This book has been written for all those who wish to study a form of body psychotherapy or who wish to discover the basic issues that have structured this field. The notion of body psychotherapy includes a discussion of any form of psychotherapy that explicitly includes body dynamics in its way of thinking about psychological dynamics. This option is different from (although related to) other forms of body-mind approaches that explicitly include psychological dynamics in their way of thinking about body dynamics but do not focus on psychological dynamics as their main object of attention.
The structure of this volume is that of a textbook, because it contains what I think people should know about the field of body psychotherapy, rather than an essay that publicizes my personal thoughts on the matter. Had I wanted to write an essay or a history of the field, I would have detailed each chapter in a different way. Writing a textbook forced me to be as clear as possible, leave out some of my personal positions, and use summarization and simplification when required by sound pedagogy.
Some people have voiced their appreciation of the way this book presents the practice of body psychotherapy. However, they complained that its content did not help them know how to work therapeutically with patients. For the moment, such knowledge is taught by schools of psychotherapy. Each movement has its own set of coherent concepts and methods, which require several years of apprenticeship before they can be used in the treatment of patients. This book does not replace the manuals that describe what specific schools of body psychotherapy teach their students. It focuses on a description of the field as a whole, so that students can situate what they learn in a particular school within a wider context. I focus on the issues and methods that have structured the field as it develops new ways of approaching the psyche for therapeutic purposes. Once a student becomes aware of these issues and methods, he can forge his own vision of body psychotherapy with greater precision and can identify his interests, all while being aware of the different options that exist in the field.
The field of psychotherapy is made up of different schools. Each school distinguishes itself from the others by its vocabulary, methods, and practices and a particular vision. Sometimes, the same word used by several schools covers different concepts and methods, or different words yield understandings that are similar.
A first way to approach the idea of a book about body psychotherapy is to propose a work that describes a school’s concepts and methods. A good example of such a book in French is the School of Psycho-Organic Analysis’s own training handbook, edited in several volumes by Jacqueline Besson since 1991. This handbook defines the vocabulary, the models, the practices, and the modes of intervention taught in the school’s training program. It also describes the clinical perspective of this approach—that is, how a therapist trained in this school perceives his patients and their problems, how he envisions the psychotherapeutic process, and the goals that can be linked to a treatment that uses the methods of Psycho-Organic Analysis. The manual also demonstrates how this school conceptualizes the rapport between its clinical approach and that of other schools. It attempts to define the compatibility between its clinical approach and the diagnostics used in psychiatry, psychoanalysis, cognitive and behavioral therapy, and so on.
This book has another goal. It wants to complement other texts like the one I just mentioned. Its usefulness has been the object of discussions in several committees in which I have taken part in the European Association of Body Psychotherapy (EABP). To the extent that each school’s training manual covers a selection of different practices and concepts, it is also useful to put together a manual that would allow students to situate what they learn in a particular school in the larger field of body psychotherapy. Most of the people trained in psychotherapy often have a limited view of the history of their discipline, the big issues that animate their approach, and the place their school occupies in the history of human thought. Thus, many practitioners have both an exaggerated regard for the knowledge bestowed on them by those who trained them and too little regard for the knowledge they obtained through their own broader education and in their own clinical practice. Their inability to evaluate what they know relative to the sciences, philosophy, and other psychotherapeutic approaches creates feelings of insecurity. This manual presents the entire field to those who would like to understand the full scope of body psychotherapy and what it can contribute to other disciplines.
The perspective of a textbook is to summarize some basic concepts that must be developed in courses, seminars, internships, and workshops that tackle practical problems like case analyses. I have followed this customary procedure. Although this text can be understood by many without additional help, as I have tried to be as clear and simple as possible, it remains relatively dense because I had to cover an immense number of issues that are regularly brought up in conversations between body psychotherapists. Those discussions can become complex, and this book defends the necessity that psychotherapists must be capable of understanding difficult questions. Our patients consider with us the meaning of life and death; they question pleasure and life itself, as well as how difficult it is to love. None of these topics yields easy answers. It seems to me that a body psychotherapist must learn to follow the complexities of their patients’ thoughts, physiology, and behaviors. By understanding the myriad byways of the questions that haunt a patient, a practitioner reaches that moment when a simple response permits a patient’s thought to crystallize around a useful metaphor. I have only developed complex theoretical issues when they can help a practitioner understand connected practical issues. Sometimes a difficult chapter will become easier to understand once other chapters have been read. I have not attempted to describe body exercises in detail, because I do not recommend working on one’s body or the body of another person without having first worked with a teacher.
I have focused the discussions in this book on the psychotherapeutic treatment of patients in individual adult psychotherapy. This choice does not exclude interest in other approaches or other patient populations, but it permits me to stay relatively focused. I will not speak at all about group therapy, although it is often used by body psychotherapists, and I only discuss a few methods used in child psychotherapy.
Although I mention important theories about the body and the psyche, I do not really propose a new one. The plan of this textbook was inspired by many discussions with my colleagues. This permitted me to cover a maximum number of existing options in body psychotherapy. It is more or less inevitable that my own journey has permitted me to more easily understand and appreciate some propositions more than others.1 It is thus inevitable that I would write this book in the first person. However, this “I” is a “pedagogical I” who attempts to describe a discipline that needs to synthesize numerous points of view. The topics developed in these pages are rarely issues about which it is possible or even desirable to have a fixed position. Each reader will inevitably have positions that are his own as they relate to the topics.
Practitioners rarely know the history of the notions they frequently use. Furthermore, having been trained in developmental psychology, I am used to situating ideas in their historical context. This strategy often helps one understand the connections between different concepts. So I decided to organize the material herein in a historical narrative envelope. Those who already know certain schools or certain personalities that I mention will notice that it is the relevance of a model for today’s practitioner that is favored, rather than an exact description of what happened. These movements and personalities serve as historical reference points. It seems useful to me to show how these reference points, like magnets attracting iron filings, gather a multitude of topics that can call out to contemporary psychotherapists. The reader may use these reference points as a way to organize important ideas in body psychotherapy and consult more specialized works if, per chance, he wants to explore the formulations of a school of thought, or recent developments in that discipline.
As an individual, I can develop a wide variety of themes in a relatively coherent way. However such a procedure is inevitably influenced by my personal biases. It complements the method used by Gustl Marlock and Halko Weiss (2006) that covers similar models by asking experts from a number of different schools to describe their vision of basic notions of body psychotherapy.
It is best to read this book from the first chapter to the last. It seems important to me to get an idea of the whole range of a domain before becoming a specialist. Nonetheless, a textbook is hardly ever used in that manner. Certain chapters are more relevant to adherents of one school than to those of another, and it can be read more easily by some because they resonate to a particular training. To allow the reader to read only a chapter of interest, I developed certain important themes several times in the course of the book. These themes run through the text as in a musical variation or fugue. These repetitions permit the reader to learn how to reconstruct a concept in different contexts.
I have tried to gather most of the topics that a body psychotherapist ought to have thoughtfully considered. The majority of the schools of psychotherapy require written work during each year of study or at least at the end of the training. This book can be useful as a basis for these assignments because it contains a detailed bibliography for each topic. The more recent texts also contain bibliographies that can help you find the writings you need.
If you are seeking possible ways to read this book, I propose an exercise that I have often found useful. For each chapter, you can ask yourself the following questions: If the content of this chapter served as the basis of a psychotherapeutic approach, in what ways would I engage with a patient, a person I am trying to understand? What characteristics of this individual does this approach help me explore? For example, you can ask yourself how a psychotherapist would work were he inspired by Taoism, by Descartes, or by Hume.2 Also, do not hesitate to use online search engines to find complementary information. For the subject matter covered by this manual, Wikipedia often gives exact and pertinent information, although often incomplete. This type of site cannot be used for reference purposes, to support a treatment, or to support an academic or professional paper; but it does refer to serious works, proposes useful links, and indicates texts that can be downloaded.
In the references, I have identified texts that can be found online. A glossary, at the end of the book, defines certain key terms. At the end of the volume, an appendix develops some technical points of postural anatomy.
Because some of my references exist in several editions, I have often indicated them in function of the system of the chapters and the sections proper to the work. The page number is insufficient if you want to find out what I am referring to in another edition than the one I used. If you consult a work in another language or in another translation, the difficulty will even be greater.
For the English translation, I tried to improve the text that had first been published in French with some clarifications. I added a chapter on gymnastics and psychotherapy at the request of several colleagues. This is, therefore, a second edition of the original work.