Body Psychotherapy

Tree Staunton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781583911167
• eBook ISBN: 9781317822400
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In the past the practice of body psychotherapy has been taken less seriously in professional circles than more traditional psychotherapeutic approaches.
Body Psychotherapy redresses the balance, offering insights into a spectrum of approaches within body-oriented psychotherapy. A range of experienced contributors introduce new areas of development and emerging theory and clinical material, covering:
* the history of body psychotherapy
* theoretical perspectives on body psychotherapy, including post-Reichian and development of integrative methodologies
* body psychotherapy in practice, including applications for trauma and regression
* the future for body psychotherapy.
This book shows how body psychotherapy can be healing, reparative and rewarding. It will make essential reading for postgraduates and professionals, whether they are already involved in this field, or wish to learn more about incorporating it into their own practice.

Chapter 1

Foreign bodies: recovering the history of body psychotherapy

Nick Totton

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The Freudian ‘unconscious’ is present and concretely comprehensible in the form of vegetative organ sensations and impulses.

Reich 1973: 63

Introduction

Body psychotherapy is today widely understood as a form of humanistic psychotherapy or, for the traditionalists, ‘growth work’. If it has in recent times taken on some psychodynamic elements, this is best seen as part of a tendency in contemporary humanistic therapy to adopt a psychodynamic colouration; these elements are often grafted on to a still basically humanistic structure. In this chapter, however, I intend to show that body psychotherapy, through its originator Wilhelm Reich, is in fact founded in psychoanalytic concepts and techniques, and becomes unintelligible without them. This fact is of more than historic interest: the recovery of body therapy's analytic context enables a practice which is sensitive to crucial issues of power and safety.

I am not aiming to reduce body psychotherapy to a subform of analytic work. In fact, in a sense my account implies that what currently presents itself as analytic therapy is a massive deviation from Freud's original insights, and that the Reichian ‘heresy’ is truer to those insights than analytic orthodoxy. There is something inherently tedious, though, about ‘more authentic than thou’ arguments. More realistically, the Reichian body psychotherapy tradition may represent a ‘third way’, which we could visualise as the third apex of a triangle with the humanistic and psychodynamic traditions as its other two angles. Like many of its own clients, however, body psychotherapy has been handicapped in developing its potential through a lack of understanding of its own history. Much contemporary post-Reichian therapy does indeed present itself as an autonomous ‘third way’, with its own language and categories of experience; but there are many gaps and incoherences in this presentation,¹ which I would suggest are ultimately the consequence of lopping off the work's psychoanalytic roots.

In arguing for the importance of the historical link between body psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, I am in many ways retracing my own history as a psychotherapist. My original training was in a thoroughly humanistic form of post-Reichian therapy (West 1984; Totton and Edmondson 1988), combining the style of aggressive bodywork which Reich developed in his late years (Baker 1980) with approaches drawn from Radix (Kelley 1974), co-counselling (Heron 1977; Jackins 1973), and other forms of growth work. My fellow trainees and I took on board the 1970s human potential movement's deep distaste for, and equally deep ignorance of, Freudian analysis. It was only very gradually, and over a period of years, that I reconnected with my own earlier interest in Freud's ideas, and saw that Reich's work emerged directly out of Freud's.

This also involved the rediscovery of my own intellectuality – my commitment to thinking. The frequent polarisation between psychodynamic and humanistic approaches has manifested itself partly as a characterological opposition between ‘thinking’ on the one hand, and ‘feeling’ and ‘acting’ on the other. This is unfortunate in many ways, not least because effective clinical practice involves the combination of all three activities (along with many more). If as practitioners we have a resistance to thinking, or to feeling, or to acting, then we need to challenge and develop ourselves rather than to seek out a therapeutic niche which supports us in our avoidance. Reichian character theory helps us to understand and explore these issues; but this aspect of Reich's work has itself been downplayed and de-emphasised in much contemporary body psychotherapy.

This chapter, then, will begin with history: briefly summarising the place of the body in Freud's theory, Reich's relationship with psychoanalysis, and the changes in psychoanalytic theory and practice which accompanied Reich's exclusion from the International Psychoanalytic Association. I will go on to discuss Reich's post-analytic development, and his subsequent reinvention as a founder of the human potential movement. Out of this historical survey, certain themes emerge as crucial for an understanding of body psychotherapy: these include ‘body energy’, ‘hysteria’, ‘regression’, ‘character’ and ‘transference’. A careful study of these themes in relation to body psychotherapy shows us, I believe, how this form of work cuts close to the bone of the human condition, illuminating the profound difficulty of our existence as bodies in society. To examine them is to develop an account of the unique contribution that body psychotherapy can make to the field of psychotherapy in general. I shall end with a description of my own current way of working as a body psychotherapist.

Freud: ‘a strange therapy’

Yesterday Mrs K again sent for me because of cramplike pains in her chest; generally it has been because of headaches. In her case I have invented a strange therapy of my own: I search for sensitive areas, press on them, and thus provoke fits of shaking that free her.

Freud to Fliess, 13 March 1895; in Masson 1985: 120

This is Freud writing to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, at a moment before psychoanalysis as such even existed, describing a form of work which seems to prefigure key elements of body psychotherapy. Nothing more is heard of this, and Freud's own practice moves further and further away from an initial active engagement with the bodies of his clients. In 1932, Freud's colleague, Sandor Ferenczi, complained that in the early days Freud used to spend ‘if necessary … hours lying on the floor next to a person in a hysterical crisis’ (Ferenczi 1988: 93). Similarly, in Studies on Hysteria we read of Freud ‘pinching’, ‘pressing’ and ‘kneading’ a patient's legs (Freud and Breuer 1895: 204–205), relieving stomach pain by stroking the patient and massaging her whole body twice a day (1895: 106–110), and, famously, pressing patients' heads with his hands to help them remember (1895: 173–174). There is little trace of such procedures in Freud's later analytic practice, and even less trace in that of most contemporary analysts.

As a theoretical system, though, psychoanalysis is intrinsically body-centred. I have argued elsewhere (Totton 1998) that it is a theory of how bodily impulses – the ‘drives’² – are taken up and transformed through their psychic representation, and of the difficulties that arise from the confrontation of our bodily drives with countervailing forces, both internal and external. ‘The source of a drive,’ Freud says, ‘is a process of excitation occurring in an organ and the immediate aim of the drive lies in the removal of this organic stimulation’ (Freud 1905: 83, my italics). This remains his consistent position, even when his own focus of interest moves away from the drives. The bodily drives are the foundation on which Freud erects the whole superstructure of ego-psychology.

Freud traces in detail how the entire psychic apparatus is a development of bodily sensations and impulses. He states unequivocally that the ego ‘is first and foremost a bodily ego’ (Freud 1923: 364), and explains that this means it is ‘ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body’ (ibid.: 364 fn.). The ego, in other words, is a psychological version of the skin – a protective organ that gives shape and definition to the whole. (As we shall see, Reich makes one small but crucial development of this image, seeing the ego as embodied not in the skin but in the voluntary musculature.) Freud's later tracing out of the complex identifications through which the ego is structured in no way contradicts this insight; such identifications appear as imprints upon the body, ‘incarnated’, from a Reichian viewpoint, as specific patterns of muscular tension.

For psychoanalysis, neurosis and other psychological problems arise out of the inherent contradiction between the desires of the body – manifested in the drives – and the requirements of civilisation. ‘Present-day civilisation makes it plain that … it does not like sexuality as a source of pleasure in its own right, and is only prepared to tolerate it because there is so far no substitute for it as a means of propagating the human race’ (Freud 1930: 294). These requirements are mediated to the individual child through their family, and ‘bound’ into the structure of the individual ego which, as we have seen, means the structure of the individual body; the medium of this repression is the policing of bodily acts like feeding and excretion. According to Freud, this individual repression builds on a deep-rooted human difficulty in tolerating pleasure and spontaneity, a difficulty which psychoanalysis sees as possibly innate. Reich, however, insists that our fear of pleasure, however profound, is not innate but implanted.

This, then, is a compressed sketch of how psychoanalysis in all its conceptual complexity is founded on a bodily understanding of the human situation (for more detail, see Totton 1998). In the early period of analytic work, this bodily element was not simply theoretical. We have already seen Freud himself interacting with his analysands' bodies. Sandor Ferenczi, perhaps Freud's most prominent colleague, found himself towards the end of his career re-engaging with the physical body in ways which in some senses dismayed him: supporting and encouraging his patients into altered states where they apparently relived and abreacted forgotten traumatic experiences (Totton 1998: 64–68). These encounters with the power of the body eventually led Ferenczi to break with Freudian orthodoxy, arguing that the despotic power of the practitioner to define and control the therapeutic situation was actually retraumatising.

Reich: the somatic unconscious

The psychic process reveals itself as the result of the conflict between drive demand and the external frustration of this demand. Only secondarily does an internal conflict between desire and self-denial result from this initial opposition…. There are social, more correctly, economic interests that cause such suppressions and repressions …

Reich 1972: 287

In his development of body-centred psychoanalytic technique, Wilhelm Reich regarded himself not as a rebel against Freud but as carrying forward Freud's central project: to reconcile ‘mind’ and ‘body’ within the individual patient. Throughout the 1920s Reich was an increasingly important analytic figure, taking a leading role in the development of clinical technique and of group supervision as a training element. This led to a consolidation of analytic theory, which in turn produced his developing focus on the body. Even though his body-centredness was extremely unpopular in some quarters, it was primarily for his political position as an active Communist, rather than for his theoretical views or clinical practice, that Reich was excluded from the analytic movement (Sharaf 1983: 175–191). It is also true, however, that in the period during and immediately after Reich's exclusion, institutional psychoanalysis cleansed itself of many of its more radical and body-centred themes. ‘Slowly but surely’ as Reich describes it, ‘psychoanalysis was cleansed of all Freud's achievements’ (Reich 1973: 125); in particular, sexuality became a psychological phenomenon divorced from the body: ‘sexuality became something shadowy; the ‘libido’ concept was deprived of every trace of sexual content and became a figure of speech’ (ibid.: 124). The psychoanalytic mainstream and Reich himself began to move in directly opposite directions.

Reich's body-centred technique arises from an investigation of the real meaning of psychoanalytic concepts like repression. ‘Until now,’ he points out,

analytic psychology has merely concerned itself with what the child suppresses and what the motives are which cause him to learn to control his emotions. It did not enquire into the way in which children habitually fight against impulses.

Reich 1972: 300

Reich shifts the emphasis to how the child represses. He concludes that, just as libido and desire are for psychoanalysis ultimately bodily, biological phenomena, so repression – the force that opposes desire – is also a bodily phenomenon, located in the habitual rigidity of the musculature.

Muscular rigidity, wherever it occurs, is not a ‘result’, and ‘expression’, or a ‘concomitant’ of the mechanism of repression. In the final analysis … somatic rigidity represents the most essential part of the process of repression.

Reich 1973: 300

On this basis, Reich began to work both on his clients' character attitudes and on their muscular rigidity.

Practical experience soon teaches us that it is just as inadmissible to exclude one form of work as it is to exclude the other. With one patient, work on the muscular attitude will predominate from the beginning, while with another, work on the character attitude will be emphasised. We also encounter a third type of patient with whom the work on the character and the work on the musculature proceed simultaneously and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Advancing Theory in Therapy
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series preface
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Foreign bodies: recovering the history of body psychotherapy
• 2 Application of post-Reichian body psychotherapy: a Chiron perspective
• 3 Sexuality and body psychotherapy
• 4 Biodynamic massage in psychotherapy: re-integrating, re-owning and re-associating through the body
• 5 Body psychotherapy without touch: applications for trauma therapy
• 6 The use of imagery in body-oriented psychotherapy
• 7 Psycho-spiritual body psychotherapy
• 8 Subtle bodywork
• 9 Body psychotherapy and regression: the body remembers past lives
• 10 The future for body psychotherapy
• Afterword
• Appendix: Training in body psychotherapy
• Index