Analytical body psychotherapy

Analytical body psychotherapy is a special form of psychoanalytic psychotherapy that works with an open setting so that action dialogues, such as the exchange of physical emotional signals, can be specifically tested and worked on. While in the context of traditional psychoanalysis under action dialogue only unconsciously conveyed relationship messages are understood, analytical body psychotherapy makes use of both unconscious action dialogues (enactments) and consciously used action samples.

The development of analytical body psychotherapy

Analytical body psychotherapy is a psychotherapeutic method that has developed within the last 15 years on the basis of psychoanalytic knowledge and with the inclusion of modern developmental theories within psychoanalysis. The most important pioneer is Sándor Ferenczi , whose importance has been rediscovered by psychoanalysis since the growing influence of contemporary infant research, as his anthropological ideas postulated in the 1920s and 1930s are now confirmed: Humans are in from the beginning of their lives fundamentally related to its human environment.

At the beginning of development there is not a hypothetically assumed drive , but a field that encompasses several individuals. The baby is a deeply relational being, and positive attachment is essential to a healthy psychological structure. Since the bond is so important as a decisive factor in survival and psychological development, the baby has been endowed with the elementary ability in the millions of years of human evolution to actively shape the bond with the caregiver by means of physical signals. The baby is a competent infant in the social field ( Martin Dornes ). The intersubjective-relational perspective of humans with the emphasis on the importance of physical interaction had a decisive influence on the development of analytical body psychotherapy as an independent psychotherapeutic method by expanding the therapeutic setting with regard to the possibility of physical interaction - in contrast to the standard psychoanalytic method. In addition to speaking, developmentally significant model scenes can be reactivated and relived in the action dialogue: The body remembers.

In certain developmental psychological ideas , Wilhelm Reich was also close to a relational infantile image , but his praxeological conclusions led him further and further away from an understanding of the therapeutic process as a relationship process. Reich was a representative of a one-person psychology (the psychological life of the patient is in the foreground), Ferenczi founded a two-person psychology (the psychological exchange processes between patient and therapist are in the foreground). These two different priorities subsequently created a field of tension within the development of psychotherapeutic methods, both within psychoanalysis and within the bioenergetic analysis method established in the 1970s and 1980s by Alexander Lowen , a student of Reich.

At about the same time as the orientation towards Ferenczi within certain parts of psychoanalysis, individual body psychotherapists who reached their limits with the theoretical instruments developed by Reich and Lowen in understanding what is going on in the therapeutic process, increasingly turned to relationships and tried to rewrite this theoretically. In the late 1980s to early 1990s, there was a clash between two different camps: between body psychotherapists on the one hand and psychoanalysts on the other. But this should prove to be fruitful in the future, because the consequence was that since then conferences have often been organized in Germany and Austria at which body psychotherapists who are open to psychoanalytic concepts and psychoanalysts who are open to physical events met to exchange their ideas and discuss.

The organizer of the Vienna Symposium Psychoanalysis and the Body is Peter Geißler , who is also the editor of the journal of the same name, which has been published twice a year since 2002. In 2007 Günter Heisterkamp and Peter Geißler published their first textbook on analytical body psychotherapy with the title Psychoanalysis of Life Movements.

Theoretical and practical priorities

If, in classical psychoanalytic understanding, dialogues of action are seen exclusively as unconsciously conveyed relational messages, then analytical body psychotherapy uses a more comprehensive definition in which unconscious and conscious aspects of action flow equally, and by determining the effectiveness of action dialogues both on their concrete and symbolic meaning for the patient explained.

For the technique of analytical body psychotherapy, this means that both unconscious dialogues of action (enactments) and consciously used dialogues of action (scenic interventions) are used. The action dialogue, which is broadly defined in this way, remains about 90% determined by unconscious components. The place of the actual effect of psychotherapy is seen in the shared, implicit-emotional-physical knowledge and its gradual change in the therapeutic process . Although verbal reflection plays a major role in the therapeutic procedure, it is not always a condicio sine qua non , but also occurs directly in mutual action ( present understanding according to G. Heisterkamp) and in this way changes the intersubjective field.

The treatment process usually takes a few years. The work is often done for one or two hours a week. The therapeutic setting is basically open to any form of physical positioning, whereby verbal associations are on an equal footing with body associations. Although the therapeutic work is often started at the beginning of the lesson while sitting opposite in the chairs, very different developments are possible depending on the physical associations of the patient and / or the therapist. Some examples:

the patient is lying on a mat and the therapist is sitting next to him
the patient and therapist both move around in the room while constantly regulating proximity and distance
the patient lies on a mat and the therapist holds the patient's head in his hands

In this way, together with the therapist, relevant model scenes of the patient's childhood and his current life are brought into the picture and processed, based on the body and action associations of both interaction partners.

The patient's self-perception gains an increasing power of persuasion with regard to fundamental emotional qualities in the patient's experience through the promotion of awareness of physical events (changes in breathing, changes in the alignment of individual body parts, physical mini-impulses, variations in vocal expression) - a valuable help Patients whose contact with their own emotional self-experience has been traumatically destroyed.

In accordance with the focus on the intersubjective experience between patient and therapist, immediate interactive movement patterns emerge that provide orientation in the complex therapeutic process. The therapeutic process alternates between engaging in the movement dialogue on both sides and reflecting on relevant ideas, emotional qualities and memories from one model scene to another. The increasingly open and physically immediate representation of developmentally traumatic parts of the here and now requires, in the resistance analysis, not only to pay attention to fears but also to precisely work out feelings of shame . Careful attention to resistances (and countertransference resistances) has the function of a guide so that the therapeutic regression , which can be very intense due to the deeper physical experience, remains manageable.

International distribution

Analytical body psychotherapy has so far been a German-language specialty; hardly any studies have been published in the USA . Since the early 1990s, psychotherapists have been active in the Steißlinger Kreis (e.g. Tilmann Moser , Günter Heisterkamp, Gisela Worm, Robert Ware and Jörg Scharff) and in Austria in the AKP (working group for analytical body-related psychotherapy) who work with deal with the further development of the methods. André Sassenfeld from Santiago de Chile joined the discussion. The platform is the AKP website, which has been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish and Hungarian in addition to German. Further internationalization can be expected in the next few years due to the good practicability of the method.

education

So far there is no state-recognized independent training, neither in Germany nor in Austria. A Psychoanalytic training is next to the body of therapeutic self-experience fundamental requirement.

Résumé

Analytical body psychotherapy is a young special form of body-related psychoanalytic therapy that is developing in terms of its theoretical foundation. Since the price for intensifying the emotional experience lies in the risk of entanglements between patient and therapist, a sound knowledge of technical forms of handling transference and countertransference is a prerequisite. The method is not only suitable for individual therapy, but also for therapeutic groups .

References

M. Dornes: The competent baby. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1992.
M. Dornes: Early Childhood. Fischer, Frankfurt / M. 1997. (Developmental Psychology of the First Years of Life)
P. Geissler, G. Heisterkamp (ed.): Psychoanalysis of life movements. Springer, Vienna 2007. (On the physical occurrence in psychoanalytic therapy - a textbook)
G. Heisterkamp: On the actions of the analyst in the talking cure. In: Psychosocial. 74, 1998, pp. 19-32.

Web link

Website of the "Working Group for Analytical Body-Related Psychotherapy"