Body psychotherapy currently attracts more interest than ever before and is taking up an important role in the general psychotherapy field, bringing awareness of embodiment into what has been a verbally oriented profession. It is also developing a sophisticated approach which engages with recent advances in other fields including neuroscience, phenomenology, and cognitive studies, as well as the relational turn in psychotherapy. Body Psychotherapy for the 21st Century charts the history of this transformation and shows how four distinct versions of embodied practice have interacted to generate the current field. It makes the case for body psychotherapy not only within the therapeutic world, but in the social sphere, where bodily difference - of gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality - is one of the major markers of oppression.

Body psychotherapy is an holistic therapy which approaches human beings as united bodymind, and offers embodied relationship as its central therapeutic stance. Well-known forms include Reichian Therapy, Bioenergetics, Dance Movement Therapy, Primal Integration and Process Oriented Psychology.

Current mainstream opinion in psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of mind holds that all aspects of human mind and consciousness are generated by physical processes occurring in brains. Views of this sort have dominated recent scholarly publication. The present volume, however, demonstrates empirically that this reductive materialism is not only incomplete but false. The authors systematically marshal evidence for a variety of psychological phenomena that are extremely difficult, and in some cases clearly impossible, to account for in conventional physicalist terms. Topics addressed include phenomena of extreme psychophysical influence, memory, psychological automatisms and secondary personality, near-death experiences and allied phenomena, genius-level creativity, and 'mystical' states of consciousness both spontaneous and drug-induced. The authors further show that these rogue phenomena are more readily accommodated by an alternative 'transmission' or 'filter' theory of mind/brain relations advanced over a century ago by a largely forgotten genius, F. W. H. Myers, and developed further by his friend and colleague William James. This theory, moreover, ratifies the commonsense conception of human beings as causally effective conscious agents, and is fully compatible with leading-edge physics and neuroscience. The book should command the attention of all open-minded persons concerned with the still-unsolved mysteries of the mind.

From yoga to neuroscience, a tour of major ideas about the body and mind. Body psychotherapy, which examines the relationship of bodily and physical experiences to emotional and psychological experiences, seems at first glance to be a relatively new area and on the cutting edge of psychotherapeutic theory and practice. It is, but the major concepts of body/mind treatment are actually drawn from a wide range of historical material, material that spans centuries and continents. Here, in a massively comprehensive book, Michael Heller summarizes all the major concepts, thinkers, and movements whose work has led to the creation of the field we now know as body/mind psychotherapy. The book covers everything from Eastern and Western thought—beginning with yoga and Taosim and moving to Plato and Descartes. It also discusses major developments in biology—how organisms are defined—and neuroscience. This is truly a comprehensive reference for anyone interested in the origins of the idea that the mind and body are not separate and that both must be understood together in order to understand people and their behavior.

The Body in Psychotherapy explores the life of the body as a basis of psychological understanding. Its chapters describe the use of movement, awareness exercises, and bodily imagination in work with various populations and life situations. It chronicles somatic work with childhood trauma, political torture, and life transitions such as aging, the loss of parents, and the emergence of a sense of self. The Body in Psychotherapy is the third in a groundbreaking series that provides a theoretical and practical context for the emerging field of Somatics. The first and second book of the series are Bone, Breath, and Gesture and Groundworks.

Bodies in Treatment is a challenging volume that brings into conceptual focus an "unspoken dimension" of clinical work - the body and nonverbal communication - that has long occupied the shadowy realm of tacit knowledge. By bringing visceral, sensory, and imagistic modes of emotional processing to the forefront, Editor Frances Sommer Anderson and the contributors to this original collection expand the domain of psychodynamic engagement. Working at the leading edge of psychoanalytic theory and practice, and in the forefront of the integrative psychotherapy movement, Anderson has created a collaborative project that stimulates interdisciplinary dialogue on the developmental neurobiology of attachment, the micro-processing of interchanges between the infant and caregiver, the neuroscience of emotional processing and trauma, body-focused talking treatments for trauma, and research in cognitive science. Enlightened by experiencing body-based treatments for thirty years, Anderson reflects on the powerful impact of these interventions, recounting attempts to integrate her somatically-informed discoveries into the "talking" frame. Reaching further, her contributors present richly informative accounts of how experiences in body-based modalities can be creatively integrated into a psychoanalytic framework of treatment. Readers are introduced to specialized modalities, such as craniosacral therapy and polarity therapy, as well as to the adjunctive use of yoga, the effectiveness of which can be grounded neurophysiologically. Somatic interventions are discussed in terms of the extent to which they can promote depth-psychological change outside the psychoanalytic consulting room as well as how they can enrich the relational process in psychodynamic treatment. The final sections of Bodies in Treatment explore the range of ways in which patients’ and therapists’ bodies engage, sustain, and contain the dynamics of treatment.