Vincentia Schroeter
Bioenergetic Analysis • The Clinical Journal of the IIBA, 2016 (26), 7–8
https://doi.org/10.30820/0743-4804-2016-26-7 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 www.bioenergetic-analysis.comThis was a year when more valid papers were received for consideration than could be accommodated. I think this shows an energetic excitement in sharing newfound ideas and concepts. The Bioenergetic community is investigating new material, including exciting scientific research linking the body and the brain. Clinicians not trained in any type of somatic psychotherapy cannot ignore the links to the body touted in all the latest research. In larger numbers they are looking to incorporate somatic psychotherapy theory and techniques into their thinking. They are seeking out trainings and readings to translate this material into their current practices. Bioenergetics, founded on psychoanalysis, body-based as per the theories of Lowen, and now modernized with neuroscience can help them. This volume can also help the Bioenergetic clinician. For example, Bioenergetic Analysts are weaving polyvagal theory into their thinking, clinical work and writing. In this volume alone, Heinrich-Clauer, Schroeter and Clauer all refer to polyvagal theory in their papers.
In addition, Perlman writes about defenses and openings around falling, holding and grounding. We have a paper of evidence-based research examining treatment effectiveness for different types of therapy by Koemeda. A personal essay, with a poetic flair, which is on finding the ground of home by Conger, breaks up the more theoretical papers.
I thank these authors for their contribution as well as my editing team, Mae Nascimento, and Margit Koemeda for all their help and support. Readers and reviewers include Tarra Stariell, Bob Lewis, Scott Baum, Joerg Clauer, Angela Klopstech, and Odila Weigand. I send thanks to the translators of abstracts, Guy Tonella, Louise Frechette, Violaine de Clerk, Sylvia Nunez, Mae Nascimento, and Margit Koemeda. This entire volume will be translated into Italian by Maria Rosaria Filoni.
In closing I would like to share in this letter some inspiring and thoughtful words taken from President Garry Cockburn’s opening address at the well-attended and well-received IIBA conference in Brazil, Summer of 2015:
“In contrast to the neurotic and rigid personality structures of Reich and Lowen’s world, today, people’s psyches are too exposed and in danger of fragmenting in the face of the social forces and global threats I mentioned. So what is needed is not a strong therapy that breaks people open. We are already too open.
What we need is a strong therapy that allows us to have the courage to be where there is little or no structure, where we risk knowing the terrors of traumatic abandonment, fragmentation and annihilation, but … where we know and trust that there is a somatic reality even in those depths that is capable of being redeemed by the touch of another. We cannot exist at those depths without the other, otherwise we risk psychosis or autistic encapsulation. And we cannot save this earth without needing and loving each other with a passion. We are all brothers and sisters on this earth, and more than ever, we need to love our neighbour, no matter what their creed, gender preference, colour or politics.
We have to deepen our understanding of what we have inherited from Lowen in order to meet this challenge. We have to articulate a more complex formulation of Bioenergetic Analysis in the world today, while maintaining the substance of what Lowen has given us about the bodily self. We need to more deeply understand how to do body therapy at this primitive level and at the level of early relational trauma, and to trust that the face and body of another is deeply programmed into our DNA …
What Bioenergetic Analysis gives us is the unifying focus and power of Lowen’s insight: that freeing the human body from unconscious terror and fear is the key to restoring the powerful loving relationship with ourselves, with each other, with nature and with the environment.”
Welcome to the 26th volume of Bioenergetic Analysis. May you enjoy these papers and may they be a forum to do for you what Garry advocates above, “articulate a more complex formulation of Bioenergetic Analysis in the world today.”
Vincentia Schroeter, PhD
San Marcos, Ca. USA
October 31st, 2015