Bioenergetic Analysis • The Clinical Journal of the IIBA, 2021 (31), 7–8
https://doi.org/10.30820/0743-4804-2021-31-7 CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 www.bioenergetic-analysis.comDear Readers,
It has been a year since we addressed you, with our last volume of the Clinical Journal, and what a year! We were caught by the pandemic and are still figuring out all the transformations we have had to go through. And it is not finished yet. As an editorial team, we had to think through how we could keep our goal – to maintain a publication that would not be affected by the disorders the world is going through.
Our desire to have an electronic version of the Journal has been long-standing. This has been the perfect moment to implement it, since our respected publisher, Psychosozial-Verlag, has offered us a platform that can host our Journal among other high-quality scientific publications.
We consider this change an improvement that can achieve worldwide reach to non-members as well, and a step forward into the era of Internet connection. The Journal, that used to take months to reach some countries after it was published, now will be instantly at hand for everyone. And as well as the benefit of cheaper costs and agility, an electronic version may help us to have more editions per year, if the number of manuscript submissions increases. A hard paper-copy of the Journal will still be available from the publisher, but the cost of printing and postage will be the responsibility of the person requesting.
In this first electronic volume you will find, as the first article, a paper about racism, by Cristina Francisco, a Black bioenergetic therapist from Brazil who was awarded the Social Work Prize at the 24th IIBA Conference at Toronto in 2017. Cristina decided to submit her article just before the latest commotions in the United States, which were part of the “Black Lives Matter” movement, that helped spread discussions about racism and prejudice around the world. We are proud to bring such an important subject to debate in our community. We thought that the moment to publish this paper was very appropriate. Cristina develops a bioenergetic view that seeks to understand the suffering, resistance and wisdom of the Black body in a relational and listening space.
Also, we have three important articles relevant to COVID-19. We have one from Louise Frechette in Canada, one from Diana Guest and Jan Parker in the USA, and one from Patrizia Moselli in Italy. Each article addresses different aspects of the process of teletherapy and the challenges therapists have to overcome in creating a clinical environment online.
We have an article from Jens Tasche in Germany, where he shares the postgraduate work he has been undertaking in Poland. Jens challenges traditional bioenergetic analysis and makes suggestions on how self-regulation, modern psychodynamics and trauma theory can be included in the bioenergetic paradigm.
Another article, an autobiographical piece by Scott Baum, describes thirty years of a psychotherapy with Dr. Michael Eigen, in order to throw some light on dealing with profound and soul-destroying emotional and psychological pain.
We have one other article that also won an IIBA Award. Iana C. M. Franza, from Brazil, was awarded the Clinical Prize with a case study about the schizoid process and its clinical challenge. And lastly, we have an article from Vicenta G. Molla and Amaia A. Martín, from Spain, presenting a case study about bioenergetic therapeutic groups dealing with trauma in a corporate environment.
We would like to acknowledge an error in the last edition of this Journal, where the article “When My Body Fails Me” by Leslie Ann Costello was wrongly attributed to Leslie Case. We immediately wrote an erratum that was sent by email to all members of IIBA. We again sincerely apologize to Leslie Ann Costello and Leslie Case for this mistake.
We want to acknowledge the work of our colleagues, translators of the Abstracts: Angelina Samartova (Russian), Claudia Ucros (French), Karin de Marval (Spanish), Maê Nascimento (Portuguese), Maria Rosaria Filoni (Italian), Thomas Heinrich (German), and Rebecca Jianpu Liu (Chinese).
We hope that you will find the reading of this Journal interesting, and we invite you to participate in the debate, submitting your ideas, in the form of a manuscript, to spread the discussion of Bioenergetics into our community and beyond. At the end of this volume you will find the guidelines for manuscript submission.
My thanks again to my Editorial Team colleagues, Maê Nascimento, Garry Cockburn, and Rosaria Filoni, a very experienced publisher from Italy, who joined the team in 2020. And a big thank you to our former chief editor Vincentia Schroeter, who once again has provided us with a beautiful painting for our cover that is so appropriate for these COVID-19 and worrying times. We wish you all a safe and healthy 2021, and an enjoyable reading of this Journal.
Léia Cardenuto
January 2021