Integrating Brain, Mind, and Body: Clinical and Therapeutic Implications of Neuroscience

An Introduction

Abstract

This paper presents a tentative assessment of what Bioenergetic Therapists may take out of the proliferating neuroscientific findings of the past two to three decades. A few examples are picked to demonstrate that different levels of observation – the sociobehavioral, the psychodynamic, the physiological and the cellular-biochemical – are equally relevant to an understanding of the complexity of human experiencing, information processing and functioning. Interventions on any of these levels can induce change on the same and/or any of the other levels: an increase of subjectively experienced stress, an activation of certain promotors and genes, synthesis and release of certain hormones, aggressive behaviour etc. All these processes are interconnected in highly complex systems. A short case vignette at the end recommends that clinicians acquire as much scientifically based explicit knowledge as possible, but that in moment-to-moment interactions with their patients they must also rely on their intuition and what has become «implicit” in their personality as psychosomatically oriented therapists.