One hundred and fifty years on: The history,significance and scope of body psychotherapy today

From Janet to Reich to the present day, body psychotherapy involves a rich and explicit theory, study, and practice of the human body–mind. This relationship is not hierarchical, nor something that suggests the unification of an age-old split, but it represents a unitive functioning with indivisible interactive aspects of the whole human being. This concept is quite revolutionary for some, liberating for others, and it can also be quite threatening. It can act as a baseline and a resource as other psychotherapies and new sciences explore aspects of body psychotherapy and their own involvement with the body, and it may help integrate some of the direct technical knowledge of the body therapies. This article is a personal attempt to cover the history and the main lines of approach of body psychotherapy, and to show how its relationship to the rest of psychotherapy is changing rapidly.