Lifestreams

An Introduction to Biosynthesis

David Boadella

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317570882
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Biosynthesis means "integration of life". It is a holistic form of body psychotherapy, which was founded over forty-five years ago. The concept of life-streams is one of its major foundations, which has since been supported by research in neurobiology.

How can we integrate the three most important domains of being human: our bodily existence, our psychological experience and our spiritual essence? Biosynthesis Therapy has developed a broad spectrum of reliable methods to make this possible and to free our life energy. It is resource-oriented and is practised worldwide. David Boadella brings his many years of experience to provide in this book a trend-setting model for the understanding both of the origin of illness and of therapy.

First published in 1987, this book has appeared in ten languages. It provides numerous case examples and is fascinating and enriching for the normal reader as well as for therapists from many different schools.

In this book, the word "bioenergetic" is used to refer to the study of life energy, which is a major foundation of the therapy method "Biosynthesis". This is not to be confused with the term "Bioenergetic Analysis", an other and different form of body psychotherapy.

Since 1985, together with David Boadella, Biosynthesis has been developed further by Dr. Silvia Specht Boadella, particularly in its philosophical and transpersonal aspects.

In 1990, Biosynthesis was the first form of body psychotherapy to be scientifically accredited by the European Association of Psychotherapy. Biosynthesis therapists can therefore receive the European Certificate of Psychotherapy ECP.

In 2001, the International Foundation of Biosynthesis IFB was formed, to coordinate trainings and research in twenty countries in Europe, Asia, North and South America.

The newest information about Biosynthesis, including our actual course programme, you will find on our website.

David Boadella

International Institute for Biosynthesis IIBS, Benzenrüti 6, CH-9410 Heiden, Switzerland

E-mail: [email protected]

www.biosynthesis.org

The Author

David Boadella, born 1931 in London, pioneer of body psychotherapy and founder of Biosynthesis. He studied education, psychology and literature and wrote numerous articles and several books. Since 1985, he is the Director of the International Institute for Biosynthesis in Switzerland. In 1989, he was elected as the first President of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy EABP. In 1995, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the "Open International University of Complementary Medicine".

Author of "Wilhelm Reich: The evolution of his work" (Arkana).

Disclaimer

Basically this book contains neither exercises or advices. Nevertheless, if statements from the book should be used for self-treatment or for treatment of others, every form of liability of the author or the publisher for personal, material, or financial damage is excluded.

CHAPTER 1

EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION AND THE BODY

The language of bio-energy

It must be recognised at the outset that it is impossible for an individual not to communicate. Even total silence tells us something about a person and the way in which he or she meets the world. The focus on neurotic symptoms as related in words by a disturbed person is complemented in bioenergetic therapy by a focus on the signs of emotional stress and expressive disturbance as revealed by the non-verbal aspects of a patient.

The first scientist to put whole-hearted stress on non-verbal means of communication as being of fundamental importance was Charles Darwin in his remarkable book, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, which must be looked on as a basic primer of psychology as well as of ethology.

I should like to give a brief quotation from what Darwin said, because this helps to set the framework of reference for the work I shall be describing.

The movements of expression in the face and body are of much importance for our welfare. They serve as the first means of communication between mother and her infant; she smiles approval or frowns disapproval, and thus encourages her child on the right path … The movements of expression give vividness and energy to our spoken words; they may, and often do, reveal the thoughts more truely than do words, which may be falsified. The free expression by outward signs of an emotion intensifies it. Passions can be produced by putting people into appropriate attitudes. On the other hand the repression of all outward signs softens our emotion.¹

All this was written in 1872, a quarter of a century before Freud began to unravel the unconscious. There is also much evidence in the early history of psychoanalysis² that Freud discovered the fundamental principle which Darwin here described. For instance, Freud recognised quite early on that remembering forgotten childhood experiences had no curative effect unless the buried emotion was also recovered. He tried through his verbal techniques to encourage affective memories, but many of his patients were unable to experience their long-withheld emotions. Something seemed to get in the way. In Freudian terminology, one talks of the ‘resistance’ to getting well; the resistance to facing what a friend of mine once called ‘the supreme crisis of being helped’.

One of the earliest workers in the psychoanalytic framework of reference, who began to understand what it was that got in the way, was Wilhelm Reich. He is well known to some for his classic book on Character Analysis.³ In this book he provided the first detailed map of the elaborate defence systems which neurotic patients construct to protect themselves both from the outside world and from the impact of their own feelings. Reich founded bio-energetic theory because he did not rest content with this major achievement of insight into the workings of the neurotic personality. He went much further. From 1935 onwards he began a close investigation of the muscular tensions in the bodies of his patients.

It is true that, independently of Reich, people like Jacobsen and Schulze had published books on systems of relaxation. Also, Rudolf Laban⁴ had developed a whole system of expressive movements which led to a revitalisation of dance training, of occupational rhythm and of physical education principles in schools. In 1966 the Laban Institute convened their first conference on ‘Movement as Therapy’ (Senate House, London) in which the possibility of movement therapy with emotionally disturbed children and adults was explored.

Reich’s approach was deeper and more dynamic, precisely because of his psychiatric orientation. Reich was concerned with the fact that his patients behaved as though they were half-dead and that their normal functioning at every level was blocked. He realised that they were disturbed sexually; they were disturbed in their work function; their bodily processes lacked rhythm; their breathing was uncoordinated. In other words, Reich began to study and approach his patients in the way Darwin had advocated, as organisms first and foremost, whose total behaviour was involved in their neurotic difficulty.

Reich’s approach was little understood because the therapeutic schools of that time lacked an orientation in this framework of references. Ethology, the systematic study of human character, had barely begun. The mind was still considered as some kind of separate compartment from the body. Reich’s emphasis on bodily expression diverged so much from the prevailing practice of other analysts that it was regarded as eccentric heresy and many thought that Reich had gone astray.

At this point I would like to refer briefly to the four people who have done most to continue Reich’s system of therapy, to teach it and to train others in it. In Scandinavia, where Reich first developed this work, Dr Ola Raknes was engaged in this form of therapy for over 35 years.⁵ Dr Nic Waal, who held many prominent positions in psychiatry in both Norway and Denmark and who was the director of the Institut for Psykiatri in Oslo, was trained by Reich and, in turn, trained many groups in this bio-energetic approach.⁶ One of the many offshoots of her work is the school of ‘movement therapists’ who are working in Holland in psychiatric hospitals with severely disturbed psychotics.

In America, where Reich moved from Scandinavia, Dr Elsworth Baker has been responsible for training a younger generation of therapists in the methods which he learnt from Reich.⁷ Finally Dr Alexander Lowen has extended and developed Reich’s work in many radical ways and is the founder of the Institute for Bio-Energetic Analysis in New York.⁸ Through his influence, knowledge of bio-energetic principles and practice has been diffused widely in the United States and elsewhere.

To call such therapies ‘bio-energetic’ indicates that we are dealing with powerful emotional reactions. The capacity of emotion to mobilise or paralyse the body is well known. Furthermore, it can be said fairly generally that every neurotic or psychotic person has lost part of the full range of human emotional expression. Such a person has lost, or never developed, the full range of movement possibilities of which any healthy child is capable. In some degree or other motility is disturbed. A neurosis then is equivalent to a system of blockages which prevent the free flow of feelings through the body. The aim of bio-energetic therapy is, therefore, to overcome the blockages and restore the free flow.

Before describing in detail some of the blockages we deal with and the means used to free them, I must make clear that, in this work, emotion is defined rather literally as a ‘movement out’. In this sense it is a fundamental expression of all life forms. Even one-celled animals show a simple function of expansion and contraction of protoplasm in response to stimuli.

We can look on this as the prototype of what we recognise in higher animals as reaching out towards the environment in pleasurable anticipation or shrinking away in pain from unpleasant situations. The term ‘flow’ has literal meaning for such protoplasmic reactions. In higher organisms the processes of expansion and contraction are mediated through the two branches of the autonomic nervous system, impulses from which pass to all the organs and muscles of the body. These impulses regulate the energy metabolism of the body and control such basic functions as circulation and heart beat, digestive processes, breathing, sexuality and orgasm. In a state of health, or of mature functioning, all these processes occur rhythmically. Humans, who can verbalise their emotions, describe the experience of these rhythmic processes in their bodies as pleasurable. In all neuroses and psychoses these free-flowing rhythmic processes are considerably disturbed.

If an animal is threatened by some event or object in its environment, a state of tension is created and it reacts to the threat as to an emergency. When the body is mobilised by the nervous system to cope with emergencies there are normally two possible reactions, which we can summarise as ‘fight’ or ‘flight’. If the animal has succeeded in ridding itself of what threatens it by attack or by escape, it has coped successfully with the emergency and can return to its normal rhythmic state afterwards; thus the disturbance was temporary and acute. The exception is in certain domestic or experimental animals, subject to human treatment (or perhaps we should say inhuman treatment), who may be kept permanently in situations from which they can neither attack nor escape. Such animals become neurotic and show psychosomatic symptoms like the ulcers developed by monkeys who are repeatedly put in stress situations which they cannot avoid.

When we look at human existence, we see that nearly every maladjusted person lives as though permanently in a state of emergency. Thus tension-states, and the over-activity of the sympathetic nervous system which maintains them, have become chronic. At this point, we find that the normal, builtin, self-regulatory processes have ceased to function and outside help or stimuli are required. It is only by dissolving the blockages which prevent the free-flowing movements that we can restore to people the ability to approach their environment rationally and healthily.

What these people need, more than anything, is to be able to relax, which is precisely what they cannot do. If persons who have bottled up their feelings of rage (say) for years are asked to relax, they cannot do so. They must brace themselves to contain their anger. If a child cannot release the tensions of inescapable stress by crying, then it must continue to hold itself in tension as if the state of emergency still exists. If it can, then the stress is more bearable.

So, in bio-energetic therapy people are helped to experience their underlying rage, sorrow, anxiety and longings and to express these in the fullest possible way within the sessions. Only after the body has given in to its blocked impulses is it able to begin to recover a true capacity for joy and for rhythmic and pleasurable vital functioning. The understanding of how a tension-state can begin and be re-inforced until it builds up into a chronic situation, incapable of release, is basic to somatic therapy. This understanding, essentially from one’s own experience, eliminates any form of judgment of neuroses and is thus a necessary and desirable prerequisite to being a therapist.

I should now like to go more specifically into the details of some of these muscular blockages and to describe some of the changes noticed when they are dissolved. The description of bodily tension-patterns can be attempted in one or two ways. I can either discuss the different segments of the body, putting before you the principal immobilities that are found and relating them to the underlying blockage in expression; or alternatively I could take the different character-patterns and attempt to show you how they vary in the nature of the tension-systems which underlie them. The second approach is by far the more subtle and discriminating,⁹ but it would require far too much detail. Furthermore, no particular individual necessarily suffers from all of this at the same time.

Reverting thus to the former method, we can view the tensions of the body as a series of constrictions, created in a situation of emergency, the purpose and effect of which are to limit movement, breathing and feeling as the only available alternative to effective action. Each constriction divides the body into separate segments, in the way that a tight ring of pressure would split up the flowing movement of a snake into two disjoint halves. Reich described a number of body segments, proceeding longitudinally down the body from head to toe.

If we concentrate for a moment on the upper half of the face, the therapist is interested immediately in the expression of the eyes. A patient may look at the therapist with studied seriousness or with an anxious shifting glance, or may have a superior stare or a worried frown. The schizoid person has a characteristic vacant look, as though gazing into the distance; Reich called it the ‘faraway’ look. These different expressions reflect how these people meet the world; they contain also, in locked-up form, their own story of how the early relationships with parents and siblings were experienced.

The tension patterns of the body can be looked on as a person’s frozen history. It is in the face that the truth of this can first be seen. The vital importance of eye-contact in the treatment of autistic children has been demonstrated⁶ and its importance in treatment lies in the fact that these children show a massive immobility and blockage in this particular area. All neurotic people tend to show some degree of disturbance in the eye area, which we can visualise as extending from the eyes themselves through the forehead and across the large muscles of the scalp to where they insert in the neck. The inhibition of weeping, fright or anger can set up very severe tensions in the scalp and muscles at the base of the skull. These tensions are the physiological basis for the severe headaches that are prevalent in certain kinds of character.

To mobilise this area, it is necessary to encourage scalp movements and the opening wide of the eyes. There is also much room for work in developing awareness of the ways in which the patient’s eyes react, or don’t react, to the therapist. Emotions that need to be released from this area, before healthy seeing and looking with full contact can be restored, can include panicky flight, buried suspicion, murderous rage expressed in the eyes, and crying, which is bound up particularly in the muscles between the eyes.

This should give an indication of the type of tensions, the emotions behind them, and a taste of how they can be released. Obviously a full treatise on this would be a biosynthesis training manual, which is not the object here. However, I hope that this, and what follows, serves to introduce and illustrate some of the basics.

Naturally each area of the body is linked up with the next, and the divisions are somewhat arbitrary. The tensions of the upper half of the face are functionally related to the lower half of the face, centred round the mouth and jaws. Patients come with fixed grins or with the down-turned mouth of despair. The compulsive character is nearly always saddled with a stiff upper lip. There are tight jaws, weak chins and gaunt cheeks, all expressing the use which the patient has learned to make of the facial muscles. The healthy child or adult has muscles which can express the full range of emotions according to the requirements of the occasion. Such a person is mobile and acceptable. The tense person is restricted and limited to a narrow range of facial expressions which was acquired in order to deal with stress. This person cannot consciously alter these expressions easily; they will change fundamentally only when the emotion behind the facial tensions can be released.

Such emotions, when they emerge in a session, are naturally infantile, since it is in infants that the first blockages of emotional expression usually take place. In therapy it is possible to release repressed impulses to bite, suck, cry and grimace from these areas of the face. With each such affective outburst and release, the patient often recovers the memory of some traumatic childhood experience; but the recovery of such memories is not essential for improvement. What is essential is the release of the bound emotion from the tensions which blocked its expression. The face is then able to relax properly, for the first time perhaps since the early trauma, and the patient is more able to face the world without the crippling limitations of the past which have been literally embodied.

The neck is one of two major constrictions in the framework of the body, the other being the waist. The neck can be viewed as a conducting tube linking the head to the rest of the body. Tensions in this area are particularly common. They have been described independently of Reich by both Feldenkrais¹⁰ and Alexander¹¹ and they serve to separate the head from the feeling of connection with the body. Many people feel identified with their heads and cut off from their bodies. In contrast, some schizophrenics suffer from such intolerable pressure in their heads, due to the pressures induced by these constrictions, that they identify with their body and feel their head as alien, even wishing it could be taken away and replaced with a new head. The feeling of identification is found to be proportional to the capacity of a person to be aware of what is felt in the body.

The main emotions held down in the throat area tend to be the noisy expressions of sobbing, shouting and screaming. In our culture, children are not supposed to make too much noise. But what else is an infant to do in intolerable situations of stress? It can only learn how to swallow down its anger and choke over its sorrows. Years later, in therapy, these unexpressed and held-down feelings can be elicited, with their original strength, by stimulation of the muscles in the throat and neck. It is remarkable to witness the changes of body-colour between the face and the trunk as the emotions are released. Patients experience a sense of ‘clearing’ in the head. A sense of unity between the head and the trunk develops. They begin to experience a feeling of coordination and grace, which a person free of such tensions is fortunate to take for granted.

Anger held back in the neck ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• INTRODUCTION
• 1 EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION AND THE BODY The language of bio-energy
• 2 CENTRING, GROUNDING AND FACING Embryology and therapy
• 3 EMBODIMENT BEFORE BIRTH Life in the womb
• 4 TRANSITIONS TO ESTABLISHMENT First impressions of the world
• 5 HEAD, HEART AND HARA The dynamic morphology of the body
• 6 WAVES OF BREATH Rhythms of respiration and feeling
• 7 GROUNDING AS COMMUNICATION Steps to transfiguration
• 8 FACING AND SOUNDING Eye-contact, voice and language
• 9 BORDERLINE PATIENTS AND BOUNDARIES On the edge of psychosis
• 10 INNER GROUND Essence and existence
• 11 THE WOMB, THE TOMB AND THE SPIRIT Life beyond the body
• Appendix 1 The early insights of Josef Breuer
• Appendix 2 References
• Appendix 3 A selection of books and articles by David Boadella
• Index