Vegetotherapy
Vegetotherapy is a form of Reichian psychotherapy that involves the physical manifestations of emotions. Development The fundamental text of vegetotherapy is Wilhelm Reich's ''Psychischer Kontakt und vegetative Strömung'' (1935), later included in the expanded edition of Reich's ''Character Analysis'' (1933 and 1949). The practice grew out of Reich's extension of psychoanalysis to cover what he called " character analysis", which involved alleviating a person's body armor and the character defenses that maintain an individual in a state of neurosis. Reich argued that "the feeling of unity of all body sensations ... increases with each new dissolution of an armor ring," leading ultimately to a merger with the autonomic functions of the body. He considered that " orgone physics reduces the ''emotional'' functions of humans even much further, to the forms of movement of molluscs and protozoa". After his claim to have thus discovered "orgone" or life energy, vegetotherapy was a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Wilhelm Reich
Wilhelm Reich ( , ; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, most notably ''The Impulsive Character'' (1925), ''The Function of the Orgasm'' (1927), '' Character Analysis'' (1933), and '' The Mass Psychology of Fascism'' (1933), he became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's ''The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence'' (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife.Strick 2015, ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Orgonomy
Wilhelm Reich ( , ; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, most notably ''The Impulsive Character'' (1925), '' The Function of the Orgasm'' (1927), ''Character Analysis'' (1933), and ''The Mass Psychology of Fascism'' (1933), he became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry. Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's ''The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence'' (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife.Strick 2015, p. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Psychoanalysis
PsychoanalysisFrom Greek: + . is a set of theories and therapeutic techniques"What is psychoanalysis? Of course, one is supposed to answer that it is many things — a theory, a research method, a therapy, a body of knowledge. In what might be considered an unfortunately abbreviated description, Freud said that anyone who recognizes transference and resistance is a psychoanalyst, even if he comes to conclusions other than his own.… I prefer to think of the analytic situation more broadly, as one in which someone seeking help tries to speak as freely as he can to someone who listens as carefully as he can with the aim of articulating what is going on between them and why. David Rapaport (1967a) once defined the analytic situation as carrying the method of interpersonal relationship to its last consequences." Gill, Merton M. 1999.Psychoanalysis, Part 1: Proposals for the Future" ''The Challenge for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy: Solutions for the Future''. New York: Americ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Stress (medicine)
Stress, either physiological, biological or psychological, is an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition. Stress is the body's method of reacting to a condition such as a threat, challenge or physical and psychological barrier. There are two hormones that an individual produces during a stressful situation, these are well known as adrenaline and cortisol. There are two kinds of stress hormone levels. Resting (basal) cortisol levels are normal everyday quantities that are essential for standard functioning. Reactive cortisol levels are increases in cortisol in response to stressors. Stimuli that alter an organism's environment are responded to by multiple systems in the body. In humans and most mammals, the autonomic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis are the two major systems that respond to stress. The sympathoadrenal medullary (SAM) axis may activate the fight-or-flight response through the sympathetic nervous sy ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Primal Therapy
Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argues that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argues that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness for resolution through re-experiencing specific incidents and fully expressing the resulting pain during therapy. Primal therapy was developed as a means of eliciting the repressed pain; the term ''Pain'' is capitalized in discussions of primal therapy when referring to any repressed emotional distress and its purported long-lasting psychological effects. Janov criticizes the talking therapies as they deal primarily with the cerebral cortex and higher-reasoning areas and do not access the source of Pain within the more basic parts of the central nervous system. Primal therapy is used to re-experience childhood pain—i.e., felt rather than conceptual memories—in an attempt to resolve the pain through complete processing and integration, becoming r ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Emotion
Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity. Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades with many fields contributing including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, and computer science. The numerous theories that attempt to explain the origin, function and other aspects of emotions have fostered more intense research on this topic. Current areas of research in the concept of emotion include the development of materials that stimulate and elicit emotion. In addition, PET scans and fMRI scans help study the affective picture processes in the brain. From a mechanistic perspective, emotions can be defined as "a positive or negative experience t ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Gerda Boyesen
Gerda Boyesen (May 18, 1922December 29, 2005) was the founder of Biodynamic Psychology, a branch of Body Psychotherapy. Life Gerda Boyesen was born in 1922 in Bergen. Her first marriage was with Carl Christian Boyesen. In 1947 she read a book by Wilhelm Reich which made an impression on her. Shortly thereafter she began therapy with Ola Raknes, a vegetotherapy, vegetotherapist who had been trained by Reich. Later she studied psychology in Oslo and received training as physiotherapy, physiotherapist which led to work with Aadel Bülow-Hansen. Through her own therapy Boyesen got to know the connection between repressed emotions and muscle tensions. In her book ''Über den Körper die Seele heilen'' she established and partly described in a very personal manner how she developed her own therapeutic method linking the beginnings of Wilhelm Reich, Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud, through her own studies, her own therapeutic experience as well as her own practice. Boyesen was the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Body Psychotherapy
Body psychotherapy, also called body-oriented psychotherapy, is an approach to psychotherapy which applies basic principles of somatic psychology. It originated in the work of Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud and particularly Wilhelm Reich who developed it as vegetotherapy. Branches also were developed by Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos, both patients and students of Reich, like Reichian body-oriented psychotherapy. History Wilhelm Reich and the post-Reichians are considered the central element of body psychotherapy. From the 1930s, Reich became known for the idea that muscular tension reflected repressed emotions, what he called 'body armour', and developed a way to use pressure to produce emotional release in his clients.Totton, (2005) p.3 Reich was expelled from the psychoanalytic mainstream and his work found a home in the 'growth movement' of the 1960s and 1970s and in the countercultural project of 'liberating the body'. Perhaps as a result, body psychotherapy was margina ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Alternative Medicine
Alternative medicine is any practice that aims to achieve the healing effects of medicine despite lacking biological plausibility, testability, repeatability, or evidence from clinical trials. Complementary medicine (CM), complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), integrated medicine or integrative medicine (IM), and holistic medicine attempt to combine alternative practices with those of mainstream medicine. Alternative therapies share in common that they reside outside of medical science and instead rely on pseudoscience. Traditional practices become "alternative" when used outside their original settings and without proper scientific explanation and evidence. Frequently used derogatory terms for relevant practices are ''new age'' or ''pseudo-'' medicine, with little distinction from quackery. Some alternative practices are based on theories that contradict the established science of how the human body works; others resort to the supernatural or superstitious to expl ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Abreaction
Abreaction (german: Abreagieren) is a psychoanalytical term for reliving an experience to purge it of its emotional excesses—a type of catharsis. Sometimes it is a method of becoming conscious of repressed traumatic events. Psychoanalytic origins The concept of abreaction may have actually been initially formulated by Freud's mentor, Josef Breuer; but it was in their joint work of 1895, ''Studies on Hysteria'', that it was first made public to denote the fact that pent-up emotions associated with a trauma can be discharged by talking about it. The release of strangulated affect by bringing a particular moment or problem into conscious focus, and thereby abreacting the stifled emotion attached to it, formed the cornerstone of Freud's early cathartic method of treating hysterical conversion symptoms. For instance, they believed that pent-up emotions associated with trauma can be discharged by talking about it. Freud and Breur, however, did not treat the spontaneous emotional relivi ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Splitting (psychology)
Splitting (also called black-and-white thinking or all-or-nothing thinking) is the failure in a person's thinking to bring together the dichotomy of both perceived positive and negative qualities of something into a cohesive, realistic whole. It is a common defense mechanism wherein the individual tends to think in extremes (e.g., an individual's actions and motivations are ''all'' good or ''all'' bad with no middle ground). This kind of dichotomous interpretation is contrasted by an acknowledgement of certain nuances known as "shades of gray". Splitting was first described by Ronald Fairbairn in his formulation of object relations theory; it begins as the inability of the infant to combine the fulfilling aspects of the parents (the good object) and their unresponsive aspects (the unsatisfying object) into the same individuals, instead seeing the good and bad as separate. In psychoanalytic theory this functions as a defense mechanism. Relationships Splitting creates instability ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |