FOUNDATIONS OF BIOENERGETIC ANALYSIS

Philip M Helfaer

Practitioners of bioenergetic analysis have long felt that their knowledge and expertise have been rather like a light hidden under a basket. This collection of readings is a step in the direction of letting that light shine out to the world. Our purposes in publishing this volume are to bring our work to the wider therapeutic, professional, and consuming communities; to show bioenergetic analysis as a work-in-progress; and finally, to illustrate some recent developments, applications, and some of the relationships to related fields of science and health care. This introduction presents an outline of the observational, clinical, and theoretical foundations of bioenergetics. Bioenergetic analysis emerged directly from psychoanalysis, but once emerged it established a radically different perspective on the human condition and opened up entirely new vistas for therapeutic and naturalistic exploration. Psychoanalysis, primarily guided by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), created a view of the mind. Bioenergetics, primarily under the influence of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) and Alexander Lowen (1910- 2008), created a view of the whole person, body and mind. The whole person emerges in bioenergetics in two senses. First, in describing character and bringing the concept of character into the therapeutic field, Reich described not just the mind, but a full psychological portrait of the person (Shapiro, 1989, pp. 56-58), how he looked and behaved in addition to mental contents. Reich then expanded on this picture by bringing specific aspects of somatic functioning into the therapeutic field. Alexander Lowen described the person as a body self and brought into the therapeutic field an expanded description of the body to include its overall form and motility. Lowen came to address the central therapeutic task as seeing the person, and that meant literally looking at him or her, looking at the body. The foundations of bioenergetics were set forth in 1934 in a remarkable paper by the then young psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich. Even the name of the paper brought a new vocabulary to psychoanalysis, Psychic Contact and Vegetative Current. This paper, and another one, published maybe ten years later, The Expressive Language of the Living, contain the essential sources of bioenergetic analysis and established a new paradigm for the treatment of neurosis, depression, anxiety, and many other forms of the personality disorders that cause ordinary human misery. The new therapy Reich developed brought the therapeutic focus to the emotions, (especially pleasure, anxiety, and anger), the body, and the expressive movement of the body. Reichs new therapy not only retained the centrality of sex and sexuality as the key factor in etiology, it went further in that it also established the capacity for orgastic sexuality as the key to health and

healing. Libido was embodied. Reich understood the evolution of his work as having been based on the study of the sexual orgasm. The new therapy also included the analysis of the mind, behavior, the way the patient related to the therapist, and the therapists own inner responses. It therefore established not only a specific conception of the unitary functioning of the person, that is of mind and body, but a unity that is comprehensive in the domains of experience and behavior encompassed. To grasp the nature of Reichs work, it is important to understand (i) that it followed a clear line of development, (ii) that it was based on the solid bed-rock of clinical observation, (iii) he kept a consistent focus on the study of sex, sexuality, and the sexual orgasm, and, finally, (iv) that in doing therapy, he always kept the clear goal of establishing the essential criterion for health, which he called orgastic potency. As a result of consistently following these guidelines, Reich was the first to introduce and systematically describe biological motility as a realm of phenomena intrinsic in the analytic situation. This means he described the living body, life as it was expressed through the individual person, and this meant expressive movements, emotion, pulsatory movements within the body, waves of excitation, and various involuntary and autonomically regulated bodily phenomena. These phenomena are outside the realm of language, where analytic work had previously confined itself, and in this way he touched a depth of human nature that had not been reached before. Wilhelm Reich emigrated to America just before the outbreak of World War II in 1939. In 1940-41, a course he gave at the New School for Social Research in New York City, called Biological Aspects of Character Formation, was attended by a young teacher named Alexander Lowen (Sharaf, 1983, p. 265). Lowen, himself the child of Russian Jewish immigrants, pursued studies and therapy with Reich, and made the exceptional effort of going to Switzerland after the war to pursue his medical degree in order to become a Reichian therapist. Following his return to the United States, Lowen separated himself from the circle around Reich, and by 1954 was in the process of establishing an institute separate from the Reichians. The bioenergetic conception of motility that emerged in Reichs two foundational papers grew out of his innovations in psychoanalysis. He began with a careful study of resistance and from there moved to the development of the technique of character analysis. Character analytic technique assiduously avoids interpretation of unconscious drive derivatives. It focuses on the observable surface of behavior, what Reich called the formal aspects of the patients behavior. By formal aspects Reich meant the manner or characteristic way in which the patient expressed him or herself, as contrasted with the hidden meaning of the expression. Formal characteristics include any and every small thing about how a person speaks, moves or acts, such ordinary things as politeness, quietness, stiffness, even the way the individual lies on the couch, a certain kind of smile or look. Through careful observation, attention to character, and steady focus on therapeutic goals, Reich described a whole new range of phenomena in the therapeutic setting. These included very

specific and astute descriptions of small characteristic ways of functioning, small movements which hid deep emotion and meaning, and all kinds of autonomic reactivity and involuntary expressiveness. Reich had a striking ability to sense the relevant quality of the ongoing experience and to give it both a description and a precise conceptualization that brought the whole therapeutic process into focus and developed an efficacious paradigm. Reichs fundamental concept of armor, the armoring of the periphery of the biopsychic system, (p. 338) is a good example of his observations and conceptualization. The ego, i.e., that part of the person that is exposed to danger ... acquires an automatically functioning mode of reaction, i.e., its character. It is as if the affective personality armored itself, as if the hard shell it develops were intended to deflect and weaken the blows of the outer world as well as the clamoring of the inner needs. ... the ability to regulate the energy economy depends upon the extent of the armoring.

Therapeutic work acted to free the person from the restrictions of the armor, releasing passion, emotion, expression, or as he says experiences which operate as vegetative-energetic concentrations of energy (p. 294). His goal in character analysis is for the vegetative sources of the personality to begin to flow anew (p. 303). The notion that a person is a psycho-somatic unity is common-place in contemporary thought. The formulation of this conception is often casual and non-specific. In Reichs work, the concept of the psychosomatic unity of the person evolved into a specific meaning with actual clinical, functional implications. This developed as follows. With consistent application of character analytic technique he noticed states of vegetative excitation and tension regularly appear, of which the patient was previously unaware (p. 305). He uses the term vegetative to refer to the non-verbal expression of emotions and involuntary movements under the influence of the autonomic nervous system. Here he is approaching what we might now refer to as affect regulation (Schore, 1994). Reichs theory of affects is also still entirely relevant to contemporary thinking. His analysis of aggression and hate is one good example of an aspect of this (pp. 338, 345, 389-90; Rizutto, et. al., 2004). Once in the position of observing the obvious manifestations of vegetative excitation, that is, tensions, arousal, and excitations, Reich was clearly placed to be open to other observations of the body. In this way, clinical observation led from character armor to the observation and description of muscular armor, a bodily expression. Here, Reich is observing stiffness, rigidity, increased tonus, that is, muscle tension. Further, he observed that these tensions have the same function as character armor, the blocking or binding of vegetative excitation, anxiety, or sexual sensations (p. 340).

Character itself is an aspect of the ego (psyche) protecting the person from inner and outer stimulation by binding excitation, anxiety, and pleasure. Muscular armoring (body) has the same function. Both inhibit, or regulate and express, the underlying process of emotion or excitation. Therapeutically, anxiety, aggression, or pleasure can be released by loosening either the character or muscular armor, allowing for the increased flow (motility) of excitation. In this sense character armor and body armor are functionally identical, and this is one precise meaning of the unity of psyche and soma, mind and body. Reichs introduction of the conception of vegetative current into this model is its peculiar genius, giving it power and depth. Vegetative current is an energetic concept. It refers to a biological flow or movement within the organism. It is a current of excitation. While it is modulated or structured in part by the autonomic nervous system, it is not defined in terms of the pathways of those enervations. It is defined by the meaning of the expressive movement of the body. Emotion is literally a movement within the body. Such movement can be outwards towards the periphery of the body and the world, in which case there is a pleasure, or aggression turned outward; or the movement can be inwards towards the core of the body, in which case the person experiences anxiety. These are the two basic emotions and movements. Armor, both of the character and the body, function to regulate or inhibit these flows (pp. 338, 356). When Reich said the goal of therapy is to have the vegetative sources of the personality begin to flow anew, (p. 303), he meant it literally. Here is another specific meaning of psychosomatic unity. An energetic or excitatory process (vegetative current) is the common root between the movements out or the movements in. The affect, spontaneous movements, or various vague excitations released when either character or body armor are softened are all forms of energetic movement. Amongst the other insights that came from Reichs work on character analysis is the understanding of the actual mechanism by which early childhood experience has an impact on the present day experience. Here, again, Reich shifted the paradigm away from hidden meanings and the unconscious mind, to here-and-now behavior. Early experience that has an impact does so by virtue of becoming the basis for characteristic modes of behavior of the person, not just what the person does, but how and in what manner he or she does it. The past can be extracted, as Reich put it, through analysis of the present. This basic idea of character analysis is still a significant part of psychoanalytic practice (Shapiro, 1989; Stark,1994). Reichs formulations of his observations and conceptualization of body armor and the underlying affective and energetic processes in The Expressive Language of the Living, is a remarkably comprehensive clinical guide. He described armoring as a series of segmental rings arranged at right angles to the longitudinal axis of the body. Functionally, they served to impede or inhibit a unitary flow of excitation through the whole body. He catalogued the bodily expressions and emotions typical to each segment. He described the orgasm reflex, a soft, spontaneous pulsatory movement of the whole body, that emerges as the armoring below the diaphragm is successively

dissolved and related it to the capacity for sexual surrender. In all these descriptions, observations, and conceptualizations, he touched profoundly the core of human emotional and sexual life. All who came in contact with Reichs work with any awareness realized that he had developed a therapeutic tool that reached deeply into the individual. No one at the time, including Reich himself, and later, Alexander Lowen, had enough experience to really understand the meaning of embarking on the therapeutic and healing projects made possible by that tool. Even Reichs description of his early cases in character analysis already revealed patients going through extremely powerful, often frightening experiences. Alexander Lowen, founder of bioenergetic analysis, built his therapeutic house on the foundation of Reichs conceptions of motility, character, body armor, and sexuality. Nevertheless, from the start, he established that his approach was also different from Reichs (Language of the Body,, pp. xii, 17, 94, 99) . Lowen shifted the focus of Reichs work in four essential ways. First, Reich had come to the conclusion that the energetic phenomena he was observing in his patients were a biological expression of a type of energy that is found dispersed throughout the universe. Bioenergy is cosmic energy, and he embarked on a serious course of scientific investigation to study it. It was clear to Lowen that doing therapy with people did not necessitate extrapolating from the organic functioning of the human body to the cosmos. There is an energetic process in the body, as Reich described, and it can be understood and worked with practically. The key to this process remained as Reich first explained, respiration. Second, Lowen got his patients up off the couch and on to their feet (Language of the Body, p. 95). In doing so, he was able to introduce a new observation concerning biological pulsation. He described what he called a pulsatory pendular swing between the head end and tail end of the body. This pulsation is the basis of bioenergetics and the practice which characterized Lowens therapy and practical investigations from first to last: grounding. This refers to the energetic connection between a persons feet and the earth or ground (Fear of Life, p.8). Grounding develops and is based on the unitary energetic flow between feet, pelvis and head. The third way in which Lowens work differed from Reichs represents a profound shift in his view of what he liked to call the human condition. The basic fact of the modern persons condition, he feels, is the antithesis between what he would usually refer to as the ego and the body itself. The ego exists as a powerful force in Western man that cannot be dismissed or denied. The therapeutic goal is to integrate the ego with the body and its striving for pleasure and sexual fulfillment. (Bioenergetics, p. 30) This is a far cry from urging the vegetative sources of the personality to begin to flow anew (p. 303). As Lowen saw it, Reichs therapeutic approach did not take sufficient account of the ego and the reality principle. In establishing this antithesis at the center of his work, Lowen also introduced a frankly dualistic way of thinking about the person (Language of the Body, pp. 18, 33, 39). Body and mind

interpenetrate, each function of one is represented by a functionally identical process in the other, and the unity of the energetic process and the identity and antithesis of all biological functions still is the basis of psychosomatic unity. However, in the therapy process, one deals with mind or ego and one deals with the body, and in modern humans, the struggle is always to unify an antithetical ego with the body. As a result of this focus on the antithetical relationship between the ego and body self - a profound tension resonates through all levels of the human condition. The reality of this tension has serious implications. Healthy functioning, for example, cannot be defined solely by a pulsatory state, even the orgasm reflex, that can be achieved in the therapists office. We do not function simply as biological creatures free of culture or of our history. A certain kind of personal maturation of ego functioning in harmony with bodily motility must be developed and lived by in the various departments of a life in terms of love and work, say in order to find fulfillment. In contemporary society, this is a difficult goal. People fall prey to the tyrannical aspects of the ego (superego, ego ideal) and the empty pursuit of egocentric, narcissistic goals, power, strength, or wealth. The outcome is reduced aliveness, diminished feeling, orgastic impotence, and a reduced or non-existent capacity for joy. The kinds of therapeutic goals Lowen articulated over the years accordingly differed from the relatively straightforward, if difficult, goal of achieving the orgasm reflex. These goals reflected aspects of overall functioning of the person in his or her life. Health is expressed not only in sexuality, But it also includes the even more basic functions of breathing, moving, feeling, and self-expression (Bioenergetics, p. 43). Similarly, while he did not abandon the ideal goal of orgastic potency, he defined the goal of therapy in relation to sexuality as sexual maturity, and said that sexual maturity is not a set state, but a way of life (Love and Orgasm). A healthy organism is characterized by freedom, grace, and beauty (Bioenergetics, p. 44). The creative elaboration of these and similar sets of positive attributes, characteristic of bioenergetic health, have characterized Lowens thinking over the years and give a strong, positive thrust to his appraisal of the human condition and the possibilities for therapy. Perhaps the major source of Lowens difference from Reich lay in Lowens perception of the nature of character. Lowen saw character as the practical bridge between ego and body, since it involved both. Lowen saw that character endured, and that the therapeutic journey was a life-long one. He felt that both character analysis and work with grounding, respiration, and bodily tensions were essential, with the body focus being most important. Reichs paradigm of the motility of the organism, however, underlies all the work with the body in Lowens approach to therapy. Pulsatory aliveness, the capacity for pleasure, and sexual surrender are still goals, but they remain in tension with the demands for maturation, functioning in reality, and the inevitable presence of the modern self-conscious ego. Lowen pursued a mission over the years, in both therapy and his writing, to understand the human condition deeply enough both culturally and bioenergetically to offer a sure, if difficult course, to greater inner freedom, aliveness, and joy.

The fourth major difference with Reich is that when Lowen talks about the body, he means the body head to toe the body as person, the living person as body. He is not referring to an organismic (vegetative) state. Seeing the person meant to see the overall shape or form of the body and the overall general configuration of muscular tensions, both of these revealing character, and it meant to see specific muscular tensions and blocks to energetic flow. These qualities reveal the individuals history. On the basis of this overall perception of the person, Lowen developed a character typology set forth in his first book (Language of the Body) and later as well (Bioenergetics). Reich had set out the basis for such a typology which is the perception of the body as a living bladder, with a charged periphery and interior, as if it were a single cell. Biologically, there are a small number of fates that can befall such a bladder; e.g., it can be frozen, depleted, the boundary can be made thick and dense, the periphery can be stiffened, and so on. Reich also formulated the classic description of the masochistic character. There are two other essential concepts set out in Reichs foundational papers, contact (and contactlessness) and surrender, both of which have a central role in bioenergetics, and for both of which Lowen shifted and generalized Reichs meanings. Contactlessness refers to a psychological and biological condition that is described by people in a variety of ways, once they begin to experience it. In essence, it is the primary disturbance of modern people. Apathy, inner deadness, isolation, (p. 311) and so on, are all ways of describing the experience of contactlessness. The early development of contactlessness leads to the development of substitute contact, ways to keep connection with objects and the world that express the original movement in very indirect and armored ways. (Reichs work on contact and contactless, by the way, is very much in the same vein as Winnicotts work on the false self {Phillips, 1988}.) Reichs explanation of the sources and dynamics of contactlessness are complex. At the core, however, Reich felt that it was the expression of a deep fear of contact with persons and things in the world, and that fear was an expression of what he called orgasm anxiety, a profound fear of sexual surrender to the living body. Such fear is typically generated in relation to conflicts during the oedipal phase. Orgasm anxiety itself is a state that can be observed only after thorough therapeutic work on the character and muscular armoring. Lowens important contribution, Fear of Life is essentially the study of contactlessness. In this discussion Lowen reframes the whole issue of contact and contactlessness, while still resting it on the underlying foundation of biological pulsation. The fear of life, common in modern peoples, is a general running away or withdrawal from the life of the body, because the bodys energies are sacrificed both to guilt and in the service of avoiding the sense of failure (shame) associated with not measuring up to the demands of an idealized ego. Both Fear of Life and Joy take up the theme of surrender deeply probed in Reichs paper on the Expressive Language of the Living. The orgasm reflex, Reich said, is essentially a deep surrender:

The organism surrenders itself to its plasmatic excitations and sensations of flowing; then it surrenders itself completely to the partner in the sexual embrace. (p.367)

This statement is a simple, beautiful and clear expression of Reichs paradigm of human motility. Lowens discussion is based on this conception of surrender, however, he understands the fate of contemporary people to be a deep struggle against and fear of surrender. In Fear of Life the individual fears surrendering to his fate, that is, relinquishing the egos struggles and accepting failure. In Joy, Lowen demonstrates how working with muscular tensions increases the capacity for relinquishing ego controls in the service of a surrender to the body that allows for aliveness and joyful experience. With the 1958 publication of Language of the Body, the theory and clinical approach of bioenergetic analysis were established. These were: 1. The understanding of motility as described by Reich; that is, a pulsatory energetic process in the body that underlies affects and the identity and antithesis of anxiety and sexuality; the functional identity of character armor and muscular armor both of which regulate the energetic process; and the role of the autonomic nervous system in muscular armor (chronic sympatheticotonia). 2. The understanding that the therapist works with the whole person. The central task of the therapist is to see the patient as a whole person with his unique history and functioning in his real life. This means seeing the person by looking at their bodily self, and the form and movement of the body. It means that motility is always under the influence of and in a dialectic relationship with the individuals ego organization, as it has been formed by family and culture. 3. The actual techniques of bioenergetic therapy include direct work with the muscular armor through physical interventions, both manually and by directed bodily movements, various techniques for improving the respiratory wave, and an emphasis on grounding. 4. The bioenergetic therapist also works as a character analyst, working through transference and countertransference. 5. Sexuality and sexual functioning are at the core of the therapeutic endeavor, even though therapy does not focus exclusively on sex or the oedipal period; overall vibrant aliveness and the maturation of the personality allowing freedom and expression are the goals. All these themes can be identified in the accompanying article by Alexander Lowen, What is Bioenergetics? In the forty years following publication of Language of the Body, Lowen went on to write a dozen books, delving again and again into the situation of the suffering of the individual whose needs for fulfillment lie with the body but who is driven by the guilt and needs of an ego shaped by modern society.

Subsequent to Reichs breakthrough paper of 1934 and independent of it, as well as both before and after Lowens publication of Language of the Body (1958), many other waves of change and development moved through the field of psychotherapy. Bioenergetic analysts have been influenced by various of these trends and have brought them into their work. With no intention to be complete, several such influences should be mentioned, including Winnicotts (Phillips, 1988) work (the therapeutic relationship as holding environment, the influence of the maternal relationship); child and infant research (for example as embodied in the work of Daniel Stern {2004}and others); ego psychology, self-psychology, object relations theory; trauma theory and therapy starting with the work of Judith Herman (1992), and developed by such people as Robert Scaer (2001,2005); feminist perspectives; and most recently various relational perspectives (Stark, 1999; Schore, 1994), as well as recent psychoneurobiological work upon which some of these rest. The core themes represented by the papers in this Reader resonate with core themes in the work of Reich and Lowen. (1) Sexuality has always been at the core of bioenergetics. Reichs focus on the nature and function of sexual orgasm was the core of his vision of the living organism. Lowens work in this area (Love and Orgasm) broadened the discussion of sexuality. He brought the heart into love, both emotionally and energetically, related sex and sexuality to the whole personality, and stated that the issue is not orgastic potency, specifically, but sexual maturity as a way of life. (2) There are various formulations in contemporary analytic therapies about the nature of the relationship between therapist and patient and the premise that the relationship is central as a healing factor. We see in Reichs writings, a careful attention to how the patient relates to him and the patients other object relations, an acute awareness and sensitivity to relatedness. It is important to note that Reich introduced the observations that in fact are already the basis for understanding the transference and countertransference in bioenergetics in the language of the body and as a somatic transaction between two people on an equal basis. He describes how the patients expressive movements bring about responsive movement (resonance) within the therapists body, and how the therapist must sense within himself these effects (p. 362). He is describing here an inter-body relatedness. It is for this reason that Lowen writes, I dont believe a therapist can help a patient advance beyond the point where he, himself, has gone (accompanying article). He is referring specifically to the therapists work with his or her own body structure. In Reichs discussions, the somatic-relational aspect of the new therapy emerges several times, and this is clearly a significant aspect of his paradigm (pp. 362, 363). (3) Muscular armor, in Reichs paradigm is functionally identical to psychic repression (p. 342). Beyond this, however, he associates a variety of physical symptoms and diseases with armoring (pp. 375, 389). With his understanding of armor, specific biological-emotional processes involved in some psychosomatic diseases can be described. Reichs work in this area is completely in line with the model of trauma related disease described by Scaer (2001, 2005).

(4) Reich offers a case study in which character analysis revealed a childhood trauma and its impact on adult functioning (pp. 306-7). Armoring was always understood in relation to a dysregulation of the autonomic nervous system. Of particularly interest, and well ahead of his times, he described the freeze response (pp. 312-3, 343), which figures predominantly in current models of trauma (e.g., Scaer, 2001, 2005). The reader is invited to study the following papers in light of this description of the foundations of bioenergetic analysis. References Freud, Sigmund. (1900). The Interpretation of Dreams. See Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Herman, Judith Lewis. (1992). Trauma and Recovery. NY: Basic Books. Lowen, Alexander. (1958). Physical Dynamics of Character Structure. NY: Grune and Stratton. (1971). Paperback edition. NY: Collier Books Edition (Edition used as reference in this article). (2006). Alachua, FL:Bioenergetics Press. ___________. (1965). Love and Orgasm. Alachua FL: Bioenergetics Press. ___________. (1975). Bioenergetics. NY: Coward, McCann&Geoghegan (Used as reference in this article.) Paperback ed., Alachua FL: Bioenergetics Press. ___________. (1980). Fear of Life. Alachua FL: Bioenergetics Press. ___________. (1995). Joy. Alachua FL: Bioenergetics Press. Phillips, Adam. (1988). Winnicott. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Reich, Wilhelm. (1945). Character Analysis. Third, enlarged ed., Vincent R. Carfagno, tr. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Rizzuto, Anna-Maria, W.W.Meissner & Dan H. Buie. (2004). The Dynamics of Human Aggression: Theoretical Foundations, Clinical Applications. NY: Brunner-Routledge. Scaer, Robert. (2001). The Body Bears the Burden. Trauma, Dissociation, and Disease. Binghamton, NY: The Haworth Medical Press. ___________. (2005). The Trauma Spectrum. Hidden Wounds and Human Resiliency. NY: W.W.Norton & Co. Schore, Allan N. (1994). Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self. The Neurobiology of Emotional Development. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., Pub. Shapiro, David. (1989). Psychotherapy of Neurotic Character. NY: Basic Books, Inc.,Pub.

Sharaf, Myron. (1983). Fury on Earth. A Biography of Wilhelm Reich. NY: St. Martins Press/Marek. Stark, Martha. (1994). Working With Resistance. Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson. ___________. (1999). Modes of Therapeutic Action. Enhancement of Knowledge, Provision of Experience, and Engagement in Relationship. Northvale NJ: Jason Aronson. Stern, Daniel. (2004). The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life. NY: W.W. Norton.