Michel Heller: The Golden Age of Body Psychotherapy in Oslo
1 Introduction
The early history of body psychotherapy has often been associated with Wilhelm Reich. Although he was a major participant of this period, his reputation has partially played the role of the tree that hides the forest. In this article I will focus on an important moment of this early history, and present a network of collaborations during the Golden Age of psychotherapy in Oslo. These events occurred during the Second World War, and in the decade that followed it. Although I will attempt to situate these events in a wider context, so as to show why readers could be interested by the issues that were raised at that period, I will not attempt in this mainly-historical article to summarize what is hap-pening today in the field.
Usage has imposed the term “body psychotherapy”, which in a way means nothing, and in another way refers to a wide frame of psycho-therapies that include methods focused on bodily events. The real issue, for me, is how psychological and body issues can be associated, and how useful such an association can be for people who suffer from ail-ments such as depression, anxiety and chronic frustration.
I do not know many people who would refute that body and mind are two aspects of an individual human being, and that ideally every aspect of an individual should be taken into account during a therapeu-tic process, starting with the nuclear dynamics in the organism, and fin-ishing with its inclusion in interactive and socio-economic circuits. How-ever, for a treatment, choices have to be made, as time and resources are finite. The issue today is to find ways of selecting a strategy that will focus mainly on a few sets of data that are particularly relevant for a given treatment. Choosing the elements one should focus on remains problematic, but focusing on mind and body is only one option that has certain advantages and disadvantages. Furthermore, even if one finds it relevant to zoom on these elements, they still contain more than can be dealt with. A therapist, or a team of therapists, does not usually have the time, knowledge and competence to associate all the dimensions of the body with all the dimensions of the mind. He will also be confronted with important theoretical issues, as the distinction is itself problematic, and as knowledge on how a human organism functions is still a work in progress. One would therefore need to find a label for all forms of psy-chotherapeutic intervention that require various forms of intervention on physiology (e.g., psychopharmacology), or on the body (e.g., using physiotherapeutic methods).
This article will focus on a series of events that proposed highly use-ful forms of treatment and are still used today. The reason I need to write an article on this period is that most of the literature on the meth-ods developed during this period is written in Norwegian, and is there-fore poorly known to the rest of the world. The main aim of this article is to encourage more translations of the written material, and more pro-fessional interaction between the relevant Norwegian institutions and those of the rest of the world.
2 Major ancestors of the Oslo Golden Age of body psychother-apy
2.1 Scandinavian body techniques
The first hero of our story was born during the French revolution, at the end of the 18th century. The Swede Per Henrik Ling blended gym-nastic movements, massage, and physiotherapy into a technique that became world famous. His main inspiration came from Turkish meth-ods, originating from the whole empire, including regions that are today located in Russia, China, Iran and Egypt. As Far Eastern bodywork still remains the reference for the world, one can thank Per Henrik Ling to have developed versions of this knowledge that could be included in a European mindset, and which could then be developed with the help of the scientific methods created during the Age of Enlightenment. The re-sult is a broad set of techniques that have transformed Scandinavia in the new reference for bodywork in the world.
In massage, Per Henrik Ling distinguished basic forms of touch, such as effleurage, pettrisage, friction, tapotement, compression and vibration. He also invented gymnastic and orthopaedic apparatus that were then used for more then a century all over Europe and America, such as stall bars and window ladders. Gustav Zander then developed new techniques, using springs and weights, to propose clearer blends of effort and relaxation in physiotherapy and orthopaedics. Today, Ling is mentioned on 80,000 web sites, demonstrating that his work has been a base for most developments in the field in Europe and North America, usually blended with Far Eastern methods. When I was a child, my un-cle in Vienna showed me his exercise book for gymnastics, which I still possess. The book was written in 1904 by a famous Danish Olympic champion named J.P. Müller. The book has been translated into 24 lan-guages, and remains one of the best gymnastic books I know. One of the many reasons for his renown was his proposition to use washing as basic gymnastic and self massage: washing and drying every part of the body maintains a minimum stretch of the joints and contact with one’s own body.
When Norway became a distinct nation in 1905, Norwegians, of course, used that knowledge and developed their own brand of body-work.
2.2 Psychoanalysis
The second hero of my genealogy is, of course, the Viennese neu-rologist Sigmund Freud, founder of psychoanalysis. Freud was influ-enced by Messmer’s hypnosis and Charcot’s psychiatry. He began his psychoanalytic research in the 1890s by showing that problematical re-lations between mind and body are at the root of hysterical symptoms. In the 1920s, one of Freud’s main trainers was the young sexologist Wilhelm Reich , who was developing a theory of character structures, and a theory on the relation between orgasm and mental health. In his correspondence, Freud expressed his doubts on the relevance of Reich’s idealistic model on orgasmic potency, but he personally wrote to Reich to congratulate him on his theory of character . Two dimensions of Reich’s character analysis were particularly popular among psychoana-lysts during the 1930s:
a) His demonstration that negative transference was often insufficiently ana-lyzed.
b) His way of including nonverbal items in the flow of free associations. Reich discussed particularities of behavior with patients as easily as particularities of a dream, and showed that the inclusion of behavioral traits in the dynamics of a psychoanalytical treatment facilitated the emergence of emotional reac-tions and contents.
When Wilhelm Reich and his wife, Anna, moved to Berlin in 1930, they joined one of the most powerful groups of psychoanalysts, as all its members are still read today: Franz Alexander, Karl Abraham, Otto Fen-ichel, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Melanie Klein, and many others. Franz Alexander created the psychosomatic model. Alexander was pro-bably influenced by Georg Groddeck, Walter B. Cannon, Wilhelm Reich and current psychoanalytic discussions. His model on how mind and physiology influenced each other was different from that of Reich. The Berlin group was probably influenced by the issues raised by these two models on how the body could be integrated in psychoanalysis. How-ever, their models followed divergent paths. Their difference of opinion on how body and mind interacted created a lively discussion amongst the whole group on the matter.
One of the important shifts in psychoanalytic theory proposed by this group was to emphasize regulation systems. They seldom used the term, as their notions on the subject were still implicit. However the no-tion and the term were floating in the air. It can be found in the writings of physiologists like Cannon, psychologists such as Piaget and Vygotsky, spiritual leaders such as Rudolph Steiner, and the newly-born artificial intelligence that soon became known as cybernetics. This implied giving less importance to “unconscious internal objects”, and to initiate a form of thinking that focused on unconscious repair systems. Otto Fenichel, for example, studied the influence of character on excretory and diges-tive regulation systems. This new trend not only influenced Wilhelm Reich, Trygve Braatøy and Gerda Boyesen in Norway, but also influ-enced more recent approaches based on the analysis of nonverbal in-teraction between mothers and infants, such as those developed since the 1980s on the East coast of the USA by Daniel Stern, Edward Tronick and Beatrice Beebe.
2.3 Psychophysiology and Cannon
The authors discussed in this volume practically never quote Walter B. Cannon , but his influence is omnipresent. I suppose that he was such an authority in the realm of psychophysiology that his ideas were spread a bit everywhere in the courses of physiology followed by most of the authors trained after 1920.
During the First World War, Cannon was a doctor in the US army. Accordingly, he spent some time in Paris where he became familiar with the ideas of Claude Bernard. Claude Bernard is one of the most famous French biologists of the 19th century. In French-speaking countries, psychology students must still read his views on how the experimental method can be used to understand how an organism functions. Claude Bernard was profoundly influenced by Lamarck’s theory of evolution and Darwin’s subsequent developments. He showed (1878) that plants and animals share a certain number of central features that can be consid-ered as basic properties of life. One of them is that all living organisms are membranes that mostly contain a form of water that acquires a cer-tain number of properties regulated by physiological systems. This bio-logically regulated fluid forms the “internal milieu of an organism”. Some of its properties are vital and must vary as little as possible. The envelope containing the internal milieu must have the means to see that the inner biological fluids vary considerably less than the organ-ism’s environment. Although this general system is constant in all living organisms, the internal milieu, its regulation systems and it’s envelope have become increasingly complex. Thus humans have several types of fluids. The intra-cellular fluid closely resembles what can be observed in plants, but blood and lymph are more recent forms of differentiation. This notion, that all living organisms could be characterized as embod-ied fluid, had a deep influence on Reich while he worked in Scandinavia.
The clearest example, also extensively studied by Cannon, is that of temperature. Most humans know that their inner temperature can only vary with a one-degree centigrade range if they do not want to become ill. From that perspective, one can differentiate an open regulation sys-tem and a closed one. The closed regulation system is also referred to as an organism’s auto-regulation system, as when the vegetative nerv-ous system regulates how blood is distributed in the organism. In this example, one can think of the organism as a complete ecological sys-tem. The open regulation system regulates the organismal ecology with that of its environment. Living creatures have developed, through mil-lions of years of evolution, an astounding variety of ways of reacting and surviving
When Cannon came back to the United States, he continued work-ing with Claude Bernard’s focus on the regulation systems of tempera-ture in relation to health. He coined the term “homeostasis” to desig-nate the regulation mechanisms of the internal milieu. For humans, the range of relevant regulation mechanisms include not only the regulation of blood sugar, but also the construction of protective devices which re-quires building houses and heating systems, digging for coal, etc.
In his 1932, The Wisdom of the Body, Cannon thus provides one with an organismal vision of the individual, in which behavior, thought and feelings are organismal functions that evolved to participate in the homeostatic regulation system like more organic mechanisms such as nerves, hormones, muscles, etc. The global vision is that everything is linked to everything, and emotions are central because they participate in the coordination of all major organs with the open homeostatic dy-namics. Thus emotions are not only closely related to interpersonal di-mensions, but also to the vegetative, cardio-vascular, digestive, and hormonal systems, and through them to the more refined dynamics of the internal milieu.
Cannon, for example, wrote a chapter on the complex interactions between emotions and gastro-intestinal movements (1991, pp. 179-190). He observed that anxiety reduces peristaltic mobility, while emo-tions can sometimes increase their mobility or decrease them. It would seem that expression of emotion supports mobility, while blind rage stops it. At the end of his career, in his autobiography, he illustrates his vision of how emotions and gastro-intestinal movements work together to regulate the organism’s moods:
The whole purpose of my effort was to see the peristaltic waves and to learn their effects. Only after some time did I note that the absence of activity was ac-companied by signs of perturbation, and when serenity was restored the waves promptly reappeared. This observation, a gift for my troubles, led to a long series of studies on the effects of strong emotions on the body. The idea flashed through my mind that [these changes] could be nicely integrated if conceived of as bodily preparations for supreme effort in flight or in fighting. The inhibition of digestive activity by emotional excitement was an interruption of a process which is not es-sential in a life-or-death emergency and which uses a supply of blood urgently needed elsewhere. (Walter Bradford Cannon, 1945: The Way of an Investigator)
During the two world wars, psychologists like Henri Wallon generally assumed that intestinal movements and emotions were permanently associated. After the Second World War, the subject disappeared from the literature, with the assumption that the only physiological support of the mind was the brain. Although Cannon’s vision has never been di-rectly attacked, it was gradually pushed to the background of obvious truths and nearly forgotten. However, as I will show, Gerda Boyesen, one of our many Oslo heroes, not only continued to explore the thera-peutic implications of Cannon’s theory, but also developed useful ways of using the association between peristaltic movements and emotions in psychotherapy, and coined the term “psycho-peristaltism” to designate the psychological functions of the guts.
The last item of interest for the Oslo period is Cannon’s exploration on the neurology of emotion. Lamarck (1815) had initiated the idea that an evolutionary analysis of the brain allows one to distinguish three main segments related to reptiles, mammals, and humans. Lamarck supposed that the central part of the brain, which is already well devel-oped among mammals, has played a major role in the emergence of emotions. In 1925, Cannon and Britton published an article on observa-tions of cats that been decorticated under ether anaesthesia. The decor-tication eliminated direct influences of the neocortex on the thalamus. When they awoke, the cats spontaneously displayed the complete pic-ture of intense fury. Ganong’s (2000, pp. 248-249) current summary on sham rage is the following:
It was originally thought that rage attacks in animals with diencephalic and forebrain lesions represented only a physical, motor manifestation of anger, and the reaction was therefore called “sham rage”. This appears to be incorrect. Al-though rage attacks in animals with diencephalic lesions are induced by minor stimuli, they are usually directed with great accuracy at the source of the irrita-tion. Furthermore, hypothalamic stimulation that produces fear-rage reaction is apparently unpleasant to animals, because they become conditioned against the place where the experiments are conducted and try to avoid the experimental sessions. ...There is therefore little doubt that rage attacks include the mental as well as the physical manifestations of rage, and the term “sham rage” should be dropped.
Cannon’s studies on rage have often been quoted by neurologists such as Papez, MacLean, van der Kolk and LeDoux as the origin of their notion that the limbic system is the “emotional brain”, which formed the basic support for lobotomy . Although Cannon was influenced by a ra-tionalist agenda that tried to find in the brain the roots of a conflict be-tween emotions and reason, he never suggested that emotions were a purely “limbic” phenomenon. On the contrary, all the limbic system could produce in his experiment was raw, maladjusted, rage that could only lead to counter-productive behaviors. Cannon thought he had demonstrated that without the neo-cortex the brain could not create what is experienced as a highly refined range of emotions. This was the position taken by the various actors of the Oslo Golden Age and by re-cent research (Trevarthen, 2005, p. 67; Panksepp & Smith Pasqualini, 2005).
2.4 Relaxation
The last hero that precedes the beginning of our story is the Ger-man psychiatrist Johann Heinrich Schultz , who began to create a Euro-pean style relaxation technique from 1908 onwards, inspired by yoga, Mesmer, hypnosis, and psycho-physiology. In a method that became known as the Autogenic relaxation training in the 1930s, he showed that relaxation could influence muscular tensions and blood circulation; and that a relaxation of muscular tension could diminish psychological anxiety. This movement also spread in Europe and America. In Chicago, Edmund Jacobson explored the relation between muscular relaxation and psycho-physiology. He was also inspired by the theories of William James and Walter B. Cannon who had been his teachers. They showed that emotions were in direct interaction with the brain, the heart, the guts and hormonal systems. Cannon’s model of the homeostatic regula-tion system became known in the realm of psychotherapy through Franz Alexander and Edmond Jacobson.
3 Oslo
3.1 Trygve Braatøy
Trygve Braatøy was born in the USA to Norwegian parents. He studied neurology in Paris and trained as a psychoanalyst with Otto Fenichel in Berlin. He then went to Norway, where he became professor of psychiatry and head of Oslo’s psychiatric institutions. During the last years of his life he worked in a private practice.
Braatøy remained first of all a doctor, which is to say a person with a broad and humanistic approach to patients. Patients were for him more important than theory, and he always refused to participate in the bitter enmities of the psychoanalytic society.
He was definitely a pupil of Otto Fenichel, not of Wilhelm Reich, but he was nevertheless deeply interested in Reich’s attempt to include bodily phenomena in psychotherapy. When he arrived in Oslo, he be-came involved with the physiotherapists of the psychiatric hospital, and the quasi-folkloric passion of Scandinavians for bodily methods. Given the many discussions in Berlin around Alexander and Reich on ways of including bodily dimensions during psychoanalytic sessions, he explored ways of using the bodily knowledge that were available around him. For example, he analyzed the biomechanical implications of having patients lying on a couch, its influence on the mind of patients, and on their way of communicating with a psycho-therapist. He would discuss certain motor patterns displayed by patients with them, and sometimes he would touch a patient who needed comfort. He also included the analy-sis of the breathing patterns of his patients in his psychoanalytic work. His humanistic stance was manifestly influenced by Reich’s work with character-analysis. However, Braatøy did not have the time to acquire the knowledge of physiotherapists, and respected them too much to ig-nore the possibilities their knowledge could offer to psychiatry. He man-aged to interest a famous orthopaedic physiotherapist in Oslo, named Aadel Büllow-Hansen, to develop forms of massage that could be used in a complementary way with a psychoanalytically-oriented psychother-apy. With this meeting, a first theme of my story finds it place, associ-ating the Scandinavian tradition of body techniques and psychoanalysis.
3.2 The Büllow-Hansen institute
Probably influenced by Cannon’s global approach to the human or-ganism, Büllow-Hansen and her colleagues developed an incredibly re-fined set of massage methods, which coordinates the muscular system, breathing, relaxation and emotional release. When patients, during a psychotherapeutic treatment, become more aware of their emotions and their breathing, when they feel a loosening of their muscular ten-sions, when they feel less anxious and trust they can experience and contain their emotions, they may find it easier to become more creative in their psychotherapy. And when psychotherapy helps patients to ac-cept their needs and their identity, they can more easily appreciate what the massage inevitably activates in them. This positive therapeutic feedback is aimed at a relatively narrow set of patients, who were diag-nosed as neurotic and rigid rather than psychotic. Today, a wider popu-lation is approached this way. Gradually Braatøy and Büllow-Hansen began to incorporate each other’s points of view. For example, Braatøy had found that taking the startle reflex into account during psychother-apy could become very useful. Büllow-Hansen then developed ways of working on how the startle reflex influenced breathing that could induce deep emotional discharge. Ebba Boyesen (1985) had the impression that the startle reflex, the orgasmic reflex and the birth reflex may be the same sensory-motor organization that accomplishes different func-tions in different contexts. This may explain why problems in one of these dimensions seems to influence the other two, and why in psycho-therapy one often needs to consider the other two dimensions when fo-cusing on one of them .
During the 1980s, Véronique Reymond-Haynal was a psycho-motrician that used another psycho-motoric approach of working with the body that could be taken up in psychotherapy by psychoanalysts such as Willy Pasini in the Sexology service of the Geneva University Psychiatry Department. Collaborations between specialists of bodywork and psychotherapists have thus become widespread in psychiatric insti-tutions. However, I know of no other period in the history of psycho-therapy that developed coordination between physiotherapy and psy-chotherapy to such a high degree of refinement as the one created by Büllow-Hansen. When Braatøy left the hospital, Aadel Büllow-Hansen created her own institute, which exists today as the Psychomotoric In-stitute of Oslo. Members of this institute, like Berit Iansen and Berit Bunkan, managed to incorporate this method and its new developments as part of the Norwegian health system, and an active third generation is developing the work of Büllow-Hansen in the largest Norwegian towns. Having visited the institute in 2005, I still consider it one of the leading institutes in the world, if not the most advanced research insti-tute demonstrating how physiotherapists can become involved in the psychotherapeutic process of a patient. This was also made possible by physiotherapists and psychologists, like Berit Bunkan and Gerda Boy-esen, who trained in psychology and physiotherapy. Having observed the realm of body psychotherapy during the last 30 years, I wonder if such high qualification requirements are not necessary at least for the main trainers of the field.
3.3 Wilhelm Reich in Oslo
I tend to differentiate four stages in Wilhelm Reich’s professional development:
- Reich the Psychoanalyst. His training period lasted from 1922 to 1926.
- Reich the character-analyst: This period began in 1927 with the publication of the Impulsive Character. This work was later developed by Anna Reich, who transformed the model, with Otto F. Kernberg into what is today known as the borderline structure model. Kernberg often quotes Anna Reich, and usually gives some credit to Wilhelm Reich in various footnotes. This period is probably the richest of Reich’s career. He was developing his work on charac-ter analysis within the psycho-analytic society, in which he associated behav-ioral and mental traits; he was developing the social implications of his or-gasm reflex model within the German communist party. There he became in-volved in mass education of youths on sexual issues that paralleled the NAZI youth movements. It was during this period that he met Vygotsky and Luria in Moscow (van der Veer & Valsiner, 1991, pp. 103-109), who are still refer-enced in psychology and neurology. They were then looking for a “Freudian” the communist party could accept. It did not work. After Hitler’s election, he published The Mass Psychology of Fascism, where he openly wrote that he had become aware that communism under Stalin was transforming itself into “red fascism” which paralleled the “black fascism” of National Socialism. As a result of this publication, he was simultaneously kicked out of the communist party, NAZI Germany and the International Association of Psychoanalysis. I do not think that his divorce from Anna Reich during the same period was re-lated. His proposal on how sexuality should be included in future social devel-opments have had a lasting influence on the whole planet, and has probably influenced in direct or indirect ways all those who read this article.
- Reich in Scandinavia: Reich immigrated to Scandinavia from 1934 to 1939. From Denmark to Norway he was at first welcomed by his colleagues, then attacked through well-orchestrated campaigns that used the Media in a mas-sive and calumnious way. His enemies today stress some of his more obnox-ious character traits to explain these massive attacks. Although these traits existed, they do not explain the importance of these campaigns, which were designed to prevent the deep transformations Reich was generating in psy-chotherapy, and in how society should deal with emotions and sexuality. Even today, when most of Reich’s propositions have been integrated in every day life, people tend to avoid associating his name to these developments, as if they were ashamed of him. This was the time when he developed, with his Scandinavian colleagues, vegetotherapy. Reich proposed a form of direct in-tervention on the psycho-physiological coherence of an individual organism, with the assumption that the orgasmic reflex was a basic movement of the organism that can spread from head to feet, like the movements of a worm. He then assumed that every chronic tension that blocks the general flow of this form of mobility was simultaneously a physiological and a psychological block that inhibited a person’s life potential.
- Reich in the U.S.A.: Once again, Reich was well-accepted in America when he arrived there in 1939. It was there that he developed his orgonomy the-ory, in which he supposed that the general psycho-physiological fluidity he could activate with vegetotherapy was a manifestation of how life energy flowed through an organism. Although he had by then published on the hor-rors of what Communism had become, when McCarthyism dominated U.S.A. politics Reich was again persecuted for his Communist past, and for the sex-ual and emotional social reforms he was proposing. It was during this period that he proposed that birth rituals should be modified in ways that have since been explored by Leboyer and Michel Odon during the 1970s; and that there existed links between the repression of emotions and cancer, a subject that was explored by laboratories in the 1980s. The violence of McCarthyism led Reich to prison where he died in 1957. Until 1968, citizens of the U.S.A. and Western Europe were not allowed to posses one of Reich’s book in their pri-vate library, or to publish a review of his work. Reich’s books were still burned by the U.S.A. government on the street under President J.F. Kennedy. The Norwegian vegetotherapist Ola Raknes visited Reich in the U.S.A. several times after the Second World War, and integrated many aspects of Reich’s theory on Orgone in vegetotherapy; however some of the newest aspects of Orgone therapy were not introduced in the general practice of Norwegian vegeto-therapists, although all of them were fascinated by Reich’s last dis-coveries.
The Wilhelm Reich who arrived in Oslo was different from the one Braatøy had met in Berlin. Like Braatøy, he was exploring ways of com-bining psychotherapy and body methods, but there were major differ-ences. First of all, after being expelled from the psychoanalytic associa-tion, Reich was redefining what psychotherapy was about. Secondly, he could not count on institutional support or current circulation of intellec-tual information, and did not have the means to combine all the profes-sional skills required for his endeavor. Braatøy, on the other hand, had support, power, and the capacity to collaborate with some prominent intellectuals in Norway. He only intended to include improvements in current psychotherapeutic strategies. Like others who had been simi-larly excluded (e.g., Adler, Jung and Lacan), Reich had to create a new identity for his work, and could not always avoid caricaturing his origi-nalities. Finally, he was not only a Marxist, but also a militant for sexual freedom. He openly lived with Elsa Lindenberg, a woman who was not his wife. Elsa Lindenberg is also a hero of the Oslo Golden Age. She was a wonderful dancer and choreographer, who had worked with a famous choreographer named Rudolph Laban. Rudolph Laban is regularly quoted by all those who studied nonverbal behavior, from Gregory Bateson to Paul Ekman, for his system of notation of body movements. Before Reich met Lindenberg, he had focused on behavioral patterns. However, like Braatøy with Büllow-Hansen, after he met her, he began to work on breathing and movement as spontaneous expressions of deep psycho-organic forces such as those that can be experienced dur-ing orgasm. Like all good dancers, Lindenberg had a broad knowledge of what could be done with breathing, posture and movement. In Oslo, Elsa Lindenberg worked as a choreographer, participated in the devel-opment of Reich’s vegetotherapy, and created her own form of dance psychotherapy, which is still taught in Norway. Reich and Lindenberg were joined by many people who were fascinated by the work they were doing, and the spirit in which they were doing it, like Scott Alexander Sutherland Neill, who created the school of Summerhill, or Ola Raknes whose influence mostly spread within the realm of Reichian psycho-therapists. There was also the psychiatrist Nic Waal, who had already trained with Reich in Berlin and had a strong position in child psychia-try. She later founded a Nic Waal Institute in which she tried to combine the work of Reich with that of Braatøy. The vegetotherapy Reich created in Scandinavia is not only a way of applying Cannon’s model, following principles that were also suggested by Edmund Jacobson, but an in-credibly powerful way of putting the whole homeostatic system of an organism in movement, so as to support an in-depth transformation of its dynamics.
Although most Norwegian vegetotherapists have integrated Reich’s energy theory, they remain close to a modernized version of a holistic psycho-physiology that is still inspired by Cannon and Kurt Goldstein for Neurology .
3.4 The relations between Braatøy’s and Reich’s team
Imagine how rich the discussions on body and mind, on psycho-therapy, physiotherapy and dance must have been in Oslo in the 1930s. Meetings were intense, rich and passionate. Rivalries, competition and admiration moved within informed, imaginative and creative minds. The context, however, was violent. The Second World War was threatening everything. Positions were often close to fanaticism. Each camp was making desperate efforts to survive by destroying all other solutions. Norway was torn by pro-Nazis, communists, humanists, and democrats; people who defended a respectable Christian moral way of life, and those who were fighting for new ways of living. The frontiers were, as always, fuzzy. Some Nazis, communists and humanists were fighting for new ways of becoming alive, while other Nazis, communists, royalists and republicans wanted to maintain traditional ways of life. The Braatøy/Büllow-Hansen camp was certainly not pro-Nazi, but it did not sympathize with some of the most extreme positions of Reich’s friends. They probably did not help Reich as much as they could have when the Media and government institutions attacked him. These issues are not spoken of openly today, but they still cast a shadow on the relations of both camps, at least in the older generation.
Büllow-Hansen, I was told, could not take two dimensions repre-sented by Reich:
A) His defense of sexual liberation, and how he openly lived with Elsa Linden-berg.
B) His reference to cosmic energy to describe psycho-physiological mecha-nisms. I agree with her that the current notion of energy, as used for exam-ple in Marty 1976, is entirely sufficient for current purposes.
Büllow-Hansen had no problem working on breathing, emotions and libido, so she was not a prude. But it seems she did appreciate certain traditional forms of morality, and a scientific form of thought. Explaining deep orgasmic bliss as a manifestation of cosmic energy was not her cup of tea. She probably openly disapproved of Ola Raknes’s tendency to ask his patients to be naked during vegetotherapy sessions.
Braatøy clearly states that a psychoanalyst must take, at least in his practice, an amoral stance: neither moral nor immoral. He criticized re-ligious nurses (in those days most nurses were nuns) who imposed Christian morality on a schizophrenic patient that had abnormal sexual displays. In 1908, Karl Abraham had published a classic article showing that such displays are some times inevitable. Punishing schizophrenic patients for such displays was therefore, according to Braatøy, thera-peutically unproductive. He had a deep humanistic stance that induced him to write on therapeutic love, on the need to understand the pa-tient’s point of view independently of moral considerations. This, how-ever, does not imply that he could adapt to sexual freedom and unsci-entific theories. In a humorous passage, he writes how Reich gradually became “a trinity of Freud, Einstein, and Wilhelm der Grosse” (Braatøy 1954, p. 101). Braatøy’s relation with Reich seems to have been am-bivalent. He admired Reich’s creativity, but could not stand the guy. He was constantly hoping he could use the good parts of Reich’s work, and ignore the rest. He certainly admired some of Reich’s more theoretical comments, but was less convinced of his therapeutic results. However, being on the run, Reich could hardly be asked to offer a reliable frame to his patients.
Braatøy wanted to create a method that combined the latest find-ings of psychoanalysis with the latest findings of physiotherapy. Braatøy did not believe that such a wide range of methods could be appropri-ately managed by less then a multi-disciplinary team. Reich, as were most of his colleagues, was forced by circumstances to combine physi-cal and psychic work in his private practice. Although he was curious about every way that could help his understanding of what an organism is about, he avoided dispersion in technicalities, and aimed for what seemed to him to be the essence (or core) of a person.
After Braatøy’s death, his school and the more marginal Reichians formed a polarized entity in Oslo. The pupils of this generation were ob-viously fascinated by all that knowledge, and wanted to pick and choose in function of their interests. Many went to work with Büllow-Hansen, and Trygve Braatøy, and Ola Rankness, and Elsa Lindenberg, and oth-ers that were forming a new generation like Bjorn Blumenthal, Gerda Boyesen, Berit Bunkan and Lillemor Johnson. Some suffered from the divisions that gradually installed themselves. Büllow-Hansen’s work was well supported and recognized by institutions, while the Reichian work had to follow more tortuous paths of development. However, I am not sure the synthesis made by Braatøy and Büllow-Hansen in psychiatry has survived, and flourished. Some of its initial richness still exists in that school, others have been incorporated in Biodynamic Psychology, and some of it died in the 1950s. However, the precision with which present members of the psychomotor school approach the relation be-tween body and emotions remains astounding. With a form of modesty and honesty that is explicit, they approach emotions from the point of view of a physiotherapist, with incredible precision, and address their patients to psychotherapists (e.g., psychoanalysts or vegetotherapists) to integrate what has been opened during bodywork at a psychological level. In Norway most vegetotherapists I have met are either psycholo-gists or psychiatrists. The issue of how much psychology such a physio-therapist should know, and how much physiotherapy such psychologists should know is an ongoing discussion all over the world. In Norway, the psychomotor schools are so integrated in the hospitals that many doc-tors and psychologists have experienced the treatment: they know what to expect for their patients. Similarly many physiotherapists of that school have had some psychotherapy, and have incorporated more re-cent ways of working.
I have often met, in Europe and the U.S.A., physiotherapists who wanted to find a way to integrate emotional reactions in their work, and psychologists who were looking for ways of integrating bodywork in their sessions. The programs of the Oslo schools are not the only useful proposals (Heller 2001), but are certainly useful.
4 Opening the discussion
4.1 How do I situate myself in relation to Oslo’s Golden Age?
When I studied psychology in Geneva, in the 1970s, I was also fas-cinated by theatre. Because I have always loved to look for connections among my many interests, this fascination led me to search for ways of connecting bodywork and psychology. I gradually began to explore fashionable disciplines that could support my exploration, such as medi-tation, Tai Chi, Reichian therapies, Rolfing, psycho-physiology and re-search on nonverbal communication. My diploma focused on a study in which Jean Piaget and his colleagues had studied how children become conscious of how they move. Slowly but surely, I settled down as a psy-chotherapist trained in Biodynamic Psychology by Gerda Boyesen and her team, and a researcher on nonverbal communication. I began my research program by focusing on posture, and then on the facial mimics of patients and therapists in a psychiatric service.
4.1.1 Developments seen with the eyes of Biodynamic Psychol-ogy
Looking back at my training in Biodynamic Psychology, I have mixed feelings about how complete it was. Like most of my colleagues, I consider that what we were taught was insufficient to become a full psychotherapist or masseur, but that it contained fascinating material for a post-training course. Most of the people I trained with had to train elsewhere before they had the confidence to claim they felt competent enough as psychotherapists; but most continue to use some of the tools they have acquired with Gerda Boyesen and her team. The content of the training was a mixed bag of real knowledge, speculation and pure fantasy. The ethics was fragile, with a poor sense of limits, little con-tainment, love for beliefs rather than robustness of knowledge, and a deep love for the depth of human nature. If Gerda Boyesen’s training groups had such a respected reputation at this period, it was certainly because she herself had incorporated the high standards of Oslo’s Golden Age. She had studied clinical psychology, and had been to psy-chotherapy sessions with Braatøy and Ola Raknes. When she expressed her desire to become a vegetotherapist, Ola Raknes told her that Reich asked all his trainees to be medical doctors, but that in Norway becom-ing a physiotherapist was enough. So Gerda Boyesen trained in physio-therapy, and specialized in the Büllow-Hansen institute. Berit Bunkan, for similar reasons, did the opposite: she first became a Büllow-Hansen physio-therapist, and then studied psychology.
When Gerda Boyesen arrived in London her training was more so-phisticated by miles than most of her colleagues in body-psychotherapy. When she worked with a patient, or made a public demonstration, she could achieve things that were astounding for most. She had a way of helping a person to contact deep vegetative flows, to open the person’s breathing and emotions, and to support deep relaxa-tion. It was phenomenal. She had gone to London in 1970 because Ola Raknes felt too old to travel all the time, and asked her to take over his practice there. This implied that Gerda Boyesen had a) to do the mas-sage work, b) the psychotherapeutic integration, and c) find ways of dealing with these two dimensions simultaneously in a constructive way. Her immense imagination permitted her to find models that could usefully frame important moments during a psychotherapy process. She wanted to maintain the high standards of the Büllow-Hansen work, which is exquisitely explicit about everything one does. My main issue with Gerda Boyesen’s work is that too often she believed that the useful metaphors she proposed correspond to a real mechanism.
In the London of the 1970s all of body psychotherapy was domi-nated by Reich’s impressive influence, and his idea that psychophysiol-ogy is organized by the laws of cosmic energy. Gerda Boyesen became a representative of a Reichian energetic tradition, and of the more psy-cho-physiologic trend of Norwegian institutions. I do not think she ever managed to coordinate these two horses, but I believe the polarity they created in her has supported some of her greatest findings.
At first she hoped to train people, who had already had professional competence, but events – and money – pushed her into accepting to train all those who were interested in her work, regardless of how much individual therapy or training they had before entering in her groups. Thus her teaching, called Biodynamic Psychology since 1979, became as much a philosophic and spiritual stance as a way of acquiring profes-sional skills. In her training groups, we were taught to work on the or-gasmic reflex as vegetotherapists such as Ola Raknes did, and on the startle reflex as developed by Braatøy and Büllow-Hansen. I was under the impression that all these people were dead. When, in 1976, David Boadella included authors such as Ola Raknes, Gerda Boyesen and Nic Waal in a book entitled In the Wake of Reich, he confirmed my belief that all these Norwegian big names were actors of the Reichian lore. Although I met Scandinavian colleagues during meetings organized by the European Association of Body Psychotherapy, I received no concrete information about what was currently happening in Oslo. Most of the time, they murmured various comments as if they were convinced that Scandinavia is only boring and provincial. Those who worked there pub-lished mainly in Norwegian, so that it was impossible for me to gather information on the aftermath of Oslo’s Golden Age. Even today, if you want to train there as a physiotherapist, you must first learn to speak Norwegian. It is only recently that I have understood that Gerda Boy-esen’s work was a synthesis of movements that were not all Reichian, and that she herself was not solely a neo-Reichian.
Most physiotherapists and Reichian therapists, for example, tend to work on hyper-tonic muscles. Lillemor Johnsen, who also trained at the Büllow-Hansen Institute, found useful ways of tonifying hypo-tonic muscles. Inspired by her, Gerda Boyesen and Berit Bunkan each devel-oped ways of using these methods with psychotic patients. What is typi-cal of the Norwegian way of doing things is that even today none of the three women know what the other has developed. Lillemor Johnsen was angry with her colleagues until she died, because she felt they had sto-len her ideas, and the other two were afraid of the others doing the same. They nevertheless published some of their findings on the sub-ject, without ever describing their way of working with these muscles outside of their training groups.
Influenced by other Scandinavian teachers, Gerda Boyesen also in-tegrated work on the fluids of the organism, mostly on venous blood and on the moisture of the skin. She talks of “energetic fluids” where, in Cannon’s style, I would be content with “biologically regulated fluids”. I have found these massages and the rationale that accompanies them of tremendous utility in some cases.
Following a rationale that remains close to Cannon’s theory on the homeostatic regulation system and on the viscera, Gerda Boyesen formed the impression that peristaltic movements played a central role in the regulation of the fluids, which also influenced sexual and emo-tional regulation systems. She began to use a stethoscope during mas-sage sessions, and found that certain forms of touch and verbal inter-vention released certain peristaltic noises. Like Cannon, she observed that these associations were complex. For example, it seems that when a person is intensely aroused, or when she experiences a non-emotional form of relaxation, no peristaltic noise can be heard in her guts. Boye-son thus developed forms of massage and psychotherapeutic methods through which she could help an organism to improve his capacity to auto-regulate. One of the main aims of therapy in Biodynamic Psychol-ogy is to restore an organism’s psycho-physiological repair systems. Gerda Boyesen had the merit of continuing to think about the relation between affects and gastro-intestinal movements at a time when nei-ther Reich nor neurologists found the topic important, and finding useful ways of exploring the means of using it for psycho-therapeutic pur-poses. Today the subject is gradually becoming fashionable again in psycho-physiology. She coined the term “psycho-peristalsis” to desig-nate gastro-intestinal movements that are not caused by digestion of food.
I met Bjorn Blumenthal in the European Association of Body Psycho-therapy. He is a psychologist who trained with Ola Raknes, and teaches in many countries such as Italy, Greece, Russia and Mexico. He invited me to Oslo to show some of my work on nonverbal communication in psychiatry to members of his Oslo training group for vegetotherapy. I was astonished to discover that at least half of the members of this group had been trained by the Büllow-Hansen institute, in psychomotor therapy, and wanted to enlarge their knowledge by training in vegeto-therapy, just like Gerda Boyesen had done in the 1940s. That is how I discovered that Oslo’s Golden Age was still influencing therapeutic work in Norway. I asked them why I had never heard the institute still ex-isted, and even thrived . I then began to look for information more ac-tively. I discovered that I could order a second hand version of Braatøy’s 1954 Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique on the Inter-net, and loved it. Bjorn Blumenthal put me in contact with Berit Bunkan who sent me her English publications. She had recently (2003) finished a fascinating thesis on the relation between body structure and psycho-sis, in which she describes some of that work. The studies are based on a reliable coding system, which allows a reliable transcription of most of the items physiotherapists tend to scan when they look at a body. As the notation system is digitalized, it can be analyzed with computer programs for research and diagnostic purposes.
I am only beginning to know how this work exists today, but I am convinced that Norwegian colleagues are sitting on a gold mine of prac-tical knowledge that could still grow, and become useful to the world.
4.1.2 Developments seen with the eyes of research on nonverbal communication
4.1.2.1 Video-analysis
To situate the Norwegian explorations on the relations between body and mind, I will contrast the explorations I have summarized with ideas that were developed in another important area for the history of how the body was used by body psychotherapists -- in Palo Alto, Cali-fornia, USA. In 1947, the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Marga-ret Mead published a study on how the members of a Balinese tribe communicated with each other. The originality of this study is that it was based on a series of photographs and an interpretation of what was happening in the photographs. Gregory Bateson later joined a team in Palo Alto which became world famous for its analysis of interaction in families and during psychotherapy sessions. There Bateson, soon joined by others, developed ways of using a detailed analysis of the gestures and positions recorded on film to understand how a group of persons interacted, and to find ways of helping people when their form of com-munication was damaging for themselves and those who are close to them (Winkin, 1981). The point of view on the relation between body and mind that was developed in Palo Alto is complementary to what was developed in Norway. The European perspective was organismal (or in-tra-psychic), which is to say that it focused on how the feelings and the movements of an organism are connected. Bateson and his colleagues focused on how the movements of one person influenced the feelings of those with whom this person was interacting. This approach found sup-port from ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen who received the Nobel Prize for their studies on the communication of ani-mals. During his Nobel Prize speech, Tinbergen presented the possibility of using ethology to study humans, and of using such methods to un-derstand autism (Tinbergen, 1972 & 1973).
Many colleagues of my generation (born after the Second World War) have tried to find ways of combining these perspectives. It has been a difficult task, as difficult, at least, as trying to find ways of un-derstanding a person through verbal and body communicative devices. The main trap I have observed is that by attempting to focus on the re-lation, body psychotherapists lose some of their skill with the more physiotherapeutic dimensions of their work. Some of the most interest-ing recent developments in this area have developed between New York and Boston, USA, by psychoanalysts such as Beatrice Beebe, Daniel Stern and Edward Tronick. They needed to find ways of combining the initial intra-psychic approach of Freud, the more interactive approach of transferential dynamics developed by Freud’s pupils, and the recent findings of ethology and family therapy. They introduced more explicitly than before the notion that it is not so much repressed memories and representations that should be the focus of a psychotherapeutic inter-vention, but regulation systems which allow various types of repair sys-tems to function. This notion was already integrated by the Norwegians for autoregulative systems, and by family therapists for relational dy-namics, but the researchers I just mentioned focused in a particularly efficient way on how intra- and inter-psychic regulation systems associ-ate. Analyzing the interaction between a therapist and a patient, or be-tween a mother and her child, one assumes that the way the protago-nists auto-regulate is an important aspect of how they communicate (Beebe, et al., 2002 & 2005; Heller, 2005). If I smile at somebody while I am trying to master an inner anxiety, the interaction will not unfold itself in the same way than if I was feeling happy and smiling. Once one arrives at such a statement, it may sound simplistic, but the issue is the combination of methods which allows one to work with the fact that auto- and inter-regulation are part of the same system.
However, Beebe’s notion of auto-regulation (which she calls self-regulation) remains relatively superficial from the point of view of ap-proaches that focus on intra-organism coordination. This is not the case with George Downing who has synthesized the Palo Alto approach, deep emotional bodywork, and psychoanalytic and psychological theory. The relation between theory and practice in his teaching is exceptionally co-herent. However, this synthesis required so much work that he has not yet found the time to publish most of it. With Beatrice Beebe and others he is also developing a way of using video films of interactions in a psy-chotherapeutic setting (Downing, 2005). By viewing micro-movements in slow motion with those patients who were filmed, he helps them to understand how they function from the inside and the outside. These video-analysis methods can be combined with more “classic” psycho-therapeutic sessions. This brings us back to the Braatøy/Büllow-Hansen model in the sense that one can have one therapist analyzing move-ments with the video working with a psychoanalyst (Cohen, P., & Beebe, B., 2002). There are now two opposite approaches to integrating the body in a psychotherapeutic process: through psycho-physiological methods and through an analysis of communication strategies. The ten-dency of transforming the traditional individual psychotherapist in a team is thus strengthened. Methods such as vegetotherapy and psy-chomotoric massage are ways of exploring the intra-organism regula-tion systems with exceptional efficiency and depth.
The possibility of including video-analysis in psychotherapy was one of the roads Braatøy would probably have explored if he had lived longer. He was already viewing films of therapy sessions, and exploring the information they could provide. In one of these films, Braatøy ob-served (1954, p. 157) that a therapist helped a patient by “gently but firmly stroking his back and neck. He asked the patient at the same time to relax and told him he wanted to help him”. He noted that a key feature of this intervention was that the therapist spoke with a very low voice, moving close to the patient. In that particular case, the thera-pist’s tone of voice could not be heard in the film, which was not re-corded well; hence, the reason why Braatøy’s memory focused on this trait. He then mentions that Pavlov had also noticed that when a thera-pist asked his questions “very softly in very quiet surroundings” a frightened schizophrenic patient would answer. He made a similar ob-servation when talking to infants. Finally, he quotes a study published in 1885 by Weir Mitchell, showing that softening one’s approach to pa-tients who suffer from anorexia nervosa could also be effective. For Braatøy, it was important to make this point in his training manual for psychoanalysts because it was not current practice in his day to ac-commodate one’s behavior to the needs of a patient, or of a child. Fol-lowing a similar trend of thought, Beatrice Beebe often quotes a 1981 study by Tiffany Field which shows that gaze avoidance allows children to lower their arousal and the speed of their cardiac rhythm. This ob-servation confirms observations by Reich and Tinbergen, as well as many others, made with schizophrenic and autistic patients. In exten-sive analysis of filmed interactions, using some of the more refined cod-ing and statistical methods available today, Beebe showed that people often need a mid-range intensity and speed of interaction. For example, eye gaze exchange and vocal exchange must not be too rapid or too slow, and voice tonality must not be too high or too low. She then de-veloped forms of therapeutic intervention that explicitly use these find-ings. An interesting detail, which may interest Beebe, is that all of Braatøy’s examples are made by a male, who stresses the effectiveness of lowering the frequency of the voice; while Beatrice Beebe is a woman who mostly studied mother infant interactions, and she stresses the need to moderate the speed of the interactive rhythm.
I developed this theme because it shows what I mean by focusing on regulation systems rather than events and representations. Tiffany Field’s research also shows how intra-organism regulation systems (arousal, heart) and interpersonal regulation systems (eye contact) sometimes form a system.
4.1.3 Basic posture
When I trained with Gerda Boyesen and her team, from 1974 to 1979, I learned to observe details of skin modification, and to use her incredibly rich way of distinguishing peristaltic noises during verbal work and dream analysis. Sometimes I notice that a formulation, an image or a movement correlates with a change of peristaltic dynamics. If I ask the patient to unpack what he experienced at this moment, I often find useful information for the psychotherapy, important details that a pa-tient did not feel the need to communicate.
I have developed another method that can be used in a similar way: the analysis of basic posture. Basic posture is that part of behavior which regulates how a body adapts his behavior to gravity. It is that part of posture that one observes to decide whether a person sits or stands, and to differentiate various ways of sitting. These apparently banal features are indicative of the stance a person takes to accomplish something. As Feldenkreis (1981) pointed out, one cannot blink without influencing how the body relates to gravity. Any particular gesture re-quires adequate support from posture, physiology and psychology to function properly. The Mathias Alexander method of postural auto-regulation is, for example, often used by musicians to frame highly pre-cise vocal or manual movements. I thus assumed that basic posture could be used as a guide to basic options of the organism, in the same way as Adele Büllow-Hansen used spontaneous diaphragmatic breathing and Gerda Boyesen peristaltic noises as indicators and guides to what is happening in a person. My hypothesis is that these are three dimen-sions that are closely related to an organism’s basic options.
5 For tomorrow
I wrote this article because I felt that its content describes a chain of thoughts that have been important in my process, and which could be useful to other colleagues. Articles on the history of body-psychotherapy are too rare.
I hope that this paper will encourage my colleagues from all over the world to (re)discover the work that was made during Oslo’s golden age on body and mind, and take the time to consider how it can inspire them today. I also hope that it will encourage my Norwegian colleagues to rediscover how proud they can be of what they have been taught, and of defending their inheritance in Norway and in the rest of the world with more enthusiasm. I do think that some of us would love it if you expressed yourself more often on the international stage.
MH:I have inserted these references below…Jude
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