Group Body Psychotherapy (Part 1)
This was written in 2007 as a contribution to the comprehensive "Handbook of Body Psychotherapy", edited by Marlock & Weiss to be published in 2009.
Introduction
A review of the literature and the internet suggests that very little dialogue, let alone cross-fertilization, has occurred between the two established disciplines of body psychotherapy and group psychotherapy.
Therapeutic groupwork with a thematic focus on body-image (e.g. eating disorders, addictions) is common; and body-oriented work in groups exists in a variety of forms - for example Feldenkrais, Body/Mind Centering, Pilates, dance and movement styles including Five Rhythms and Laban, and Eastern practices like yoga, Tai Chi, Qui Gong; many of these only tangentially or implicitly attend to psychological and relational dynamics. There are also body-oriented approaches practiced in groups, both within the Reichian tradition, and outside it (e.g. Pesso-Boyden Psychomotor System, Psychodrama, Process-Oriented Psychology, and Gestalt). However, in body psychotherapy as defined by the EABP and the USABP, groups are generally seen as a mode of delivery, rather than an integral aspect of what is being delivered, and little attention has been paid to the specific terrain of the group itself nor to its therapeutic potential in terms of the actual relationships between the participants and the group as a social entity.
Groups are a microcosm of each member's life patterns and therefore manifest, mirror and bring to awareness in vivo, in immediate relational experience, a large proportion of the very issues which participants seek therapy for. At the same time simple participation in group interactions - whether explicitly intended by the therapist or not - can have transformative and sometimes healing effects - the group itself can thereby constitute an agent of therapeutic change.
These are principles well-recognised in group psychotherapy which, of course, exists as a recognised discipline in its own right, as an ensemble of modalities which includes both humanistic approaches such as encounter (Rogers 1973, Schutz 1966), T-groups (Lewin 1948), Worldwork (Mindell 1992), and psychoanalytic approaches including the tradition originated by Bion at the Tavistock Clinic (Bion 1961), and the somewhat different methodology of group-analysis pioneered by Foulkes (Foulkes & Anthony 1965).
Historically, body psychotherapy has largely identified itself with the humanistic wing of psychotherapy (Totton 2002), though some re-integration between psychoanalysis and body psychotherapy has been taking place over the last 20 years (Geissler, Cornel, Totton 1998, Soth 2004). However, with some notable exceptions, body psychotherapy has been only very slightly influenced by any tradition of group work, analytic or humanistic.
There is a wide gulf between the largely verbal focus of established group work practice on the one hand, and the bodymind paradigm, concepts and techniques of body psychotherapy on the other. Any formulation of Group Body Psychotherapy principles needs to straddle this gulf and consider how the two disciplines can inform and cross-fertilise each other.
This chapter is an attempt at a broad-spectrum integration of diverse approaches to group psychotherapy that is specifically grounded in modern body psychotherapy and practically relevant for the body psychotherapist as group leader. Its basic premise views the group as a complex bodymind organism constituted by individual bodymind organisms, and subject to collective processes not readily grasped by the individualistic focus of the counselling and psychotherapy field in general, as well as traditional body psychotherapy in particular.
Working at the interface between individual and collective, 'private' internal and 'public' external worlds generates awareness of the fundamental psychological processes of internalisation and externalisation: how we manifest our internal reality (object relations) in external relationships, and how we internalise collective dynamics in our individual psyche. It allows recognition of the parallel processes implicit in characterological patterns, specifically, between group members' collective/familial past and their role in the group dynamic here and now and how the originally wounding relationships are being re-enacted in and through relationships in the present. These phenomena - highly relevant to group therapy - have, as far as I am aware, not yet been considered comprehensively from a bodymind perspective, and this chapter sets out to at least begin such a project.
The humanistic influence on Body Psychotherapy and its limitations concerning group therapy
Body Psychotherapy owes much to the humanistic revolution which placed big hopes on working in groups as they played a central role in the youth- and counter-culture of that time. However, alongside the many precious gifts we derive from the humanistic influence, we also inherit some fundamental limitations in our understanding of groups and group therapy.
One of the inherent contradictions of the humanistic revolution is its emphasis on groups and the collective whilst championing individual freedom over and against social constraints. As necessary and liberating as both of those elements were, arguably the underlying tensions were not fully resolved: humanistic aspects of groupwork practice, therefore, remain influenced by that unresolved dichotomy as well as a reactive bias against authority and any kind of hierarchy (Bly 1997).
Three related and overlapping key issues in groupwork can be differentiated, where the humanistic influence manifests in one-sided and dogmatic or split and confused attitudes, in either case precluding a full validation of bothpoles inherent in the following - often polarised - tensions: a) the conflict between individual versus collective perspectives, b) the tension between power differential versus equality and c) the dialectic between structure versus unstructured space.
Any formulation of Group Body Psychotherapy would first need to address the dichotomies inherent in these key issues to the point where boththe productive and the defensive potential of both polarities are recognised. These tensions are pervasive and perennial, and central to the life of groups. By questioning one-sided assumptions on all three issues, and embracing the polarities as paradoxical rather than polarised only, a group therapist can enhance their capacity to respond flexibly and fluidly when confronted with these tensions.
Individual versus collective
As made explicit throughout this volume, therapeutic theories and values are informed by social and historical context. The more the prevailing zeitgeist sees human pathology as an individual issue, rooted in individual psychology, the more people tend to use therapy to work out their own 'private salvation', most likely resulting in (pseudo-)therapeutic adjustment of the individual to the social climate.
The more, on the contrary, we see psychological dysfunction as a healthy response to a dysfunctional social environment (Laing 1970, 1988, Illich 2005), the more our conception of a comprehensive therapeutic approach needs to include group work. It is in the group as a 'mini-society' that humans as social beings can become aware of and hopefully resolve unsatisfying and dysfunctional interpersonal patterns. To the extent that both the origins and manifestations of psychological pain are socially constructed and transcend dyadic relating, groups can be considered the ideal setting that both constellates and confronts as well as helps us to work through the issues at their root.
The first perspective - espousing the capacity for individual freedom (as, for example, traditionally suggested by Gestalt) - holds that group members need to take responsibility for the ways in which their individual psychology contributes to the group dynamic. The other polarity - emphasising the power of the collective over the individual (as, for example, suggested by a systemic perspective) - sees the group dynamic as creating and perpetuating certain roles which will inexorably be filled by somebody. In this view, individual psychology merely influences which role a group member is more prone to being drawn into.
Yalom, in one of the seminal texts within the field, says (2005): "Does group therapy help clients? Indeed it does. A persuasive body of outcome research has demonstrated unequivocally that group therapy is a highly effective form of psychotherapy and that it is at least equal to individual psychotherapy in its power to provide meaningful benefit."
The polarity between individual versus social perspectives is especially relevant to the body. In a culture where the body is considered as one more 'object' that 'belongs to me', feminist and postmodern writers (Merleau-Ponty 1969, Orbach 2006, O' Loughlin 2006) have critiqued both the social construction of the body, and its pervasive objectification. The body as an object - as a narcissistically presented image, an advertised substitute rather than an expression of self and therefore subjected to endless manipulations as illustrated for example by cosmetic surgery or some eating disorders - is a sociocultural phenomenon which is best addressed in groups.
In spite of its awareness of sociocultural influences, humanistic practice has often focussed on the individual and their 'inner' capacity for change. Thus the traditional methodology of Reichian, Post-Reichian and Gestalt therapy was primarily focused on the individual within the group, resulting in what might be called 'public individual work'. Typically (and with some significant exceptions), the group leader would conduct individual sessions in the middle of the group, with the other group members functioning as props, stand-ins for significant others, or sources of feedback after the work. Undoubtedly, as I can confirm from my own experience, this can be a powerful way of working: as sessions are conducted by the therapist and therefore usually uninterrupted, this allows the work to find both depth and resolution, thus often triggering other group members' own material and leading to further sessions in the middle. And even group members who do not work in the middle can derive significant relief and learning from witnessing other people's work, both in terms of painful struggles and possible transformations.
However, with the focus of the group leader mostly on individuals, or at best on the relationships between individuals within the group, large areas of the group's therapeutic potential remain unexplored. With most of the communication flowing through the therapist as the hub of the group, the two principal areas that get neglected within this format are a) the spontaneousunstructured and unmediatedinteractions between group members, and b) the dynamics of the group as a whole.
In established group therapy practice, it is precisely these two areas which are seen as essential: "One of the most important underlying assumptions […] is that interpersonal interaction [between group members!] within the here-and-now is crucial to effective group therapy." (Yalom 2005 p XV)
And: "There is little question of the importance of group-as-a-whole phenomena." (Yalom ibid p. 193)
A first principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would, therefore, have to be the capacity to work across a whole spectrum of formats, including bothconducting individual sessions in the middle and attending to the spontaneously unfolding group dynamic between participants as well as the group-as-a-whole.
Power differential versus equality
The term Group Body Psychotherapist does not - yet - exist. Humanistic groupwork often uses the term 'facilitator' to convey the implicit notion that no imposed guidance of the group by a 'leader' is required. The group is seen as quite capable of organising and regulating itself, requiring only - if at all - the catalytic help of a facilitator (Heron 1999). In a field which a) is richly diverse, where b) no one established nomenclature is adhered to and where c) so many hybrid integrations between often contradictory approaches exist, it would be oversimplifying to make sweeping generalisations. With this in mind, the term 'facilitator' nevertheless circumscribes a well-established body of knowledge, attitudes and practice (Heron 2001) and often reflects an important anti-authoritarian and anti-patriarchal perspective on group work and collective reality.
However, it could be argued that - deriving as it does from humanistic influence - the term 'facilitator' does not sufficiently include the legitimate function and purpose of authority, as would be understood in the term 'group therapist' or would be implied in the role of the 'group analyst'. There may be aspects of the group's reality that can not be accessed or disclosed by the facilitator's egalitarian stance, and which such group practice may therefore remain oblivious of. One of the dividing lines between the humanistic 'facilitator' and the analytically-oriented 'group therapist' would be the question: what group and leadership functions are required to perceive, reveal and work with the 'unconscious' both of the individuals and the group as a whole ?
The more emphasis is placed philosophically and theoretically on the opaqueness and the vicissitudes of the unconscious, the less likely it is that a purely catalytic facilitator function is sufficient to create the necessary safety for unconscious dynamics to fully manifest and be fruitfully addressed. Considering that much human pain originates in relationships characterised by power differential, the humanistic emphasis on equality and its bias against oppressive authority often leads to the superficial avoidance of power issues rather than their radical transformation.
A second underlying principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would include the capacity to be unbiased towards both power differential and equality and to hold the tension between these polarities in such a way that the group unconscious can be allowed - to borrow an analytic phrase - to transferentially construct the therapist according to the prevailing, emergent dynamics within the group. This means the group therapist does not unilaterally determine the stance they take purely based on their own principles and convictions, but remains susceptible to the transference realities called forth and required by the group. The therapist holds the tension between authentic self-disclosure on the one hand and on the other allowing transferential dynamics to emerge and build (rather than side-stepping and minimising these by premature declarations of their own beliefs or by other manoeuvres).
Structured group work versus unstructured space
Although nearly all body psychotherapy training happens in groups, and the tradition has accumulated considerable group experience over the decades, both the content and the educational purpose of the training modules mitigate against the open, unstructured space required for therapeutic attention to the group itself, as well as to the transferential position of the combined tutor-leader-group therapist.
One specific advantage of psychoanalytically influenced group theories is their understanding of unconscious dynamics and their impact on the group leader. It is possible - by taking a proactive and facilitative-educative stance - to provide useful structures and experiential exercises for the group through which lot of useful therapeutic work can take place. However, through participants consistently co-operating within the structure given by the leader, powerful unconscious forces may be stopped from manifesting and certainly from reaching and impacting on the therapist. In its extreme and defensive form, the therapist - as an unquestioned benign parental figure, providing a consistent flow of nurturing and enlivening structures - is protected from anything other than compliant responses on the part of the participants.
This does not deny the value of the wealth and breadth of creative group exercises being used by humanistic facilitators and therapists, both within the Body Psychotherapy tradition and its surrounding field. In their emphasis on experiential exploration, participants can discover and gain awareness of themselves in a myriad of powerful ways, reaching from body-oriented work to psychodramatic techniques.
However, there are problems with the therapist assuming an unquestioned benign and beneficial role, even if the structures provided - within an overall reparative framework of positive transference to the group and the leader - do enable safe and productive exploration and individual development. One common ingredient in such a framework is the unspoken assumption that the group be conceived of as the positive 'anti-family' to the originally damaging 'bad family'.
The dangers of the leader over-structuring the group are well-recognised in groupanalytic practice which, however, can fall into the opposite extreme of absolutising 'unstructured non-directiveness' into an equally one-sided, inflexible principle (through, for example, a policy of 'silence' on the part of the therapist in order to 'let the group stew', waiting for 'the weakest link to crack'). Whilst such ideas contain a valid rationale, as a rigid policy they can become counter-productive and unnecessarily punitive.
When we do not approach the group with either a bias towards or against structure, we notice that any given structure, when employed habitually, will tend to be used and usurped by participants' defence and control mechanisms which quickly learn to adapt and 'play the game'. Some flexibility and fluidity between structure and structurelessness, and a commitment to both as part of the group experience, is best suited to bring out such rigid and defensive adaptations and maximise the potential for addressing these effectively.
The group expresses the unconscious of the leader
It is important that leaders do not unconsciously import - through the backdoor of their therapeutic principles, assumptions and beliefs - their own rigidities and habitual relational patterns (Soth 2007 "The implicit relational stance and habitual therapeutic positions"). There are situations where the group - via a reverse parallel process well recognised in group dynamics - rather than being facilitatedby the leader actually manifests the unconscious of the leader. This is more likely when the leader adheres to protocols and rules of supposedly 'correct' practice. Any habitual bias or assumption which the therapist makes about groups and how to work with them (maybe based on their own past experience of significant groups including their own family), is likely to engender such a process. It is hard to overstate the significance of this phenomenon in group work; I will come back to this later in the context of habitual assumptions in the Body Psychotherapy tradition regarding energy and spontaneity.
Benefits of unstructured space
Body Psychotherapists are conversant with the tension between directive, educative, guiding interventions on the one hand versus a patient, allowing, inviting presence (what Gerda Boyesen calls the 'midwife approach' which relies on 'being' rather than therapeutic 'doing' and allowing 'impulses to impinge from within').
The same tension between contradictory stances on the part of the therapist applies to groups: providing structure from within an energetically-attuned, involved position can be experienced as facilitative and reparative in itself. But open unstructured space is equally required and has many benefits: it allows and invites spontaneity and communicates both acceptance and faith in 'what is'. By allowing space for unmediated spontaneous interaction, group members can experience permission to become involved (rather than implicitly deferring to the leader's expertise or perceiving the group leader as a hovering, observing parent likely to pounce on anybody's 'wrong move'). In this atmosphere, both deeply conditioned shadow aspects or regression to primitive realms of experience as well as unthought-of new ways of relating may emerge. Thus unstructured space allows and invites on a group level what Winnicott considered a crucial therapeutic ingredient: play.
"A freely interactive group, with few structural restrictions, will, in time, develop into a social microcosm of the participant members." (Yalom 2005 p.31)
This spontaneous emergence both of the participants' self-sabotaging interpersonal patterns in relation to each other and the often unexpected self-regulating and self-healing capacities of the group can be 'structured out of existence' by a too active and central facilitator. Once unstructured space has allowed participants' patterns to manifest, there "... is no need for them to describe or give a detailed history of their [interpersonal universe]: they will sooner or later enact it before the other group members' eyes." (Yalom ibid)
Group therapy is therefore a highly effective avenue into what in Reichian terms we call characterological issues and how they organise a person's relationships.
It is in the fluidity between these poles of structured and unstructured space that group therapists can maximise both containment and spontaneity, security and novelty. A third principle for Group Body Psychotherapists would, therefore, include the capacity to be familiar with the advantages and disadvantages of both structure and structurelessness and to hold the tension between these polarities.
Summary: the therapist's paradoxical position in relation to the three basic polarities
A habitual bias or aversion on the part of the group leader, on any of these three issues (inclined towards individual or group focus, for or against power differential or equality, favouring or avoiding structure or unstructured space) will limit the therapeutic potential of the group, whatever the particular theories and techniques, skills and capacities which the therapist relies upon and through which they define their therapeutic identity.
To do justice to the full potential of group therapy requires a familiarity with the whole spectrum of theories, techniques and formats. More importantly even, it demands of the therapist the capacity to sustain their vulnerability in the face of the necessary uncertainties, paradoxes and tensions between the various poles of the spectrum (which they will inevitably be drawn into).
Many groups, by their definition, restrict the leader's free access across the whole spectrum, such as those structured by a shared theme, problem or client group, or those defined by a particular therapeutic approach.
But Yalom is unequivocal about the disadvantages of such restrictions and structured group formats: "[…] managed care decision makers may make the mistake of decreeing that some distinct orientations […] are more desirable because their approach encompasses a series of steps consistent with other efficient medical approaches: the setting of explicit, limited goals; the measuring of goal attainment at regular, frequent intervals; a highly specific treatment plan; and a replicable, uniform, manual-driven, highly structured therapy with a precise protocol for each session."
He is only too aware of the therapeutic potential that gets lost in such theme-focussed and structured groups and warns: "But do not mistake the appearance of efficiency for true effectiveness." (Yalom 2005 p XV)
Over and against such restricted applications of group therapy, Group Body Psychotherapy has the potential to bring an holistic-integral approach to working with diverse and heterogeneous groups, reflecting the multi-cultural reality of the 21st century and bringing the transformative potential of bodymind wholeness to socially embedded interpersonal relationships.
Towards an integration of group therapy and body psychotherapy
A dialogue between the estranged traditions of body psychotherapy and group psychotherapy involves bringing a group perspective to areas neglected by body psychotherapy, and - by applying our holistic perspective to group phenomena and approaches - making the theories and techniques of body psychotherapy accessible and available to a field which is still largely steeped in body/mind dualism. The advantages of such dialogue go beyond the mutual cross-fertilisation of the two traditions: a possible integration of bodymind and group perspectives may generate a new sensibility and new ways of framing the therapeutic endeavour altogether, including new ways of perceiving, understanding and intervening therapeutically within the 'body politic'. Such an integration may be of profound significance for the future of both group therapy andgroup facilitation if they are to make an impact on the roots of our sociocultural crisis and our established ways of conducting group relations in every aspect of society. We can envisage the development of an integrative and embracing socio-bio-neuro-psychological model and technique of therapy which would not only be relevant to groupwork, but to the underlying assumptions governing the modern practice of therapy in all its forms. By including and focussing on the body within the context of the bodymind as a whole multi-dimensional system (Soth 2007), body psychotherapy is already providing and modelling certain fundamental integral attitudes which are relevant not only to specifically body-centred work, but have a contribution to make for all therapy and therapists (Totton 2005).
How might this 'body psychotherapy paradigm' operate in a group context? And how might such an understanding of body psychotherapy add to as well as transform the already existing corpus of group psychotherapy?
Bringing in the body
The most obvious and basic contribution of body psychotherapy is, quite simply, to include the body, in awareness, in experience, in interaction, welcoming and attending to the bodily experience of participants and leaders in just the same way that one might do with any other aspect of experience. Thus, group members are encouraged to share and explore body sensations, impulses and symptoms, just as they might share emotions, fantasies and thoughts; and these body experiences are considered as valid and important contributions to the group's knowledge of itself, as well as the individual's self-understanding. In parallel, the leaders will consult their own embodied experience, asking themselves how shifts and alterations in the flow of their embodiment express countertransference responses to the group and its members.
Beyond and arising out of this attention to and sharing of body awareness, body psychotherapy follows and surrenders to embodiment as it manifests in all kinds of spontaneous processes. Many group cultures require members to participate mainly through contributing impulses which have been reflected upon and suitably civilised, channelled or censored. But since group members allow for and arrange themselves around everybody else's control mechanisms, an exploratory space of 'play' is unlikely to emerge without judicious encouragement of spontaneous impulses and their expression.
Psychotherapy has a traditional bias towards symbolisation and reflection, equating action with 'acting out', and discouraging spontaneity in the supposed pursuit of 'meaning' that is then understood to be primarily mental. By encouraging the emergence and the creationof meaning through following spontaneous impulses (see Marlock - Wiederbelebung des Selbst), body psychotherapy has helped to counteract that traditional imbalance.
Example 1
Jane had consistently been the quietest group member throughout the first six of twelve weekly sessions. Nobody - not even herself - had noticed what was obvious with hindsight: having a tendency to arrive late, she never sat anywhere other than opposite Tom, easily the most verbal and intellectually articulate participant. Tonight she finally took issue with what she perceived as his self-involved, alienating and abstract ruminations. Compared to him, it turned out, she felt inferior and less entitled to the group's attention.
Their interaction started with Tom holding forth, rather like a king holding court, self-consciously preoccupied with reflections on his place and contribution to the group. In the middle of his soliloquy, Jane broke into a wild coughing fit which - to begin with - she politely smothered in her handkerchief. She begged the group to continue and to ignore her coughing, but there was something about her self-effacing manner which some members of the group, including the facilitator, found funny. For all his usual composure, Tom was offended - he looked hurt, as if the laughter was exclusively meant for him, referring to what he had said. He went distinctly quiet.
The facilitator noticed that his own laugh had acquired several meanings. He felt caught between what both Jane and Tom were making sure was most certainly not a confrontation. He also noticed that - apparently - his laugh carried more weight, with both Jane and Tom, as if he was siding with one against the other.
On the surface this was an issue between two individuals, and the facilitator initially pursued it as such, asking Jane to experiment with coughing 'at' Tom. The cough soon became a direct challenge and an open expression of her hostility towards him. The dynamic between the two of them was quickly established and took its time to unfold, with Jane and Tom owning their mutually negative feelings towards each other. This was a moving exchange, but with a deeper layer of significance: later in the work, the facilitator began to think of Jane and Tom as the protagonists of two quite polarised ways of being, both in the group and in the world.
On the most simple level their polarisation is between 'articulate mind' and 'inarticulate body', and the question whether - in Gaie Houston's words - the "verbal self" is used "as a tool to enlightenment rather than neurosis-maker" (Houston 1993, p. 82). It was through the leader not only trusting, but actively encouraging Jane's coughing that an apparently meaningless and otherwise unconscious element of the group dynamic, carried in the body, could unfold and reveal its relational meaning. Where verbal exchange is taken for granted as the dominant or exclusive mode of interaction, such a body symptom could easily have been overlooked as 'irrelevant data'; it requires a particular holistic sensibility, as developed in body psychotherapy, to notice and value Jane's spontaneous bodily expression as communication, especially in contrast to Tom's defensive disconnected mind.
For sure, there are many other facets to the polarisation between Jane and Tom, rooted in their contrasting individual identities, reflecting their particular life stories and especially how they each found ways of coping with pain whilst getting some form of attention. But if we do not reduce such conflicts to individual issues only, we recognise that one dimension which groups often polarise around is the body-mind split, dividing the group into one faction essentially afraid of the body and identified with the rational mind over and against spontaneity and an opposing sub-group identified with vitality, expressiveness and impulsivity. The first group needs to control the body, whereas the second feels imprisoned unless it is given free reign. The group thus manifests and plays out unresolved cultural conflicts which none of us entirely escape. Each participant's identity is bound to have been organised in partial and biased ways around these painful conflicts. And each participant will therefore tend to maintain and defend that identity, inexorably drawn towards a particular characteristic position in the unfolding group dynamic.
A crucial step for the facilitator is to think of these polarisations as manifesting not only between people, but also within each group participant. Using the group sculpt technique (which is infinitely adaptable to a whole range of situations), the leader suggested that everybody line up on opposite ends of the room with either Jane or Tom, depending on whom they felt more identified with. A lively interaction between the two sides ensued, with a predominantly goading and raucous rather than hostile undertone. The group ended feeling energised, as one unexpected aspect of the exercise was that people found themselves repeatedly switching sides.
An essential skill for the group leader is the capacity to recognise the parallels between intrapsychic, interpersonal, group and cultural dynamics, and to see how each level reflects the others. The group leader is then able to flexibly use each as an avenue into the others, shifting backwards and forwards between internal and external, individual and collective, fluidly using techniques appropriate to each domain. Where group participants present partial identities, specialising in one or the other domain to the exclusion or neglect of others, the leader can thus facilitate a group awareness which is oriented towards a more wholesome embrace of both individual and cultural splits.
The group as a whole - the group as an organism
The perception of the group as a whole entity, rather than just a collection of individuals, is of course central to both systemic and psychodynamic approaches to groups.
"As Bion (1961) noted, we may observe individual gears, springs and levers and only guess at the proper function, but when the pieces of machinery are combined, they become a clock, performing a function as a whole, a function impossible for individual parts to achieve. Appreciating the group as a whole requires a perceptual shift on the part of the observer or consultant, a blurring of individual separateness and a readiness to see the collective interactions generated by group members." (Barnet and Hayden 1977)
Rather than a clock, however, body psychotherapy sees the group as an organism. Unlike many mechanistic models of groups, this picks up on the important fact that the group members are organisms, and suggests that the group is an emergent entity no less complex - and embodied - than the individuals who make it up.
Like an organism, a group is a complex living system, which needs to change and develop in order to sustain its evolving dynamic integrity. Like an organism, it needs to both interact with its environment by opening its boundaries, and to maintain them so as to organise its separate identity.
Phases of group development - the orgasmic cycle
Like an organism, one of the most basic features of a group's experience is that its development can be seen to go through cycles and that the group itself has a life cycle.
Since its inception, groupwork has generated - mainly linear - models of the phases and stages of group development (Bennis & Sheppard 1978; Feder & Ronall 1980; Houston, 1993), the most familiar one captured by Tuckman's (1965) famous phrase 'forming-norming-storming-performing'.
Body psychotherapy has made its own contribution to our understanding of the cyclic aspect of any living process and relationship. Reich's original 'orgasm formula', the process by which 'energy metabolism takes place in a four-beat rhythm of tension, charge, discharge, and relaxation' (Reich 1983), was developed further in a variety of ways and appears, amongst others, in Gestalt, Hakomi, Biosynthesis and Biodynamic Psychology.
Randall & Southgate's pamphlet (1980) Co-operative and Community Group Dynamics: Or, Your Meetings Needn't Be So Appalling (Randall, Southgate and Tomlinson 1980) explicitly applies the Reichian concept of the orgasmic cycle to group life, but distinguishes further between the 'creative orgasmic cycle' and the 'destructive orgasmic cycle'.
Creative groups (Randall & Southgate focus mostly on work groups of various kinds rather than therapy groups) begin with nurturing, move on to energising, then reach a peak after which the group moves into relaxing. A destructive group, however, follows the same cycle with a different emotional tone: destructive nurturing involves smothering, withholding, paternalism, dependence, destructive energising is dominating and conspiratorial, the destructive peak is explosive and fight-and-flight, and destructive relaxing is false and illusion-based. Most real life groups, of course, are a mixture: "neither wholly creative nor completely destructive. Sometimes it is closer to one extreme than the other. Sometimes it just feels a bit flat." (1980, 12)
This model combines Reich's four-phase cycle with Bion's understanding of the destructive potential of the 'basic assumption group' (Bion 1961). An embodied perspective can thus bring added dimensions to models of group development, both theoretically, first by complementing linear models with the cyclic phenomenology of living systems, and secondly by translating these principles into group practice. There are many techniques and group exercises which can be used to facilitate the unfolding of these phases - whether over a weekend or over a year of weekly meetings. Through 'energetic perception' of the cycle and an understanding of each member's characterological barriers to certain phases of the group cycle (see Halko Weiss chapter on character barriers to existential issues), the embodied therapist can work with the group as an organismic bodymind system.
Group Energy
The Randall/Southgate model of group life is basically an energeticmodel, consistent with Reich's functionalism and tying together the life of the body and that of the mind: physical, physiological, neurological, sexual processes are seen as interwoven with and functionally identical to emotional, imaginal and various mental processes in a dynamic whole which can be tangibly experienced.
"Our energy is our aliveness. It is the stuff that creates the continuity of our life. We wake up with it, we go to bed with it, it is present in our waking and sleeping dreams. ... It is the ground from which our living emerges. ... In a way energy is nothing special, but it is the glue that binds everything together and connects us to our essential self." (Heckler 1984, 58-9)
Identifying with one's energetic process as emotional subjectivity is a fundamental, radical and significant recognition embedded in the Body Psychotherapy tradition, and quite unique to it.
'You are your energy. Your body is your energy. ... The unfolding of your biological process is you ... as body. Your body is an energetic process, going by your name. It delights me to say that I am my body. It gives me identity with my aliveness, without any need to split myself, body and mind. I see all my process - thinking, feeling, acting, imaging - as part of my biological reality, rooted in the universe' (Keleman 1975: 24).
The equivalent in a group context - and one which is employed by many who are not body psychotherapists - is to talk about 'the energy in the room' and what it feels like, even what it 'wants' or is 'trying to do'.
In practical terms (that other approaches to psychotherapy can readily understand), the term 'energy' is co-extensive with what we might call emotional tone - what Daniel Stern calls 'vitality affect' (Stern 1985, 53-60). The ability to read vitality affect is probably central to group facilitation, and there are many passages in Reich's work which anticipate the significance of vitality affects (Totton 1998, 166-9) and how they interweave with sensations and movements.
Reich often likened the energetic functioning of the human bodymind to a pulsating amoeba, a notion which is echoed throughout our tradition:
"Energetically speaking, the whole body can be viewed as a single cell with the skin as its membrane. Within this cell excitation can spread in all directions ... One can experience the flow of excitation as a feeling or sensation which often defies anatomical boundaries." (Lowen 1976a, 51-2)
Attention to this basic level of aliveness underpins and informs the therapist's perception: there is the energetic state of particular participants; and also that of the group as a whole, the 'emotional weather' of the group. In the 60s and 70s, political meetings often appointed someone to act as 'Vibes Watcher' and give periodic reports on the emotional atmosphere - in particular, to bring awareness to 'stuck' and 'heavy' or 'anxious' and 'jumpy' vitality affect.
'Charge' as an embodied-relational notion of energy
As has been explored elsewhere in this volume (Wehowsky p.152 in German volume), rather than being clearly defined, the range of meanings which the term 'energy' holds within the field is diverse, contradictory and best understood as multi-dimensional.
In trying to overcome the body-mind split, the body psychotherapy tradition has often swung from one extreme to the other: from mind-over-body dominance into body-over-mind, leading to oversimplified notions of 'spontaneity' (Soth 2000) and 'energy'. Imagining the therapeutic task as "liberating the animal" and its life energy (Reich 1983) implies taking a polarised position in the conflict between mind and body. As I have suggested elsewhere, following in the footsteps of Reich's 'mission', generations of body psychotherapists have tended to construct their therapeutic position as an "enemy of the client's ego" (Soth 2005). Whilst consciously working to overcome the client's body-mind split, it is perfectly possible for a body-oriented therapist to actually end up exacerbating it or enacting it relationally, precisely by polarising against the dualism inherent in the split (Soth 1999, 2006). In siding with the body against the mind, we have tended to favour cathartic expression, aliveness and the flow of energy over inhibition, numbness and stuckness. Whilst this has provided a useful counterbalancing of the disembodiment structured into our culture, it is - as Perls criticised early on (1951) - not always a therapeutically productive position, or one that actually facilitates true spontaneity. Rather than favouring expression over inhibition, Perls therefore insisted on therapeutic attention to the conflict between body and mind, between flowing and blocked energy, between aliveness and 'resistance' (and pointed out the degree of energy contained in resistance).
Because of body psychotherapy's traditional bias, and contrary to Reich's own meta-psychological conception of mind and body (as being antagonistic and therefore equally valid expressions of an underlying functional and energetic unity), in practice the notion of energy has often been reduced to the vitality of the body only. Consequently, the associated concept of 'charge' is usually understood to refer to the degree of energetic aliveness in the client's physical body, which can be influenced through conscious breathing, physical exercises and stress positions, and is observable and even measurable from the outside. However, this fails to take into account both the charge in the mind (Lowen's notion of the brain as a condensator of energy 1958; e.g. the energy contained in images, dreams, fantasies, thoughts - generally speaking: symbolisation and verbalisation) and the relational charge arising from the subjective and inherent meaningfulness of contact - with environment, with other or with self (Perls' "inherently vibrant contact").
Example 2:
In a supportive group atmosphere, Paul had over some weeks increasingly got in touch with how much he had missed just such an atmosphere in his life, and in his family of origin. 'I always thought my longing for a more loving family was a pipe dream, an impossible ideal. I did not think it might actually happen.' He then fell into a phase of depression, with the 'wasted years' weighing heavily upon him and feelings of despondency and hopelessness actually beginning to separate him from the group. One evening the group encouraged him to contact his passion and aliveness which they vividly remembered from just weeks before, but the more they tried to rescue him and nudge him towards an apparent group consensus of 'health', the more he felt dead, isolated and misunderstood. The group leader noticed Paul's impulse to draw his knees to his chest and curl up. Encouraged to follow this, Paul started rocking and finally rolled onto his side, into an isolated foetal position. The therapist drew Paul's attention to his breathing which had nearly stopped. This prompted Paul to remember how as a child he used to lie on his bed like this and experiment with holding his breath: how long could he survive without air ?
What eventually allowed some transformation was the insight that the impulse behind these 'breath-holding experiments' had been his desire to superhumanly control the one thing in his life, going right back to his parents' divorce, which might not be out of his control. Although his body felt dead and immobile, there was a lot of charge in the recognition that these attempts at control were still continuing to this very day, right here in the group. The charge then moved into his contact with the group: the love he had received in the group threatened his identity, and provoked this regression into an accurate replication of what had actually been his childhood reality.
But was he nowgoing to allow another outcome ? This question precipitated an opening of the floodgates, and he broke down into profound and uncontrollable sobbing. Some group members spontaneously came towards him, and he allowed himself to be held and rocked. The group surrounded him and touched him, until naturally he felt soothed and his crying subsided. As the group continued over the following months, nobody was in any doubt that this session constituted a profound turning point in Paul's life.
This example illustrates various points:
a) the importance of the facilitator not siding with the group in their definition of 'health', but giving attention to 'charge' as both an embodied and a relational phenomenon: by not reducing charge to 'energy in the body', the therapist allowed the possibility that there can be a lot of charge in the reflective and contactful awareness of a frozen, paralysed state of embodiment, or even disembodiment.
b) the importance of touch: the group had created enough safety for disinhibition and spontaneous gestures, to allow members to respond warmly and authentically to Paul's distress. Had he been left alone in the isolated state, his 'felt sense' of the group would simply have been a re-enactment of his childhood scenario. At such times, the group transcends the individual therapist and to some extent functions as a substitute parent, without some of the major transference implications which would be inevitable in individual work. It opens up touch as a culturally neglected and underrepresented avenue of social interaction, and reinstates its essential function in human bonding.
c) the group as the family of origin: this is one of the most significant - and in its intensity and pervasiveness to most participants surprising - phenomena in group work, which especially in ongoing, weekly groups is almost guaranteed to manifest clearly after some time. This can be used and set up as a group focus and theme deliberately (e.g. as a technique in psychodrama or Pesso-Boyden enactments), or it can be discovered by the group members as a spontaneously emergent group dynamic which occurs unconsciously and of its own accord. In either case, the very dynamics which according to developmental theory are at the root of people's difficulties, become repeated and tangible in the group context. Participants project members of their family of origin into the group and enact the wounding relationships which constitute their character. Roles taken within the group replicate those taken or allocated in the family, setting up characteristic patterns of communication and interaction as well as transferential dynamics in relation to the leader(s) as parent(s).
d) the transference implications: whilst in this case no major transference fall-out seemed to occur in the further development of the group process, such a possibility cannot be ruled out altogether. Whether the group or the therapist become idealised 'good objects' as a result of such a session, and locked into a demand for further, potentially collusive gratification, depends on many factors, not least whether the regressive experience was forced prematurely, involved a degree of compliance or self-conscious cathartic 'performance', and whether it was completed and integrated. An organic, containable and transformative unfolding of the regression within the group context is supported by the therapist modelling attention to both 'resistance' and 'cooperation', inhibition and expression, spontaneity and reflection as valid modes of contact.
Perls' focus on awareness of the conflict between body and mind rather than on siding with the supposedly 'alive' body againstthe supposedly 'deadening' mind as well as Gestalt's paradoxical principle of change ("change happens when we accept what is") give the group therapist a more balanced, less habitually proactive position, suited to allowing both the group's unfolding in 'unstructured space' as well as still retaining the capacity for decisive and determined intervention.
Building on this, we can expand our notion of charge beyond identifying it with the body, i.e. beyond Reich's very literal, bodily sense of libido (Soth 2005, Totton 2003). Charge can then be defined as a characteristic of both intra-psychic and interpersonal relationship: charge is not mainly a feature of mind or body, but of how they are relating to each other, i.e. the current process of 'vertical' body/mind organisation; and secondly charge is not a feature of the client orthe therapist, but of how they are relating to each other, i.e. the current 'horizontal' organisation of the interpersonal system and the interactions within it.
Charge can thus become a helpful embodied-relational term to describe the body/mind phenomenology of the transference/countertransference dynamic, a crucial ingredient in the therapist's awareness and attention. Reflection on countertransference often boils down to a contemplation of charged moments in the relationship.
By reframing our notion of 'charge' through a relational perspective, we do not lose its groundedness in spontaneous vitality and a communicated 'felt sense'. In a group context, we do of course attend to energy - as described above - in terms of the cycle of expression, i.e. flowing or blocked, expressive or inhibited, agitated or calm, frightened or excited. Here the therapist wonders what energetically wants to happen, what is ripe, what is blocked and what would need to happen to unblock. But beyond asking ourselves where the energy is, as a second step we also wonder where the contact is. This is a question of awareness and to what extent the energetic processes are embraced, owned, inhabited or conflicted, split-off, disowned, fought-against. What processes are in awareness, and which ones outside of it ? Which ones do group members identify with, which ones against ? What kind of contact are participants making with themselves, with each other and with the therapist? Is that contact forced, hesitant, half-hearted, ambivalent ? Here the therapist wonders what - amongst the myriad of interactions and bodymind processes - to bring awareness to.
Whilst there can be a fair amount of shared perception as to the salient energetic dynamics, the question which one to focus on and attend to immediately brings the therapist's subjectivity more into the room. As the therapist, what am I in or out of contact with? Where is my attention drawn to, what is missing or denied? The processes which the therapist selects as significant and worthy of attention speak as much to the group's energetic reality as to the therapist own psychology. Here the therapist's awareness of their own wounds and authentic self-awareness becomes paramount.
Beyond asking ourselves where the contact is, as a third step we can wonder what kind of relating and which internal and/or external, fantasised and/or real relationships are most charged and constellated in the field.
Attending to charge in this sense means going beyond a focus on energyor contact, not habitually privileging embodiment over disembodiment, or contact over disconnection, or 'health' over dysfunction. Here the therapist wonders about what relational dynamics are being enacted, irrespective of bodily energy or contactful awareness.
A deadeningly neglectful, paralysingly intimidating or numbingly shaming relationship can be very charged, whether or not it is expressed emotionally or somatically, whether or not it is explicit and in awareness or hidden and denied.
These considerations become relevant for the body-oriented therapist as group leader, because via the reverse parallel process mentioned above, the group will often express the leader's unconscious bias and - as every bias constitutes a polarity - polarise around the conflict implicit in it. As long as body psychotherapists operate from within a one-sided primarily literal-physical notion of energy, the group will tend to reflect this bias by splitting into compliant 'alive-expressive' and resistant 'held-back inhibited' factions. The leader's therapeutic stance, repetitively implying a bias against the mind, is picked up and enacted by the group as favouritism towards the 'alive-expressive' faction.
If we are not caught in operating from an unequivocal habitual bias towards the 'alive and expressive body', or towards the 'authentic and explicit contact', then we are free for our embodied countertransference to guide our attention towards how the conflicts between body and mind, aliveness and numbness, expression and inhibition, engagement and withdrawal, spontaneity and control are being played out within the group. For each person and the group as a whole, habitual patterns of relating - to self and others - are colliding with the reality of relationships in the here and now. As group facilitators we constantly attend to how charge gets 'organised' around these conflicts individually and collectively and we monitor how we are affected, implicated and involved in these dynamics at any particular moment.
Emergence
Whereas in the past leadership and the process of change were seen largely as a top-down affair, the science of complexity has discovered and postulated the emergence of new patterns from the bottom-up. Ideas such as dependence on slight variations in initial conditions (the 'butterfly effect'), self-organisation in complex systems ('autopoiesis'), bifurcation and strange attractors point to a new understanding of how change comes about and what the leader's role may be in it (Coveney and Highfield 1995; Maturana and Varela 1987). The new paradigm of non-linearity and complexity has had a revolutionary impact in groupwork, helping facilitators and consultants generate more flexible and diverse notions of leadership.
Rather than painstakingly pushing incremental, linear change against the perceived resistance of established structures, we can understand allsystems as dynamically and delicately balanced. Structure - although it may appear inert and frozen - is still process; the ego with its defences - as impenetrable and homogenous a fortress as it may seem - is actually split, conflicted and vulnerable, with the cracks always already showing. As Body Psychotherapists we are used to intuiting the frozen process in character, and the continuing here & now pressure cooker atmosphere and brittle tension susceptible to and positively 'begging' for radical transformation.
Group leaders can attend to the emergent processes in the group by viewing it as such a complex finely balanced system, alert to indicators of impending discontinuities and quantum leaps of non-linear change.
Body psychotherapists are at home with the notion that transformation need not be an imposed effort, a disciplined application of will; they have been working with 'emergence', the idea of 'going with the flow', for decades. As illustrated above, we have learned to trust and follow spontaneous bodily impulses even if - to begin with - they do not yet make sense. Complexity theory thus confirms many of body psychotherapy's basic assumptions regarding self-regulation and the body-mind relationship. Therefore, body psychotherapists have the perceptive and emotional skills as well as facilitative capacities to profoundly affect groupwork practice. Emergent process tends to announce itself in subtle, almost imperceptible ways, arriving outside established structures, group norms and the dominant discourse. The participants' bodies and their subliminal cues are a principal route for emergence. Mindell (1995) explicitly heralds 'the disturber' in the group as the often unwilling and unwanted messenger of emergent process - all kinds of behaviours, otherwise judged as insignificant or immaterial to the task at hand, can be perceived, followed and thus explored.
Projection
A group works as a projection screen for each member's 'inner world', i.e. as a complex social organism onto which inner figures and relationships can readily be projected. This, in turn, can become fertile ground for the therapeutic work of re-owning projections, thus leading to increased self-awareness and 'better' relationships.
However, as important as this work is in a group context, it is limited by the visual-perceptual bias traditionally inherent in 'projection' as a concept which is primarily understood in mentalist terms. Body psychotherapy can help us understand projection as a bodymind process and thus contribute important perceptual, theoretical and technical skills.
From a holistic perspective, projection involves more than simply (mis-)perceiving the 'image' of a disowned internal process as belonging to another person. The projected image is only the perceptual fragment of a much larger phenomenon: an inner relationship of which (at least) one pole is disowned and externalised. But both poles are bodymind processes and as such tangibly experienced, communicated and apprehended by the other.
Body psychotherapists understand the characterological patterns at the root of projection mechanisms and how these are anchored in subliminal bodymind processes. Each fragment of the disowned internal relationship - whether externalised via projection or not - immediately constellates the whole dynamic: a simple frown may open up a whole scenario of self-contempt; a swaying foot may conjure up a whole story of internalised aggression.
These body-oriented skills put facilitators in a better position to notice, access and pursue the shifting tapestry of projections as they follow each other in quick-fire succession; to support the energetic-cathartic working-through of such patterns before they become hopelessly entrenched (as they often will do in groups unless we 'interfere'); and to help participants experience for themselves their own patterns of internalising and externalising and thus develop psychological awareness and fluidity. As a result, the group atmosphere and the kind of relating that occurs within it will deepen and become more 'real-life'-like.
Example 3
In the last hour of a first group session, participants were invited to move through the room, experimenting with gazing and not gazing at each other. They were asked to notice the three people in the group they experienced most charge with - whether pleasant or unpleasant - and to trust their physical and gut reaction to each person. In the next session, this was explored further, through each participant imitating, mimicking and quietly miming the three people they had picked the previous week. This provided material both through the accuracy of the imitation (for the imitated person), and through bringing attention to the non-verbal anchors for projection (for the imitating person).
Gina for example, mimed Sue - one of the women which would later be recognised as being given high-status by the group - as gesturing and moving in a slow, deliberate and composed fashion. In Gina's mind, this was a sign of Sue's vulnerability as it resembled Gina's older sister Mary who had been abused and traumatised, leaving her frequently in a semi-catatonic state. Gina had only recently found out about the abuse, but throughout their lives had always felt guilty about being irritated and impatient with Mary whom she perceived as helpless and broken.
The non-verbal exploration drew attention to a nascent process by which Gina was projecting her vulnerable sister Mary onto Sue. There was an element of surprise in how distinctly different this was from how other members perceived Sue: they responded to Sue's slow speech and hyper-controlled, deliberately calming manner by feeling intimidated and inferior. In this case, Gina's projection of her sister Mary onto Sue had several functions: on the one hand, it was a competitive attempt to weaken Sue's position in the group, but on the other hand, it gave a profound insight into a hidden side of Sue. During the exercise, when others imitated her, she discovered the degree to which her posture and mannerisms resembled her controlling mother whom she had introjected. Gina's different perspective on this high-status domineering behaviour later opened up important avenues for understanding that behind the controlling attitude of Sue's mother lay buried hidden trauma.
This example is, of course, not meant to suggest that non-verbal work pre-empts and avoids projections, but rather that it deepens them, connecting them to their pre-conscious roots in sensory and bodymind processes. All of the projections involved would have occurred, anyway, subliminally, but working through the body allowed both their explicit, felt recognition as well as the transformative potential of the kernel of perceptive accuracy.
Character styles as embodied interpersonal patters within the group dynamic
To a large degree, character patterns are both communicated and perceived - as well as experienced in the first place - in somatic and right-brain intuitive ways. Their restrictive inertia is felt, and perceived by others, as embodied. Since these patterns are frequently experienced as 'normal' ('ego-syntonic'), the group provides a profound feedback system against which the pattern can stand out as something that can be questioned rather than taken for granted.