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The Theory Of Somatic Psychology

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Despite the dismissal of the body in Western society and the relegation of the body as ‘other’, the field of somatic psychology proceeded to develop anyway. Somatic psychology is defined as the psychology of the body, a discipline that focuses on our living experience of embodiment as human beings (Barratt, 2013). Somatic psychology has always been around, although not always under that name. Psychoanalysis as it emerged through Freud’s career was always a bodily theory and often a body practice. Freud massaged his early patients, ‘pinched’, ‘kneaded’ and ‘stroked’ them (Freud, 1895), pressed their foreheads and chests (Masson, 1985), lay for hours on the floor with them (Dupont, 1995) and paid close attention to their complaints, aches and pains, tics and fidgets, energy cycles, and states of sexual arousal. Psychoanalytic theory and practice, while once began with radical potential, conformed to promote the ideologies of the dominant social order. It involved the leaving behind of a vision of human liberation in favor of ideas of cultural adaptation and social conformism (Barrett, 2013). It was not until the 1930s and 1940s when Wilhelm Reich, the founder of somatic psychology as a clinical discipline, carried Freud’s approach beyond psychoanalysis. Reich was the first to work systematically with the bodily aspect of experience, focusing in particular on the breath. Reich developed a methodology which used pressure and manipulation to release tension held in his

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