New York Society for Bioenergetic Analysis

Bioenergetic Analysis is a body-oriented psychotherapy rooted in the cardinal principle that mind and body are fundamentally linked aspects of the same energetic processes. This approach to psychotherapy views psychological phenomena, behavior, and physiological experiences as somatic events. The psychotherapist, using this approach, offers clients a way of understanding themselves and a means of enhancing self-expression by calling attention to bodily experiences--sensations, feelings, posture, and muscle tension--the basic elements to knowing and expressing ourselves. Focus on these tangible somatic experiences, combined with techniques to evoke and amplify underlying emotion, which is often unconscious, allows clients to find a vehicle for self-expression that they can carry as far and as deep as they wish.

Bioenergetic Analysis is a specific form of body-psychotherapy – based upon the continuity between body and mind – rooted in the work of Wilhelm Reich and founded by Alexander Lowen. BA basically combines a bodily, analytic and relational therapeutic work, based upon an energetic understanding. Bioenergetic Analysis helps to release chronic muscular tensions, manage affects, expand the capacity for intimacy, heal sexual difficulties and learn new, more fulfilling ways of relating to others. Tenderness, aggression, assertion – and their confluence in sexuality – are seen as core lifesaving forces. The therapeutic relationship provides a place of safety in which healing begins. The therapist reads the body, resonates with its energy, feels the emotions, listens, hears and answers the words. The language of the body (osture/gesture, breathing, motility, expression) is on focus as it indicates the status on the way to personhood – from the past to the present and future. Techniques are used which address the energetic aspect of the individual, including her self-perception, self-expression, and self-possession. These also include work with body contact, boundaries, grounding, and the understanding of muscular tensions as indications of somatic and psychological defences against past trauma. The goal of therapy is more than the absence of symptoms - it is having aliveness, getting a taste of pleasure, joy, love – vibrant health.

"It integrates a work with the body, with the patient’s interpersonal relationships, and with his mental processes; each of which is correlated and interpreted in terms of the others.... Bioenergetic Analysis starts with the reality of the body and its basic functions of motility and expression."(Alexander Lowen New York, 1963) "When you have no words for your feelings, for what happened to you, for what is missing in you, we listen to the inner resonance - of your inchoate secrets - as it lives in your body. We help you to sense and amplify this inner resonance until its movement comes close enough to the surface of your being to enter your consciousness. But we also listen carefully to your words and are touched by them when they come from a depth of your being that no one can put a hand on. We invite you to surrender to the spirit of your body and the body of your spirit - and in so doing, to embrace your true self." (Robert Lewis, M.D)