Bioenergetics: What Is Behind Wilhelm Reich’s Theory?

If Wilhelm Reich is the pioneer, then the man who truly developed bioenergetics into its modern form is his disciple Alexander Lowen. Lowen was an American lawyer who met Reich in 1940. He underwent Reichian style therapy for a few years and began learning his methods himself, eventually developing his own style, which he termed bioenergetics.

Lowen long had an interest in the body, movement, and exercise, even studying a method of body relaxation called Jacobson Relaxation and Eurythmics, a method of musical expression through body movement, with a focus on combining the mind and body.

Eventually, he formed his own health organization, The Institute of Bioenergetic Analysis in 1956 with two other followers of Reich, John Pierrakos and William Walling.

According to their theories, our body physically manifests our mental problems in different ways. Trained therapists are then able to recognize these patterns and use them to help give deeper insights into the workings of and problems of the psyche. Therapists also look at one’s relationship patterns to help form a full picture of their various selves.

Ultimately, we are all reaching for a state of complete, all-encompassing fulfilment and this is reached through a path. Deviating from this path results in “ailments”. Typically, these are emotional or mental in nature. The therapy primarily focuses on things one would visit a traditional psychotherapist for: post-traumatic stress, anxiety, stress, or depression, but because of the physical aspect, it can also help with back, neck, or shoulder pain.

One article lists the example that a childhood trauma can result in a deep-set fear response that can follow a person for their life. Negative emotions from our childhood actually causes muscles to tighten as a defence mechanism. Sufferers physically hold certain protective postures such as making themselves look small. Emotionally, they’ll become reserved and protective of their emotional state, which has strong repercussions on their interpersonal relationships.

Basically, every emotion has a physical manifestation and bioenergetics is one way to help.

Bioenergetic therapists also believe that our bodies make unconscious reactions to certain stimuli and these are likely the result of the body’s memory. Certain people make us close up or cause our muscles to tighten. Conversely, some people will make us open up. The memory can also manifest itself by helping us make decisions, the “gut feeling” reaction to things.

To illustrate, a child may exhibit physical symptoms if the parent’s message is that “boys don’t cry,” which can lead to the expression of emotion being replaced by tensing of muscles, holding of breath, and other symptoms of anxiety. The goal of bioenergetic therapy is to make the patient aware of these hidden connections. It is based on the assumption that neither psychotherapy based on deep conversations nor physical techniques alone are sufficient to achieve the desired results. Instead, a combination of the two is needed in the spirit of holistic healing.

Bioenergetic therapy is similar to traditional psychoanalysis, but it integrates body work into the process, making it a much more holistic approach to health than pure forms of psychotherapy. A bioenergetic therapist will try to unearth the emotional root of the patients’ problems.

The ultimate goal is for the patient to be self-reliant, to reach a point where they can deal with their own issues without the help of a therapist. The patient is taught through movement and sometimes touch to be self-aware of their own postures, movements, and breathing and how these reinforce problems, not just exist as manifestations of them. By physically adjusting the patients to the proper position, it helps release the trauma that is stored in the muscles.

This bioenergetic therapy focuses especially on forming a bond between the therapist and the patient. In a way, the therapist aims to reach a level of emotional resonance with the patient where they can almost feel what they are feeling. It helps build chemistry that coaxes the patient to open up and lower their emotional and body defences.

Bioenergetic therapists are particularly concerned with attachment theory, which says that the way our needs were met before the age of three can deeply influence aspects of our relationship strategies as an adult.

According to Reich’s theories, which are often still espoused by modern therapists, our experiences will be expressed in a mixture of five major character archetypes, each with its own posture: the Unwanted Child, The Needy Child, The Endurer, The Controller Leader, and The Perfectionist. The bioenergetic therapist will try to examine their attachment strategy and personality type and either utilize it to help them develop healthier ones.

Many of Reich’s ideas were quite far out from the mainstream thinking of psychotherapy. By the time that he had passed away in prison, he had been ridiculed as a whole and had even written books about space aliens. This latter point does not discredit his earlier work, especially that with bioenergetics, but many use this as ironic evidence that this guru of mental health was far from healthy in his own head, and his postulations seem to be made with no regard for actual science.

In general, bioenergetics lies under the body psychotherapy or body oriented psychotherapy (BOP) umbrella which includes dance therapy, massage therapy, and yoga. It’s a huge field. It is widely practiced in Europe and Britain and some universities even offer degrees in “somatic psychology”.

Despite this, it remains relatively underrepresented in mainstream psychological research. Part of the problem is that it can be difficult to specifically define, though many of the methods overlap.

Another stumbling block to studying bioenergetics and BOP is that it is very hard to design effective clinical studies, so much of the evidence is case-based, with all the biases that such papers include.