Written as a chapter for "Contemporary Body Psychotherapy - The Chiron Approach" (a book edited by Linda Hartley, published 2008), this paper gives an overview over the phases and quantum leaps in the development of Body Psychotherapy at Chiron, with particular focus on the 'relational turn'.
To [...]
This article charts the deconstruction of the 'medical model' (which was taken for granted as a basic paradigm for the work of psychoanalysis by Freud at the conception of our profession) over the 100 years since then. It starts from the premise that the 'medical model' implies a [...]
Some preparatory thoughts on an embodied whole-person approach: if we want to work with the whole spectrum of processes from unconscious to conscious, from spontaneous to reflective, from somatic to emotional, mental and psychological, we recognise that in its traditional manifestation, the field of psychotherapy mirrors the fragmentation [...]
This article was written for the BACP Journal 'Therapy Today' to up-date the image of Body Psychotherapy across the professions of counselling and psychotherapy. By spelling out the - partly justified - prejudices against Body Psychotherapy deriving from 1970's practice, I try to show how - by working [...]
This was written as part of the Introduction to the Advanced Training programme of the Chiron Centre in 2004, following the enthusiastic reception of modern neuroscience by psychological practitioners. It spells out a list of the therapeutic micro-skills involved in bringing awareness to right-brain-to-right-brain attunement and the relational [...]
This article was written as a response to some interview questions by Penny Gray, the editor of the Healthcare Counselling & Psychotherapy Journal. It is primarily addressed to counsellors working in the NHS, but it also covers wider questions regarding the bodymind and psychosomatic aspects of counselling. It [...]
This chapter, published in Nick Totton's 2005 book "New Dimensions in Body Psychotherapy" is my first and quite condensed formulation of some of the original concepts arising from an integration of bodymind and relational perspectives (3 kinds of contact; the 5 parallel relationships including the [...]
This is the edited and elaborated text of my presentation at the UKCP Conference 'About A Body' which was eventually published in three versions: one published by UKCP in 2006 (9000 words) and one published in two parts in the Journal for Body, Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy. [...]
This was written as a response to a brilliant and helpfully clarifying article by Lavinia Gomez 'Humanistic or psychodynamic - what is the difference and do we have to make a choice ?', which tackles this difficult theme in a non-dogmatic and fairly comprehensive fashion. I [...]
This brilliant and helpfully clarifying article by Lavinia Gomez tackles the difficult theme 'humanistic or psychodynamic' in a non-dogmatic and fairly comprehensive fashion. Lavinia poses some challenging questions, especially for integrative therapists: how free and fluid can we allow ourselves to be in terms of combining, mixing and [...]
This article was written for the magazine 'Self & Society' following the workshop series I ran in 2003 on the paradoxes inherent in psychotherapy. In the workshops I addressed specifically six paradoxes which do not even get a mention in this article, as it was more an introduction [...]
This was an invited response to a case presentation by Maggie Turp, a psychodynamic therapist who has initiated a consideration of the body and of the importance of wellbeing in psychoanalytic circles. Whilst this must be a worthwhile project and her case study shows dedicated and insightful therapeutic [...]
This is an extract from "The Integrated BodyMind's View on 'Body/Mind Integration' (2000)", as it is often requested on its own. It basically critiques the notion of 'body/mind split', but then uses it to focus more precisely on what experiential reality that tricky concept may usefully be [...]
This was written as an article following a presentation to the Chiron Association's (AChP) AGM in 1999. During the presentation itself I more or less did the opposite of what I was talking about and modelled a fairly dis-integrated stance. The learning from that experience then inspired this [...]
This was my first public attempt at spelling out the difficulties and pitfalls of Body Psychotherapy as I knew it in the late 1980's and the early 1990's. It took years to become aware of and formulate the hidden 'medical model' assumptions, the implicit idealisation of the body, [...]
This was written for a psychodynamically oriented audience from an integrative perspective, outlining - with no attempt at a comprehensive formulation - some of the ways in which the body enters the counselling room and the counselling relationship.
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This is a longer article on the same theme as my letter with the same title to the European Psychotherapy Journal, written later and more detailed. It was cobbled together from two articles in consecutive issues of the AChP Newsletter (as it was then called), and with [...]
A Letter in response to Emmy van Deurzen-Smith's 1996 paper 'The Future of Psychotherapy', taking issue with her suggestion that some of what used to be the intuitive art and craft of mothering could and should now be provided by a scientifically validated counselling profession. I suggest that [...]
