Body Psychotherapy for the 21st Century

Book excerpt: Body psychotherapy currently attracts more interest than ever before and is taking up an important role in the general psychotherapy field, bringing awareness of embodiment into what has been a verbally oriented profession. It is also developing a sophisticated approach which engages with recent advances in other fields including neuroscience, phenomenology, and cognitive studies, as well as the relational turn in psychotherapy. Body Psychotherapy for the 21st Century charts the history of this transformation and shows how four distinct versions of embodied practice have interacted to generate the current field. It makes the case for body psychotherapy not only within the therapeutic world, but in the social sphere, where bodily difference - of gender, ethnicity, age, sexuality - is one of the major markers of oppression.