How does the body feel when perceived from within – beyond medical diagnoses or athletic performance? The history of somatics tells of a quiet revolution: a movement that combines body awareness, healing, and personal and social transformation. Originating in the tension between psychology, movement art, and political utopia, it stretches from the Californian coast to interwar Germany. This introduction invites you to delve into the fascinating emergence and self-reflection of a field of research that strives for more than technology – it seeks to enable the human being to be experienced in their entirety.
Somatics: How this field of research emerges and reflects itself
As a relatively new term, Somatics defines a variety of pedagogical or therapeutic methods and techniques focussing in a body-centred way. It concentrates on practicing body awareness, working with movements and contacts, based on coherent practical knowledge of psychological and physical processes.
The American Feldenkrais teacher and founder of his own method, Thomas Hanna, shaped the method-spanning concept of Somatics in various publications in the late 1960s and early 1970s and strengthened it through the publication of the eponymous journal, Somatics. Since the 1970s, this journal has published articles on topics such as biofeedback, phenomenology, martial arts, meditation, dance, pedagogy, yoga, sensory awareness, acupuncture, autogenic training, and ethical issues, as well as articles on pioneers such as Ida Rolf, Moshe Feldenkrais, Carl Rogers, Gerda Alexander, Carola Speads, and F. Matthias Alexander. (See website of Somatics)
Soma – body awareness from within
Hanna defined Somatics as as the body experienced from within, where we experience mind/body integration. As well as many of his colleagues Hanna researched and practised with the aim of understanding how living bodies regulate themselves and how people can perceive and change limiting and unconscious patterns of movement and behaviour through practicing awareness. This is what he called “somatic learning.”
At that time, however, somatics was anything but an established field of research and practice, with practitioners and researchers who respected each other as colleagues, professional associations, conferences, degree programs, research funding, and institutional recognition. This field had just begun to form. In the early 1960s, various therapists from humanistic psychology joined forces in the Human Potential Movement. They assumed a largely untapped human potential for a happy, creative, and self-determined life and sought ways to develop this potential. The meeting place for these psychologists, who soon invited a whole host of movement educators and body therapists to exchange ideas, was the Esalen Institute on the Northern California coast, founded for this purpose. (See Don Hanlon Johnson, “A Brief History of Somatics” (see website)) This idyllically located institute quickly became and remained for decades one of the most important centers for the field of somatics research. Here, the founders of various body therapy and psychotherapy methods discussed with each other, demonstrated their techniques, and applied them to each other. Here, they also began to understand the prehistory of their own history.
The history of Somatics, as the constitution of an US-American field of research including an object of research, methods and questions of research begins at the Esalen Institute. The research itself relates beyond the USA into other continents, other cultures, other centuries and other fields than those of psychology, movement education and massage.
With his proposed terminology, Hanna contributed greatly to the fact that in the USA a large number of representatives of different methods and practices of bodywork, body therapy, movement education and psychotherapy began to consider themselves as belonging to a community and to discuss with each other the possible common area of research and practice.
Somatics is a generative concept like “cognitive science” or “ecology” or “QiGong”; names whose task it is to create opportunities for communities that are otherwise isolated from each other and often in competition and conflict in working together. Thus, between the Reichian bioenergetics, Rolfing and Hatha Yoga seemed to be an unattainalbe connection. Now we can see how each of these practices can strengthen the others and make them more effective. Thanks to this new paradgim. (cf. website of Don Hanlon Johnson)
Just as QiGong is a term that was only coined in the 20th century as an umbrella term for hundreds of different exercise systems, with the intention of emphasizing their connection, their common principles and their origins in a Chinese tradition and thus strengthening Chinese medicine, to which some of these exercise systems belonged, against the influence of Western medicine, so too is Somatics a term that was intended to ensure more dialogue and unity internally, not least so that the common concern could be better represented externally.
A counterpart to the Somatics movement of self-reflection and self-organization in the USA was the founding of a European umbrella organization for body psychotherapy methods in the 1980s: the European Association for Body Psychotherapy, which, however, more sharply demarcates itself from body therapy methods that do not have a formulated psychotherapeutic concept.
Is there an universal idea of the human being?
In the process of reaching agreement on common concerns and principles, in exchanging ideas about respective working methods, and in the development of training guidelines in the USA, awareness of differences also grew. An important line of inquiry was: Is there a universal ideal of humanity? Was there a correct pelvic position with the correct spinal vibration for everyone? Should clients be manipulatively brought into the “correct” alignment? Or was it important to show everyone ways to sense the needs of their own body, which, despite all its similarities to all other human bodies, is uniquely constituted, to perceive its impulses and give them space, and thus to learn to develop their own unique way of standing and acting in the world.
Don Hanlon Johnson, a former Jesuit doctor of philosophy, later a certified Rolfer, and founder of the first academic degree program in Somatics in 1983, made this part of the history and self-reflection of Somatics understandable in its entire philosophical, spiritual, and political dimension in his books (including “Body, Spirit, and Democracy”). Since early childhood, Don Hanlon Johnson suffered from a completely stiff spine. His body resisted all attempts to manipulate it toward ideal alignment. Ida Rolf, his instructor, made it clear to him that such truly deep spiritual development would never be possible for him. He felt like a disabled person who would never be a fully developed human being. His experiences and research led him to the profoundly democratic view that every person, by virtue of their unique standpoint on their uniquely shaped feet, has an irreplaceable, irreplaceable, and unalterable view of the world, and that they require knowledge of as many other embodied viewpoints as possible in order to form the most multidimensional picture of the world possible. According to Don Hanlon Johnson, body therapy methods can also be either democratic by valuing the uniqueness of each individual, or bear the characteristics of an organized religion or other totalitarian institution by subordinating the life and body of the individual to some norm, ideal, or collective.
Political and social dimensions of bodily self-perception
The political and social dimensions of enabling or restricting bodily self-awareness, self-acceptance, self-regulation, and self-efficacy become very clear in historical research on the largely European prehistory of American somatics. The historical lines initially lead to Northern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly to Germany during the period between the two world wars.
In her study of the “beginnings of modern body therapies,” Karoline von Steinacker demonstrated how close fascist and democratic orientations lay in the scene of breath and body pedagogy, nudity culture, the early environmental movement, the youth movement, and the ecstatic celebration of the “natural” body liberated from industrial drudgery and darkness. (cf. Karoline von Steinacker: Luftsprünge. Anfänge moderner Körpertherapien, Munich 2000) Both shared ideals of beauty, purity, and order. Greek statues of nude people served as models for the powerful, centered human being in dance, gymnastics, and film. Elsa Gindler, one of the founding figures of German body and breath pedagogy, worked with this ideal, as did Leni Riefenstahl, who portrayed it in her films. The seemingly small difference between playful movement with relaxed muscles in body pedagogy and the rigid, over-the-top posture in National Socialist films makes all the difference here.
In the particularly explosive context of the German interwar period, the historical and social influences on body images and methods become very clear. The work toward a liberated, upright, “natural” posture and the preferences and models of expression developed within a network of socio-political, artistic, and spiritual movements; they are just as inseparable from developments in dance and acting as they are from economic or medical developments, pedagogical doctrines, or the evolution of gender relations.
Author: Anja Streiter