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DAVID BOADELLA Review: Vorbemerkung der
Redaktion: Der folgende Beitrag ist eine Replik von David Boadella auf
den Report "Der Energiebegriff in der Körperpsychotherapie"
der "Energie-Arbeitsgruppe des EABP-CH, den wir in der gekürzten
Fassung auf den vorhergehenden Seiten veröffentlicht haben. Da mir
der Beitrag Boadellas nur in Englisch vorliegt, und ich wegen des Umfangs
des Beitrag nicht die Zeit hatte, ihn zu übersetzen, wird er hier
im Original wiedergegeben. Vielleicht findet sich ja auch ein interessierter
Leser, der eine deutsche Fassung besorgt. Der Energiebegriff in der Körperpsychotherapie Authors: The Energie Arbeitsgruppe des EABP-CH (Ernst Juchli, Jeannette Andermat, Marga Moser, Monica Rumbelli, Bernhard Villiger, Jules Zwimpfer.) Reviewed by David Boadella. This 137 page report, produced by a working group of the Swiss Body Psychotherapy Association, had the opportunity to do a serious scientific work on the energy concept in body psychotherapy, which could have been of inestimable value for body psychotherapy in general. Unfortunately the six authors of the report have produced a document claiming to be seeking to be scientific, and yet full of paradoxes, predjudicies, and problems.
1. The context of the report. The report appears at a crucial time in the history of body psychotherapy,
when every psychotherapy method is being challenged all over Europe to
show that it is scientific.
2. The authors of the report. Four of the six authors are from one body psychotherapy school accepted within the Swiss Psychotherapy Charta:Klientzentrierte Körperpsychotherapie (GFK). (The other two are from biodynamic psychology and organismic psychotherapy). The four authors from GFK have a particular philosophical perspective, radical constructivism, which is used in various parts of the Report as a basis for negative critical commentary on the energy concepts of body psychotherapy. However, nowhere in the report is radical constructivism defined, or described. The authors of the report describe various stages of their unhappiness in doing the investigations (to be described later) on which the report is based, chiefly due to their difficulty in finding a consensus of viewpoints within body psychotherapy, and partly because of the frustration of their apparent wish to find a scientific perspective for the energetic concept. It can be questioned how seriously the four authors from Client Centered Psychotherapy may be in this wish, in view of the fact that a leading author in Client Centred Psychotherapy (Peter Schmid), who is quoted in the report, sees the energetic concepts of body-psychotherapy to be incompatible with client centred psychotherapy. Thus a massive built in bias seems to have been incorporated into the report from the beginning, due to the overweighting of one school in the constitution of the investigating team, and to the particular philosophical pre-assumptions of this school.
3. The investigating methods of the report. The procedures described consist of: a) an agreed questionaire on energetic concepts in therapy, the selection
of 17 persons to be interviewed, and the processing of the questionaires.
4. The questionaire The designers of the questionaire created many questions which are more practical than theoretical, yet in the comments to the responses to the questions, the authors of the report state that the anwers are not theoretical enough. The questions are frequently what is known as "leading questions", that is they are questions that predispose the interviewed person to respond in a particular way. Again the responses so provoked are criticised for being vague, not scientific, or not theoretical enough. The authors of the report had the wish to make use of the protocolls
of the taped interviews to justify their conclusions. They make a distinction
between the spontaneity of a spoken interview, where a person, in their
view, says what he really thinks, and the For this reason, among others, a policy decision was made not to send to the seventeen persons transcripts of their interviews, which is the normal process in interviews. The following situation therefore arose, in relation to the raw data of the report: i All those interviewed (with one exception, see below) are unnamed, but letter coded. We are told that they ranged between trainers in a body psychotherapy direction, and those trained in it. No information is given if any of those in the second category were "Lehrtherapeuten" or not, with any capactiy to teach others the concepts of body psychotherapy. We are told that their professional background included: Doctor, psychologist, natural scientist, and "other", but no figures are given of how many of those interviewed were in each category, or of what "other" might mean. ii No interviews are reproduced in full. Rather twelve out of seventeen are selectively extracted by the authors of the report, to highlight their critique of the energy concept in body psychotherapy. iii No interviews presented have been seen by those interviewed: so the accuracy of transcripts has not been checked. iv There are various non-sequiturs, where sentences break off into inaudibility
in v One interview, done in English, was translated into German, but the giver of the interview was not allowed to correct the translation, as this conflicted with the policy decision to publish (extracts from) unedited raw transcripts. vi The policy of anonymity of those interviewed was broken in relation to myself, as one of the seventeen persons interviewed, for the following reason: when I received the protocoll of my interview I realised that I could not consent to its publication in an unedited and uncorrected state. Therefore I withdrew my consent to use it. Nevertheless I was the only person named in the report as one of those interviewed, and comments on my interview (without text) were nevertheless made. |
vii The anonymity of the others means that the energy concepts of body psychotherapy are being criticised based on statements without identifiable authors. Not only are the authors not identified the schools they represent are also not identified. (They were all invited as private persons, and represented in total nine schools of body psychotherapy, including four of the five accepted within the Swiss Psychotherapy Charta, and five additional schools. One of these five schools (the school of George Downing) does not use energy concepts, so it is difficult to know why this school was chosen for interview. We have no information as to the distribution of the seventeen persons between these nine schools, and no idea of how representative the views of those interviewed may be in relation to their schools.)
5. The processing The authors tried to classify the statements about energy in the interviews by using eight colours to differentiate different levels of statements. They distinguish the following meanings: metaphorical , natural scientific substantial,vitalistic,constructivistic,phenomenological, esoteric, and other. These categories are arbitrarily created, and no coherent attempt is given to justify them. Rather predetermined assumptions are used to bias the discussion in advance. Short comments I can make on these eight categories:
In addition to this confused and unscientifically "justified" list of eight forms of energy concept, the authors of the report constantly interject feelings and attitudes of their own, as commentaries on the highly selected and unedited abstracts, to illustrate their viewpoints, rather than in any genunine attempt to clearly and impartially represent the view of those they interviewed. Nowhere is their colour coding process for the eight forms of energy concept they categorised illustrated, nor is there any summary of to what degree, in the opinion of the authors of the report, each of these categories was represented in the interviews of the anonymous therapists from the unspecified schools. 6. There is no literature survey appended to the report. Of the immense literature on the energy concept in body psychotherapy, they choose to ignore, with one exception, the work of Wilhelm Reich, as it is too comprehensive for the authors to comment on. They limit themselves to publishing in their report reviews of a mere nine books, and three articles. Ten of these twelve reviews are listed in the contents to the report. Inexplicably the reviews of Baker and Boadella are omitted from the contents list. Of these twelve reviews, eight are by body psychotherapists (Baker, Boadella, Boyesen, Brown, Downing, Lowen, Pierrakos, Rosenberg). Seven of these authors support the energy concept, and give different degrees of emphasis to it, or use different universes of discourse in describing it. There is a spectrum of usages of the energy concept, comparable with the spectrum of uses found in psychotherapy on the use of the concept "libido" (contrast, Freud, Reich and Jung), or of different ways of defining and understanding transference (contrast Kohut, Kernberg, Klein etc). One of these eight authors, George Downing, explicitly criticises the energetic concepts of Reich. I have pointed out in my article on Energy and Therapy¸ that his critique is actually a critique of reductive ways of using the energy concepts, not the concepts themselves. Although my article is reviewed in this report, there is no mention of this extensive reply to George Downing in the review. The remaining four are reviews of: a) An ecological report by Arnim Beckmann on the desert
research of Wilhelm Reich b) A book by Loil Neidhofer called "Intuitive körperarbeit". Neidhofer does not call himself a psychotherapist, and is in fact contemptuous of both psychotherapy, and body psychotherapy. A review of his book has no relevance to the energy concepts of body psychotherapy. c) A book by Bernd Senf on alternative energies in
agriculture, complementary d) An article by Peter Schmid, a well known client centred psychotherapist. Peter Schmid edited a series of books on dialogues between client centred psychotherapy and other psychotherapy forms. Schmid is not a body psychotherapist, and he does not understand the energetic concepts of body psychotherapy. I did an interview for him in Vienna, and the transcript of this interview (properly edited and corrected) was published and was a true record of the views I gave in the interview. However in his comments on this interview, Schmid makes deductions and assumptions which are not grounded in the interview, and which include his own predjudices against the energetic concept in body psychotherapy. In this sense he is an untrustworthy person to quote in a report that seeks to represent the view of body psychotherapists on energy. The content of the reviews is mixed: like all reviews,
they express personal views of the reviewers. Naturally, some valuable
points of constructive critique may be found.
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