This book introduces body psychotherapy as one of the essential approaches in psychotherapy, reflecting the increasing integration of the body into clinical mental health practice.

Ulfried Geuter is a body psychotherapist and psychoanalyst who works in his own practice in Berlin. He taught body psychotherapy as a lecturer at the Free University Berlin from 1995-2003 and as an honorary professor at the University of Marburg from 2010-2023 and is a training analyst, supervisor and lecturer in postgraduate psychotherapeutic training programs. He runs the Institute for Advanced Training in Body Psychotherapy in Berlin and is the author of The Professionalization of Psychology in Nazi Germany, 1992.

1. Introduction 2. Towards a definition of body psychotherapy 3. The quest for natural aliveness: On the origins of body psychotherapy 4. The legacy of the schools 5. The living subject 6. Body experience: The basis of self-experience 7. The experienced body and the body of natural science 8. Embodiment research: The sensorimotor basis of thinking and feeling 9. Memory: Embodied remembering 10. Emotions: Models of emotionality and the practice of body psychotherapy 11. Child development: The shaping of experience in early affect motor dialogue 12. Affect motor schemas as body narratives 13. Defence and coping meachnisms: Bodily forms of processing experience 14. Communication with the body: Body behaviour and therapeutic interaction 15. Transference and somatic resonance 16. Moments of understanding 17. Self-regulation and life regulation 18. The contribution of body psychotherapy to integration