    Bioenergetic Therapy combines bodywork with psychoanalysis to help individuals resolve emotional problems and to increase their potential for pleasure and joy in living.
Also known as bioenergetic analysis or simply bioenergetics, this therapeutic system was created by Alexander Lowen, a protégé of Wilhelm Reich, who in turn was Freud's student; as such, it stems from the Freudian psychoanalytic tradition. It is seen as a humanistic psychotherapy for its holistic mind-body approach and it is also sometimes grouped with gestalt.
It was created in the 1950's in the United States and have been spreding in Canada, Europe, Latin America, Israel, New Zeland, Australia, Japan and other countries where many societies represent this current and participate to its clinical and theoretical enrichment. All these societies are affiliated to the International Institut for Bioenergetic Analysis in New York (IIBA).
Bioenergetics is a way to understand and therapeutically intervent both psychologically and physically. Diagnoses focus on both:
The etymology of emotion refers to movement (i.e., e-"motion"), and muscles are the organs of movement, so armoring inhibits both emotional feelings and expressions (e.g., pelvic tightness related to sexual conflict blocks both sexual pleasure and performance). Although mind and body are discussed as separate, they are assumed to be functionally identical, differing only semantically:
A key tenet is that the level of energy available determines overall quality of life. For example, depression is seen as related to both lowered psychological experience of energy and literally "depressed" physical energy, such as caused by decreased respiration due to chronic muscular tensions in the chest. Why bioenergetic treatment of depression may involve vigorous physical movements, such as kicking and stretching, to increase physical energy, and psychoanalytic explorations to regain emotional contact that was previously blocked by chronic muscular tensions and can only become reexperienced after physical release. Bioenergetics aims to relieve such chronic maladjusted patterns, both mental and physical, and is applicable to understanding and treating a variety of psychological conditions. It may be particularly helpful for diffuse, so-called negative, symptoms, such as a lack of feeling pleasure and aliveness.
In contrast to most bodywork, bioenergetics considers it essential that physical changes be processed in the context of psychodynamic understanding of character in order to result in permanent changes; in contrast to most psychotherapies, bioenergetics considers that psychological intervention without corresponding bodily changes result only in short-lasting effects that inevitably revert the characteristic ways of experiencing and behaving.
The combination of psychological and bodily approaches allows bioenergetics to help clients resolve emotional problems and realize greater pleasure in life than would either approach alone, facilitating self-understanding grounded in body experience and continuously reinforced through freely expressed emotions.*
The goal of therapy is more than the absence of symptoms: it is having aliveness, getting a taste of pleasure, joy, love, vibrant health.
(*) Adaptation from "Corsini - Encyclopedia of Psychology"
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