Somatic psychology

Somatic psychology is a form of alternative medicine that focuses on somatic experience, and the embodied self, including therapeutic and holistic approaches to body. Body psychotherapy is a general branch of this subject, while somatherapy, eco-somatics and dance therapy, for example, are specific branches of the subject. Somatic psychology is a framework that seeks to bridge the mind-body dichotomy.

Pierre Janet can perhaps be considered the first somatic psychologist due to his extensive psychotherapeutic studies and writings with significant reference to the body (some of which pre-date Freud). It is only gradually that the body entered into the realm of available techniques that could be used in a psychodynamic frame, following the explorations of Sándor Ferenczi and his friend Georg Groddeck, then Otto Fenichel and his friend Wilhelm Reich. Wilhelm Reich is the first who tried to develop a clear psychodynamic approach that included the body, but he soon found out that it could not be done. He then developed his own way of combining body and mind and the somatic regulators that connect these two dimensions. Reich was a significant influence in the founding of body psychotherapy (or somatic psychology as it is often known in the USA and Australia) - though he called his early work "character analysis" and "character-analytic vegetotherapy"). Several types of body-oriented psychotherapies trace their origins back to Reich, though there have been many subsequent developments and other influences on body psychotherapy and somatic psychology is of particular interest in trauma work.

Dance therapy or (dance movement psychotherapy) also reflect something of this approach and are considered a study and practice within the field of somatic psychology.

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