Bodymind Integration : Approaching the person as a whole.

“Therapy on the body without integrated work with emotions and thoughts is just as one-sided as psychotherapy that ignores bodily processes. Furthermore, working with a person should offer them a perspective and integration with ‘the whole’.

Dirk Marivoet

Abstract: Most contemporary systems of psychotherapy and body therapy are extrapolations from the reductionist view prevalent in the 19th century. The author describes three main branches of this reductionism: monistic, dualistic, and parallel worldviews, each leading to specific therapeutic modalities. He critically examines the ‘holistic’ view, which opposes reductionism and is often erroneously or incompletely claimed by ‘alternative’ therapies. The separation of body and mind in treatment philosophy and methodology is sometimes clear and sometimes more subtle. This paper explores what an ‘integrated’ approach should entail, moving beyond a purely causal relationship between ‘body’ and ‘mind’.

Extrapolations from the reductionist view

Reductionism. 

19th century science viewed the universe as a collection of interrelated but essentially separate parts and particles, each of which could be studied and understood in isolation (Bohm, 1980). Most systems of psychotherapy and body therapy are extrapolations of this reductionist perspective. Reductionism assumes that complex phenomena can be understood by reducing them to their basic building blocks and examining the interactions between these mechanisms. Many healthcare systems still consider a person to be an amalgam of parts, viewing the whole as merely the sum of its parts. While I leave the deeper philosophical discussions to more qualified individuals, I will briefly outline three main branches of the “person as parts” worldview: monism, dualism, and parallelism. Each approach results in different therapeutic methods based on its underlying belief system.

Monism.

The monistic approach is highly reductionist, asserting that everything that exists is physical. Our mental experiences, thoughts, and feelings can all be explained by physical processes like synaptic transmission and neuronal firing. Consciousness and self-awareness are considered by-products of biological processes. Thus, in the monistic view, the mind is merely the product of electrophysical chemistry in the brain. Consequently, a person is seen as equivalent to the functioning of their organs, with problems traceable and treatable by healing the affected organs (e.g., biological psychiatry). This worldview also embraces determinism, where every event, including human actions, has a cause determined by causal laws. Modern neuroscience, for example, only developed after Descartes’ theory of inbornness was abandoned.

Dualism

In dualism, the mind and body are considered completely separate, each requiring distinct treatments: verbal therapy for mental issues and physical therapy for bodily discomfort. Some dualistic approaches acknowledge interactions between domains but still believe that the correct treatment targets the domain where the “real problem” resides. Kepner (1987) refers to treatment methods from a dualistic model as singular approaches.

Parallelism

Parallelism views the mind and body as separate but inherently connected, with inevitable effects on each other. Psycho-parallelists believe that the workings of the mind reflect the workings of the body and vice versa, with no causal force in any part. Depending on the perceived connection, problems in one domain are seen as functions or dysfunctions in the other. Change in one part impacts the other. For instance, psychological stress is believed to cause physiological arousal, and physical complaints can result from emotional conflicts or cause mental depression. Kepner (1987) refers to treatment approaches based on a parallel relationship between body and mind as alternating methods.

Holistic, or Pseudo holistic?

Holism is the scientific counterpart to reductionism. Over the past several decades, it has become a buzzword within the humanistic, transpersonal, complementary healthcare, and new age movements. In the popular mythology of these movements, holism is widely perceived as an inherently positive concept, representing the notion that various forms of division can be resolved, healed, or transcended into a higher-order integration. This integration is often equated with health and maturity, whether in personal, social, or political contexts. However, the term ‘wholeness’ is both seductive and treacherous, as it means different things to different people. In the following discussion, I will examine the extent to which certain visions of wholeness are truly useful and valid.

A definition

According to Kramers, holism is the doctrine that values the whole organism above its individual parts. Van Dale defines holism as the view that coherence in reality emerges only when considering the whole, not from its parts. In other words, it is the theory that the parts of any whole can only exist and be understood in their relationship to the whole: “Holism also means that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” Based on this definition, individual elements of a system are determined by their relationships to all other elements within that system. A complex structure cannot simply be regarded as the sum of its parts. As an anthropological principle, this means every aspect of human life should be examined in relation to all other aspects. From a micro perspective, holism views the human organism as a living system with interdependent and interconnected physical and mental components. From a macro perspective, it assumes that an individual organism is in constant interaction with its natural and social environment.

A few interpretations and versions

Perhaps the most popular interpretation of holism is the integration of body, mind, and spirit. Ideologically, this means recognizing the fundamental inseparability of a person’s physical, mental, and spiritual aspects. Therapeutically, it emphasizes treating the person as a ‘whole’ and the ‘healing’ that results from integrating these three aspects. This powerful metaphor has been enthusiastically promoted by followers of new paradigms in health and psychology. However, in my opinion, it is often limited and diluted. One reason for this is that, within various new paradigms, holism is largely equated with a ‘positive thinking’ approach that is inherently polarized and unintegrated. This approach is often utopian, envisioning a perfect and beautiful integration of a healthy body, a positive mind, and a divine spirit. New paradigms tend to idealize youth, physical beauty, imagination, creativity, love, empathy, happiness, self-realization, enlightenment, peak experiences, ecstasy, and peace. However, this kind of holism is not truly holistic. Instead of integrating, it reinforces the split between good and evil, life and death, youth and old age, health and sickness, beauty and ugliness, imagination and logic, love and hate, and ecstasy and dismay. It denies, suppresses, or demonizes what Jung calls the ‘shadow’ (Zweig and Abrams, 1996; Pierrakos, 1996). As Rollo May (1969) noted, it fails to fully recognize or address the so-called ‘negative aspects’ of human experience, such as illness, fear, hostility, and stagnation. Therefore, this view cannot be truly integrative or holistic. I refer to this as ‘pseudo-holism.’

I also consider pseudo-holistic approaches that strongly oppose the ‘old paradigms.’ These approaches make frantic efforts to confirm their unique identities and differentiate themselves from the ‘old paradigms.’ They generally identify with what they see as the positive side of the split while projecting much of the negative side onto their opponents. This inevitably leads to a fragmented and incomplete vision. Even worse, some ‘holistic’ practitioners reject or devalue scientific and cognitive processes that accumulate knowledge. A more holistic approach attempts to integrate and heal these splits. It recognizes the need to incorporate the supposedly negative, dark aspects of human nature. Moreover, a true philosophy of the Whole cannot exclude reductive research because such research provides detailed data that composes the whole. This integrative approach is not new; it is found in existentialist thinking and many psychotherapeutic theories and practices.

Applying this principle to the body-mind-spirit metaphor means we must address the shadow as it manifests in each domain. For the body, this means accepting pain, illness, aging, and dying. For the mind, it involves coping with anxiety, depression, jealousy, anger, and other seemingly negative emotions, as well as the rational, analytical, and conceptual thinking often devalued in new paradigms. Spiritually, we need to reconcile ourselves with meaninglessness, tragedy, human weakness, loss of faith, existential guilt, and the ‘dark night of the soul.’ In body therapy, we must be wary of polarized, idealistic tendencies in our approach. This can manifest as cult-like certainty, charismatic enthusiasm, and spiritual glorification. On the other hand, a little self-doubt and humility is refreshing and essential. We should balance our interest in self-realization, peak experiences, ecstasy, and the ‘positive’ effects of meditation with research into failure, trough experiences, and real-world risks. All this should be connected to the bigger picture of our life plan.

Horizontally and vertically. 

We still face another important problem: the form of holism described above remains largely individually oriented. What is the role of other people, social and cultural systems, the earth, and the ecosystem in this model? How do we understand the relationship between the individual and these other realities? To address this issue, we need to integrate the individual body-mind-spirit (‘positive’ and ‘negative’) into the social, cultural, and natural worlds. As Warwick Fox (1993) suggests, we must find ways to respect and integrate all ‘four quadrants,’ defined by the combinations of ‘inside-outside’ and ‘individual-collective’ dimensions of evolution.

The ‘vertical’ development of a person towards higher forms of spiritual consciousness should be integrated with a ‘horizontal’ vision that emphasizes the importance of expanding our sense of self outward to a broader and deeper identification with the natural world.

In other words, we need to connect our egocentric and anthropocentric (vertical) dimensions to our biocentric or ecocentric (horizontal) dimensions. There is a significant difference between understanding that this type of holism requires the integration of upstream and downstream flows or the dimensions of inside-outside and individual-collective, and being truly capable of achieving this integration. This is the difference between what Ken Wilber (1994) calls the map and the territory. Holism or integration should ultimately be achieved through life experiences, not merely through models.

Back to the body in therapy: 

Therapy approaches from the reductionist view.

Singular (single) approaches:

Prevailing therapies, whether psychotherapy or physical therapy, have traditionally adopted a ‘singular’ approach to treating the person.

Psychological therapies, such as psychoanalysis (Freud, 1938) and client-centered therapy (Rogers, 1951), rely almost exclusively on verbal interventions. Physical processes are often seen as epiphenomena, connected to but separate from underlying mental events. Similarly, many body therapies, such as Rolfing (Rolf, 1977), the Alexander Technique (Alexander, 1971), and the Feldenkrais Technique (Feldenkrais, 1972), recognize the contribution of psychological processes to body tension and postural imbalances. However, these somatic approaches lack a formal methodology to integrate psychological processes into their practice. The singular approach, whether psychotherapeutic or body therapeutic, faces significant philosophical and methodological challenges.

Even when verbal psychotherapy considers physical phenomena, such as interpreting physical symptoms, it often misses the somatic methodology required to integrate these aspects into a cohesive whole. It views mental conflicts as causing physical symptoms, rather than addressing the dilemma of the entire organism. Some singular approaches assume an interdependence (but not true holism) of mind and body, suggesting that changing psychological processes (conflicts or defenses) will also change the dependent physical structure. Conversely, they assume that altering the body’s structure will change its psychological function.

For example, in an NLP workshop, a trainer suggested that teaching a depressed person to raise their posture and eye position, such as by playing basketball, would eventually change their mental attitude. If treating depression were so simple, extensive therapy wouldn’t be necessary. A depressed person cannot maintain an undepressed attitude, either physically or psychologically, until all depressed domains are liberated and integrated. The reverse is also true: psychodynamic exploration of conflicts and suppressed impulses inherent in depression will not necessarily change the shallow breathing and depressed attitude of the client. This does not mean that integrating a postural imbalance cannot change mental constructs and attitudes, but this change is not based on a causal relationship from part to part (body on mind or spirit on body). Instead, these aspects belong to the whole.

Alternate approaches

A possible attempt to overcome the dilemma of ‘singular approaches’ is to give due attention to the respective physical and psychological aspects of the person by alternating physical and mental therapy methods. This is a logical step for many therapists, whether psychotherapists who have learned body-oriented interventions or somatic therapists who learned therapeutic skills. Such an alternation of techniques can then take place within one session, or within several sessions. They take place at different times, and there is no attempt to work simultaneously with body and psychological processes. The problem with this approach is that, since there is a clear distinction between somatic and psychological work, the feeling of splitness in the person (client as well as therapist) may increase. It is difficult to experience a sense of one’s own unity when bodywork and psychological work happen at different times, which is not to say that integration (the sense of self as a whole) cannot occur through an alternating approach. However, integration depends on certain client capabilities that therapists cannot automatically assume. In addition, the therapies used may contain philosophical and methodological inconsistencies that may be conflicting and confusing to the client.

Layered approaches

Some body-centered therapists work in a ‘layered approach’. For example: The therapist can start by having the client conduct a Gestalt dialogue, eg a conversation between different parts of the self. Simultaneously, the therapist works on the client’s muscular tension and posture. The work looks elegant; two parallel but different voices that together form a melody line. However, the physical and psychological methods remain separate voices, although they work together. To the untrained eye, the work seems integrated, but it is not because methods used together are a guarantee of the client’s experience together. Another problem with a layered approach is that the physical and psychological methods are derived can be from various theoretical and philosophical sources. For example, client-centered and transactional analysis do not have an explicit ‘understanding’ of body phenomena in their theory and methods. Using these methods along with a body method makes it likely that the layers of physical and psychological work remain parallel and unintegrated. There is no explicit understanding of the importance or relationship of body phenomena and emotional processes, meaning that methodologically they do not have a clear way of bringing the different layers together, and there may be different views of the person’s vision between different methods, and the nature of tension or resistance. For example, there are important differences between Gestalt, Rolfing and Reichian approaches, for example, in their view of tension and resistance, but it would be too tempting to go into this in detail in the context of this article. So if the therapist uses Rolfing and Gestalt together, for example, he is in principle no longer faithful to the theory and spirit of Rolfing, respectively Gestalt therapy, or both, a truly integrated approach as we find it in Postural Integration (PI), for example. Painter, 1987) is looking for holism, both in his methodology and in his view of the person. An approach such as PI has been influenced by Gestalt, Rolfing, Reichian therapy, etc., but is integration and synthesis from thesis and antithesis within the method, making it not an eclectic approach or a sum of partial therapies. For a description of this method, I refer to “Deep Bodywork and Personal Development” (Painter, 1987).

Suggestion for an Integrated Approach

views a process—be it conflict, a life theme, or a physical symptom—as part of a larger whole that encompasses both somatic and psychological aspects. Every psychological theme, such as conflicts between parts of the self, emotional trauma, or unfinished interactions, is part of a larger gestalt that manifests physically through tension patterns, bodily postures, and breath inhibitions. Similarly, every physical symptom, such as chronic tension or an attitude disorder, is an expression of a larger whole that includes a psychological dilemma as part of its manifestation.

The classic psychosomatic view in psychotherapy posits that mental conflicts cause physical symptoms. In contrast, the integrated vision considers both parts as unitary expressions of the self or the organism. Wilhelm Reich (1949) referred to this as the functional identity of body and mind.

Methodologically, an integrated approach unifies all aspects of the person so that the individual can experience themselves as a cohesive organism rather than a collection of separate parts. Therapeutic techniques should not isolate one aspect of the person as intrinsically different or separate from the other, but rather address the person as an integrated whole.

More concretely:

• Psychological processes, such as conflicts or beliefs, are explicitly linked to their physical expressions.
• Physical processes, including posture, muscle tension, and physical ailments, are recognized as meaningful expressions of the person.
• Both physical and psychological processes are considered aspects of the same whole (the person/organism) rather than divided parts. Therapeutic techniques aim to restore the sense of self as a unified whole and to reinforce the mutual identity of these parts.

Conclusion 

I strongly support the idea that the ‘philosophical environment’ of therapeutic practice, as well as its ethical foundation, should embrace a modern integrative ‘whole-system’ worldview. While this article may appear critical of new paradigms, my intention has always been to clearly formulate the possibility of integrating body and mind into personal growth practices. I hope this text contributes to a truly holistic and integrated approach to addressing ourselves, our fellow humans, and the world. The traditional separation between psychological and somatic methods should not only be bridged, but the psyche and soma should be united within the individual and the therapeutic method. This unity should also extend to social and transpersonal realms. (Transpersonal refers to a perspective that considers the ‘individual’ in relation to the larger ‘whole’.)

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