The body as a carrier of information - A study in Bioenergetic Body Diagnosing

Abstract

For bodypsychotherapists body posture and movement of patients convey much clinically relevant information. However, statistically significant empirical evidence on the relatedness of physical appearance to verbally communicated symptoms, as well as on the type of information body psychotherapists draw from their patients’ physical appearance, is - as far as we know - still lacking. In the present study photographs (whole body) of 90 patients who had attended 2 1/2 hours of bioenergetic group therapy on a once a week basis for 2 years, were evaluated by 6 bioenergetic therapists and 6laypersons as controls. Their task was to answer questions such as: Which picture was taken at the beginning and which one at the end of the bioenergetic treatment? Which out of three texts containing anamnestic information and present symptoms best fits the depicted person? Which character structure according to Lowen (1958) is attributed to the depicted person, i.e. which personal dynamics are judged dominant by bioenergetic therapists? Experts are more accurate than non-experts and outperform the chance level in a statistically significant way. Their superiority compared to nonexperts is most pronounced when patients’ faces are not visible and information has to be drawn from body posture exclusively. In assigning pictures to text information both groups statistically significantly outperform the chance level. Laypersons also outperform chance level when they can compare each patient with himself (at the beginning and at the end of their therapy) with faces visible. Bioenergetic therapists assign character structure diagnoses to the photographed patients with relatively high congruence. The median of Kappa-coefficients amounts to 0.71 (0.53 .s.  0.83).

Keywords:
Body psychotherapy, diagnostics, bioenergetic analysis, personality, character structure, nonverbal communication.