Bioenergetics

Bioenergetics presents Alexander Lowen's body-centered psychotherapy for a general readership. Its central claim is that personality and its conflicts are written into the structure, posture, breathing, and energetic "charge" of the body, so that genuine psychological change must be worked through the body and not the mind alone.

Building on Wilhelm Reich's notion that emotional defense is held in chronic muscular "armor," Lowen organizes the approach around the dynamic of charge and discharge: excitation is built through breath and movement, then released to restore the free flow of feeling and aliveness. He adds "grounding" practices that connect felt contact with the body and the earth to psychological stability.

The book set out a systematic body psychotherapy that became a template for the somatic therapies that followed. It helped relocate the subconscious from thought alone into held tissue and restricted breath, anchoring the modern body-mind tradition.