A Teacher
Alexander Lowen
Charge and discharge of energy through the body
The transmission
Alexander Lowen (23 December 1910 – 28 October 2008) was an American physician and psychotherapist who founded Bioenergetic Analysis, a body-centred form of psychotherapy.
He met Wilhelm Reich in 1940 and trained with him through 1952, undergoing personal Reichian therapy in the early 1940s. Building on Reich’s idea that emotional defence is held in chronic muscular “armour,” Lowen developed his own system with colleague John Pierrakos, founding the Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis in New York in 1956.
His widely read book Bioenergetics (1975) set out the approach for a general audience. Lowen matters to the mind-power lineage as a principal architect of the modern body-mind tradition. He held that the personality and its conflicts are expressed in the structure, posture, breathing, and energetic “charge” of the body, and that psychological change requires working through the body, not the mind alone.
His central dynamic, the charge and discharge of energy (building excitation through breath and movement, then releasing it to restore flow and feeling), provided a template for the somatic therapies that followed, locating the subconscious not only in thought but in held tissue and restricted breath.
What they gave
Bioenergetic Analysis: Founded a systematic body psychotherapy linking character structure to chronic muscular and energetic patterns.
- Charge and discharge: Articulated emotional health as the free building and release of bodily energy through breath and movement.
- Body reads the psyche: Showed how posture, breathing, and tension encode subconscious history, anticipating later somatic-trauma models.
- Grounding: Introduced “grounding” practices connecting felt contact with the body and the earth to psychological stability.
In their words
Mature love is not a surrender of the self but a surrender to the self. The ego surrenders its hegemony of the personality to the heart, but in this surrender it is not annihilated. Rather it is strengthened because its roots in the body are nourished by the joy that the body feels.
The primary nature of every human being is to be open to life and love. Being guarded, armoured, distrustful and enclosed is second nature in our culture. It is the means we adopt to protect ourselves against being hurt, but when such attitudes become characterological or structured in the personality, they constitute a more severe hurt and create a greater crippling than the one originally suffered.
We must realize that we are all, like Dr. Faust, ready to accept the devil’s inducements. The devil is in each one of us in the form of an ego that promises the fulfillment of desire on condition that we become subservient to its striving to dominate. The domination of the personality by the ego is a diabolical perversion of the nature of man. The ego was never intended to be the master of the body, but its loyal and obedient servant.
It is a grave injustice to a child or adult to insist that they stop crying. One can comfort a person who is crying which enables him to relax and makes further crying unnecessary; but to humiliate a crying child is to increase his pain, and augment his rigidity. We stop other people from crying because we cannot stand the sounds and movements of their bodies. It threatens our own rigidity. It induces similar feelings in ourselves which we dare not express and it evokes a resonance in our own bodies which we resist.
It is only by making the past alive again for a person that a true growth in the present is facilitated. If the past is cut off, the future does not exist.
Happiness is the consciousness of growth.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Wilhelm Reich (his teacher and analyst); collaborator John Pierrakos; the psychoanalytic tradition.
- Influenced: The broad field of body psychotherapy and somatic therapies; Pierrakos’s Core Energetics; modern somatic trauma work.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Their Practices 1
Essential Works
- The Language of the Body1958
- Bioenergetics1975