Alexander Lowen (1910 to 2008) and John Pierrakos (1921 to 2001) were American psychotherapists, both students of Wilhelm Reich, who in the mid-1950s together founded bioenergetics, or bioenergetic analysis, a therapy that works with the body, the breath and the feet on the ground as well as with talking. Pierrakos later founded Core Energetics, which brought a spiritual dimension into the work. They stand on the line that runs from Reich’s discovery of body armour to the body psychotherapies of today, a line Therapeutic Shamanism draws on in its own work with the body.
Who was Alexander Lowen? #
The best known of Reich’s students. Lowen was born in New York City, studied with Reich in the 1940s and early 1950s, and then went his own way, developing bioenergetic analysis with John Pierrakos. He founded what became the International Institute for Bioenergetic Analysis, practised for most of his life in New Canaan, Connecticut, and died in 2008 at the age of ninety-seven.1 His many books include Physical Dynamics of Character Structure (1958), later retitled The Language of the Body, and Bioenergetics (1975). One person who sat in his sessions was the writer Jeff Brown, later the author of Soulshaping. See Who is Jeff Brown, and what is grounded spirituality?
Who was John Pierrakos? #
The student of Reich who took the work in a spiritual direction. Pierrakos was also a student of Reich, and with Lowen he co-founded the first bioenergetics institute. He married Eva Broch, the founder of a spiritual teaching called the Pathwork, and under her influence came to see no separation between medicine, psychology and religion. In 1973 he founded the Institute of Core Energetics in New York City. He died in 2001.2
What is bioenergetic analysis? #
A body psychotherapy built on Reich’s idea of character armour. Like Reich, Lowen linked our psychological defences to chronic tension in the muscles. He described five character structures, which bioenergetic therapists call schizoid, oral, psychopathic, masochistic and rigid, understood as patterns a person adapted in order to cope, “not as fixed diagnoses”.3
Its best-known idea is groundingGrounding. Returning fully into the body and physical reality; the bedrock of safe practice, and how every journey ends. More about this: standing with the knees slightly bent and feeling the connection with the ground. Breathing work opens up the breath and releases tension, and stress positions, held for a while, bring feelings to the surface quickly. A session usually begins with talking, then moves into body awareness, with the therapist watching posture and breathing and guiding movements such as kicking on a mattress, reaching out, or using the voice; touch is optional and used only with consent.4
What is Core Energetics? #
Pierrakos’s own development of the work, aiming at the unification of body, emotion, mind, will and spirit. It describes a path in stages: first penetrating the mask, letting go of the false ideals and adaptations taken on in childhood; then confronting and transforming what Pierrakos called the lower self, so that it can be joined with the higher self; and so coming to live from the core, to “embody our core essence and fulfill our life task.” Disturbance of body, feeling or mind is understood as energy that has become blocked.5
What does the research say about body psychotherapy? #
Both that it helps and that more is needed. A 2021 review of randomised trials of body psychotherapy, one of which used bioenergetic exercises, concluded that the evidence “indicates that BPT is beneficial for a wide spectrum of psychic suffering”. The same reviewers, Sophie Rosendahl, Heribert Sattel and Claas Lahmann, also wrote that “There is a strong need for high-quality studies with bigger samples.”6
How does their work connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Through the body. Therapeutic Shamanism holds, with Reich, that “the body never lies”, and treats the body as a conscious part of the self with its own wisdom, not a vehicle for the ‘real’ self to ride around in. Many people these days are barely in their bodies at all, ungrounded and living in their heads.7 Grounding, in the ordinary sense of being present in the body with both feet in everyday reality, is “the bedrock of shamanic practice”, the thing that keeps journeying safe.8 Feelings, too, need to be felt, and allowed to work their way through both the body and the psyche.9 Lowen’s and Pierrakos’s methods are among the body psychotherapies built to do that work. For how Reich’s ideas are used, see What is body armouring, and what does Reichian work contribute? and Who was Wilhelm Reich?
What the shamanic map adds is what lies beyond the human body and psyche: the Lower-WorldLower-World. The realm of Mother Earth: pure, unspoilt, wild nature, with no technology and no agriculture. Home of the Peoples and of our own Soul, and completely safe: feeling threatened in a journey is a reliable sign of not having reached it. Read the full answer Soul, the other-than-human Peoples, and the healing of parts of ourselves that have left altogether. Pierrakos’s higher self and core are terms of his own, and are not the Spirit and Soul of Therapeutic Shamanism. See What can shamanism offer somatic and body-centred therapy?
