The golden age of body psychotherapy in Oslo I: From gymnastics to psychoanalysis

Abstract

During the Second World War, Oslo became a crucial centre for those interested in how the body could be used in a psychotherapeutic setting. There, for a short while, psychiatrists, psychoanalysts, psychologists, physiotherapists, dance therapists, and vegetotherapists discussed passionately with each other. The catalyst of these discussions was Wilhelm Reich, recognized as the founder of body psychotherapists. These discussions are little known because the majority of the literature is in Norwegian. How Scandinavian bodywork influenced psychotherapy is described in this paper. How Reich intervened in these developments, and how these discussions are continued today, will be presented in a follow-up article.

Keywords:

• Body
• physiotherapy
• psychotherapy
• vegetotherapy
• gymnastics

Acknowledgements

This article was written with the translation assistance of Judy Ramsay-Jensen.

Notes

Notes

1 I thank Ernst Falzeder for having clarified this historical point when he was working on Freud's correspondence at the Washington Library of Congress.

2 Cannon, 1945/1968, p. 38.

3 Cannon, 1945/1968, p. 38. See also pp. 92f and 109f, or Cannon, 1911/1986, pp. 179–190.

4 Lobotomy is also associated to the Scandinavian history of that period. Egas Moniz, who introduced the method in 1936, received the Nobel Prize for medicine in 1949.

5 This chapter incorporates many suggestions made by Bjorn Blumenthal (2001) and Berit Heir Bunkan (2003). I thank them for all the information they gave me, but take full responsibility for the mistakes or clumsy blending of information in that chapter.

6 Fenichel's critique of Reich's character analysis was published in 1935.

7 Fright and pleasure are associated in the brain's thalamus.

8 The article can be found in various English publications of Otto Fenichel's “collected papers.”