Concentrative movement therapy
Encyclopedia
Concentrative movement therapy (CMT) is a psychotherapeutic method for group and individual therapy which is based on thought models stemming from psychodynamic psychotherapy
and depth psychology
. Taking as its point of departure the theory that perception
is composed of sensation
and experience
(Viktor von Weizsäcker
), CMT is interested in the conscious perception of the body in the “here and now“ against the background of the individual life and learning story
.
, reflection
and communication
. This is how the sensory-emotional is linked to the linguistic-cognitive cycle in the sense of V. v. Weizsäcker
’s Gestaltkreis.
When we speak of movement therapy, by movement we understand the following:
articulates in the following way: "I have a body and am my body". "For us the body is not the entrance to what psychically happens, but is rather the place where the entirety of what happens psychically takes place."
CMT is theoretically based on Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
‘s existence philosophy, Piaget’s genetic theory of knowledge, how he presents this in his development of the thought structures, in Viktor von Weizsäcker
‘s medical anthropology (his theory of the Gestaltkreis) and in theories in depth psychology
about ego development (A. Freud
, Hartmann
, Blanck and Blanck) and the object relationship (Balint, Mahler
, Ericson, Winnicott
, Kohut
and Kernberg
) and in the newer infant research (Lichtenberg, Stern
, Sanders
).
CMT‘s fundamental philosophical principles come from diverse sketches of the body-mind problematic in western philosophy. Up until today Descartes' dualism (body and mind as separate entities) marks our thinking. The transition from philosophy to psychology through Ehrenfels, Koffka
and Köhler, the Gestalt psychologists, brought about the change to a unifying concept. In the field of philosophy, the phenomenologist and existence philosopher Gabriel Marcel
made a significant contribution to the overcoming of the body-mind split with his "Etre et avoir" theory. He arrives at the formulation "I have a body and am my body" (“corp que j` ai et corps que je suis”) as does Maurice Merleau-Ponty
in his "Phenomenology of Perception": "One’s own body is in the world the way that a heart is in an organism: The body is what keeps the entire visible spectacle alive; it innerly nourishes and fills one with life and builds a single system with the spectacle."
In his teachings about psychosomatic illnesses, V. v. Weizsäcker
starts with psychophysical parallelisms and interaction theory and moves to his Gestaltkreis teachings; in these teachings he starts with the subjectivity of the perception process and with the notion that perception and movement are linked: "What prevails is a continual and reciprocal, self-illuminating, enclosed in-itself, bodily-mental back and forth, in cycle-like unity."
On the level of developmental psychology the Gestaltkreis teachings correspond to Jean Piaget
’s observances on the development of the early childhood structures of perception, attitude and thought. In continual assimilation and accommodation processes, the motor cognitive and the emotional development work together and determine each other. The development of the senses, the continually differentiating thought and comportment structures, and the experience of space and time are, for Piaget, the prerequisites for developing the ability to symbolize. Compatible with this are the theories of development in depth psychology, where the main emphasis is on early childhood experience with the people with whom one has relationships and where the condition for a healthy development is a happy relationship with the person to whom one relates most closely (Balint, Mahler
, Ericson, Winnicott
, Kohut
and Kernberg
). (Pokorny, among others, loc.cit., pp. 21-22)
"When in therapy it is about gaining more insight and awareness into oneself, language and thinking are needed. But language does not necessarily have to be the verbalization of contents; body language or the expression of one’s own private language also helps. It is precisely those patients, who cannot verbally express their feelings and sensations, who more easily find in gesticulation, in symbolic expression about subjects or scenes, a first point of entry into their inner lives."
and psychotherapist Helmut Stolze used the method in the university-clinical field and named it “Concentrative movement therapy” in 1958. From this moment on CMT was taught as a special method on congresses and was more and more represented in the psychotherapeutic practice.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy
Psychodynamic psychotherapy is a form of depth psychology, the primary focus of which is to reveal the unconscious content of a client's psyche in an effort to alleviate psychic tension. In this way, it is similar to psychoanalysis. It also relies on the interpersonal relationship between client...
and depth psychology
Depth psychology
Historically, depth psychology, from a German term , was coined by Eugen Bleuler to refer to psychoanalytic approaches to therapy and research that take the unconscious into account. The term has come to refer to the ongoing development of theories and therapies pioneered by Pierre Janet, William...
. Taking as its point of departure the theory that perception
Perception
Perception is the process of attaining awareness or understanding of the environment by organizing and interpreting sensory information. All perception involves signals in the nervous system, which in turn result from physical stimulation of the sense organs...
is composed of sensation
Sensation and perception psychology
In psychology, sensation and perception are stages of processing of the senses in human and animal systems, such as vision, auditory, vestibular, and pain senses. These topics are considered part of psychology, and not anatomy or physiology, because processes in the brain so greatly affect the...
and experience
Experience
Experience as a general concept comprises knowledge of or skill in or observation of some thing or some event gained through involvement in or exposure to that thing or event....
(Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physician and physiologist. He was the brother of Ernst von Weizsäcker, and uncle to Richard von Weizsäcker and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. .He studied at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he earned his medical degree in 1910...
), CMT is interested in the conscious perception of the body in the “here and now“ against the background of the individual life and learning story
.
General
Through the concentrative engagement with early levels of experience, memories are brought to life which appear in bodily expression as posture, movement and behaviour. Like the material which appears in dreams, subjective bodily experience also contains information which can extend back to preverbal times. Bodily movements or bodily contact call forth a patient’s basic postures. Through the movement work the biographical material is made topical so that a correlation can be made between what a person has experienced and that person’s life story. “The primary process-like level of experience and the secondary process-like level of spoken expression constitute a unity. Through this, speaking acquires the following meaning: What has been experienced is, in the act of being spoken of, conceptualized, and consequently brought to the levels of thought, associationAssociation (psychology)
In psychology and marketing, two concepts or stimuli are associated when the experience of one leads to the effects of another, due to repeated pairing. This is sometimes called Pavlovian association for Ivan Pavlov's pioneering of classical conditioning....
, reflection
Introspection
Introspection is the self-observation and reporting of conscious inner thoughts, desires and sensations. It is a conscious and purposive process relying on thinking, reasoning, and examining one's own thoughts, feelings, and, in more spiritual cases, one's soul...
and communication
Communication
Communication is the activity of conveying meaningful information. Communication requires a sender, a message, and an intended recipient, although the receiver need not be present or aware of the sender's intent to communicate at the time of communication; thus communication can occur across vast...
. This is how the sensory-emotional is linked to the linguistic-cognitive cycle in the sense of V. v. Weizsäcker
Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physician and physiologist. He was the brother of Ernst von Weizsäcker, and uncle to Richard von Weizsäcker and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. .He studied at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he earned his medical degree in 1910...
’s Gestaltkreis.
When we speak of movement therapy, by movement we understand the following:
- To-move-oneself, the experience of movement includes a person’s sensorimotor functions.
- To-be-moved, what internally moves and has been moved (affects and emotions).
- To-be-on-the-way, that means the person’s developmental steps and his gradual progress in the overcoming of actual or fantasized external or internal impediments.
Areas of application
Clinical patients and outpatients in individual or group therapy:- Psychosomatics
- Early disturbances: narcissistic and borderline disturbances; in particular, body-schema and body-image disturbances
- Neurotic disturbances
- Illnesses resulting from addictions
- Crisis intervention
- Acute reaction to pressure
- Traumas
- Psychoses
- Morbid anxiety
- Compulsion disturbance
- Eating disorder
- Depression
- Chronic illnesses with pain
- Consciousness raising
- Adult education
Theoretical basis and principles
CMT extracts a deepened understanding of human nature from the existence-philosophical formulation, which Gabriel MarcelGabriel Marcel
Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society...
articulates in the following way: "I have a body and am my body". "For us the body is not the entrance to what psychically happens, but is rather the place where the entirety of what happens psychically takes place."
CMT is theoretically based on Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
‘s existence philosophy, Piaget’s genetic theory of knowledge, how he presents this in his development of the thought structures, in Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physician and physiologist. He was the brother of Ernst von Weizsäcker, and uncle to Richard von Weizsäcker and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. .He studied at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he earned his medical degree in 1910...
‘s medical anthropology (his theory of the Gestaltkreis) and in theories in depth psychology
Depth psychology
Historically, depth psychology, from a German term , was coined by Eugen Bleuler to refer to psychoanalytic approaches to therapy and research that take the unconscious into account. The term has come to refer to the ongoing development of theories and therapies pioneered by Pierre Janet, William...
about ego development (A. Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...
, Hartmann
Heinz Hartmann
Heinz Hartmann , was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. He is considered one of the founders and principal representantives of ego psychology.-Life:...
, Blanck and Blanck) and the object relationship (Balint, Mahler
Margaret Mahler
Margaret Schönberger Mahler was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis...
, Ericson, Winnicott
Donald Winnicott
Donald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and a close associate of Marion Milner...
, Kohut
Heinz Kohut
Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of Self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.-Early life:Kohut was born...
and Kernberg
Otto F. Kernberg
Otto Friedmann Kernberg is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology...
) and in the newer infant research (Lichtenberg, Stern
Daniel Stern (psychologist)
Daniel N. Stern is a prominent psychiatrist and psychoanalytic theorist, specializing in infant development, on which he has written a number of books - most notably The Interpersonal World of the Infant ....
, Sanders
Sanders (surname)
-A:* Addison Hiatt Sanders American Civil War Brevet Brigadier General; Secretary of the Montana Territory, USA* Adrian Sanders , UK politician* Ajai Sanders , American actress and stand-up comedian...
).
CMT‘s fundamental philosophical principles come from diverse sketches of the body-mind problematic in western philosophy. Up until today Descartes' dualism (body and mind as separate entities) marks our thinking. The transition from philosophy to psychology through Ehrenfels, Koffka
Kurt Koffka
Kurt Koffka was a German psychologist. He was born and educated in Berlin and earned his PhD there in 1909 as a student of Carl Stumpf...
and Köhler, the Gestalt psychologists, brought about the change to a unifying concept. In the field of philosophy, the phenomenologist and existence philosopher Gabriel Marcel
Gabriel Marcel
Gabriel Honoré Marcel was a French philosopher, a leading Christian existentialist, and author of about 30 plays.He focused on the modern individual's struggle in a technologically dehumanizing society...
made a significant contribution to the overcoming of the body-mind split with his "Etre et avoir" theory. He arrives at the formulation "I have a body and am my body" (“corp que j` ai et corps que je suis”) as does Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Karl Marx, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger in addition to being closely associated with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir...
in his "Phenomenology of Perception": "One’s own body is in the world the way that a heart is in an organism: The body is what keeps the entire visible spectacle alive; it innerly nourishes and fills one with life and builds a single system with the spectacle."
In his teachings about psychosomatic illnesses, V. v. Weizsäcker
Viktor von Weizsäcker
Viktor Freiherr von Weizsäcker was a German physician and physiologist. He was the brother of Ernst von Weizsäcker, and uncle to Richard von Weizsäcker and Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker. .He studied at Tübingen, Freiburg, Berlin, and Heidelberg, where he earned his medical degree in 1910...
starts with psychophysical parallelisms and interaction theory and moves to his Gestaltkreis teachings; in these teachings he starts with the subjectivity of the perception process and with the notion that perception and movement are linked: "What prevails is a continual and reciprocal, self-illuminating, enclosed in-itself, bodily-mental back and forth, in cycle-like unity."
On the level of developmental psychology the Gestaltkreis teachings correspond to Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology"....
’s observances on the development of the early childhood structures of perception, attitude and thought. In continual assimilation and accommodation processes, the motor cognitive and the emotional development work together and determine each other. The development of the senses, the continually differentiating thought and comportment structures, and the experience of space and time are, for Piaget, the prerequisites for developing the ability to symbolize. Compatible with this are the theories of development in depth psychology, where the main emphasis is on early childhood experience with the people with whom one has relationships and where the condition for a healthy development is a happy relationship with the person to whom one relates most closely (Balint, Mahler
Margaret Mahler
Margaret Schönberger Mahler was a Hungarian physician, who later became interested in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis...
, Ericson, Winnicott
Donald Winnicott
Donald Woods Winnicott was an English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who was especially influential in the field of object relations theory. He was a leading member of the British Independent Group of the British Psychoanalytic Society, and a close associate of Marion Milner...
, Kohut
Heinz Kohut
Heinz Kohut was an Austrian-born American psychoanalyst best known for his development of Self psychology, an influential school of thought within psychodynamic/psychoanalytic theory which helped transform the modern practice of analytic and dynamic treatment approaches.-Early life:Kohut was born...
and Kernberg
Otto F. Kernberg
Otto Friedmann Kernberg is a psychoanalyst and professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College. He is most widely known for his psychoanalytic theories on borderline personality organization and narcissistic pathology...
). (Pokorny, among others, loc.cit., pp. 21-22)
"When in therapy it is about gaining more insight and awareness into oneself, language and thinking are needed. But language does not necessarily have to be the verbalization of contents; body language or the expression of one’s own private language also helps. It is precisely those patients, who cannot verbally express their feelings and sensations, who more easily find in gesticulation, in symbolic expression about subjects or scenes, a first point of entry into their inner lives."
History
The Munich physicianPhysician
A physician is a health care provider who practices the profession of medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring human health through the study, diagnosis, and treatment of disease, injury and other physical and mental impairments...
and psychotherapist Helmut Stolze used the method in the university-clinical field and named it “Concentrative movement therapy” in 1958. From this moment on CMT was taught as a special method on congresses and was more and more represented in the psychotherapeutic practice.
Literature
- Gräff, Ch.: „Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie in der Praxis,“ Hippokrates Verlag, Stuttgart, 1983
- Budjuhn, A.: „Die psycho-sozialen Verfahren. Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie und Gestaltungstherapie in Theorie und Praxis.“ Verlag modernes lernen, Dortmund, 1992
- Pokorny, V. & Hochgerner, M. & Cserny, S.: „Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie“ Facultas Wien, 1996
- Bayerl, B.: „Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie bei chronisch schizophrenen Patienten – eine Kasuistik“, in: Röhricht, Priebe, Körpererleben in der Schizophrenie, Hogrefe Verlag, Göttingen 1998
- Schreiber-Willnow, K.: „Körper-, Selbst- und Gruppenerleben in der stationären Konzentrativen Bewegungstherapie“, Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen 2000
- Gräff, Ch. & Maria L.: "Aus dem Tunnel der Depression. Ein Entwicklungsweg mit Konzentrativer Bewegungstherapie", Psychosozial-Verlag, Gießen, 2005
- K.P.Seidler, K.Schreiber-Willnow, A.Hamacher-Erbguth, M.Pfäfflin: "Die Praxis der Konzentrativen Bewegungstherapie(KBT): Frequenz - Dauer - Setting - Behandelte Störungsbilder", Springer Verlag, Berlin/Heidelberg, 2002
- S.Cserny & C.Paluselli: "Der Körper ist der Ort des psychischen Geschehens: praktisches Arbeits-Lehr-Buch für Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie", Verlag Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg, 2006