Body Process: A Gestalt Approach to Working with the Body in Psychotherapy By James I Kepner PhD

Traditional psychotherapy approaches, focusing on working with and correcting mental events and conditions, have placed little importance on the fundamentally physical nature of the person. Yet many of the problems people bring to therapy are linked with or manifested in the body–such as obesity, psychosomatic distress, chronic tension, and sexual problems. This book provides a therapeutic approach that addresses both the physical and mental nature of clients.

In this book, James Kepner shows that a client’s posture, movements, and bodily experiences are indeed relevant to therapy, and he offers an insightful framework for incorporating these aspects into a therapeutic framework. This comprehensive treatment explains how body work can be integrated with the aims, methods, and philosophy of psychotherapy, offering a framework within which practitioners of different theoretical approaches can better appreciate body processes in the context of the whole person, rather than as isolated events.

This book, including an updated introduction by the author, explores the range of body work in psychotherapy, from the development of body awareness to intensive work with physical structure and expression. And it demonstrates how this approach can be particularly effective with a range of clients, including survivors of sexual abuse, recovering drug addicts or alcoholics, or those suffering from chronic illness.

Jim Kepner is an author, psychologist, and international trainer based in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Body Process: working with the body in psychotherapy (1987/99), considered a classic text in Gestalt therapy and in the area of body-oriented psychotherapy.

Healing Tasks: psychotherapy with adult survivors of childhood abuse (1995), which presents a holistic and holographic model for understanding the healing-as-growth in the process of recovery from childhood trauma.

James I Kepner

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Lastest Book

A fundamental book on Gestalt and body Great book to learn more about the Gestalt approach to the body and take a time for reflection on your own body process according with the cycle of experience. The Gestalt concepts are well explained and justified, the book is accesible even if you don't have previous knowledge of Gestalt. Resistances are explored and how to deal with them in therapy with the help of body approach. Really useful and interesting.

Amazon customer

Great book for mental health and medical professionals If you work with people in any of the healing arts, this book is a must read for understanding the power of working somatically with people. Jim Kepner writes comprehensively about physical process from the Gestalt perspective.

Tim Warneka

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