Looking back, I think he was retraumatized by that session. Knowing what I have now gleaned from neuroscience and trauma treatment, I would have conducted the session quite differently. I would have first reviewed with him what support and resources he had in his present life, and had him articulate some safe person or place that he could vividly imagine. Then, I would have taken him piece by piece through that iconic afternoon, bringing him back and forth between past and present, allowing his nervous system to integrate after each segment. We would not have been able to revisit that traumatizing event in one session, but that would have been fine because he would have been able to be fully present when he left. I also suspect he would have been able to return the next week to continue because the overload on his nervous system would not have stimulated the bronchitis in his lungs and caused him to miss his next session. (Just to reassure you, he did survive, and completed advanced degrees in both law and business in the US and is currently holding an important position in one of the Arab Emirates). Reich’s comprehension of the connection, even the identity, between emotions and the body was a precursor of both medicine and psychology today. Concepts such as self regulation have been adopted and elaborated upon with the assistance of technological advances in neuroscience such as the fMRI. What we have called “energy,” neuroscientists call “resonance” and measure the changes in brain waves when two people such as mother and baby, as well as patient and therapist, interact. Bridges that were wobbly and tentative spanning the gulf between verbal psychotherapy (such as cognitive behavioral and psychoanalysis) and body psychotherapy are beginning to look to both sides like the newest frontier. Writers such as Allan Schore applying neuroscience to psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, constantly allude to the importance of the body, non-verbal communication, etc., in the early mother-baby pair, in adult relationships of many sorts, and in the psychotherapy office where body psychotherapists are experts. Schore emphasizes the body in virtually every paper he writes and every presentation he gives. In a 2005 article, Schore heralds a “new paradigm” in psychoanalysis which must inevitably include non-verbal, bodily-based interventions directed toward nonconscious, procedural processes. In this same paper, he quotes V. M. Andrade in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, citing information from neuropsychoanalysis as concluding, “As a primary factor in 30 Jacqueline A. Carleton Reich Was Right psychic change, interpretation is limited in effectiveness to pathologies arising from the verbal phase related to explicit memories, with no effect in the pre-verbal phase where implicit memories are to be found” (p.677). He goes on to point out that body psychotherapy, originally a product of “certain pioneers of classical psychoanalysis and trauma theory” has developed independently and often in opposition to contemporary psychoanalysis. But, the body psychotherapies are also now adopting an interdisciplinary outlook. Psychoneurobiological data and attachment research have supported a neglected dialogue between psychoanalytic and somatic psychotherapies. Interpersonal neurobiology and trauma research are making enormous contributions. Theorists and researchers have made important advances in understanding exactly how the central nervous system processes both trauma and its repair. On one hand, neuroscientific research validates a lot of what Reich proposed so long ago. It also articulates and refines and explains a lot of our work. And, of course, it occasionally mandates modification or even invalidates some of our practices. In the final sections of this paper, I will outline a few of the principles and resulting techniques that Levine and Ogden and their colleagues have applied to the treatment of adults and then conclude with a brief case vignette. It will be seen that each of these principles and techniques is fundamentally geared toward reestablishment of self regulation. For if, as Peter Levine insists, “trauma is in the nervous system, not in the event”, that trauma is the interruption of the self-regulatory capacity of the organism, specifically of the nervous system. Neuroscientific principles in adult treatment Whether it is acute or developmental, the nervous system needs to process trauma slowly. We must nudge the nervous system to do what it needs to do, slowly and carefully, to process and release the trauma, to allow the bodymind to return to self regulation. The human organism, with its unlimited neural plasticity, is designed to heal even intense, extreme experience. As I have applied such neuroscientific principles in a way that increasingly honors this process, even patients I have worked with for many years have had remarkable lessening of symptoms, increased creativity, and improvements in relationships. I am thinking of a man I have worked with for a long time as he has fought his way through life-threatening health problems for the last 20 years. Now, at 50, having
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