Bioenergetic Analysis

Bioenergetic analysis is a branch of body psychotherapy developed by Alexander Lowen, building on the work of his teacher Wilhelm Reich. Reich had described the body's muscular tension patterns as a segmented armor arranged transversely across the torso, and Lowen, together with John Pierrakos, who went on to develop the related approach of core energetics, extended this finding of the body's segmented armoring into their own therapeutic frameworks. Lowen held that the body's physical expression registers a person's state more clearly than words can, and bioenergetic analysis works through that physical expression as part of psychotherapy, placing it among the various named branches of body-oriented psychotherapy that each trace their origin to a particular founding figure.