Jerome Liss, Luciano Rispoli
S.I.F.
Società Italiana di Psicoterapia Funzionale Corporea
CENTRO STUDI WILHELM REICH
This Is a propitious moment for a reconsjderation of how Body Oriented Psychotherapy can enhance its scientific and theoretical development. The forming of the Publicat.ions Comittee, headed by Barbara Andriello, as one of the new projects of the European Association of Body Psychotherapy creates a center for coordinating new ideas regarding Body Psychotherapy as a effective methodology and as a body of knowl edge. Thus, here are our suggestione. i. Writers of articlee and books should be aware of the literature already written in their field. Too often psychotherapists write an article without clting others who have already made contributions on the same subject. This lack of citing others may give the writer an illusion of “being the first”, but, in fact, this tendancy prevents a deeper construction of knowledge. If we imagine a body of knowledge may be represented by a serles of separate bricks, each built upon the other in the forrn of a tower, for the moment, the separate bricks are stili streùìn upon the ground in a disarray. The Publication Committeeàs project of creating an annotated bibiiography can help this orientation of building toward the future by considering what works of the past remain valuabale. – Journals that bave already printed hundreds .of articles—— Energy and Character, Quaderni di Reich, etc.—can be reexamined by their Editore or other people designated by the Editor in order to read through the articles of the past and select@ 1= the articles that merit reprinting in their entirety (probably very few), the articles that merit citation because of their valuable parte (probably quite a few), and the articies that merit mentioning in an annotated bibliography divided according to theme. Another suggestion for writing theoretical articles that ere baseci on case presentations (and much of the best oritinal work in the field of psychotherapy le based on such case studies, c.f., Freud and Reich): we can suggest that CONCRETE MATERIAL from the therapy sessione be cited with precise transcriptions. This type of concreteness on the observational level can create a greater rigor in the theoretical development since the theoretical concepts must correspond to the concrete case material and act as their explanation. Such concrete presentation also permits the reader to use his own critical facilities for deciding whether the theoretical matrix Is JUSTIFIED by the case material. If these suggestions or others developed by the Publications Committee could be printed by Body Psychotherapy journals as “A Message for the Author”, perhaps we will see the rise in quality of scientific reflection merited by the deep quality of our therapeutic work.