Publications
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This chapter explores the development of an integrative framework for psychotherapy training and supervision at The Minster Centre, grounded in the philosophical lens of neomodernism. Drawing on over two decades of clinical and academic experience, the author traces their journey from body psychotherapy towards a flexible, multi-modal practice capable of holding the tension between competing therapeutic truths.
Central to this framework is the neomodernist synthesis developed by Vardi (2020), which navigates between modernism's deep universal structures and postmodernism's fluid surface phenomena — offering trainee psychotherapists a coherent philosophical anchor within a profession of more than 750 modalities.
The author introduces the metaphor of the fruit salad, adapted from Siegel (2007), to distinguish genuine integration — where differentiation and linkage coexist — from both rigid eclecticism and uncritical blending.
The chapter presents two original pedagogical contributions: a dynamic integrative assessment framework drawing on Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems model, attachment theory, and intersectionality; and a card-based supervision game that transforms the learning environment into a playful third space (Winnicott, 1971), enabling students to inhabit contradictory therapeutic perspectives simultaneously.
Together, these tools cultivate what the author terms a flexible tapestry — an approach that honours each modality's distinct contribution whilst weaving them into something coherent, ethical, and responsive to the lived reality of clients.
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From a theoretical and clinical perspective, developmentally needed, reparative therapeutic relationships have deep roots in psychoanalysis and other psychotherapeutic modalities, including biodynamic body psychotherapy (BP).
This paper explores BP's approach to regression as it supports the client's continued salutogenic development—the processes of moving toward health—and the realization of their inherent potential.
By integrating unique clinical tools and techniques, BP fosters psychological and physiological corrective emotional experiences that reestablish authentic affective states as allostatic phenomena—the synchronized capacity of all systems to achieve dynamic stability amid change.
This paper illustrates practical ways in which biodynamic psychotherapists become a "good enough" presence in the Winnicottian sense, while also considering the impact of regression in reestablishing biopsychosocial functions.
These include aspects of neuroscience and psychoanalysis, such as conscious and unconscious integrative processes, organic changes in perception, and the emergence and reconsolidation of memories.
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This article explores aspects of attuned touch and its potential to induce epigenetic modifications. It posits a hypothesis explaining the changes in clients, and illustrates the application of animal model research to elucidate these clinical phenomena, particularly in the context of body psychotherapy techniques that use touch, such as biodynamic massage.
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Freezing and momentary paralysis is a normal adaptive reaction to a scary situation. We hear an unexpected loud voice from somewhere near us and we stop, freezing to enable ourselves to assess the situation. We assess, think and choose the best adaptive response, shake ourselves, shake our body and mind out of the freezing state and move into a chosen action - back to the flow of life.
But what happens if the scary situation does not stop, such as in times of war or a household in which physical punishment is permitted? What happens if, after we have assessed the situation, we come to the safe conclusion that it is better not to move?
What happens to us if we are like a little child in a scary situation created by somebody close to us, like our caregiver, a care giver who is dangerous because they can abuse us physically, sexually or emotionally? What happens to us if the dangerous situation is that our needs are not attended to as they should be by our caregiver, and we are left in a pool of painful feelings, isolated instead of having somebody to support us and relieve our pain?
For example, somebody to come to us when we scream when we feel alone in our cradle? What if we are born into the cradle of evilness and there is no good reaction that we can find to undertake other than paralyse ourselves and wait, hoping against hope, for a better time in the future when it will be safe to move and join the flow of life again.
Sometimes freezing ourselves, cutting ourselves off mentally, dissociating ourselves from experiencing pain and terror, is the most adaptive reaction we can choose. However, if we stay in this situation for a very long time we may not be able to shake ourselves afterwards and we can't shake our body and mind out of the frozen state anymore. We may even die, as could happen in a voodoo death.
Sometimes we can't shake ourselves and once again join the flow of life without having another sympathetic person with us who can show us the way to bring ourselves back to life. Our mind in such a state is oftentimes unavailable. Talking does not register in our frozen brain. Then the only way to access us is through our body.
We need to learn again, body to body, beyond the boundaries of the spoken language, how to trust the fundamental flow of interaction with another person who is a caring and sympathetic human being.
In this presentation I will tell the story of a client who believed that he descended towards his voodoo death and how I worked with him and supported him in re-engaging with the flow of life. The story will be presented as the subjective phenomenology of the psychotherapist and will be enriched by findings from contemporary science and Biodynamic theory.
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Developmental trauma undermines the body’s regulatory capacity and robs a person of a sense of ownership over their own body, as part of their embodied self as a competent being worthy of love and the successful pursuit of life ambitions. These disembodied individuals form a disembodied society.
This paper is based on an experiential workshop that immersed participants in martial arts activities designed to repair this malignant legacy by channeling and redirecting the trauma-loaded energies and knowledge of troubled disembodied people towards empowering and embodied forms of self-expression, narrative reconstruction and self-regulation, including key domains: the cognitive, affective, and physical.
Beginning with movements from Tai-Qi, Dao-Qi-Gong and Shaolin Kung-Fu this workshop transitioned into their connections with Body-Psychotherapy, trauma, embodiment and self-regulation and examines themes of violence, exploitation and attachment disruption.
It culminates in the co-creation of original scene work and corrective experiences. The aim is to move towards feeling secure in our bodies and finding behaviors aligned with our emotions, cognition, sensorimotor experiences, and social choices.
The work can help to mend the split between the self and society and to support cooperation and collaboration with oneself and others, as well as taking responsibility for oneself and contributing to the creation of an embodied society.
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In this article, I propose that there are fundamental limitations to current scientific mainstream methods of writing about therapeutic processes that in fact hinder our ability to both write about our therapeutic process and to learn from other clinicians' and researchers' writings. In my view, these limitations may partially be compensated for by allowing creative writing, poetry and other forms of art to be the major part of a case study, where the objective measures must be integrated into the subjective frame of writing.
Creative writing conveys its truth by acknowledging the intense subjective complexity originating from sensations and emotions accompanying the actual objective memory. Therefore, describing only the client and therapist's narrative itself or material that is only observable by external senses, heavily compromises the quality of the therapeutic process.
By therapeutic process, I am including all interactions that a person has concerning any aspects of their health, whether with a medical doctor, therapist, psychotherapist, body-psychotherapist, psychologist, physiotherapist etc. In this article, for simplicity I will call all those from whom the person seeks support the Therapist and the seeker a Client rather than a patient.
In some other places, when I think that the important aspect of the experience is simply human and is not dependent on a particular function or the differentiation between therapist and client, I use Person or Participants.
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When I grew up in Israel, as an Israeli Jew, the Holocaust enveloped us all the time. But as I had no other experiences, I was never actually aware of it. My mother would never listen to Wagner. We did not buy German products and horrid stories were floating around; those stories may have just floated around, but their full emotional content was never addressed directly. The message was clear: the Germans were the bad guys and the Jews were the good guys. We lived in this simple dichotomy of bad people and good people.
When I was a teenager, I realized that I lived on two planets, and I seriously struggled to integrate and make sense of my life. One was the reality in which I went to school in a democratic, free Jewish country, had friends and felt that I had all options open to me as a proud young Jewish person.
The other planet was in the shadow of the Holocaust, where food could disappear at any moment, and I had to carry mountains of it on a regular basis. A planet where I was force-fed just in case it all happened again, where dangerous people could always re-appear from the undefined past. Where the bodies of people in the shadows were reappearing in my life as disembodied souls, pulling me with their emaciated hands towards the dark world of helplessness and depression.
One planet was the here and now. The second was in the Holocaust, many years ago.
We lived the past during the now in a strange and distorted way, stuck in transposition. In mathematics, transposition is “a permutation which exchanges two elements and keeps all others fixed” (Wikipedia). The two elements in my life that had seemingly been exchanged were the Now and Then-in-the-Past – a past I never lived through, their reality. A past full of fears and terrors that were passed down to me via transgenerational and intergeneration transmission, mainly from my mother.
It pushed me to start to make sense of my life, to make sense of living on those two planets, as maddening as it felt. Back then, I was sometimes unsure of what was real and I could not bridge between the different parts of my life. This experience would later send me on a long expedition of learning about myself and about the psychotherapeutic field which developed around the subject.
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Biodynamic massage is an integral part of biodynamic psychotherapy, which allows psychotherapeutic work within the framework of the body. The name ‘biodynamic massage’ encompasses fourteen different methods of touch. Almost all the touch methods can be performed at different levels of the body — the bones, periosteum, deep and superficial muscles, fascia (containing the muscles), subcutaneous tissues and the different levels of energy.
A biodynamic psychotherapist is often guided by a stethoscope whilst carrying out biodynamic massage. The stethoscope is used for listening to the digestive system’s sounds (A.K.A. the psycho-peristalsis); this makes it possible to obtain immediate feedback from the body about the level of accuracy, quality, and attunement of the touch applied. The experience of touch must be modulated by context and internal state.
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Trans-generational trauma represents a form of trauma that has been transferred from the generation of survivors who have experienced (or witnessed) the catastrophe or atrocities directly. This could be a natural trauma (like an earthquake or tsunami), or a man-made one (such as the Holocaust, or the genocidal wars in the Balkans and Rwanda).
It is also possible to examine the ‘trans-generational’ transmission of trauma in a wider perspective, as trauma passed through the relationships of ancestors and descendants as well as the parent-child couple.
In this chapter we explore insights on intergenerational trauma and trans-generational trauma based on group work - “Attending to the Silence”: A Post-Holocaust-Trauma-Group.
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In biodynamic psychotherapy, we emphasize the importance of an integrated approach to promoting health that brings mind, emotion, body and spirit into a deeper connection and reawakens wellbeing.
Health is defined by the World Health Organization (WHO) as: ‘A state of complete physical, social and mental well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Health is a resource for everyday life, not the object of living. It is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources as well as physical capabilities’ (WHO, 1986).
WHO also suggests that health promotion is ‘the process of enabling people to increase control over and to improve their health’.