Healing Body, Self and Soul

Book excerpt: Review of Jerry Perlmutters Healing Body, Self and Soul: Integrative Somatic Psychotherapy (ISP) In Healing Body, Self and Soul Perlmutter offers a mature, career-long account of his primary work, Integrative Somatic Psychotherapy. He outlines his use of body psychotherapy in the character work tradition of Reich, Lowen, and Brown including grounding, stress positions, hard and soft touch, externalizing introjects, strong expression of intense emotions, and more. This is integrated with a client-centered approach of keying off the spontaneous through honoring, and respecting unpredictable experiences as they arise in the client. Work is done in the context of an ongoing awareness cycle that promotes self-awareness, self-acknowledgement, self-acceptance and self-appreciation, which in the second stage of ISP therapy, following deep character work, leads into transformational explorations of ones soul and the spirit connected to the souls energy. Clearly written and outlined with rich illustrations of the clinical theory. Gregory Johanson, Ph.D. Author (with Ron Kurtz) of Grace Unfolding: Psychotherapy in the Spirit of the Tao-te ching