Development and use of a grid to investigate body experience in psychotherapeutic groups. Results of a clinical study in Concentrative Movement Therapy

Karin Schreiber-Willnow

Rhein-Klinik, Bad Honnef (Germany)

Abstract
Results of a clinical study (N=72) will be reported, where psychotherapeutic in-patients were analysed in an integrative group therapy setting. The main interest of the study lay in the research of „Konzentrative Bewegungstherapie“ (Concentrative Movement Therapy, KBT). KBT uses the focussed awareness on movement and body to come in touch with early traumatic material and inner conflicts. KBT is a well established method for psychotherapeutic in-patients in Germany. The study group covers patients with neurosis, borderline disease, eating disorders and somatic functional disorders, who are treated in the psychotherapeutic hospital for about 3 to 4 months. I developed a „body- and self-experience grid“ with fixed elements, which refer to the essentials of the KBT. I elicited the individual constructs in a clinical interview. Patients filled it in again in the middle and at the end of treatment. The evaluation was made with the INGRID- program (Slater, translated by Willutzki). I chose a group statistical approach by judging the correlations between the first an the other grids, and looking for the inter-element distances of more successful versus less successful patients, comparing them group-wise. I interpreted the inter-element distances as representations of the internal space containing body representations as well as self representa-tions. The results will be shown and discussed as being specific for the body-psychotherapeutic method of the Concentrative Movement Therapy.

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