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About Us

Learn more about us, the council and the community

The International Community (&Council) of PsychoCorporal (Bodymind) Integration Trainings (&Trainers) (ICPIT) is the Official International Organ regulating the practice of the different forms of "Bodymind Integration," developed by Jack Painter, PhD. and brings together recognised Trainers/Trainings in Postural Integration, Energetic Integration and Pelvic-Heart Integration worldwide. See a list of current recognised members here.

The International Council of PsychoCorporal (Bodymind) Integration Trainers (ICPIT) was founded in 1988 by Jack W. Painter, Ph.D. and gathers all active trainers in Postural Integration®, Energetic Integration and Pelvic-Heart Integration. Postural Integration was invented in the 1960s and 1970s. Energetic Integration and Pelvic-Heart Integration were created in the 1980s and 1990s. All these methods are being refined on to this day. ICPIT is a worldwide community of training programs, trainers, assistant-trainers, helper-trainers, master practitioners and practitioners in these methods who support each other professionally and are motivated to make this work accessible and available to the general public.

 

WHO 

  • ICPIT is a Council of Trainers with backgrounds in Psychotherapy, Counseling, Coaching and Holistic Bodywork. It is a worldwide network and extends into a community of practitioners trained according to the guidelines of ICPIT.
  • The methods taught are unique in that they work simultaneously with Body (with a touch intensive protocol), Emotions and Thoughts and also go in the Spiritual.
  • ICPIT organises training programs worldwide.
  • ICPIT TRAININGS are an enterprise both orientated towards the process and experience as well as committed to a profound theoretical reflection of experiences.
  • ICPIT TRAINING Institutes and persons providing training are committed to clearly defined ethical standards (see our ethical code), a continuous scientific development of theory and practice of the person- centred/experiential approaches, to scientific research and to working together with similar institutions and persons on national and international levels.
  • ICPIT is committed to a self-guided way of learning on the basis of empowerment and the ‘freedom to learn’ as postulated by Carl Rogers and to self-evaluation while meeting the requirements within the respective given legal and institutional frames.
  • ICPIT gathers regularly in live meetings and through Skype to update the work and to support trainings, trainers, assistants and practitioners worldwide.
  • ICPIT offers supervision training for practitioners in order to support supervised practice of person-centred/experiential relationships with clients.
  • ICPIT offers CPD (Continuing Professional Development) in order for trainees to develop their own theoretical stances.
  • ICPIT requires their trainees to work with the experience in self-development in different settings (e.g. training groups, personal development groups, group therapy or counselling, individual therapy or counselling etc.) 

 

BODYMIND INTEGRATORS ARE HUMANISTIC PRACTITIONERS 

It is within the humanistic counseling tradition that the core conditions of counseling emerged: unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence, authenticity, caring for the client, phenomenological assessment strategies, self-discovery, and insight. These core conditions permit therapeutic intervention in life areas which were previously inaccessible, such as love, hope, meaning of life, loss, relationships, creativity, holism, spirituality, freedom, transcendence, personal growth, social justice, multicultural and gender issues, responsibility, and interdependence. ICPIT trainers are Humanistic practitioners that are very much grounded in these core conditions.  ICPIT Trainings are always "Person–Centered and Experiential"

  • ICPIT TRAININGS base their practice upon a philosophical foundation based on the affirmation of the dignity of every human being.
  • ICPIT TRAININGS acknowledge the responsibility of human beings for their own destiny, having within themselves the answers to improving their own lives and the quality of life of all human beings.
  • ICPIT TRAININGS recognize and respect the ability of human beings to employ reason, science, intuition, and creativity as tools for the discovery of knowledge and the achievement of goals.
  • ICPIT TRAININGS believe that wellness and health is best achieved by combining personal growth with avid service for the greater good of humanity.
  • ICPIT TRAININGS facilitate personalisation, i.e. the development of the personality, of the trainee by a person-centred/experiential relationship and encounter between the trainers and the trainees aiming at the personal and professional abilities required to offer, establish, maintain and develop person-centred/experiential relationships with clients.
  • Among other elements the theoretical and practical learning in ICPIT TRAININGS consists of: anthropological, philosophical and ethical foundations, theory of personality and relationship development, both in general and regarding processes of different persons and groups in different situations, theory of psychopathology and therapy, contextual (legal, medical, economical etc.) necessary knowledge.

 

WE WORK WITH THE BODYMIND CONCEPT 

The inseparable unity and synergy between body and mind is at the heart of the „Bodymind” concept. This concept claims that our body is „living memory” and carries in it the signs and traces of our personal life experience as well as our familial heritage. All kinds of traumatic experiences and learned fears, impregnate our character and influence our posture. Our physical structure and posture are concrete and tangible entrances to the whole Bodymind.

 

THE PRESUPPOSITIONS OF PSYCHOCORPORAL (BODYMIND) INTEGRATION 

The presuppositions of PsychoCorporal (Bodymind) Integration are that in the holistic and integrative therapeutic approach we accept the following:

  • Body and mind are not separated;
  • There exists a fundamental connection in the world, driven by energy and consciousness;
  • The focus of attention is on intrinsic health or the „essential self”; pathology occurs as a consequence of the loss of connection with the essential self.
  • The practice of Bodymind Integration focusses on embodied, current experience;
  • This experience can be verbalised in a descriptive manner;
  • Bodymind Integration is practiced in relationship with the therapist; the work is both interpersonal and intrapersonal;
  • Bodymind Integration is a mutual enterprise of therapist and client that is done with curiosity; both therapist and client change through the experience; there is no set end goal.
  • Given an appropriate climate, individuals discover their own process of healing and self-regulation.
  • From the concepts developed by C.G. Jung, we integrate in the training:
    • The collective unconscious and the archetypes (animus; anima; persona(e), shadow, the self….)
    • The postulate of the reality of the soul
    • The process of individuation as a lifelong process of psychic growth, becoming and realisation of the self.
    • The vision in which psychic suffering is not reduced to a pathology, but is seen as a passage in the process of individuation of the individual

 

WHAT DEFINES HUMANISTIC THEORY 

  • Humanistic theories attempt to describe the phenomenologically constructed world of the client by exploring the potential of humanity through the nature and experience of values, spirituality, meaning, emotions, transcendence, intentionality, healthy relationships, the self, self-actualization, creativity, mortality, holism, intuition, and responsibility (among other topics).
  • Humanistic theories arose as a reaction to an increasingly industrialized world, Freudian psychoanalysis, and behaviorism. Humanistic theories first emerged in the writings of Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, and Victor Frankl , and came into full expression in the works of Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, Gordon Allport, Carl Rogers, Charlotte Buhler, Virginia Satir, Albert Ellis, and Fritz Perls, among others (Association for Humanistic Psychology, n.d.).

For all Information Contact our Secretariat in Belgium.

DIRK MARIVOET - General Secretary, Destelbergenstraat 49-51, B-9040 Gent, +32 9 2284911

Existentialism - ‘here & now’ awareness / responsibility for one’s own choices

Soren Kierkegaard

• wrote passionately about the existence of each human individual.
• criticized both the established church, philosophy, and society as lulling human beings to sleep with a false security.
• believed that too many individual humans did not see any need to struggle with the direction of their personal existence. They assumed that they were already Christian and modern by birthright.
• compared the average human being's condition throughout life to that of a peasant who falls asleep in his cart while the horse pulls him home.
• believed that philosophy should act like a mosquito and sting the complacent individual awake, to direct and experience the course of his or her own life, or to awaken the individual and "oblige him to judge" (Kierkegaard, 1962b, p 35).
• Throughout his work Kierkegaard confronted a myriad of self-soothing defenses by which individuals preserve their sleepy complacency

Friedrich Nietszche (1844-1900)

• repeated Kierkegaard's emphasis upon the individual.
• saw Western civilization as degraded to the core
• castigated Christianity as a distortion in humanity.
• called for a "doctor of the soul" to tap his hammer and discover where the edifice of culture was rotten, so that the wrecking process could begin.
• called for a transformation in all values, and created an image of a new individual, a superman (Ubermensch), who would create authentic values (Nietzsche, 1966, 1892/1954). The superman would realize to a higher degree the human capacity to create the shape of one's own life. "Such a person, one might say, lives courageously by overcoming illusions and taking responsibility for his or her life"

Field & Holism - a belief that we are all connected / appreciation of the whole person: mind, body, spirit & emotions, as well as the individual’s unique field of experience

Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) (Holistic Theory of Organism)

• applied the figure-ground principle from perception to the whole organism, presuming that the whole organism serves as the ground for the individual stimulus forming the figure - thus formulating an early criticism of the simple behavioristic stimulus-response-theory

Kurt Lewin (1890-1947) (Field Theory)

• suggested that neither nature (inborn tendencies) nor nurture (how experiences in life shape individuals) alone can account for individuals' behavior and personalities, but rather that both nature and nurture interact to shape each person. This idea was presented in the form of Lewin's equation for behavior B = ƒ(P, E).
• coined the term 'group dynamics'. He described this notion as the way that groups and individuals act and react to changing circumstances. This field emerged as a concept dedicated to the advancement of knowledge regarding the nature of groups, their laws, establishment, development, and interactions with other groups, individuals and institutions.

Gestalt Psychology

Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka, Wolfgang Kohler, Goldwein, etc.)

Zen (differentiation between thing and concept, e.g. Allan Watts)
Ludwig von Bertallanfy's General Systems Theory
Alfred Korzybski (General Semantics ("The map is not the territory")
Gregory Bateson's work on double bind, ecology of mind, cybernetics
General Systemics

Dialogue - the therapist’s approach is relationally focused with the therapist as an active participant in the process - relating with respect, curiosity and authenticity

Martin Buber (1878-1965): thesis of dialogical existence - 'I-Thou', 'I-It')(Buber, 1970)

• provided an appealing philosophy of the interpersonal
• described reality as falling into two opposing realms.
• In the first, authentic realm, an "I" addresses a "thou" in dialogue, in relationship. Within this unfolding relationship of an I to a thou the human person is born and unfolds to its full potential. For Buber the human self does not develop except in relationship, in dialogue
• The opposing realm involves an "I" addressing an "it," that is an object of practical utility. When one human being addresses another human being as an "it," both the other and oneself are diminished

Phenomenology - awareness of self as experienced now: cognitive / emotional / body responses / awareness of self in relationship to others. For the phenomenologist, no human behavior and no neuro-physiological process can ultimately be understood apart from its context and situation.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938

• battle cry of returning "to the things themselves"
• encouraged philosophers and scientists to set aside theoretical assumptions and describe their immediate experience of phenomena
• emphasized the intentionality of human mental activity. Psychic acts are intentional because they are oriented or directed toward some specific situation or object beyond themselves, and can be meaningfully understood only by that context. Ultimately this means that consciousness is not merely internal; rather, it is an involvement of the perceiving human being with the object perceived
• emphasized the validity of the everyday "life world," the world of immediate experience and life.
• He rejected the Cartesian scientific view that external reality only consists of internal mental representations. The human being and the experiential world are interactive. Through intentionality human beings "co-create" phenomena, rather than just passively registering what is there.
• called for the development of a phenomenological psychology which would set aside the "naturalistic" modes of thinking used by medicine, biology, and physiology
• work parallels in its focus and approach with the "radical empiricism" of the American psychologist and philosopher William James (Husserl acknowledged James' work)

Martin Heidegger (1989-1976)

• detailed examination of the structure of human existence
• described the human being as a "being-in-the-world," that is, as an entity whose very fabric involves an immersion and openness to the surrounding world
• Human beings always discover themselves already thrown into a specific factual situation, which defines them in their historicity
• studied the temporal organization of human life, and found that human beings discover their wholeness in an awareness of their own death.
• Human beings are also truly metaphysical beings; they are the only being which takes its own being as a question to be pondered

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

• drew on both Husserl and Heidegger, and shifted the focus of phenomenological research to the structure of behavior
• emphasized the body as the primary site of knowing the world, a corrective to the long philosophical tradition of placing consciousness as the source of knowledge, and maintained that the body and that which it perceived could not be disentangled from each other.
• The articulation of the primacy of embodiment led him away from phenomenology towards what he was to call “indirect ontology” or the ontology of “the flesh of the world” (la chair du monde) (seen in his last incomplete work, The Visible and Invisible, and his last published essay, “Eye and Mind”).
• understood behavior as intentionally directed toward a situation
• defined the "mental" as the organization or structure of behavior
• used the evidence of the Gestalt psychologists, especially Kurt Goldstein's investigations of neurologically damaged individuals, to explore the organization of normal human movement and the embodied organism's relationship to the environment

Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) - Swiss

• drew on the philosophy of both Husserl and Heidegger to find an alternative manner of understanding human existence, especially the experiencing of the mentally ill
• applied Heidegger's definition of the human being as a "being-in-the-world" to psychiatry and mental illness.
• emphasized the existential significance of the "Mitwelt," the social world shared with others, the "Umwelt," the physical and biological environment, and the "Eigenwelt," literally, the "own-world" of identity and personhood.
• described fundamental existential apriori, or existential structures, which shape human experiencing.
• studied the world-views, or patterns of experiencing, of disturbed individuals.

Medard Boss (1903-1991) - Swiss

• defined health as the total "haleness and wholeness" of the human being
• Health is characterized by an openness and flexible responsiveness to the world. Unhealthiness in human existence is "nothing but the privation, blocking, impairment or constriction of this original openness and freedom
• investigated psychosomatic illness as a means of jamming or blocking one's openness to the world and to specific threatening situations

Ronald D. Laing (1927-1989)

• used the philosophy of Jean Paul Sartre (1965) to illuminate the divided self of the schizophrenic patient

Experimentation - exploring new ways of being and relating that are potentially more satisfying / working through unfinished business and blocks to awareness & integration - Holistic Bodywork - Bodymind Drama

Milton Erickson (1901-1980)

• unconventional approach to psychotherapy (described in the book Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley and the book Hypnotherapy: An Exploratory Casebook, by Milton H. Erickson and Ernest L. Rossi (1979, New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc.).
• developed an extensive use of therapeutic metaphor and story as well as hypnosis and coined the term brief therapy for his method of addressing therapeutic change in relatively few sessions
• believed that the unconscious mind was always listening and that, whether or not the patient was in trance, suggestions could be made which would have a hypnotic influence, as long as those suggestions found resonance at the unconscious level. The patient could be aware of this or could be completely oblivious that something was happening. (Ericksonian Hypnotherapy)
• expected trance states to occur naturally and frequently, he was prepared to exploit them therapeutically, even when the patient was not present with him in the consulting room

Bodywork Traditions - Somatics

• Yoga
• Pilates
• Bioenergetics
• Alexander technique
• Moshe Feldenkrais (Functional Integration)
• Ida Rolf (Structural Integration)
• Aston Patterning
• Dance/Movement therapy

Bodymind Drama - Embodied Psychodrama

Psychodrama (Jacob L. Moreno (1889–1974)) is an action method, often used as a psychotherapy, in which clients use spontaneous dramatization, role playing and dramatic self-presentation to investigate and gain insight into their live

Bodymind Drama (Jack W. Painter (1933-2010) is an embodied action method, using energetic charging-discharging, gestalt-like dramatisation, role playing and dramatic self-presentation.
focuses on a particular situation to enact on stage. A variety of scenes may be enacted, depicting, for example, memories of specific happenings in the client's past, unfinished situations, inner dramas, fantasies, dreams, preparations for future risk-taking situations, or unrehearsed expressions of mental state in the here and now. These scenes either approximate real-life situations or are externalizations of inner mental processes. Other members of the group may become auxiliaries, and support the protagonist by playing other significant roles in the scene.

Recent Developments

Inter-subjectivity (Relational Psychoanalysis (e.g. Daniel Stern), Applied to newborn infants (e.g. Colwyn Trevarthen ), theory of embodied simulation (Vittorio Gallese – mirror neurons)

• Somatic Psychotherapies (e.g. Sensorimotor Psychotherapy (Pat Ogden), Somatic Experiencing (Peter Levine), NARM (Laurence Heller)
• Acceptance and Commitment therapy
• Strengths based therapy (e.g. emotionally focused therapy, play therapy, narrative therapy
• elements of CBT
• ‘mindfulness’
• contemporary relational themes in counselling and psychotherapy
• Chaos Theory (Ilya Prigogine, Isabelle Stengers – Order out of chaos) Vinciane Despret
• cranio-sacral therapy
• The “new psychosomatics”
• from genetics to epigenetics. Epigenetic reprogramming
• from Hans Selye’s stress to the inhibition in the action syndrome (Henri Laborit) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hD7lMDXDvt8
• The social engagement system. The listening project (S.W. Porges)
• The anticholinergi anti-inflammatory reflex (K.J. Tracey)

Support is given through an organized online and live format

Contact Us - info@icpit.org/+32 9 2284911

Official trainings in Postural Integration, Energetic Integration & Pelvic-Heart Integration worldwide

Join a Bodymind Integration training: info@icpit.org/+32 9 2284911

ICIPT is: Psychologists, Psychiatrists, Psychotherapists, Bodyworkers, Scientists

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