• Corpus ID: 44973227

Holotropic Breathwork

@inproceedings{Breathwork2010HolotropicB,
  title={Holotropic Breathwork},
  author={Holotropic Breathwork},
  year={2010}
}

• Holotropic Breathwork
• Published 2010
• Psychology

H Breathwork is one of the more recent contributions to depth psychology, a discipline initiated at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Since Freud single-handedly laid the foundations of this new fi eld, depth psychology has had a complex and stormy history. Freud’s contributions to psychology and psychiatry were truly groundbreaking. He demonstrated the existence of the unconscious and described its dynamics, developed the technique of dream interpretation, identifi ed the psychological mechanisms involved in the genesis of psychoneuroses and psychosomatic disorders, discovered infantile sexuality, recognized the phenomenon of transference, invented the method of free association, and outlined the basic principles of psychotherapy (Freud and Breuer 1936; Freud 1953, 1962). Although initially Freud’s interest was primarily clinical—to explain the etiology of psychoneuroses and to fi nd a way of treating them—in the course of his explorations his horizons expanded enormously. The range of phenomena that he studied included, besides the content of dreams and psychodynamics of neurotic symptoms, such themes as the mechanism of jokes and slips of the tongue and a number of cultural and sociopolitical phenomena—problems of human civilization, history, wars and revolutions, religion, and art (Freud 1955a and b, 1957a and b, 1960a and b, 1964a and b). Freud surrounded himself with a group of unusually talented and imaginative thinkers (the “Viennese circle”), several of whom had their own unique perspectives and developed renegade schools of psychotherapy.