David Boadella 1931–2021 “Etwas geht immer weiter” (something will always go on and on)

Abstract

I first met David Boadella in the early 1990s as a recently trained Gestalt therapist curious to learn more about somatic psychotherapy, and soon after had the privilege to be taught by him. Without doubt, the field of psychotherapy, and particularly body psychotherapy, lost one its great pioneers when David Boadella passed over on 19th November 2021. He will be remembered for ‘Biosynthesis’, the body psychotherapy approach with roots in embryology he created, but equally, or perhaps even more so, for numerous ground-breaking insights and visionary conceptions which influenced and shaped the psychotherapy field far beyond his Biosynthesis modality or indeed the institute in Switzerland he set up together with his wife Silvia Specht Boadella. After studies in pedagogy, literature and psychology, and an early career as a teacher, David Boadella completed a training analysis with the Reichian vegetotherapist Ola Raknes. He began to develop his approach soon after, at first as the director of the ‘Institute for the Development of Human Potential’ in London, and at the first Biosynthesis Institute from 1983 onwards. At a time when the psychotherapy field was rife with ‘schoolism’, and often fierce competition for some supposedly ‘superiority of psychotherapy methods’, he not just argued but actively pursued cooperation, cross-modality discourse and mutual learning, and thus became a pioneer for what would eventually become known as ‘humanistic-integrative’ perspectives. The journal Energy & Character he founded in 1970 became not only a forum for cross-modality discourse within the field of body psychotherapies, but also the primary somatic psychotherapy journal for several decades. Furthermore, he pursued his vision of cooperation and integration through professional umbrella organisations and in 1989, he was duly elected as the first President of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy (EABP). He was also a founding board member for the ‘European Association for Psychotherapy’ (EAP), the European umbrella organisation created in 1992, where he also served as the chairperson of the EAP ‘Scientific [modality] Validation Committee’ for a time. Somewhat