Barbara Goodrich Dunn

stumbled into somatic psychotherapy in the early seventies. Electrified by how working with the body created psychological changes that words alone could not instill, she began a life-long in depth study. She has practiced and written about body psychotherapy and other somatic therapies for over 40 years.

Interested in how body and soul intersect, her interviews with Jungian analysts as James Hillman and Marion Woodman have appeared in such books as A Blue Fire and The Conscious Feminine as well as Common Boundary magazine. Her work on somatic psychotherapy has also appeared in Psychotherapy Networker, the Journal of the United States Association for Body Psychotherapy, and is excerpted in the book, The Historical Basis for Body Psychotherapy.

She has presented on somatic psychotherapy at numerous conferences in the U.S. and Europe, including Psychotherapy Networker, Common Boundary, European Association  for Body Psychotherapy, U. S. Association for Body Psychotherapy, Friends Conference for Psychology and Religion, and the American Association for Bonding Psychotherapy. She was featured in the article “Culture Healers—Ten Therapists Who Do more Than Talk.” Utne Reader(1997).

Barbara co-founded the U.S. Association for Body Psychotherapy and the D.C. Area Guild of Body Psychotherapy. With Elliot Greene she has conducted four-year training programs at the Washington Institute for Body Psychotherapy. She also completed training in poetry therapy at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, Washington, D.C.

The modality Barbara uses is Organismic Psychotherapy as developed by Malcolm and Katherine Brown.  It is a somatic psychotherapy that integrates the Gestalt psychology of the neurologist ,Kurt Goldstein and the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung.