In 1964, the military in Brazil carried out a coup d'etat supported by
the CIA and local right-wing groups, inaugurating a bloody
dictatorship. It was during the dictatorship that a clandestine
anarchist activist named Roberto Freire, who also was a psychoanalyst,
(anti)psychiatrist and author of books and plays, confirmed the
destructive effects of repression on people's behavior and
psychological and mental health. Freire believed that micro-social
relationships are the genesis for macro-social authoritarianism and he
aimed for understanding the politics of modern society through
people's behavior in their everyday life. He realized that the fact
that one believes in a certain ideology and has a libertarian view of
the world doesn't always lead one to have a libertarian behavior in
his/her personal relationships with his/her fellows – there is
something else, like an unconscious barrier, that determines the
attitudes of the individuals towards life and other people. Freire,
then, broke with psychoanalysis and over the next decades researched
and developed Somatherapy – a therapy form in shape of a pedagogy, or
a kind of pedagogy with therapeutic effects. That means that the way
of dealing with neurosis is shifted from a medical perspective to an
educational one. The goal is to liberate those who have been subjected
to repression (all of us). Somatherapy supports itself in theory and
praxis with the social and corporeal psychology of Wilhelm Reich,
Antipsychiatry, Gestalt Therapy, Anarchism and with the Afro-Brazilian
art form of the people called Capoeira Angola.

The technique that he created consists of assembling a group of people
to form a collective with limited duration (about a year and a half)
that, through self-managed and non-hierarchical dynamics, will search
to explore, understand and develop their capabilities to be creative,
self-regulated, to love and to be loved and to be confident in the
defense of their own desires and needs towards a society hostile to
independent individuals.

All of this happens in a methodology composed of four elements: (1)
experience of exercises created by Freire and carried out by the
therapist in charge of the group (Freire or a disciple of him); (2)
meetings of the group without the presence of the therapist (that
guarantees the group's and each person's independence and
responsibility for the therapeutic process); (3) practice of Capoeira
Angola; (4) interaction of the group's members in various social
activities, either for fun or any kind of collective work.

The exercises created by Freire usually are body exercises, following
Wilhelm Reich's realization that neurosis is located not only in one's
mind, but also in his/her body. Reich realized that the authoritarian
social structure and its mechanism of repression shape people's
personality, creating a neuromuscular character armor. That means a
chronic rigidity in the muscles that obstruct the full circulation of
the vital energy. Then it becomes a lifeless body, unable to act
spontaneously, to feel pleasure, love or true emotions.

Reich was positive that this illness has social causes, that it is
implanted by systematic suppression of instinctual needs of sex,
pleasure and love carried out by authoritarian mechanisms that enforce
all of us, starting in the first days of life, to adapt ourselves to
patterns of social behavior. "The millenary subjugation of impulsive
life created the ground for the psychological fear of the masses to
the authority and the submission to it, for an incredible humility, on
one side, and a
sadistic brutality, on the other side – and that's why in the last 200
years the capitalist economy of profits could expand and survive" said
Reich.

Roberto Freire is a forerunner of Reichian Therapy in Brazil and one
of the few people in the world who kept the unity between
social-political and psychotherapeutic approaches against neurosis.
Opposing ideologies of sacrifice (neurosis), Freire maintains that the
healthy human condition dwells in what he called ideology of pleasure.
The exercises that he created bring the participants to bodily
communicate their barriers and difficulties, at the same time they
provide bioenergetic relief, release of creativity and stimulation and
awakening of the senses. They have simultaneous diagnostic and
therapeutic effects.

Following the principle of pleasure, Freire refuted the tendency in
traditional psychology to relate therapy with discomfort, suffering
and formality and strove to create ludic, playful and pleasant
exercises that, based on theatrical techniques, stimulate sociability
and new ways of interaction.

After each exercise the participants make use of verbal communication,
but in a peculiar way. Sitting in circle, each person reports the
sensations that she had, the barriers that she perceived in herself
and other people, what kind of pleasure she felt or what kind of fear
and difficulty came out. The way to report the experience should
follow the theories and methods of Gestalt Therapy, which prioritize
an objective and practical approach, trying to acknowledge (how it
happened) rather than interpret (why it happened).

Based on studies of human perception, Dr. Frederick Perls, precursor
of Gestalt Therapy, sustained the fundamental significance of living
perceptually alert to the present moment. Perls believed that the
unmediated perception through the senses allows the spontaneous and
natural mechanism of self-regulation. Rational abstraction prevents
this spontaneity from occurring and creates another mechanism that is
alienation and self-censorship through acceptance of external values
and judgments (coming from the family, society, etc.), which are
settled in the conscious and unconscious.

Gestalt Therapy determines the practical way in which the anarchist
therapy of Roberto Freire happens. Somatherapy is neither clinical nor
confessional. It does not deal with traumas of the past, but it does
deal with
their manifestations in the present, through the situations
experienced during the exercises and everyday life. Freire understands
that one of the many problems that people have is related to inability
to define what they want and like. He believes that spontaneous
self-regulation is achieved by the search for pleasure and by the
discovery of each person's own unique originality.

Because neurosis is born in social relationships, group therapy is
more efficient because it creates a micro-social lab in which a
variety of relationships may happen. In Somatherapy, it's the
self-managed and non-hierarchical dynamics that effectively make the
therapy happen, on the personal level (self-
awareness) and on the social level (new strategies for living
together), in so far as it establish a state of collaboration,
cooperation and complicity between the members of the group.

Also, only in a group is it possible to deal with damaging forms of
communications brought to light by Antipsychiatry. Somatherapy doesn't
work with schizophrenics or people in advanced states of emotional
unbalance, but it uses those studies of Gregory Bateson, David Cooper
and Ronald D. Laing that have prophylactic uses for neurosis.

Antipsychiatry makes use of the studies in pragmatics of human
communication, which prove that paradoxical ways of communication in a
context of strong emotional and affectional ties can lead to deep
psychological disturbances in one's personality. Somatherapy allows
one to realize how his personality is shaped by the paradoxical
communications used against him by his family when he was a child, as
well as being able to perceive when it happens in the present. It
makes possible the creation of strategies to defend oneself against
emotional blackmails and teaches the importance of choosing sincere
and direct ways to communicate and prove how useful metacommunication
is (communication about the situation in which interaction takes
place).

One of the last elements that Roberto Freire added to his technique
was Capoeira Angola. Unlike other styles of capoeira that spread out
all over the world, Capoeira Angola is an Afro-Brazilian art form that
combines playing music, dancing and fighting – it's a theater and a
playful game. It has its origin in African tribal rituals and dances.
In Brazil, aspects of martial arts were introduced, so that black
people could prepare
themselves to fight their oppressors: the slave masters and the
Portuguese (and later Brazilian) Empire. Freire found in Capoeira
Angola an excellent bioenergetic exercise, that enables body
awareness, teaches how to keep all senses alert, and wakes up the
ability to confront, which is very necessary in the struggle to defend
oneself against repression and to affirm a free personality.

Subjective Ecology

With its anarchist perspective, Somatherapy brings to psychotherapy
the concept that neurosis is a deviation in natural and ecological
human behavior. Traditional psychology manifests in its praxis the
attempt to adapt one to the social rules in
force. Somatherapy helps the individual to recover her capacity to
satisfy her needs and desires by defending herself and struggling
against a psychotic society that denies her the freedom to exercise
her own unique originality.

For Roberto Freire, the human being must be understood in his unicity:
the individual is the indivisible and non-hierarchical unity of his
body, mind, emotions, memories, expectations, desires, culture, social
behaviors and actions that he does at every moment. In western
societies, the aspects of life are fragmented. Freire created
Somatherapy with the aim to struggle for the totality of being, for
the unity that allows the natural principle of spontaneous
self-regulation. He conceived his technique for revolutionaries,
challengers of the status quo and anyone who feels libertarian, as a
tool in the struggle for a life directed by joy, beauty and pleasure.

Acting on the level of subjective ecology, which is understood as
living accordingly to biological impulses, Somatherapy shows a
different path in the struggle against patriarchy. Helping to liberate
an individual from the barriers that prevent him from his own
self-determination and freedom is consistent with the idea of not
intending to construct a new world, but giving people the opportunity to create this new world by themselves.

Radical changes of behavior that enable the experience of pleasure and
love are the reconciliation with our own nature, and that's a step
towards the utopia of a society that is not harmful to individuals or
their environment. "Civilized society is at risk of disintegration by
the primary hostility of men towards each other," said Wilhelm Reich.
"Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings
can master their sadistic destructiveness."