The roots of body psychotherapy go back a long way. Michael C. Heller traces their origins and finds them among the great Chinese, Indian, and Western thinkers, as well as among the practitioners of yoga, acupuncture, and Tai Chi. He discovers them in Laozi and Confucius, in Plato and Kant. He uncovers them among the Enlightenment scientists from Lamarck to Darwin and outlines the birth and early development of body psychotherapy from mesmerism through hypnosis to the gymnastics movement of the "Golden Twenties" in Berlin. Heller reports in his clear and easily understandable language what motivated and drove Charcot, Freud, Ferenczi, Fenichel, and Reich. He does not hold back on details, revelations, and critiques, and comments on the somewhat bizarre developments of the 1960s with the rediscovery of Reich leading to the beginning of clinical research in the 1980s.