IN MEMORIAM : KATHERINE ENNIS BROWN 1927 -2006

Katherine Ennis Brown, Co-founder and ­director of the European Institute for Organismic Psychotherapy, died on 29th December 2006 after a long illness.

³Call the world if you please, ³The Vale of Soul-making². Then you will find out the use of the world.² John Keats.

These words of the English poet from a letter to his brother were quoted by Katherine in her address to the 3rd European Congress of Body Psychotherapy in Lindau in 1991, entitled ³Shadows on the Moon², in the course of which she expressed many of her thoughts and concerns relating to the development of Body Psychotherapy and her hopes for its future. She represented strongly
the feminine aspect of the work and it is not least through her influence and commitment to what is now referred to as the ³soft skills²  that Organismic Psychotherapy could become the holistic and soul-building discipline that it is, uniting harmoniously in its best manifestations the masculine and the feminine, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, the front-half and back-half being centres.

Katherine was born into economically hard-pressed parents in Dayton Beach in Florida, USA on 10th February 1927.  Her childhood was characterised by the many moves around the southern states the family was forced to make, until at eighteen she married her childhood sweetheart, Leland Bogue by whom she had three children. She left her husband to move to Atlanta, in order to study and expand her horizons and entered the University of Georgia where she read Humanistic Psychology and obtained her bachelor¹s degree. During this time she married Gary Ennis, and had a fourth child with him. After the ensuing separation she lived alone with her four children, running a day-care centre in Atlanta and giving massage sessions during the evening.

In the early seventies Katherine trained in Sensory Awareness with Charlotte Selver and Charles Brooks. During this time she met and married Malcolm Brown, a clinical psychologist, who was in the process of developing his own form of body psychotherapy. They lived at first in Berkeley, California, then moved to Europe with her two youngest children, initially to the island of Corfu and then to northern Italy near Lago Maggiore. From their base there they trained therapists all over Europe in their ever-developing and unique style of body psychotherapy. It was also here that Katherine wrote the thesis for her MA: The Shadow and the Body in Theory and Practice. Clinical applications of the Theories of C.G.Jung and Malcolm Brown.

 The essence of Organismic Psychotherapy is much due to Katherine¹s style of long sustained nurturing touch and her delicate sense of the client/therapist relationship. They worked generally as a couple and thus were able to activate both the father and mother transference simultaneously and work effectively with both, in single sessions as well as in groups. Also the vitality of their own relationship and sexuality served as an inspiration to couples and singles alike, lasting as it did until her final illness, well into their seventies. Katherine died quietly at the age of 79, as a result of a series of mild brain strokes resulting in dementia, in a nursing home in Colorado Springs, Colorado. She was buried in Stone Mountain Cemetery, Atlanta on 6th January 2007.

I will never forget you: your kindness and warmth, your beauty and your openness, your healing strength, your humour and the gentleness of your wonderful hands. Thank you Katherine and fare thee well.
Your grateful student, Liz Marshall.

For Katherine In memoriam A personal history

The first time I met Katherine dates back around 30 years ago, down in Corfu, where me and my later husband had flown in to start our first body psychotherapeutic ³intensive³( 3 weeks of nearly daily individual sessions in organismic psychotherapy). In my very first therapeutic session I spent a solid 45 minutes on the Lowenian Chair ....³Those were the days, my friend²... I was in my late twenties, in the middle of my hippie times and in search of many things, including new ways of being a woman. Katherine, in her late forties, was a beautiful woman, but what struck me the most was her aliveness, her being present on all levels including an erotic radiance. She was much different from the women I knew in my mother´s generation who all seemed to have lost these qualities, especially the latter, somewhere on the road. Metaphorically spoken for many years she became my, and surely not only mine, Ariadne´s thread in the labyrinth of what self-actualizing woman could develop into in post-modern times. After more intensives, most of them taking place in their beautiful home ³Villa Candida² near Lago Maggiore, came a long period of time as a trainee. In the beginning of the 80s I joined one of the Browns´ international training programs, taking place all over Europe, filled with a bunch of colourful young and eager body psychotherapists to come. In these trainings, if Malcolm was the ³brain² of organismic psychotherapy, Katherine definitely was the heart and the body of it, always being present with her warm, intuitive, aware, containing and balancing capacities. I loved these meetings, and called them ³my little islands of paradise², because everything one could possibly need to discover and unfold one´s soul needs was available. Friendships lasting until up until now evolved in these times... Only much later I understood how Malcolm and Katherine, though more than once quite controversial, as the couple they were, created a very safe place for this endeavour. Flashes of memories of those years come to my mind. The parties at each meeting were legendary, Katherine always in the centre, enjoying life with us, dancing, laughing, drinking, smoking until late at night; and you could bet  that the invitation for the next meeting would always contain at least half a page elaborating on what the food would be like....this was not so much Katherine´s concern, I guess...though she was an excellent cook. ( Actually looking back I wonder how she managed to do all the work with training programs all over Europe, intensives at home, plus raising kids, plus running a complete household...)

During years and years of supervision groups I also watched Katherine move out of Malcolm´s shadow as far as teaching theory was concerned and struggling for the emanation of her, what in organismic psychotherapy is called ³logos capacities²: writing her theses, holding this wonderful speech at the EABP congress in Lindau and also being theoretically much more present in the groups, very much appreciated not only by the female trainees. And she did things on her own: we had several wonderful women¹s groups together with Katherine´s girlfriend Irma Shepard where females from different trainings would gather and celebrate life.

The therapeutic possibilities of working as a couple as taught and lived by the Browns were intriguing.... to continue this tradition a group of Germans, all trained by them, set up a German Association for Organismic Psychotherapy in 1987. Additonally, being four couples, married and working together, plus a couple that ³only² worked together, formed a peer-couple group, trying to live up to these standards. We hopelessly failed, three of the four couples split, including mine. Malcolm´s most cherished notion of the ³hierosgamos-principle² didn´t work for us.     I always wondered if this quest was so much Katherine´s concern, as I always experienced her in a much more down to earth way being confronted with what daily living and working together as couple could eventually entail.

When the Browns moved back to U.S.A. in 1994, the connection thinned out somewhat but never broke. The time as a trainee had come to an end, a personal friendship remained.... Her death touched me deeply, and I feel grateful for the time we had together. If I ever learned what well contained empathy, attentiveness and support in the therapeutic contact can be, I owe it to her. She definitely has a place in my heart.

Angela Belz-Knöfer