In 1963, Dr. Rosenberg began traveling to the Esalen Institute, in Big Sur, California, where he studied with the great leaders of the Human Potential Movement: Fritz Perls(Gestalt therapy), Abraham Maslow, Alexander Lowen, Will Shuts, John Periocus, Rollo May, Carl Rogers, Moshe Feldenkrais, Ida Pauline Rolf (Rolfing). At the Esalen Institute, he also studied Eastern philosophies and became a yoga practitioner. Rosenberg was particularly influenced by the work of Robert K. Hall, M.D. (Lomi School).
From 1968 to 1976, Dr. Rosenberg was a training therapist and board member at the Gestalt Institute of Psychotherapy in San Francisco. In fact, Rosenberg’s first name for IBP was “Gestalt Body Psychotherapy.” For over eight years, he studied and did Freudian Psychoanalysis with Jean Pouteu, M.D. He worked with the leading therapists of that time: Dr. Philip Cucurudo (Reichian therapy), Jim Simkin, Ph.D., Jack Downing, M.D., (founder of the Gestalt Institute of San Francisco), Elaine Kepner, Ph.D. , (Gestalt therapy), and Janie Ryan, M.A. Dr. Rosenberg was in individual therapy for ten years with Victoria Hamilton, Ph.D., an Object Relations therapist who assisted John Bowlby, of Attachment theory fame. (Dr. Hamilton also trained in Object Relations therapy/theory with R. D. Laing and Donald Winnicott.) All these different therapeutic approaches are seamlessly integrated into IBP.
In 1976 he moved to Southern California and started a training group at the Center For Healing Arts where Harold Stone PhD was running a group for people with life threatening illness. It was there that he met Marjorie Rand who had just completed her Master’s Thesis and dedicated it to him. Together they co-authered Body, Self and Soul: Sustaining Integration and started the IBP Institute in 1980.
After Dr. Rand left the Institute in 1995, Dr. Beverly Kitaen-Morse became Co-Director of the Institute with Dr. Rosenberg of the IBP Central Institute.
We all respect the value and innovations he brought to somatic psychotherapy.
