The Work Of Elsa Gindler
The work of Elsa Gindler is not so well known but has had an enormous impact on the emerging field of somatics. She was a pioneer who worked in Berlin during in the first half of the 20th century. Her work emphasised sensory awareness, play, and human development.
It was never named as such, partly because of the difficulty of working through the Nazi period, and partly because of her simple reluctance to name what she did – the closest she got was to refer to it sometimes as “human work”. All the documentation of her work was burned in the closing days WWII which is another reason she is little known. Through her students however, the work continued and had a profound influence of many other somatic forms
