Anise Smith: Peter, together with our colleague Christoph Sommer you have produced a whole series of DVDs about Jean-Pierre Barral’s ‘New Articular Approach.’ You started a few years ago with a DVD showing detailed work for shoulder dysfunctions. After that you continued with DVDs on the forearm and hand, and on the different parts of the vertebral spine. And last year you completed the series with a follow-up about dysfunctions within the hip, knee, and ankle. What brought you to this project?

Peter Schwind: When I studied at the Rolf Institute® in Boulder, Colorado many years ago, there was almost no possibility of video documentation. At that time I had serious doubts about the possibility to document manual treatments using a camera. I have a fairly large collection of photos that I took during my years as an assistant during the early 1980s, and sometimes I look at these pictures and remember ‘the old days’. But I miss having high-quality video documentation in HD quality of the work of the old days. As I realized what we could do with video nowadays, I talked to Christoph Sommer and Jean-Pierre Barral about starting a series of DVDs.

AS: What is “new“ about Barral’s New Articular Approach?

PS: Anybody who participates in Barral’s courses will notice that he is well rooted in the traditional osteopathic view of the human joints. Actually, he used to teach biomechanics at a European college of osteopathy a long time ago. But what he does with the New Articular Approach is a different story: he includes all the different components of a joint in testing and treating; his focus is not only on the muscles with their fascia and the bones and ligaments. He includes the nerves, the arteries and veins, as well as the capsule of a joint. Sometimes he even treats the fat nearby a joint, for example near the elbow. And he does something that I had never seen him do before: he includes active participation by the client, by asking him for movement. When we see him work on the fascial connection between the latissimus dorsi and the teres major, asking the client for ‘intelligent’ micromovements, we may get inspired to go deeper and deeper into this modality of combining manual treatment and ‘intelligent movement’ from our clients.

AS: What is at the basis of that combination of manual treatment and client movement?

PS: Barral has always talked about the connection of tissues and the brain, so this connection is the basis for his way of working with the joints. And – by the way – it was also the basis for his visceral work from the very beginning. In his work with the joints, he emphasizes the importance of receptors, which are present in the tissues, connecting with the cerebellum. When we look at that, it is not surprising that he arrives at the use of active movement by the client.

AS: Since you mention visceral manipulation, is the New Articular Approach connected with the visceral approach?

PS: When Barral developed his work with the organs, he started with observations of inner ‘bridges’ between dysfunction of an organ and dysfunction of a related joint. That was long ago. His first discoveries had to do with the impact of tuberculosis on joint function of the neck. That was the starting point. Later he demonstrated that we are able to map a whole variety of connections between organs and joints. What I like is that he developed tests that enable us to distinguish between a ‘true’ joint dysfunction and a joint dysfunction that is just the expression of an organ that is not doing well. And what I like the most is that the tests are quite simple to perform and the results seem to be quite reliable.

AS: Does the New Articular Approach also include dimensions of work with the brain?

PS: What can I say? . . . When you say ‘dimensions’ of working with the brain, several aspects come to mind. Many of us know that cranial work – I mean cranial work in the sense of traditional osteopathy – is fascinating and challenging at the same time. But there is another aspect that Barral has been exploring. This aspect deals with the fact that dysfunctions seem to be represented – or ‘mapped’ – in very distinct ways in certain areas of the brain. And I believe that this aspect may turn, sooner or later, into an essentially new modality of bodywork. I have just finished the manuscript of a book with the title The Croissant Inside the Brain: The Unusual Osteopathy of Jean-Pierre Barral. The German version of the book will be published this fall. The story – and the ‘stories’ – of that book are about the most challenging cases I observed when Barral occasionally worked at my office in Munich. On these occasions, whenever I wanted to see what my teacher and friend could do for ‘hopeless cases’, I saw no miracles at all. But in many other cases, those that were not truly hopeless, I became witness to moments that extended the limits of our manual efficacy far in the direction of results, and saw results that were far beyond what we expected. Coming back to your question – of course the New Articular Approach includes dimensions of work with the brain.

AS: Do you have practical experience with this in your own practice?

PS: I feel that I am – once again – at the beginning. Like my colleagues and the teachers of the Munich Group, I am more and more confronted with clients suffering from serious dysfunctions at the level of the brain. When European Rolfers started this journey with our first Rolfing Structural Integration (SI) classes thirty-five years ago in Munich, we had no idea where it would take us. Nowadays, when we have to see what we can do for children diagnosed as being handicapped, when we work with people who have brain-function issues after accidents, the New Articular Approach is an essential part of our craft. Not because it is about joints, but because it illustrates in a convincing way how moving or not moving a joint is interrelated with all the voices of the ‘orchestra’ of the human organism.

AS: Coming back to the DVDs, do you really think our colleagues are able to study the New Articular Approach by watching them?

PS: To understand this work, to master this work, we need to experience it within our own bodies and with the full presence of our minds. And of course we all need the presence of a competent teacher. The DVDs help us by adding a sort of ‘objective’ frame to our subjective experience of the work. And they give information in such a precise way that we can refine what we learned in class. They are not videos made during class, they are high-quality studio productions with the importance and helpfulness of every aspect considered: camera angle, lighting, editing, and opening music . . .

AS: And does this New Articular Approach fit into a Rolfing session?

PS: That’s an interesting question, and one that is simple to answer. When I started practicing thirty-six years ago, I was quite happy with what we could accomplish with classical Rolfing SI. But over time I was not always happy. Quite frequently I saw the limitations of our work concerning joint dysfunctions, and sometimes that was quite frustrating, not just for me. So some of us went in the direction of direct joint manipulation, and there was a sort of a battle about that – are we as Rolfers allowed to do that?; does our work need additional joint manipulation?

With the New Articular Approach we have a modality for the joints that fits well with fascial work. It gives us insight into the most significant details that determine joint function. It may add – by working on micro-restrictions – in a constructive way to what we as Rolfers are already doing with larger fascial connections.

AS: Do you have plans for a new project?

PS: I have been working with my dentist friend – Dr. Sebastian Schmidinger – on a DVD about temporomandibular joint (TMJ) dysfunctions. And in the fall Christoph Sommer and myself plan to make another DVD with Jean-Pierre Barral, this time on a very classical theme – Advanced Visceral Manipulation.

AS: Thank you for this interview.

The New Manual Articular Approach DVDs are available in the U.S. from http://barralinstitute. com (in the section Products & Specials). In Europe, they are available from www.munich-group-media.com.

Peter Schwind, PhD is an Advanced Rolfing Instructor and the founder of the Munich-Group for Interdisciplinary Manual Treatment.

Anise Smith is a Certified Advanced Rolfer. A former dancer, born in San Francisco, Anise has been living in Germany since her childhood.The New Articular Approach of Jean-Pierre Barral[:]