ABSTRACT
Tom Andersen is most well known, of course, for his introduction of the ''reflecting team'' into psychotherapy, and authors will have quite a lot to say about the ''reflecting process'' and ''reflecting talk''. But crucial and distinctive to Tom's way of being with his clients is his sensitivity to what authors will call the ''livingness'' of things, to living, bodily events, both his own and those of his clients. Tom carried this in-out, tension-relaxation over into his psychotherapeutic relations with his clients/patients. Tom helps to create that atmosphere of profound trust in which a speaker feels enabled to reveal his or her internal depths. Thus, of the many dimensions of Tom Andersen's work, authors have chosen to emphasize just one of them—his focus on spontaneously occurring bodily activity as manifested in the special intonation of words, in pauses, in the timing and rhythms in and of people's speech—and to explore what this focus means for him in his practice.
