Marion Rosen

Marion Rosen (formerly Rosenfeld) was born in 1914 in Germany and was of Jewish origin, (although she was unaware of this until the persecution of the Jews began). Trained by Lucy Heyer (a student of Elsa Grindler) in massage and breath-work, Marion worked on clients who also received psychotherapy from Lucy’s husband Carl Gustav Heyer. Heyer was a Jungian psychoanalyst and a former student and colleague of C.G. Jung. Marion soon noticed that the treatment time for patients was greatly reduced by this combination of bodywork and psychotherapeutic intervention.

Having escaped from Germany, Marion took further training both in Sweden and in the United States as a physical therapist (physiotherapist). She also spent six months working with clients from the Tavistock Clinic in London while her brother (the late psychoanalyst Herbert Rosenfeld) completed his psychiatric residency there.

“This work is about transformation from the person we think we are to the person we really are”

Marion Rosen, Founder of Rosen Method Bodywork.

Rosen Method Bodywork grew out of Marion’s personal observations of working with clients as a physiotherapist. She discovered through her touch and dialogue that clients relaxed and felt safe enough to share feelings and memories which they had forgotten or had previously had to suppress. Getting in contact with these suppressed aspects of themselves often signalled a way to accelerated recovery.

Her work subsequently changed to focus on healthy people (people who did not come to her to be fixed but who were curious about her method and wanted more out of life). She started to teach her work to others in the 1970s, and Rosen Method is now taught worldwide. Training centres can be found as far apart as the United States, Scandinavia, Russia and Australia.

Until the day she died in 2012, aged 98, Marion was actively involved in teaching and guiding students in the USA and abroad, continually fascinated by the mystery of the body-mind relationship.