Peter A. Levine

It has been suggested that this article be merged into Somatic experiencing. (Discuss) Proposed since July 2024.

Peter Alan Levine (born February 19, 1942) is an American psychotraumatologist, biophysicist and psychologist. As a psychotherapist, he offers lectures, advanced training and seminars on Somatic Experiencing (SE) he founded worldwide. He received his doctorate in medical biophysics from the University of California at Berkeley, and a doctorate in psychology from International University.^{[citation needed]} He is the developer of SE^[1] and founder of the Foundation for Human Enrichment. He described his understanding of coherence with the acronym SIBAM (sensation, image, behavior, affect and meaning). For Levine, a complete phenomenological experience is only given with the simultaneous activation of those five aspects. In the case of coherence, all five elements of consciousness combine with one another. Trauma creates a fragmentation of the coherence of experience. Separately from the meaning, an image triggers an affect, e.g. black rubber boots trigger the impulse to flee. The here and now becomes there and then. By emphasizing only two of the channels of the SIBAM model, cognition and behavior, cognitive behavioral therapy ignores three very important aspects of coherent experience, sensation, image and affect.^[2] Levine was a stress consultant for NASA on the development of the space shuttle project.^{[citation needed]} He was a member of the Institute of World Affairs Task Force of “Psychologists for Social Responsibility” and served on the APA “Presidential Initiative on responding to large scale disasters and ethno-political warfare”.^[3]

In October 2010 he received the Lifetime Achievement Award^[4] from the American Association of Body Psychotherapists.