necessity of often working without touch with traumatised victims presents a special challenge for body psychotherapists. Organizations The European Association for Body Psychotherapy (EABP) and The United States Association for Body Psychotherapy (USABP) are two professional associations for body psychotherapists. The EABP was founded in 1988 to promote the inclusion of body psychotherapy within a broader process of professionalisation, standardisation and regulation of psychotherapy in Europe, driven by the European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP). The EABP Board committed to meeting the EAP standards for establishing the scientific validity of psychotherapy modalities and achieved this in 1999/2000 for body psychotherapy as a whole, with various individual modalities subsequently also achieving this recognition. It was accepted as a European-Wide Accrediting Organisation in 2000. EABP has a bi-annual conference; organises a Council of ten National B-P Associations; supports a FORUM of Body-Psychotherapy Organisations, which accredits more than 18 B-P training organisations in 10 different countries; the EABP website also provides a list of research papers; a searchable bibliography of body-psychotherapy publications, containing more than 5,000 entries. The USABP was formed in June 1996 to provide professional representation for body psychotherapy practitioners in the United States. The USABP launched a peer-reviewed professional journal in 2002, the USA Body Psychotherapy Journal, which was published twice-yearly from 2002–2011. In 2012, the sister organisations, EABP and USABP, together launched the International Body Psychotherapy Journal. There is also an Australian Association of Somatic Psychotherapy Australia. Cautions The importance of ethical issues in body psychotherapy has been highlighted on account of the intimacy of the techniques used. The term bioenergetic has a well established meaning in biochemistry and cell biology. Its use in RBOP (Reichian body-oriented psychotherapy) has been criticized as "ignoring the already well established universal consensus about energy existing in Science." There is a group of psychotherapists who believe that psychotherapy should be thought of as a craft and evaluated based on the effectiveness of the treatment, rather than evaluated based on scientific validity. However, efficacy studies of body psychotherapy have been few in number and, although the results are supportive of the use of body psychotherapy in some contexts, this trend "is not overwhelming". See also References Further reading Heller, Michael C. (2012). Body psychotherapy: history, concepts, methods. (M. Duclos, Trans.) New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Lowen, Alexander. (1958). The Language of the Body. Marlock, G., Weiss, H. with Young, C. & Soth, M. (2015).