History
Antigym® was created by the physiotherapist Thérèse Bertherat (1931 – 2014). She is the author of bestselling “Le corps a ses raisons” / “The body has its reasons”.
Thérèse Bertherat and her daughter Marie Bertherat.
Having completed her studies in physiotherapy, Bertherat was unhappy with the education she had completed. In her experience, the pedagogical approach was inflexible and dry. She wrote: “We learned about the muscles of the body and the bones one by one. We were never taught anything about the body as a whole, only as an object consisting of individual parts. It was the same with the treatment methods; there was no holistic thinking.”
Her dissatisfaction led her towards other methods of treatment. Her meeting with the French physiotherapist Françoise Mézières became a turning point for Bertherat. Mézières had developed a completely new concept in anatomical studies. She regarded the body as a unit, with body parts which interacted with each other, and she developed a new physiotherapeutic method in 1947: Mézières’ Method.
Thérèse Bertherat was trained by Mézières, and then continued her own research. She explored other forms of physiotherapy such as energy therapy, eutonia, rolfing, gestalt, acupuncture and Chinese medicine. She connected these with her own knowledge of psychoanalysis, gained through years of studying Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and Wilhelm Reich. Even more important was her continuous work with patients. Through her meetings with them, she was able to develop her own method, slowly and painstakingly. She called the method Antigym®. Over time, she made it available world-wide.
Marie Bertherat, daughter of Thérèse Bertherat, took over her mother´s practice in 2014, and she is now the head of Antigym® globally. One of her main responsibilities is to quality- assess the training of all new practitioners.
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