Ida Rolf

Early life and education

Rolf was born in New York City in the Bronx on May 19, 1896. An only child, her father, Bernard Rolf, was a civil engineer who built docks and piers on the east coast.

Rolf attended Barnard College and graduated in 1916 with a bachelor's degree. In 1917 she began her doctoral studies at Columbia University and, at about the same time, also began work at the Rockefeller Institute in the chemistry laboratory under the supervision of Phoebus Aaron Theodore Levene. She earned her PhD in biological chemistry from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1920. Her dissertation was titled "Three Contributions to the Chemistry of the Unsaturated Phosphatides".

In the 1920s she was studying Yoga and Tantra with Pierre Bernard.

Career

After graduating, Rolf continued to work with Levene at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City. In 1918 she was promoted to assistant in the chemistry lab. In 1922, two years after receiving her PhD from Columbia, she was promoted to associate, then the highest non-tenured position for a scientist at Rockefeller.

From 1919 to 1927 she published 16 scholarly journal papers, mostly in the Journal of Biological Chemistry. Her research was mostly laboratory studies on biochemical compounds lecithin and cephalin. With the exception of her doctoral dissertation, all of her published work was co-authored with Levene.

In 1926, Rolf left her academic work in New York. She took leave to study mathematics and atomic physics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich and also biochemistry at the Pasteur Institute in France.

Rolf later developed Structural Integration. In addition to her 16 academic papers published from 1919 to 1927, she would later publish two papers in scholarly journals on structural integration. She had an h-index of 10 with a total number of 299 citations (February, 2007).

Structural Integration (Rolfing)

Structural Integration (or Rolfing) is a type of manual therapy that aims to improve human biomechanical functioning as a whole rather than to treat particular symptoms. Rolf began developing her system in the 1940s. Her main goal was to organize the human bodily structure in relation to gravity. Rolf called her method "Structural Integration", now also commonly known by the trademark "Rolfing".

Structural integration is a pseudoscience and its claimed benefits are not substantiated by medical evidence.

Rolf's second son, Richard, helped her to continue developing and refining Structural Integration, as well as assisting in preliminary studies of the healing effects of structural integration. They taught Structural Integration classes at locations around the United States in the 1950s. Based for many years in New York City, they worked together to advance the practice and to make the general public aware of the practice and benefits of Structural Integration.

In the mid-1960s she began teaching at Esalen Institute, where she created a loyal following of students and practitioners. Esalen was the epicenter of the Human Potential Movement, allowing Rolf to exchange ideas with many contemporary visionaries, including Fritz Perls.

In 1971, Rolf´s teaching activities were consolidated under the Rolf Institute of Structural Integration (RISI). The school has been based in Boulder, Colorado since 1972. As of 2010, the RISI had graduated 1536 practitioners, including some trained in Germany, Brazil, Japan and Australia. In 1990, a group of senior RISI faculty split to found the Guild of Structural Integration, which had 628 graduates as of 2010. Currently there are nearly two dozen schools teaching Structural Integration. Standards are maintained by a professional membership organization, the International Association of Structural Integration.

In addition to the proliferation of practitioners and training institutes that are devoted specifically to Structural Integration, Rolf's concepts and methods have influenced a wide range of other contemporary manual therapies. A growing number of organizations offer training in "structural bodywork" or in techniques of fascial manipulation that are clearly derivative but lack the holistic perspective of Structural Integration, instead focusing only on the treatment of specific symptoms (i.e. massage therapists, chiropractors or physical therapists).

Research foundation

In 2007, the Ida P. Rolf Fascia Research Foundation was formed to encourage and support evidence-based studies of Structural Integration's effects and its implications for conventional and complementary health care. It was introduced at the First International Fascia Research Congress (FRC) at the Harvard Medical Center. The foundation is dedicated to growing a symbiotic relationship between science and therapeutic practice. These events bring scientists and clinicians together to share their ideas and encourage collaboration. The Fascia Research Congress occurred again in 2009 in Amsterdam, 2012 in Vancouver, BC, and in 2015 in Virginia, US.

Personal life

Rolf was married to Walter Frederick Demmerle. They had two sons, Alan Michael Demmerle and Richard Rolf Demmerle. Richard was a chiropractor and also a Rolfing instructor who was involved in his mother's Rolfing project and continued her work. Richard moved to Switzerland in 1979 with Brigitte Waldmeier Demmerle, his wife, and their youngest son Michael Richard Demmerle. Richard Demmerle died February 1, 2015.

Publications

(From the Institute for Scientific Information.)