Sophrology, the origins

I.    HISTORY (AND GEOGRAPHY)
Madrid: the birthplace of Sophrology
The founder of Sophrology is Professor Alfonso Caycedo. After his early education in Colombia, Caycedo moved to Spain to study in the faculty of medicine at the University of Madrid where he became a doctor of medicine and surgery. He specialised in psychiatry and neurology under the direction of Lopez Ibor, a Spanish professor of psychiatry.
When confronted with the options available at the time, Professor Caycedo believed that that there had to be something more than electroshock to treat patients with psychiatric illnesses, and in particular depression. One option was hypnosis, but he noticed that many people were wary of the term as it was often associated with something mysterious and even magical. In fact it was often seen as a means of theatrical entertainment.  For this reason, when he first started to use similar practices, he coined the term sophrology in October 1960; Sophrology comes from the Greek,
•    SOS = serenity, harmony
•    PHREN = spirit, consciousness  
•    LOGOS = science,
In the same year he founded the first department of clinical sophrology at Madrid University. At this time, sophrology was in fact very close to hypnosis, although sophrology advocated a more humanist approach to the patient.
Switzerland and Phenomenology
The next stage in the history of Sophrology took place in Switzerland, where Caycedo studied with Ludwig Binswanger, the Swiss founder of phenomenological psychiatry, in 1963. Caycedo was his last student, and became familiar with the method of investigation of the consciousness suggested by Husserl and Heidegger and this definitively influenced the direction of his research on the consciousness.  Thanks to this his aim became to rediscover the phenomena of modified states of consciousness with a phenomenology-inspired approach.
The Far East
When in Switzerland he also married; his wife was already interested in yoga. This dovetailed neatly with his interest in ways to modify consciousness, and he embarked on a trip to the orient from 1965 to 1968, where he visited India, Tibet and Japan. When in India he learnt Yoga beside some of the great Yogis whom he met through Indian doctors. In the Himalayas, he met one of the doctors of the 14th Dalai-Lama, and discovered methods such as Tummo which allows one to reach modified states of consciousness. Caycedo also visited Japan where he was equally impressed by Zazen. Caycedo recognised the importance of the body in these different methods. My understanding of this approach, where the body has its influence on the mind, and not only the contrary, is one of the things that I personally feel is a huge strength of sophrology.  
Upon his return he wrote:
‘Sophrology is not trying to transplant Eastern methods. It is trying to adapt the contents of these processes, with lot of respect for the disciplines. I propose the name ‘Dynamic Relaxation’ to describe a method of Sophrology training that is practiced in groups with therapeutic and preventative aims and objectives. This training does not require any particular belief system.’