Born in 1914 in Nuremberg, Germany, Marion Rosen was a young adult as she and her family began to experience the anxiety and fear of the Jewish community in Germany in the 1930’s. 

In 1936 she began studying touch therapy in Munich with some of the leading innovators in body-oriented therapies in Europe. During her apprenticeship, she worked with many patients undergoing psychoanalysis and working with a Jungian analyst named Gustov Heyer. In this context, she drew on touch therapy to help people to access unconscious feelings. This was a seed that would inform her work many years later. 

She left Germany in the late 1930’s as war broke out, and became a physiotherapist while she waited for US passage in Stockholm. She later completed her US licensure in physical therapy at The Mayo Clinic. 

Her experiences meant that she understood the connections between the physical body and the emotional self.

As she worked with her physical therapy patients, she could explore more deeply how people's deeply held tension in the body was related both to the functions of the muscles themselves (from her physical therapy background), and also how this tension was related to unconscious patterns of emotional holding (related to her Jungian background). These explorations eventually became The Rosen Method. 

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In 1982 she founded her school to train others in The Rosen Method here at The Berkeley Center. She was the founder and guiding light at the Berkeley Center during its first three decades.