Chapter Two - Psychomotor Sessions as an Arena for Learning for the Therapist and ClientPsychomotor therapy sessions* have afforded me a valuable classroom for the observation of emotional phenomena and behavior. Sessions include "structures" during which a group member reexperiences memories and feelings, and, in addition, permits the tensions and bodily changes felt during these "structures" to be the impetus for action. The client is encouraged to move in any way that the body tensions seem to call forth. For instance, if the tension is felt in the hand, he is encouraged to move his hand in any way that would either reduce the tension or "use" the tension. The aim is not to make the tension "go away" as one wishes an unpleasant feeling to go away, but to move in the direction of the tension, thus permitting it to become overt action.
The psychomotor process is based on the hypothesis that emotions tend to become action and action seeks to find appropriate or satisfying interactions. Psychomotor group members are taught to become sensitive to the relationship between emotions and action so that they can begin to move directly to the impulses they discover in their bodies. They are also taught accommodation, which is a way of controlling the interaction process to provide satisfaction to the action that is expressed. In the energy--action--interaction hypothesis the accommodation or controlled interaction is seen to "match" the action that is being expressed, in the way one part of a jigsaw puzzle matches or fits into another part. It is understood in psychomotor theory that many emotions are not experienced or actions expressed by people because the family setting or circumstances they were raised in did not provide satisfactory accommodation or "matching" responses to their feelings or behaviors. By offering accommodation to as yet unexpressed emotions and behaviors, the psychomotor process taps the reservoir of repressed, inhibited and unconscious feelings and permits those aspects of one's being that have yet to be discovered, to be expressed and hopefully, to be integrated into one's life.
The specific process in a psychomotor group in which this takes place is called a structure. In a structure one group member at a time is given twenty-five minutes during which he explores his own personal feeling state and develops out of that an interpersonal relationship using other group members as accommodators. When a person in a structure expresses anger, by punching, biting, or kicking, the accommodation includes actions and sounds that simulate the responses to punching, etc. The satisfactory accommodation of anger includes the death or destruction of the target figure. To offset the loss of important figures in a structure, the psychomotor process offers polarized, or two sets of, figures. A group member is offered a negative mother and father and a positive mother and father. The negative figures represent only the negative aspects of the real-life, many faceted figures. When they are symbolically destroyed it is not as if one is killing one's entire parents. The positive parental figures do not represent the positive aspects of the real figures but idealized or archetypal parents who perfectly satisfy the needs for growth. A structure provides an opportunity for symbolic re-birth in a perfect setting that matches his need for expression and personal growth. In psychomotor theory the major developmental needs that must be met are nurturance, support, protection, and limits. The positive parent figures fill the deficits of one's real or fantasized past. It is postulated that when developmental needs are met the further process of becoming one's uniquely creative self can be attended to with more energy and less distraction.
This matching of action and response gives us a picture of what the ideal childhood would be like as seen from the viewpoint of a remembering, feeling adult. It also permits a testing of behaviors and responses. One may think that he wishes to perform a certain action to correspond to a certain feeling or tension, but when he actually makes that movement he may find that it is not at all what he thought it would be, and that he has done it without any strong feeling or impetus. It is possible that one could be denying that feeling and therefore have no emotion attached to the expression of it; but if the client has worked for some time, those feelings and behaviors that are possible for him to express with emotion come out sharply and clearly.
When a client considers what responses he wants from his accommodators, he may request a response that seems satisfying to him in his mind, but when he experiences it it may seem bland or unpleasant or unwanted. When he asks the accommodator to respond in other ways, he may find exactly the response that suits him or that has been waiting for without perhaps knowing that he has been waiting for it. The same is true of his own behavior. When he moves in the way that his body would seem to indicate, the satisfying or matching response is unmistakable.
It is by watching the congruency between feeling, action, and response in thousands of hours of structures that I have felt that a pattern of interaction for different ages of life can be discerned. It has seemed to me that certain predictable things occur or should occur in infancy, in childhood, and in adolescence that permit emotional growth. Observation of clients of different ages, from ten through seventy, and of different backgrounds and cultures has led to the belief that there are some universal "givens" that must be met in terms of action and response, which permit the cultivation of the most consciousness and choice while maintaining individual cohesion and remaining alive in the fullest sense.
Conflict Between Cultural Background and What Is Learned in Therapy
It is conceivable that psychomotor therapy could put a client in conflict with his religion or culture; hence it is the job of the therapist to work with this person in such a way that the models of behavior that are extended and permitted do not jeopardize his standing in his cultural community. It is also conceivable that the client considers his inherited culture to be alien to his "true" nature, and psychomotor therapy could be used to assist him in finding the "rest" of himself that his culture has not evoked and help him locate his place in the world at large.
Another alternative would be to assist a person in becoming himself and then aid him in finding or translating those tenets of his culture that support that growth. Often one can work with an individual who feels that he must rebel against his family or his culture for he feels that they are his enemies and that they will "kill" him. He may find that those very things he was rebelling against can be usefully integrated into his world view and his self-concept.
Toward a Universal Culture
Although there are aspects of psychomotor therapy that would seem to lead toward the development of a universal culture regarding man's emotional and behavioral self, its over-all aim is toward inclusiveness rather than exclusiveness. That is, it is directed to accepting and including all that man is and can be, rather than limiting and defining narrowly only those things that permit man to be called man.
Acting Versus Thinking in Learning about Emotional Desires
This manner of learning about man's nature by watching people in their structures highlights the important difference between a man "thinking and saying" and one "experiencing and doing." I or one of my clients might "think or say" that such and such a behavioral response would be the ideal or most appropriate for a given emotional memory or circumstance, but it is only by the client's actually "experiencing" his accommodator's responses and "doing" his own emotional movement that he and I both learn what his emotional, motoric, bodily (instinctual, if you will) requisites are.
What Does the Young Human Organism Need?
From a combination of reading, speculation and watching clients during structures being born or in which they reexperience intrauterine existence, this picture results.
When the organism is conceived, it is made up of material from two individuals. It is not itself yet. It is not aware of itself as a separate entity. It requires that the materials from the two parents have sufficient compatibility and genetic content to effect the conception and keep the life process developing. It needs to find, or to be placed, or fall upon the appropriate place on the uterine wall (somewhat as the seed of a tree has to find, or be placed, or fall upon fertile ground), and that wall and the materials around it must be compatible with the new organism. Apparently if any of the foregoing conditions are not present, or if the materials are in any way defective, a natural abortion takes place.
If all goes well, it could be said that the sperm "knows" how to find the egg, that both sperm and egg "know" how to unite, that the new organism "knows" how to find the appropriate place on the uterine wall, and that the wall "knows" how to relate appropriately to the growing organism.
What Can We Learn from This?
I would like to explore the area of human psychic structure and also of memory. It is a real event that we talk about when we speak of the sperm and egg coming together to form one organism. That means that at the deepest roots of our structure, we were at one time two and not one. Is there some primitive memory of this twoness and does this twoness pervade or influence our nervous system?
Recent experiments have shown that a fetus can be conditioned in utero. How far back can we go and find learning and memory possibilities? Can an egg learn? Can a sperm learn? Can they remember? Do they bring their remembered history together? How and when do the two systems unite to become one and experience themselves as one? Is not this oneness--to unify under one banner all that one is--becoming the entire point of therapy and education? There is a conscious knowing and an unconscious "knowing." Isn't the job of therapy to bring these two knowings together?
If there are memory traces from our earliest prenatal selves, it seems likely to me that they would reside not in our conscious minds, which did not yet exist, but in our organisms or "body-minds." This seeking of "data" from our "body-minds," and bringing them to an arena where all the learning and information stored in our parental genes can be reaped, is the central principle of psychomotor therapy.
It is commonplace that individuals under stress seem to regress to an earlier, less complex, more satisfying past. Sometimes clients, from normal to psychotic, may find themselves during a structure in fetal position and wish to be covered over completely and to feel the pressure of people's bodies or hands, or of pillows around them. This is quite different from a nurturance structure where the client wishes to be held and nurse in the arms of the mother, with the arms of the father embracing the two of them to give them support and protection. The latter structure indicates a higher level of trust.
Trusting Life
The fetal structure connotes a return to a different order of trusting and not trusting. The client in the fetal structure may verbalize his feeling that his parents didn't know how to take care of him. He may say that living is too painful and impossible; that he doesn't know how to live; that his parents never saw, understood or responded to him; that the world is too crazy, unsafe, and upset to live in; that his parents never wanted him, etc. Obviously this client is not about to trust people. However, he may be able to trust certain natural processes. He can be told that his mother's uterus "knew" him and "understood" him and "responded" to him. He can be told that life is possible, that life does "happen," that even though his parents didn't know how to live themselves nor how to raise him, his innate living material does know how to live and his parents' physiological processes can be trusted.
It is not sufficient simply to tell a client this. He must also experience the warmth and safety of the fetal position. From the warmth of the therapist and other members of the group he may learn to begin to trust people, but first he must find some fundamental process that makes life not only possible, but also relaxing and pleasurable. If he can grasp the experience of the well-cared-for fetus, he can perhaps find a basis on which to go on living, and then can learn to trust people and become a person himself, rather than an unconscious carrier of the life forces within him. Many "normals" can live without trusting others. Somehow they manage to maintain an existence, albeit limited in satisfactions, that can pass in some cultures for the average. Seriously ill persons, however, reach a point where their very existence becomes untenable due to their paucity of conscious or unconscious life experiences that meet even their most meager needs. The rebirth structure offers a possible beginning point for therapy for all those clients who can no longer trust others to any extent to care for their painful lives and who need something beyond people to begin living with.
Another bit of information that can be gathered from the description of conception and the attachment to the uterine wall is the similarity between primitive "knowing" and what is called accommodation in psychomotor therapy. When the sperm can be said to "know" the egg, it can be understood that each has surfaces which permit a mutually satisfying relationship. (In the act of accommodation the satisfaction may not be mutual, but as the accommodator behaves synchronously with the client, the client's satisfaction is high.) When it is said that the uterine wall "knows" or "recognizes" the new organism, it can be understood that it has processes on its surface which match processes on the organism, and that through those processes a relationship occurs which is mutually satisfying, or to put it more simply, a relationship occurs which furthers the development and survival of both sides and therefore has value.
The accommodator, by his very act of synchronous relating, lets the client experience being known and related to. To go back once more to the uterine wall and the implanted organism, there is a further stage which includes the flow of energy in a simple, concrete, and utterly real way. Energy in the form of nurturant fluids does pass between the uterus and the fetus. This represents to me primal knowing, relating, and growing. Whatever is needed by the growing fetus is provided by the uterus, unquestioningly and perfectly. It has led those of us engaged in psychomotor therapy to believe in the intrinsic right of living things to be provided for by the very act of being conceived. There is nothing a fertilized egg must produce or perform. It has an intrinsic right to live by virtue of its being itself. It has an intrinsic right to be provided for by virtue of its being itself. Those clients who feel that they cannot live because they have done nothing worthwhile, or who have performed badly or who have failed, can be reminded that life itself in its most primitive form makes no such demands. It is only later at the more complex level of interaction with one's parents and one's environment that survival depends on performance.
If one were to extend the word knowing to include the meanings in learning, one could see that in the act of relating (in this basic sense of the word relating) one is learning. Accommodation then, which enhances and perfects relating, can be understood as a powerful learning device. The major process by which life goes on can be seen to include the sequence of being, with articulated surfaces which permit relating, and that relating includes the flow of energy, or nurturants, or learning, which permits growth and development. Psychomotor therapy gains its usefulness, I think, from the use in structures of accommodation, which permits this flow to occur in a developmental way.
The basic tool in psychoanalytic therapy is the phenomenon of transference. Transference in psychomotor terms would seem to include the client's expectation of certain relating surfaces or modes from the therapist. When the client in psychotherapy begins to transfer on his therapist, he is in a position to relate and therefore to grow and learn from his relationship. The use of the transference in traditional phenomenon psychotherapy is limited, I think, by the therapist's inability in a one-to-one relationship to accommodate in the psychomotor sense to the client. With the addition of accommodation and the splitting of the target figures in a structure to positive and negative, the therapist is in a position to offer the client the appropriate responses he is anticipating. The traditional therapist does not accommodate either positively or negatively and the learning comes more from what the therapist does not do than from what he does. With accommodation, both positive and negative, the relationships with the therapist as well as with the rest of the group are strongly enhanced. With those relationships and the kinds of controls that exist in psychomotor therapy, the transference can be not only intensified on some levels (in that the flow can go both from client to therapist and from therapist and other group members to client), but diluted on others (by taking the intensity and ambiguity from the therapist and spreading them among the rest of the group).
It seems to me that by not responding in the transference relationship, the therapist is behaving like a uterine wall who says, "I see what it is that you want from me; I hope you see what it is you want from me and understand the fallacy and foolishness of ever expecting me to respond to you as you wish." I admit to overstating the case. It is a rare analytic therapist that would behave in such a passive and then painful manner, but the theory of a Blank Screen does permit the possibility. The psychomotor therapist could provide a different set of responses from those described above. Certainly he would not say that he, personally, was a uterine wall and that he, personally, could provide the necessary nurturant flow. If he did it would make him seem to the client a personal god who could magically save his life. It is important that the psychomotor therapist assist the client in developing a mental or memory set that will place the interaction in the appropriate setting and time. Those group figures who placed pillows, blankets, and their own bodies around the client in the earlier example could represent symbolically the uterine wall, and some female group member's hand, possibly placed against the stomach over the navel, could represent symbolically the umbilical cord. The therapist could suggest to the client that he imagine being an embryo and permit himself to fantasize how it would feel to have all this happening to him. The therapist would point out that the client was indeed not now an embryo in fact, but that he could suspend momentarily his adult concept of himself and enjoy the symbolic and fantasized experience of intrauterine living.
All this could be done entirely in fantasy, but it is important to include concrete sensory and motoric input to the fantasy to make it a more believable and educational experience.
Earliest learnings seem to benefit greatly from sensory-motor elements. It is only after such basic concrete events that one can go confidently on to more abstract types of learning and have them be experienced as real. Perhaps those patients who experience little of life as real can be seen to be suffering from lack of satisfying concrete relationships in the earliest days, months, or years. This would point to the value of psychomotor therapy or some other form of therapy using sensory-motor techniques with seriously ill, hospitalized patients.
Memory
What could be the point of a grown individual's going through a structure about being a fetus in a pillow-blanket uterus? What therapeutic use could it have? What educational use could it have? An adult is certainly not an infant. Being an infant is certainly not the problem of that adult. Why not concentrate on what his problems actually are, rather than delve so far back into an uncertainly remembered and probably highly fantasized past?
The question could be responded to by another question, "How does the past, whether remembered or fantasized, affect the present?" What indeed is a memory? Why are some memories so powerful and vivid and some memories so weak? What is the difference between memory and learning, that is, what is the difference between remembering and knowing? Knowing, as we have used it heretofore, presupposes a present, ongoing relationship, or energy interchange, as that between the embryo and the uterine wall. Let us take the meaning behind memory apart and see what it consists of. Memory develops from this energy interchange, the effects of which are recorded. The constantly developing embryo is at any given moment the embodiment of all changes produced by the energy interchange. The present, then, is a record of the past, and learning or knowing presupposes change.
All that the new organism is when it begins its existence is a most encapsulated history of its biological past. It carries into its future (by means of its genes) all the knowledge regarding living itself that has been accumulated by the race without the excess baggage of memory of the specific events experienced by each individual member of the species. Dying may become a necessity because of the wastefulness of the organism's having so much of its energy wrapped up in recording and recalling so many events. The only way an individual could become immortal would be for him to give up the personal baggage consisting of the record of his personal events and that would be the same as being reborn as one could not (without such record) recall in any way what he had been or been through. However, the recording process takes place in the living cells themselves, so how is one to give that up to begin anew without dying? Death of the individual is the only answer, and perpetuating an abbreviated history of the species the only way to begin again. Perhaps the explanation of the varying longevity of different species lies in their varying capacity to carry history through the present into the future. Death is the price of having a history, or it could even be said that death is the price of life.
How Are Events Recorded?
I should like to explore the old categories of mineral, vegetable, and animal with regard to the recording of events. For mineral, let us take a rock; for vegetable, let us return to our tree; for animal, let us take first a household pet, a cat, and then, separately from the rest of the animal kingdom let us take man.
First, we shall take the rock. The rock, in its immediate present, is the history of all its components. It has within it a record of geological events, including massive heating, congealing, and cooling (not to mention its molecular history in being born in the furnace of the stars). Its particular shape is a record of its interaction with other rocks, with the sun, with ice, with the air. Each interaction with another energy system leaves its mark or its record on the very structure of the rock. The rock remains a rock, recording the events that bespeak its energy interactions from the past into the present, so long as energy that reaches it is no greater than its intrinsic energy to maintain its shape or coherence. For example, if that rock were at the seashore, it might record the interaction with the sun, with the air, with the water, and with other rocks and grains of sand that have been washed over it. The smoothness or roundness of the rock would attest to or record the energy interaction with the sand and water; the chemistry of its surface would attest to the energy interaction with the sun's rays. Should a larger and heavier rock fall on our rock with a certain momentum, our rock might split and no longer be itself. Should the sun's rays or the heat of the sand or air become such that they would melt the components of the rock, it would no longer be itself. Should the air or the sun or the water, over a period of time, strip away all the particles of the rock, molecule by molecule, the rock would no longer be itself.
The rock, then, maintains its identity only so long as the energy of its interactive events is not greater than the energy of its coherence. This would hold true for the vegetable and animal kingdoms as well. There is a range, therefore, within which learning, knowing, relating, and recording can take place, but beyond which dissolution and death of the individual result. That is, if one is to control the length of one's life, one has to have some control over the energy of interactive events. But what is a rock to do? Can a rock say, following an impact with a medium-sized rock which duly left its mark in the form of a chipped edge on our rock, "Boy, that was a close one. I'd better look out for medium-sized rocks in this vicinity?" First of all, can a rock sense its vicinity, as well as sense the shape of other-sized rocks, and even if it did, what could it do to alter the course of events? Could it respond differently to the course of events, or tell other rocks--that it knew and liked--how to deal with medium-sized, edge-chipping rocks? All our poor rock can do is record the impact and "know" about medium-sized rocks, in an even less "knowing" way than the seed "knew" the earth, the water, and the sunshine.
The seed arrives on the earth packed with history, but in a different way than does the rock. First of all, the seed is alive, which basically means that it has the capacity to reproduce itself. The history it carries is not its own individual history, for truly it hardly has one, but the history of the species. The seed "knows" (remembers?) how to interact with the elements so as to become a tree that can produce seeds that know how to become trees. At this point perhaps we should clarify the use of the word know. It seems necessary to divide "knowing" into three aspects of one process: knowing as interrelating; knowing as learning; and knowing as remembering or recalling. Having a history of successful living is valuable to the seed, for should it find the same conditions in its own present that permitted trees to exist in the past, it can bring this information successfully to bear upon the interactive events in the environment. In other words, having a genetic memory makes the future possible so long as the future is very much like the past. If there were sudden or rapid changes in the environment, the seed would have no chance, but with the operation of natural selection and with slow environmental changes, it could "learn" new things with which to cope with the changes. In a sense the seed which becomes a tree has a past and a present but really very little future. Individually, it cannot plan or prepare for changes that may be forthcoming in a way that a human can. In a certain sense the tree making a seed is "experiencing" the future. It would be a more accurate experiencing of or preparing for the future if its seeds were different from what it was as a seed.
To sum up: the tree's memory is genetic. A tree's individual history of having experienced small changes in the environment is not what it recalls in order to cope with these changes the next time they occur. For instance, consider the small environmental change of the earth's rotation, causing the sun to be at different angles and directions in relation to the tree at different times. The tree doesn't change its leaf angles because it remembers that this is what happened yesterday, but its genetic make-up is such that the action of the sunlight causes cells to grow in such a way as to cause the leaves to face in different directions. The tree can be said to be knowing, or relating to, the apparent movement of the sun, but it is only learning the same lesson that all trees of its species can learn. Its response is not a new learning, but the repetition of an old lesson. Let us not derogate old lessons, however, for they make tree survival possible.
Let us take note of another factor. When the position of the sun changes, sensory mechanisms in the structure of the branch and twig, which measure the amount of sunlight, release or inhibit the growth-producing substances in the appropriate places to bring about the necessary angle changes. This can be seen as a primitive stimulus-response mechanism. What I mean to illustrate is the hookup between sensory mechanisms and behavior-modifying mechanisms in nature, even including the vegetable kingdom. Trees, as with all living things, must have methods of controlling the energy interactions with the environment, as stated earlier, in order to maintain a dynamic equilibrium. The control of the energy can come about from the structure of the tree (bark, roots, branches, etc.) as well as from the cellular response of the tree. Indeed the greatest control factors in the tree are in its structure, as noted previously.
Clearly, genetic memory or knowing is crucial for survival of the species, if not always of the individual. As one goes up the scale of living things, one realizes that upon genetic memory and knowing is built the possibility of individual memory and knowing. Interestingly, there is a corresponding lessening of numbers of seeds or new infants as life becomes more conscious and individualized. Let us now examine the animal kingdom with the household cat as our subject. In addition to considering the meaning and value of memory in respect to the control of the environment and of the future for the species and the individual, we are even more concerned with the value of memory in therapy. The cat has genetic memory, as is evidenced by its structure and behavior. The cat looks and acts like a cat. That is, she (I refer to my black female mother cat) moves and behaves in certain situations much like any other member of her species. She is certainly herself as an individual. She is recognizably herself, much as a tree is individually recognizable as itself. The cat's and the tree's individual histories of interactions are each uniquely their own as no other cat and no other tree lives in precisely their time and space.
The genetic memory of the cat family shows up very strongly in the mating season. A neighbor's male cat showed up on our back deck for many days courting our female. The male knew we had a female, and, when he had the chance, knew how to relate to her sexually for very soon our black cat was pregnant. I should describe something of the appearance, behavior, and attitude of the neighbor cat when he waited for our black cat to make herself available. We have an opening onto our deck which has large glass sliding doors. When the drapes were open in the evening we could see the neighbor cat staring intently inside while he yowled loudly. Should our black cat be visible, his interest would seem to increase and he would seem to be looking for some way to get beyond the glass door. If we decided to let our black cat out at these times, if she was so inclined, he would move rapidly to her and show even more heightened interest. It seemed to me that our lovers were in this state for at least a few weeks and possibly a month. (Perhaps it is just the attitude of parents of a daughter, but that neighbor cat seemed to be endlessly hanging around the house and was a perfect nuisance.) The one or two times I came upon the pair actually engaged in sexual intercourse they seemed entirely engrossed, full of energy and excitement and of course behaving exactly and in the same position, including male's vise-like hold with his jaws on the female's neck and head, as all cats probably have through history. But those cats were not bored! They were obviously living spontaneously in the moment. They were very likely experiencing powerful emotional sensations; and if we could monitor their bloodstreams, we would find a veritable storm of hormones. But those cats were not just the blind, mechanical, abused pawns of nature; they were nature itself in the bodies of cats having a ball! If Zen teaches us to seek and find eternity in the mundane, they were well taught! If our hippie youth teach us to "swing" and "go with it," those cats know all about it.
This raises the question: How much free will is there, if any, in the natural world? There is clear evidence of individuality and uniqueness, but is there free will? More specifically, what evidence is there of free will in the human and what do education and/or therapy do toward developing that capacity? Or is the goal of education and therapy the grateful and humble acceptance of the world as it is--that is, adjustment? Without choice, what changes can education and/or therapy actually bring about? What is the range and limit of changes, assuming that change is a possibility? These are interesting questions. Where is free will in this case for the cats? What would the point of free will be in this case? If those cats were human they could choose many, many alternatives of behavior, but which would cause the most joy? If they were brought up in certain religions, they could perhaps decide not to have intercourse and experience instead the joy of renunciation. Or, and this is an important point, they could consciously know as humans that they were being deeply influenced in their feelings and behavior by their genes, and consciously and freely decide to let themselves be excited and moved by those feelings and drives. Is that a legitimate use of the term free will?
There would have to be important differences, of course, between the cats' giving free rein to their instincts and the humans' doing the same. When nature called, the cats were still on our back deck. Should a human pair have remained on the back deck or found a "more suitable" place? A lot would depend on the background of the lovers and that of those in the house and here we begin to see some of the dilemma of being human. The human knows too much about the implication of his actions and can fall into the human trap of not acting at all.
Cats do not have much range of adaptation for their behavior. But certainly they can learn about their environment and learn how to get the most out of it. Let us see how memory or past experience influences their control of the environment and of the future. We have seen how genetic memory influences the cat's behavior in reproduction, yet there is a more subtle way in which learning that includes genetic memory can take place. Let us say that our pregnant cat has now given birth to her first litter. One of the results of the delivery is that the mother cat begins to have milk at its little teats. The mother cat and the kittens have drives which are mutually satisfying. It does not seem to me that the mother's drive to lie and be suckled and the kittens' drive to suckle are entirely automatic, however; when they find each other doing mutually satisfying things, the obvious pleasure they experience is sure to intensify their actions. They may then learn to perform those actions even better than they could by the influence of their genes alone. What I am outlining is the relationship between genetic learning or memory and learning to adapt that behavior with reference to the immediate conditions of the environment and themselves. By trial and error the mother cat and the kittens can find that they can more consciously and directly effect satisfaction from the genetic drive to suckle and suck. I am sure the kittens learn how to be better suckers than their instincts tell them to be, because the satisfaction they derive from sucking acts as a motivation to improve it.
Let me give another example. Watching kittens is a fascinating pastime. Kittens seem to know how to suckle, how to groom themselves, how to scratch, how to stretch and yawn, how to eat, how to eliminate, etc. None of these things do they do very well, nor do they excel in walking, climbing, and running. Sometimes I have watched a kitten in the midst of one action, say scratch, begin another action, say stand up, and have observed the apparent collision of two drives, to the bewilderment of the kitten. I hypothesize that there are general and not too sharply formed behaviors which are genetically originated which the kitten can see and experience. Being a kitten and having some measure of self-control and adaptability, he is able to consciously participate in this action so that it affords him the pleasure of the scratched itch where he is itching. He is doing two things then: using the genetic drive to scratch to his own immediate advantage and his learning to perfect his instinctive scratching is being reinforced due to the pleasure derived from that act.
When the kitten responds to the sound of the electric can opener and comes running, is it because he remembers that food usually follows that sound or is he only conditioned? Does he have the capacity to recall other times when that sound preceded food or is he living solely in the present and the same stimulus produces the same response because it has been reinforced by satisfaction? Can a cat or kitten consciously remember or is he merely a conditioned organism?
Our kittens learned very rapidly to use the kitty litter tray that the mother cat used. I believe that the mother cat served as a model for the kittens and they did as she did. When they do that as adult cats, do they remember seeing their mother doing that a long time ago? Or do they just live in the moment and continue what has been successful? How much can a cat consciously know about his being, about his environment? In that knowing which is so different from unconscious "knowing" he would have to be able to stand off from himself, a stance that we know humans can take. It is this self-consciousness, conscious recall, and capacity to take action other than genetic, conditioned, and modeled action that makes man peculiarly man among the other animals.
When a tree interacts with the elements, the record of the interaction is contained in the cell structure of the tree. For instance, if there has been a season of unusual wetness, the structure of the tree will demonstrate it. If the tree were situated in a place where there was constant strong wind from one direction, the structure of the tree would demonstrate it. In both cases the tree, if it survives, can be said to have learned how to respond to such conditions. The tree still lives entirely in the present and cannot "recall" that event except as it is itself an expression of that event.
When a kitten has its first encounters with humans and they have been satisfying or pleasant, its future encounters with humans will produce responses similar to the past ones but not necessarily because the cat remembers. The behavior of the cat is produced by his ongoing neurophysiological equipment which is present-oriented (to the best of our knowledge) and not past or future-oriented. He does not sit and contemplate humans and internally relish or fantasize how nice it is going to be to sit on their laps and be scratched and petted because he remembers how nice it was yesterday.
Let us now consider the human. There is no doubt that he has the capacity for genetic recording or remembering. It can be demonstrated that he learns and remembers through conditioning. It can be said that he learns and remembers through mimicking. Man and perhaps some of the other higher animals seem to have an addition to the nervous system that permits a different kind of flexibility and adaptation denied the lesser beasts. I would like to postulate here that in life all those organisms that are equipped with sensing or recording mechanisms also have corollary mechanisms of action or response to that which they record. For instance, genetic recording is obviously hooked up to cellular structure and to instinctual behaviors, conditioning recording certainly produces behavior that replicates the original event, modeling recording certainly demonstrates the living capacity of some animals to do what they see being done. So with man's capacity to record events in other than genetic, conditioning, and modeling ways, and behavioral capacities to respond to such recording, we must add a behavioral capacity to respond to this new recording or learning mode. This behavioral mode is that of purposeful or controlled action and the recording mode that of monitoring all events on a replayable screen of consciousness. To elaborate, not only do humans have all that animals have in capacity to record the present in our very living cells and structures, but we have a new neurological consciousness, like an interior TV tape that we can play back and tinker with.
One of the results of this is that we as humans can sit back after a situation has been lived through and play back the event at our leisure and learn from it what we didn't have a chance to learn from it the first time. We as humans can learn while we are doing nothing but thinking. Writing a language and speaking a language seem to be reflections of the same process of recording events in retrievable and reusable packages in order to plot out the future with greater accuracy.
When I watch one of the kittens trying to find a way to return to the deck which he has learned to leap off of, I see his careful assessment (or so it seems) of distances, firmness of ground from which he is to take off, etc. All those preparations could be said to be anticipations of the future moment when he is to leap up to the beam, so he does plan for the future in some limited respects. But he cannot do any of that planning without being in contact with the ground he is about to leap from and having within sight the beam which he is trying to reach. We humans have a way to reconstruct interiorly through the symbols of words or some other devices as yet undiscovered in our minds, to consciously know and remember what it felt like to prepare to make that leap and even to reexperience some of the emotions of that event without the use of the conditioning effect of the ground or the beam. Perhaps it can be called conditioning but conditioning by the symbol of the external stimulus and not the physical reality of it. Symbols then, can be experienced as real to humans and that is to their glory and to their pain.
Man's consciousness and the motor system connected to it provide the possibility for free will, if indeed it exists. Man's capacity for developing behavior patterns that are not connected to genetic memory includes the capacity to inhibit genetic behavior, for how could non-genetic behavior occur if instinctive behavior occurred willy-nilly when the individual had decided to take a more rational course of action? Sometimes our inhibition is not entirely successful for we can all recall situations when the unintended act was performed even after a rational course had been decided upon.
I would now like to return to the fetal structure which stimulated all this speculation on the meaning of memory. We can see now the many ways that man has at his disposal to learn, and to attain a repository of information. He is capable of genetic learning, conditioned learning, (trial and error learning is a type of conditioned learning), mimetic learning, and conscious recall or remembered learning. The aim of a psychomotor structure is to release the capacity of the human to recall, not only verbally, but, more important, in motor terms, all those events and interactions which have not resulted in satisfaction or pleasure or maturation, experiencing and "playing them out" again. This time the conscious, rational minds of the client and the therapist are available to glean new learnings, attitudes, conditionings, and modelings from the replaying, while permitting in a safe therapeutic environment the expression of energies and behaviors that had not been expressed in the original event, and adding to this memory positive relationships and experiences that had not been available in the original event.
Once again I ask the question: what is the point of going back? The problem is in the present and in how the future is to be dealt with. Obviously past learning controls the present and in a sense, predicts the future, that is, unless one gets a grasp on the patterns that have molded one's self and attempts to change them. There seem to be times when it is important for certain experiences to occur in the animal world, and if these experiences do not occur the negative results that accrue are irreversible. Simply removing the mother goat from infant goats for periods of an hour or more soon after birth and then returning the mother in a normal way thereafter can result in premature death for the kids. What is our adult client doing in that only now he is seeking the nurture from his mother that he did not receive when he was an infant? How did he survive when the goat did not? Perhaps man can overcome certain environmental deficiencies by his capacity to experience symbols as real. Perhaps humans can derive nurture from other sources than the mother by using their capacity to inhibit and control their genetic life and replace that nurturance with symbols created in their own minds that somehow, albeit partially, overcome the deficit. Perhaps early as well as later he can confuse his inner symbolic life with concrete external life. How long does the human organism, waiting for the experiences it needs to grow with, remain receptive to new symbolic input through psychomotor structures? I believe it is possible, using the human power of recall, to reassemble those feeling states and emotions and ideas one had as an infant and place this experience, this new and partly symbolic and partly concrete experience, beside them as if the new experience had occurred in the past. He can, after that, experience the memory of his structure as if it had occurred in the actual past. When we watch a client in a structure are we only conditioning him to experience warmth from people now and in the future and not dealing with or affecting his past at all? If the past can not be re-experience, how is it that the client can verbalize about feeling a different body size, experiencing a different body image, finding the quality of emotion he identifies with being an infant, may even cry the way a baby cries, unexpectedly find a part of himself that doesn't know how to talk, that cannot move as an adult but only as a squirming helpless infant, that wishes to suckle, to clasp with his fingers, etc.?
When his body and mind are in this state, are we to interrupt him and say, "Listen, you are an adult; stop acting like a baby. You cannot go back. You will have to face the fact that you were deprived as an infant and understand that those feelings have nothing to do with you now." All these things said would be true but would we be helping him to truly face the present or the future?
What we do is to create a structure and accommodation where all his needs can be met, not by us literally in the group with him, but by us symbolically as the parents he never had and which he deserved to have. We attempt to achieve the fullest match between his needs and our responses, and inevitably the client achieves a level of satisfaction and relaxation that is far distant from the agitation he showed earlier. He can also be afforded the negative parents toward whom an enormous amount of rage would be forthcoming, permitting his experience with the positive parents to remain unambiguous and undisturbed. When he is through the structure and re-experience his present sense of himself, he may have a new picture of the world on which to base his future expectations. He is now in a position to anticipate that there might indeed be people who can understand him and relate satisfyingly to him, and he can begin to grow from there.
How is it that the client can recall and reproduce so graphically at that time the emotions and actions of an infant? Perhaps it is that humans remember those things that did not turn out well and forget those things that did. For instance, we are more likely to recall those questions in an exam that we could not answer properly than those which were a snap. When things do not turn out well we experience frustration. When we experience frustration we get angry. If we find ways to express the frustration and anger, we have still to overcome the frustrating experience. If perhaps we find no way to overcome the frustrating experience and no way to express the frustration and rage, we are in a bad place. Humans seem to have the capacity to inhibit, as described earlier, genetic and other types of memory and learning and also the capacity to recall. We think that in psychomotor therapy we are taking advantage of that recalling capacity in permitting inhibited and possibly misdirected energies more direct motor expression, which them permits more rational choices. It is hypothesized that unless they are so expressed the misdirected emotional energies distort and contravene the rational energies.
If we were to take an adult cat that had not been well treated in its infancy and place it with a group of other cats, would it regress to kittenhood and try to suckle and get angry and bite in memory of the absent nipple of the mother cat? We know that it would not. Our cat would be locked into the "now of itself." It could not recall as our human client could. It could not overcome the vicissitudes of its inferior infancy. It would have to bear the results of its history, whatever they were. I do not think that it would be sufficient for our client to change if he only understood what had happened to him when he was young. What would make him truly believe that the future could or would be better? If nothing beyond that, a positive-ending structure might make him inclined to believe that at least those in his group could be nice to him, but I believe it does that and a good deal more.
Animals certainly must have a screen of consciousness which is somehow recorded interiorly and mentally. Animals remember which is their territory and which is another animal's. Perhaps there are markers--visual, auditory and olfactory--which assist them in this recall each time they move through the territory, but they do remember pathways and locales they have been through before. The question is, how much innate capacity have they for internal representation of a symbolic form? Bees are known to have the capacity to report the location of pollen sources to other bees. Isn't this working with symbols and then manipulating the symbols for the purposes of the future? However, has the bee decided to do this or is he locked into his instinctive equipment which has the limited capacity to symbolize only events having to do with pollen gathering? Perhaps the appropriate attitude should be that animals and insects show rudimentary forms of symbol making and symbol use whereas man has a very large capacity for the same.
Dreaming
Animals dream. I have often seen my German shepherd in what appeared to be similar to a human dream state. He will move in a way that is reminiscent of running, his breathing becomes rapid and he utters small barks. Is his motor system simply turning over in his sleep without a concomitant representation in his head of some encounter that would include running and barking? My inclination is to believe that he is dreaming, meaning that he must have some capacity to symbolize events and then recall them as if real, at least in a dream state. If that is the case, then dogs and other animals that dream have that inner, "playbackable" symbolic screen that only humans are supposed to have. There must then be two different orders of screen, that of dreaming which is an automatic or not consciously directed process, and that of thinking and planning which is of a conscious and future-directed process. I would like to hypothesize that dreaming is a somewhat "bodiless" state where the inner symbolic representations of reality are manipulated by automatic processes in the brain for mastery of internal energies and external events. By using the term somewhat bodiless I mean to point out that emotional events in the animal world are usually responded to behaviorally but that in a dream those neural impulses and glandular discharges can be shunted to another arena which is essentially bodiless but which has some small measure of motoric discharges (as the grunts and squirmings we have all experienced and seen in others will attest) and sensory input, as rapid eye movement studies show, for the eyes seem to be following the movement "see" in the dream. Is the dream state the early neurological model for symbol formation and manipulation that we see in conscious thinking? The sequence toward the evolution of symbolic thought processes could be first a sensory-motor experience, then the symbolic representation, or automatic memory of that in a dream which includes some sensory-motor content, and then the conscious manipulation of those symbols without (or with negligible) sensory-motor experience.
What I am seeking to describe is that mental and behavioral capacity that man has for dealing with the inner and outer world on three levels: that of experiential interaction with concrete reality, that of dreaming, and that of symbolic thinking. I believe that included in what we call mental illness can be the misapplication of energies that would go toward interaction with concrete reality and expending them on those processes that are merely the inner screens for the symbolic experience and manipulation of that concrete reality. Said more simply, mental illness can include the confusion or fusion of those three arenas, with the patient attempting to relate or interact to his own inner processes as if they were external reality. What we attempt to do with mental patients in psychomotor therapy structures is to take that interactive energy and direct it toward other people (accommodators) and wean it away from its application to one's own symbol-making processes.
This could explain the physical appearance and behavior of certain mental patients who are described as having motor difficulties. That energy that would mobilize their bodies to respond in a concrete, interactive, instinctive way with the environment could be used in a "bodiless" symbolic way described in the dream and thought state. Schizoid in this description would mean split away from the body and its normal interactions with other bodies. And the "concrete" thinking of those patients could be explained as treating and experiencing the symbols of thought and dream states as if they were indeed the concrete reality they are confusing it with. The equation seems to include the possibility of a simple reversal. Inner symbol processes are experienced as concrete interactions and concrete interactions are experienced as inner thought or symbol processes.
Life seems to move toward an ever greater and more conscious control of the environment. Our genes carry information regarding successful control of and adaptation to the environment, and the process of natural selection is the means which nature uses to test new modes of control and interaction. By what seems to be a random manipulation of the microscopic shapes of genes, adaptation of behavior to the macroscopic environment can be improved. Of course most of the random manipulations result in monsters and failures; however, those fortuitous combinations that result in greater control over the environment replicate themselves and are passed down as valuable or at the least nondestructive information for the species.
Another stage for the testing of new information that would be valuable for the species and to the individual is dreaming where microscopic, possibly random, symbol manipulations could demonstrate new possibilities in the macroscopic world of real events. Dreams could offer two uses to humans. One, the commonly accepted one where those emotions that cannot be expressed during the day in reality can be expressed in the "bodiless" dream state, and two, the learning of new behavior and response possibilities from the random manipulation of the symbols of daily events. Certainly we see enough monsters as natural selection and mutation must create monsters in our dreams, but a certain percentage of the manipulations would perhaps prove valuable and lead toward new adaptations and better control over the environment. Probably both those processes go on simultaneously, explaining both the familiarity and the originality of dreams.
The most recent stage for the testing of new information is the stage of conscious thought. There the manipulations of the microscopic symbols of reality are more conscious and more directed, thereby providing the more rapid explosion of new information and new controls we as humans are now experiencing. When humans first became humans, this process must have been relatively slow since the external symbols, the written words, did not appear until fairly recently. With the advent of a system which permitted the transmission of this new knowledge from person to person in a concrete form, a repository, much like the microscopic repository within the genes, is assembled which is used to salvage the individual knowledge for the group and for future generations. With the advent of instantaneous communication media, the dissemination of this new information is now becoming global which should result in a relatively global culture.
In short, the slow moving evolutionary process of random manipulation of information is being accelerated through the use of dreams and conscious thought, placing in man's hands the possibility of conscious evolution of the species. Should man's dreams and man's thoughts be contaminated, so to speak, with confused application of interactive energy, or in other words, would this rapid evolution and control of the world be infected with the mental illness of misdirected psychic energies, the result could be disastrous. This, then is a plea for the rational use of thought and technology toward the goal of species and life improvement and not species and life destruction.
Now with this hypothesis regarding the evolution of dreams and thought and symbol-making processes, we see a greater differentiation between man and the other animals. We have also highlighted another aspect in the use of psychomotor structures. A structure might be seen as an invented arena that taps the human potential to learn from the manipulation of dream materials and conscious thought materials using sensory-motor memory and reinforcement, as well as instinctive, interactional modes of relationship. It also uses some of the qualities of "playing," whereby certain roles can be tested and experienced. In sum, psychomotor structures offer an extremely wide range of learning, growth, and clarification opportunities other than the mere acting out of bodily impulses. I will go into exhaustive detail further on in this book, describing many structures so that the kinds of controls, limits, and freedoms that are permitted in a structure will be entirely clear to the reader. But first, in the next chapter, I would like to return to the question "What does the young human organism need?"
*See Albert Pesso, Movement in Psychotherapy. New York: New York University Press, 1969.
