CHAPTER 4The ideal relationship of the child with the parents is not a static but an active and changing one. The process of becoming an autonomous, competent human being with a sense of one's own identity and place in the world is a resultant of a complex interaction of energies, behaviors, relationships, attitudes, and genetic processes. There is a multilevel, simultaneous, mutually interdependent nexus of forces which is the center of the experience of being human itself. There are some elements of this process which I have not described in psychomotor terms, which task I would like to undertake now.
Interactive Energy
Life is essentially interactive. By that I mean what is implied in those words beginning Chapter 1, "Life comes from life. Life needs and relates to life." Experience in psychomotor therapy leads me to believe that the primary equation in life is feeling (or sensing) leading to action, leading to interaction. Life seeks targets for its own expression and growth. The concept of interactive energy includes five distinctive arenas, each with its own sensory-motor apparatus and type of target (an expansion of the three motor systems described in my book Movement in Psychotherapy). I call these five systems reflexive body righting, metabolic-vegetative, interpersonal, material (impersonal), and verbal-symbolic. When working with the interactive-energy concept in the interpersonal arena, I use a diagram of three concentric circles representing three spheres. The inner circle is the source of the interactive energy, the head or the brain. The next circle represents the body or action sphere. The outer circle represents the "other body" or interaction sphere.
[Figure 4-1, p. 54]
Experience in psychomotor therapy has led me to believe that there are archetypal pathways for the expression of interactive energy which result in archetypal patterns of behavior. Just as the behavior of the fertilized egg demonstrates that the egg "knows" how and where to attach to the uterine wall, it shows also that it "knows" how to receive the "responses" of the uterine wall. The primitive, archetypal behavior of the infant demonstrates that he "knows" how to respond to the ministrations of the mother. I am suggesting that on some primitive archetypal level, action itself "knows" its own effects and responses. It is as if the shapes of action which the body makes are in a jigsaw-puzzle-like match with aspects of the environment. For example, when a person expresses anger, he may swing his fist. The shape of this action anticipates the reaction of someone being struck and falling back. Implied here is that all parts of nature are connected and that the parts "know" each other. Life is not lived in a vacuum. All life is interrelated.
Consider the molecular structure of chemical interactions. When two elements combine to form a compound, they do not simply "hang around" each other in some loose fashion but their molecular faceting engages in a concrete, almost mechanical fashion. In an analogous sense, the matching facetings "know" each other; and through their "knowing" they are relating, sharing, and changing in a growing "learningful" way. Recent research in enzyme action suggests that the enzyme functions by having surfaces which geometrically match the surfaces of the elements of the two molecules which they will unite or separate. (Perhaps the analogy of the catalyst is appropriate for the educator, therapist. He should have "surfaces" that match the student, client, and the material). It seems possible to me that even at our advanced level of evolution and complexity, we contain some vestiges of this primitive way of relating. It also seems possible to me that when we are at our most primitive levels, in our infancy for instance, we are most likely to show archetypal and stereotypic actions and responses.
In psychomotor structures, I have learned to watch the body of the client to see where on his body the interactive energy can be perceived and then to attempt to arrange the accommodation by means of the "other bodies" of the group members to "match" the potential behavior that is appearing. An adult client is not a primitive infant and what can be seen on his body is a complex, symbolic conglomerate of tensions and imminent behaviors and inhibitions. How is this sorted out? First let us return to the infant. The infant is still pretty well locked into his instincts and primitive stereotypic reflexes. His interactions with his mother are fairly concrete, particularly where his nursing, tactile, and support needs are concerned. His mouth comes in contact with the nipple and breast of the mother and his little body is supported and cuddled in his mother's arms. His head and trunk are the particular areas experiencing the support, and his mouth and general skin surfaces the areas experiencing the nurturance and cuddling. In psychomotor terms his mouth is energized and "wants" to come into active contact sucking on the breast of the mother. An adult in a structure might not only experience a reawakening of the sucking mode but feel the clasping and squeezing in his hands, as well as the curling and uncurling of the toes, that are evinced by nursing infants. The baby's curled body position may indicate the shape the mother's arms and torso should make to match it in "counter-response."
The clasping and unclasping hands of the infant seem to "want" to squeeze the breast of the mother, as nursing kittens press their paws against the breast of the mother cat. The curling and uncurling toes do not seem to show specific goal orientation. It is possible, however, that the toes are an expression of pleasurable feeling without having an object. It is also possible that the feet are behaving in some tandem fashion with the clasping and unclasping of the hands and represent a kind of neural "echo" of the hands.
What have we been saying? We are saying that humans rapidly go from the stage of simple, mechanical, direct, concrete interactions with the world to complex, symbolic, indirect,
abstract interactions with the world. These abstractions should be based on satisfying concrete experiences and that is the type of ordering that we try to achieve in psychomotor structures. Since the human psyche is so flexible, and since the human propensity for symbolizing body parts and actions and the body parts and actions of target figures is rapid, there is great opportunity for fusion and confusion of basic actions and interactions. We see the work cut out for us in structures to include the tasks of finding the place where the interactive energy is appearing, finding the target and the part of the body aimed for in the target, and then attempting to make an ordered and clarifying reconstruction of what would be most appropriate, satisfying, and unfused. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that human emotions and feelings can be very plastic and also used symbolically. The task then, is threefold: (1) to assist in the unfusing and clarification of the confusion of the emotions (energy sphere); (2) to assist in the unfusing and clarification of the organs or body parts involved in the expression (body sphere); (3) to assist in the unfusing and clarification of the confusion of target figures (other body sphere).
Interactive Energy Directed toward Symbolic Alternatives
The goal of the interactive-energy schema is related to the goal of the concepts-regarding-infant-needs schema with the addition of the symbol-making process. Let me see if I can tie them together. It is understood that a fetus and then an infant needs certain types of interaction which include nurturance, support, etc., and that if those needs are not met by the parents he will find alternatives to those needs. Those alternatives include his own body processes, and both these processes and his own thoughts treated symbolically. It can be seen then that the symbol-making capacity of the human can be used as an auxiliary system of controlling the needed input from the environment. Using symbols that way is not the highest use to which symbol-making can be put, but it is a survival technique which permits much adaptation to inferior life circumstances. It promotes survival but hinders future growth due to the stultifying nature of the fusions and confusions that result. Thus when fusions and confusions show up in a structure, an attempt is made not only to clarify them but to provide the client with the direct satisfaction of his basic child needs with relation to the appropriate figure. However, therapeutic intervention must include the use of the energy that has been bound up with the inappropriate symbolic actions and targets. This is demonstrated in the following diagram, dotted lines indicating what should have occurred and would have been more satisfying and the solid lines what actually did provide satisfactions.
[Figure 4-2, p. 58]
This diagram represents perhaps the nurturing interaction of a client with a cold, unresponsive mother and a warm, cuddling, humming father. In the deficiency of actual mouth satisfaction, the infant very likely found internal symbolic means (including thumb sucking) of satisfying himself; however, it is possible that those suspended interactive needs could also have been met by his father's frequent feedings, cuddlings, and hummings. This client may feel rejecting toward females, feeling that they are cold and unloving (and indeed he might develop a life style that would place him in the company of such females only) and may seek out warm men with a certain quality to their voices. It is clear what consequences such fusion and confusion can produce. Immediately the client's role in life is confused by having a father who is more mothering than his mother, a mother who is not a good target for affection, and a style of relating to males that includes receiving warmth from them--which style can lead receptively toward homosexual fantasies.
What we try to do with such a client is to resurrect the original pattern of interaction and then to try to bring to the mouth the sense of pleasure and satisfaction that the male voice brings to the ear. It is very likely that he will go through a period of rejecting the mother figure entirely, even though she is drawn as a warm, giving person and is played by a warm, giving female in the group. He will very likely have to reexperience and express some of the original deprivation, frustration, and rage at the unsatisfying mother. Once that experience and rage has been encountered, the way is open for the acceptance of the positive mother figure at some future time. The result of that series of structures can be a change in his self-concept and a change in his perception and anticipation of relationships with females.
Interactive Behavior Directed toward One's Own Body
So far we have only examined interactive energy that is fused or deflected from its originally intended target and seeks alternative targets in the environment. Now I should like to spend some time exploring situations in which the child finds the environment so impoverished that there are no relationships from which to draw alternate satisfactions. (Of course, if the parents were physically abusive, the child could at least derive the "negative nurturance" described earlier.) This turning to one's self is more fruitful in the area of protection and support. Let us look at one possibility in the area of protection. As stated earlier, the innate need for protection for the child is experienced as a wish to be surrounded by the strong arms of the parents. Diagrammatically it would look like this.
[Figure 4-3, p. 60]
The dotted lines represent what would have occurred in the natural, normal course of events and the solid line represents what actually did happen. Certainly one wants a client to be capable of protecting himself, but if he has never, or only rarely, experienced the protection of his parents, it tends to minimize his ability to bring certain of his interactive energies in a more adult symbolic form into his contacts with other people. He tends to be aloof and self-sufficient, not needing people. A structure with such a client would probably include much rejection of the offers of help from accommodators in the group. If he were seen holding himself, one could speculate that the charged area of contact would be the surface of skin between his arms and his torso. If one could get him to relate those areas to others in the group, representing good parents, one would be well on the way to solving that bit of truncated energy expression. However, if one assigned such a client to hug his good parents, it would show some interesting results. Some clients who have been in such a situation have held the good parents with their arms only lightly, and the parent figures have reported that the client seemed to be shrinking away from them. Other clients have very strongly grasped the good parents and it soon became apparent that they were falling into the role of protecting the good parents rather than being protected by them. Still others have embraced the good parents so forcefully that they caused them to feel real pain. Possibly such a client was expressing, without necessarily knowing it, anger at the original set of parents and that is the assumption we would make in handling the structure. The leader could point out that the force directed toward the positive parents should indeed be directed toward the negative parents and should the client be prepared to express directly that anger it would open the door toward the future acceptance of protection from the good parents. At some point the client would probably have to experience or reexperience the lack of protection in the original setting. The feeling of vulnerability in the presence of the good parents would go far toward permitting that client to be vulnerable in a reality setting.
This particular structure outline points out how psychomotor therapy can split the ambivalence toward target figures and permit the angry feelings the client might have felt toward the good parents to be polarized toward the negative parents, allowing a successful acceptance of the positive input from the positive parents.
Clients who are represented by the diagrams showing the interactive energy being placed on inappropriate symbolic alternative figures and on inappropriate symbolic aspects of their own bodies can be classified, generally, as normal neurotics. Of course there are not hard and fast rules in this as people are so flexible that in some aspects of their personality they show pathology and in others they show complete normality.
Interactive Energy Shunted toward One's Own Mental Processes
Interactive energy is at first behavioral and then, as it matures with the individual, it becomes more symbolic. There are those individuals who by natural constitution or by devastating nurturant circumstances never experience their interactive energy--muscularly, motorically, or behaviorally--in sufficient doses for them to be able to utilize it as a normal part of their living process. A crude example of those circumstances might be a parent who constantly interrupted the child's normal interaction with her and the environment with admonitions and sharp noises or punishments. This could result in the child's not daring even to experience his interactive energy as a potential for action. Schematically speaking then, he would have to find some way to shunt his behavioral interactive energy to some "bodiless" system in his mind such as described earlier in dreaming, or to some symbolic system such as thought or daydreaming. Certainly this would not be a conscious decision but the results would be nevertheless decisive.
The extreme resultant of this would be the psychotic individual who had never properly made the transition from concrete behavioral interaction with a benign environment to maturation as a symbol-using adult interacting with the environment. The schematic design for such an individual would be as follows:
[Figure 4-4, p. 63]
The dotted line represents the normal pathway for interactive energy and the solid line what occurs with those individuals who can be classified as psychotic or having psychotic aspects to their personalities. The body is left relatively untouched by interactive energy and the interactive energy amplifies the internal processes in the brain to an extreme degree. If this were a diagram of a battery it would be demonstrating a short circuit. In an analogous way it could be said that the heat of anxiety could represent the misdirected interactive energy in the same way as the heated wire in a short circuit represents electrical energy that has not been "used" for its intended work.
The interactive energy in this diagram is used as substitutes in dreams, hallucinations, thoughts, etc. People represented by this diagram tend to have those characteristics described earlier as motor difficulties and behavior of bodiless type. The difficulties of working with this type of client are obvious. First, one must find some way to relate with the client although his interactive energy is not directed at one! Secondly, one must find some way to locate the target or targets to which it is directed. If the interactive energy were to reach the client's body, one would have some clue as to what was felt. But it is not reaching his body and it is reaching his mind, using his own personal symbolic processes. One must endeavor to decode the symbols that are the target for the energies and somehow manage to get the client to express those energies directly. Expressing them directly was probably so painful and even impossible the first time that getting him to do so now, so many years later, is obviously going to be difficult. Certainly the therapist will have to be extremely patient in developing a long-term relationship with the client, making it possible for the latter to begin to trust sufficiently to feel safe with expression in the presence of the therapist.
These clients have never sufficiently tested out the range of their feelings, so it is to be expected that they will have great misconceptions regarding the force of their emotions. And since they have little experience in truly individuating from the universal, they have no sense of what is them and what is not them, making it possible for them to believe that their energy expressions would have world wide repercussions. Another way of describing these clients is to say that their energies have imploded as can happen to the energies of a star. It has been speculated that such stars are difficult to find in the heavens because even their own radiations of light and energy cannot escape the intense force of gravity that has been set up by the implosion. I believe that clients who say that they have no idea what they feel are unable to receive energy from their imploded interactive systems which would give even them a clue as to what was going on in their emotional processes. In these cases I have tried to find these psychic processes that represent the binding energy of the emotions and then attempt to carefully loosen them. One example of that is a client who compulsively and frequently tapped three times in sets of threes to offset terrible consequences. I attempted in that case to suspend momentarily and temporarily that counting and tapping process and then to help the patient direct the resultant trembling agitation toward me or the environment in an acceptable and accommodating way. I speculated that the trembling, in her ordinarily very frozen and immobile body, was the appearance of some interactive energy. If I could find a means of showing her that I could help her contain, control, and limit that energy, I felt that I could assist her in making a tentative relationship with the real concrete world. Those attempts did prove successful in some measure.
Since anything can mean anything else in a symbol system it becomes extremely difficult to find those important interactive energy symbols in a psychotic individual who is not inclined to share anything of his inner world with you. So called "normal" clients often have difficulty in knowing exactly or entirely what they are thinking or really feeling in certain situations, and the process of making the interactive energy and expression explicit, concrete, and then accommodating to it simplifies the matter considerably. Perhaps this illustrates the difference between how resistance is met and handled in psychomotor therapy and how it is met and handled in traditional psychotherapy. In traditional psychotherapy the client is treated as if he is greatly interested in avoiding the painful process of therapy, and he must be goaded or pushed along by the therapist, implying that the healing force is mostly in the therapist and very little in the client. I find myself resentful of that implication. It makes the therapist too different from the client; granted that he is the expert and the client is in need, the client does want to feel better and get better as well as avoid the pain of his unhappy state. It seems that the therapist can assume there is operating in the client a normal health-seeking process which he can assist. Just as the medical doctor does not actually heal, but helps to set the natural healing process in action or to remove the obstacles to the natural healing process, so can a therapist understand that he is not actually the healer, but the assistant to the innate, balance-seeking mechanisms of the psyche.
When the psychomotor therapist offers the client the contract of accommodation he apparently also changes the rhythm of the therapeutic process as regards resistance. The psychomotor therapist offers an outlet and an accommodating target for the interactive energy that might be bound in some symbolic system. I can understand the difficulties clients in traditional psychotherapy have in the verbal situation where there is no contract for accommodation. In the traditional therapeutic setting the most painful memories of frustration, deprivation, unexpressed love, and anger are recalled where there can (by the very nature of the process) be very little response and certainly no accommodation. What are they to do with the activation of the interactive energy that such recalling inevitably produces? They must swallow it again just as they have in the first instance and added to that pain itself is the pain inflicted on them by their therapist who is reminding them that they are resisting. Once they have a place or arena, as they do in a psychomotor structure, to play out those feelings in an emotionally satisfying way, they are much more likely to face the issue of why they took such an indirect pathway to goal seeking and expression as they have done in the past. They will be in a more clear-headed and less painful position to explore alternatives to their behavior. Certainly many patients and clients in traditional psychotherapy do get help and do feel better after being in therapy; however I do believe that the process can be accelerated and significantly changed by the addition of some of the techniques being spelled out here and bringing to traditional therapy another set of tools and techniques to add to its already impressive armamentarium.
Resistance of a kind is met in psychomotor therapy. Some clients, at some point in their growth, do need to be goaded or pushed or reminded of the goal of therapy, but not to the extent that it is at the center of the process. Given a more satisfying alternative, most clients would opt for the healthier mode, just as would most therapists. However, on a scale that ranges from psychotic to normal, it is the patients with psychotic processes who show the most resistance in psychomotor terms. Those patients who have had a paucity of satisfying interactions are least inclined to open the old wounds; they have become rigidified in their pathological symbolic style of living.
Locating Interpersonal Interactive Energy in Other Energy Systems
As discussed earlier, the interactive energy may find alternative routes for expression if the original, normal, archetypal pathways are blocked or not available. To repeat, interactive energy is essentially motor as well as oriented toward specific external targets. When a client in a structure stops moving and interacting with his accommodators, I hypothesize that there has been an energy shunting at some psychic level and, to locate it, I use a model of energy arenas with the following schema. There are five energy arenas or outlets, the one that we have been exploring being the interpersonal interactive.
The interactive energy of one arena that is shunted to any other arena can overload systems not designed to use that energy and becomes an indirect form of expression. Thus one who is not very active on an interpersonal level may be found to be doing a great deal of daydreaming and fantasizing or he may have myriad body aches and pains which take up a good deal of his attention.
I am not saying anything radical or new here. It is common knowledge that some neurotic patients will develop psychosomatic ailments and that some neurotics will be compulsive procrastinators and daydreamers. What is different is postulating that the energy they are diverting is interpersonal interactive and then giving those patients or clients the opportunity to redirect the energies in a controllable, satisfying, motor way, as in a structure. The discovery of the covert means of expression is not as important to me as the subsequent opportunity for the direct expression of those energies. In other words, insight is not enough. The insight should be the first step toward redirection, not only in the therapeutic session, but in reality.
Interpersonal Interactive Energy Shunted to the Verbal-symbolic Arena
Let us say that a client is in a structure, perhaps just having given motor expression to a great deal of anger at the negative mother. He now begins to lie in the lap of the good mother and may say that he wants to see what good nurturance feels like. He may curl up in the arms of the good mother and having seen many other clients nurse on a fleshy part of the accommodators arm or hand, attempt to do the same. Suddenly he may grow quiet and the expression on his face is such that neither his hands nor his mouth nor his entire body is energized in the usual and discernible interactive way. He is not being actively rejecting of the good mother; it is more as if she were not there and the client were not there. After some moments of such silence I would usually interrupt the client and ask what his thoughts were. Invariably they highlight or are associated very strongly with what has just been going on. It is an excellent opportunity for discovering the client's symbols for nurturance and for having the client learn his non-motoric symbols for nurturance. One client at this point mentioned that he was in a kind of reverie about nature and particularly about trees and the woods. He recalled that as a child he loved to go walking in the woods with his father, and that as he grew older nature and woods were an important part of recreation and he spent a great deal of time camping and tramping out of doors. As a matter of fact, at this very time he was carrying in his jacket pocket a book on nature that he was reading in his spare moments.
The conclusion that I am drawn to in this case is that the client receives nurturance in a motoric way by being in contact with nature and trees and in a symbolic way by reading or thinking about trees. The stereotypical way of receiving nurture from a mother through his mouth was relatively meaningless to him at this time and any attempt to force it to be meaningful without engaging the energy around the nature symbols would be negatively productive. What I suggest the client do at this time is to fantasize that he is indeed in the woods or that his good mother is Mother Nature herself and to let himself experience the quality of emotion he gets in the presence of trees. He may walk, feeling himself amongst the trees or he may lie down feeling himself out of doors in the woods. One way or another, an attempt is made to reexperience the motoric aspect of the satisfying experience and then to try to associate that quality with the experience of lying in the good mother's arms. One step would be for him to attempt to hug the mother or relate in some way to the mother while thinking and feeling the way he does in the woods. He can be reminded that mothers can make people feel just as relaxed, safe, and at home as woods do. This is not to take away from the pleasures of the outdoors, but to bring that client closer to the possibility of relating warmly to females in a nurturant situation, first in structure and then, later in reality, in a peer relationship.
Also, the phallic aspect of the trees and its relationship to the father might be a possible association for the client. It is important to keep in mind, and to work with, the client's own associative processes, and not to press potential or future associations too early. With the knowledge that his love for the woods could include some aspect of making up for nurturant deficits, the client can review his emotional and experiential responses to females and see if they include, either in the present or in the past, the intensity and the quality he recalled while trying to nurse in the good mother's arms. If the client cannot successfully include the mother without doing injury to his sense of wonder and awe at the woods, it may be suggested that other group members stand and be representative of trees and then permit the client to "free-associate" in motor terms and see what he would do with the trees.
Similarly, another client found that nursing from the mother was a relatively meaningless event, but that the quality of the sunshine coming in the window had an uncanny attraction for him. By using the combination of his sensations in reaction to the sunshine in tandem with his relationship with the mother, he was able slowly to experience the life-giving forces from the mother that he derived from the sunshine.
Other clients, when questioned about their silence might report that a word just kept going through their minds without attachment to anything that they thought relevant. The word, when spoken aloud and in the context of a nurturant relationship, might suddenly take on new implications to the client or the therapist. Clearly, the process of free association is rich for therapy; however, it is by the inclusion of the motoric element that another value can be reaped. To repeat, it is not sufficient to know, but the knowing as a focus for new action and a new relationship in the therapeutic setting can take the learning one step further. To include the motorically interactive process of psychomotor therapy with the associative process of traditional therapy is another way of describing the above.
Let me give another kind of example. Let us say a client feels that he is very angry and wishes to feel murderous toward the negative parents. He may set up the negative parents in front of him and have them tell him some of the negative things his real parents might have said in an attempt to arouse the heat of his anger. He may stand there, listening to the negative parents' insults, but not showing a sign of being angry; his body can be observed to be unenergized and quite relaxed. One thing that could be happening is that the client is absorbing the negative stimulus as negative nurture in the form of a humiliation feast. If that is the case it is important that the therapist intervene and stop the negative intake. Of course the therapist should tell the client why he intervened and that could lead to the client's new understanding of his unconscious attempts to manipulate situations to produce humiliations for him. It could also be very provocative to the client and he may be incensed at the interruption from the therapist and insist that he be permitted to "run his own structure." The therapist must use his judgment in this case and decide whether to allow the client to continue (for indeed he may be working himself up by the repeated negative stimuli to getting extremely angry) or to demand that the process be stopped.
I have learned from the times when I have been more permissive or lenient in cases where the client for long periods of time had not reacted to the insults heaped upon him by the negative parents by rejecting them or the content of their remarks. In accepting the insults from the negative parents, those clients seemed to be swallowing the negative input while building up an unexpressed feeling of hostile omnipotence. I learned to recognize that process and to demand that the negative input be stopped and that the client find some way to discharge the rage that was being built up in him. In fact, the term and indeed the concept of negative nurturance came from just such clients. Let me focus on the result of continued restraint or inhibition of reactions to negative stimuli. I have come to understand that result not only as a passive-aggressive device but also as an omnipotence-seeking device. I have hypothesized that all unexpressed or untested strong reactions are contained interiorly as a way of inflating one's fantasy sense of power. All unexpressed emotions seem to amplify the longer they remain unexpressed. Those emotions need the testing of reality, and the limit-setting function of the good parents to place them in their proper perspective.
When such a client is asked what he is thinking about, he may answer that he was visualizing or fantasizing a tornado and that his parents were being picked up off their feet by the force of the tornado and thrown about. Saying this aloud might make the client laugh in delight at the thought. The therapist can suggest that the client imagine or pretend that he is the tornado and that he should express his interactive energy that way (yes, anger is interactive). He might then whirl about with tremendous energy and take great delight in the expression of it and at the accommodation by the negative parents. Or he might be appalled at the thought of getting angry at the negative parents and say that they are so much bigger than he that they would overwhelm him and smash him if he were to express anger. He could imagine a tornado knocking them about but certainly he could not imagine that he as a little boy had the power to affect them in the slightest. Perhaps his fantasy of the tornado was one way to offset the impotence he felt in their presence.
The goal for both these reactions is the same; to bring the interactive energy to the body itself and to experience either the accommodation or the limit-setting that would seem necessary and appropriate. Let us first take the reaction of the client who enjoyed being the tornado and enjoyed seeing his parents flung about by his force. It is good that this client is able to "muscularize" some of his anger and actively express it, but another step must be made. In being a tornado, there are elements of omnipotence and superhuman strength that would seem to need limit-setting and clarification. In fact the client who was able to become a tornado in this structure might find himself in the same condition as the one who could not imagine being actively angry at his parents even as a tornado, although as a human boy he would attempt to be directly expressive of his anger at the parent. If the therapist were to suggest to the tornado client that he express his anger as a boy, the client might find that he was feeling fearful and wanted the protection of the good parents. He then might tentatively poke a fist out toward the negative parents from between the bodies of the protective good parents and see what effect it had on the negative parents. If that were successful he might become more daring and then become more forceful.
The structure might take another tack. The tornado-acting client might become fearful after seeing the effects of his force and would find his anger vanishing while verbalizing that he is concerned about the fact that he has such violent inner feelings. The therapist could then suggest a limitation structure. The client could then vent the entire force of his anger and see that he could indeed be contained and this would be very reassuring. It should be clear that it is not a simple matter that we are discussing. When the symbolic forms of anger or other forms of expression are discovered, the client and the therapist must work toward finding situations that will tend to release the emotion and permit its expression on a motoric level. It was not without reason that the expression was symbolized in the first place. After the limitation structure, the client might find himself more able to vent his anger on a normal day-to-day level. There is a delicate series of judgments that a therapist in psychomotor therapy must constantly be making: whether to provide accommodation for the anger while having it directed toward the negative parents or to have the anger limited while directed toward the positive parents. The general rule of thumb is: if the accommodated anger produces fear or a sense of omnipotence, then limiting is in order; if the accommodation produces relief and a sense of being rid of the negative effects of the bad parents, then no limit need be set.
The client who could imagine the tornado but could not permit himself to behave like a tornado could be given a few alternatives. He might be offered or ask for the protection of the good parents and then have another group member behave like a tornado while he watches. Or he could have the good father behave like a tornado while he remained protected by the good mother. The latter alternative might produce other consequences. It might isolate him from the father and remind him of being fearful of the father while being protected by an over solicitous mother. Every move in a structure has consequences and a therapist must be alert to all of them.
Or he might want to behave like a little tiny tornado while in the protection of the good parents. He might begin with short puffs of wind and watch the effects of that on the negative parents. This could lead to a slowly rising crescendo of force until he finds himself able to more fully express his anger. Whatever alternative is selected, it is important that the client arrive at a place where he is able to express his own feelings effectively without relying on the protection or assistance of outside figures. Naturally, a client does not begin at that point but reaches it by slow degrees; using the imaginative and creative capacities of the therapist as well as his own, he can learn to find those avenues of expression that are open to him and develop competency and daring through slow developmental steps.
Whatever choice is made, the therapist should watch the effect it has on the client for only that way can he be sure that the appropriate moves are being made. Sometimes an alternative can be offered that makes remarkably good sense to the therapist and to other group members but which is a colossal flop when applied to a specific client. Only the client's reaction should be the guide to what is working and what is not working. Every new condition or element that gets introduced into a structure has consequences and some of the consequences can be absolutely unpredictable. Some minor move in a structure might remind a client of something with the most profound implications which cannot be ignored but must be dealt with. The client and the therapist must work in an improvisational frame of mind and dare to walk into the new territories that may be opened. One cannot plod along in a stereotypical manner, expecting that each client's response will be predictable. Primitive emotions may be stereotypical and one of the aims of the therapy may be to reestablish typical pathways for behavior, but each human being is remarkably complex and different from each other human being in terms of actual experiences and symbolic formations. The therapist should respect those differences and be prepared to respond to all the subtle changes and nuances of each client and of each structure.
Interpersonal Interactive Energy Shunted to the Metabolic-vegetative System
Sometimes in a structure a client may find that he does not feel any impulse to move in any particular way, feels no tensions in any muscles and has no associations that are calling attention to themselves, but feels a pain in a particular part of his body, for example, his eyes. The location of the pain seems to have some relevance to his emotional state. However, that fact is usually learned after the exploration of possible movements pertaining to the pain and not before. For instance, the client might be in a structure or situation where the anticipation was that he would be angry. He does not feel angry, nor is his body energized in any way except for the pain in his eyes. At such times I have suggested that the client attempt to express the anger with his eyes--to try to pierce or penetrate the negative figures as if knives or a ray of some kind were coming from his eyes. The accommodators are instructed to respond to the subsequent narrowing of the eyelids as if they were being penetrated by knives or by a painful ray of some kind. The narrowing of the eyes and the accommodation sometimes seem to "connect up" in the client's mind and he feels that indeed his eyes are causing pain in the accommodators with their efforts. This can lead to an amplification of the expression and a slow shifting from the symbolic arena to the active. The aim is to bring the symbolic--and this time metabolic-vegetative--expression to the realm of skeletal muscular expression. Once again it is usually those clients who have found that their skeletal muscular methods of expression were either inhibited or rendered ineffective in their childhood who turn to these more symbolic forms too early.
Our aim in psychomotor therapy is not to make concrete primitive monsters out of symbolic complex humans, but to expand the range of expression in those individuals whose expression was not permitted to take the usual concrete course before going through the process of symbolization.
Significantly, during the use of the eyes as a weapon, the client often speaks of feeling as if energy were flowing from his eyes to the accommodator's and says that he is getting a great deal of satisfaction from the forceful narrowing of his lids. Frequently, the energy of the narrowing seems to travel to the rest of the face and a grimace or a tightening around the mouth ensues. Sometimes the client, as he experiences the rising of his angry emotions, begins to growl in an animal-like fashion. The growling can change to shouting at the accommodators and that can lead to the making of fists and the pounding of some object while the accommodator responds as if struck.
Often, after such a structure the client will mention that the pain in his eyes has subsided or gone away entirely. Parenthetically, it is quite common for a client to mention at the outset of a structure that he has a painful headache and following a successful and energetic structure report that his headache has gone. These comments have confirmed my belief that the interactive energy that normally would have led to a satisfying motoric expression had been shunted to another system. The pain in the eyes can be understood to result from an overload on that system.
Sometimes pain will be noted in the hands. In that case the client is instructed to motorically "free associate" and see what type of behavior, using that part of the hand that is in pain, and what kinds of responses from the accommodators provide a satisfying or pertinent feeling. It is possible that the client may wish to hold onto the hands of his positive accommodators and recall a time when he was very frightened and had no one to turn to. It is also possible that the client might find that when he made a fist with the hand that ached, a sudden surge of energy would flow into the hand, making it close into a much tighter fist. Or perhaps the client may want to strike at some object with the flat of his open hand. It is up to the client and the therapist to use their imagination and creativity in exploring the possibilities of the potential expression.
Sometimes a client may feel nauseated in the course of a structure. The way we have become accustomed to responding to that in psychomotor therapy is to suggest to the client that he permit the feeling to become active. For such occasions a large plastic bucket is kept available and many clients will go through violent and forceful retchings with the negative accommodators responding as if being vomited upon. The surprising thing about such expression is that no one has ever really thrown up in a structure more than a bit of phlegm although the feeling of the nausea is intense and the expression of it total and forceful. However I do not trust being without an available bucket in such circumstances.
The nausea seems to take two forms. Sometimes it appears to be a result of rage that has found that avenue for expression and other times it seems as if the client were attempting to get rid of an emotion that is an integral part of himself. If the latter seems to be the case, the therapist can mention that all his emotions are all right and that he doesn't have to get rid of any of them. This is an important factor, and if the client seems to respond favorably to that license to feel, it is preferable that the license come from the good parents. When the good parents say it, the client may remember that his own parents would not permit such expression and the structure can be polarized around the negative parents telling him to stop behaving in that fashion.
Another type of the seeming somatization of expression is suggested by the tingling that some clients report in various parts of their bodies. Wherever the tingling takes place, the client can attempt to move that part of the body until he comes across some movement that seems to be relevant or meaningful to what has been going on in the structure. (It should be noted that there are times when such exploration proves fruitless and the structure seems to become bogged down in speculation, both verbal and nonverbal, regarding what the client is really feeling.) The tingling is treated as if it were a way the body used to call attention to a portion of itself. I know that that sounds like a mind within the body talking to the watching mind of the client but, that is my anthropomorphic/poetic way of describing that phenomenon.
Sometimes the pain will show up in the chest or throat. Experience has shown that this tends to be a precursor to a form of expression that will include the powerful breathing of the client. This can result in structures with great shouting or great sobbing depending on which way the structure develops. There have been times when I have suggested to clients who have reported pain in their chests that they try shouting at their negative accommodators. If attempted when that is not the actual cause of the pain, the fact becomes obvious to both client and therapist. The client who attempts to shout when shouting is not the business of the body at that time, shouts with little force and expression. He may then adopt a relaxed exploratory stance, called a species stance, in an effort to find out what other kinds of motoric or pre-motoric messages there are in his body. What I am getting at is that the client may find that he wishes to cry and then remembers an event recent or past that has been weighing heavily on him. The resultant tears and sobs are not contrived but have, I believe, a direct relationship to the pain felt previously. For following the outbreak of sobbing the client often mentions the lessening or absence of the pain in his chest.
To sum up this chapter, the therapist in psychomotor therapy includes in his functions that of "tracking" interpersonal interactive energy. That is, he can see where the energy shows up on the body, help it to become concrete and motoric, and help to direct it toward appropriate targets. If the energy does not show up as overt action, his function is to find its symbolic expression in the realm of thought or fantasy and to assist in translating it back to action. If the energy shows up as pain, somatic disturbance, or tingling, he must help to translate it back into action and to clarify its expression and target. This schema of interactive energy and its possible conversion to other forms of energy systems, although hypothetical, provides a useful frame of reference when faced with the infinite possibilities that each human being in any situation presents to the onlooker. Previous to the use of such schemas, the work was more difficult and the learning process similar to groping and probing in the dark. Without such schemas, the description of complex events would be without shape or organization and without guiding principles to assist in the handling of the emotional phenomena of psychomotor structures.
Of course the schema alone is not enough. People are too complex and human and varied to place in any mold, however flexible. Not all phenomena are explainable by this schema, and moreover, even if they were, the therapist would still be faced with making all kinds of difficult judgments and decisions on a moment-to-moment basis and these cannot be made by any system, schema, or what you will. The therapeutic situation still demands the responses of a feeling, caring, intelligent, warm, and sensitive human being as well as a trained, rational, clearheaded, and thinking professional.
* TMs and © Copyright Albert Pesso and Diane Boyden-Pesso 1998 all rights reserved
