Interpersonal interactive energy works through the emotional motor system, that motor system, described in my previous book, which makes people congruent with their feelings, emotions, and drives--a state which I call inner environment congruency. That is, it is that motor system which is impelled by the inner state of experience and directed toward a target. When I wrote about the emotional motor system in my previous book, I had not yet developed the concept of interactive energy and therefore did not realize that the matching of behavior to feeling could not be achieved unless the behavior resulted in a satisfactory response from the outer environment. For example, when one is angry with another person, his anger is resolved only if his movements effect a response from that person. Therefore I described it only in terms of that motor system that produced behavior related to interior states of feeling and being; paradoxically I described the voluntary motor system as that system that was utilized to develop congruency with the external world, not in terms of what one wished to do but in terms of what one could do to meet that world's demands. The effect of voluntary movement was not necessarily pleasure in the fulfillment of inner needs, but rather pleasure in the mastery of the body--making it do as one bid. Purely voluntary movement necessitates the inhibition of emotional movement and interactive energy. It is "learned" movement rather than genetic movement. By that I mean that the individual who gains mastery over his body and can move as the external world of objects and people seems to demand has learned to move that way by observation, trial and error, thinking, and planning. The person who moves directly to feelings in respect to his needs and his interpersonal relationships is using not so much learned movement (although the refinement of his primitive urges is developed by the addition of voluntary movement) but inherited movement patterns such as fight and flight reactions.
In the example of the structure where a client was active in an emotional way and then became quite still, and when asked what was he thinking responded with a verbal symbolic association, it could be said that he had shunted to mind energy; and if he were to move it would be sure to be voluntary movement. In fact those mental patients who have shunted their interactive energy from their bodies to their minds are most likely, primarily, to be using voluntary movement to activate and mobilize their bodies. Interestingly, voluntary movement can be used as a symbolic form of expression of interpersonal interactive energy. That is, when interactive energy gets shunted to the mind, not only does the mind provide symbolic expression of the interactive movement in terms of ideation and association but if the client were to move his body in the standard exercise of habitual voluntary movement, or voluntary patterns described in my first book, symbolic gestures and movement patterns relative to the interactive goals would appear.
For instance, if the client who had the ideation about a tornado were asked to move his body in a voluntary mode, he might very well perform some action that would be reminiscent or symbolic of the force, direction or nature of the tornado but without the energy, rhythm, and speed that would show up in interpersonal interactive, emotional movement. A person who was experiencing fear but who could not permit his body to move in terms of that emotion, would probably, without knowing why, select a series of movements or gestures suggesting protection, with the hands seeming to block a potential threat. Therefore, I see a connection between the symbol-forming capacity of the mind using words in mental energy and the symbol-forming capacity of the mind using the limbs and body parts in voluntary movement.
Voluntary movement is not to be seen as an auxiliary system for the expression of interactive energy, which it can be, but should be understood as a value in its own right. In the above example I am stressing only the aspect of voluntary movement that represents the spillover or shunting of interpersonal interactive energy to other systems of energy. Those other systems of energy have their own value and their own functions in the task of being a human, namely the capacity to control feelings and to respond rationally to and control the external world. Voluntary movement and mental processes of thought, symbol-making, ideation, planning, etc., can be understood as the highest and most recent acquisition of living beings that permits greater learning, memory, and transmission of learning for the purposes of adaptation and change in a rapidly changing environment. Those are the processes that are usually listed under ego processes. But I am not entirely satisfied with that terminology, and further on in this book I would like to develop my concept of self and the ego.
Concept of Identity
I understand the term identity in psychomotor therapy to include elements of location and orientation as they are understood in navigation. Identity then must deal with one of the same issues looked into earlier which is the process of individuation from the universal. If the goal of identity is to include the ability to locate one's self in time and space, one must be able to differentiate one's self from other figures in time and space and to differentiate one's self, more particularly, from the universal ocean of all other times and spaces combined. If one is identified with or unified with a universal flux of time and space, one does not have to face the issue of individuation and separation and location. One then is all things and all things are one's self. This is a stance that can be taken by some mental patients and can also be experienced under drugs. Some religions and philosophies seem to have as their goal the losing of one's self into the universal, but I feel sure that what they mean is to retain the capacity to lose sight of one's own individual self under certain circumstances and the capacity to see the universal relationship of all things. My preference is to be able to have an individual identity while seeing my place, and portion of, and relationship to, the universal.
The goal of identity seeking includes the idea of autonomy. That is, one's identity and location in time and space are more clear if one has the capacity to move one's self, feed one's self, support one's self, protect one's self, limit one's self, just as the womb primarily and the good parents secondarily did for one's self. If one is not doing those things for one's self, one must remain in a dependency relationship with figures larger than one's self who will provide for one's needs. One's location then must be relative to and perhaps a satellite of another body from which one never moves too far.
To have an identity one must have a finite shape; one must have boundaries and therefore limits. That is not to put man in a prison of rigidity--one understanding of being human is to be capable of "becoming," but even that potentiality must have limits. If there are places in one's personality where one does not know where one's self begins and ends and where others begin and end, one's identity is fuzzy. If one has interactive energy that has not been tested in concrete reality and found to have limits, one can have concepts about that energy that include its omnipotence and to that extent one's identity is fuzzy. Of course if one falls into the opposite frame of mind and feels that one has no power and therefore no range for one's efforts, that is another way of having no shape--or of becoming identified with the universal. One can thus see death and the loss of one's energy, form, and outline as a kind of merging with the universal. This merging with the universal can be reminiscent of the actual experience of the sperm merging with the egg and the fertilized egg merging, or more correctly joining, the uterine wall. Therefore those emotionally ill clients who speak of wishing to die may also mean they wish to recall or reexperience those earlier, probably very satisfying mergings and relationships.
Levels of Relating
I should like to digress briefly to discuss the point just raised. There are rising levels of relationship. The first level seems to be: merging or sharing of one's actual life place and energies with another, such as occurs in the act of conception. The second level seems to be: joining, as the fertilized egg joins the uterine wall and gains a flow of energy and life through it. The third: eating or consuming, as the infant eats or consumes the love from its mother through its mouth. Fourth: being held or supported or "understood" as one is tactually and then symbolically held up and touched by one's parents. Fifth: seeing, hearing, and speaking as one sees, hears, and speaks to one's parents and the rest of the world. Sixth: the sharing of information by symbolic means such as speaking and writing as one does in school and in the rest of one's life. Finally: the capacity to use the appropriate form of relating for appropriate circumstances including loving, marrying, and parenthood.
Certainly, one does not lose the capacity to relate on concrete, motoric, or tactual levels, but the capacity to relate on more symbolic levels does increase as one matures. Maturation must include, as mentioned earlier, the movement from the concrete to the abstract and the movement from the motoric or behavioral to the symbolic. Interestingly, however, many people manage to use symbolic levels of relating to satisfy earlier deficits of relating. For instance, those clients who may have a nurturant deficit and still need to relate by means of the process of consuming, may "consume" vast amounts of reading material and films, "consuming" aspects of the environment through their eyes. Other clients might constantly have to hear the voices of others in a manner that can be described as consuming the voices and sounds as if they were food and life sustaining. It seems as if all neural stimulation might be interchanged for all other kinds of neural stimulation so that in the last resort, given the absence of all other satisfying kinds of relating, one can relate to one's self by giving one's self pain and at least having that to "eat." In the absence of satisfactory neural input on whatever level, we can always experience life so long as we can inflict pain on ourselves. My work with hospitalized clients has shown me numerous cases where patients inflict wounds on themselves. Certainly there is an element of guilt involved in the process, but there is this self-nurturant aspect also.
Fixed Positions
To navigate, whether it be on the oceans or in the universe, one needs to have a fixed position as a point of reference. Sailors have learned to use the stars and the magnetic compass for this purpose. The young organism in utero does not need an external orientation point for he is not yet separate from one of his fixed positions. I have come to call those figures in human-identity processes who can be used as reference points, pole-star figures. It is important that these figures remain fixed and relatively stable throughout the period that they are needed for orientation purposes. After the infant is born he feels the mother's physical presence and not only is that important in the nurture satisfaction the mother provides but also in the burgeoning process of identity-forming. It is as if there were two intensities of interpersonal interactive energy flow coming from the mother. One is the strong energy flow that provides for the living process itself. The other is a low intensity energy flow or weak charge that is used in the process of orientation.
Respect
Respect, noted earlier as the fifth quality in the parental relationship to the child, comes into play here. Respect that parents feel toward the child can be likened to the weak energy flow that the child uses in his orientation process. Let me elaborate. As the child begins to nurse it has been noted that the child spends much time gazing into the face of the mother. The child can be understood to be fixing the image of its mother in its mind, that image being coupled with the pleasurable sensation and satisfaction of nursing. The mother tends to look back at the child and that can be translated as "I see you and you are good" in much the same sense that God in the Old Testament looked upon his works and regarded them as good. By that action, God proclaimed the existence and worthiness of what he had created and now saw as separate from him. It seems to me that individuation, separation, and identity cannot be completed unless some important figures proclaim that you do indeed exist, for they see you, and you do indeed have worth and are worthy of respect, for they have judged you. Before one can learn to withstand the impact of negative criticism in one's adult life, one must have gone through the experience of being respected and identified by one's own parents in a satisfactory way. One seems to need verification from the external world as well as from one's own senses that one is indeed alive and worthy of that right.
As the child begins to grow, and particularly as he begins to be able to move away from the mother, he must be able to return to the mother frequently to orient himself and to see if he is still there and still "a good boy" or worthy of respect. If his mother should be away for a protracted period of time, he would experience distress, not only because he will be missing her in the nurturant sense but because his still fragile sense of his own identity will be jarred. If she is not around he will become disoriented in a very real sense, like a ship with no stars and no compass to guide it. However, the child cannot be constantly in the mother's presence (and indeed if he is normal and has the child's normal curiosity, he will want to look at as much of the world as he safely can), and it is important that the mother be willing to permit the slow development of his autonomy in small successful steps. If he is separated from the mother too soon and too painfully it will be difficult to get him to dare to be out of sight of the mother for any but short periods of time. At first the child may need the actual touch of the mother to feel safe and locatable, then he may need only the sight of the mother, following that he may need only the voice, then perhaps the memory or the thought of the mother will suffice. Obviously there is a greater and greater abstraction and use of symbols in the process of orienting to the mother figure, reflecting the rising abstraction in the level of relationships noted earlier. I do not mean to leave out the function of the father in the identity-making process. As the child grows, the focus shifts from the mother alone to include the father with the mother. It is perhaps my bias in favor of the nuclear family, but I find it most important to have both mother and father present in the orienting process as early as possible. To find a third, unknown point it is well to have two known points. This helps the child distinguish between the different functions and roles of the two parents and aids him in identifying and modeling after the appropriate one.
As the child grows older, the father becomes more of the judge and critic and it is important for him to pass favorably on the production and behavior of the child. This favorable judgment should not be offered randomly or meaninglessly but should be appropriate to the level of the child's development. If there is no worth variation placed on the efforts of the child seeking approval, he will gain no satisfaction in his efforts to gain mastery over what he is doing. Without criticism or value judging, there can be no development of discipline, competency, or judgment, for without value judgments all things and all efforts would be deemed equal, and they are not. I do not imply that a child should be prodded constantly to excel, but I mean that values should be developed in the child. The relationship that I am describing includes the concept of limits. The child must learn that some things cannot be done and others can in order to give him a sense of definition and boundaries. The parents should assist in the development of values and limits for the child, but his support, nurturance and protection should never be made conditional upon his satisfactory production or behavior. The child's innate worthiness of love and care should be without question and without reference to his productions.
Interior Orientation and Identity Process
An analogy that I have begun to use in understanding identity processes is that of the interior stabilizing devices used in rockets in our space program. The equipment is so designed that the interior or onboard stabilizing platform is oriented toward certain stars and locked into that position. As long as that platform does not get knocked out in the sense of loss of current and so long as the onboard computers are fed information regarding speed and direction changes, the men on the rocket will always be able to find out where they are and can travel safely. I don't believe that the stabilizing platform has literally got to continue to see the star that it was originally fixed on. In a sense it has internalized the star or taken some symbolic abstraction of the star and relates to it in its own interior. I believe that this is essentially what goes on inside a human child's head as he grows from the age where he needs literally to see the mother and father to where he can orient to them through his abstract, symbolic internalization of them.
In the process of growing older, the child becoming an adult begins to see beyond the parents and to search for other, perhaps ultimate, constant figures. Out of this search comes a seeking for God and a development of philosophies or creeds or world views which can be seen as constant and unchanging, much as one saw one's parents as constant and unchanging when one was a child. This search for constancy can be pathological as a result of an insecure childhood, or a healthy need for ordering the universe so that one can operate within it. The difference is in the intensity and capacity of the individual to find a satisfying meaning to life in general and to his own in particular.
It is also worth noting that as one grows older the constant figures one chooses are more likely to be symbolic and abstract like ideas and thoughts rather than concrete like people and places. I call those inner concepts pole-star ideas by which one arranges one's life. Just as one result of concrete, motoric interactions is development of the capacity for abstract, symbolic interactions, one result of having recognized concrete, pole-star figures is the capacity to use abstract, symbolic, internal means for orienting one's self. Just as the child who lacks concrete interactions can turn pathologically toward his inner processes to make up for the experiential deficits, so can a child turn too soon toward his inner symbol-making processes in an attempt to stabilize his disoriented and disorganized world. If he does so too early he will never have a normal identity, but more likely will not be able to differentiate himself from the universal because he is using a part of himself as if it were outside himself and therefore he must be "out there" as well as "inside here" in himself.
I have speculated that some of the clients I see in the hospital have learned to know who they are, so to speak, in their own pathological way by orienting themselves to their own anxiety. Here is how I arrived at such a conclusion. Let us say a child is removed too soon from its mother and feels the shock, disorientation, and distress that is a result of that absence. Let us say that that absence from the mother is continuous and that whenever the child looks for the mother, he fails to find her and hence experiences discomfort. I speculate that it is possible for that child to orient or know itself by way of experiencing anxiety over the absence of the mother. Paradoxically, if that client were not feeling anxious, I am not sure that he would "know who he was." Anxiety is chronic for some children and they may very well use it as a pole-star feeling. Some may say "I think; therefore I am." Others may say, "I feel lousy; therefore I am." Not only is it possible to survive with negative nurturance, but now we see it is possible to have a negative identity and still survive.
If it is actually the case that a client can orient by means of his own negative inner experiences and that he can nurture himself by means of his own negative inner experiences, how is one to bring the identity-making process back to the external world, and how is one to prevent the interactive energy from finding its target in one's own inner processes? That is one of the most difficult tasks I face in working with hospitalized patients. In order to become a parent substitute, a temporary pole-star figure, one must be constant and regular in all ways, and have the necessary patience to wait and find the means of interesting the patient in interacting with you in a way meaningful to him. There are some hospital patients who can see the therapist only as "friend" and cannot imagine him as anything else. If the patient gives up his focus on his own inner processes for identity and nurturance, he may literally die if there is not sufficient stability and love awaiting him. That is, he may kill himself in his frustration and hopelessness and rage. The patient's very life depends on this focus and he will not be careless in what he does. Even if he lives in an insane world by what he does, at least he lives.
The hospital itself becomes the limiting, nurturant, constant external object for some patients and leaving it may be very much like leaving the gaze of the loving mother. They may find it impossible to go away even if they have learned there to feel better. However, if a patient can learn to use the hospital as an identity reference point and as a source of nurture, the job of attaching that energy to the therapist and the group is a lot easier.
Working with identity concepts in psychomotor therapy is relatively new as most of our attention has been paid to interactive energy processes. Identity issues arise with feelings of disorientation and not knowing what to do or where to go. When such a quandary shows up in a structure, we have the good parent figures, standing close to one another, say something like, "We see you and we know who you are and we know you are good." Sometimes a client likes to hear his name mentioned in that context. It strikes me that early infant-identity growth includes four values: constancy, seeing or touching, naming, and approving or valuing (naming may include valuing, i.e., he made a "name" for himself). When the clients have said, "Tell me that you'll always be there," it has included more than constancy of nurturance and protection. When we have done "face-telling" (as described in my earlier book), we have been doing more than satisfying one's need for tactile interaction. Face-telling includes touching with a gentle, caring manner each part of the client's face, naming the part such as the eyebrow, eyelash, nose, ear, etc., and saying that it is good.
There have been many instances of a client's asking to do a structure in which he makes something and brings it to the good parents for approval. Our experience has been that the client has wished for a reasonable response from the parent. Some of them have had parental responses that never included approval; no matter what they did, it never seemed to be good enough and they found themselves agonizing over every work effort with the dread fear that they and their work would be rejected. Other clients have mentioned that their parents said "good" to everything that they did and that it didn't seem to matter whether it was actually good or not, making it appear that the parents were not really interested in what the clients had done but were just brushing them off with a meaningless comment. Clients have let us know what it is that they wish to hear regarding their products by telling their positive parent figures precisely the words to use. Sometimes they wish to hear constructive criticism which they can then work on later seeking approval for the new end result. There seems to be a need for testing one's competency on a reality level without risking a crushing experience if one does not meet with instant approval.
As mentioned previously, it is important that the approval or disapproval not be connected with one's right to receive love, protection, etc. The valuing should refer to the product and not the individual himself. The individual himself is beyond measure and should be told so. What we are aiming for as an ideal situation or child-parent relationship is one which produces a child who is so certain of his intrinsic worth and of the constancy of his pole-star figures and concepts that he can attempt a new project without feeling that his very life will be lost if it does not meet with success. Naturally one does not meet with success in every new venture. New situations demand many trials and many attempts to rectify the new adjustments and refinements. Therefore, society must develop cultural attitudes and processes which prepare both children and adults to cope with the demands of a rapidly changing world.
One must be able to differentiate one's self from one's context (as the figure differentiates itself from the background). The tension of relationship between the individual and the context or between the figure and the background must be such that the figure is aware of the dimensions of the background, must feel safe in the presence of the background--that is, in an anthropomorphic sense, feel that the background likes and approves of it, is not hostile to it, or if it is hostile in some respects, that the figure can learn how to cope with or avoid the hostility. So what does the child need in relation to his context? One, a sense of the over-all picture; two, a sense of his separateness from the over-all picture; three, a sense of security within the over-all picture; four, a sense of self-worth, of his range of action within the context; five, a means of orienting himself to the context while he is moving and not only while static, i.e., of knowing who he is without having to remain still, or, to say it still another way, of not having his identity wrapped up with a location; six, the capacity to experience pleasure and joy within the over-all picture in sufficient degree to make the living worthwhile.
Identity issues, then, cut across a broad spectrum of other issues, including: individuation, autonomy, competency, self-esteem, capacity to symbolize the context, capacity to orient to symbols, and capacity to enjoy all this.
Changing Capacities, Changing Contexts
The difficulty of holding one's identity constant is that as we grow both our capacities and our contexts change. It makes it doubly important that our early identity-forming experiences have gone well for the later identity testings may prove to be too much for a fragile solution and the individual might very well become disoriented and unable to live should he face such a critical situation. Our present rapidly changing world compounds the problem by producing technological advances that have great implications for expanding man's capacities and for creating a shifting and uncertain picture of the total universe. The events of the world seem to be drawing a picture of man as an ugly, murderous, self-polluting, hateful, unnatural, immoral, corrupt, sex-obsessed, material-obsessed, untrustworthy beast, living in a world that was not made for him and that is hostile, dangerous, and ready to kill him if it gets a chance. A far cry from the idyllic pleasures of living in the womb and the perfect interaction between individual and context in that setting! No wonder people are having a hard time living today. This brings me to an absolutely crucial point in the practice of psychomotor therapy. How do we deal with the problems of the adult? How far can we take an individual in psychomotor therapy or must we forever keep him in a motoric, concrete, perfectly intermeshing, interactive system?
It has been adults who have come into therapy and happier, better functioning adults who have terminated therapy. We have been led by the adults to learning the needs of children. We have not directed them to move in the manner in which they moved. Those behaviors simply flowed out of them. We only arranged an appropriate context for them. It is a fundamental role of the psychomotor therapist to assist in the development of a responding context to every act. The act is never performed in a vacuum, but always in a relationship or a context--this is my argument with any therapy which deals primarily with the intrapsychic. All behavior is interpersonal. There is always a figure and a background. If there is a blocking of intrapsychic energy, there may be body armoring in the individual which shows the location of the block, but that block was created in an interpersonal constellation and it will never do to manipulate away that block without dealing with the interpersonal element.
When adults come to therapy and behave as they do, seemingly regressing and dealing with ancient issues, are we to believe that there is some innate psychic balancing mechanism that is at work to show the client where the real problems lie, or are we watching a phenomenon of avoidance, resistance, and procrastination with respect to the real issues? My experience and the reports of my psychiatrist colleagues lead me to believe that the former is true. I believe that those people who in their present reality are seriously disturbed by the changing conditions in the world and who suffer impairment of their capacity to live are demonstrating the early fundamental, concrete, relationship failures of their past which are now bearing fruit. With the world as it is now, we must pay more and better attention than ever to our child-rearing practices. We have been able to get by in the past but that time is now gone. We can no longer permit the haphazard and unconscious development of psychological cripples that we have produced for thousands of years. Just as with the advancement of medical practice, we have learned to overcome and stop tolerating the obvious physical crippling and disease-ridden dislocations that had been taken for granted for long times past. We are all carrying about the pock marks of haphazard rearing. I know that that sounds like the attitude which seeks to put all responsibility on others but I don't think that even the best of parents know how or have been trained to be good parents. Most parents have certainly done their best, but their unconscious messages and concrete motoric deficiencies--the good words and good attitudes notwithstanding--are what come through to the child. Our children are a result of what we do and not only a result of what we say or think.
We think that what we are doing in psychomotor therapy is a repair job on the past. Psychoanalysis takes us back to past in order to review it, and see where the wreckage, bumps and bruises are, in order to better understand the patterns of behavior that were a resultant of that past. That knowledge is available for application to one's present in order to improve the present and to eliminate negative patterns of behavior that were relative to the long-gone past but are no longer relevant. Psychomotor therapy attempts to return to the patterns of the past, not only through verbal symbols, subjective states of mind, and some somatic responses--as is done in analysis--but also through concrete sensory-motor behaviors and responses by which that past is "relived," on the assumption that when such concrete sensory-motor behaviors were originally aroused by the experiences of the past, they were inhibited and not satisfactorily expressed. Last but not least, psychomotor therapy attempts to provide those experiences and relationships that would have resulted in an autonomous, competent, self-esteeming person with a sense of his own identity. We do believe that it is possible to provide childhood-like experiences that are responded to in some ways just as if they had occurred in the past and are part of the client's history, but which would have better prepared him to live in the present. That is what I mean by a repair job on the past.
Clients who have gone through psychomotor therapy have reported to us that not only do they perceive the world differently and respond to the world differently and with greater competence and satisfaction but that they also perceive and treat their own children within the context of their new understandings. Psychomotor sessions are a good training place for becoming a parent. The learning comes from two directions: one, from experiencing motorically and behaviorally what one would have wanted in one's own past and understanding needs from one's viewpoint as a child, and two, from watching other people's structures from the vantage point of an observer or of a "good parent." One can learn from watching parent behavior in other structures or from playing the role one's self. Many clients have reported this to be a very important result of psychomotor therapy sessions.
Let us return to the question, "How do we deal with the problems of the adult?" I believe a partial answer has been given above. The adult does change his perceptions and patterns of behavior in the present, thus affecting his relationships in every sphere, including marital, job, and parental. However, there are clients who go through structure after structure, seemingly responding with strong affect in their movements and actions and seemingly coming up with new satisfying endings, who nonetheless remain in the same reality position in which they were uncomfortable in the first place. Of course psychomotor therapy is not always successful--in every instance and with every type of problem--but some of those individuals who seem unchanged by their work in therapy can be understood to have another frame of reference, usually symbolic, where they "really live" which they have not permitted to be touched by the therapeutic process. In these cases the symbolic frame of reference must be recognized and those interpersonal interaction energies that are bound within the symbols are able to be more fully experienced by the client. This permits that hidden aspect to be put into relationships with others. With those clients I have attempted to develop new techniques. The client in the structure is confronted with either the real figure involved in this problem or someone role playing the real figure rather than a polarized aspect of that figure. This type of structure is more like a psychodrama than psychomotor technique, but it gives the client a chance to practice directly those behaviors that he cannot seem to achieve in reality. If--in the midst of this psychodrama-like structure--an old pattern of behavior related to past events comes up, one can switch immediately to structures of the accommodating type or polarizing type and work out the problem through psychomotor means and then return to the reality setting.
Sometimes within a group there will be a reality interaction between members of the group or between a group member and the therapist. These are extremely valuable because there is no question whether a client is "play-acting" or pretending as there may be on other occasions. The relationship is permitted to work itself out on a reality base and often it will become apparent to them that there are massive projections from the past involved and this can lead to the development of a very meaningful and deeply experienced structure for a client who may have felt that many of his previous structures lacked these qualities. This kind of event points up very dramatically the relationship between the present and the past and gives the client an opportunity to work on present-day issues within the group with the same adults with whom he works out past-day issues. Some clients are so deeply concerned with immediate problems in their lives that they are uninterested in looking back into their past experiences for the answers they so painfully need.
Another solution that many of our clients take advantage of is concurrent membership in a traditional psychotherapy group, traditional psychotherapy one-to-one interviews, or well-supervised encounter groups. However, the expansion that is going on in the range of psychomotor therapy includes the use of the techniques described above. The hope is to make of the psychomotor group a multipurpose, multifaceted instrument that permits as much growth and learning as possible within the limitations of the time, capacities, and creativity of the group members and the group leader. Psychomotor therapy is not static but, it is hoped, is constantly developing and growing. My own active participation in many of my groups has permitted me the opportunity to grow in my own work and to observe the effects of my own changes on how I respond to the group and how the group responds to me.
Is the world a safe place to live in? Are we as a race and a species murderous and rapacious? Are we all partial schizophrenics not daring or not knowing how to interact with the world? Is the world a hostile, non-human, impersonal accident of random manipulations of matter? I think not. I believe that the interactive process does not stop being meaningful as soon as one leaves the concrete motoric world and enters the world of the abstract and the symbolic. We do not leave the Garden of Eden of our childhood as soon as we enter the world beyond people--the world of the abstract, symbolic, and impersonal. Or do we?
Two issues come to mind. One is the issue of interactive energy and its appreciation or meaning in the realm of objects and things in contrast to people. For I have discussed only interpersonal interactive energy, and have not paid sufficient attention to how man handles things. How much of his ability to handle things is innate and how much learned, and how much is his capacity to learn innate? The second issue is related to the first, having to do with man's orientation to or relationship with the total order of things beyond the usual sequence of environments within which he must find his place in order to have a solid identity. By usual sequence of environments, I mean the environment of the womb, followed by the home, school, the peer group, the job, the family which he and his mate head, and the society in which he lives. The umbrella under which all those interpersonal environments and relationships exist is the natural order of the entire universe. It seems that all cultures and all societies have at their base or at their pinnacle some mythology regarding man's place in the universe and in nature. All the other settings gain their meaning, or at least can be lived within in tranquillity, so long as there seems to be some sense of total order in the material universe that includes man. The fact that all the rest of the universe visible to man beyond the universe of living things on this planet is material relates the two issues. There is some parallel meaning in the way we relate to the material world and the way we relate to the universe.
It seems to me that without a universal context, whether conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, realistically or unrealistically accepted or worked within, day-to-day transactions in the interpersonal contexts can break down. If one's world view is such that the natural universe is seen as hostile, and man as rapacious, how can one possibly live in tranquillity? The fundamental issues of identity in our present time would seem to fall into two important categories. That is, the capacity to live well in any world would be enhanced considerably by, one, the infant's and child's successful experience of the motoric and concrete relationships that have been outlined heretofore, and two, the child's being introduced to concepts which cover the entire material universe and all its phenomena. Those cultures that still cling to orthodox beliefs even in the face of technological contradictions may have a better thing going for them and their offspring than have we in our knowledgeable but rootless and alienated superiority. The massive identity problems that we face in this era may result rather from the breakdown of the family and its capacity to provide concrete motoric interactional satisfactions and from the breakdown of long-standing moral, religious, and ethical universe-ordering concepts than from any rapid change in human-level contexts such as intensified schooling, job pressures, etc. Certainly those are important but their importance is dwarfed by the breakdown of more fundamental identity-clarifying processes.
It is hard to make even the smallest move unless one has some sense of the total picture. Without that there are no orientation points, no maps, no polar directions--just amorphous suspension of being. This may explain some of the behavior of some of our youth who seek primitive return to nature and/or powerful interactive motoric release in sex and aggression. The recent phenomenal interest in astrology and transpersonal events points toward the need for some order that unifies our total experience and relates us to the physical universe of all matter and all stellar objects. The willingness of the two wealthiest nations on earth to spend vast amounts of money and natural resources on programs dealing with outer space may have more than a potentially militaristic value. Perhaps it is part of an unconscious search for meaning in the great "out there." Modern man's intense preoccupation with fathoming the secrets of the material universe by means of atom smashers and subatomic-particle research may be the natural corollary of exploring the universe.
It is becoming increasingly clear to me as I write and speculate that one of the tasks that modern man has to face (at least one of the tasks that I as a human being and myself have to face) is the finding of unifying concepts that make possible the total ordering of the material universe from the smallest particles of energies apparently without shape or form, through the natural world of living things--including man, built somehow out of the interrelationship of trillions of those particles--through the largest conglomerates of matter and matter-producing stars and galaxies. There is amazing order in molecular and subatomic structure. There is amazing order in nature and in man's own flesh and brain. There is amazing order in intergalactic shapes and rhythms. What is it all about? Where do we fit in? How did it happen? What do we do about it? What part do we play in it? What is our identity, our role in relationship to it all?
Must seeing all this boggle the mind? Does seeing all this banish one from the oft-mentioned Garden of Eden? Obviously it doesn't have to boggle the mind. Man is already deep into mysteries of the atom and of space and still going strong and wanting more. I think it does banish humans--or rather distinguishes humans from other animals. And it is just this step from the concrete to the abstract that does it. However, that does not mean that we must lose our capacity to live in the motoric and concrete. We can have the best of both worlds. It is not an either/or proposition though some might make it seem so. There are those who believe that since the highest order of evolution is represented by man's capacity to think, speak, and symbolize that he should live as much as possible in that higher order. Doing or believing anything that might remind them of lower orders would be to become less human. I am doubly reminded of the popular shock at Darwin's suggestion that we might be descended from or related to the ape and also of some analysts' shock at the possibility of a client's "acting out" or doing something other than verbalizing while in his office--both suggesting that such relationships and such behavior are less than human. Just because we have the capacity to build a tower on the Empire State Building, must we never descend lower than the eightieth floor or--heaven forbid--visit the subbasement?
Paradoxically, all this speculation about the value and meaning of the symbolic has originated out of my deep involvement in and understanding of the motoric. Even the Empire State Building had to have a foundation built first that would support a structure of great heights.
I would like to speculate about man's innate capacity to deal with the material universe. I have made a long case for man's innate ability to relate to other humans by means of the concept of interpersonal interactive energy and I submit, one, that there must be an innate base for man's obvious capacity to deal with the material world and two, that there must be systems of energy and relationship for such dealings which perhaps are connected to those already hypothesized. Material things obviously "know how" to relate to other material things. The order in the universe is sufficient evidence of that. The rising complexity of elements from hydrogen on up through the addition of electrons demonstrates that matter knows perfectly well how to relate to other matter and to develop greater and greater complexity of forms and properties as a consequence. Even our celestial bodies know how to relate to one another through gravity and probably other not-yet-known means of energy interactions. Since we are made up of the same particles that make up the material universe, we have on some level innate knowledge of how to relate to nonliving matter.
Recall that our rock (discussed in Chapter 2) knows how to hold all its particles together to form a coherent and conglomerate whole. Our tree is a master in doing what I have just wished a human to be able to do, that is, find its place between the microscopic and the stellar. Our tree, by means of its roots and with the help of water, relates to inanimate minerals and with the help of the far distant sun manipulates those material and energetic elements into its own life. Obviously then it knows how to relate to material and energetic things. (Watch that word energetic for I think it will probably return to haunt me in the disguise of spiritual). Our cat doesn't pay too much attention to material things except to walk over them, leap on them, and push them about a bit. Our cat and most other animals affect the world through their stomachs. Some animals such as ground hogs and gophers can relate to the material world through their instinctive ability to build nests out of material things. Other animals such as birds and beavers can manipulate living things such as twigs and branches and logs to make their homes. Most of the manipulations are done with the mouth and a little bit with the claws and paws of these animals. Most of the manipulations are made for the purpose of home building (context-securing and ordering?). The major way that the animal world relates to and affects the world is, I repeat, through their stomachs. By grazing, hunting, and foraging, the animal world changes the surface of the globe. By metabolizing what they take in and then by eliminating their wastes, the animal world affects and yet maintains an ecological balance with the world. It strikes me that metabolism is somewhat analogous to human processes of thought and symbolizing. Metabolizing includes the taking in of raw material, breaking it down to some of its component parts, the manipulation or reordering of those components, the use of the component parts toward the furtherance of the life of the individual, and the elimination of what is not or cannot be used. Human thought and other mental processes seem to use some of the same elements: the taking in of raw experience, breaking it down into associative components, the manipulating or reordering of those events, the use of portions of events toward the furtherance of the life of the individual, and the forgetting or discarding of what cannot be used.
Animals' primary mode of relating to the world can be expressed by the equation relating equals consuming. Humans can operate on that level of relationship, but can also add other modes that are analogous though on another level. This way of ordering things has some fascinating applications. It highlights the fact that all energy systems and all motor systems have an end result that is interactive and that the interactions are different in that they are operated on different levels of being: the reflex, the metabolic, the interpersonal, the material, and the symbolic. It points out the possibility of certain pathological ways of relating. Some mental patients relate on what must be the metabolic level, that is, the basic assumption is that the relationship is consumptive. For example, the cannibalistic thoughts of some patients can simply refer to the metabolic level of relationship or, relating is consuming. Other pathological modes of relating can result from using the mode in relating to material things and applying symbols to the interpersonal field--that is, treating people as if they were things and symbols rather than as people. For example, I have found myself treating my clients as if they were "cases" and not so much as if they were people. Obviously there are many varieties of pathology and many variations among relationships, but pathology can be seen as the application of inappropriate relationship modes, as in the above example of patients who treat themselves and everyone else as if they were inanimate objects rather than human beings.
We have not yet applied the metabolism metaphor to interpersonal interactions. Perhaps this level of interaction functions to take in relationships and break them down into their component parts for appropriate assimilation and use in the furtherance of life.
Humans, as distinguished from animals, have the capacity to interact with and to influence the material world, through the body in the form of voluntary energy and movement and through the mind by means of symbolic manipulation and the combination of the two. The combination of the two has resulted in the fantastic technological and industrial growth of the recent past. The mind manipulates material facts to create formulas as methods and decisions to be carried out by our voluntary motor systems or by machines. In this way, we are capable of complex and controllable behaviors having little to do with interpersonal interactions. The machine is an extension of the body for the symbol producing mind. What an interesting dilemma we humans are faced with. We are the first species that has found itself with the capacity to do this type of material exploration and manipulation, and we do not yet know the end of it nor even how to integrate it into the totality of our being--note the increasing complaint of the impersonality of our technological advances. It seems to me that the ultimate aim of our voluntary-movement and symbol-making capacities should be to place us in a more meaningful relationship with the material world from the subatomic to the galactic. It should permit us to manipulate the microscopic without losing sight of the ecological up to and including the universal.
This brings us back to the original question which produced all this speculation. What is man's place in the order of things? What is the greatest and primary context within which man must find his place and identity? From the preceding it is obvious that man is part of nature and is that part of nature that can see itself and the world and perhaps alter itself and the world in the direction of greater value to all nature. Man is nature becoming itself in the form of an individual. The processes of individuation, of autonomy and identity-seeking can be seen as a return to a religious frame of reference in which no aspect of life and living is without regard for and relationship to the universal order of things. Scientific and technological man is not anti-religious so long as he does not become impersonal. If man can remain personal while fulfilling the highest order and capacity of symbolic and material controls and manipulations over the world, his every move will be in vibration with universal rhythms. Man does have an innate ability to interact with and to know and understand matter. And since matter is all that there is in the universe (I do not exclude the spiritual from matter), man can learn through his innate capacities to make a better interactive match with nature than he now has. I believe that the tool of symbolic control and voluntary manipulations is so new to the species and so relatively unpracticed that it is, so to speak, still in its infancy. Perhaps another way to explain the disruptive effects of the use of man's capacity for control of nature is to say that they are caused by the distortions in the symbol-making process by unfinished and poorly finished business on the human interactive level. If we were to perfect or at least improve the ways of providing for our human interactive needs and matches, perhaps the people that were a result of this could use their minds in a way that we have not heretofore seen, in the service of humanity and all living and material things.
Then the work of psychomotor therapy is thus applicable to the problems of the adult. It frees his adult symbolic energy capacity from the distortions of shunted interactive energy. It also gives the adult in a group the potential use of this frame of reference as a guide to his identity-seeking problems. If the parent figure in a structure saw the world as a good place, within which man was part of the natural order, the child figure in the structure would be able to face going out into that world with a little more equanimity than if the parent indicated the world was a hateful place and man a hateful creature. As an individual grows in psychomotor therapy, he needs less and less to do structures and eventually does not need to do them at all and leaves the group. If at times in his life he finds that some interactive-energy imbalances are showing up, he may return to the group for a one- or two-time participation. Or if he finds that his emotional energy is inappropriate in certain events, he may do an internal or "head" structure in which he will work out the energy dispositions in his mind as he did so many times before in an actual, concrete, motoric way. What I mean is that those who are successfully undergoing psychomotor therapy find that their everyday lives are becoming more effective, and when they are troublesome they explore the issues in a structure to see if they can be sorted out by using the models outlined. Thus there is an interrelationship between the real world of the client and the structure or psychomotor world of the client, with structures used as a kind of emotional kidney to clean misplaced interactive energy out of the everyday events.
I would like to mention here that many of the clients that come to psychomotor therapy are not emotionally ill as emotional illness is usually understood. Many are professional people who are quite effective in their respective areas of expertise. How is it that they have so much misplaced interactive energy? It is startling to me to work with a group of professionals in a workshop for sensitization to psychomotor techniques and find the great extent of unconsciously learned mismatches in interactive energy. Perhaps it is because this frame of reference has not been used before that this is so. It is as if this process permits the wearing of a set of lenses that bring into appearance and into focus other aspects of our lives that were relatively hidden to us before. Therefore I see psychomotor therapy largely as an educational technique and not only as a therapeutic technique. In fact "normals" seem to be able to grasp its application more rapidly than neurotic or psychotic clients. But these terms are so flexible and overlapping as to become meaningless anyway.
There is still something nagging me regarding the identity issue and the universal frame of reference or context. I left the poor human being at a point where his mind either becomes the universal context or at least creates the universal context, both positions getting him perilously close to omnipotence and its consequent distortions and dislocations in feelings and interpersonal relationships. Let us then hypothesize further.
Let us assume that the innate structure of matter and energy is such that life as we know it can assemble itself out of extremely complex relationships--molecular, cellular, organic and interpersonal--and that all of these could be understood to be innately possible were one to know the inner structure of the atom of hydrogen and all its structural potentials--in the same way that chemists have been able to predict the properties of elements before they were found in nature. By all this I mean that the kind of evolution we have here on earth producing human beings can have gone on before in other systems and may be going on now in millions of star systems and planets. Those beings in other solar systems may be less advanced than we are, at the same level as ourselves, or much beyond our level of development. Until now, none of those beings has "taken over" the universe and controlled it for their own use or if they have the news has yet to reach us. What kind of control can they exercise on the vastness of space? What is the limit, what is the extent, that they or we can reach? My earlier point of conjecture left man at a point where all of nature was potentially under his control. If that were so what would be the relationship between us and those other creatures who are assumed to be so far advanced beyond us? Obviously we both would be only minute fractions of the total force and order of things since we were only the furthest possibilities in a set of, if one were knowledgeable enough of the possibilities inherent in matter, limited and finite possibilities. What if we had disagreements as to what would be the most valuable course of action we could take that would affect both our societies? Would they then have to destroy or control us or we them? Or would there be only a limited or singular set of choices that would lead to a better future? If the answers were limited, then where would man's freedom and control be? What would happen to man's free will? Man may be said to have free will to the extent that he is able to transcend his instinctive or interactive, interpersonal nature, but within the level of the symbolic, and the areas of manipulation of the material world by the symbolic, there must be some outer limit of possibilities and controls as there are in every other system. Or do we then rise to another system beyond symbolic and what would that be but spiritual?
Is there a consciousness and a responsibility for all levels of things from material through organic to animal to human to spiritual beyond man's, or at the very least beyond my own? For myself, I believe so. For I am tired of holding the world up and figuring it out for myself and perhaps for others. Surely there must be other human beings at work in this and surely there must be ranges of order and consciousness and control beyond what you or I and other humans on this planet can even conjecture about. I capitulate to those higher orders of consciousness and control. I and the world I see are less than a speck on an atom in a molecule of a cell of an organism that consists of all of the material universe. Or perhaps all the material of the universe is an aspect of the consciousness of that organism. In this context when we speak of God, how can we say that he "sees" us or that we "see" him. The best we can do is say that by some innate means beyond our senses we can experience the order and rhythm of the universe as we travel in it and it vibrates through us. We can never leave it or it us for we are but a small gathering of its energy coiled around itself, seeing and experiencing itself for a moment in eternity that for some reason seems to contract and expand. What is the point of being, then, if being is so short in pulsating eternity? The only answer that I can find in myself is that if I am part of the show, even for only an instant, I want to enjoy every moment of my own share of eternity and use every part of my portion of energy, action, consciousness, and responsibility that I can lay my hands on. I believe that as there seem to be an innate interpersonal ethic and interactions that can be discovered as well as destroyed in human life, there is an innate interactive ethic between man and matter and between man and the universe that can be discovered and responded to or not with consequences that can lead to order, meaning, and tranquillity, or disorder, meaninglessness, and despair. I choose the path of seeking balances and interrelationships with matter, animals, man, and the universe that will lead to more productivity, joy, and tranquillity for myself as well as for as many others as possible.
I would like to now go on to other aspects of psychomotor therapy including the concept of the ego in that process.
CHAPTER 5
