CHAPTER 7 The superego, to use the Freudian term, is in my understanding a system for catching the interactive energies that slip past the ego and would seem to endanger the species. That is, in some respects the system works for the safety and satisfaction of others rather than for the safety and satisfaction of the self. Therefore I prefer the term "species ego" since the system functions as a safety valve for the species.
In a rough analogy the species ego can be seen as a massive circuit breaker for the emotional system, as a huge magnetic deflector which directs the aggressive energies toward the self for self-punishment or even self-destruction, or as a shunter of interactive energy from one energy system to another. A visual representation of the deflector could be the curving of a barrel of a gun so that the open end of the barrel faces the gunner. The idea of punishment is included in this system as well as the idea of loss of supportive figures as a result of certain behavior.
Some people are born with a greatly developed sense of "the other" and some with a deficient sense of "the other." The function of the ego is related to the satisfactions of the self through the gaining of appropriate matchings between interactive energy and target. Sometimes the species ego seems to coerce the ego for its own purposes. To put it another way, an individual may stop himself from performing a certain act that would be harmful to others because he fears the disapproval of supportive figures.
By and large the species ego is a more primitive apparatus than the ego. Perhaps a simile might be that when the normal ego interactive energy systems develop balances that do not endanger the species, the superego remains unused until there is an energy overload that would burn out the system. This, then, would seem to indicate that the species ego system includes self- preservation as well as preservation of the species. For example, when an ego break occurs and the interactive energy can move toward infinity, there seems to be an instant shunting of the interactive energy over to the symbolic system, the dream or fantasy system, or even to the perception system (hallucinations). This shunting prevents the total system from being "burned out" by a cataclysmic burst of energy on the interpersonal interactive level, such as a catatonic excitement.
When the species ego functions as a circuit breaker, it turns off the energy in an interpersonal interactive system. The ego can use the voluntary motor system to modify or modulate behavior to achieve greater congruence with the real world and therefore greater satisfaction for the interactive processes. The species ego modifies behavior not to increase satisfaction as the ego does, but to thwart or punish the self to stop the action. The species ego, then, is a last resort, or stop-gap measure, in the event that all other things fail.
This perhaps explains the use of the species ego when, for example, a father's limiting powers are subverted by the aggressive and sexual interpersonal interactive energies of his son and he calls upon the forces of society or God to stop the son in his transgressions. The father may say, "I can't stop you but you will burn in hell for what you have done. God will punish you for this." The father is attempting to arouse the species ego processes in the son, whom he has limited capacity to control through his own interactions. Parents, then, can use the species ego constraints when their own ego interactions fail to do the job of limiting. The device is available as an innate possibility, and it can be overused to modify behavior.
The concept of taboo falls very nicely into this construct. When the individual behaves in a manner that is beyond the strictures of the community, the species ego processes take over and the individual may die. He may die by his own hand or he may die because his very life energies are "turned off" just as the circuit breaker turns off the current. Thus, in some cases more than the forbidden interactive behavior is turned off. By this I mean that some individuals may die in certain cultures when they have transgressed. They do not feel simply a loss of aggressive or sexual energy but experience the life drain on the metabolic, vegetative level.
The species ego must have perception mechanisms connected with it, for it must be able to measure energy output (just as a fuse essentially measures energy output) in order to function. Under poor genetic or interpersonal circumstances a species ego "fuse" could be set at a low voltage and might shunt energy at very little provocation. Individuals with such a sensitive species ego would tend to be very cautious and timid and be exceedingly careful not to do anything that might cause anyone the slightest pain or disturbance. Their energy output would be low, and they would tend to be very compliant. In a schizophrenic case of this nature, the interactive energy would be omnipotent fantasies and hallucinations. The normal timid individual would still have his interactive energies largely available to him in their ordinary capacities although quite reduced in voltage.
In the same case of poor genetic and interpersonal conditions a species ego fuse could, on the other hand, be set too high, and this individual would see barely anything from the other person's view and would have very little control over his aggressive or sexual impulses. This is a classic example of character disorder. The limiting of this individual would have to be strict to develop the stunted species ego faculties. Perhaps he could have his own interpersonal needs become dependent on the satisfaction of others' needs so that he might develop a species ego out of his own self-interest. This situation raises the necessity for inner monitoring or perception of one's energies, which brings out two issues: the species ego processes must borrow perception of outer and inner events from ego processes; and that the self perception must function to censor or monitor the direction and flow of the energy before it becomes action.
In the process of treating the character disorder individual, the limiting figures should be with him as much as possible to watch and monitor his energy flow, for if he is alone he can say to himself, "No one can see what I am doing so it doesn't matter what I get away with. No one will ever be the wiser." The normal individual can act in a situation as if he were being watched by others and that tends to limit his action. Having a species ego is like having an all-seeing monitor constantly within one's self. It is as if a piece of ourselves or our egos did not individuate and remained universal, omnipotent, and omniscient and we named it God or our conscience. At the outset of this book I speculated regarding life and interactive energy that all life in some inexplicable way knew all other life, that everything was related to everything else, and that interactive energy "knew" its target because the target "matched" the energy. I also speculated that human life moved through the process of individuating from the universal and that therefore living partook in some fashion of the universal. The universal stance would seem to me to include the statement "I am you and you are me and we are all one together." The species ego processes seem to imply the use of that concept in the use of the Golden Rule, which says, "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you," which could mean that you and others are essentially the same.
This paradox of being at one time universal and individual seems connected to what I understand as species ego. Species ego learning or developing seems to have to include one's view of the world as well as what one identifies one's self with. If I see myself as the same as all animals, I would find it difficult to treat animals any differently than I treat myself and would find it impossible to eat them. Vegetarians behave in just that way. Other individuals who take a broader view of identification with nature find it difficult to kill or consume anything but the bare necessities of life. Other individuals who would suffer tremendous pangs of conscience and guilt if they injured a human being can butcher animals without the slightest hesitation for they do not identify with them. All wars include massacres of people by troops who are described as perfectly loving men to their own kinfolk. When the enemy is seen as not like one's self, or not quite human, one does not have to control one's behavior toward them. Obviously, then, species ego processes are vitally connected with learning. The capacity to convert or shunt one's energies to other systems, to direct one's energies to one's self, to turn off one's energies are innate and somehow built into the human psychic system. But the events and situations which trigger those responses are learned and developed within certain frames of reference. The qualities of the species ego which seem to be found in all cultures and which seem to be somewhat unlearned are the qualities of identification with the target of one's energies, that is, "He is I," and the quality of internal observation which is likened to being observed by God or by some authority figure. In other words the species ego possibilities are there in the human psyche but the names and situations are learned in each culture.
The species ego, then, gains its energies from the ego and, by splitting off a portion of the ego to serve as universal and god-like forces, exercises control of the self in the name of those forces. Thus, when the interactive energies become too great for ego control and one begins to feel omnipotent, the superego, in the name of God and omniscience, redirects those energies back to the self! With the shunting of the energy into the realm of fantasy, hallucination and delusion, as it is in the case of psychotics, the ego just about disappears with the enhancement of the omnipotent aspects of one's self. All or almost all of one's self becomes identified with the universal, the omniscient and the omnipotent. Psychosis in this frame of reference is the result of the superego's exercising too much control which causes the imbalance of the total self and the loss of the ego. The individual, then, loses his identity in the usual process of individuation, and those aspects of the ego that have been split off to create the superego in the name of the universal become dominant. Because the psychotic never tests his beliefs about himself in the world of motoric concrete reality and because his energy is shunted away from the body and into fantasy, hallucination and delusion via manipulation of the symbolic perceptual world, he never realizes the fallacy of his view of himself. If, then, there is not sufficient parenting at an early age to emphasize the ego and individuation in the motoric, concrete reality base, the individual can develop a sick species ego by doing for himself on the symbolic level what should have been done for him on the concrete level. The untested symbolic level, not based on reality interactions and not ego-oriented but universal-omnipotent-oriented (since it has transcended the parental figures and done symbolically what they have not done concretely), identifies more of the self with that split-off portion of the ego devoted to self-scrutiny for the purpose of identification with the universal, that is, the species ego. It strikes me that most pathology seems to move in the direction of permitting the symbolic to dominate the actual or concrete. It also permits species ego processes to dominate ego processes. It stops the process of interaction with people and moves to manipulation of things and ideas. At the very least pathology creates energy imbalances and arena confusions. By that I mean the confusion between the interactive energy arenas which normally distinguish food, people and things.
The positive applications of species ego processes would seem to be toward the development of ethical relationships with food, people and things. That is, to respect in a healthy way those targets as if they were somewhat like one's self, which indeed in a philosophical if not real sense they are. If the ego can be understood to be a system of energies which assist the organism in the process of maintaining its wholeness and integrity, the species ego can be understood as a process which assists the species in maintaining its wholeness and integrity. So that given a choice between the individual and the species, the species ego sees to it that the species wins out even at the price of death to the individual.
Punishment
One regularly sees in psychomotor structures angry actions arising in an individual which the individual then either suppresses or directs toward himself. The good parent figures usually speak to that inner-directed anger and tell the client that his anger is all right and that he doesn't have to hurt himself with it. It is not sufficient simply to say that, however, for the client usually will begin to explore why he is bad for having such feelings, which often are related to some event when his anger was the cause of much pain and consternation in the family. In some cases the client may have thrown a rock which nearly killed a playmate and since that time he has had difficulty expressing his anger outwardly. He may consider himself a murderer in actuality and remove himself from many interactions for fear that he might endanger someone's life. He may possibly remain in nominal relations with people but without investing interpersonal interactive energy in those relationships. He may treat himself and others as either things or ideas.
If the client is convinced that he is bad and should be punished, he may become accident prone, so that indeed he does experience pain regularly at his own hands. He may have a low estimate of his capacity to control his feelings and may spend a lot of time telling himself that he is bad and is unworthy of human love and caring. So we have the phenomenon of the angry emotions not only turned off or shunted to another system but directed toward the self in accidental injuries on the physical level or in self-punishing ideas on the emotional or mental level. The self-punishment or request for punishment from the outside (which also is a regular occurrence with guilt-ridden persons) can be utilized as a negative nurturant or relationship input. Therefore, when the species ego directs the energy inward and does not allow its outward expression, this energy has the secondary value of being utilized as a negative nurturance mode. Thus, some clients adamantly hold on to their guilt for they are being nurtured by it and do not expect to receive love or support from any external figures because of their feeling of unworthiness. Obviously, then, when an energy disposition is dealt with, the therapist must look at the dynamic implications of it in terms of its intra-psychic function. That is, the guilt cannot be given up until a replacement mode is available and is desired by the client. Without the replacement the client would be left with a painful deficit in his interpersonal interactive system.
This presents an interesting picture in terms of energy dispositions. An ego is developed as a child experiences the appropriate relationships with his parents which permit the normal growth from universal to individual, from concrete to abstract, from dependent to independent. If the parenting is deficient in some ways, it increases the child's anger and frustration. If the child expresses the anger and the parents cannot handle it, they may tell him he is bad and arouse his guilt. This type of situation will force the child to turn away from his parents as satisfying figures and turn to others if they are available. If others are not available, he will turn to himself too soon and will injure his capacity to receive nurturance and relate in a satisfying way. His anger will reinforce his sense of omnipotence and ability to transcend his parents and his species ego processes will shunt his angry energy toward himself. Now he receives that energy from himself and may use it in lieu of warmth from his parents, making it harder still for him to turn toward external figures. Everything that happens leads him further away from relationships and more toward directing his energy toward himself and narrowing his exchange of interactive energy with the world. None of this is prescribed or perceived as a healthy or satisfying solution; however, it has its value in that it presents a stable energy condition. Perhaps this is where the issue of resistance can be understood. Naturally the patient is unwilling to disturb the equilibrium of his energy distributions, particularly so if he has not been given any obvious and clearly defined alternative. Psychomotor therapy, because of its emphasis on motoric and nurturant satisfactions, permits an energy alternative that is not available in traditional psychotherapy. We can point out the inappropriateness of the guilt "eating" and indicate that good positive nurturance is available from the good mother. The good parents can also point out that no matter how angry the client gets, they can handle the anger. Thus the client can learn to handle his anger because the good parents permit him to express it in a limiting structure. In this way his angry emotional energy is no longer available to be directed toward himself in a negative nurturant way and his pathological hold on the inward-turned, angry-guilt energy is broken when his anger is expressed in a contained, motoric way.
When the good parents hold the client in the limiting structure, they represent the reinstating of ego controls over the powerful angry emotions that previously had broken through the ego bounds and had been directed back upon the client by his species ego. Once that energy is contained within the ego, it is less available as a source of negative nurturance from the self and the client is in a position to look outside himself for relationship and nurturance. The limiting structure reinstates positive parent figures who are larger and stronger than the client and who can be used by him as external pole-star figures in his identity-orienting process. In short, the limiting structure places the client in a position where he can relate to others again and use his body safely in a motoric, concrete way without the negative intervention of his species ego processes.
Whenever the species ego has swung strongly into action, one can assume that there has been an ego break, that there will be symbolic rather than direct expression of powerful feelings, and that the person will identify more with the universal than with the individual (that is, he will develop feelings of omnipotence and personal grandeur). This person will tend to withdraw from interactions with other people and will prefer to interact with his inner self; he will lose a sense of competent identity with other individuals as there will be no external figures powerful and stable enough to orient from and he therefore will orient from his own omnipotence but without external, concrete motor confirmation of his power. Of course there are many variations of intensity within this type of disturbance, but I think that the characteristics described above are generally true and provide good frames of reference within which to work when clients exhibit the kinds of feelings and ideation that bespeak an ego break.
When there is that ego break, the species ego may interrupt the energies as described above, or there may be great pressure on the ego to grow and actually to realize the powers that exist on the fantasy or symbolic level in order to remain in motoric concrete relationship with reality. Those figures in history who have accumulated vast powers seem to me to fall into the latter category. If they were prevented from accumulating or realizing their powers, they would have to face the consequences of becoming severely emotionally ill for then they would have to revert to symbolic, delusional experiences of that power instead of the real concrete demonstration of it. I postulate that these figures represent a massive struggle to remain sane while attempting to realize the energy releases of their ego breaks. They attempt to stretch their egos over the entire surface of the earth to bring it all under their dominion. If they were to find that they could not demonstrate their power in a real and concrete way, they would face the specter of insanity or those energies would then turn toward the self in a destructive way.
There is a question whether or not the limiting structure in psychomotor therapy tends to reduce ambition in clients. Experience has not shown this to happen, but the opposite is frequently true--there has been a general raising of competence. It is, after all, the rare individual who does take the path toward world dominion. He must represent a unique combination of abilities as well as circumstances which propel him toward his destiny. The average person faced with an ego break tends to move toward pathology, that is, withdrawal from reality and relationships, and to experience the species ego processes strongly enough to be shunted by them to symbolic delusional expression and experience.
The relative genetic strength of the interactive-energy ego and the species ego would have to be taken into account in these cases and would permit great variation among individuals, for example, the real accumulation of power plus great amounts of guilt and negative nurturance. I do not think that powerful historical figures such as Alexander or Caesar can be called simply psychopaths; surely there may be a reduction of species ego strength in their cases, but psychopaths tend to disorganize society, while these powerful figures exhibit strong needs to organize society as well as to hold dominion over it. Psychopaths seem temporary and puny in comparison to these figures and would seem to have weak egos as well as weak species egos. Consider their inability to contain their interactive energy, to time its release and to match it with the appropriate figures. These historical military leaders had great discipline and impulse control and fit more readily, in this rather general overview, into the description of strong ego and interactive energy with too little limiting from their parents.
I would like to turn now to a specific, recent case which demonstrates some of the factors described above. This client arrived for a weekend workshop, and it was clear to me that sexuality would be an issue for her from the start. She was a psychology intern in her late twenties and had a manner of bearing and dress that aroused sexual fantasies in me at once. Her eyes were "receptive" and "inviting" but there hovered about her a minor air of "dirtiness," sloppiness or messiness that jarred slightly with the sexual attractiveness. As a workshop leader and therapist I have grown accustomed to a certain amount of sexual energy directed toward me, and I have watched the expression of it and my responses to it change as the client changes. I have come to recognize a certain pattern of behavior and my responses to it over a period of years. Some clients have been able to arouse in me a powerful wish to have sexual relations with them. When I saw those patients on a one to one basis, it became difficult to work because of the sexual arousal and the concomitant guilt and anxiety it produced in me. I would find myself having thoughts and feelings that could be verbalized as "I must divorce my wife and marry this person because she is the most attractive and beautiful person I have ever seen."
I felt consternation the first times those powerful feelings and fantasies presented themselves. As time went on, in the course of therapeutic change, those clients began to become less and less sexual objects, more female people, more interesting as people and less frantically desirable as sexual objects. Those changes bespoke my own changes and growth as well as my client's changes and growth. Inevitably those clients had to deal with their own powerful wishes for father figures and their usually unconscious sexual luring of the father figure. These women were attractive sexually not only to me but to men in general and they illustrate the fact that people (not only clients) tend to produce in the environment the kinds of responses to which their personality structures are prepared to relate. Some people on first meeting a person provoke in him the fantasy and wish to beat them, for example, and I have learned to pay attention to those feelings and fantasies that are aroused in me on first encounters with a client and to examine their origins either in me or in the client's behavior and manner. If it is clear to me that the feeling originates largely in the client, I can then begin to make certain assumptions regarding the history of the need to produce that response in others.
In the case of the client in question, I recognized my responses to her attractiveness but without guilt. However, I wondered at the "dirty" little girl messages and held that perception in readiness for use in the structures that would be forthcoming in the weekend. I was already prepared to deal with powerful sexual wishes in her for her father and in anticipation of her demands had formulated some responses.
At the beginning of each weekend workshop, following the slow accumulation of clients in the room and the low-level social interaction that ensues (learning something about the other person much as one does at a cocktail party), there is a more formal process where each person gives his name and occupation and says something about his goals for the workshop and possibly something about reactions to the previous workshop. I then present some outline of the psychomotor process as an aid to orientation to the weekend which in this case included some statement about negative nurturances and primary modes of relationship. I said something about these people I mentioned above who produce wishes in others to hit them, about others who make people wish to humiliate them, others who make people wish to feed them and about those people who provoke sexual fantasies in others. At that point the client under discussion interrupted my talk to interject, "What's wrong with relating sexually?" I clarified that indeed there was nothing wrong with relating sexually but that I was pointing it out as a sometimes primary mode of relationship which excluded other modes of relationship and was out of balance with the total personality. Obviously the client felt the need to defend sexual relating more strongly than did anyone else in the group. At the very least it brought attention to the fact that sexuality and its level of use would be a factor for her.
The next event that told me much more about her occurred in the exercise of the fall-catch. In this exercise the group members individually stand in the relaxed species stance, permit their center of gravity to fall forward beyond their feet and then allow their reflexive responses to move them to catch their balance rather than catching themselves by stepping forward voluntarily. When it was this client's turn, I felt for some reason that I cannot consciously understand that it might be important for her to have some supporting figure right in front of her in case she wished to fall straight down. For the fall-catch is sometimes useful as a suicidal or self-destructive barometer in that those clients who are feeling that way will fall straight down without catching their balance and possibly will injure themselves. Perhaps I thought that this might be the case with this client because of the way she did the stance; at any rate, I was about to speak to her and suggest that good parent figures be placed in front of her. When I started to speak she had just begun to fall forward, and the usual process was interrupted when she did a fall-catch that reflected her wish to stop and hear what I was saying. I had deflected her relaxed attention to the process and had awakened the volitional process which controlled the fall-catch differently than the reflexive process. When she regained her balance, she explained her responses by saying that she had heard my voice and that she did not want to "let go," meaning give in to the reflexive process. By a complex series of intuition and hypotheses, I made the assumption that this client was indeed intent to hold on to me as the father and that it would take some strong effort to pry her loose from her hold.
This particular weekend afforded the clients the opportunity of having one structure with myself and one with my wife, Diane, as we were co-leading the workshop. The first structure this client had was with my wife, who saw her as withdrawn from the group and a little hostile to the group and the process. At one point following her role as the accommodating parent figure for another member of the group, the client said that she meant nothing that she had said as the good parent and that as a matter of fact cared not in the least for the person whose structure it was. Fortunately for the person whose structure it was, those remarks had little or no effect for as a matter of fact the group had commented that the client had been sensitive and effective in her role as the good parent. It seemed to my wife and to the women in the group that the client was attempting to make them become antagonistic toward her. Clearly, then, her reactions and elicitations of response varied according to the sex of the recipient. From women, my wife and the female client whose structure she tried to dismiss as unreal, she attempted to draw hostility. When it was her turn for a structure, she didn't seem to know what to do and commented that she didn't know how to make demands for herself. My wife mentioned to the client that she seemed to keep to herself and that perhaps she would like to do a structure as a little girl who was playing with her friends in order to give her the opportunity to relate to other people. This early age level was suggested because the client obviously had difficulty relating as an adult and my wife sought an earlier age when perhaps that problem was not yet so pronounced. The client did set up several members of the group as her friends and then had a marvelous time playing as a child with them. Then she commented that it was different and unusual for her to look her "friends" in the face and that it felt good to be able to look at them and have them look at her. She then said that all during the years that she had been in traditional psychotherapy she had never looked at the therapist directly. This was in definite contrast to how she looked at me. Perhaps within the context of the group where my wife sat beside me as I spoke and I was so clearly not going to be available as a sex partner, she was able to express those sexual feelings toward me on some unconscious level. I should have expected her to be sexually seductive toward her therapist, but perhaps since the traditional therapist is an ambiguous figure, he might have been too threatening to look at in that way.
When I saw her in the first session the next morning and asked her what reactions she had to the previous structure, she said that it was wonderful to be young, passive and without responsibilities and how good it felt to have other people running the group who would take care of her. She mentioned that she ran many groups and that it was such a relief not to run this one and that she had purposely worn a littlegirl dress this day to keep with the mood of being taken care of and being irresponsible.
The client had seemed to my wife to move in contradictory swings of feelings during her structure. She had made statements unaccompanied by appropriate feelings and then had completely contradicted those statements and had laughed at her contradictions. I already had observed that she was inconsistent in the way she responded and that she seemed ambivalent and relatively "loose" in her expression. Her attempt to carry out the little girl feelings in reality and not just during her own structures indicated to me that she was not making a strict enough separation between structure and reality and therefore that there was an ego problem, for it is the ego that is involved in making that kind of discrimination. This became even more clear during her second structure.
At the end of the group session with my wife, this client, having noted that several structures of other members of the group included some responses to incestuous wishes, remarked that winning your father was no big deal and not worth it. My wife wondered to me if that client had not had sexual relations with her father and wondered if the client would use that material in a structure. Weekend workshops consist of six three-hour sessions over a period of two days, and it was not until the very last session that it was possible for her to have a structure in my group. This particular weekend had long structures and more people than usual who yet had to do structures in the last session. There were six people to be worked with and I spoke with the members to gain a sense of the issues and priorities involved with each person so that I would be able to pace the time allotments appropriately and to know what kinds of issues might be coming up. When it came to this client's time to speak about her issues or whether she felt much immediate pressure to do a structure, she said that she was feeling very good and didn't need to do another structure.
The plan had been for two groups, my wife's and my own, for which we had alternated leadership, would gather together at the end of the individual structures to work as a single group. The expectation was that we would be ending by ten o'clock or so and by that time her group, which had less structures to do would have joined my group. All five other clients went through their structures successfully and then I turned to the client under discussion and half wondered if she would decline a structure and half hoped that she would as it was now past eleven and I was tired. However I also knew that if she did not do a structure, it would simply postpone to some other time dealing with the material that seemed to be arising. The client said, "I do not want to do anything but I want to say something or announce something that will shock the group." I said, "In that case I think I already know what you might say." She said, "Everybody makes such a big deal about wanting to sleep with their parents; I slept with my father twice in one week when I was twelve years old." She then made a series of contradictory statements to the effect that either it didn't affect her at all and that it stopped her from having the problem that all others in the group seemed to have about wanting to know the parent sexually and feeling guilty about it, to statements or memories that she had suffered such terrible consequences of the act as a child that she could not go to school and study and had terrible nightmares and thoughts that she was a horrible criminal and should be put in prison. She also spoke about being filthy and belonging in the gutter, and she laughed about some of those statements.
I understand the guilt feelings and her wish to shock the group as manifestations of a wish for negative nurturance as punishment for her sexuality and as a substitute for the warmth she could receive from the people in a more appropriate style of relationship. I said to her that I was not shocked and moreover that I felt very sorry for the little girl who had been treated that way and that if I had been her father I would have "kept her in trust" and safe from my or others' sexual explorations until she was old enough to make her own decisions regarding sexual experiences safely and with a minimum of guilt. She laughed when I used the term "keep her in trust" and thought it was a little "ridiculous, cute and old-fashioned." At that point I asked her if she wanted me to be the good father as my wife had just come into the room with the rest of her group which had completed their structures. I suggested that she use my wife as good mother so that we could work with the transference level or reality level with me as well as on the structure level. When I put my arm around my wife and made the usual statement that good parents make at that point, namely, that we only had sex with each other and that I would never direct myself sexually toward her, the client remarked how good it was to see us together and how much she needed to see that.
The structure was not terribly motoric except for some symbolic gestures such as making a circle around her to hold in her sexuality and to keep out too much stimulus from the world. She spoke a lot about what we were saying; at first she would see nothing to it and then she would recall a rapid series of memories that emphasized what we had been saying and that permitted her to consider what the alternatives might have meant to her had she had good parents in her own past. First she said it hadn't affected her to have had her father sexually. I disagreed and pointed out to her that the moment her father had become her lover, she had lost her father as a father, which would have identity consequences. I did not say it to her, but this also meant that she had lost her mother as a mother and had gained her as a competitor. This caused an ego break which permitted her sexual feelings to transcend the parental limitations, an identity crisis when her parents dropped out of their normal roles, and a loss of the limitation and protection normally provided by the parents. She had indeed become her own parents and with great difficulty and with the help of therapy had maintained her balance and her sanity, albeit, with some scars apparent to her ego.
We put our arms around her and said we would protect her and be her good parents. She said something to the effect that she was strong and didn't need any parents. This I understood to be the same confusion between structure and reality that she had made earlier, and I clarified for her that it was the child we were speaking to and not the present-day adult. It must have been perfectly clear to her when we were doing structures with other group members throughout the weekend that we were responding to the child memories and not to the reality adult aspect of the individuals; but in her case she saw the distinctions fuzzily. When she tried to see what it would have been like to experience strong parents as an adolescent child, she was shocked to realize that her entire childhood had been transformed by that event with her father and that she felt she had no one to turn to at home (she left home and got married at a very early age). She remembered that she had vowed to leave home as soon as she could and only at that moment realized that this vow had to do with the sexual seduction by her father. Her sexual feelings at this point in her life were freer than she could really stand, and I believe she had a lot of guilt and conflict about them. She seemed to feel it was all right to have sex with anybody and everybody and really didn't think that incest was harmful, and then recalled a series of reactions and memories which indicated that she had suffered terribly from the two incidents with her father. Slowly she began to accept the ministrations and protecting and limiting features of the good parents and to incorporate them into the past and not into the present. This allowed her to experience a new set of feelings regarding what her past might have been like.
As the good father I made the gesture of pulling out of her father's penis and then demonstrated to her that I would use my power to protect her and used my hands to push the world away from her rather than direct my hands toward her. As I kept repeating that I would not put anything in her, I knew that she would fight because I felt she was dependent on sexuality as the primary relationship mode and did not yet have enough knowledge or expectation of any other mode. She said something to the effect that what good was she if she was not attracting or attractive to me sexually. I replied that I saw her as a sexually attractive person but that I would not direct my sexual expression toward her. In effect she was in the same place as those clients who are being limited in an aggressive limiting structure. If we succeeded we would be stopping the ego break and the availability for guilt to be consumed as a relationship mode with herself and others; we thus would be placing her in a position where she would be able to relate more directly and appropriately with others.
As soon as it became clear that she was beginning to accept the limitations of the good parents and was feeling how it might be to be a safe child in the family structure, she began to talk about how bad she was and to say that she thought people would now be saying that she was a shameful person. I understood that as a wish to consume or relate to negative input, and we set up a negative figure who said she was bad. Her reaction to this was unexpected and interesting. The moment she heard the negative words she made a sucking noise with her mouth as she drew in air and a little saliva. To me it seemed apparent that she was eating the guilt. The good mother said that she didn't have to eat guilt and that she could eat good nurturance from her. The client then remembered and mentioned that her mother had had enormous breasts and that she was always pushing them on her. The good mother said that she would only give her as much as she wanted and would not force her. The client wanted to hear the negative voices again for she heard them in her own mind. Once again she made the sucking sounds and this was transferred over to the mother. We threw away the negative figure and told the client that she was not bad and that she didn't have to eat guilt. Then she felt that the group was thinking that she was bad and that she had also taken up too much time and didn't deserve time in the first place (it was now after twelve). The group responded that they didn't think she was bad at all and that they felt an empathy for her. She wasn't yet able to look directly at the group or have the group look directly in her eyes. We as good parents undertook to protect her from the outside and used our hands as filters to hold back the stimulus from the group. She looked between our fingers at the group and slowly was able to tell us to lower our hands as she related directly to the group. She then felt the structure was over and the group members individually and in groups came to her and she looked at them as they told her how they felt about what she had done.
When a person is very guilty, he responds more to his guilt than he does to anything else in the world. The guilt becomes the target for many interactions and the person relates and interacts with his negative voices inside his own head. One must remember that guilt originates from the deflecting of the energies toward the self. It becomes increasingly clear to me how to understand the dynamics of withdrawn individuals, guilty individuals and ego break individuals in psychomotor terms. How this is put into practice is yet to be seen. This client did not relate well to other people, particularly females in the group, and attempted to receive hostility and guilt voices from them. She very likely related in a sexual way with most men to maintain the sexual omnipotence that was released when she succeeded in sleeping with her own father. However, this pattern was broken in her structure and it is hopeful that it had a more than temporary effect. The fact that she is now in training to be a therapist and that during structures she showed indications that she was sensitive to the needs of others when she accommodated indicates a healthy capacity to overcome her difficulties and to learn new patterns of behavior and reactions.
Negative Voices
All of us at one time or another have felt that we are bad and have heard our thoughts saying just exactly that. I know that when I have had such feelings, they can become so intense that I can think of little else and they take up much of my energy. With psychotic individuals it becomes extreme in that it seems as if the voices are coming from elsewhere than one's own thoughts and the voices have an authority that is hard to disobey. From what we have outlined, it would seem clear that those are the voices of the species ego which is in truth a part of the self. Those patients who have a conversation with their own inner voices are relating to themselves, obviously, whereas they may feel as if they are relating to God or to some other powerful person. With normal or neurotic clients when the voices or thoughts of negative feelings toward one's self become evident, we have attempted to concretize the negative voice as a definite external figure and have that external figure say those negative words. When that external figure says "You are bad," the client or his positive accommodator can attack the negative accommodator, who represents the voice, without attacking the client himself. The client may have conflicting feelings about the voice within himself and wish he could either tear himself up because he is bad or tear the negative voice out because it disturbs him. Neither of these actions is a healthy one. One cannot destroy one's self or tear out a negative aspect of one's self as a therapeutic step. One can, however, place that voice outside in a structure, and then deal with that outside voice without doing injury to one's self.
Let me give an example. This client is a student in his middle twenties who has once been in a mental hospital for a short period of time. He was in the midst of doing some action or having his negative accommodator be beaten up when he began to feel that he was a terrible person. The good parents said, "You are good and don't have to feel guilty about being angry," and he replied that he knew that he was a bad person and had always known it. Whenever a statement comes out that clearly as a complete sentence, it is well to use that sentence just as it was spoken by the client and place it in the mouth of a negative, external voice figure. This is what was done, and when the client heard the statement he smiled and said that it was exactly true. The good parents and myself as group leader said, "Do not accept that voice so readily. Look how much you are enjoying it, eating it up. Fight it off." This he couldn't find in himself to do and therefore it became incumbent upon the good parents to fight off the voice. When the good parents come in at this point it has an interesting effect. Often I have seen a client look at the parents in a puzzled, incredulous way. Sometimes he is shocked to hear someone standing up for him and has an impulsive wish to have the good parents really like him. I suppose the moment a client accepts the ministrations of the good parents, particularly if he believes that they are also strong as well as good, it must put him in a relationship with those parents and take him out of relationship with the guilt processes. When the negative voice sentence is repeated, it might have an entirely different effect. In the case of the student, the second time he heard the sentence he wanted to fight off the negative voice himself, with the help of the good parents. Apparently, a client who reacts in this way begins to want the positive parents to nurture him and relate to him, and he fights off the negative voice as he would any external harmful figure. If the negative voice were not externalized there would be little opportunity to fight against it without tearing one's self apart.
One cannot deal with the negative external voices without also concomitantly having the good parents available because the entire constellation has to be dealt with and not just one factor in it. Psychomotor therapy does just that. It deals with many forces, energies, and phenomena simultaneously on many levels. Suppressing here and releasing there so that the energy disposition within an individual can be dealt with totally and not just in one aspect without dealing with its consequences in other aspects. The earliest uses of psychomotor techniques when the most that we understood was the polarization of the target figures was enough to make for therapeutic progress. The splitting of the figures into positive and negative permitted the safe release of the angry energies without jeopardizing positive relating figures. With the further understanding of the need for limits (which was tacitly inherent in our use of positive figures) and the process of using guilt and species ego energy deflections for negative nurturance, more of the energy phenomena in structures can be explicitly handled. This book's further elaboration of the interactive arena assists greatly in tracking interactive energies and provides a frame of reference which permits a more conscious search for what is going on in a structure.
I would now like to present a chart of the interactive systems including these other factors: body parts, ego perception, ego function, external target, parent function, species ego function, identity statements, normal, pathological. The purpose of the chart is to make clearer the task of knowing what arenas the child has to master before he gains a sense of competence and well-being. It also could assist the group leader or the reader to organize ideas and expectations when observing emotional phenomena.
[charts 7.1 - 7.5]
