CHAPTER 8 In the psychomotor view living is not just being, it is interrelating. What in Freudian theory is an instinctive blind bundle of drives becomes in psychomotor therapy one of five interactive energy systems which are inherently target-seeking and somewhat target-knowing. The function of the ego is to assist in the seeking, recognition and matching of the target, and in the coordination of the efforts to achieve appropriate relationships. The ego is to interactive energy as the pilot of a ship is to a ship. The ego may master or control the ship but the ship is not a recalcitrant beast straining to escape its destination. The interactive energy ship wants to get where it is going and the ego helps it get there. "Where id was there ego shall be" is certainly not the goal of psychomotor therapy, at least not in the terms that I understand ego and id. In psychomotor terms the energy systems most available to the ego are the material-impersonal-rational system and the verbal-symbolic-immaterial system. That would mean that if ego took over every function there would be a rather mechanical and abstract symbolic treatment of the self without sufficient interpersonal, reflexive, metabolic treatment. The mechanical body would remain but the psychological, interpersonally relating body would be asked to leave.
Actually much of the work in psychomotor therapy seems to me to be the strengthening of the ego, at least in psychomotor terms. But ego strengthening is a vague term. Certainly I do not mean that the ego made stronger is to take over interactive energy functions. I mean that the ego helps to direct, coordinate, articulate, perceive, and discriminate in all interactive functions to the degree that it enhances the appropriateness and pleasure of the relationship.
There are those who seem to fear the murky dangers of the id. One gathers that the ego must not only keep a firm hand on restraining and distrusting it, but must somehow gain its power and energy and use that power to mobilize the "higher" centers of abstract thinking and symbol manipulation. That seems to me the idea behind the concept of sublimation. The id's sexual energy is sublimated, and that sublimating ability becomes the cornerstone on which civilizations are built. It seems to me that very few major contributors to civilization, such as artists, prophets, architects, philosophers, teachers, urban planners, kings, dictators, presidents were celibates and that puritan societies are not noteworthy as remarkable contributors to the advancement of civilization.
It seems more accurate to me to postulate that the human capacity and propensity for creative, symbolic and abstract manipulations is just as innate and "id-like" as man's capacity to be sexually active and interactive. One does not necessarily have much to do with the other unless disturbances in one interactive system influence the functioning of another. In some views man forces himself to be a man by controlling his animal instincts—-that is, if man relaxed he would become an animal. Man is certainly a creature of his own creation—-more so than any other species—-but man has not "invented" man. This seems to me to be confusing "limiting" as it is understood in psychomotor terms with sublimating or overcoming. Certainly if a man has lived in a nurturant familial surrounding that did not include limitations, there would be potential for destructiveness and chaos, but that does not say that interactive or "id" energies are per se bad or chaotic. As I understand it, the ego is on the interface of interactive energy and is an integral part of that energy system and not inimical or hostile to it. However, if the outside interface is sliced off or not permitted to grow properly, the result cannot be labeled as inevitably bad or uncontrollable, but more as "incomplete."
My impression of psychoanalytic terms and attitudes is that conflict arises between parts of the self and that this conflict possibility is an inevitable part of the human condition. Is it possible that man is bad or angry not because he is innately bad or angry but because he has yet to be in a family structure or society that permits a proper management between his needs and the environment? Psychomotor therapy concentrates on the early family structure and how it influences ego growth and develops patterns of behavior that result in either frustration or satisfaction of interactive needs. In psychomotor therapy the family relations, particularly between child and parents, produce the model from which the ego takes its shape for the future. It is possible that psychomotor definitions of man, his interactive energy and ego phenomena would allow a new understanding of his relationship to the entire universe which would lead to competency and satisfaction in handling relationships on all levels.
The five interactive arenas could be seen as a hierarchy that would lead toward the highest goal of human life, that of an understanding and experiencing of the symbolic and abstract. In psychomotor terms all those arenas would operate continuously, albeit with some changes of emphasis as one grows older. Even though humans do live in an abstract symbolic world a good deal of their adult life, their interactions with other people, things, food, and gravity obviously do not ever stop.
Now let us look at the terms "conscious," and "unconscious." The term "conscious" includes the verbal symbolic arena. It also includes the workings of the ego—-yet the ego also includes much that is unconscious. It seems possible to me that there are ego articulations and controls which go on in perfect wakefulness and are not repressed, but of which the individual does not appear to be conscious. This is similar to the way in which an animal, fully awake, makes certain choices, judgments and modifications in its behavior that in a human would be seen as ego processes without that animal being able to "know" that it is making those choices or to verbalize that it was making those choices for certain reasons. Much of human ego processes go on in this way. Unconscious or not conscious in these cases does not mean repressed or id material, it simply means material not yet translated into verbal-symbolic terms for communication purposes.
This would explain so many human actions that are not so much hidden or repressed when they come up in therapy but just plain unnoticed and undescribed by the client, for the processes are not so much verbal as behavioral and have never been translated by that individual into the verbal arena. That would also explain the great disparity one often finds in therapy between what a client says or thinks he is doing and what he actually does. When that occurs it does not necessarily mean that that person whose description of his behavior does not match his actions has been acting irrationally—-more exactly, he is acting non-verbally. One would hope that eventually an individual might more exactly describe or understand in verbal terms his actions but that is not necessarily what would make him an emotionally healthier person. Insight is not enough; he must also learn to make and exercise those interactive choices that would be not only more appropriate but more satisfying.
When a person or child attempting to learn to stand and to walk begins to discriminate how much effort to use when, what to hold on to, how much to let his reflexive responses to gravity take hold, how much to contribute in voluntary (material, impersonal, rational) movement, etc., he is using his interactive and ego processes. He may never translate those choices into words. When a child or adult is learning or relearning because of injury how to eat and swallow and what kinds of foods he likes to eat and swallow and to control his eliminatory sphincters and to pay attention to the entire metabolic food interacting system, he is using ego discriminations and modifications but he may find it very difficult to tell you about it. When a child or adult learns which people to come close to and what feelings to give out or take in, he is making ego discriminations regarding the interpersonal interactive arena. He may be called upon to explain his choices or his actions but the reasons he gives need not necessarily be the felt, experienced, or behavioral reasons. The reasons he chooses to verbalize may have a gestalt, a structure and a reasonableness all their own and may represent the capacity of the mind to reason and manipulate verbal symbols rather than explain what actually "happened."
In verbal psychotherapy one may become quite adept at developing a perfect congruency between what occurred behaviorally and what one verbally describes, and that is quite an integrative achievement but not the end of therapy. I have always understood the goal of therapy to be behavioral and perceptual changes that permit a more satisfying relationship with the world as a whole. The disparity between what one thinks and says is going on and what actually is going on is not necessarily a measure of the need for therapy. Words and ideas have their own gestalt and it is surprising how different a person can be in a verbal therapeutic session and in reality. The reality, if it could actually be viewed by the therapist, might not be half so bad as the client describes; in fact it might have little to do with what the client describes.
Psychomotor therapy deals with the actual interpersonal behavior of the client as well as the words of the client. I do not deny the use of words, but I would like to define for the reader and myself the function and use of words in the psychomotor therapeutic setting. Words allow the client to identify his problem and thus help motivate him to change. Words can be useful in re-creating the memory set of a time when certain behavioral choices were made so that those behaviors can be acted out again during the structure of that individual. Words and names are important in identifying the roles of the figures in one's structure so that the appropriate behavioral responses to those figures can be explored. Words are used by the therapist to point out the alternative courses of action available in a structure. However, in all these cases the central focus in the structure is on behavior and experience. The words are in direct relationship to felt behavior and perceived experience and are used to bring to the surface the issues that are present. From my descriptions of cases it should be abundantly clear that words are used extensively in psychomotor therapy. The therapy is not non-verbal in the sense that it uses no words but non-verbal in the sense that the central realities that are dealt with are behavioral and experiential, with the controlled role-playing of the accommodators permitting the actual feelings that would arise with those essential "others" in one's life. Without those accommodating "others" the client would only be able to imagine what he might feel about them in a traditional therapeutic setting without the confirmation of the actual responses and behaviors that arise in a structure. The feelings and behaviors that are aroused in a structure are too concrete to be denied or explained away, and they permit the words that gather about them to be based on emotional realities. If there is a discussion between the client and the therapist in psychomotor sessions, it can have the advantage of a behavioral and experiential structure that both observed, albeit from different vantage points.
Verbal Paradoxes and Contradictions
I have made an argument that the verbal processes are an expression of consciousness, and yet actual experiences demonstrate to me the fact that what a client is saying can be taken in two ways—-as a direct and honest statement of where the client is emotionally, or as a rationalization, irrelevant to where I believe he is. If I were to point out to the client the implications of his statement, he might say, "That's what you thought I said; but what I meant was . . ." and add some description that I would consider a denial of what seemed so honest and appropriate. Many times the gist of what I understand as the honest expression is couched in a phrase that seems to have many levels of meaning. There have been times when I have responded likewise and had a conversation with the client on these many levels, with the client responding behaviorally and emotionally to one set of meanings and verbally and rationally to another set of meanings. Those are the times when I can readily believe that there is a person within the client that the client does not know anything about, and that that hidden person is not only visible and present in emotional behavior but sometimes verbally present in the speech of the client without that client's conscious knowledge. Once again, then, we have another meaning for the word "conscious." Before, I took it to mean verbal, and now it is clear that there are times when what is said verbally is also unconscious, or not known or accepted by the speaker.
An example of that would be the verbal interchange between myself and the client I described earlier whom I interrupted just before doing the fall-catch exercise. When she said that she knew that she wasn't going to "let go" and consciously meant that she wasn't going to be able to relax enough to do the exercise reflexively, I also took it to mean that she wasn't going to let go of the father via holding on to his voice. When I insisted that I would not let her hold on to me, she just as emphatically insisted that she was not going to be able to let go. At the time of this exchange this client had no idea on what level I was talking and responding to her. It was not a knowing, punning, humorous exchange which can be fun to have with a person who is experienced in psychological punning and who knows that both of you are talking on those levels. As far as the client knew, I was just making some cryptic remarks about letting go that she could not understand. It was only later that her "other" meaning became perfectly clear in her structure about her incestuous relationship with her father.
This type of conversation has intrigued me when it has been with some schizophrenic patients who are speaking in a garbled word-salad manner. But with sharp attention paid to poetic or pun meanings, one can "decipher" and talk back to the patient in like manner without presenting anything directly or consciously to the patient. If one did translate one's meanings directly to those schizophrenic patients, there would be either blank denial of or upset responses to what they would consider untenable attitudes on their part. I do not know how to explain this phenomenon in psychomotor terms except to consider that we are seeing the shunting of interpersonal interactive energy to the arena of symbolic verbal expression which is ordinarily the seat of consciousness. To explain how it can remain unconscious while it is being so clearly said is a problem to me unless one postulates a walking, talking "unconscious" that takes up residence in the body. It is not that I do not know what to do with that phenomenon in therapy; I find it very familiar and talk to it all the time verbally and non-verbally, but the difficulty arises in placing it into a theoretical framework that makes sense to me.
Let me give one more brief example of this type of phenomenon in action. It was at a point in the structure where the good parents were together facing the client. The good parents were telling the child that they would never be separated and that they loved the client as a daughter and not as a lover. At some point it became clear that the client was gaining some meaning or satisfaction from the good father's voice which had little or nothing to do with the content of what the father was saying. The client could be said to have been getting nurturance from the father's voice; for she was ignoring the mother as a nurturant figure and had never had a structure where the mother was meaningful as a giving, nurturant figure. Since I was chosen as the good father I said, "I am going to pull my voice out of your ear and I only put my voice into mother's ear." I then leaned over toward the mother figure, placed a hand beside my mouth and her ear and hummed into her ear in a low tone. The moment I made the gesture of pulling my voice out of the client's ear, she rushed both hands to her head with a look of shock and then seeing me and hearing me hum in the mother's ear began crying and saying, "No, no, no." She said, "I don't know what I am crying about but I can't stop. This is ridiculous. I just feel like saying, 'you can't do that to me, you can't take that away from me." The client thus talked on two levels, one of shock at the loss of the father as a combination nurturant and sexual figure, and the other of surprised observation of her responses which seemed to make no logical sense to her. The client then began to have a feeling of depression and loss and wanted to just curl up and die and be left alone. This is the time when the mother should be made available as an original nurturant figure, and this is what was done. We dealt with some of the client's early, infantile feelings of loss of the mother, and slowly she came to accept this good mother in place of the substitute nurturant voice of the father.
The feelings and behaviors of this client were dealt with in a series of structures dealing with different aspects of the same issues, and she changed in terms of relating to female figures in her everyday life. She also became more of a peer and less of a child to her husband, who was very much older than she. The important point, however, is the disparity between the levels of consciousness and levels of meaning in both her words and her understanding of the words of the good father. On one level the words of the father had a tremendous impact and on another they were ridiculous. On one hand she felt words welling up and said, "You can't do that to me." On the other hand she at first had little idea what she meant by those words or where they came from. Shortly the meanings became perfectly clear and she sought more meaningful relationships with her mother figure. But what is happening during this process? Are we seeing different parts of this client's being come together? How do different aspects of a client come apart and stay apart? How do they come together? The words integrate one's personality, seem appropriate, but what exactly is meant by that? Bringing together these two levels of knowing and of behavior and experience is an important part of therapy, but I have not yet satisfactorily formulated for myself in psychomotor terms what is going on. It is almost as if the personality had the capacity to fragment and to have several pieces of it reside within the self in limited relationship or communication with one another.
One client described a more extreme moment of this kind of occurrence in her structure as like being taken over by a dybbuk. A dybbuk is a demon-type force in some Hebrew or Yiddish mythology that enters and takes over a person's body for its own purposes. While she was in one of her structures, an exploratory one in which she moved in a motoric, free-associational way without specific targets, she found herself moving in powerful and somewhat convulsive ways and with certain kinds of symbolic and gestural actions that were incomprehensible to her in any context. However, she felt a powerful compulsion to move in those ways. In her case I suppose one can say the fragmented parts had fairly great distance between them. This client has been in a regular weekly group for approximately a year and is still in the process of, for want of a better word, "integrating."
My conclusions are that one can have several "selves" or levels or aspects of one's self residing in one's body and using one's voice at different times. Something can be going on using both one's body and mind, actions and voice, and yet be nameless and unrecognized in the total order of things. Once the process is named and accepted as part of the total self, it can be dealt with more openly and with more conscious direction. I suppose it can be placed in the category of "becoming all of the self," which I postulated earlier in the book as one of the aims of therapy. Something of the above phenomenon can be seen in hypnosis. The subject can be given a suggestion during hypnosis that he will respond to certain words with a certain reaction after he is awakened from the hypnotic state. When the hypnotist says the cue words, the client goes through an elaborate response in exactly the detail he was told to during hypnosis. When asked why he is doing those things, he will be bewildered and unable to find any reason for his behavior or he may present an elaborate explanation that has nothing whatever to do with the real reason. Yet clearly "something or someone" in the subject heard the cue words and responded directly to them. Does hypnosis split off a piece of one's self and place it under the aegis or control of the hypnotist? Who or what is the hypnotist in the cases I have been describing in psychomotor therapy?
The above makes me think of conditioning experiments where a certain cue will produce a result that has no cause and effect relationship and is pretty well outside the animal's or person's conscious control. Are clients conditioned by the events of their past? Are there also some genetic, symbolic conditionings that somehow are triggered in some clients? Consider the infant primate's response to a snake. Experiments have shown that infant primates will respond with remarkable fear to a snake or to snake-like objects even though they have never seen a snake or had a frightening experience with one. Is it possible, then, that we can be hypnotized by hypnotists, by past events and by our own genetic structure? There has been some speculation that mental illnesses can be described as forms of hypnosis, or that they have features that can be explained in terms of hypnotic processes and phenomena.
Perhaps it could be said that one of the jobs of therapy is to assist the client in pulling together under one self or ego all that occurs within the self, so that those aspects of himself that were in control of other aspects or events or one's genetic structure become at least "known" consciously. The client then is able to choose his responses and possibly to modify inappropriate responses. If the client's personality has been "splintered" so that he has more than one self harbored inside his skin, he can be helped to bring it under one leadership.
It is possible that other terms will have to be invented to describe the above situations. Conscious and unconscious do not seem to do the job sufficiently. Perhaps therapy can be understood as education inasmuch as it assists individuals to know how they "work" and, in a sense, to be wakened from the hypnotic trance. Of course understanding and insight are not enough. One has to have the capacity and the motivation to do something with the understanding that would make life more satisfying and meaningful. Meaningful in the sense that we are more than machines or animals frozen in our predestined or pre-programmed slots in the total order of things. It is not all done for the purpose of getting control of everything for it is often enough clear that letting go is sometimes more appropriate than trying, but at least one can know why and choose to let go to processes over which he can never have total control.
Some Unconscious Language
During the years I have been practicing psychomotor therapy, I have come to recognize certain fairly constant or stereotypical body tensions, or actions or postures that allow me to predict the general areas of issues and to assist the client in finding where some of his emotional interactive energy has located itself. These tensions and body postures are important to this chapter in that they indicate the surfacing of an emotion associated with a past experience. The tensions often lead to an active expression of this emotion and a concomitant awareness on the part of the client of the source of the emotion. Thus, is made clear the relationship between the body tensions and actions, the emotions associated with the tensions and actions, and the past experience being recalled. It is this process of a past emotional experience surfacing through body tensions which demonstrates the value of using the body as a route to the unconscious.
When in the beginning of a weekend workshop I have the entire group do the species stance, I ask them to let go of all the muscles that they can in their bodies, without falling down and to attempt to blank their minds of thoughts and feelings. I then ask them to monitor which parts of their bodies call attention to themselves in terms of tension, tingling, pain, or what thoughts they have in terms of potential behavior. When they finish the stance, I ask each group member in turn to report on what he found. Years of hearing these reports and then learning and watching what people do with those tensions has led me to make some rough generalizations about what will be forthcoming. Let me start from the top of the body and then work down to note some of the more common actions and thoughts associated with each part.
Head Tensions
Headaches denote conflict that does not necessarily show up as muscle tension. My first tendency is to think that it is the result of anger that is not finding an appropriate outlet. I don't think of it as repressed sexuality or repressed fear, for headaches almost always seem to have an element of frustration and anger attached to them. When a client speaks about a headache, I may ask him to tighten his fists. Sometimes he will find that his fist tightens strongly and with great power and may follow the tightening with the statement that that effort has made his head begin to throb painfully. The increased pain may make him wish to hold still and remain inactive. However, if that client were permitted to do a structure right then, the anger and the relationships which surrounded the anger would be able to be worked out and very likely the pain and the headache would diminish or disappear. I do not suggest that if one has a headache one should simply make some angry movement. As I explained, that might simply increase the pain. One has to deal with all of the aspects surrounding the anger, with appropriate targets and accommodation in order to change things effectively.
Sometimes the pain of the headache is such that the client may feel like lying down and may state that he doesn't have enough energy to tighten his fists or even to move strongly in any way. Surprisingly, those clients may feel quite energized after doing a structure including some angry expression. It would seem as if the species ego functions in this case to diminish the energy level available in order to control the anger.
The tensing of the body may or may not provoke associations about what is causing the headache. Sometimes the client might get an immediate association about what he is feeling the moment he closes his fist tightly. He may feel he knows exactly who he is angry at and why. If one set up a negative accommodator at that time, the structure could proceed at once. Other times the situation is much less clearly defined and some exploration is necessary.
Eye Pain
Eye pain can also be connected to the expression of anger or to the withholding of the expression of anger. I have at times asked a client who has described or reported eye pain to try to pretend that his eyes were shooting daggers or death rays at the accommodator of his choosing. When the client narrows his eyes, the accommodator reacts as if being pierced, and if this gives the client pleasure and arouses his efforts to continue to narrow his eyes, one can assume that there has been an interactive match achieved. Some clients in this circumstance will become quite excited by the relationship and the accommodation and will begin to walk aggressively toward the accommodator as the accommodator cringes and cries out in pain and anguish at the visual onslaught. Accompanying the client's walking toward the accommodator might be a concomitant tightening of the fists and pursing of the lips in intense grimaces. Some clients have described their subjective feelings at this time and they often included the feeling of an actual flow across space from the eyes to the accommodator. The flow feels relieving to the eyes and is experienced as a real physiological flow. When this occurs I suggest that the client continue to have the same emotional feeling but include some skeletal muscle tightening so that the angry expression becomes more definitely motoric and concrete and less symbolic and indirect. At times clients will profess that they prefer the indirect expression and do not want to tighten the skeletal muscles. Further inquiries as to the reasons for that may lead to responses like, "If I got angry at him with my fists he would just come over and beat the hell out of me because he is so much stronger than I am. This way I have magical power over him and he is helpless." Obviously the client had learned early in his own life that his physical efforts to protect himself were insufficient, and he turned to symbolic means of defense. I am not a champion of brute strength, but it is important for children to learn to be effective and competent on the physical level before they turn to the symbolic, abstract level. I therefore recommend to those clients that they try to use the normal or stereotypical pathway for the expression of anger that would ordinarily flow to mobilize the skeletal muscles. At the very least that would draw the energy away from the eyes, where it cannot be effectively processed, and into the skeletal muscles, where it can be discharged. This demonstrates to me that emotions direct physiological, chemical and neurological messages to the skeletal muscles. If the energy is not processed there, it might flow elsewhere in the body to cause psychosomatic symptoms such as those described in the head or in the eyes.
If I were to tell those clients the moment that they reported the head or eye pain that they were angry, they would probably reply that they were not and ask how I came up with that idea. Yet if the clue of body tension or pain were to be followed out, anger would be the result. Of course it is also possible to pull up anger on demand, just as it is possible to find enough urine for a urine analysis in the doctor's office. The doctor could authoritatively say to the client, "You have to urinate," and the client could honestly reply; "Honest, Doc, I really don't," and, surprise of surprises, find that there really was a little bit of urine in there.
Actually, the parallel would be more apt if the client would tell the doctor, "I have a terrible pain in my lower abdomen." The doctor then would have a greater basis for saying, "Perhaps you have to urinate?" If the client urinated and the pain went away, the doctor would have grounds to assume that there was some relationship between the pain diminishment and the urination. To follow the parallel a bit further the psychomotor therapist might reasonably assume that the head or eye pain had something to do with the expression of anger if the pain diminished following the expression of the anger. The patient in the doctor's office who complained about the pain in the abdomen without himself considering that he might have to urinate would be a rare patient indeed. However, the client in a psychomotor session or in a psychiatrist's office would not necessarily have made that basic connection between anger and his eye and head pain as readily as he would about associating lower abdominal pain with bladder pressure. Most people are not told that they should not urinate and therefore do not have to learn to ignore the signals of a full bladder. Many people have been told that they should not get angry; and they learn to walk around full of anger, with no idea that they might want or need to eliminate it. A backed-up bladder can cause all kinds of consequences further back in the plumbing system, and a backlog of unexpressed anger can do the same to the emotional and perceptional system. It must be said, however, that emotions are not something that one so much eliminates as "processes." Catharsis implies that one eliminates one's emotions much as one eliminates the body's waste materials. Emotions are not waste materials. I have been tempted to think that the emotions were like some fluid traveling around in the body and that sometimes they arrived here at the eyes and caused one type of sensation or action and then could move to the arms and cause another. Wherever the "fluid" seems to be located, the client will talk about that part of the body getting hot or getting itchy, and he will feel some compulsion to use that part of the body in some way. The emotion at times can almost be seen as a thing within a person but separate from the rest of the being that takes over or energizes that part of the body that it settles in. Many of us have experienced a high rage where we can describe the "waves" of feeling coming over us which exerts its own demands on our behavior. During those times one's perceptions of events are not normal and it is only after one finally calms down that the world looks the same again.
Of course, our blood chemistry does change drastically during the experience of emotion, and perhaps there is some way that specific chemicals can gather in certain locales and effect some changes in the behavior of the body at those places. To follow my scheme of interactive energy, this phenomenon would be described as interactive energy changing its mode of expression and target as it moved from one system to another, but it is more than that. What we are describing here is not so much a change from metabolic to interpersonal, although that it included, but a change from one physical mode of expression to another, depending on which part of the body the "feeling" settles in. Sometimes it can settle in the mouth and it will set up a terrific wish and need to bite while in a rage. Before we go any further, it would seem worthwhile to establish a workable name for this "fluid energy," for even if it is only hypothetical, it does describe an existing phenomenon. Let us call it fluid interactive energy.
What is interesting me now is that quite often it is only after the client has begun to move in an angry fashion following the tensing of the fists, that he experiences anger. The interactive energy seems to become evident in body action first and show some external clue to its whereabouts that can be interpreted by a trained observer. Only when he is finally moving does the feeling become known to the person. But that can mislead one to think that one simply has to tense the muscles in order to feel angry; and that is not the case. One first has to have the potential for the anger settled in the muscles. To use my new term, one first has to have the fluid interactive energy in the vicinity, for instance, of the hands and arms. But what has made the fluid interactive energy available in the first place, and what has made it settle at one particular place more than another? What mental or brain agencies or processes are involved in the choosing, and how is it that the individual himself does not know that it is going on until it is well on its way to being expressed?
The answer might simply be found in the mechanisms of interactive energy and their ego processes that I have outlined heretofore and could be entirely unconscious. The selection of one locale over another for the expression of the anger could easily be modified by the environment through conditioning effects and other learnings and become part of the unconscious ego process of selection based on perception both of the internal direction and force of the emotion and on perception of the external direction and force of the target. One explanation of the distance between this type of selection process and the conscious experience and acknowledgment of the feelings that were aroused could be to postulate a conscious and unconscious ego and then one has to explore why they are separate and how they could become more integrated.
The fact there could be such a separation is clinically observable in depersonalized patients in a hospital. Such patients might show signs of physical tension or tingling in a particular part of the body and then be permitted to express in muscular and motoric ways with the aid of accommodators the behaviors that would be produced by such tension. I have seen such patients express with seemingly tremendous feeling and emotion great amounts of rage or love and then announce in a matter-of-fact tone that they did not "feel" any of what they just did and that it was not representative of themselves. When asked where such powerful feelings came from if not from themselves, they cannot answer. These patients are not lying or hiding from their emotions; they simply are not in touch with them. Their bodies may move but the part of themselves that they consider "me" has not yet been involved or touched nor has it participated in any way with what has been done.
Some schizophrenic patients cannot behave in the muscular motoric way that has just been described. The interactive energy in their cases cannot enter the muscular arena. Depersonalized patients can come in contact with their interpersonal interactive energy on a muscular motoric base, but it is their ego that is split away from the body. That may be the beginning of an answer. Ordinary schizophrenics have had their interactive interpersonal energies shunted away from the body, and depersonalized schizophrenics have had their conscious ego split away or separated from the body. The unconscious ego, in the example of emotional expression that is not felt, is still in relationship with the body, for the structures that these patients are capable of doing, albeit without learning and changing very much, are still in clear congruence with and relationship to their life environment. That is, the emotions are not just explosive and random but follow the same logic and interaction with figures in their lives as any "normal" person's structure would.
The therapeutic approach that I have followed with such patients is to ask them to move their bodies in the usual voluntary exercises while they are controlling their bodies using their conscious ego. The process hopefully will result in the client's saying "I am moving my own body the way I want and I accept that it is my own decision and my own body that is responding to it." I then permit the client to participate in structures that are not emotionally threatening and check whether he is experiencing the movement and feelings or is separated from the movement and feelings. If there seems to be separation, I attempt to knit together, over a period of time, the actions of the self and the conscious ego.
It is clear, then, that my charts have not discriminated between the functions and attitudes of the conscious ego and those of the unconscious ego. The column under identity statement would seem to include the functions and attitudes of the conscious ego. The integrating process that I spoke of earlier would simply mean the linking up or integrating of the unconscious and conscious egos. Most people, when finally energized and mobilized and interacting in an emotional, interpersonal fashion, will accept that the feelings and behaviors are their own. They may be puzzled by them and bewildered by them but they almost always adopt them as their own. So it could be said that a structure is a way of bringing to the surface, or to the doorstep of the conscious ego, the interactive energy of the unconscious ego as only the actions and feelings of the body can do. It is difficult for the normal person to disown all that he feels and sees himself doing unless he is a depersonalized schizophrenic.
If I see the clues of the interactive energy dispersal before it has become activated and then interpret that to the client, he may disown my interpretation, for there is very little feedback to him directly from his own body that would lead him to the same conclusions that I present. My interpretations would point out the separation or distance between the conscious ego and the unconscious ego. The same would be true in a traditional verbal session with a client. The unconscious ego may be communicating clearly to the therapist, through the client's relating of dreams or through his verbal associations, but if the therapist interprets these to the client, the client may have no basis whatever for accepting that information as true or as relating to him in any way. The traditional therapist, just as the psychomotor therapist, has to wait for or arrange for the client to give a more direct expression of his emotions that would permit him to see and accept them as his own. I feel that this is far simpler and more directly believable to a client when he is in a structure than when he is in a verbal therapy session.
When a client is in a structure he knows that there is an outlet for all his emotional expressions and he knows that he will be presented with alternative targets if the ones he is using are not satisfying or are embarrassing to him. He also knows that he is in a structure and not in a reality situation, and he is more willing to "go with his feelings" because he knows that what he is saying and doing has more relevance to past circumstances than to present ones. However, a client in a traditional verbal interaction with his therapist may be forced or feel he is being forced to accept attitudes and feelings toward the therapist that are unacceptable to his "now" assessment of himself. I can see where a client would have enormous resistances to such feelings and information about himself, even if it is made clear to him that these are old feelings and not representative of his adult assessment of himself. The traditional verbal session is sometimes so arranged that the client has to "really" believe that the therapist is behaving like his original mother or father before he can integrate his feelings toward his parents into his conscious ego. The structure as a therapeutic device permits this kind of learning with more opportunities for finding alternative forms of behavior and response.
Review of Terms
I would like to expand on the terms "conscious" and "unconscious ego." It seems to me that what I have often understood as unconscious and assumed to be of unconscious origins can be placed under the category of unconscious ego. The term "unconscious ego" might also well be understood as "body ego." A child, after all, makes the most of his gravity, metabolic, interpersonal interactive matches well before he is proficient in speech. It is not surprising then, that he has so few words or concepts available to deal with or describe what he has done. And if he is told that some way of relating which he has found to be satisfying is wrong or inappropriate, he may not learn to recognize it consciously and continue to do it without knowing it. Repression in this case would not be repression of the action but repression of the conscious knowledge about or experience of the action (and also repression of the knowledge of the potential for the action). Yet that cannot be the only process at work, for the verbal ego is certainly also representative of the individual rational self. However, the verbal conscious ego may operate within a fairly wide range of congruence with the unconscious or body ego. What is needed is an understanding of and explanation for the development of relative distance between the two kinds of ego. My experience shows me that most normal people have pretty impressive distances between their conscious and unconscious egos, and how is that to be explained and how is their "normalcy" to be explained? How is it possible to lead such body- and emotion-blind lives and still remain in one piece and lead relatively satisfying lives? In some respects it makes the conscious verbal ego seem irrelevant, and yet that is what makes a human different from other animals. What is the point of having a conscious verbal ego if there can be so little dysfunction in the living process and so little personal discomfort even if the verbal conscious ego is far away from emotional reality and relevance? Or are we all living in an unconscious despair whose extent is measurable by the distance between our conscious and unconscious egos?
Can this explain why realizing our human potential is something that is striven for and not often attained? Then being human does include the inevitability of conflict due to the psychic structure of man's two ego states. Not the conflict between the id and ego or superego but the conflict or possibility for incongruency between man's conscious and unconscious egos.
The question remains: how important is the conscious verbal ego for human living? What are its limits and uses? Is
this distance between the two egos at all valuable, even while it creates such a large potential for conflict and incongruity? My immediate answer to this last question is a resounding Yes. Sometimes a good white lie to one's self will let life go on whereas the truth might cause impossible suffering, and possibly the end of life. How is it that life cannot stand to know the truth about life? The problem, then, is to find the basis for the standards of the conscious verbal ego and how it is that these standards can be in such contrast and contradiction to actual human living realities. In other words, how is it life and ourselves as living creatures can tolerate world views, religions and philosophies that contradict what we know interactively, emotionally and non-verbally to be true? What kind of knowing is it when we "know it to be true" and yet deny it consciously? It must be a kind of knowing that can be denied, subjugated, subverted and discarded. Then which knowing is the more superior and the more valuable, that of the non-verbal, experiential, unconscious body ego, or that of the symbolic, verbal, conscious ego? However much the non-verbal, unconscious ego is subjugated or denied, it must have its needs met on some level or in some way or the person will literally physically die. It may have its needs fulfilled in the numerous ways noted earlier in the section on interactive energy, but it is the verbal ego that calls the shots-—or is it?
Perhaps answers can be found by looking at the developmental process to see when the capacity and need for the activation and growth of the conscious verbal ego arises. I realize that until now I have taken it for granted that when I used the term "ego," that there was nothing other than body ego although I hadn't called it that. I described the ego as much like a skin or interface of interactive energy that moderated the interactive matches between the self and the rest of the energetic world. The ego filtered the energy input by assessing the quantity and direction of environmental energies and accepting or avoiding or rejecting them. The ego also was described as a filter that would modify and direct the internal energies so that the skin and the self were not burst by the force of one's feelings. The protecting and limiting functions of the parents were understood to be important factors in developing those capacities in one's self. The functions of the ego, therefore, were to perceive inner and outer energy distributions and directions, modify and direct the interactive forces to maintain the economy and continuity of life, and thus to ensure the proper functioning of one's interactive arenas and to satisfy one's interactive needs.
Now if the verbal, conscious ego does indeed exist, its functions must be very much like the functions of the body ego but operating on the conscious, verbal-symbolic level. Earlier in the book I described the possibility that certain types of pathology arise from the capacity to symbolize and to treat symbols as real. When that process was used in place of the actual support and nurturance provided by the real parents, and those needs were met in an abstract, symbolic way by the self, life became that much less real and less satisfying, and there was less satisfying interaction with other people. I also wrote that there was a verbal-symbolic interactive arena and that one learned to make verbal-symbolic matches just as one learned to make other types of interactive matches. From this, I present the following two suppositions: there is a verbal symbolic conscious ego, just as other interactive energy systems have ego interfaces to moderate the energy distribution; and, there is the human capacity (and developmental need) to treat verbal symbols as if they were real. Therefore, I must assume that the human organism grows and develops from the motoric-muscular interactive state to the abstract, symbolic-verbal state. The verbal symbols are just as real and manipulable as one's own body and limbs. It is clear that one cannot heal, teach or "therapize" a human without paying strict attention to his verbal as well as to his body ego.
The human being, then, by virtue of his genetic, developmental structure, prepares to live a portion of his life in the verbal-symbolic arena, which affects with all the power of the concretely real his metabolic, muscular interactive life. His verbal-symbolic ego must have a structure that functions to keep the individual properly balanced between his inner self and the outer world. One of the implications of this is that one can shear off the verbal-symbolic ego by using verbal symbols and leave the interactive energy without the ego and therefore undirected and without limitation.
Let me give some examples of this type of phenomenon. I have read that some people who are allergic to certain types of foods, when told (falsely) that they had just eaten that food would develop all the symptoms of the allergy; that is, the verbal symbols were enough to trigger metabolic responses, the verbal symbol became as real as the irritating food. It is important to note that there can be great disparity between what is actual and concrete and what is verbally described, and yet the result can be the same as if it were actual. The same kind of phenomenon can be seen in hypnosis; a subject can be told that he is like a dog and enough dog-like behavior is elicited to make one see that some part of that person believed the verbal symbols and was prepared to "live them out." Apparently, in hypnosis the hypnotist takes control of the subject's verbal ego and uses verbal symbols to manipulate his responses. One should note that if there were continuous disparity between the actual and the symbolic—-that is, if a subject under hypnosis were constantly fed symbolic information that contradicted concrete, metabolic reality—-it would very likely produce some kind of disturbances. The same could be said of non-hypnotized people whose verbal-symbolic ego was at odds with their body ego, which more likely represents concrete reality.
The verbal-symbolic ego of a person must operate by developing, during his early maturation, a set of symbols and words to represent external reality and a similar set of symbols and words to represent his self. That is, interactive energies of all kinds—-reflexive, metabolic, interpersonal and material—-would have key words, symbols, and concepts attached to or representing them. The external interactive forces and energies of the world and the internal interactive energies of the self, symbolically represented, would be moderated by a verbal-symbolic representation of the body ego or the self. Then if all went well, the entire interactive process, or most of it, could take place on the symbolic level exactly as the body ego moderates, modifies, monitors and filters concrete motoric, muscular interactive energies. Yet one can immediately see the pitfalls that such a transposition could entail. The interactive energies of the world, the self and the ego functions could be accidentally or purposely misnamed, misunderstood or not be given a name at all. Any of those errors would have consequences and one simply has to look around at the world at large to see them. The naming process that little children go through should be carefully and clearly articulated, for those things left unnamed could be left in a symbolic limbo and real objects, energies or functions could be treated as if they did not exist, even though they had concrete, tactile reality that could be experienced by the body and body ego. This would certainly provide a person with cognitive and other kinds of dissonance! And isn't this what we therapists see every time we work? What if there were no names given to the sexual organs and they were never talked about in one's home? Wouldn't that be an effective way of making sex go underground? How could one deal with one's sexual without paying strict attention to his verbal as well as to his body ego.
The human being, then, by virtue of his genetic, developmental structure, prepares to live a portion of his life in the verbal-symbolic arena, which affects with all the power of the concretely real his metabolic, muscular interactive life. His verbal-symbolic ego must have a structure that functions to keep the individual properly balanced between his inner self and the outer world. One of the implications of this is that one can shear off the verbal-symbolic ego by using verbal symbols and leave the interactive energy without the ego and therefore undirected and without limitation.
Let me give some examples of this type of phenomenon. I have read that some people who are allergic to certain types of foods, when told (falsely) that they had just eaten that food would develop all the symptoms of the allergy; that is, the verbal symbols were enough to trigger metabolic responses, the verbal symbol became as real as the irritating food. It is important to note that there can be great disparity between what is actual and concrete and what is verbally described, and yet the result can be the same as if it were actual. The same kind of phenomenon can be seen in hypnosis; a subject can be told that he is like a dog and enough dog-like behavior is elicited to make one see that some part of that person believed the verbal symbols and was prepared to alive them out." Apparently, in hypnosis the hypnotist takes control of the subject's verbal ego and uses verbal symbols to manipulate his responses. One should note that if there were continuous disparity between the actual and the symbolic— that is, if a subject under hypnosis were constantly fed symbolic information that contradicted concrete, metabolic reality—it would very likely produce some kind of disturbances. The same could be said of non-hypnotized people whose verbal-symbolic ego was at odds with their body ego, which more likely represents concrete reality.
The verbal-symbolic ego of a person must operate by developing, during his early maturation, a set of symbols and words to represent external reality and a similar set of symbols and words to represent his self. That is, interactive energies of all kinds-—reflexive, metabolic, interpersonal and material—-would have key words, symbols, and concepts attached to or representing them. The external interactive forces and energies of the world and the internal interactive energies of the self, symbolically represented, would be moderated by a verbal-symbolic representation of the body ego or the self. Then if all went well, the entire interactive process, or most of it, could take place on the symbolic level exactly as the body ego moderates, modifies, monitors and filters concrete motoric, muscular interactive energies. Yet one can immediately see the pitfalls that such a transposition could entail. The interactive energies of the world, the self and the ego functions could be accidentally or purposely misnamed, misunderstood or not be given a name at all. Any of those errors would have consequences and one simply has to look around at the world at large to see them. The naming process that little children go through should be carefully and clearly articulated, for those things left unnamed could be left in a symbolic limbo and real objects, energies or functions could be treated as if they did not exist, even though they had concrete, tactile reality that could be experienced by the body and body ego. This would certainly provide a person with cognitive and other kinds of dissonance! And isn't this what we therapists see every time we work? What if there were no names given to the sexual organs and they were never talked about in one's home? Wouldn't that be an effective way of making sex go underground? How could one deal with one's sexual feelings? One would have to learn to depersonalize, tolerate psychic disharmony, develop new words and concepts, psychically or actually perform a genital removing operation or in some other way resolve the confusion.
Parents should be careful not to give certain kinds of pet names to their children or to bodily functions of their children for they will live out the implication of the names. To return to the hypnotist making a person act dog-like, I remember a mother whom I knew (not therapeutically) who often said to her daughter, "You are so stupid I should have sent the dog to school and kept you at home," implying that she was not as intelligent as the dog. That poor child grew up with her self-esteem impaired and looked less pretty and more "hang-dog" as the years went on. Since it is the parents who do most of the early naming and sanctioning of behavior, it is their function to see to it that the child does not grow up with an impaired verbal-symbolic ego. Not only do the parents name objects and functions of the outer interactive universe, but they name the child and his own interactive functions and also directly and indirectly sanction those functions. (Interestingly, children who are born out of wedlock either do not have a legitimate name or have a "mark" on their name. Also, people are often concerned with not losing their good name). The child's self-esteem could relate to what he is called and how he is treated as well as to how well he lives up to the frames of reference established by the parents and the society in which he lives. Thus the parents have a great responsibility on the verbal-symbolic level. I have previously been well aware of how tremendously important it is that the parents meet the interactive needs of the child, but I am now emphasizing the importance of the parents' role (and, I suppose, that of the school system as well) in developing the child's verbal-symbolic picture of the world and of himself.
There are various ways of coping with this disparity. For example, the need some people have to combine liquor and sexuality leads me to think that they must have to deaden their verbal-symbolic egos before they can function sexually, for sexual organs and behavior may never have been properly named or sanctioned in their homes or cultures. Perhaps this is also why some people have to have sex in the dark, for then they may be able to deny that they are having it, and also why some people may have to depersonalize in order to have sex. I suppose some people may have to deny or depersonalize the functions of eating and eliminating because those functions may never have been properly named or sanctioned. They certainly could not stop doing those things or they would not be able to continue living, so they must have to be able to create and maintain a distance between the body ego and the verbal-symbolic ego in order to maintain life itself.
This demonstrates clearly the power and function of words in the process of clarifying what one is doing and how to continue to change one's behavior. One of the functions of good parents is to name the interactive events and sanction them and verbally clarify them, as well as to meet the interactive needs of the child.
In our psychomotor structures we give names to processes which a client is incapable of symbolizing verbally. We permit the surfacing of the interactive energy under the aegis of the body ego. By having the good parent name and sanction the behavior as it is acted out we are healing the distance between the body ego and the verbal-symbolic ego. By using words and symbolic concepts to describe the person's actions and behaviors which were established and articulated before words and their clarifying function were available, we are bringing to the body ego and the motoric interactive process the clarifying assistance of the verbal ego. In other words in the last process we are bringing out into the open, in terms of overt behavior, patterns of interaction which might not be entirely satisfactory and are unconscious and unnamed and thus we are "maturing" or improving the body ego matches. We have in a structure the opportunity for going back and re-educating the body ego by using discriminations and controls that were not available in the first enactment. For instance, when a client is undergoing a rebirth structure he has available not only his own verbal-symbolic ego, which is monitoring and watching the process, but the verbal-symbolic egos of the group leader and the rest of the group. The client, when he was actually being born, did not have available his own symbolic-verbal ego, and even though his mother's or the doctor's or the nurse's ego was present, he was not able to be in communication with it. If in reality the child was under pressure at birth and experienced discomfort and pain in the event, or if the child was not sufficiently cared for after birth and was lonely and frightened, he can now in a structure be told as both the child and the adult simultaneously that his good mother loved him and that both parents wanted him and were looking forward to his birth. He can be assured that when he was being pressed on from the outside (by the accommodators in the structure and the uterine canal during his birth), it was not being done to hurt him but to help him move and be born, and that when his mother nursed him it was her breast that provided the milk, that he was not eating his mother, that his mother liked feeding him, and so forth. The labeling and naming process would tend to change the tension of the original event and make it more understandable and manageable, and would more effectively co-ordinate the interactive matches. This is particularly so in structures dealing with a later period of the client's life. The client not only is held by the good parents but is told that they are supporting and protecting him, making the experience much more clear and understandable.
Thus a structure is not only an arena for satisfying unmet interactive needs, making clearer interactive matches, placing interactive energy in the appropriate energy systems and arenas; it is clearly also an arena for the integration of the two kinds of egos and for the development and maturation and articulation of those egos.
I am increasingly aware of the enormous complexity of the human being. I will try to list for myself and the reader the frames of reference, scales or gauges that can be checked out when a therapist is confronted with a client and is attempting to find out not only something about who he is but something about what his problems are and some way to understand them and organize an approach that would lead toward a solution of those problems. This is something of a checklist for the psychomotor therapist:
1. What are the areas showing body tension.
2. What are the kinds of behavior the client associates with those areas.
3. Can the client translate the tensions into action.
4. What is the action that results.
5. Is it being expressed via the appropriate motor system.
6. Can the client name the action.
7. Does the action relate to anger or frustration and for what reason.
8. Does the action relate to any interactive deficits.
9. If so, what interactive system and at what age level.
10. Does the client have a name for the target of his action.
11. How does he react when the name is used. Does he accept or reject his target or the name of it.
12. Can he believe that the negative parents were wrong in treating him badly, or does he feel that he is unworthy of fair treatment.
13. Can he accept the ministrations of the good parents.
14. Does he show changed behavior as a result of his structures, or does he remain the same. If so, why.
It is time to return to the tour of the body regarding the meanings and potential behaviors behind certain areas of tension.
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