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Origins and History of Pesso System/Psychomotor Therapy
This is Part Four of the Article by Louisa Howe, Ph.D.
 Another early form of limiting occurred in response to a structure enactor's Oedipal strivings. A person might become aware of having had a childhood impulse to push his or her parents apart. The therapist would then instruct the couple accommodating in the roles of "good" parents to hold each other firmly around the middle, asking help from others in the group if their "child" had unusual physical strength. The enactor could then try with all his or her might to separate the parents, and would inevitably fail. This experience could offer a wholesome corrective to the person's past situation if real parents had not been emotionally close to each other and had all too readily allowed their child to come between them.
The need for limiting is one of several basic needs of the growing individual, needs which, before birth, are satisfied by the mother's body, and usually by the mother or by both parents after the baby is born. Besides the original need that Al and Diane had identified, the need for nurturance, they now specified three more: the need for support, for protection, and for limits or containment. Two further needs were subsequently added: the need for a place (where one belongs), and the need for respect. The identification of these needs resulted from Al's giving attention to the question of what kinds of response (interaction) would best match or satisfy each emotion that people might experience. As the "good" parental responses of providing support when the child felt insecure, protection when the child was frightened, and nurturance when the child was hungry or in need of comfort were experienced and internalized, the child was enabled increasingly to be self-supporting, self-protecting and self-nurturing. Recognition of the human individual's need to be limited, to have what might be called a "holding environment", was -- it seems to me -- a particularly significant development in PS/P. Parents' provision of limits for their child enables the child to internalize the meaning of this particular interaction with the parent(s), so that from this time on the child can impose appropriate limits on his or her own behavior in similar situations. Lacking adequate experience of such limit-imposing interactions, the child is unsure of his or her own boundaries and vulnerable to a sense of omnipotence on the one hand and total powerlessness on the other. Interestingly, in view of Freudian instinct theory, the two realms in which limits are imposed during PS/P structures are sexuality and aggression. During this middle period the enactor of a structure in which limits were to be imposed on the expression of anger was asked to lie on the floor on his or her back. "Good" or positive parents then usually limited the person's arms, assuming positions that allowed them good leverage. "Extensions" of the "good" parents held the person's head and legs. Not until everyone was in place did the struggle begin. When it ended the exhausted enactor realized with surprise and gratification that his or her anger was not, after all, so powerfully dangerous that it could destroy the world; instead, a mere handful of ordinary mortals were able to deal with it calmly and kindly. As a result there was less need to deny anger or hold it back inappropriately and the person felt a new sense of validation and empowerment. Except for the Oedipal limit structures already described, I believe sexual limit structures came along well after the limit structures for anger had become part of the PS/P repertoire. One sort of sexual limiting also took place with the enactor lying on his or her back on the floor. Then ideal parents (as they were beginning to be called) placed their hands over the enactor's hip bones to limit his or her pelvic thrusts toward either the ideal mother or father. Statements made by the ideal parents validate the enactor's sexuality at the same time that their superior strength keeps the person's sexual energies appropriately limited, or contained. The meaning of this external, interactive restraint can then be internalized so that the person no longer needs to fear sexuality, inappropriately hold sexual feelings back, or punish him- or herself for having them. Another kind of sexual limit structure entailed recognizing and respecting the structure enactor's wish to invite sexual contact with a parent but not permitting this to happen. Originally the response in this situation was to have ideal parents wrap their arms firmly around the enactor's knees, saying that it's all right to want to open up sexually to, say, ideal father, and it's all right to try to do so with all one's strength, but they won't let the enactor literally do that. Ideal parents then add that they have literal sex only with each other, which they very much enjoy, and that neither one of them would ever do anything literally sexual with their child, no matter how appealing the child might be. More recently Al has shifted to having only women do the limiting of a woman's openness by restraining her knees. Al's second book (1973) referred to what he called a "species ego", describing it as a system for catching the interactive energies that slip past the ego and would seem to endanger the species... a massive circuit breaker for the emotional system [that] works for the safety and satisfaction of others rather than the safety and satisfaction of the self (p. 145). Limit structures are designed to repair gaps or deficiencies in the ego which permit interactive energies to move toward infinity and omnipotence, a movement that the species ego would otherwise counter either by turning off the energy or by deflecting it back toward the self, perhaps giving rise to fantasies or hallucinations. At a later period limit structures tended to be carried out with the structure enactor remaining in whatever position he or she had assumed, rather than being asked to lie down on the floor and wait for accommodators to assume the positions that made limiting relatively easy. This shift avoids the break in continuity required by the earlier method and works well when there are enough people in the group. Establishing the Institute By l969 there were several people who had been trained to conduct PS/P exercises and structures. The process of teaching, along with lecture-demonstrations presented by Al or Diane to new groups, challenged Al to try to work out increasingly clear concepts and theories concerning PS/P and its effects. The pattern of a more formalized two-year program was beginning to emerge from the rather informal apprenticeship type of training that the earliest students of this new approach had experienced. It seemed essential to Al to set up an organization explicitly devoted to Psychomotor teaching, practice, and research; accordingly the Psychomotor Institute was established during the summer of l970 and approved as a nonprofit corporation the following year. Besides Al and Diane, the incorporators were Ellsworth Neumann, M.D., Administrator of the Massachusetts General Hospital; Charles Pinderhughes, M.D., psychiatrist at the Boston V.A. Hospital; Leo J. Reyna, Ph.D., a behavioral psychologist involved in the research on Psychomotor at the V.A. Hospital; Eugene Smith, M.D. a psychiatrist in private practice who was interested in seeing Psychomotor develop further. This was another period when I was not much involved with Psychomotor and the Pessos, but Al sought me out to join the roster of incorporators and to sign the necessary documents. Next it seemed clear to Al and the trainees that a building was needed, a place more accessible and better adapted for training than the Pessos' house out in Weston, where the trainees could begin to practice what they were learning. In l97l the Psychomotor Institute bought a handsome former residence -- most recently a music school -- at 25l Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a six-story building containing numerous large wood-paneled, virtually soundproof rooms. Here trainees could learn, be supervised, and practice Psychomotor. During the next couple of years I continued to have only slight contact with the Pessos, and that occurred mainly when the Incorporators or the Board of Directors met. The Board included Al Pesso as President and Diane as Vice President, positions they have retained to this day. Arthur Perry, trained by the Pessos in dance and in PS/P, served as the first Secretary, through 1973. In early l974 I took over this office and have held it ever since. Diane and I were the only women on the Board. Although Rufus Peebles was named as executive director of the Institute and Arthur Perry as administrator, I gradually came to realize that Diane had assumed most of the work of managing the Institute: acquiring office equipment, desks, and other furnishings, developing a mailing list, doing public relations work, hiring and supervising work-study students from Emerson College, arranging and publicizing lecture-demonstrations, attracting clients, etc. She worked long hours without payment and with minimal acknowledgement of her efforts. She was much involved in technical discussions with Al but had dropped her former private practice to work on the community model, and to meet the needs of both the Institute and the family. Except for the family's living and schooling expenses everything that they earned was now devoted to paying the Institute's costs, and the family's former life style was sacrificed to the Institute's financial needs. Al, meanwhile, was carrying an overload of work, still teaching fulltime at Emerson College, seeing a number of clients, doing most of the training, working up to ten hours a week at McLean, completing his studies for Goddard, striving to build a network of people who were informed about and supportive of PS/P, and, during a brief vacation period, churning out a second book, Experience in Action (1973). In early 1973 I was asked to assume a more active role, becoming a member of the Institute's staff. While Al and Diane had hoped that applicants for training would be well-experienced psychotherapists, including psychologists and psychiatrists, some new trainees had more limited preparation, both academically and clinically. Accordingly it would be my task to fill the gaps in these trainees' conceptual and theoretical background. A few months later a half-year sabbatical for Al from Emerson College was scheduled to begin, and I was also asked to keep an eye on the Institute during their absence. The Pessos planned to travel, partly to visit Al's relatives in Jugoslavia and also to respond to the interest in PS/P therapy that had been kindled by the publication of Al's first book, Movement in Psychotherapy, especially in France, the Netherlands, and England. They also planned to meet with various professional groups in other parts of the United States and in Canada. The Boston Institute's program suffered during and after this period. The Pessos' absence was resented; financial problems became exacerbated; antagonistic feelings developed; some people left. Al and Diane became concerned that drop-outs from the program might represent themselves as fully trained PS/P therapists -- which might be dangerous to clients, with a technique as powerful as this one was. Damage also might be done to PS/P's reputation, if inadequately trained people started to claim that what they were doing was PS/P therapy. Guarding the integrity of PS/P, and establishing as firm a theoretical and research-based foundation for it as possible, seemed to Al to be the most promising way of attracting well- qualified psychiatrists, psychologists and others to seek PS/P training. While Al and Diane agreed that the spreading of knowledge about PS/P was extremely important, they differed on how to accomplish this. Diane argued that if marketing was done so that the general public became aware of what PS/P could do, a demand for this kind of emotional re-education would build up from potential clients and thereby motivate psychotherapists to get training in this new modality. As Diane comments, it was Al's viewpoint that won out. A further vision of Diane's was that high school students all over the country might some day, through PS/P education that they would receive, be given an opportunity to overcome the effects of whatever inadequate parenting they might have suffered before they made their choice of mate, and be enabled to become more fully adequate parents themselves when they had children. She felt that PS/P help for this age group would be a highly cost effective way of preventing future psychological problems. A training committee was set up for the Institute, which recommended that intensive training in PS/P should in the future be offered only to people who had already been professionally trained in psychotherapy. Certification standards were tightened and steps were taken to register "Psychomotor" as a service mark or trade mark. Trainees under supervision were expected to lead PS/P workshops and therapy sessions, but were not granted the right to claim that they were Psychomotor therapists until they had completed the certification training program and had been certified. Therapists who had merely attended a few workshops could say that they were utilizing Psychomotor techniques, but not that they were conducting Psychomotor or PS/P workshops. As Secretary of the Institute I wrote a number of letters to people who had announced workshops they were conducting in what they called Psychomotor therapy, asking them not to do so since they had not been sufficiently trained. Members of the Board of Directors were loyal and helpful, meeting a total of six times during 1974 in an effort to deal with the problems the Institute was facing as well as to plan for the exciting possibilities of future development that evidently lay ahead. Financial problems were considerably relieved when a confused real estate tax situation was straightened out, and when the Pessos sold their Weston house to clear up the Institute's debts. By this time I had been finally and fully drawn into the PS/P fold. As a method of psychotherapy it amazed me -- it was so finely, thoroughly, coherently developed -- and it was still developing. I enrolled as a first year trainee (while also a staff and Board member) in l974, looking forward to being certified as a Psychomotor therapist in a couple of years. Our small group, which eventually consisted only of Gus Kaufman and me, met usually with Al, sometimes with Diane and often with both of the Pessos, who took turns along with us in doing structures as well as teaching us about them. Our sessions were held three mornings a week, from nine in the morning till noon; fortunately Gus -- who had moved from Atlanta to Boston for the sole purpose of being trained as a Psychomotor therapist -- and I both had work schedules that permitted this time commitment. At last I believed I could learn to do therapy this way, and that it would be the best and most effective way from the standpoint of clients. But I also found that it was a highly complex set of skills that had to be learned. The Pessos' involvement with trainees and others helped in clarifying, extending, enriching and refining PS/P theory and practice. During the early l970s, for example, Nat Hollister, M.D., a neurologist who had attended PS/P groups in Ohio with his wife, Jane, came to realize that a large number of his patients suffered from emotional rather than neurological problems. They decided to come to Boston so that Jane could enroll in the Psychomotor Institute's two year training program and Nat could be trained in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital and also attend the first year of PS/P training. Subsequently Nat decided to focus on the treatment of chronic atypical pain patients. The therapeutic program he developed used PS/P as a major treatment modality and was established as a special unit at the New England Rehabilitation Hospital in Woburn, Mass. This became a very innovative and effective program. He hired as many PS/P therapists as were available and sought training for the rest of his staff. Nat then moved his staff and program to the Massachusetts Rehabilitation Hospital (now Spaulding Hospital) in Boston. Subsequently, New England Rehabilitation Hospital appointed a new psychiatrist to continue the work of the pain unit, and requested that one of the Pessos and their trainees provide the essential PS/P component. Al worked with the patients and staff for a short time and then turned the work over to Diane. While Director of Psychomotor Therapy at the Pain Unit Diane found that patients' great difficulty with anger expression interfered with the usual structure work. Needing to find a way for patients to access their historic unmet emotional needs without triggering off the blocking effects of anger, she devised two new exercises, the ideal parent and the self/self - self/other exercises. These made it possible for patients to go directly to positive structure experiences. Nat's wife, Jane Hollister, a therapist whose orientation was Jungian, recognized that what the Pessos had been calling "good" or "wished-for" parent figures could be considered to be "archetypes"; the concepts of "animus" and "anima" were also useful in illuminating the "phallic" attributes of women and the receptive, nurturing and creative qualities of men. Jane became one of the early graduates of the Institute's training program and for a while a member of its teaching staff. Other early graduates were Arthur Cobb, Ph.D., David Doolittle, M.A., Gail Murray, M.A., Charles Nordby, Ph.D., Rufus Peebles, J.D. and Michael Werle, Ed.D. For my part I believe I contributed to some clarification of what had been called "good" and "bad" parent figures. Rather than such judgmental terms I preferred words like "positive" and "negative" parents. It then became clearer that these were aspects of real parents which it was useful to polarize (or "split"), and that in addition to these two sets of opposing aspects of real parents, there were the ideal, archetypal parent figures who could be constructed to supply precisely what the negative aspects of real parents had failed to provide. This meant that there were now three sets of parent figures rather than just two. Though the concept first arose with reference to archetypes, it seemed simpler to speak of them as "ideal", rather than archetypal, parents. (Diane, for her part, liked to call them "alternative" parents.) During the course of our training Al conveyed to Gus and me the importance he placed upon the spiritual nature of PS/P therapy. His view of spirituality was not doctrinaire, but allowed individuals to define as they saw fit the nature of "all that is", which some might choose to call God. Al considered that parents -- and especially ideal parents -- served as conduits through which energies traveled between the young child and what might be called a higher power. At the same time the child, him- or herself, was part of the higher power; the power existed in the child as in every other part of the universe. Similarly we, as therapists, could feel ourselves to be conduits for energies existing in the universe that traveled through us, as well as through accommodators, to bring benefit to the people with whom we worked. Since so little of our own energies needed to be expended because we mainly were conduits, it seemed to me to follow that there was very little need ever to feel tired! I continued to be impressed with the close correspondence between PS/P and Freudian theory, especially if the latter were augmented by a sociological emphasis on interaction and its internalization -- such as has been more recently supplied through the development of object relations, self psychology, and family systems theories. Further augmentation of psychoanalytic views occurs through PS/P's emphasis on the body and its ways of moving and acting, an emphasis that seems quite compatible with Freud's views even though it was not developed by him beyond his statement that "...the ego is first and foremost a body ego." (See chapters ___ and ___ ). Although the use of limiting figures to handle and help structure enactors to handle their sexual and aggressive energies seems compatible with Freud's designation of the latter as "instincts", PS/P's postulation of the child's inherent basic need to have such limits imposed is significantly different from Freud's view. Freud saw the child's wish to murder one parent and marry the other as opposed only by the fear of punitive retaliation -- castration anxiety -- subsequently internalized as a guilt-laden superego. By contrast it is the Pesso System's more optimistic view that a need to experience opposition to these omnipotent wishes exists innately within the child. There is something within the child, they believe, that welcomes the firm and kindly parent figures' non-punitive, non-retaliatory, non-judgmental and non-guilt-arousing imposition of limits on his or her wishes. Freud saw the ego as a "surface entity"; Al Pesso similarly referred to it during this period as "the skin of the self", later using the term ego wrapping to describe how, through the loving, caregiving, validating responses of parents, ego is wrapped around the individual's soul or core self. As for gaining access to unconscious thoughts and feelings, for PS/P it was primarily the body and its sensations and movements, rather than dreams, which represented "the royal road to the unconscious." Out of a wish to remain hospitable to all possible theoretical views that might be held by potential PS/P trainees or clients, however, and to avoid alienating anyone, Al and Diane deliberately chose not to align themselves with any particular school of psychotherapy, and they readily acknowledge that many elements of their approach are also found elsewhere. Perhaps as a reaction to the Pessos' (and my) efforts to deter people from improperly claiming that they were PS/P therapists, some individuals who have attended workshops have then gone on to teach PS/P techniques to people being trained in types of therapy bearing other labels, without mentioning the source from which these techniques came. As a result it has sometimes been supposed that Al and Diane derived their techniques from these other practitioners, rather than the other way around. I recall one Board meeting when Al told about having led a small, undersubscribed workshop in the same building where another, very popular, workshop was being conducted. He soon became aware of a familiar sound: a blow being struck on a yielding surface, accompanied by the outcry of a negative accommodator. He later ascertained that a whole two-day workshop was being devoted to negative accommodation alone. Not surprisingly, it was being called by a different name. Return to Part One Go to Part Five Return to Book Excerpts |
