Return to Part One Go to Part Seven Return to Book Excerpts History of Pesso System/Psychomotor Therapy
This is Part Six of the Article by Louisa Howe, Ph.D.
 Developments in the United States Al's and sometimes Diane's travels within North America also succeeded in stimulating greater knowledge of and interest in PS/P. They had done some traveling within the U.S. before 1973, but after that year Al went further afield, conducting workshops at the University of Alaska in Anchorage, Houston, St. Louis, Denver, Boulder, Winston Salem, Columbia, Tampa, Orlando, and elsewhere. Workshops in Minneapolis were coordinated by Will Larson and by Helen Gilbert. Al and Diane did several two-day Institute programs for the American Academy of Psychotherapists and the Association for Humanistic Psychology. In February, 1990, they conducted a two-day Institute for the American Group Psychotherapy Association. Their first visit to Atlanta took place in 1969, with a workshop at the Adanta Center. Staff here were Henry and Jean Harsch, Earl Brown, Irma Shepard and Joen Fagen, all well-respected psychotherapists in the Atlanta community and associated with the clinical psychology doctoral program at Georgia State University. It was at Henry and Jean Harschs' center, An Open Space, Limited, where the Pessos first met Gus Kaufman, Jr. By then Diane and Al had begun to use videotape; this was to become an indispensable tool for supervision as well as for orienting new people to PS/P. The location for PS/P work then shifted to the Pine River Center, where most of the workshops were led by Al and coordinated by George Taylor and then by Jackie Damgaard, who went on to become certified in PS/P. Currently the coordinator of training programs in Atlanta, is Gus Kaufman, Jr. Atlanta continues to be a place where PS/P is held in high regard. Each January Al gives a one day program for graduate clinical psychology students at Georgia State University. For quite a few years PS/P has also been included among the schools of psychotherapy graduate students learn about in the doctoral program in clinical psychology. As part of this program students at the University read up on and then impersonate Al and Diane as part of the series of "Master Psychotherapists" whose work they are studying. Leading psychologists and other psychotherapists in the area have enrolled in workshops conducted by Al Pesso, and many individual clients, including people training to be therapists, have had PS/P experience either with the Pessos or with therapists trained by them. Besides the persons already mentioned, numerous others have been strong supporters of PS/P over the years, including the family therapist Gus Napier, whose book, The Fragile Bond (1988) contains two engaging and graphic descriptions of PS/P structures. Gus Kaufman has recruited therapists for the first "European model" training program to exist in the United States; its first graduates are scheduled for certification review in 1990. In addition several trainees who had been enrolled under the earlier U.S. plan continue to work for certification. The most recent PS/P therapists to be certified in the US are Carl Clarke and Joel Rachelson, both from the Atlanta area. Other groups around the country also have developed an interest in the Pessos' ways of doing therapy and have taken various steps toward establishing training programs or, at the very least, toward arranging future visits from Al, Diane, or other PS/P trainers. Active centers of interest in PS/P have existed (and many still exist) in Northern California, where three therapists have been certified, including trainer Robert Beloof; San Diego; Minneapolis; Chicago; Albany, N.Y.; South Carolina; North Carolina; Virginia; New Jersey; and New York City. Another place regularly visited by Al, and sometimes Diane, during the 1970s was Lake Grove School on Long Island, N.Y., a boarding school for troubled adolescents. Michael DeSisto, the director there, who was especially enthusiastic about PS/P, then left to start a similar school in western Massachusetts, the De Sisto School, where PS/P continues to have an important place. In 1975 it became clear that Al's hopes for the Psychomotor Institute in Boston were not going to be fulfilled and that it would be wise to think about alternatives. Al then discovered a beautiful place on Webster Lake in Franklin, New Hampshire, 94 miles north of Boston, that he felt would be a wonderful setting for residential PS/P training workshops and for a home base. There was a sizeable farmhouse attached to a big barn, complete with silo -- and with a strongly supported hardwood floor in the barn. There was a sandy beach, a tennis court, a boathouse and gazebo, a comfortable four-bedroom house part way down the hill, and a trout pond, all set in about 200 acres of woods, with lots of lawn. The former owner, George Alpert had created a lovely 3 hole golf course. His son Richard (Baba Ram Dass) and his followers resided summers in the woods and fields. In the early summer of 1976 Al and Diane ran their first workshops there. Strolling Woods has proved to be a wonderful setting for the training programs, but a burdensome set of financial and management problems for Diane. Meanwhile I had embarked on private practice as a newly certified PS/P therapist, having found a large office suite in an old building in Copley Square where people would not be disturbed if there were loud sounds from time to time. Since the Psychomotor Institute had been incorporated in Massachusetts and most of the Board of Directors lived in the Boston area I offered to house the Institute in my office. Besides being the Board's Clerk I now became the Institute's Registrar, Training Committee Chairperson and Boston Director, keeping copies of trainee applications, logs of training hours completed, and other records. Mostly the Institute's relocation was an "on paper" shift, since the main center of PS/P activity had now moved to New Hampshire with the Pessos. During the late '70s Al and Diane tried out various plans for scheduling and organizing the summer training programs. During a couple of summers I recall that Gus Kaufman and I were recruited to take over the training during weekends to give the Pessos respite from the full weekdays they had scheduled for themselves. This was a period when the total group was divided in half, so that Al and Diane each worked with a group of about six people, located either in the cottage or in the barn; then on occasion the whole group would meet with both of them. Robert Beloof, a poet and professor of rhetoric at the University of California in Berkeley, was first introduced to PS/P at workshops organized by Roger and Peggy Mastrude in Aptos, California. He started to attend the summer sessions in 1976 and was eager to be helpful in the development of the training program. One proposal Robert made was to have Diane give instruction in the PS/P exercises as part of the training. Quite evidently the exercises formed an important part of the requirements for certification, yet no time had been put aside for teaching them; this then was rectified. During some later years Diane conducted weekend sessions that were devoted just to the exercises so that the trainees could have access to this experience. Robert, and I spent many hours during much of 1978 and '79 struggling to work out a coherent set of requirements for PS/P training, which I then negotiated with Al and Diane. This was now divided into three sections that clarified some confusing aspects of the training modultes they had previously outlined. Provisions were made in this training brochure for some credit to be given for watching videotapes. No tapes had as yet been edited for this purpose, however, and current work was not being videotaped on the equipment the Pessos had purchased in early 1974. Videotaping by 1979 made use of cassettes that recorded in color. Before long the Pessos had acquired more up-to-date equipment and the old black and white reels were put away and forgotten. They and the transcripts remain, however, as an impressive historical record of the changes (some of which are clearly the result of Diane's influence) that occurred in Al's ways of working during this five-year period. They also testify to his ability to keep learning and improving and his unflinching honesty in self-criticism, as the following examples show (Pesso, A., 1980): First, with a male client: I skip a couple of steps. I don't ask him to choose an ideal father. I simply step into the role and feed him the lines immediately. I touched his head too soon...He moves his head forward and I touch him without asking him. I'd prefer that there was someone else other than me to tell him to wait even if his head is moving forward, to find out if he wants to be touched there, also to find out what the significance is of the touch. I find myself to be more active than I now like to see. A figure that I didn't have available then and wish I could have used was the negative voice because he's constantly coming in with his doubtings, and his confidence-eroding voice. It's probable that I was trying to become his positive voice. I'm encouraging and encouraging, and I'm suckered into becoming his positive voice instead of being simply an ally to his positive voice, which is my stance these days...So if we had the negative voice out there, then I could follow the true line of his positive voice rather than trying to encourage him beyond where any interior voice is taking him. With a female client: Clearly the reason the accommodators freely ornament their responses is because I give them such a good model. I say just what she says and then I do her one better and add my viewpoint. I would prefer I did not do that... but I didn't make any distinction then between my role as ideal father and myself... This is an important distinction that should always be made. She got to a level of pain that I don't think she should have been asked to handle by herself. She needed contact. She started grabbing for a part of herself which was possibly gripping up and tightening up as an attempt to either hold the pain down or to give herself the strength to fight it off, which highlights the need for some support. She's also stiffening the back of her neck which could be a counter hardening to offset the hardness coming towards her. Surely she needs contact, and rapidly. It's painful to watch her telling me by self-self contact, without my knowing it then, exactly where she wants to be touched. I'm wanting her to express everything and I think I'm doing the right thing... It seems now that she's getting the support, the fullness of the pain can come. Seemingly my earlier notion of getting all the pain out and then getting the support is contradicted. This support seems to release some of her pain without her feeling that she might die of loneliness while she feels the pain. She's now embracing the ideal mother and she's needed to do that, really, from the beginning... She needs a lot of that mommy contact. And I've noted that each time before she gets it I somehow manage to interrupt it... She looks absolutely right cuddling with Diane as the ideal mother, and I'm waiting to see whether or not I will tolerate not being the only center and the only giver... At that time I was unable to recognize that condition of jealousy... Only now that I've solved some of it does it make it possible for different interventions to become available. In these excerpts a number of further developments that occurred during these five years of PS/P's evolution can be noted. One was the far greater clarity that had been developed in assuming a role and distinguishing between statements of the role-played figure and one's self. Another was the introduction of the "negative voice", a voice that the structure enactor hears as if it were his or her own inner voice and may only later identify as having had an external origin. Externalizing the negative voice by having it roleplayed by an accommodator makes it easier for the structure enactor to deal with such a voice. The reference to self-self has to do with the distinction between self to self contact and self-other interaction to which Diane first called attention. Often a person trying by him- or herself to satisfy some need will touch a part of the body related to that need. This can supply information about what a wished-for interaction would consist of if another person, such as an ideal parent, were there to satisfy the need. There is evidence here, also, of Al's awareness of the female client's possible defensive use of her male "counter" organ. I find Al's forthrightness in criticizing the way he led these structures very impressive. He recognized how he sometimes ignored the client's own process and timing and imposed his own; he criticized the formula he had previously followed, that a client must first be alone while experiencing pain and only later be given support and corrective messages. All of these changes point to his greater understanding of how to show respect for the client and how to trust and follow his or her process rather than his own. Finally he talked about his inclination to be "the only center" and the feeling of jealousy that had made it hard for him to allow a literal female, in this case Diane, to nurture a client when he wanted to do the nurturing himself. It is clear that important progress was made during the late 1970s in rendering PS/P techniques much "cleaner" than they had been before. Al and Diane came of age in the post-World War II era, a time marked by strong efforts to return women to their place in the home so that jobs they had filled during the war could provide employment for returning veterans. Until well into the 1970s -- and, for many people, still -- women were seen as subordinate to men, and wives, especially, as subordinate to husbands. It was a wife's duty to contribute self-effacingly to her husband's achievements in the world and not call attention to accomplishments of her own nor to the assistance she had given him. Diane certainly performed this wifely duty for a long time without complaints that reached my ears. As the years passed, however, both Diane and I found our consciousness being raised, and it began to seem important to raise Al's as well. In the introduction to his first book Al does say, "The core of the motor and spatial sensitization techniques grew out of my long experience performing and teaching dance with my wife, Diane Pesso." His second book makes no mention of her except on the dust jacket, where PS/P therapy is noted to have been founded ten years earlier "by Albert and his wife Diane." Al's 1966 paper referred to "much discussion and argumentation... between my wife and myself which contributed greatly to the development of the ideas that followed." He added that when he used the pronoun "I" the reader should understand that he meant to include Diane (1966, p.9). Over the years Al did become increasingly sensitized to the issue of sexism and began not only to give Diane more credit for the part she had played but tried to make sure that others did so as well. Currently he maintains that the contributions each of them has made are so thoroughly intertwined that it is almost impossible to disentangle the portions that came from each of them. Both agree that neither one of them alone could have produced this system of psychotherapy. Since Al currently does the major part of the teaching as well as writing about PS/P, however, many people tend to give him sole credit for being its originator. In this account I have tried to redress the balance by calling attention to some of the contributions made by Diane. PS/P in the 1980s: A. Training, Organization In the early l980s the Pessos acquired new Sony video equipment for use during their training weeks as well as for supervision and certification. Having a video record of certain of Al's lectures -- for example, his discussion of the meaning of body parts -- enabled trainees to go over this material on their own and spared Al from having to present the same material over again too soon. This was especially important because people who attended the training weeks generally ranged from old timers like me to people who were having their first experience of PS/P work. Also, some came only for the first of two training weeks, others for the second and some for both weeks. (Summer training weeks have since been expanded to four. In 1983 Han Sarolea paid a visit to Al and Diane in Franklin during the period when training was in progress, and so did Gus Kaufman, Jackie Damgaard, and I. It seemed like an excellent opportunity to plan for the future development of PS/P. Every spare hour we could find was devoted to conferencing by the six of us. Han was concerned that requirements for certification were less rigorous in the United States than in Europe and hoped to see changes made so that U.S. methods of training would correspond more closely to the European model. According to that model, at least three fifths of the training was to be done by Al and Diane and up to two fifths by other designated trainers, who would also provide supervision. In addition the group of trainees would periodically meet with each other for a certain number of "intervision" hours. Applicants for training would need to commit themselves to continue the training for a full three-year period. The European model required fewer hours than either the Pessos' original modules or the specification of the modules that Robert and I had worked out. While the latter required eight hundred and fifty credit hours for certification training, the three-year European plan called for four hundred and sixty eight hours: nine six-or-more-hour Pesso days per year, six of which could be during a training week in Franklin; six days per year with another trainer; three additional days of supervision; and nine days per year (six days the first year) of intervision. Less emphasis is placed on trainees' own structure work, and there is a definite sequence of topics, planned out in advance, that are to be covered during the training days. Another decision of the summer meeting in 1983 had to do with levels of training. These were now to be expanded; there would be an adjunct level training, marking roughly the halfway point on the way to certification training; beyond the latter would be two additional levels, first that of supervisor and finally that of trainer. A year or so later another, Level One category was added, with primary emphasis on the exercises. This required two hundred credit hours -- a number that seemed to make it possible for Fielding students in clinical psychology to count this much of PS/P training as fulfilling a requirement at that time of mastering a new modality of therapy. With its emphasis on the exercises, this first level of training was an early step toward establishing something like the European model in the Boston area. Al had previously made presentations to the Fielding Institute and was an adjunct faculty member. There were other connections through Gus Kaufman's Fielding coordinator, Jackie Zilbach, M.D., a training analyst and psychiatrist who attended a weekend with Al each January, along with some of her current and former students. I also served as a Psychology faculty member at Fielding for a few years in the 1980s and co-led occasional seminars with Jackie that used PS/P structures as in vivo illustrations of psychoanalytic and developmental concepts. Jackie joined the Board of Directors of the Psychomotor Institute in 1987. In 1985 I set up a "Level One" training program for Boston area Fielding students. The group completed the program, which included four days in New Hampshire with Diane, and reported that they found it valuable. Early in 1984 I moved (still providing a home for the Psychomotor Institute) from my Copley Square location in Boston to a small office condo unit of which I was now the proud owner, near Central Square in Cambridge. Equipped with numerous couches, a full bathroom, a half bath and a tiny kitchen, this was also a place where PS visitors, occasionally including Al and Diane, could be put up for the night. A major change in the Pessos' lives occurred when they purchased, in late 1984, a computer. Both Al and Diane took to it with the greatest of ease and enthusiasm, and before long their PS/P mailing list, correspondence, financial records, and much else had been entered on the computer's hard disk. A couple of years later Al acquired a portable computer which he could take with him when he traveled. Not only has this helped him to keep track of what has happened when and where, it has also boosted his writing output significantly. Carl Clarke, an Atlanta psychologist/minister who had been attending Pesso workshops since 1975 and who also trained religious leaders in a program of marriage enrichment, arranged in l986 to start bringing his video and audio equipment to Franklin during the training program. He had set up a non-profit organization, the Telles Institute. With the help of this organization, he hopes to have all of Al's lectures transcribed so as to be available in typed form and as both audio and video cassettes. Tapes of structures may be available to the structure enactor for a rental fee. Carl also, along with the Rev. Armen Hanjian, has been coordinating a PS/P training group in New Jersey; he records sessions of this group during Al's visits, as well as some sessions in Atlanta. Since Carl has largely had to rely on volunteer efforts to prepare these materials it has been difficult to make them accessible. Meanwhile, having acquired improved printing equipment, Al and Diane themselves have begun putting out a number of Al's writings as publications of the PS Press. Their earlier newsletter, first The Sketch Pad, then PS News, and most recently PS/P News, has also become something they publish themselves. Return to Part One Go to Part Seven Return to Book Excerpts | 
