.....Let’s imagine an organisation that has to deal with the world of people, say a typical community mental health service. At the top is the CEO and board of directors; below that are the various levels of management. Under these, are the helpers who go out into the field to deal with people and their problems in the jungle of life, these are the support workers who cope with real people in the real world.
..... It is true to say that the CEO does not experience the world in the same way as do the workers in the field. This is not a judgemental statement in any way. I am trying to isolate a very definite difference: a difference in experience – noting the difference just as neutrally as one would say: eating an orange is a different experience from eating spaghetti. The CEO may hold regular meetings of the staff to share work problems, but it is still true to say that the worker’s have their own experiences. They see of the world in the raw. The CEO has a different perspective. He has other things on his mind, on paper work, on government funding and inspections – as well as his own personal issues as a boss. I am simply saying that the body of field workers’ experience the world in a way that top management does not – and cannot.
.....I have used this story as an analogy or metaphor for the way the physical body is related to the ego or conscious ‘I’. I am suggesting that the body experiences the world in a way that the conscious ego does not – and cannot.
.....I’m skipping the intricacies of neurophysiology and the mind/brain problem. I want to draw a simple distinction between the way the body experiences the world and the way the conscious ego does. Firstly, we must grasp the fact that the body does experience the world for itself, in its own way – like the field workers in our analogy. I’m asking you to suppose that the body interacts with the environment directly, immediately and holistically, without conscious analysis, language, systems of ideas or our kind of understanding. It has an implicit feel for the way forward in ways that the self-absorbed ego often misses. The body’s way of interacting and dealing with its environment is immediate, precise and decisive and without analytic thinking. It can also interact cooperatively with the thinking level of conscious ego, if the ego can allow it.
.....Part of the body’s environment is the ego itself. One of the things the body has to cope with is an ego that gives little status to the body’s own experience; an ego that assumes control without consultation. I don’t usually think of my body as having a problem with me. That way round never occurs to us because we think of the body as an intricate but passive mechanism, a vehicle with the ego as the driver.
.....Those of you who attended two of our previous seminar series (the one on phenomenology and the last series on the Freudian tradition) will remember the discussion on ‘primal experiencing’ and also Loewald’s ‘primal density of experience’. And now, Dr. Brian Broom tells us in his ‘Meaningful Disease’ (Broom 2007) that “…it may follow that not just the brain but the whole body is capable of ‘experience’ at some level, because the body is not just dead matter organised to give the appearance of life… the brain may only be more an organiser and developer of experience, a generator of more sophisticated experience.”
.....We don’t doubt that animals are capable of experience; that, in their own way, they have intelligence, can feel pain and suffering. And there is now some proof that dogs have telepathic abilities (Sheldrake 1999).
.....There are some very alien ways of experiencing the world. We don’t know what it is like to be a bat (Nagel 1974) but we can be sure that there is something it is like to be a bat – in the sense that only a bat knows what it is like to be a bat. We simply have to grant that there are modes of experiencing that we know nothing about.
.....But there is a kind of alien experiencing quite different from the ego, and one that is very close – so close that we can feel it. So close that we are in it. It is the very flesh we seem to inhabit. This is where we have found a whole undiscovered territory of the body’s experiencing that we can tap into, an area that turns out to be so intricate and complex as to leave us astounded.
.....In experiential psychotherapy and focusing this area has given us invaluable insights. Before focusing no one had really worked experimentally on what we now call ‘the felt-sense’. It could only have been discovered in the strict Rogerian ethos, the original idea of counselling.
.....Here for the first time the therapist was, as far as possible, simply an emphatic mirror who deliberately did as little as possible to contaminate the client with his own data, keeping interference at an absolute minimum. We must remember that every method in psychotherapy prior Rogers was skewed and hugely influence by the therapist’s own ideas, attitudes and expectations. The placebo effect was just not considered – remembering that the etymology of the word ‘placebo’ means ‘to please’.
.....The early innovators in psychotherapy never got pure phenomena because the therapist’s own expectations contaminated his observations. Put very simply: they never just listened ! Looked at in this way it was bad science. But then, many valuable disciplines begin like this, where observers contaminate their observations without knowing it.
.....So for the first time it was possible to observe how people related to their body’s experience – and to find out that some people did and some people didn’t; and to discover that this was the crucial factor that determined whether or not the client made any progress.
.....When clients are in touch with the felt body, the interaction between the ego and the body spontaneously tracks them forward, step by step, moving them through their own unique solutions to life. Mapping the exactness of the way this happens and the exact function of the felt-sense, in case after case – formulating hypotheses based upon observation, keeping oneself out of the picture – was quite a new achievement. It became possible to see the pure phenomena, as it were, in a receptive, but otherwise neutral culture.
.....This approach produced two very important discoveries: (a) the implicit complexity of the body intelligence and (b) a way of relating to it for the benefit of both it and oneself. The implications are enormous. It requires us to considerably upgrade our idea of the body’s function and status; it also requires us to deeply review our practice and revise our ways of helping people.
Broom, Brian (2007). Meaning-ful Disease: how personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness. Karnac, 2007
Nagel, Thomas (1974). What is it like to be a bat? [From the Philosophical Review LXXIII, 4 (October 1974) : 435-50].
Sheldrake, Rupert (1999). Dogs that know when their owners are coming home. Hutchinson, London, 1999.
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