THE BODY AND THE EGO.

....................by Stanley

.....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.

MEANING-ful DISEASE; a book review

.................by Stanley

.....The idea that physical diseases can be an expression of problems in a person’s psychological life is not new. It was an essential part of Georg Groddeck’s thinking at the time of Freud. Medical thinking has never really caught up; the idea of ‘psychosomatic’ is very vague and limited. It doesn’t really embrace the notion of ‘meaningful disease’. But more recently the idea has gained popularity from writers like Louise Hay, who has a huge following, particularly among Americans who have difficultly thinking. Hay pushes a simplistic view that each psychological condition has a symbolic and fixed one-to-one physical symptom, like corns on the feet mean ‘a hardening of one’s thought’; or an infestation of tapeworm means a ‘strong belief in being a victim’!!
.....Brian Broom, the author of Meaning-full Disease calls the Louse Hay’s style of reductionism ‘meaning fundamentalism’. The truth is much more complex and much more interesting. A physical disease, if it has a psychological meaning and at the same time is an expression of it, can only be uncovered by the most careful enquiry into the person’s specific life story. And, just as no two stories are alike, no two physical symptomatic correlates are alike.
.....Brian Broom’s book has plenty of examples – mercifully short and succinct case studies – of physical symptoms whose meaning becomes clear as he listens carefully to the person telling their story. The correlation between the physical symptom of which patients complain and certain phrases and descriptions they use to tell their story is remarkable. Often the connection is obvious and jumps out perfectly clearly without any suspiciously clever interpretation. As Broom says, ‘at times the matching of meaning and disease is so vivid that the disease appears to be communicating the meaning’. A case in point was the patient who suffered from a thickening of the skin…..

.....Eunice has generalized thickening of the skin, and tissues under the skin, causing uncomfortable splinting of the chest, and tightness of the arms and upper legs... She startled me by saying that it began when she fell over in the local garden nursery, sustaining injuries to her face and legs ...She described the fall as "shattering." ...I asked what effect this event had had on her. She replied: "I went into my shell for a while." I was immediately struck by the fact she was presenting to me with a thickened shell of skin and here she was using language to match. I invited further comment, and within the next 3 to 4 minutes she used the words "I went into my shell" three times. She was taken back to her home by a friendly gentleman: "I went inside the four walls of my house, and closed the door, and sat and sat and sat." In the few weeks following the injury skin thickening developed first in the legs and then became more generalized... She had actually started to improve by the time I saw her... She said that she improved again as she started to "come out of my shell."
......A somatic metaphor (Broom’s term) like this is relatively straightforward - although very difficult for the medical fraternity to grasp, or even consider, because of the fixed idea that the mind is one thing and the body as a living mechanism is another. Broom examines in detail why there is such resistance to the idea of meaningful disease both in the medical profession and even with patients themselves. He shows us the clear need for a revision of our philosophical and common sense assumptions that will permit us to conceive mind and body as simply two aspects of the same thing, a holistic unity. In every chapter of the book Broom hammers home this same message from many angles.
.....He makes use of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty who brought the centrality of the body back into philosophy where it has long laid neglected, sidelined by the emphasis on the non-materiality of the soul, leaving the body as a mechanism to be dealt with by materialistic medicine. Broom gives a good example of the medical dilemma.
....."The old physico-materialistic views of matter would argue that meaning-full disease cannot occur because they imply causation in the wrong direction. The idea was that the general direction of biology is bottom up. Genes (at the bottom) give rise to everything else. At a higher level of organization this means that brain gives rise to mind, and mind gives rise to meaning. The traffic does not go the other way. Interpreted simply, this means that meaning-full diseases cannot occur because they appear to be the result of a top down influence, involving a direction from meaning and mind to brain, and from there to body…In short, the direction is wrong and the transmission of meaning cannot happen anyway because of the mind/body problem. We clearly need different models to explain meaning-full disease.
.....Of course the whole discussion of whether causation goes from ‘from top to bottom or from bottom to top’ is still based on the dualism that mind is one thing and the body is another. This is the very fallacy that generates the problem.
.....Dr. Broom writes with great clarity and gives plenty of examples where the meaning of a disease is clear; and also of where there is a sort of complicity of circumstantial evidence that helps a patient uncover the depth of his difficulties and so find a path back to health. This thoughtful book is thoroughly recommended reading. It’s easy to understand without being over simplistic.

.....Brian Broom is adjunct professor at the Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand, and leads the post-graduate programme in MindBody Healthcare. He works as consultant physician (allergy and clinical immunology), psychotherapist, and mindbody specialist, at the Arahura Health Centre, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Meaning-ful Disease: how personal experience and meanings cause and maintain physical illness
is available at the Christchurch Public Library 616.0019 BRO

His other previous book:
Somatic Illness and the Patient's Other Story. A Practical Integrative Mind/Body Approach to Disease for Doctors and Psychotherapists.
also available at the Christchurch Public Library 616.08 BRO

A very short and readable page by Dr Broom:
What is mindbody healing
Is available at the NZ Mindbody Network
http://www.mindbody.org.nz/what_is_mindbody.html

EMBODIMENT

............................ by Stanley


.....Descartes said: ‘I think, therefore I am’, seeking to reach the certainty of existence from the fact that he could think; he could doubt everything except the fact that he could doubt.
.....Let’s take on the great philosopher and try another tack. Let’s look for a basic certainty in:
......‘I am embodied, therefore I am’.
.......I know my existence from the fact that I have a body. It is possible to imagine, to dream or hallucinate myself without a body; but, in fact, I never concretely experience myself as myself without my body. What I call ‘myself’ is very much my physical existence. This is not a super-individualistic idea. Quite the reverse. As a physical being I am in constant interaction with other things and people; and in special moments, as in love-making, I experience myself as two bodies, not just one.
..... But essentially,
.....To be is to be embodied.
.....OK, so what?
.....So a great deal. It sounds simple enough, but it undermines many of our presuppositions about life that are based on the idea that ‘I am not my body; I am a mind, a thinker, a soul, an unconscious, a spirit. With our religious inheritance, we have imagined ourselves as any number of things – but not as essentially embodied.
.....Just think for a moment what this does to our whole idea of knowledge. Much of what we know, we know sensately without analytical thinking. The body doesn’t just know how to run the body-machine. Embodied knowledge means more than how to pump blood, make bones and babies and manage a system of defense against viruses. It means that the body also, in its own way, helps us in many areas of knowledge, including psychology, situational psychology particularly. We understand sensately and implicitly how to navigate difficult family and social situations, how to play tennis and chess and how to ride a bicycle. It also explains why mums are among the best therapist. This is because their knowledge comes from direct physical engagement, rather than from clinical text books. The physical act of mothering puts them in touch in a unique way. And this empathic ability stays with them.
.....What is now being discovered in brain research is not at all surprising – it does not contradict what we are saying here at all. A new neurological discovery is that we have what are called ‘mirror neurons’ that enable us to directly, physically mimic and have the feelings that we watch other people having – this is at a basic neurological level.
Our embodied self knows a whole host of things we are used to crediting to something called ‘unconscious intuition’, without knowing where or what it is, or how to cultivate and take care of it.
.....But we’ve always known how to destroy it, how to ruin a person’s bodily knowledge. For instance: the golf stroke – just make the golfer bring to mind how he does it. As he is about to play his stroke ask him to describe exactly how he holds his left leg and right elbow. We know, too, how to ruin a person’s natural ability to learn – simply make them apply their mind to learning. Or how ruin a person’s organic memory – just insist that they memorise. All these efforts separate something called ‘the mind’ from the body. The mind, by itself, has no idea how to function holistically. The so-called ‘mind’ without the body is a helpless cripple, like many highly trained clinical psychologists.
.....One of the greatest discoveries of late 20th century psychotherapy is the felt-sense – the direct access to the body’s implicit knowledge, moving us through the next best step in any situation or context. How to use this felt-sense is what we learn in the technique called ‘focusing’.
.....It reminds me of what it really means to be ‘sensible’.
.....In most plays about the time of Oscar Wilde some upper class mother is bound to say to her wayward son. ‘Oh, Francis do try to be more sensible.’ She is, in fact, telling the boy to be more mindful, not more sensible. He is wayward precisely because he is already too sensible in the delights of gambling, drinking and loose women – mostly as a reaction against his excessively mindful parents. This young man’s kind of abandonment to the senses is what our Christian culture is utterly terrified of.
.....So unless we are lucky the body becomes suspect and we live without sense or sensibility, unable to trust the body’s grasp of what is important – and to trust its ability to carry us forward; instead, we imperiously rule it like some out of touch despot. We over articulate and drown out what the body is feeling. Like bad therapists, we seldom ask and never listen to what the body would want us to know.
.....Psychology’s job is to show us how to be good therapists to ourselves.