PSYCHOSOMATICS

by Stanley

The term ‘psychosomatic’ was coined in 1860 to define a disorder having physical symptoms, but originating from mental or emotional causes; it is a compound word from the Greek (psyche) plus (somatos) body. The whole idea has had a long tortuous history with much disagreement as to exactly what this means. We are still a long way from overcoming the basic assumption that the mind and body are two different things, instead of two viewpoints of a single interwoven network. I am going to bypass the historical controversies and try to look at the question in a new way.

Strictly from our point of view we can regard all physical problems as psychosomatic, not because we are ignorant of viruses and all the other physical causes of disease, but because whatever the causes may be, the ‘psychological’ aspect is always involved in some way. Put simply, if I catch the influenza virus and am suffering the usual symptoms, I also will have an ‘attitude’. I may think I am dying; I may be sorry for myself; I may bravely soldier on; or profit by being looked after; or, more subtly, it may revive body memories of previous illnesses and traumas – together with the ‘attitudes’ I had to them at the time. The past is invariably involved.

Now, it may seem that I have complicated things instead of simplifying them. Not really, because we are now free to explore the psychological side of the equation, putting aside whatever else is involved whether bacteria, viruses, accidents, injuries, fungi, dog bites or genetic predispositions. We are not disavowing the reality of these causes, but simply saying that we can address the psychological aspect for what it is. We are interested only in the subjective experience of body, the way we experience the condition. This allows us to refer to any and all the bodily sensations as simply: somatics. In this way we side-step everything else except the subjective experience of the physical sensation.

A somatic is any physical feeling/sensation. It doesn’t have to be bad or painful. Without distinctly felt bodily sensations there can be no pleasurable excitement or anticipation. Even the purest form aesthetic appreciation is a finely felt erotic excitement.

The term ‘somatic’ has a wider application than ‘felt-sense’ as in focusing – and it is used differently. There are similarities to ‘wholebody focusing’, but it has a different theoretical underpinning and a different perspective; one difference being an appreciation that the environment is not universally supportive. The struggle for survival is a continuous fact of life. We are guilty of New Age deception if we romanticize otherwise. Our immune system, for example, is engaged in a continuous battle with the hostile forces of nature.

Whilst fully acknowledging this, we don’t have to work out the material ‘causes’ of somatics when we are doing this kind of work. We don’t have to look into the etiology of a somatic. We are primarily interested in the reality of the somatic as we sense it and the effects of bringing it fully to consciousness without asking anything of it. Through this process we can unwind the psychosomatic aspect of any life problem whatever its cause. It can also unveil the ‘secondary gains’ of being sick.

Then there are other problems that have no physical cause whatever. For example, an emotional upset in the family. These will have psychosomatic consequences such as physical tension, or anxiety stomach, or a stiff neck.

However, it is quite normal to have a stiff neck and have no idea of its connection with the family upset. When you have an emotional problem, the somatic effects can seem completely disconnected. Indeed, to suggest such a connection is often felt to be ridiculous. A stiff neck is a stiff neck – that’s that! Probably due to the way I slept (which might be true). The solution would then be some kind of physical manipulation – which may, incidentally, work; but this will not advance a person’s deeper understanding of herself.

The sixty-four dollar question is: how do you come to know, how do you discover, the intimate connection between psyche and soma? Here’s one way to get it started. A strong feeling is usually accompanied by some kind of visible physical reaction. I may sit up in my chair; I may lean forward or shrink back. If it’s a pleasant feeling I may feel an excited energy in my chest. If unpleasant, I may pull a face with disgust or horror. Ask the person to repeat the exact physical effort involved, to do it again, in other words. Get them to pull the same grimaced face they had a second ago. They might discover that their shoulders also make the effort to hunch up at the same time. Then ask them to do it again and hold it whilst exploring what else it may lead to. Give the person time – in fact, tell them to take their time to explore.

This simple little dodge is one way into mindbody connections. Incidentally, this process is not about relaxation – quite the opposite. Bodily tensions – we will call them ‘efforts’ because they have an intention – are what the body is intending. Ask the person what the effort, the screwed up face and hunched shoulders, want. Exploring this will reveal a whole string of efforts and somatics in other parts of the body. Then the person might unexpectedly start thinking of a traumatic incident early in life – even of birth. This is the string of somatics unwinding. This process gives rise to many interesting conscious reflections that can be dealt with in the usual person-centred way of counselling.

There is no simple one-to-one correspondence between a somatic and an incident in life. A somatic effort has multiple references because you make the same effort in may different circumstances. It works like this: many times when faced with an actual or potential threat you react with the same body response. Whether it is a loud noise, or seeing someone hurt themselves, or a fight in the family, or when you were intimidated at school, or being interviewed – your stomach went anxious, you tightened your shoulders, your heart beat faster, and your anus squeezed up – a whole swag of your own precise and characteristic body reactions to a certain kind of trouble. The incidents may not seem similar, but they feel the same because of the same physical response to each of them.

As the somatic efforts unwind I don’t need to remember all the incidents associated with them – my body remembers them. I need to talk about them only when a memory or an incident arises. Otherwise, concentrate on the moving sensations and let the somatics unwind in their own way.

It is important not to get stuck on this form of bodywork (call it ‘bodyminding’) as a method. Not everyone can do it. One has to be fluid with it, adjusting it to the needs of the moment and the person. It should be introduced carefully. It’s a way of gradually learning how give way to one’s biological nature when it is right to do so.

GIRL WITH THE PEARL EARRING

by Stanley

“Come over here and look out of the window”.

She obeyed.

“Look at the clouds”, he said. “What colour are they?”

“White”, she said. Then she paused, still looking at the clouds. “No …they’re ….green and yellow and silver and..”

He smiled at her. Although she was just a housemaid, she had got it.

This was a scene from the movie (and the novel) Girl with the Pearl Earring in which the Dutch painter, Johannes Vermeer, encounters the servant girl who is to be his model for the famous painting. Vermeer must have seen something about the girl that attracted him and prompted him to find out whether she had that special quality with which he himself was endowed – a quality which his wife, although he loved her, lacked.

What was that special quality? Put very simply, it is the ability to see. It sounds so very simple. Everybody knows that clouds are white, grass is green and the sky is blue. But these words are labels, symbols, ciphers – they are not colours.

Most of the time we live in Cipher-Land. Consider the world of trade, business and economy. This is a complex game with ciphers where we manipulate things called dollars. A dollar is a symbol of worth, it is not worth itself. In a sense it isn’t real life; and yet it seems like real life; and in a way it is. The elaborate world we live in would not function without these secondary systems, the world of ciphers.

When you first abandon Cipher-Land and cross over into reality, you look at the clouds and have no idea what colour they are. You are unsure. Could be this, could be that. The old labels don’t mean anything. When you really taste the clouds the old ciphers are irrelevant. Taste is a good analogy. Have you ever put something new to your tongue and tried to describe the taste. It’s impossibly difficult, isn’t it? Taste is so direct, immediate and untranslatable.

It’s the same when you look at your inner landscape. Your feelings aren’t just sad or happy, resentful or jealous, angry or painful. These are just ciphers. In my work I have come to know exactly when a person is tasting themselves, or whether they are talking in ciphers. When you cross over into really experiencing yourself, tasting yourself, the old ciphers don’t fit. You fumble to say exactly how you feel. Then, like Vermeer, I am please because I know you’ve got it. I’m not interested in the ciphers, except when they point to the experience. As they say in Zen, ‘Not the finger pointing to the moon – but the moon!’

When I try to do therapy in Cipher-Land I ‘consider’ my feelings; I ‘reflect’ on how I feel. I shuffle my ideas around on the mental chessboard. When I look past Cipher-Land and into the real taste of myself I find only the sensation of my body as it usually is: a surface skin and an inner darkness – maybe a few of the usual discomforts. Nothing more.

Neither should there be anything more, for I have stepped into a new place, beyond the chess-game of the mind. I am where I can begin to use my taste-buds. I don’t worry. It’s like getting used to the dark. I know that, as I continue, my discernment will get more sensitive, and surprising vistas will emerge – colours and scenes unfamiliar, yet in some way reminiscent! But definitely outside the box.

Achieving this is not just a matter of passively meditating. The thinking level has a resistance, insisting on doing things its own way. I feel a bit diffident about writing a blog like this because I know how what happens: one reads it and finds it interesting, but that’s as far as it goes. That’s as far as it can go because it is too difficult to do by oneself. It needs to be done within a relationship – I mean, a therapeutic not a romantic – relationship. And that takes time, which is why short term counselling is only of limited value.

WHY MARITAL SEX CAN BE DIFFICULT.

By Stanley

Married life can sail along quite amicably in a routine sort of way, but if there are unresolved communication problems, the bedroom is where they surface. In day to day life a couple can get along quite happily. There are no hard words and each is kind to the other. Their relationship is a success. They have learned not to tread on each other’s toes; they both know where the trouble-triggers are, have learned to avoid them and have achieved that happy state of being almost unconscious of them. But the unresolved barriers are there. The problem is that sexual congress requires a deeper intimacy that cannot flow past those hidden barriers – they are like invisible elephants in the bedroom. Eventually both partners quietly learn to leave sex alone.

Why does marital love degenerate like this? To answer we must remember that a partnership or marriage emotionally approximates childhood. Marriage revives long lost hopes, wishes and desires that were given up ages ago. Given up? Not quite – rather sleeping in daydreams and imagination, waiting for a better day. They remain quiescent so far as behavior is concerned.

This is not so hard because, as a child, I learned how to live in two worlds: one where I do what I’m supposed to; and the other, a fantasy life, where I do what I want. But when adolescence comes along there rises up a want so powerful that it overwhelms the whole neat solution. The burst of my hormones shout: ‘I don’t care what you want me to be, I AM ME. At that moment I become a revolting adolescent. My wants are very strong and embellished with fantasy.

But it is this unequivocal ‘I AM ME’ you need as a sexual being throughout your life. It simply means being in touch with your body and being able to let it take over when the time is right. In a satisfying sexual encounter you are able to let the body run the show and progress to where two bodies are running the show in sync. The beauty of this is that I become both of us, without loosing the sense of ME. It is a process beginning with ME as one, towards ME as two; through selfishness to love. This blessed state precisely mirrors the ideal nursing relationship of infancy.

The problem is that the dream of a relationship revives all these long lost desires. At last there is the hope that I will really get what I want, the hope of harmonious union. Maybe I can recover that blissful state of safe, innocent togetherness; a place where I don’t have to try. At last I will know what love is – all that I had to give up to grow up.

Anxiety about sex is typically infantile. It is the fear that if I don’t do it right I’ll be cut off. In infancy this spells disaster. It is literally the fear of abandonment, annihilation and death. Such emotional intensity goes with trying to re-kindle the deepest attachment since babyhood. In the beginning of life, such an attachment was a matter of life and death and thereafter, all one’s life, sexual closeness takes one back to the beginning and opens up the same vulnerability.

In my sexual life I am wide open and vulnerable. I have to risk it. There is no escape. Without the vulnerability I cannot reach the centre of the sexual experience, but I also risk failure and disaster

Intimacy is where I can safely bare my soul, and the other to me. The resolution of the sexual problems does not lie in the sexual scene per se. The resolution lies in improving the quality of the relationship in general. The kind of intimacy that is needed in sex is required throughout a relationship, although perhaps not quite so intensely. Intimacy is not specific to the sexual scene; but whereas in other situations I can blur the lack of it, in my sexual life I cannot.

The quality of sexuality is present across the whole spectrum of a relationship. It is easy to see it in a way couple look at each other and in the tone of their conversational interchange. You can always tell when Eros is present or if he has left.

LOVE & WAR part 2: our better nature

by Stanley

As civilization evolves our modes of living change; social practices that were once acceptable, like harsh corporal punishment of children, are no longer tolerated. And things that are ordinary to us, like having teenagers, would have horrified our forefathers. No doubt in the future ‘same sex marriage’, which causes so much heated debate now will, in the course of time, be quite unremarkable.

We are marginally different from what people were like fifty years ago. And if we read a Victorian novel, their drastically controlled manners and their censored emotional life is quite foreign to us. Taking only a slightly longer view, we are unimaginably different from what people were like in the Middle Ages; if you could be suddenly transported into that time the shock would blow you away – the disgusting smell if nothing else. We not only live in a different world, we are different people. One of the biggest differences is the amount of lethal damage we afflict on each other.

A good question is to ask is: Am I more likely die by the hands of another man now than say 100, or a thousand or ten thousand years ago? What would be my relative chances of scraping though life without being knocked off in one way or another? We have to look at the historical and archeological records to find out; and the evidence is that the probability of death by violence has been diminishing dramatically over time; my chances, and yours, of getting through life without being strangled, shot, executed, hung, blown-up, stabbed, killed in battle, mutilated, buried alive, raped, decapitated, lynched, assassinated or burned at the stake, are better now than at any other time in human history.

Even in our two recent world wars (including all the combatants) there was only a quarter the violent death rate as in the earliest hunter-gatherers societies; and the same is true of those groups that exist today, despite all our romantic imaginings about ‘indigenous cultures’. If we crunch the actual numbers, it turns out that we are living in the most peaceful time in human history. In proportion to population, death by violence has been diminishing over historical time.

This thesis is hard to swallow because we watch the nightly news and pass on the pessimistic memes of current opinion. But no one has ever actually counted or crunched the statistics or done the thorough historical research. If death by violence in the last world war had been the same order of magnitude as it was in Neolithic times, the figures in our most recent wars would have numbered in the billions, not millions. In the West at least, by all standards of measurements there is an observable evolution, a civilizing process that has distinctly speeded up since the 17^th century; and this goes for all the areas of human violence: homicide, capital punishment, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, slavery, human sacrifice and superstitious killing.

Steven Pinker’s monumental new book, just published, The Better Angels of Our Nature, is a long overdue recognition of our better nature. It turns out that violence is not a single instinct, but a strategic response to circumstances. And the fact is, our cultural and social circumstances have changed out of all recognition over time and we have changed in synchrony with it. The interactive network of modern society could not exist with the mindset that existed in feudal times, prior to the emergence of the nation state. In most of Europe it was the nation state governed by the King that brought an end to the factions of squabbling feudal warlords.

This pacification process didn’t require a set of new genes because sympathy and empathy are also part of our evolutionary heritage, though on a smaller, family scale. The emergence of the nation state favoured these cooperative evolutionary adaptations. The gradual expansion of commerce and the interactive social networks we call trade, both within and among nations, made these inherited characteristics more dominant, since trade and commerce are functionally based on trust. And as our society got more complex, we depended more and more on each other. As my trading partner you are worth more to me alive than dead, however much we disagree.

Pinker shows, with an enormous amount of historical and archeological research, that violence has been on a variable but steady decline. He shows this, not by taking absolute numbers, but by calculations proportionate to the size of populations. This is obviously the only way to calculate because the greater the population, the greater total number of deaths by violence. Remember there are six billion of us today. The only measure is not the absolute numbers, but the proportion that die by violence.

There is a ‘New Age’ view that the ‘good old days’, where we lived in harmony with nature, was somehow better. But I’m afraid Thomas Hobbs had it right: life in a hunter-gatherer tribe was indeed ‘nasty, mean, brutish and short, quite unlike Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’; a theory that would have us believe that civilisation made us worse.

In biblical times and even in Greek Classical times whole cities, every enemy man woman and child, would be put to the sword as a matter of course; and this behaviour was given divine sanction. Normal life then was a constant fear of attack, rape, pillage and plunder. And it all goes down the sink-hole of fictionalized history on the TV screen – we don’t really believe it.

Later, in the Middle Ages, life was violent too. The myth of the heroic and gentlemanly knights of old is a fairy tale. The Barons were more like Mafiosi gangsters running incredible protection rackets – not unlike the bad old days in mob controlled Chicago, where the city was divided up into areas, each controlled by a mobster. The emergence of the central state where the King ruled over the Barons, although repressive, was an improvement and certainly less lethal.

It’s true there has been a long history of glorification formal war, as Hillman shows us, but war has lost the glamour it once had. In 1914 young men eagerly flocked to the colours, today they are more likely to burn their draft cards. War has become distinctly distasteful; and between nation states it is recognisably a zero-sum game – no one wins. ‘The kind of patriotism that enabled the people of Europe to endure two world wars now appears as archaic as the feudal loyalties that it had displaced’[1]

Today, the only popular reflection of the glorification of war is what we call ‘sporting events’. But these are surely an improvement on the games of blood that were played out in the Roman Coliseum.

Human nature has certain fixed characteristics, and yet it is malleable. It can be conditioned by circumstances and upbringing. Sure, we are wired for aggression, but also part of our biological inheritance is the capacity for love, cooperation, care and empathy. How these are all balanced is determined by the quality of the society in which we live and with which our human nature is inextricably interwoven.

What have certainly changed dramatically are the values with which we regard violence and cruelty. A stark illustration of this is the way today we regard the brutality of the God of Old Testament. Taken as a reflection of the standards of justice and moral behaviour – as it obviously was at the time – we simply ignore that part of the Bible. Yet we know full well that Christianity has gone hand in hand with torture and persecution beyond description. So much have our standards changed that Christians today more or less disown the Old Testament – like it’s not really important. But the violent sadism of early Christianity speaks clearly enough through its central symbol: the cross – an instrument of torture; and where we cannibalistically eat Christ’s body and drink his blood. We prefer to think that all this is merely symbolic (incidentally, the Vatican does not) because our moral feelings have changed.

Today we deplore capital punishment and the long waiting lists on death row in the backward states of the US. But we forget that not so long ago death sentences in England were meted out after a trial of only a few minutes; and the methods of execution were ghastly. You could be hung, your body taken down before you finally strangled, stretched on the rack, after which you would be castrated, disemboweled and your four limbs torn from your body and burned while you watched, if you were still conscious; and your crime – saying a rude word about the King. The spectators watching these public entertainments would have enjoyed the show. In 1660 Samuel Pepys records in his diary of how he and his party were at a public hanging-drawing-and-quartering in Charing Cross Road, after which they all went to a tavern for a feast of oysters.

But still the attachment to pessimism about the human saga persists. It’s almost as though we dare not think that human society and our social feelings have improved – let alone speak of progress. Have our humanitarian sensibilities progressed at all over time? It is a crucial question, for resting upon how we answer it depends whether we regard any effort to improve human wellbeing as a waste of time.

In this regard, Steven Pinker has done us a signal service in debunking the fashionable shadows of misanthropy. It is quite amazing how the critical reviews of Pinker’s book are polarized. One critic wrote ‘I have not read the book, but I entirely disagree with its hypothesis’. Well done!

We must remember that we always judge the misdeeds of present with the sensibilities of the present age. If we use those same sensibilities when we look at the past we can only be appalled at unimaginable extremities of everyday cruelty and violence, and amazed too that, at the time, it didn’t occur to anybody to think it was wrong.

In the last analysis it is not a question of optimism or pessimism, but of facts. And it is a fact that over time, at least in the matter of violence, war and homicide, there has been an improvement in the quality of the human pageant. No guarantee that it will continue – history is full of unexpected turns, but the historical facts remain. And as Pinker says, perhaps it is time we looked at what we have been doing right, instead of all the things we have done wrong.

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[1] Howard, Sir Michael. The Invention of Peace. Yale University Press, 2001

LOVE AND WAR

by Stanley

It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilisation is built upon the renunciation of instinct. Sigmund Freud.

Everyone knows that women are from Venus and men are from Mars, but not everyone knows the real story from Homer’s Odyssey. Venus is, of course, the goddess of love, but she’s not the sort of warm, fuzzy love-girl you might expect. She is a ruthless sexual predator with no respect for marriage or fidelity – or at least, that’s how the beautiful goddess is portrayed. Her husband, Vulcan, poor chap, is a lame and unattractive smithy, a blacksmith, of whom, she says, she can always rely on for fixing things around the house. In other words, although he too is one of the gods, he sounds a pretty ordinary sort of chap trying to do the best he can with his adorable, but promiscuous wife.

One of the best stories in the Odyssey is where she has it off with Mars, the brutal and handsome god of war. There’s no doubt that, strong though he is, he is no match for her overwhelming sexual allure. Funny isn’t it: in real life it’s men who are inclined to be sexually predaceous. But as always, the woman gets the blame. Obviously, Mars is innocent – she enticed him and led him on.

Anyway, it turns out that Vulcan, probably limping along after a day’s honest toil in the workshop, catches the two of them in flagrante delicto, red handed, as they say. Being a man (or rather a god) of technical ingenuity, Vulcan knocks up a strong net which he casts over them while they are actually doing it. Well, they are simply caught and can’t get away. To punish them Vulcan calls upon all the gods of Olympus to come and witness the scene. They all have a jolly good laugh and it’s all very embarrassing. Hermes, one of the more delightful of the gods, says he would endure any punishment for one night of love with Venus.

Much has been made of this story over the centuries. It was a favourite subject for allegorical paintings of the Renaissance. Both Veronese and Botticelli show Mars quite vanquished and docile in the arms of Venus. It has been said that the meaning is quite clear; she has defeated the god of war himself, or in other words ‘love conquers all’.

James Hillman made a quite different interpretation. The association between Mars and Venus signifies, he says, that man has an on going affair, a Terrible Love of War – the title of his last book. And the fact that the story is played out by the immortal gods means that our love of war is an eternal part of us, and we are not to expect any improvement in human nature, or expect that our practice of war will ever diminish. ‘There have been roughly two and a half wars going on for every year of recorded history’, says Hillman, ‘Can it be doubted that not only is war "normal", but that it is a manifestation of a force as powerful to our species as is Eros or Death, and far more permanent than the Peace it outstrips?”

I’m going to offer a completely different interpretation.

Freud was on to something when he said that civilisation is built upon the renunciation of the instincts; to be civilised we have to repress them. He also believed that instincts were discreet forces, psychic energies. We know today that the picture is a little more complicated. But for simplicity, just lets say that there is something called an ‘aggressive instinct’ and something called a ‘sexual instinct’. That’s more or less the idea in the myth. Venus = the sexual instinct and Mars = the aggressive instinct.

But where does Vulcan fit in? Doesn’t he stand for the containment, the capturing of the instincts? It is significant that Vulcan is the technician, the workman; he is domesticated and a skilled toolmaker; bringer of culture, invention, trade and eventually globalisaion – in fact, everything that Freud meant by ‘civilisation’. Vulcan puts the instincts to shame, exposing them and demonstrating how disruptive to civilised domesticity they can be. Granted, Vulcan is lame in his domesticity, but it is the lameness that goes with the repression of the instincts – the price, Freud said, we have to pay for civilisation.

Falling in love and succumbing to the allurements of Venus is, by itself, not enough to contain war and the chaotic mayhem of the undisciplined instincts. Without Vulcan and his influence Hillman is right; there is nothing to stop the excesses of those two primitive instincts. With Vulcan, and an intelligent accommodation with growing modernity, we can and do gradually move forward into a more peaceful life. But it takes the ‘civilizing process’ to do it, something we used to call – before it was unfashionable to use the word – progress. Self assertion and lust are valuable human assets. The problem is not how to renounce them, but how to refine their expression.

The first stages of our civilizing process in the disciplining the instincts was a pretty rough sledgehammer repression. The mediaeval church taught us how to do that in a big way: masses of sexual guilt and obscenely cruel punishments for disobedience. But rough as it was, it was a step towards a more discriminating and intelligent society. The next stage was the 18^th century Enlightenment, the beginning of science and the beginning of a more psychological and human understanding of the mind.

We’re not doing too badly really. Our sex lives are probably freer that they have ever been without he need for the spoils of war: ‘rape all the women and kill all the men’ – a customary practice in the good old days.

Certainly the raw sexual instinct has to be curbed, but there are clever, discrete, artistic and harmless ways of sexual expression without making it bad, disowning it, and then being sadly deprived. And, as for aggression, we now have courts of law instead of duels, suits for defamation of character instead of honour killings, divorces instead of marital death by attrition; and our aggressive instinct is now reduced to watching The World Cup on the telly. Life can still be rough, but it is much less lethal than it used to be. War, as we have known it, is a casualty of human progress. It is more clearly recognized now that we can realistically no longer afford it – the ‘markets’ would be upset – and that would never do!

I think the fact that one can make so many different interpretations of the Mars/Venus/Vulcan myth demonstrates something about mythical interpretation in general. It seems that what one gets from a myth is a picture one has already arrived at. My perception does not derive from the myth itself or from any fancy archetypal footwork, but from a more reliable kind of research; that, I will tell you about in my next blog.

IN MEMORIAM

by Stanley

Our psychological community has lost two of its elders: Harry Cohen and James Hillman.

Harry was an old colleague of mine with whom I shared many supervision sessions along with Bridget Lee Nicoll. Working for many years for the Prison Service and in private practice, he was a psychotherapist of the old school. I remember him for one dogged piece of profound wisdom which he never tired of promulgating. Most psychological problems, he would tell us, derive from the early relationship with the mother and particularly with breast feeding.

Old hat, you might say. Well, maybe, but it is a hat we would do well to wear and remember. Why? Because breast feeding isn’t just about feeding, it's about love-making, it’s about our first experience of intimacy – or lack of it; it’s about all the anxieties, fears of dying, the exhilaration of living, and all the twisted fantasies that later haunt our intimate and sexual proclivities

What is transmitted to the infant in those first new experiences is the whole convoluted history of our culture’s attitudes to relationships, to sex and intimacy of which the hapless mother is the carrier and child is the wide open recipient. Thank you Harry for your tireless dedication to an important truth.

And then, James Hillman has departed too; not so local as Harry, for he never visited New Zealand, but his impact on us was nonetheless considerable. Hillman graduated in the school of C.G.Jung, eventually distilling the essence of Jung, founding what came to be known as archetypal psychology. Jung was always in the grip of Christianity, an obsession he never got over. Using mythological language Hillman rescued depth psychology from monotheistic spirituality, freeing depth psychology into the realm of pagan mythology which, as Hillman said, is much closer to the true nature of the soul. Hillman also rescued the term ‘soul’ from Abrahamic monotheism, giving it a polytheistic twist, showing us that there are as many places of the human soul as there were pagan gods before Constantine and his creation of institutionalized-state religion.

Hillman invented a whole style of language, combining scholarship with the vividness and imagination of the old classical writers who used mythology as a psychology without giving it that name. For that matter, they wouldn’t have known what ‘mythology’ was either. For them, as for Hillman, what we call ‘mythology’ was an accurate depiction of the human condition. The gods, with all their twisted excesses and blind passions, was human life writ large. It was all projected on the screen of immortality – for the gods were immortal – implying that our pathologies and theirs are unchanging and that we, as individuals, carry the whole conflicting circus within our breasts – each and every one of us.

It was this acceptance of the gods and ourselves as irredeemably pathological, the acceptance of our pathology as normal, that helped us be more tolerant of the way people are and to realise that the only desirable outcome of therapy is ‘congruence’.

Harry and James, thank you both for your unique and very different insights into the many mansions of psychology.

THEN

by Stanley

There were these upsets with my partner. Afterwards I’d feel bad because I would start to lose my cool. I wasn’t very well behaved…. Ah! That phrase rings a bell: ‘not well behaved’. Reminds me of when I was a kid: wanting something from my mother and her not giving it to me. Even now, I’m not sure what it was I wanted from her, but whatever it was she couldn’t give it and I would get angry and obnoxious. It’s the same family game. I don’t know whether I wanted something from my partner and she couldn’t give it or whether she wanted something from me and I couldn’t give it. Probably both. In any case, I’d get obnoxious.

Just getting hold of this was enough to make me feel a little better. I hadn’t worked anything out. I hadn’t solved anything; and it was still confusing. But looking at the whole thing, I had paid enough attention to it to put some time and space between me and the past. It helped me locate the past instead of reliving it, like I did when was upset.

Of course, a single process like this didn’t turn my life around, but over a longer period of therapy I began to get into the habit dealing with myself like that. Over small things and bigger difficulties I began to handle myself by taking, as it were, a second look – a look that created a space for the past. Not that I was doing focusing continually. But whether it is a disturbing mood or a serious upset I am not stranded in present-time with it, taking everything literally; at the back of my mind I know there is always more to a mood than meets the eye; and just that, by itself, is often enough to defuse it.

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Your body is a dynamic organism with an evolutionary history measured in millions of years – it’s a powerful package set up to survive. But more than just surviving, we have the urge to live creatively toward the enhancement of wellbeing. However, we all know that these natural urges can be subverted by unfavourable circumstances – remembering that there are families and cultures that are not exactly incubators of human well-being. Then too, there is the unavoidable impact of bad times: illness, deprivation, loss, earthquakes. All of this, all of it, we can call ‘non-survival experiences’.

The common denominator of the non-survival experience is that it is difficult to live forward from it; and the more severe it is, the more difficult is to live through it unscathed. Months afterwards, people in Christchurch are still suffering the effects of earthquakes without quite knowing the emotional and physical costs.

So too, long ago trying to deal with tangled family circumstances you can get even more entangled in your own sometimes devious tactics to survive. To get through it one can twist oneself into an alien. Dysfunctional families are particularly damaging in this respect.

Bad times are situations where it’s hard move and function in ways that’s good for you – they tend to be times where you are frozen. Typically, there’s no way out, no movement. And the memory of it goes on not moving. In this way, we can say that some aspect of a person can be said to be ‘stuck in time’. Times when you successfully escape or fought back don’t count as ‘stuck moments’ – obviously, because you weren’t stuck.

Stuck moments manifest as physical tension. Even something as simple as not speaking up when I should, can manifest as a tension around my throat or a constriction in my chest. This was a time, perhaps, when it was too dangerous to speak up; maybe too dangerous even to be seen. Although I may not notice it, some part of my body goes on carrying the tension and stress. Physical tension is frozen motion that persists as bodily memory.

It’s as though someone had taken a flashlight photo in the midst of a real-time crisis, but this photo also contains recordings of my physical and emotional state at the moment of crisis. Of course, there is no separate photo recording – all this tension is mapped into my nervous and muscular system. This is the body’s memory.

The body’s memory is a physical repository of past experience. [1] The body’s memory has nothing to do with words, explanations, rational thought or insight. The body’s memory operates in a way that doesn’t need awareness. It is a necessary and instinctive response to what was once experienced as danger.

I can’t actually remember this physical memory as I would ordinary memories, like what I had for breakfast this morning. The body’s memory has nothing to do with actually ‘remembering’ in the way we understand this. We are talking about the body’s memory; and the body’s memory is not cerebral, but somatic. It is not literate, but organic. These are memories that are mapped into my flesh and blood. When the body’s memory is activated, I, as a conscious being, may have no idea of what is going on. But when it is re-stimulated it changes my mood and behavior.

Many of my moods are caused by my body being reminded of some past event that was non-survival. It reawakens the experience of stuckness. I then relive it without remembering it. When reliving a past event I am in it; it is literally happening again. (Although, not ‘again’ because there is no time in it, no space between me and the original event.) The event is not happening in the past, it is happening now. I relive the past as though it is the present. That is precisely what ‘restimulation’ is.

In therapy or counselling I actually create the past by putting space and time for the event to happen then. By calling it up I create a ‘then’. I separate the incident from present-time. Instead of reliving the past, I locate it.

This therapeutic locating is not the same as remembering what I had for breakfast. And, most importantly, locating is not ‘wallowing in the past’. Locating a memory is often felt rather than remembered in the usual sense. There is always an element of interpretation when we try to understand it. This is not to say we can’t have an accurate feel for it. The felt-sense of it can be quite definite. We learn to trust this different way of knowing – sensing rather than rationally knowing. But the important thing is, by touching upon it, however lightly, we locate it in a different space-time.

People sometimes feel that once they have told the story of a past event that it’s over and done with. ‘That’s it. I’ve said it all’. And indeed, many therapists today will actually discourage a client from remembering. It’s the latest fashion precipitated by the hasty application of brain research. This is a killer because it closes the door on all the infinite subtleties that stir the imagination. The past is never a series of simple facts; it is never done with – if only because the past is always stirring up something that newly reverberates with the present, slightly changing the scene. This is not repetition, but discovery. Locating a memory does not reinforce it, it unenforces it.

I can almost predict that someone will accuse me of being far too concerned with the past with the danger of ruminating and wallowing in it. People who go on about ‘living in the present’ don’t realise that their so-called ‘present’ is not crystal clear and pure, but contains large chunks of past of which they are totally unaware.

My analysis here does not, of course, exhaust the complexities of the personality and it may seem an oversimplification – and so it is. I’ve done this deliberately for the sake of laying stress on some salient truths of great practical importance.

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[1] We could analyse this in terms of neuroscience and brain functioning. But I am trying to say it in terms that we can understand using our psychological way of knowing.

BALLETIC FOCUSING

by Stanley

The first edition of ‘Focusing’ by Eugene Gendlin came out in 1978. Since then a great deal of work has been done expanding its basic idea[1], which is really very simple. It places the emphasis on the person’s own experiencing. But here ‘experience’ means something very specific. ‘It is the process in which the person gives attention to the ‘feel’ of a problem or situation as a whole and then attempts to articulate this ‘feel’. On encountering a problem or situation we bring our attention, not to the thoughts or emotions that arise from the situation, but to the sense, often physically felt, of ‘all that’’[2] It’s a process that can’t be hurried. At first, the sense of it can be quite vague, but as attention is given to the feel of it in the moment, the problem begins to open up, revealing new perspectives. And it is this opening up that moves living forward in places where it may have been stuck.

This appeal to the body’s ‘felt-sense’ is perhaps the most singular and original idea in focusing. The body can be the source of quite intricate intelligence, not merely in the management of its own homeostasis, but also in having an insight into the broader aspects of living. This goes against the current notion of what the body is. But it has never been given the chance. No one has really granted it that sort of intelligence. So that when we first look in the direction of the ‘felt-sense’ it does feel unknown and vague, largely because we are out of touch with our physical being. We have drawn such a wide demarcation between our ‘physical’ and our ‘thinking’ selves that we have cut ourselves off from perhaps the greater part of our being.

It seems as though the body can serve as the first barrier, the first line of defense, against a hostile world. Numb the body and you numb the effects of an unhelpful environment – it is to ‘toughen up’ as they say. The ability to feel pain or physical discomfort is no indication that one is in touch with the body. Beyond such primitive perceptions lay the full spectrum of our wholebody and with it the possibility of a much enlarged sense of self and wellbeing.

The working model of focusing has assumed that the most precise avenue of expression for the felt-sense is language. And this has proved remarkably useful. There is no doubt that when we know what we really feel and speak from the heart we are truly ourselves. This is what invigorates and gives our life movement.

But there are other forms of bodily expression that do not involve language and that are just as passionate and meaningful as words, and sometimes even more so. There’s the whole area of music and dancing. If you have ever watched a couple of Latinos dancing a tango or a stunning Spanish Flamenco dancer you will know what I mean – that wonderful combination of burning vibrancy fueled by controlled passion.

When the waltz was first introduced into Victorian society it was thought to be scandalously outrageous, vulgar and immoral. The wild, whirlwind of the music and the sight of a man holding a woman so close to his body in public was denounced as offensive by the church and all right thinking people. Naturally this was just what appealed to the young of the time whose spirit was busting to get out. Popular ballroom dance-forms in the west have evolved a lot since then. The Rock and Roll era seemed to end the tradition of couples dancing together, replacing this, as today, with individuals doing their own separate thing, although perhaps vaguely connected with someone else somewhere on the floor. And it’s interesting to note that today the dancing movements are free-form; one simply expresses oneself as it comes.

Now someone has developed a therapeutic form of dancing and called it ‘wholebody focusing’. It involves using the felt-sense to discover the style of dance that one’s body wants to express. It is only a little way-out to call it Balletic Focusing; and with it we are back to the pas de deux, only this time the couple are more like a focusing partnership where one person is the ‘listener’ while the other performs; but instead of listening to words, she ‘listens’ to your dance; and she does this with the same unconditional positive regard that you would find in a good person-centred therapy session – without interfering or joining in, she is with you in whatever way you tango.

What is amazing is how strong the guiding felt-sense becomes in this process. It begins to take over; and the more you trust it the stronger it becomes; and the stronger it becomes the more you trust it. Your movements morph into a work of art in which your body seems to work through long held tensions, moving though timeless psycho-physical blockages. It becomes a trance-like state and you only know dimly what you are doing and why. It all takes place below the level of consciousness, but you can feel something deeply cavernous is happening. Consciously, you are only aware that someone inside, some hidden self, is being satisfied and is smiling. Maybe because, for the first time in ages, one realises that one’s being is profoundly physical and, like a child, is delighted at being seen – a healthy exhibitionism.

It must have been at least ten years ago I had a bright idea. I had just come out of my morning meditation and I found myself yawning and stretching. ‘Now there’s a funny thing’, I thought, ‘why was I allowed to yawn and stretch only when I stopped meditating? I must have been sitting still ! That’s what you are supposed to do in meditation, isn’t it? I wonder what would happen if I paid attention to what my body wanted while I was meditating.

I began by giving up the rather up-tight yoga posture and, reclining back in a comfortable chair that gave my body room to move, I began to discover exactly what I have been describing above. I had no idea what to call it. It wasn’t meditation proper and it wasn’t focusing proper either. I decided to call my little private practice bodyminding. I thought this appropriate because it seemed as though I was the body’s minder.

When, a year or so ago, some people at the Focusing Institute in the States came out with Wholebody Focusing I was quite startled. And when I attended Karen’s workshop here in New Zealand last year I found that they had not gone exactly the route I had and there were certain philosophical differences. But they were on the same page as me – a case of simultaneous discovery. Quite encouraging.

And I’m pleased to tell you that Karen will be coming again to New Zealand in March of next year to conduct another weekend workshop of Wholebody Focusing and a five day retreat at Mokihinui Westport – a beautiful spot I’m told.

More information on this at a later date.

[1] To get an idea of the number of published books on focusing go to:

http://www.focusing.org/eShop/10Browse.asp?category=Focusing%20Books

[2] Purton, Cambell. Introduction to the Special Issue on Focusing Oriented Therapy . In Person-Centered & Experiential Psychotherapies. Special Edition. Volume 9. Number 2. June 2010