In doing this I go against the grain of certain contemporary Alexander trends which emphasise the physical and publicise the Alexander Technique as a 'practical way of improving posture'. 'Improving posture' is often the motivation for seeking Alexander lessons and an outcome. There is nothing wrong in either but as an answer to what the Alexander Technique is, it falls woefully short. My own answer can be found in a previous blog and is grounded in Alexander's writings, most notably the title of his second book 'Constructive Conscious Control of The Individual' - CCI.
For those that do not have time to read two blog posts in one day, I will briefly break down the salient points for them here. The first is that Alexander Technique is concerned with consciousness, what we can be aware of and specifically it is concerned with becoming aware of how we control ourselves and the implications in terms of functioning in a general sense. Patterns of control can be constructive in that they allows for greater levels of integration and functioning or they can be destructive with poor performance and various difficulties being the result. Normally, now a days when Alexander Technique teachers list the resulting difficulties, they list as Alexander would have phrased it, 'so called physical' difficulties such as back or neck pain. He though, again to paraphrase, included 'so called mental difficulties'. Unfortunately his writing here here is not always particularly illuminating because of his adoption of a stimulus-response model for mental processes. There is one particular observation concerning manner of use and manner of reaction that I will come back to in a later blog that is absolutely key here, in its practicality and usefulness.
Today though there are four points of departure. Three from Alexander and one from John Dewey. Starting with Dewey, he explicitly refers to Alexander's work as a 'completed psychoanalysis', so it is clear that for Dewey and one assumes Alexander who included Dewey's introduction to his work that 'conscious control' is relevant to the field that psychotherapy seeks to elaborate.
Moving on to Alexander he explicitly makes 'behaviour' the concern of his work, specifically the change of behaviour. This is very rarely mentioned, if at all in an evolving Alexander literature. Yet, for me this is often what holds out most promise, if not the only promise of the Alexander Technique. It allows us to become aware, conscious of our behaviour, conscious of it implications and gives a practical procedure for helping to change it. Now behaviour and action are intimately connected and the two final points of departure are Alexander's breaking of the world into physical and mental acts, excluding and ignoring what I would call inter-personal acts. Part of the reason is that Alexander like many men of his time was wedded to a unit of society based on the individual rather than looking to see individuals as persons in relationship - this being the fourth and final point of departure.
One of the ironies of the last point is that it is possible to trace tentative links through Dewey and McMurray showing how Alexander's work might have influenced the development. What is important to say here and what marks this out as a radical break with Alexander is to note that our earliest habits, habits to do with the use of our head and our neck, habits to control our experience of ourselves are not the result of some stimulus-response mechanism but our active experimentation with being in the world. So that by six months babies have functionally acquired movements of their heads and necks to control their experience before they can walk. That control exists in and evolves in an interpersonal framework and the Alexander Technique can help establish conscious control inter-personally in our relationships with others. To do this we need to recognise a different category of action to the two that Alexander outlines in CCI, that is of of inter-personal acts. Doing so radically breaks and extends Alexander's work into our personal relationships, our being with other's and allows for for links to be made with psychology, psychotherapy. Most of all it allows for an extension of ourselves through understanding of ourselves in relation to others and giving us the opportunity not just to be with others but to play a role with respect to them.
Interesting and well written - but to me not new at all. I remember saying to my teacher in the first year of taking lessons that Alexander Technique is Psychoanalysis, but coming to it from another direction. Many years later, during my training, it was always clear that AT is about consciousness, and making conscious decisions as to what and how we want to be and how we want to operate, rather than be driven by habits.
ReplyDeleteI also believe that the stimulus/response model can be applied to all aspects. On my linkedin page, I say:
"Whatever we do - and I use the word "do" in a broad sense, to include physical and mental activity - we do in response to a stimulus - a trigger. I believe that everything life presents us with falls into the category of "stimulus", and that all our actions fall into the category of "response to stimulus". Taken in that broad sense, Alexander Technique is a study of how we live!"
And life of course includes relationships with others.
Ii agree with you - this needs to be written about and talked about more often. But for marketing purposes, it would not work. Most people would simply be scared.