Use – a scientific concept.

A working understanding of ‘use’ is something anybody with an interest in Alexander Technique has to acquire. A ‘working understanding’ involves practice and ability to employ oneself purposefully, and skilfully in any activity. Indeed ‘practice,’ ‘employment,’ ‘skill,’ ‘purpose,’ as well as ‘habit’ provide the etymological roots for ‘use,’ which is the founding abstraction of Alexander’s work.

That ‘use’ is foundational for Alexander work should be clear to any one, that it is an abstraction is sometimes missed, with ‘use’ being taken as something concrete. Where use is taken concretely it becomes common to accuse people with no knowledge of Alexander’s work of misusing themselves. This I think is a mistake on a number of levels, foremost of which is that the practical problem for many people is that they have no concept of using themselves at all. ‘Use’ is how Alexander began to analyse his own actions and how he analysed the actions of his pupils. ‘Use’ is therefore the unit of analysis of Alexander work. To develop a working concept of use, a person has to abstract from his or her own experience - something practical that works.

Doing so they have to abstract the ‘similarity of the difference,’ to borrow a phrase from David Bohm, that the use of themselves can actually make to their lives and the difficulties that they are experiencing. In doing this, ‘use’ comes to explain what has happened and what is happening.

‘Use’ therefore elucidates the subject matter of Alexander’s work, as well as providing the explanatory power and the unit of analysis. These three elements together, are what the great Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, saw as being necessary for the methodological grounding of a scientific discipline. Which is how John Dewey characterised Alexander’s work. It is a scientific discipline for each person that seeks to learn it, like Alexander, to borrow a phrase, this time from Kelly who was inspired by Dewey they are ‘personal scientists.’ 

To view people as ‘personal scientists’ is to recognise the importance of intentionality, of wishing and willing – something Walter Carrington in his published talks stressed as being necessary for success in Alexander work. 

To talk about being a ‘personal scientist’ here is to follow Dewey in ‘Human Nature and Conduct’ in saying that while we rely on habit we must also be able to use our intelligence to review habits and change behaviour as necessary.

Which is very much how Alexander came to see things. The difference between Dewey and Alexander being, as the former, I think would have admitted, is that the Alexander Technique provides the practical way of changing things, turning them around. 

Stand Up Straight Now!

If you felt yourself stiffen to the above command then you are almost certainly not alone. It is most people’s first and un-thought out reaction to being asked to stand up straight. The resultant posture involves a fixing and holding of the breath. It was even cultivated for a while as a healthy posture in schools and of course the classic sergeant major pose with head pulled back, chest puffed out is an exaggerated form of it. The fact that it is not healthy, in interfering with relaxed respiration and placing undue strain on the back, was missed until Alexander came along. His work was in part responsible for these sort of exercises disappearing and some of the worst exercises of army drill stopping in the early twentieth century.

However, you just cannot keep a bad idea down as it were, and nearly a century later the idea that we should practice standing up and sitting up straight, as a way of cultivating will power and control is back. It is being promoted by Professor Roy Baumeister and my attention was drawn to his work, through an interesting post on Alexander Technique teacher Jennifer Mackerras' blog.

Now the problem with simply asking someone to stand up straight is that it assumes that they know how to do it. Yet if they did, you would expect not to have to tell them, they just would stand well. It is a point made by John Dewey* in elaborating a conversation with Alexander. Alexander having pointed out to him that people, in seeking to make any change, including one as simple as changing how they stand, believe they merely have to will it and it will happen.

This for Alexander, according to Dewey, is merely a ‘superstition', a belief ‘on a par with primitive magic in its neglect of attention to the means which are involved in reaching an end.’ What is important is an ‘intelligent inquiry to discover means which will produce a desired result, and intelligent intervention to procure the means.’

Without the enquiry into how we might change how we stand, we are most likely, to quote Dewey again, to end up ‘standing differently, but only a different kind of badly.’ This Dewey expands on, to make a more general point that an act comes before the thought, that a habit must be established before we can ‘evoke a thought at will.’

These thoughts of Dewey for me, connect Alexander to George Kelly and his Psychology of Personal Constructs. Kelly was hugely influenced by Dewey and, in his insistence that ‘behaviour is the experiment’, one can see a direct link between the foregoing and his evolution of fixed role therapy. A link that is re-enforced by something else Alexander said, that Dewey reported, namely that we are not simply talking about ‘control of the body’, but the ‘control of the mind and character’. All of these rely on ‘intelligently controlled habit’ and that must be the aim of Alexander lessons or any kind of therapy, such as Personal Construct Psychology, which takes people as active creators of their own lives.

*Dewey,J. (2008) The Middle Works, 1899-1924 ,Volume 14:1922, Human Nature and Conduct . Carbondale:Southern Illinois University Press p23-25

Stopping, Looking and Seeing

Today I start with a quote from the opening paragraph of art historian John Berger's, 'The Art of Seeing' – something I wish I had written as it expresses beautifully, something fundamental, not just about the work that I do, but about life and what it is to be in the world.

 'Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.'

This quote resonates with me so much, because when I am working I often make a distinction between looking and seeing, listen and hearing, feeling and touching, and for that matter feeling and being touched. Of these, I place the most emphasis on vision, as when we begin to allow ourselves to stop look and see, our relationship with all our senses changes, improves. We experience the world differently, we see the world differently, we hear the world differently and we can touch and be touched by it differently.

Use in effecting function, as Alexander noted affects ourselves, how we see our possibilities, whether we have can have hope. Hope in our darkest hours is a light that can lead us onwards, finding a way to a new future. We do not have to ‘paint ourselves into a corner’ as George Kelly observed and to free ourselves we need not just words but the ability to see a situation differently, to see the alternatives. Only then do we have a choice where we can weigh up the implications before committing ourselves to action.

Stopping which I blogged about last week, involves a commitment to look at a situation, to see it, to become focussed. The experience of which, is a coherence not just towards the situation but within ourselves, as it includes us, as we release, lengthen and widen, breathe, prepare. This reflects the fact that most of our experience is both pre and non verbal – words giving the handles that allow for patterns and sequences to be identified, thought about, and communicated to others.

Stopping also allows us to look at others, be with them, be alongside them and I will be blogging more about this aspect of my work in coming weeks. For the use of the eyes and the facial muscles involves our earliest habits, habits that link us to others in an inter-personal world, an inter-personal world that is sometimes hidden, but always there. This world, the world of love and attachments is the source of our deepest anguish, profoundest sadness, as well as moments of immense joy, happiness. It is a world to be understood, that in our being with others, we can take a conscious stance towards.

Which brings me back as always to the Primary Control its importance in organising not just ourselves but our experience of the world, whether we want to better understand others, perform better or simply free ourselves from aches and pains that interfere with everyday living. The Primary Control is the means through which conscious control can become established and constructive – it is what makes Alexander’s work unique and it is freely available to anybody who knows how to stop, look, listen, become aware of themselves and allow themselves to begin to see and hear the rhythms and patterns of their lives, their worlds.

Cutting the Bungee Cord

Despondency tends to descend on people who, in trying to change, repeatedly experience failure, finding themselves jerked back to where they started, just at that point when success seemed to be within reach or even accomplished. It is like trying to change with a bungee rope tied to your back which becomes taut at the last moment, pulling yourself back to where you started - change becomes a Sisyphean task. Each day a person seems condemned to start again, only to be frustrated. It is a familiar experience for many and is often evidence of failure to really stop and find a way forward.

Both Alexander and Kelly wrote about this phenomena and using different language both suggested solutions that were similar and pertinent to whoever finds themselves experiencing this sort of difficulty. As is often the case, it is helpful to approach such difficulties not just from one standpoint but two or more and that is what I hope to do today.

For Alexander, the failure lies in what he called 'end-gaining', in not identifying the real cause of our difficulties, which lay for him in relying on what he called 'subconscious guidance and control.' Rather, we identify a specific fault and tend to try and correct it directly, so a problem with a limb is seen as just that, and not a problem stemming from the overall use of ourselves that is best corrected by aiming for a better co-ordination of the whole. For Alexander, the need to stop and think, to reconstrue is an embodied matter, best done through releasing one's breathing, freeing oneself for a wide range of possible actions, actions that in themselves depend on new conceptions of what is possible, conceptions that recognise situations for what they are, which break our dependence on old habits and cut the cord that binds us to our past. What Kelly adds to this comes with the formal idea of a construct being based on a dichotomy, a contrast, where we like to experience ourselves on one side of the distinction being made. Constructs as contrasts, are highly personal, borrowed and evolved by each person for their individual ends. Meanings are seen as personal, rather than dictionary definitions formally imposed. So, that for one person the choice at work might be to pull down and be a 'kindly' person rather than a 'efficient’ one, where attempts at ‘efficiency’ are always in the end trumped by the need to be ‘kind’. This might happen because being 'kind' or 'nice' is ultimately a way of attempting to control the person’s anxiety in the face of the unknown demands of ‘efficiency’. Kelly called this kind of attempt at change ‘slot rattling’ and like Alexander saw it is an ineffective sort of change, that is better replaced by controlled elaboration and experimentation. In this case the link between being ‘kindly’ and ‘efficient’ might usefully be broken and seen not as an ‘either/or’ but possibly as an ‘and’, subsumed underneath a new construct for change – that of ‘confidence in the face of the unknown’. This involves the ability to stand and face the future, to see what possibilities hope offers us. It is the pre-requisite for change that Alexander always brings us back to and Kelly invites us to adventurously elaborate by cutting the cord to our past failures and seeking the future.