Alexander Technique and The Inter-Personal

Today I want to blog about something very new in the Alexander world, something so new that to my knowledge no-one to date has ever suggested it. Having said that readers of this blog will notice familiar themes, as will anybody conversant with Alexander's work. However what I want to say goes beyond Alexander in very important ways, while looking at ways of fulfilling certain of the promises that he felt his work contained.

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.

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

Curiosity Recaptured

A few years ago, before blogging became prominent,  Mornum Time Press published a book of short essays centred on people's experience of the Alexander Technique -AT. I am not sure whether Jerry Sontag, who edited the book, came up with the title or someone else did, but whoever it was, in choosing 'Curiosity Recaptured', they chose well. For 'Curiosity Recaptured' says something about an attitude to life and to others ,that we can consciously choose, whatever life throws at us. It allows us not just to be curious but to wonder.

I was reminded of the book today, during a conversation with an senior psychotherapist about how they see their work. They described their work with couples, as helping people to make the most conscious adult choices possible, through being curious about the other. It was a nice simple explanation of where dialogue begins, where what Kelly called sociality starts.

Sociality is something that distinguished personal construct psychology back in the 50's. Now psychologists and other psychotherapists are catching up, as they talk about theory of mind and mentalization. Their contributions are all illuminating and helpful but lack something of the clarity of Kelly was getting at. Namely, that in order to play a role with regard to somebody, it is helpful to be able to predict them by being able to 'stand in their shoes' so to speak. The extent to which we can do this helps determines the type of role that we can play.

At a very simple level, this occurs every day while driving or walking along the pavement. Sometimes it goes wrong, as today when I encountered someone walking towards me. We both did that dance that sometimes occurs, with each person trying to step one way and then the other. In this case, our anticipations went astray, we both went the same way and collided. Thankfully this is rare, particularly when driving!

In work and at home we play more complex roles and have to navigate not just relationships with one other, but amongst groups. We need to make sense not just of the individual people involved but of the multiple relationships that exist between people, as well as the relationships horizontal and vertical that exist between the group and the outside world.

Personal Construct Psychology - PCP has some lovely ways of working with these that have been developed by Harry Proctor in the form of Perceiver Element Grids, PEG’s for short. I have used them with both therapy clients and pupils to help them think about the various relationships in their families and most importantly, help them suspend, a PCP word, or inhibit an AT word, old constructs, a PCP word, or conceptions, an AT word.

Whichever words one chooses, whatever theory one starts with, both refer to the same ability of stopping, looking and beginning to see the situation a fresh - as I blogged about last week. It is always a matter of finding our sense of wonder, our sense of curiosity, possibility, no matter what assails, no matter how troublesome a situation or a relationship is. As it is the freshness of being present, that presents the future with new horizons, new vistas, ways forward, whether together or apart.

Psychotherapy, Psycho-therapy and Alexander Technique

Etymology is a favourite pastime, the root of words giving clues not just to forgotten meanings but often to a vital world hidden behind a veil of socialisation and habit. So it is with psychotherapy, a word increasingly professionalised, medicalised and placed at the service of the government and the market economy. I got to thinking about the roots of psychotherapy and all the work I do as an Alexander Technique teacher and professional psychotherapist, thanks to an recent, excellent article by Guy Dargert in the The Psychotherapist. The two root words psyche and therapy point to a specific domain and the act of ministering to it. Dargert locates the domain of ‘psyche’ in the myth of Psyche and the necessity of her journey from a ‘charmed but ultimately unsatisfying life’, where ‘all her wishes were effortlessly fulfilled’, to one where she has faced the contingency of life, the limits of human endeavour and the inevitability of death. Such a journey marks our way to maturity, a therapist is simply one who attends to the possibilities afforded in such a journey, who perhaps may play the role of mentor. To play the role of mentor is, as Dargert points out, to enter the world of ‘menos’, a word with which the Greeks combined for ‘mind’ and ‘spirit’ – a ‘mentor’ being a person who brings an ‘overview’, ‘a higher perspective’ and ‘clear thinking’ to troubled minds. For Dargert such a person might be a ‘true ‘mental health practitioner’’.
To talk of ‘spirit’ is to talk of what is vital, what is animating, and this is usually associated with breathing, which is another meaning of ‘psyche’ that Dargert notes. A psychotherapist would be a person who minsters both to the journey of Psyche and would attend to the process of breathing. In doing so they might adopt the role of mentor providing oversight and clarity, inviting a person onwards to where they can stand calmly in the face of the unknown – which is an aim of the Alexander Technique. It is often forgot that Alexander thought of his work as ‘psycho-therapy’, but it is not surprising when you think of his emphasis on breathing. Breathing not just for its own sake but as a necessity for forming ‘satisfactory conceptions of new or unfamiliar ideas or experiences.’ In this Alexander Technique is a practical way of learning to face ones difficulties, to follow the journey of Psyche, to become one’s own mentor, to become whole in the face of uncertainty and the unknown, to dream, to live a life, and to feel alive. To feel alive is as, good a measure of outcome, as any in psychotherapy. George Kelly recognised this and while his Personal Construct Psychology might focus more on ‘menos’, deep within it is a recognition of Psyche, the need for transition, the need to reconstrue, the need to dream - through what he called loosening, the need to live by what he called tightening, into experiment and action.