Why We Need A Teacher

Alexander believed anyone could do what he did in working things out for himself; he also believed that lessons would reduce the time needed to do so. I am far from certain about the former statement, while being pretty sure of the latter. The problems in working it out for oneself are many, even if you have the excellent guide that is given by Alexander in chapter one of his third book ‘The Use of The Self.’ This account of how he worked things out is undoubtedly idealised, but in his idealisation Alexander lays out a pretty good framework for learning what he knew. 

Within that account the chief difficulty becomes apparent, namely the need to do something unfamiliar, not to rely on habit, not to rely on feeling, to allow something different to happen. All too often at the last second, we revert to the familiar, go with the habit, make our usual choice, missing the new road that is in front of us.

Alexander was well aware of this, as the most recent blog by Robert Rickover makes clear. Alexander’s practical experience of teaching both himself and others emphasised this tendency to revert, to rely on habit, to rely on old conceptions of how to go about things, even simple things like sitting and walking.

In talking of conceptions here, it is worth remembering a belief of Alexander’s, that John Dewey picked up on, namely that experience precedes conception. There are some very deep waters we could get into here about conception and what is going on in general, but from a practical point of view Alexander is right. Only when you have experience can you really begin to know, to have concepts in terms of ‘knowing how,’ which is very different from ‘knowing that.’

Getting the experiences is where a teacher comes in, where the teacher can help you gain in minutes experiences that it took Alexander months to work through. Those first experiences of difference in how you can move, how you might use yourself, are what allow you to begin to be aware of what you currently do, how you currently work, what you might stop, what might be right, what might be wrong in terms of how we function. 

We too often rely on the pre-verbal solutions of our childhood, modified haphazardly or sometimes modified consciously and badly, as our way forward. A teacher can help us correct these by making plain the implications of our patterns of use, our habits, not just verbally but through experience and words, putting the two together so we can learn the concepts for ourselves. As we do so, we develop Conscious Control for ourselves; we can use ourselves intentionally. 

Without a teacher we are liable to lose ourselves, always returning to old habits, relying on old feelings of right, that are wrong; tying ourselves in knots, missing the way forward, repeating old mistakes, following the old ways, that have led us into impasse, always, and forever will do so, unless, we first learn to stop, call a halt. With that a teacher can help, before pointing the way to a new use, new habits that can free us towards a better and more constructive use of ourselves.  

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.

The Primacy of the Primary Control

Not a compelling title for a blog, I know, but perhaps one of the most important things to understand about Alexander's work. It is a phrase I wish I had come up with, and comes from a pupil who has gone on to train as an Alexander Technique Teacher. They used it in one lesson with me, to sum up their insight into what I was teaching them. It expresses something very nicely that people take time to understand about Alexander's work. It is often missed if a person's exposure is limited or they fail to understand the importance of the primary control in developing constructive conscious control. Constructive Conscious Control, of course is also a daunting phrase, and being the aim of Alexander Technique it is important to understand it.


Breaking down the phrase into its constituent parts enables it to be quite easily understandable by most people. Particularly when followed by a simple and practical demonstration that is relevant to them. The easiest place to start is with the middle and last terms together. ‘Conscious control’ for Alexander means being aware of how we control ourselves in thinking and action. The contrast to conscious control is where we are unaware of how we do things, where we rely on what Alexander would have called ‘sub-conscious guidance and control’ and the trouble with sub-conscious guidance and control is not only are we not fully aware of how we are controlling the use of ourselves and our habits, but we are also not fully alive to the short and long-term implications of how we go about things. Implications which include poor performance, being in a bad mood, to troublesome musculoskeletal problems such as back and neck pain. For Alexander such implications are indications of a control that is destructive of the positive potentialities that he would see as our birthright and future.


The positive potentialities can be maximised through a conscious control that is constructive, that is not only is not harmful but it improves what he termed the ‘standard of functioning’ through time – which is another Alexander phrase that lacks appeal and is difficult to get to grips with. Which I’ll blog about sometime but for the moment it might be best understood as covering an amalgam of different psycho-physical attributes all trending in a positive direction. So constructive conscious control improves not just performance, but mental and physical well being, as well as helping prevent various ailments that are centred around interference with breathing and a harmful use of the musculoskeletal system.


Like a good engineer Alexander discovered one central factor that worked to control everything, which involves a ‘certain use of the head in relation to the neck, and the head and neck in relation to the torso, and the other parts’. That ‘certain use’ is an intentional choice to both not do certain things and to proceed about one’s business in definite manner which promotes ‘freedom in thought and action.’ As a certain use it precedes everything, thinking about a subject, a person; making a movement, performing an action. It is primary, it comes first, always, in everything.