The integrated body/mind's view on ‘Body/Mind Integration’

Introductory Health Warning

I understand that when I use the notion of ‘body/mind integration’, I am inviting history. I am inviting collective history and I am inviting personal history. For the majority of association members, this should be a loaded, emotionally-charged concept. So let me come clean: I do understand that in the body-oriented tradition it is one of the ‘big values’, right next to brushing your teeth every evening, breathing properly and the Holy Grail. Whatever ‘orgastic potency’ and ‘genital character’ are for Reich, what the ‘integrated adult’ is for TA, what the ‘order of love’ for Hellinger, ‘enlightenment’ for the buddhists, I suspect ‘body/mind integration’ is right in there - in the ‘higher echelons’ - for AChP as an organisation. We’re talking serious idealisation. Wherever we’re talking serious idealisation, we suspect serious pain and deficiency, some source of urgency and maybe desperate need. And whenever we put this explosive mix together, we’re also talking serious disappointment. It may not be something we have been warned about when we got the ticket for our descent to this planet, but any good fairy tale will tell us that these things hang together.

So let me spell out the fundamental warning right from the beginning: ‘body/mind integration’ is as dangerous, misleading, unhelpful a concept as any other theoretical construct, but especially if used or imagined as an ideal, goal or objective to be brought about in a client by the therapist (in which case it should carry a health-warning!).

I do think ‘body/mind integration’ can be a very useful concept, if it is used as a ‘perceptual tool’. My perception of the current (here & now) degree of ‘body/mind integration’ in the client, in me and in the relationship can tell me about the unconscious dynamic, the working alliance and possible ‘emergencies’ from an holistic perspective. Every therapist is internally busy with these relational preoccupations, but ‘body/mind integration’ can help us into a fuller, holistic awareness of them. Essentially, it is an avenue into fuller awareness of the depth of conflict and pain, and also the potential for pleasure and transformation present in the relationship.

When we have theoretical discussions on the theme, what really makes people idealise or dismiss the concept (and its possible use as such a ‘perceptual tool’), is their own longing for integration or their own disappointment in that possibility. Just because it’s a suitable label for what most people intuit to be a desirable state, does not mean that I am indeed promising or selling it as a normative ideal or goal. Because it’s desirable, it may be something that clients expect or demand, but that does not necessarily mean I take it on as what I’m being paid to deliver. It’s therapists’ own hope for integration, happiness, transcendence which attaches itself to any such notion of a desirable state; they are then susceptible to believing it’s their responsibility to bring it about. ‘Body/mind integration’ then becomes a goal, an onerous task to be urgently achieved or a false, misleading and ultimately disappointing ideal to be resisted.

Is integration possible ? Many people rather take refuge in a firm, repetitive ‘no’ than hold open an uncertain possibility which they intuit they are not in control of. Many other people, of course, take refuge in some blind faith that if they follow the right procedure, integration will be possible, implying the illusion that they do have control over it.

‘Body/mind integration’ is, of course, just the other side of the coin of the ‘body/mind’ split. Because it’s the cultural soup we’re still swimming in, we cannot really think from outside it. It is very, very difficult to experience the split and/or to think about it without getting split and perpetuating splitting. It’s hard to be in touch with the pain of the split, and not take sides, and not try and force a premature resolution; to look into the abyss and not be compelled to abort the process by pushing for closure, one way or the other.

Thinking about this understandable urge for closure, conclusion, settling the agonising pull between hope and despair for once and all, always brings to my mind a particular memory.

I remember the end of a session where a client had had one of the most serious and devastating external and internal set-backs that I have ever come across. He was scraping the existential barrel, and consequently driving himself to the brink of his suicidal past. It wasn’t even a question of therapy, and whether it was working or whether there was a point to it. We both felt hopeless and despairing, spending most of the session in some sort of stupor. Me taking any therapeutic perspective or stance in the face of his experience would have been a sham, a farce, a joke, and we both knew it. He got up to leave and said something to the effect of: “what is the point of coming next time, if I’m still around ?” My mind was blank, except for one thought (partially a left-over from the previous evening’s teaching group where I’d been talking about holding the tension, between friend and doctor, colluding and objectifying, between ‘something desperately has to happen’ and ‘don’t force anything to happen’). I actually thought it several times and didn’t say it because I couldn’t imagine saying it. I couldn’t dare trivialising his life struggle (a significant chunk of which I had been part of). I was certain he would fly in my face if I said it. So I said it: “isn’t that making it a bit simple for yourself ?” It proved to be one of the most containing little utterances that have ever graced my lips. The moral of the story, in prose terms, is that to appear to give up is easier than holding the tension. To polarise to the negative (‘there is no point’), is easier than being in limbo in between the polarities.

My experience of the AGM and the purpose of this write-up

On the AGM I did not hold any of the tension and I miserably failed the title of my talk: I got stuck into the polarisations and never talked that much from - or even about - the ‘third position’. We never got near the promised contemplation bit. This is very normal: we talk about the polarisation of body and mind, and - surprise, surprise - we polarise. We talk about how body and mind are split - and we split. We talk about how the split may find resolution and we still split. We can talk about the possibilities of ‘body/mind integration’ from a bias in the body and we construct a whole therapeutic universe around it. On the other hand we can talk about the vicissitudes of ‘body/mind integration’ from a bias in the mind, and we inhabit the polar-opposite universe. As long as internally we oscillate between body and mind, as long as we can’t manage to hold the tension between them, as long as we sense/feel/think oppositionally, we will polarise externally.

In discussions on the AGM several questions emerged:

Is the concept of ‘body/mind integration’ useful ?

Is the concept of ‘body/mind split’ useful ?

What do we mean by ‘split’ ?

I did initially write up the discussions around these more abstract questions and my responses to them, but decided to leave them out of this article (I am happy to send the relevant few pages to anybody on request). Dialogue about these questions is apparently meant to achieve a shared meta-position from which to hold the polarisations, but in my experience the apparent dialogue actually replicates the polarisation energetically after all. So rather than a philosophically watertight exposition of the abstract questions, here’s the colloquial version of my response to these questions:

Little bits of ‘body/mind integration’ happen all the time, and from within the experience there is no doubt in anybody’s mind whether it’s ‘good’ or useful. Of course it is. It happens. Just the same as shit happens, integration happens. Occasionally. Temporarily. Not as a permanent undying state, but as a precious moment in the process nonetheless; as a moment we’re also bound to lose again, because impermanence is rule no 1 in our cosmos. If it wasn’t for impermanence, we wouldn’t lose it, but then we wouldn’t have the possibility of even deeper integration later. Whatever experience I associate with the term ‘body/mind integration’, once I’ve tasted it, of course I want more of it. We can create space, we can try and hold the space, we can push and fail, we can even imagine we can make it happen and torture ourselves, but we can’t make it happen. Essentially it’s paradoxical: it’s co-created grace.

In this write-up I want to reverse the emphasis of my talk. I want to briefly summarise the way I see the polarisation affecting us as an association, then suggest how it accurately focusses us on certain blind spots in our tradition, and then (in a second part to be published in the next newsletter) concentrate on how we might begin to imagine a ‘third position’, particularly in regard to some of the inherited wounds and how they they are reflected in our theory.

‘Body/Mind’ polarisations within AChP - idealisations and disappointments

I think it’s fair to say that as a group of therapists, the majority of us have been swinging from some sort of idealisation of the body to disappointment of that idealisation. How often do I hear the post-certificate cry: “I’ve done all this therapy and training - now that I’m finally working with people, I find I just don’t believe in therapy any more. I end up sitting in chairs and talking. I wonder whether there is any point to it at all. How can I work as a therapist when I don’t believe in therapy myself ? How can I invite them into a process when I know it’s not going to deliver what they’re asking and hoping for ?”

This is a well-known process whatever the orientation of the training: students will be attracted to a particular approach and organisation and go through a therapeutic process, not just in their therapy, but also in relation to the approach itself and the organisation that provides it. Students (in any training) wouldn’t bother to make the initial commitment unless they were first able to indulge in defensively idealising the approach they’ve chosen. At this stage ‘good-enough’ is not ‘good-enough’ - it has to be perfect! Students go on a trip with it: ‘our approach as the guaranteed and predictable pathway to health, happiness and general redemption’. The approach is constructed as an ideal object, promising to cure at the very least my own, but probably all my family’s and ideally all of humanity’s ills.

Chiron is no exception. The only thing that is particular is the object of idealisation: in our case the most likely candidate is the body. The recovery of the neglected, repressed, alienated, beaten and abused body and its restitution as a wise, self-regulating source of being is part and parcel of the idea of ‘body/mind integration’.

My proposition is that as association members we are all in various and often opposing stages of that swing, between idealisation and disappointment, with various degrees of attachment to what we individually take to be our current position. I hear people fight against their erstwhile naivete and ‘blind faith’ in the body and Body Psychotherapy. I hear people take fixed positions which sound like disappointment elevated into theory. Rather than still being in some process of ‘swinging’ between the polarities, it then sounds like they have swung too far and are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

My question here is: what comes after disappointment ? And how do we recognise what comes after ?

For me, one ingredient of worked-through disappointment involves some sense of having owned and embraced my original impulse to idealise. I guess, this might show itself as the capacity to forgive ourselves for our initial naivete and to lovingly hold that impulse to idealise. We then might find in it a kernel of inspiration which reflects a part of our soul that saw something through and in spite of the idealisation. I don’t see us as having collectively found such a position which is true to our original impulse. I think I would recognise it by the mature passion it would emanate - a passion that has both ‘patience’ / equanimity and ‘wildness’ / drive in it.

The most salient feature of the association is that we’ve all been through the Chiron training. It is an enormous organisational challenge that for most of us our emotional position on the idealisation / disappointment spectrum is bound up with particular interactions with particular people within the association. Just imagine, all the exciting and disappointing objects in the room, when we’re having an AGM - it’s a miracle that the ceiling doesn’t come down.

To be blunt about it: a considerable part of whatever we take to be our ‘theoretical position’ (e.g. in relation to the ‘body’ or ‘body/mind integration’) may well be unresolved transference to Chiron and not amenable to theoretical reflection and discussion. I do not at all exclude myself and everything I am saying here from this: I am not assuming that my ‘theoretical position’ is free from this.

Considering the creative potential of now about a hundred individuals, who have collectively spent at least half a million pounds and countless hours of their lives working to embody themselves and their potential, frequent exhortations for contributions to the newsletter seem to find a rather pitiful response. Where is our enthusiasm, creativity, spontaneity, willingness to play ? What the hell is going on ?

The polarisation between ‘idealisers of the body’ and ‘disappointers in the body’ reflects the culturally pervasive polarisation between body and mind. We are magnets for collective and primal pain. So it’s not surprising that sometimes we don’t seem to get much done. I think a considerable amount of association energy goes into the polarisations described above, and in my experience over the last 10 years association business ends up not being much fun. I feel this association has suffered and still suffers from the above polarisations, which - both generally and very practically - too often block initiative, passion and creativity. To recent members some of what I’m saying about us as an organisation may seem a bit over the top. You have to remember that I have been with the agonisingly slow process of the association’s development from the beginning, and much of what I’m saying here has that backlog of charge which I’m trying to lay to rest for myself. I’m also writing in the hope that some of it may be helpful when you’re in the thick of it and you’re caught in between being a student and being an independent therapist, with considerable and intense ambivalence toward the association, Chiron, Body Psychotherapy. This is an issue I am exposed to and struggle with every week in the training.

Training or ‘Chinese whispers’ ?

None of our teaching escapes that fateful development from idealisation to some sort of disappointment. Every one of our concepts I see being used, abused, distorted, misunderstood, re-translated at both ends of that development. For many students the moment where gold turns to dust happens in the third year. The fantasy of the omnipotent body-magician who slowly but surely disabuses the client of their now unnecessary defences and melts the client’s character armour with relentless and persistent midwifing turns into helplessness, failure, loss of therapeutic position. We’re coming home to the wound aspect of the ‘wounded healer’, not as something that the therapist has finally outgrown and overcome, as certificated by the seal of the Chiron diploma, but as something that we continuously work from as therapists.

How students hear or use our concepts, our teaching, our modelling depends largely on where they are in this idealisation-disappointment process. There isn’t one concept that I haven’t at some point seen changed beyond all recognition, either by the need to maintain the idealisation or by the impulse to stamp out the idealisation in bitter disappointment.

Swinging between these two polarities is too simple. There is more complex and hard work to be done. All models, concepts and tools can obviously be used therapeutically or counter-therapeutically. In my own language I’d say: all therapeutic models, concepts and tools can become vehicles for re-enactment of the client’s pattern in the therapeutic relationship. And each therapeutic approach inherits its own tendencies to take certain re-enactments for granted and to miss their relational significance. There is, of course, an intricate interweaving of the therapist’s inner world and the therapeutic training they are attracted to. So we can say that we inherit a particular set of insensitivities from our original parents, and another, related and often exacerbating set of obliviousnesses from our therapeutic parents.

These wounds want to be embraced to the point where we can hold the tension between idealisation and disappointment. Disappointment in Reich / the body / Chiron

In the long process of finding our original impulse, I have an image of us as the prodigal sons (and daughters) of Wilhelm Reich, still fairly lost in the wilderness. And - it has to be said - we left Daddy Wilhelm for some very good reasons, which I haven’t yet heard spelt out bluntly, so here goes.

When we describe a therapeutic approach, we are used to thinking about its characteristics in terms of theory and technique. To this I want to add a third: the implicit therapeutic/relational stance. If I take all of them into account, the main problem with the particular combination of theory, technique and implicit therapeutic/relational stance modelled by Reich himself is that in my opinion it doesn’t actually work. Why not ?

The theory is great for being non-dualistic and holistic, the techniques are powerful, some of his scientific findings merit more attention than they get, his meta-psychology is in some ways original, ground-breaking, vital. What really sucks is his therapeutic stance which is superior, objectifying, medical, righteous (for a taste of his objectification of the women in his life, his therapising - according to his criteria - of each and everyone he came into contact with, read his letters in “Beyond Psychology”). He seems profoundly incapable of mutual relating, and his theory is profoundly unrelational, both internally and externally. He does not conceive of internal relationship in any significant shape or form, and therefore doesn’t make use of his own relationship to himself as therapist, i.e. he does not work with countertransference in any way I can recognise.

There can be no doubt that he had extraordinary perception, incisiveness and clinical acumen (that’s why he got to leading the Vienna Clinical Seminar in the 1920’s), apart from a good portion of narcissistic charisma. And for him, this combination may have worked ‘well-enough’ in his therapeutic activities. He certainly won over a good many of his clients to his cause, and that wasn’t just because he had a revolutionary theory.

However, for us following in his footsteps 60 years later, some of Reich’s character traits are reflected in major blind-spots in our theory and practice, partly through being exacerbated by his pupils and followers. To name just a few:

Character structures are the only solidly holistic typology I know about; if I want to categorise people, I might as well use an accurate and organically-rooted model. So far, so good. But Reich’s version was anything but comprehensive: significantly Stephen Johnson had to add two character structures at the narcissistic stage to make up for a complete ‘hole’ between Reich’s ‘oral’ and ‘masochistic’ stages (that stage between oral need and masochistic independence is the crucial turning point in the Kleinian conception of childhood development (e.g. rapprochement) - so how come it just disappears in Reich’s version ?).

Reich pays little attention to the ego and its internal workings (Fairbairn’s notion of the splitting of the ego into the libidinal and the anti-libidinal ego is therefore an important complement to Reich; unfortunately Fairbairn seems to lose the ‘Id’ in the process) - theoretically he is impatient with the ego and wants to address and access the neglected and denied ‘animal’; he therefore wants to undercut the ego; in his defence it needs to be said that in practice, however, he is more discerning and recommends working closest to the ego (e.g. in his chapter on ‘Character analytic technique’)

Reich consequently underrates the importance of the ego’s capacity for symbolisation, which means he falls foul of a central pillar of analytic theory. This makes him easy fodder for attacks both by Freudians and Jungians; but others are equally offended: Juliet Mitchell (in ‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism’) questions Reich’s politically radical reputation because of this, and says that the revolutionary potential of Freud’s ‘unconscious fantasy’ is much more significant than Reich’s impetus towards sexual liberation.

Without paying much attention to symbolisation, Reich is liable to underestimate the significance of fantasy (that’s why Conger is so enthused about the combination of Reich and Jung, and why we can learn so much from the Jungian conception, as for example expressed by James Hillman, of the primacy of the ‘image’, i.e. fantasy and symbol: Hillman would argue that there is no such thing as the actual body, only a variety of - archetypally determined - fantasies about the body which in turn mediate our experience of it).

As Reich maintained an active, if not attacking, stance against the client’s ego, he maintained a focussed and separate position in the relationship. Because of this implicit relational stance (separate, superior, objectifying) - he is liable - if not guaranteed - to miss projective identification and other fused states in the relationship.

Reich was very sensitive to the patient’s secretly hostile construction of therapy and the therapist. He attacked his analytic colleagues for colluding with the patient’s ego by relying on and indulging ‘positive transference’, and for being naive about the extent to which the patient’s ego could adapt and pervert analytic procedure and principles. He set himself much more demanding standards for what might be achievable and what he wanted to achieve: he wanted to develop a systematic and efficient way of overcoming the ego’s defences against surrender to organismic and orgastic experience. He assumed that the only reason why his analytic colleagues did not join him in his mission was out of their own fears and inhibitions - he saw them as trying to dodge ‘the animal’. He was rightly impatient with their double standards (theoretically reducing all human functioning to primitive, sexual drives, but excluding their own quasi-scientifc objectivity and neutrality from this pervasive human condition, excluding the immediate experience of the ‘primitive’ from the consulting room by a variety of frame manoeuvres, excluding the ‘Id’ and the body by giving the ego primacy in their conception of the healthy resolution through impulse control and symbolisation). On every count he polarised against them and against the civilised ego which he saw them as colluding with and succumbing to. He saw them as underestimating the ego in its effect on the perpetuation of the underlying neurotic conflict (sexual and orgastic stasis).

But in thinking he had the power to single-handedly disabuse his patients from their unnecessarily restrictive ego and liberate them into immediate experience of health-giving genital functioning, Reich in turn underestimated the power of the patient’s ego. He took a fixed, quasi-medical therapeutic position (against the patient’s ego) and was then oblivious to the relational dynamics he was thereby enacting. There must have been a good number of patients who - by identifying with the ‘aggressor’ - benefited from submitting to him and willingly acquired the gospel according to Wilhelm. But vegetotherapy or orgone therapy is just as subvertible by the patient’s ego as anything else. In my view it is perfectly possible and actually fairly common for body therapists to re-enact the body/mind split - I have written an article for Self & Society on this theme.

Analysis as a refuge for ‘human relating’?

So in swinging from idealisation of the body into disappointment, we understandably take refuge in people whom we see as capable of making up for how we feel Reich failed and betrayed us. We look for people who will not bypass whatever kernel of individuality may reside in our ego, but have a modicum of interest in our thoughts. Maybe we don’t want to be reduced to animals, albeit healthy, orgastic ones. Maybe we’ve exhausted ourselves in repetitive hopeful catharsis, trying to re-capture and reclaim an aliveness which was in fact damaged long ago. Maybe we’ve come to the end of using regression as an avoidance of the painful recognition that that damage persists today; that the extent of the damage exceeds our control. Maybe we’re ready to look for intimacy in our woundedness rather than compulsively trying to overcome it. Maybe we’re fed up with Reich’s literalness, inflation, quasi-medical unrelatedness.

Reich’s narcissistic idealisation of the body urgently requires Klein’s notion of the ‘depressive position’ for containment. We are then drawn to people who have been talking about relationship dynamics for a long time, who are more modest in their promises, who are less pushy and primitive. Psychoanalysis appears as a more solid tradition, more stayed and mature, more holding. Psychoanalysis has had its own splits and internal battles, and has steadily recovered from its original reductionism (see Greenberg and Mitchell: “Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory” which beautifully outlines the historic development and the tension between drive theory and object relations). Talking about a swing from body idealisation toward analytic ‘depressive position’ is tricky as there are quite a variety of analytic positions; as there are, of course, different ways to inhabit the depressive position: we can on the one hand imagine a grudging, resigned acceptance of such uncomfortable realities as the co-existence of ‘good’ and ‘bad’, the separateness of the other in the face of our need of them, the limitations to our omnipotence, etc. Or on the other hand we can imagine a more creative, pleasurable and joyful experience of these realities, in Balint’s ‘harmonious interpenetrating mix’ or some of Winnicott’s descriptions of the delights of play.

However, the move to the ‘depressive position’ - as necessary as it is - may turn out to be a jump from the frying pan into the fire. On the whole, analytic attention to relationship typically comes at a price, i.e. re-enactment of the ‘body/mind split’ from the other side: where Id was there Ego shall be. We may be letting into the back door all kinds of dualistic and patriarchal assumptions (about linear development, linear time, hierarchical rather than holistic kinds of order, mind over matter, and so on) which Reich rightly railed against. Psychoanalysis as a discipline is shot through with 19th century paradigms - it’s got imperialism written all over it in big neon letters.

A third position?!?

Neither idealisation of the body nor disappointment of that idealisation sit comfortably with me. Neither traditional Body Psychotherapy nor traditional analysis help me to hold the tension enough - between body and mind, between longing and loss, between despair and transformation.

I propose that there is an important death beyond idealisation. I propose that there is life beyond the ‘depressive position’.

My suggestion is that we’re going to go round in the cycles of the various polarisations until we de-construct both positions, by remaining open to the possibility that there is indeed a third. The third will have something of both in it, something precious. The good thing about idealisation is that it has the seeds of passion in it. Because for all his outrageous literalness, his orgasm-addiction, his grandiosity, his unwillingness to relate, I still think Reich was onto something. I suggest that in all the idealisation of the body which drew me (and maybe you) to Reich, there is a kernel of a spiritual realisation which is of incredible value to our time.

The problem with this spiritual realisation - as with any other, I guess - is what Wilber talks about as the difference between Atman and the Atman-project. He proposed the notion that what may in principle be a correct spiritual intuition inevitably goes through a phase of being appropriated by the ‘ego’ - Atman turns into the Atman-project. So when we get disappointed with the idea of ‘body/mind integration’, we want to be careful that we don’t throw out the baby Atman with the undoubtedly dirty and repulsive, but understandably tempting bathwater project.

Embracing both the idealised Reichian project and how it failed me, how I looked elsewhere and how I come back to the original impulse, I can then begin to integrate Reich with whomever I escaped to in my disappointment. I suggest that the key ingredient in this is to formulate Reich’s - often precious - concepts not from an objectifying, but from a ‘wounded healer’ position, which is what I want to begin to do in the second part of this article by looking at notions like ‘body/mind split’, character structure, working alliance, ego, vasomotoric cycle etc.

Body/Mind Integration Part II

In the first part of this article I suggested that as an association we oscillate and polarise between idealisation and disappointment in relation to our origin - Reich and - let’s call it - the promise of the liberated, sexually free ‘animal’-body. In reflecting on my own infatuation with - or shall we say: appreciation of - Reichian theory and tradition and my subsequent disappointments, it becomes clear to me how I have swung between different approaches, and how I have neatly projected my primary scenario into the various fathers and mothers of psychotherapy.

What attracts us to a particular approach ? What’s the process by which our idealisation swings away from one of these ‘therapeutic parents’ and gets hooked on another ?

We are used to describing each approach in terms of its theory and technique, but as I suggested before, a more comprehensive grasp of the character of a therapeutic position also requires attention to the implicit relational stance which theory and technique are both an expression of and at odds with. How therapists actually operate in the relationship may be very different from what they do or think they do. There are inherent rifts and contradictions within each of our therapeutic parents (between their theory and their implicit stance, between theory and practice, etc) which partially reflect the historical relationships between them as actual people. Through our training we inherit these unresolved issues which then colour the tensions between our own theory, technique and implicit relational stance.

As an association, how can we hope to find a ground which goes beyond enacting these historical splits and our own swinging between idealisation and disappointment ? I am reminded of the ‘integrative triangle’ I used to refer to a few years ago in the Charge teaching - an oversimplified account of how an integrative position needs to do at least justice to Freud, Reich and Jung. We could say that on a variety of basic issues there is a collusive agreement between any two of them which requires the third to counteract and balance it (e.g. Freud and Reich’s shared focus on sexuality and biology versus Jung’s ‘opus contra naturam’; Freud and Jung’s reliance on the mind to access the symbolic versus Reich’s gross literalness, Reich and Jung’s shared optimism requires Freud’s Saturnian sense of limitation and boundary, etc.).

The idea of this Freud-Jung-Reich triangle was that a position between idealisation and disppointment becomes more possible the more we plummet the rifts and conflicts between the three of them - and the archetypal positions they inhabit and represent - in ourselves. We really need to identify with - and maybe get lost - in each of them, before we recognise the depth of our habitual biases. A useful exercise, both individually (and maybe for the association collectively) is to imagine the Freud, Reich and Jung in myself and each of us, and a fantasise a continuation of the unfinished struggles between them. This would include the use of therapeutic weapons to pathologise each other, which may open the possibility that they could actually also be therapeutically helpful to each other rather than just defensively therapising each other. In crude terms we could say that Reich, Freud and Jung respectively champion body, mind and spirit, and the transformational potential inherent in each of them.

When I see our association as caught in chasing our tails round the circles of the various - historically entrenched - habitual biases, driven by the polarisations between initial idealisation and disillusioned reaction, the notion of a third position becomes increasingly attractive. Reaching for such a third position, being sorely disenchanted with some of Reich’s grosser traits whilst remembering the spark of spiritual intuition inherent in what I think of as the ‘original impulse’, I arrived at the conclusion that we need to re-formulate some of our basic concepts from a ‘wounded healer’ position.

Rule 1: Re-formulating Reich relationally - re-formulating Freud holistically / energetically

The general principle underlying the suggestion of a ‘third position’ is to look at Reich’s energetic and holistic concepts and re-formulate them relationally. And, from the other polarity - which many of us had to take refuge in - we look at analytic relational concepts and ground them in the body by formulating them holistically and energetically as ‘body/mind’ relationships. Once we’re at it, we discover remnants of reductive, linear thinking as well as one-sided hierarchical and patriarchal elements both in the Reichian and in the analytic notion of the therapeutic position. Thus we find in both approaches aspects which imply unreflected obeisance to the medical model, at odds with our notion of the ‘wounded healer’. I therefore need to prepare the second principle by a little excursion into ...

Psychotherapy’s love-hate relationship with the ‘Medical Model’

In humanistic circles we are accustomed to vociferous and in many ways justified criticism of the ‘medical model’, for being unrelational, objectifying, unequal, counter-therapeutic. This ‘anti-medical model’ position, however, doesn’t do justice to the complexities of the therapeutic relationship, either. Paradoxically, the therapeutic position implies and indeed ‘needs’ the medical model - we can’t function without it, for several reasons:

first and foremost, the client already has an objectifying relationship to themselves which will inevitably be projected into therapy and the therapist, i.e. the client can’t help but construct therapy as an objectifying relationship, anyway, nevermind what the therapist intends or offers or thinks about it; as therapists we want to be available to be constructed as ‘objectifying’ objects

without the capacity to also objectify the client and have a reflective quasi-medical diagnosis, we have nothing to catch up with the pressures for fusion and merging at work on the more primitive levels of the relationship; we are then liable to get drawn into the client’s splits and enact them unconsciously; the medical model provides the frame and the boundaries which make containment of primitive processes possible; in simple terms: we need our own experience of being split and objectified in order to relate to and do justice to the extremes of splitting in the client - our capacity to relate needs to embrace intense states of unrelatedness. We don’t want to categorically rule out these kinds of states as ‘un-therapeutic’ (along the lines of: therapy is all about ‘contact’ or ‘connection’, as opposed to treatment which is all about objectification) because these states constitute the lack which keeps the client committed to the process.

as I have suggested before in this newsletter, the medical model is rooted in an infantile longing for perfectly-attuned, magical, omnipotent mothering - avoidance of the medical model also sidesteps and minimises the charge of this longing. By keeping the medical model out of the precious relational realm of therapy, the process thus loses an important ingredient: the fuel for attachment and urgency

Generally speaking, avoidance of the medical model tends to result in more shallow, ego-oriented ways of working which circumvent the vicissitudes of power, exploitation, inequality, asymmetry, etc. I therefore consider the medical model an essential ingredient in a relational therapeutic approach, also knowing that when we fall into the medical model unconsciously, we destroy the essence of therapy. In his love-hate relationship with the medical model Freud also said things like: “the cure is essentially effected by love.”

Rule 2: formulate the therapeutic position paradoxically, as conflicted

So a second principle is to not polarise against the medical model, but to embrace it sufficiently (including its assumed supremacy) and formulate the therapeutic position paradoxically - i.e. as an ongoing sense of conflict, from moment to moment, from session to session. The capacity to sit in conflict, to be used (and abused) as an object, to hold ambiguity and uncertainty, to endure regressed states without jumping into ‘solutions’ and ‘contracts’, to survive if not embrace (let alone enjoy) paradox, is a necessary requirement for surviving as a therapist.

A third position, therefore, involves embracing all of the ‘medical model’ linearity and literalness implicit in Reich’s stance (e.g. the idea of ‘genitality’ as the healthy pinnacle of development, his one-dimensional focus on orgasm, etc.) and formulating what’s precious about his perceptions from the ‘wounded healer’ position as conflict and paradox.

The ‘medical model’ is associated with the Apollonic project of modern science, the (to be re-formulated) notion of the body/mind split, linear, objectifying, dualistic thinking (the - as Robert Bly calls it - insult to matter / ‘mater’ inherent in the assumed supremacy of mind over matter), and various other unimaginative conceptual traps (e.g. linearity of time) which fly in the face of body/mind experience. We therefore want to attend to unreflected remnants of this thinking in our theory, not because they’re not ‘true’, but because they’re not exclusively ‘true’.

Rule 3: formulate all ‘entities’ and ‘psychic structures’ as energetic processes / relationships

As appreciation of relationship has had a few more decades to develop in analytic discourse, here the unreflected remnants of the medical model often operate in a more hidden, implicit fashion, and are encapsulated in theory (and meta-psychology) rather than explicit therapeutic stance. From the perspective of the third position we want to appreciate all structural ‘entities’ and ‘objects’ as they appear in analytic theory and re-formulate them also as processes, relationships. For example, it’s not only a fixed object that gets introjected (that’s true in one way), it’s also a whole relationship (Masterson, for example, comes close to this when he talks about units).

I would now like to attempt to re-formulate a selection of our basic concepts from such a third position. In summary, I will do this by attempting to re-formulate:

Reichian concepts relationally

analytic concepts holistically and energetically

structural concepts as processes and relationships

medical model assumptions from a ‘wounded healer’ position as paradox and conflict

The ‘body/mind split’

Reich had a clear notion that it is the chronic opposition of body and mind which is at the root of neurosis. He (and Lowen after him, see his metaphor of horse and rider for the body-mind relationship) worked with the idea of the functional identity of body and mind. The neurotic body and mind are chronically split, the healthy body/mind experiences spontaneously the wholeness of that functionial identity.

However, the term ‘body/mind split’, if taken literally, lends itself to being used in a split way (as illustrated in my article ‘Relating to and with the Objectified Body’ in Self&Society, also Chiron website). The tradition of Body Psychotherapy has suffered from an ‘anti-head’ bias, both in terms of theory and in terms of practice. It’s perfectly possible and quite common for body therapists to re-enact the client’s body/mind split in the relationship whilst theoretically pursuing a clear idea of body/mind integration and ‘wholeness’.

It’s very hard to think about the split without taking sides either way and therefore splitting (e.g. as Perls used to say: “Lose your head - come to your senses!”). It was argued on the AGM that the term ‘split’ in this context isn’t quite consistent with its general use in analytic language. But rather than inventing new terms, I’d like to present what I consider a more refined and differentiated meaning of the concept.

The term ‘body/mind split’ may remain fruitful if used as a shorthand for the opposition between spontaneous processes and reflective processes. This way of re-formulating Reich’s idea of the conflict underlying neurosis is not without difficulties, either, but, I think, is closer to the actual experience. It’s also consistent with complexity theory and notions of ‘emergent’ versus ‘established’ structures. Ken Wilber has comprehensively described the conflicting modes of consciousness involved in the underlying conflict (which he calls - in some ways more precisely - the ‘European Split’).

For me, then, when I use the term ‘body/mind split’, ‘body’ is only shorthand for ‘spontaneous processes’, ‘mind’ is shorthand for ‘reflective processes’ (from here onwards I will use quotes around ‘body’ and ‘mind’ to indicate this wider sense). Keeping this translation in mind, it is clear immediately that ‘spontaneous processes’ actually include far more than strictly physical ones: apart from biochemical, physiological, vegetative, muscular and sensory processes there are sensations and proprioceptions, internal and external movements, impulses derived from drives, instincts or object-seeking needs, feelings, images / fantasies / associations, voices (internal & external) and to some extent even thoughts (e.g. the paradox of obsessive thoughts arising spontaneously).

Although all of these spontaneous processes have a physical aspect in some way, many of them are usually considered to have primarily psychological significance, consequently they are commonly labelled ‘mental’. So to lump all these spontaneous processes together as ‘the body’ is utterly misleading. In the same way that spontaneous processes are not exclusively physical, so reflective processes are not at all exclusively mental.

What do I mean by ‘reflective processes’ ? Human beings (as we know them) seem to be both blessed with and condemned to the capacity to interrupt, react against, hold back and reflect on the spontaneous processes outlined above. In the context of the term ‘body/mind split’, ‘mind’ is only useful as a shorthand for this capacity to interrupt and hold back spontaneous processes. Again, keeping this tranlation in mind, it is clear immediately that ‘reflective processes’ actually include far more than strictly mental ones: in order to be effective, the force which reflects or reacts against a spontaneous movement needs to affect all levels from the mental right down to the physical. This can be a deliberate, temporary reaction (i.e. a holding, containing form of reflection), or it can be a chronic, fixed, habitual pattern which occurs outside of awareness. The first one is an important source of human creativity (Jung’s opus contra naturam). It’s the latter which Reich considered to be the root of ‘neurosis’ and which deserves the term ‘body/mind split’.

I would think that it was one of Freud’s great contributions that he formulated the apparently irreconcilable opposition between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, between what he calls primary process and secondary process, and eventually Id and Ego. From within patriarchal history we pursue the fantasy of mind over matter, and it appears as if our mind were operating on our bodies, as if the body/mind relationship was just a one-way operation. And towards the end of the 19th century that was the dominant scientific fantasy (i.e. positivism and reductionism) which Freud blew a hole into: he dared to say that rationality was NOT the only or even the dominant logic controlling experience and behaviour. He took the risk of saying that there was a meaning and a logic outside of the rational mind, irrational but intelligible. He ‘listened’ to hysterical conversion symptoms as if there might be a meaningful communication contained in them, in opposition to rational intention. We can think of it now as oversimplified to see it as ‘body’ in conflict with ‘mind’, but it was a revolutionary step then. And that was what Reich latched onto and saw himself developing, true to the origins of Freud’s work.

Following Reich’s intuition, the main reason to keep the term ‘body/mind split’ is because it does justice to our experience of internal conflict between spontaneous and reflective processes.

In the split some spontaneous processes are chronically at war with other reflective ones and the potential (at least temporary) wholeness of the body/mind becomes habitually aborted through being fragmented, split and conflicted.

The essence of the ‘body/mind split’ is that both ‘mind’ and ‘body’ lose their aliveness, their rootedness in process, their mutual interdependence and become fixed, static, objectified. Processes turn into static entities. Relationships (internal and external) turn into power battles around fixed and habitual positions. The ‘mind’ becomes dry, sterile and defensive, rationalising its flight away from life, pain and conflict. The ‘body’ becomes mechanical and addictive, oscillating between lifelessness on the one hand and insatiable greed and compulsion on the other. Once processes have appeared to turn into entities (like ‘my personality’, ‘my ego’, ‘my addiction’), it then becomes essential that as therapists we have an objectifying language which does justice to the objectified experience.

So whilst on the one hand it’s experientially evident that in most of us ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are separate and at war, it is also true on the other hand that ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are utterly inseparable, intertwined, antagonistic and complementary aspects of the same thing - their separation can only be an illusory construction. I see this as one of Reich’s revolutionary contributions: the idea of the ‘functional identity’ of body and mind. From here, holism (as comprehensively described and defined by Wilber in “Sexuality, Spirituality & Ecology”) is only a step away.

Because we’re clearly dealing with a paradox, the term ‘body/mind split’ must remain confusing. On the one hand I want to hold onto it because it conveys an important experience and a valid focus for the Reichian tradition, on the other hand I am trying to expand the meaning of the term ‘body/mind split’ to the point of it becoming non-sensical. As Walt Whitman said: “I contradict myself ? Very well then - I contradict myself! I am large, I contain multitudes.”

‘Body/Mind Integration’

In my perception of the bodywork tradition, the notion of ‘body/mind integration’, (in the sense of ‘being fully embodied’) has frequently been used as a tool for objectification of the client. Bodyworkers (including myself) have rather relentlessly pursued it as an agenda, as something which the therapist brings about in and on behalf of the client. However, that is to blindly enact the objectifying relationship which the client already has with themselves. The fact that many clients are positively demanding and crying out for this enactment doesn’t make it any less counter-therapeutic: they don’t know any better. All they know is that they experience their body as an ‘it’ which their so-called ‘identity’ or ‘personality’ sits on top of and is supposed to operate upon. Now that the client’s ego has admitted failure in this department (they’re not successfully managing to operate on their spontaneous processes), of course they assume that therapy is more of the same: a better and maybe cleverer auxiliary ego (in the form of the therapist) operating more successfully upon this clearly unruly and pathological ‘body’. This merely re-enacts the original relationship which was the origin of the ‘body’ being split off as an object in the first place.

The only way we get out of this is by getting into it. As therapists we do not want to shrink from the danger of objectification, from the certainty of re-enactment: it’s an important element of what brings the client to us. So we want to have it, experience it - in the room, in the here and now, in the contact. We want to hold the tension between co-experiencing the client’s worst reality and/or their potential release from it into their best possible reality. If we want to stand a chance of holding this tension, we don’t want our habitual assumptions to trip us up. As mentioned above, it’s therefore important that we don’t habitually assume ‘body/mind integration’ as our taken-for-granted normative goal. It is not something any ego - the client’s or the therapist’s - can force or bring about. Our intentions, awareness, actions certainly do have an influence on it happening or not, but we can’t make it happen.

It’s only when we don’t idealise ‘body/mind integration’ as a goal or an objective, that we can begin to use it as a tool of perception. To the extent that the therapist is at home in their own body/mind experience (whether that in itself is harmonious, conflicted, ecstatic or dissociated), their perception of the current degree of ‘body/mind integration’(in the client, in themselves and in the ‘energetic system’ between them) can become an avenue INTO inner and outer relationship, into a fuller body/mind experience of the unconscious dynamic.

Character structures

One of the points I did manage to state in my talk on the AGM was that I consider the concept of character structures to be clinically dangerous (precisely because it’s so holistically accurate and seductive). It is very rare that I see a supervisee using it helpfully. The opposite is much more common: whilst being entranced with the overall indisputable accuracy of the typology, the therapist misses the relational dynamic in the moment. However ‘right’ we may be about the client’s past and inner experience, about their basic life scripts and statements and what transformations these may need or want to go through over the long years of the process, that kind of overview usually only distracts us from the intricacy, subtlety, complexity, mystery of the present moment.

But that particular danger inherent in the concept might be manageable. What’s worse is that the theory of character formation is in itself contradictory. It leads itself ad absurdum in the following way:

if we follow through the idea of internalisation (implicit in Stephen Johnson’s step 4 of character formation: turning against the self, see “Character Styles”), then both child and parent position become internalised physically, emotionally, mentally. It’s the whole relationship which gets internalised, not one ‘object’. The internalisation of the conflict requires the incorporation of both sides of the relationship: the ‘negative environmental response’, as Johnson calls it, and the various layers of the child’s experience (original impulse, organismic reaction) which is why object relations theory talks about self and object representations. The child’s body therefore is inhabited by and reflects both relational positions: external relationship becomes internal relationship.

The bulk of character theory (body types, relational patterns, defences etc), however, concentrates on the client’s body exhibiting only the fixated child position in the conflict (e.g. the masochistic body is the humiliated, squashed child; the oral body is the neglected infant who is stretching to grow up too quickly, etc). Consequently the application of character theory to the therapeutic process conveniently assumes that the therapist’s task consists of dealing with ‘the child’ (by confronting the defences against the child experience, or through re-parenting the hurt and traumatised child). Although character structure theory postulates the existence of an internalised parent, most of its application relies on the equation: ‘client’=’child’. Body techniques are then used to counteract or circumvent whatever internal parent there may be, to access the ‘child’ more directly.

The bulk of character theory - as it is being applied - has a conveniently infantilising bias which habitually allocates the parent position to the therapist. We all know experientially that this is not the case: in the countertransference we recognise how both child and parent polarities are juggled between therapist and client like a hot potato most of the time. Somatic resonance sensitises us to the pervasive nature of projective identification where it is not at all clear who is the parent and who the child.

Many of my supervisees who do rely on character theory, however, use it in a way which perpetuates the illusion of the therapist exclusively as the parent. This assumption then obfuscates awareness of the intense pressure for the therapist to experience the child polarity - my educated guess is that some dynamic like this is behind at least 60% of the confusion which therapists encounter and bring to supervision.

There is, however, a more significant step we can take with this which relativises character structure theory even further from inside: if internal objects are not merely mental representations, but complex embodied relationships (there’s something right about the Jungian term ‘complexes’), the idea of one character structure dissolves into multiple internal characters. The internalisation of the parent(s) implies that the child’s character contains other - internalised - characters, on an energetic and a physical and emotional and mental level. So as therapists we’re not dealing with just the one client, but multiple and diverse identities (who in turn are conflicted and comprised of internal object relations). Any and all of these identities the therapist can experience him- or herself as trapped by and merged with.

As such projective identification is usually fuelled by primitive affect, it constitutes a disturbing and de-constructing threat to the therapist’s ego both on an energetic-emotional and on a mental-symbolic level. The therapist’s own - maybe too singular and restricted - self-image and construction of the therapeutic position are on the line. In the ‘here & now’ of the contact, the simple idea of the client’s character structure can then be used to protect ourselves against the multiplicity of identities and enactments going on in the room. Our notion of the client’s character structure oversimplifies and occludes this complexity and then seriously gets in the way of us standing any chance of containing it.

Working Alliance

It is quite common for the working alliance to be viewed as a function of the therapist’s presence, relatedness and competence, as if the working alliance was only (or mainly) the therapist’s responsibility. The assumption then is that the better the therapist, the more solid the working alliance, and that any break in the alliance is the therapist’s fault or mistake.

The biodynamic version of this could be that the good working alliance comes about through the therapist’s allowing energetic presence, in which case the therapist might blame themselves for any sign of holding back or resistance in the client; the TA therapist might blame themselves for not having provided an appropriately contracted frame if there is any non-cooperation or negativity in the relationship; the analytic version could be that the good working alliance is a function of the analyst’s competent provision of containment in which case the analyst might blame themselves if any acting-out occurs.

Even analytic theory and integrative writers like Petruska Clarkson refer to the working alliance as the relationship between the healthy parts of the client’s adult / ego and the equivalent aspects of the therapist’s adult / ego.

Where does the notion go that the mind is a function of repressed drives or unfulfilled object-seeking needs ? Can we really afford to abandon our understanding of the client’s internal conflict which we track in every other department of mental activity, when it comes to the client’s thoughts about therapy ? Is it our experience that the contractual interaction which frames the working alliance is an adult-adult exchange ? What should be a fairly anxiety-provoking commitment procedure for both the “frightened people in the room”, gets conceptualised as a healthy negotiation just because we all want to agree that therapy is a ‘good thing’, leading to health and more health ?

We all know that the preconceptions about therapy which the client brings to the first session are part of the work. In Charge we say that the client’s version of the problem is part of the problem, and that equally the client’s version of the ‘solution’ (i.e. therapy) is part of the problem. A working alliance contracted around and based on these preconceptions is untenable, as the client’s version of therapy already constitutes a major re-enactment. For example: the habitually humiliated client demanding a pathologising diagnosis; or the abandoned client wanting to attend only fortnightly to maintain their treasured ‘independence’; or the ‘driven achiever’ wanting to be the best fastest-developing client ever; or the unassertive client pleasing and placating the therapist by agreeing with every intervention. Working alliances offered on the basis of these patterns, even though they can appear to generate an ‘adult’ ‘commitment to the work’, are bound to backfire, and so they should. As soon as we conceive of the client as an internal relationship with conflicting needs of therapy, maybe represented by conflicting therapeutic approaches, the working alliance becomes a more complex conundrum. One Chiron graduate wrote his - highly recommendable - final essay around imagining the client as a failing internal marriage coming for couple sessions, with hilarious, but profoundly challenging results.

To conceptualise the working alliance as a homogenous thing, created and maintained by the therapist’s skill and presence, based on some notion of an adult-adult negotiated frame is - in my view - a dangerous way of thinking about it. For a start it doesn’t particularly invite actual hostility into the room (which was one of the points which sent Reich wild: theoretically the ‘negative transference’ was recognised as an important element in many a client’s process, but “in practice, we shied away fom it”). The other consequence is that the therapist is likely to cling to their therapeutic position, assuming that loss of therapeutic position means ultimate failure.

If, however, we work with the parallel between the inner relationship (including the conflicted and compromised relationship between ‘body’ and ‘mind’) and the outer relationship to the therapist, then the ‘success’ of therapy depends on the alliance breaking down. If any transformation of the client’s internal object relations is to occur, these relationships have to break down. To phrase this in analytic language: if the therapist recognises the importance of allowing themselves to be constructed as an object by the client’s unconscious, it becomes paramount that they are also available to be de-constructed.

The de-construction of the therapist as an object disturbs the working alliance, which in this view is a paradoxical beast: the working alliance is alive only to the extent that it can break down and die. Conversely, any survived breakdown of the working alliance strengthens it for the future. Rather than conceptualising the working alliance as a static ‘given’, to be ‘given’ to the client by the therapist, it becomes the barometer for the unconscious process and for those areas of pain, splits and lack of integration which the relationship hasn’t been able to touch yet.

Here an holistic and relational perspective can make an important contribution to the often rather vague analytic notion of ‘containment’: by maintaining awareness of the parallel process between working alliance and ‘body/mind integration’ we can work towards anchoring whatever seems uncontained also in the here-and-now of physical-energetic experience.

The Ego

In my view, the greatest weakness of the Reichian tradition is its one-dimensional notion of the ego. In simple terms: the ego is conceived of as ‘the enemy’ - of spontaneity, of aliveness, immediacy and vibrancy, of - as Reich said repeatedly: “the animal”. If as Reichian therapists we take it upon ourselves to fight against the client’s ego - using the wide, powerful and indeed effective range of weapons at our disposal - we are liable to enact and exacerbate the client’s split (that’s the main point in my article mentioned above: ‘Relating to and with the Objectified Body’).

Reich was hooked by the collectively taken-for-granted notion of the ego as a fixed entity over time and it was formulated as that by Freud - as a structural building block of the psyche. And it certainly can have that kind of subjective psychological reality: people do think of themselves as one personality with consistent, stable, coherent characteristics, attitudes, values, beliefs, thoughts. Our culture is built on the assumption that our ‘identity’, (our “Ich”, as Freud called it), is stable, continuous over time, self-responsible, with the capacity for choice and self-control when it comes to action and behaviour.

It is here, I feel, that if we work through Reich’s heroic anti-ego bias, we can make the greatest contribution to the field. We need to do justice to its idea of itself by talking about it as an entity, but by also formulating the ego as a process, as a conflicted relationship itself, and - more importantly - as a parallel process, we open up a space beyond identifying with or against ‘the ego’. This is what I would like to begin to do in another article in the future, as I feel it deserves special and detailed attention.

For now, this is my temporary ...

Conclusion

Unfortunately, in my opinion, most Body Psychotherapy theory is formulated from narcissistic idealisation, from within the ‘body/mind split’. It tends to idealise the body as the ‘good’ and ‘exciting’ object. On top of that it was modelled by the founders in an unrelational, medical stance. Fortunately we found some containment and human relating in various aspects of analysis and object relations theory.

Unfortunately most analytic theory is formulated from disappointment, as conveyed implicitly even in the term ‘depressive position’. It tends to idealise the mind and symbolisation as the ‘good’ and ‘containing’ object.

The good thing about idealisation is: it has passion in it. If there is a ‘third position’ which we can move on to beyond idealisation and disappointment, that quality of passion is an essential ingredient to be saved over the threshold. In my view there is a ‘third position’: it is about holding the tension of the conflict until re-organisation occurs spontaneously. As the therapist I want to be able to desperately desire the transformation, for myself and on behalf of the other. I equally want to be able to do nothing about it. It’s about the impossible paradox of unattached passion - something the sufis and some buddhists know about. It’s about the impossible paradox of doing and non-doing, where ‘longing is its own reward’.

There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire; when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage ? Hark, do not castrate yourself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust. Rumi

Last Updated April 5, 2005