Neurosis is not usually defined as a fear of life, but that is what it is. The neurotic person is afraid to open his heart to love, afraid to reach out or strike out, afraid to be fully himself. We can explain these fears psychologically. Opening one’s heart to love makes one vulnerable to being hurt; reaching out, to being rejected; striking out, to being destroyed. But there is another dimension to this problem. More life or feeling than one is accustomed to is frightening to the person because it threatens to overwhelm his ego, flood his boundaries, and undermine his identity. Being more alive and having more feeling is scary.
I believe that to some degree we are all in the same situation as this young man. We want to be more alive and feel more, but we are afraid of it. Our fear of life is seen in the way we keep busy so as not to feel, keep running so as not to face ourselves, or get high on liquor or drugs so as not to sense our being. Because we are afraid of life, we seek to control or master it. We believe that it is bad or dangerous to be carried away by our emotions.
Being a person is not something one can do. It is not a performance. It may require that we stop our frantic business, that we take time out to breathe and to feel. In the process we may feel our pain, but if we have the courage to accept it, we will also have pleasure. If we can face our inner emptiness, we will find fulfillment. If we can go through our despair, we will discover joy. In this therapeutic undertaking we may need help.
The neurotic individual is in conflict with himself. Part of his being is trying to overcome another part. His ego is trying to master his body; his rational mind, to control his feelings; his will, to overcome his fears and anxieties. Though this conflict is in large part unconscious, its effect is to deplete the person’s energy and to destroy his peace of mind. Neurosis is internal conflict. The neurotic character takes many forms, but all of them involve a struggle in the individual between what he is and what he believes he should be. Every neurotic individual is caught in this struggle.
In Western culture the practice has been to make the person feel guilty about sexual feelings and sexual practices like masturbation that in no way threaten the peace of the community. When guilt or shame are attached to feelings, the conflict is internalized and creates a neurotic character.
Wilhelm Reich had a different view. Although he had studied with Freud and was a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, he realized that the absence of a disabling symptom was no criterion of emotional health. In working with neurotic patients he found that the symptom developed out of a neurotic character structure and could be fully eliminated only if the person’s character structure was changed. For Reich it was not a question of functioning adequately in the culture but of an individual’s ability to give himself fully to sex and to work. That ability allowed the person to experience full satisfaction in his life. To the degree that this ability was lacking, the person was neurotic.
In his therapeutic work Reich focused upon sexuality as the key to the understanding of character. Every neurotic person had some disturbance in his orgastic response. He could not give in fully to the involuntary pleasurable convulsions of the orgasm. He was afraid of the overwhelming feeling of total orgasm. The neurotic was orgastically impotent to some degree. If, as a result of therapy, the person gained this ability, he became emotionally healthy. Whatever neurotic disturbances he suffered from disappeared. Further, his freedom from neurosis continued as long as he retained his orgastic potency.
Reich saw the connection between orgastic impotence and the oedipal problem. He claimed that neurosis had its roots in the patriarchal authoritarian family in which sexuality was suppressed. He would not accept that man was inexorably bound to an unhappy fate. He believed that a social system that denied to people the full satisfaction of their instinctual needs was sick and had to be changed. In his early years as a psychoanalyst Reich was also a social activist. However, in his later years he came to the conclusion that neurotic people cannot change a neurotic society.
Breathing, motility, and the involuntary pleasurable movements of orgasm were markedly restricted in the neurotic individual by chronic muscular tensions. He described these tensions as a process of armoring, which reflected the character on the somatic level. He stated that the bodily attitude of a person is functionally identical with his psychic attitude. Reich’s work is the basis for my development of bioenergetic analysis, which extends Reich’s ideas in several important ways.
Grounding refers to the energetic connection between a person’s feet and the earth or ground. It reflects the amount of energy or feeling the person allows into the lower part of his body. It denotes the relationship of the person to the ground he stands on. Is he well grounded or is he up in the air? Are his feet well planted? What is his standing? One’s feelings of security and independence are intimately related to the function of his legs and feet. These feelings strongly influence his sexuality.
My focus has been and is upon the individual as he struggles to find some meaning and satisfaction in his life; in other words, as he struggles against his fate. However, the background of that struggle is the cultural situation. Without a knowledge of the cultural process we cannot comprehend the depth of the problem.
Man is part of nature like any other animal, fully subject to her laws; but he is also above nature, acting upon and controlling her. He does the same with his own nature; part of his personality, the ego, turns against the animal part, the body. The antithesis between ego and body produces a dynamic tension that furthers the growth of culture, but it also contains a destructive potential. This can be seen best through analogy with a bow and arrow. The more one draws the bow, the further the arrow will fly. But if one overdraws the bow, it will break. When the ego and the body pull apart to the point where there is no contact between them, the result is a psychotic break. I believe we have reached this danger point in our culture. Psychotic breakdowns are quite common, but even more widespread is the fear of breakdown, on both the personal and the social levels.
If success is measured by material possessions, as it is in the industrialized countries, and power by the ability to do and go (machines and energy), most people in the Western world have both success and power. The collapse of their world is the impoverishment of their inner or emotional lives. Having committed themselves to success and power, they have little else to live for. And like Oedipus they have become wanderers on the earth, uprooted beings who can find no peace anywhere. Each individual feels alienated, to some degree, from his fellowman, and each carries within him a deep sense of guilt that he does not understand. This is the existential condition of modern man.
Human life is full of contradictions. It is the mark of wisdom to recognize and accept these contradictions. It may seem like a contradiction to say that accepting one’s fate leads to a change in that fate, but it is true. When one stops struggling against fate, one loses his neurosis (internal conflict) and gains peace of mind. The result is a different attitude (no fear of life), expressed in a different character and associated with a different fate. Such a person will know the fulfillment of life. This is how the story of Oedipus ends, the figure whose name identifies the key problem in the personality of modern man.
It is said that people learn from experience, and in general this is true. Experience is the best and, perhaps, the only real teacher. But when something falls within the area of a person’s neurosis, the rule does not seem to apply. The person doesn’t learn from experience but repeats the same self-destructive behavior again and again.
Such behavior can be regarded as neurotic because of the unconscious conflict that underlies it. In the case of the man, part of his personality wants to help, another part doesn’t. If he helps he feels resentful, if he doesn’t he feels guilty. This is a typical neurotic trap from which there is no way out except by retracing the steps that led into it
Unable to face his pain and the anger to which it gives rise, the neurotic individual strives to overcome his fears, anxieties, hostilities, and anger. One part of himself seeks to rise above another, which splits the unity of his being and destroys his integrity. The neurotic person struggles to win over himself. In this, of course, he must fail. Failure seems to mean submission to an acceptable fate, but actually it amounts to self-acceptance, which makes change possible.
may be a compulsion to lose, for there are people who seem fated to be losers. But such a fate can be changed if the nature of the compulsion and its origin are carefully explored through analysis
The term neurotic character refers to a pattern of behavior based upon internal conflict and represents a fear of life, of sex, and of being. It reflects the person’s early life experience because it was formed as a result of those experiences.
The therapeutic task was to help Margaret discover why the light faded from her eyes. Why was she unable to maintain the glow of life? What was she unconsciously afraid of? Margaret’s lack of life was the result of self-negation and a self-destructive attitude. In most neurotic persons this attitude is unconscious. Margaret was aware, however, that she was self-destructive. She said, “I am always trying to kill my body by not eating properly, not sleeping enough, by being worried about my image, and by being frantic about my work. I am never ‘there’ for myself, I am never able to enjoy myself, I don’t take care of myself
Margaret said that she was also self-destructive in that she took no responsibility for her own life. She died of heart trouble in her fifties. “But,” Margaret said, “my father was equally self-destructive, working twenty hours a day and never taking time for pleasure. He was Christ, the martyr. He died of a heart attack in his forties
She added, “My father was a burden to me. I felt I had to save him. He was in my mind all the time. He made me very sad and unhappy. I could never reach him. I remember looking at him when he was suffering from heart trouble, and he had such a pathetic look. It was actually worse than pathetic. It was the look of suffering. He was a sufferer. I need to help people
Her manner and her expression indicated that she, too, was a sufferer. Just as she is drawn to those who suffer, so they are drawn to her. Each hopes the other can relieve his suffering, but each only brings suffering to the other. Neither has any joy to offer.
However, there was a price attached to this victory. That price was the loss of his orgastic potency, namely, the ability for a total body surrender in sex. Robert’s sexuality was limited to his genital organ; the rest of his body did not participate in the excitement or the discharge. His inability to give himself fully to his sexual feeling was due to the rigidity and tension in his body, which was also responsible for his emotional deadness. Whether the emotional deadness resulted from a fear of sex or whether his orgastic impotence was caused by his emotional deadness need not be argued. The problem had to be worked out simultaneously on both levels, the sexual and the emotional. On a deeper level, both represented a fear of life.
The infantile sexual feelings are too entangled with feelings of guilt, fear, and hatred for such a simple resolution to occur. The whole complex is repressed.
The most effective weapon a parent has to control a child is the withdrawal of love or its threat. A young child between the ages of three and six is too dependent on parental love and approval to resist this pressure. Robert’s mother, as we saw earlier, controlled him by “cutting him out.” Margaret’s mother beat her into submission, but it was the loss of her father’s love that devastated her.
This surrender constitutes an acceptance of parental power and authority and a submission to the parents’ values and demands. The child becomes “good”, which means that he gives up his sexual orientation in favor of one directed toward achievement. Parental authority is introjected in the form of a superego, ensuring that the child will follow his parents’ wishes in the acculturation process. In effect, the child now identifies with the threatening parent. Freud says, “The whole process, on the one hand, preserves the genital organ, wards off the danger of losing it; on the other hand, it paralyzes it, takes its function away from it.”
An inability to cry is commonly encountered among men who complain about a lack of feeling. The person may be depressed and recognize that he is unhappy, but he cannot feel his sadness.
A similar mechanism operates in the suppression of sexual and other feelings. By sucking in the belly, pulling up the pelvic floor, and holding the pelvis immobile, one can reduce the flow of blood into the genital organs and block the natural sexual movements of the pelvis.
Since the suppression of feeling is accomplished by chronic muscular tensions that immobilize the body, it is impossible for a person to sense a suppressed feeling. He may know logically that feelings are suppressed, but he cannot feel or perceive them. By the same token, character that is structured in the body as chronic tension is generally beyond the person’s conscious perception.
He has no sexual feeling left with which to go out into the world as a man. Such severe suppression of sexual feeling can be explained only by assuming that there was an equally intense incestuous attachment during the oedipal period.
I agree with Reich. The Oedipus complex vanishes as a conscious phenomenon through repression, but it then becomes active in the unconscious. Consequently, a person will marry someone who, superficially, is the opposite of his or her parent but then be compelled by the complex to treat the spouse as the parent. Another result is the superficial demonstration of the proper filial love and respect to the parent of the same sex while maintaining under the surface a great hostility. In effect, as I shall explain later, each boy marries his mother and each girl marries her father. And, while we do not kill the parent literally as Oedipus did, we do so psychologically by the hatred in our hearts. It is my argument that repressing the Oedipus complex assures that on a psychological level one will share the fate of Oedipus.
Laius staked his infant son in the field to die; Oedipus left Corinth to avoid killing his father. Yet despite these efforts to avoid their fate, the prediction of the oracle came true. The question that came to my mind was: Did it happen just because they tried to avoid their fate? This question struck me with some force, since I had been aware for some time that one aspect of the neurotic character is the neurotic’s inability to accept himself. I realized that the neurotic individual struggles to avoid a feared fate, but by that very effort he ensures the fate he is attempting to escape.
We often say that fate overtakes a person or that a person’s fate catches up with him. I have said that such actions ensure one’s fate. But ensure may be too strong a word. Invite seems more appropriate. For example, if a person walks about with a chip on his shoulder, someone is sure to try to knock it off. Certain attitudes naturally invite certain responses from others.
There is another way of looking at the operation of fate. The defenses we erect to protect us create the very condition we are trying to avoid.
Similarly, one cannot assure peace by amassing arms, because armies by their very nature lead to war. This concept is particularly evident in the psychological defenses people develop. For example, the person who out of fear of rejection defends himself by not opening up or reaching out to people isolates himself and ensures by this maneuver that he will always feel rejected. No person is free who is tied to a defensive position. This is true of the neurotic character who erects psychological walls and armors himself muscularly as a protection against possible hurt, only to find that the hurt he feared is locked into his being by this very process.
But the effect was to make him muscle-bound-with the emphasis upon the word bound. He was so bound he couldn’t express himself. He didn’t know how to relate to people. In company he felt awkward and humiliated because he didn’t have anything to say. Thus, the humiliation he felt as a child persisted into adulthood. He complained about a lack of feeling, but he had suppressed all feeling in the effort to overcome his fear. Only by accepting his fear and expressing his sadness could he become a real person in his relations with others. This is what therapy helped him do. The attempt to overcome a personality problem by denying it (“I am not going to be afraid”) internalizes the problem and ensures its continuance.
The will is potent in doing or performing, but it is impotent in changing the inner state of our being. Our feelings are not subject to our will. We can’t change them by conscious action, but we can suppress them. However, suppressing a feeling doesn’t make it go away; it only pushes it deeper into the unconscious. By this action we internalize the problem. It then becomes necessary to have therapy to bring the conflict back to consciousness so that it can be worked out in a nonneurotic way. In the case of the patient described above, this meant becoming aware that he was afraid to say to his father, “I don’t want to compete. I don’t want to be what you want.” Having suppressed his rebellion, he has nothing to say.
My thesis is that one can’t overcome a problem that is part of one’s personality. The key word in the statement is overcome. The attempt to do that turns one part of the self against the other; the ego, through the will, is set against the body and its feelings. Instead of harmony between these two antithetical aspects of human nature, a conflict is created that must ultimately destroy the person. This is what all neurotics do, locking themselves into the fate they are trying to avoid. The alternative, and the healthy way, is through understanding, which leads to self-acceptance, self-expression, and self-possession.
There are, then, two ways in which we program our fate. First, by our attitude and behavior, that is, by our character, we invite certain responses from others. If, out of fear of rejection, we are aloof and withdrawn, we should not be surprised if people keep their distance. Or if we are paranoid, our distrust will antagonize people, and we will experience their hostility. The second way is by perpetrating within ourselves the fate we fear. We create our own inner emptiness by suppressing our feeling; we trap ourselves with tensions that develop as a resistance to yielding out of fear of being trapped. But these two ways are not unrelated. The person who feels empty within himself lives a life that is empty of meaning in terms of relationships and involvement. The person who feels trapped in himself does get trapped by life situations. The outer situation has to match the inner condition. A square peg doesn’t fit in a round hole. Generally speaking, each person finds his appropriate niche in the world. Of course, it is also true, though it may seem like a contradiction, that the outer situation produces the inner situation. Through its influence upon the family, culture molds the character of children. If we live in an alienated world, we become alienated from our bodies and ourselves.
Struggling against fate only enmeshes one more deeply in its coils. Like an animal caught in a net, the more one struggles, the more tightly bound one becomes. Does this mean we are doomed? We are doomed only when we struggle against ourselves. The main thrust of therapy is to help a person stop struggling against himself. That struggle is self-destructive, and it will exhaust a person’s energy and accomplish nothing. Many people want to change. Change is possible, but it must start with self-acceptance. Change is a part of the natural order. Life is not static; it is constantly growing or declining. One doesn’t have to do anything to grow.
Growth happens naturally and spontaneously when energy is available. But when we use our energies in a struggle against our character (fate), we leave no energy for growth or the natural healing process. I have always found that as soon as a patient accepts himself, there is a significant change in his feelings, his behavior, and his personality.
A body is not like a bubble, which once it bursts cannot be put together again. Within limits, the body’s fate is to restore its integrity and to maintain its process against traumas and injuries from the environment. This should be equally true of the emotional traumas and injuries we receive as children. Why doesn’t neurosis heal spontaneously like any other illness or disease? The answer is that the neurotic interferes with this healing process. He keeps picking the scab off the wound. By his defense or resistance, he keeps the injury alive. That is what it means to be neurotic and why we can define neurosis as a struggle against fate.
There is much in common between instinct and fate. Both can be described as blind forces inherent in the nature of things. Both have the quality of predictability. Both are structured in the organism either genetically or characterologically. There is, however, an important difference between them. Instinct describes an act or a force that furthers the life process. It is an active principle. We speak, for example, of an instinct for survival. Fate, on the other hand, is a passive principle. It describes the way things are.
In this analogy the compulsion to repeat can be seen as a “broken record.” The needle goes round and round in the same groove, repeating the same notes because it is unable to advance. Thus, the repetition compulsion can be seen as the result of a break in the personality, which fixates the individual at a certain pattern of behavior he cannot change. But human beings are not mechanical devices. The repetition compulsion can also be seen as an attempt by the personality to return to the situation where it got stuck, in the hope of someday getting unstuck. However, as long as the break exists, the needle will go round and round in the same groove, the pattern endlessly repeated. That is its fate until the break is healed.
We shall see in a later chapter that when the break in the personality is severe, it gives rise to a death wish in the person. If the wish is conscious it constitutes a suicidal desire or intention. In many cases, however, it is unconscious and severely restricts the individual’s ability to live his life fully. Such a wish, though structured in the personality, is not a death instinct, for in most cases it arises from a highly traumatic oedipal situation. To one degree or another that situation breaks the unity of the personality in modern man. His life becomes like a broken record, endlessly replaying the conflicts of his oedipal situation.
The important thing about this concept is that it applies equally to psychic structures and to character structures. If we know a person’s character structure, we can predict his fate. Take the case of a person with a masochistic character that is structured in the body mainly as chronic tensions in the flexor muscles.5 Because of these tensions it is very difficult for him to express feelings easily. These tensions are especially severe in the throat and neck, strongly blocking the utterance of sound. The total pattern is one of holding in both physically and psychologically, with the result that such a person tends to be submissive. Since such behavior is predictable, we can say that it is his fate to be submissive.
Reich described character as a process of armoring on an ego level, which had the function of protecting the ego against internal and external dangers. The internal dangers are unacceptable impulses; the external dangers are threats of punishment from parents or other authority figures for these impulses
Reich extended the concept of character armor to the somatic realm. In the latter, the armor is expressed in chronic muscular tension, which is the physical mechanism by which dangerous impulses are suppressed. This muscular armoring is the somatic side of the character structure, which has a psychic counterpart in the ego. Since psyche and soma are like the two sides of a coin, head and tail, what goes on in one realm also occurs in the other. Or, one can say that the muscular armor is functionally identical to the psychic character.
Therefore, one can read a person’s character from the expression of his body. The way a person holds himself and moves tells us who he is. Reich said the various character types needed to be more systematized.
The neurotic character is the person’s defense against being broken. In effect, he says, “I will do what you want and be what you want. Do not break me.” The person doesn’t realize that his submission amounts to a break. Once formed, his neurotic character constitutes a denial of the break, while his muscular armoring functions as a splint that doesn’t let him feel the break in his spirit. It is like closing the door after the horse is stolen and then believing that the horse is still inside. Of course, one dares not open the door to find out. Then, by repressing the memory of the traumatic event, one can pretend that it didn’t happen and that one has not been broken.
While the repression of a memory is a psychological process, the suppression of feeling is accomplished by deadening a part of the body or reducing its motility so that feeling is diminished. The repression of the memory is dependent upon and related to the suppression of feeling, for as long as the feeling persists, the memory remains vivid. Suppression entails the development of chronic muscular tension in those areas of the body where the feeling would be experienced. In the case of sexual feeling, this tension is found in and about the abdomen and pelvis.
In the attempt to avoid the fate of Oedipus, modern man becomes neurotic. The neurosis consists in the loss of full orgastic potency and in the formation of a character structure that binds the modern individual to a materialistic, power-oriented culture with bourgeois values. If the suppression of sexual feeling is not severe, the individual can make an adjustment to the cultural mores without developing symptoms of emotional illness. This is not to say that such a person is emotionally healthy. His neurosis would be characterological and expressed in rigidity of attitudes. If it is severe, the person will develop symptoms of emotional illness or a state of emotional deadness like Margaret and Robert.
The tendency of people to repeat old, established patterns is the main problem in therapy. Here is a simple example. A person complains of a feeling of being “out of it,” of holding back, of an inability to move forward. When I look at how this person stands, I see that his knees are locked, the weight of his body is on his heels, and he is leaning backward. Thus, he is doing (unconsciously) just what he is complaining about. This bodily attitude can be reversed.
I ask the patient to bend his knees slightly to unlock them and to shift his weight forward to the balls of his feet. He is also instructed to breathe and keep loose. When he does this, he experiences himself differently. He feels himself in the world and ready to act or reach out. His whole body feels more alive. He can sense that the difference involved a change from a passive way of standing and holding himself to a more aggressive one. It is what he wanted and it feels good, but it is uncomfortable. He feels under stress and is afraid that he will fall forward.
Why is change for the better so difficult and frightening? We know that in every process of change there is an element of insecurity. The move from a known to an unknown position entails a period of instability. The child learning to stand up and walk is insecure but not frightened. He is not afraid to fall. We cling to the old because we believe it to be safer. We believe the new is dangerous. In the case of neurotic patients, that belief has a certain validity. If one was punished as a child for being aggressive, then it seems safer to take a passive position in life. One can’t change one’s position or way of standing until the early experience is relived and the feelings associated with it expressed. This is the psychological work of therapy.
The problem of change has another dimension, however. That dimension can be described as a tolerance for excitation. Too little excitation is boredom, depression, or death (“bored to death”). Too much excitation overwhelms the organism, flooding its ego boundaries and wiping out the sense of self. The feeling is one of estrangement and is akin to insanity. Character can be seen as the way we handle excitement, ensuring that it is neither too little nor too much.
Now, our potential for aliveness is too much for our structures. We can’t stand it. When we are overexcited we become jittery, nervous and frightened. The therapeutic task here is to expand slowly the person’s capacity to tolerate excitation or aliveness.
Summarizing, we can say that once a pattern of behavior is structured in the body it becomes self-perpetuating. It determines how we act, and we must act according to character. Necessarily, then, every effort we make to overcome our character is part of our character and only result’s in reinforcing its structure. I see this all the time in my office. The compulsive individual compulsively tries to effect a change but only ends by becoming more compulsive. The masochistic individual submits to therapy as he does in all other life situations, and so therapy changes nothing. Even his gestures of rebellion lead to his being more submissive. This has to be understood and accepted before change is possible.
We acted on our feelings, which is how fate operates. Looking back, we can say that it was fate that drew us together and kept us together. But our marriage could easily have failed. We came close to breaking up many times. Opposite characters clash as often as they complement each other. We had to face our neurotic characters so that we could see and understand how we hurt each other despite our conscious desire not to do so. If one is blind as Oedipus was, one cannot avoid the tragedy of losing one’s love.
Consciously I had to see my wife as “not my mother” while unconsciously I treated her as if she was my mother and almost destroyed my marriage. Only by recognizing this fact did it become possible for me to respond differently to her.
Generally there is both pain and pleasure in the relationship, although one or the other may predominate. However, an infant cannot accept that the person who gives him pleasure is also the one who causes him pain. We know that the infant splits the image of his mother into two figures, the “good” mother and the “bad” mother. Although these images become fused later, the initial split persists in the person’s unconscious mind.
We protect ourselves against heartbreak by not loving, and against death by not living. But by this process we also lock our heartbreak into our being, and so our pain persists although we are no longer conscious of it. We become afraid to love and to live, though we desperately want to do both. We can momentarily open our hearts, but we dare not keep them open. We can feel love, but we cannot express it.
Our bodies are molded by the social forces in the family that shape our character and determine our fate…which is that we must try to please to gain approval and love.
Love can’t be won or earned, for it is a spontaneous expression of affection and warmth in response to another person’s being. It’s “I love you,” not “I love what you are doing.” Love implies an acceptance that was denied the child. Once we give up our true self to play a role, we are fated to be rejected because we have already rejected ourselves. Yet we will struggle to make the role more successful, hoping to overcome our fate but finding ourselves more enmeshed in it. We are caught in a vicious cycle that keeps closing in, diminishing our life and being.
But they do not touch the real problem, which denies the person a sense of fulfillment and a feeling of peace and joyfulness. That problem is the fear of being himself, the fear that his true self is tainted, inadequate, and unacceptable. This fear forces him to hide his genuine feelings, to mask his expression, and to accept the role that was demanded of him.
Another aspect of this problem is the cost in energy of playing a role or supporting an image. So much energy is required to maintain a role or facade that little is left for pleasure or creativity. Imagine an actor playing a role constantly, both offstage and on, and you will get some idea of the energy it takes to do that. Being is effortless because it is spontaneous and natural. That is why children can be so creative. However, most people do not sense the effort or the energetic drain of the role they play. What they do feel is chronic fatigue, irritability, and frustration. When one plays a role, the end result is always depression.
One could guess that beneath the facade of the soldier there seethed a rebellion that was rigidly and strictly kept under control. Disobedience carried the risk of court-martial. Even the failure to maintain the pose (the wooden soldier) meant the firing squad. For Frank to dare to be himself was to die or to kill. He strongly suppressed any impulse to attack and destroy the authority (father) who had dictated his fate.
The helper is a person who is structured characterwise to be “there” for others, that is, to respond to their needs even at the expense of his own. Many therapists play this role, and they have probably chosen this profession because it provides an opportunity for them to live out their fate. The role applies to me, and so I know it well. The body structure of the helper also has considerable rigidity. He cannot afford to collapse because others depend on him. The shoulders are rigidly held to carry the weight or burden of other people’s problems. One characteristic aspect of this personality type is an inability to ask for help, because that implies weakness and need. The helper doesn’t cry easily because his pain is subordinated to that of the people he is trying to help.
I could not dissociate my sexuality from the sense of guilt or the feeling of obligation toward them. I wanted to be free, and I knew I had to do it through my body. I owe this realization to my father, who was oriented toward sexuality and the body. But he, too, suffered from sexual guilt related to his own oedipal situation.
If I saved women, I could be sexual. But what kind of sexuality is that! As long as I was trying to save women, I had no real sexuality. I had to stop being a helper, that is, a person who helps in order to feel entitled to pleasure and sexuality. To do that required the recognition that in being a helper I was denying my own needs.
As we saw, the implied threat of castration forces the child to submit to the demands of the parents, which always means the adoption of a neurotic role and the surrender of authenticity.
Strangely, it was not a cry of frustration or despair. Having given up the struggle momentarily to realize her illusions, she felt neither frustration nor despair. She cried from a sense of deep hurt, from a deep well of sadness. The pain inside was real, but when she gave in to it and cried, the pain diminished. Crying is the most primitive mechanism the body has to relieve tension and pain.
Accepting one’s despair or one’s fate is not resignation. It acknowledges that one cannot overcome what is within the self, but it does not preclude a protest. My patient had remarked that she woke up often with a sensation of choking. I had the thought that she was choking off her protest. She had not been able to protest her parents’ attitude when she was young. She had not dared scream at them, “Why don’t you love me? You brought me into the world.” Such behavior would have been viewed as “bad” and would have brought the rejection she dreaded. She choked off the scream, but in the process she closed her throat, making it impossible for her to take in and be nourished by the love that became available later.
When the crying subsided, I asked the patient to kick the bed with extended legs and to scream “Why?” Kicking is another form of protest that mobilizes the body and serves to discharge some of its tensions. In this exercise the “why” sound is prolonged until it rises to a scream. Now this patient kicked and screamed her protest about her lack of love. By making this protest, a person accepts the fact that the rejection occurred and realizes that all efforts to deny it are a waste of energy. One is bound to the past only if the memory and feelings associated with it are repressed.
The authentic person can be recognized behind the mask by the sound of his voice. The voice is a major avenue of self-expression, and its quality reflects the richness and resonance of the inner being. When one’s voice is limited because of neck and throat tensions, one’s self-expression is restricted and one’s being is reduced. The voice is also related to sexuality, at least in the male. The thin, feminine voice of a castrated man is well known. Energetically, the scream is similar to an orgasm in that it is an intense discharge. In the scream one “blows one’s top,” and in the orgasm the same thing happens in the bottom. Both should be fully available to the person. Any diminution of either is a loss of being.
We are interested to know why the self is supposed to be centered in the belly. One’s first thought is that the belly is the locus of certain feelings. Crying and laughter originate in the belly. When we laugh or cry from the belly, it is a deep experience. We describe such intense experiences as “gut feelings.” The most important of these gut sensations is sexual feeling, which is experienced in the belly as melting, heat, and glow. From the belly the excitation flows into the genitals, the organs of discharge. The sexual feeling is related to the
On the other hand, when the ego surrenders its control and the body takes over in the moment of orgasm, there is neither an observing I nor a separate genital function. The self is experienced in its unity and totality as complete being. Persons who experience genitality as a function of body sexuality identify the self with sexual feelings.
When a child is born and during its first year of life, the I and the me are undifferentiated aspects of an inchoate self. Being is a unitary experience with very little self-consciousness. The differentiation of the I, the me, from the inchoate self split the unity of the experience of being, which must then be sought on a higher level of consciousness. When the self is experienced as sexuality, the unity of being is restored.
Oriential thinking has long recognized this contradiction in thinking. The goal of both the T’ai Chi and Zen disciplines is to find the self through its identity with universal or cosmic processes. This identity is achieved when the individual is centered in his belly. A person so centered is a master, because every action he takes is in harmony with the universal and, therefore, right and proper. Every move is effortless because it flows in harmony with the universal flow. This is no small achievement, as anyone who has attempted to become a master of these Oriental disciplines knows. Yet, on a lower level, it is the natural state of an animal or young child whose ego or I has not developed to the point where the unity of being is split or the harmony with nature disrupted. When one regains this unity one becomes a master, a person of wisdom.
I strongly believe that sexuality is the key to being. The pelvis is the keystone bone in the body arch. Any chronic tension in the muscles of and around the pelvis disturbs the motility of the pelvis and upsets the balance and harmony of the whole body. Such tensions are the physical counterpart of castration anxiety, which has a similar disturbing effect upon the personality. Since sexuality is the key to being, it is also the key to personality. To understand this statement, one must distinguish sexuality from sexual activity. The former refers to feeling, the latter to doing. Too often, sexual activity is engaged in to gain sexual feeling. People who lack sexual feeling are often obsessed with sex and sexual activity. Here, too, it is important to keep the distinction between sexual feeling and genital excitation clear. The former describes the feeling in the whole body, not just in the genital organs.
In my view, sexual describes a person who is conscious of his or her sexuality but not self-conscious about it. Such a person has a sense of himself or herself as a man or a woman, since sex refers to the differences between male and female. A sexual person has no need to exaggerate these differences or to deny them. Simply said, a sexual person is proud to be a man or woman.
Sexuality also goes with a pride in one’s body and in one’s animal nature. The natural functions of the body are not a source of shame or embarrassment. The person feels good about his body and identifies with it. For example, a sexual person will accept his feelings as natural and right. If he is tired, that will be accepted. A lack of identification is expressed by remarks such as “I don’t know why I feel tired,” or “I shouldn’t be tired.” The same thing is true of sexual feeling. A sexual person will accept his bodily response as indicative of feeling or not. A neurotic individual, whose orientation is toward performance, regards the lack of genital excitation as a sign of failure and cannot accept that the body always expresses for the self
An identification with the body implies that one lives with regard for the body. One does not abuse it with drugs, alcohol, excess food, lack of exercise or rest, etc. And one dresses in such a way as to make the body more attractive. A person can see himself as more than a body, more than an animal, more than a sexual being; but body, animality, and sexuality are the foundation upon which the mind and the ego with all their pretensions rest. Without that base, the ego is only a cloud in the sky or an image in smoke. In some respects culture does arise out of the sublimation of sexuality, but without sexuality there would be no culture at all. Without the feeling of sexuality in the body, there would be no dance, no music, no poetry. A sexuality that is limited to genital excitation can produce only pornography.
Jack avoided the sexual issue by regressing to an infantile level. His wailing, crying, and screaming like a baby was largely a smoke screen to hide his fear of sexuality. I am not suggesting that Jack had no birth trauma or that there were no significant problems in the oral stage (age one to three years) of his life. But these problems cannot be tackled effectively until the later, sexual or oedipal, problem is faced and worked through. This is a basic rule in character analysis. Failure to follow this rule leads to chaos in the treatment. In analysis the chaos takes the form of a mass of infantile material, which the analyst interprets without producing any change in the patient’s behavior or attitude. In other forms of therapy, the chaos is in the form of an emotional outpouring (wails, cries, screams) that has no relationship to the patient’s immediate life situation.
The child is threatened for infantile masturbation, shamed into covering itself, and punished for peeping and playing sexually. Since the sexual feelings and impulses are so much a part of its being, the child feels guilty and bad in its very being.
The main aspect of the paralysis in Jane’s personality was an inability to speak up in some situations. Her throat became severely constricted, and she had trouble with her voice. In fact, the whole upper half of her body was very tight and constricted, so much so that it was quite narrow. In contrast her hips and thighs were large and full. This discordance between the upper and lower halves of her body denoted some splitting in the personality between the ego and sexuality. The lower half of the body reflects the person’s relationship to the parent of the opposite sex, that is, the sexual feelings that existed in the oedipal period. The upper half of the body reflects the relationship to the parent of the same sex, the ego identification with that parent. Jane had been close to her father; on a feeling level, there was an incestuous involvement between them. She had been terrified of her mother.
Jane was not energetically connected to her pelvis, she was not fully identified with her sexuality. Therefore, she lacked a solid base for her being. This weakness in her personality undermined her ability to express herself. She tried to compensate for this weakness by turning to men sexually, hoping that they would affirm her being by accepting her sexuality. She had done this with her father and it had saved her, though, at the same time, it made her vulnerable to her mother’s jealousy and hostility. When a man responded to Jane’s sexuality, she had a sense of security. It was only temporary because Jane did not accept her own sexuality, but if she was rejected by the man, she felt destroyed
The other day a patient remarked about her date, “He made me feel like a woman.” The implication was that without his interest she didn’t feel like a woman. Her sense of self and being was deficient because she was not fully connected to and identified with her sexuality. When a woman is secure in her womanhood, a man’s recognition of it is like icing on a cake.
Men have a similar problem. They turn to women for an affirmation of their manhood, and, when it is not forthcoming, they accuse them of being castrators. But a man who is unsure of his masculinity and needs the support of a woman is a partially castrated man, psychologically speaking. Most women are perceptive in these matters and resent being used in this way. When a man goes to a woman with a full measure of his sexuality, he will always meet with a warm response. If he needs to have his masculinity affirmed, he should get it from other men, just as a boy gets affirmation from his father, not his mother. However, a man may find it difficult to turn to other men when his unconscious Oedipus complex is too threatening. In that case therapy is the answer.
All my patients complain of some weakness or lack in their sense of being. In every case there is a corresponding weakness or lack in the person’s identification with his sexuality. Being is more than sexuality, and the problems of being cannot be worked out on the sexual level alone. Difficulties in self-expression on an ego level must be given the same care and attention that are given to the sexual problem. But these difficulties can never be fully resolved unless the underlying sexual guilts and anxieties are understood and analyzed in terms of the Oedipus complex. We must keep our focus upon sexuality as the basis of self and being.
Erich Fromm advances the hypothesis that being is reduced by having. He says, “Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is, nonbeing-i.e., stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by ‘sitting on it,’ by holding on to our ego and our possessions-can the mode of being emerge.”
The having mode is based on possessive relationships. The self is seen as the I that has a wife, a home, a car, a job, even a body. Since the I that has a body is the ego, the having mode is an egocentric position. This mode developed from and depends upon private property, power, and profit. Its focus is upon the individual rather than the community. The being mode, on the other hand, is based on loving, giving, and sharing relationships. In this mode the measure of the self is not in terms of what one owns but how much one gives or loves. In the being mode, the individual finds his identity through his responsibility to the community.
The possessive mode not only reduces being, it restricts freedom. The things we own, own us. We are possessed by our possessions in the sense that we must think about them, worry about them, and take care of them. We are not free to walk away and leave them because for many of us they represent our identity, our security, and even our sanity. We would not hesitate to describe a person as crazy if he gave away a fortune just to be free. We think one can’t be free unless one has a fortune, so we spend our lives trying to make a fortune, and we discover too late that we sacrificed our freedom. We do not realize that freedom is worth more than a fortune, for without freedom one cannot be
When we say, “Let it be,” for example, we mean, “Don’t do anything.” Doing something is not letting it be. Doing represents an attempt to change a situation, which is all right when the situation is an external one. However, when the situation is internal, that is, a state of being, trying to change this state by doing results in a reduction of one’s being. This can be explained by the fact that to act upon the self one part of the personality must turn against another part. The ego or the I turns against the body by using the will against the feelings of the body. In this process being is split and, therefore, reduced. Such an action may be necessary in the face of real danger, in which case it is not neurotic. It becomes a neurotic reaction when the maneuver persists beyond the point of danger. Neurotics are always trying to change themselves by using willpower, but this only serves to make them more neurotic. Emotional health can be gained only through self-awareness and self-acceptance. Struggling to change one’s being only enmeshes the person more deeply in the fate he is trying to avoid.
Does this mean that change is inconsistent with being? The answer depends upon which kind of change one is talking about. Change produced by the application of a force from without is the product of doing and affects being adversely. However, there is a process of change that takes place from within and requires no conscious effort. It is called growth, and it enhances being. It is not something one can do, and it is not, therefore, a function of the ego but of the body. Therapeutic change, which means a change in character, is similar to growth in that it is an inner process that cannot be accomplished by conscious effort. This is not to say that doing plays no role in the growth process. In acquiring a skill it is necessary to repeat certain actions consciously so that learning can occur, but the learning itself takes place on the unconscious level
All productive activities, such as preparing a meal, writing a book, or plowing a field, are aspects of doing. However, where pleasure is the dominant motivation, as in dancing or listening to music, the activity is in the being mode.
Where the focus is upon what is happening in the outer world, the activity can be characterized as doing. When the focus is upon what is happening on the inside, that is, upon the feeling one has during the activity, it partakes of being. This distinction is particularly relevant to sex. Some people do sex, that is, they are performers and their interest is in the effect their sexual activity has upon the other person. It’s an ego trip for them. For others, sexual activity starts from a strong feeling of desire and ends with a strong feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. When feeling dominates one’s sexual activity, it is in the being mode. If the mind, the will, or the ego dominates the activity, it is doing. When feeling inspires and guides an activity, it belongs to one’s being.
Being takes time: time to breathe, and time to feel. When we drive ourselves to produce or accomplish, we become like machines, and our being is reduced. However, if we pay at least as much attention to the process as, to the goal, doing becomes a creative or self-expressive action and increases the sense of being. As far as being is concerned, what counts is not what one does, but how one does it. The reverse is true for doing
When an activity has the quality of flow, it belongs to being. When it has the quality of push, it belongs to doing. One pushes when the goal or end becomes more important than the process or the means. An activity that flows is always experienced pleasurably because it stems directly from a desire and leads to the satisfaction of the need. An activity in which push is required is painful because it is against one’s desire and so requires a conscious effort through the use of the will. Most times writing is a very pleasurable process for me. When I have something I want to say, the writing flows and is easy. When I use my will to write, it is because I don’t have anything exciting to say. The writing is painful and poor. I always have to do it over. This distinction between flow and push applies equally to those activities we call play, games, or sport. When winning is more important than playing, the sport or activity is no longer a game but a job. Thus, we can say that for some people work is play because it is pleasurable (flow), while for others play is work because it is painful (push). Unfortunately, too many of our activities are in the doing mode. This is particularly true of the educational process. The emphasis upon achievement and the disregard for feeling make children resistant to school because they sense that their being is denied by the system.
In our spontaneous movements and utterances, we experience directly the life force within us. We do not get the same sense from our reasoned and deliberate actions. Spontaneous responses bypass the ego and, therefore, are regarded as authentic or genuine responses of the self. When we respond spontaneously, we do not say, “I did it.” Since the action is not willed by the ego, we tend to adopt the passive tense. We would say, “I was moved to anger,” or “I became angry.” These two expressions suggest that some force independent of the ego or the I acted in the person to produce the feeling. All emotional experiences are of this nature. They are “moving” experiences. We relish them because they make us feel so alive, so full of the sense of being.
A hysterical outburst, though spontaneous and involuntary, is not the same as an emotion. The latter is a total response of the individual; the whole being is moved; both mind and body, thinking and feeling, ego and id are involved and coordinated in the emotional response. The hysterical reaction is a release phenomenon in which the outburst occurs against the ego. The ego is trying to suppress the feeling, which breaks out despite the conscious intention.
Normally, the actions of a healthy person show a fine balance of being and doing, of feeling and thinking, of spontaneity and deliberated response. Full harmony between ego and body, I and “it,”7 leads to movements that are both spontaneous and controlled. This may sound like a contradiction, but only this combination produces actions that are graceful and efficient, that are completely natural yet totally appropriate to the situation. The individual in whom these forces are harmonized possesses poise, grace, and dignity. In such a person, being is raised to its highest state.
The roles we adopt in life become structured into our bodies as our way of being in the world. But they become the only way we can be and thus severely limit our being. This is another way of stating that a person’s fate is determined by his character, which is structured in the body by chronic muscular tensions. These tensions constitute “holding patterns.” We hold ourselves up, hold ourselves in, hold ourselves back, etc. Holding is a form of control. By holding we do not allow the flow of excitation to occur naturally, we control it. This holding against the flow develops gradually and insidiously and ends by being unconscious. Our character structure then becomes second nature to us, and we are no longer aware that we are blocking the natural flow of our feelings into responses and movements.
Though the holding is unconscious, we are “doing” it. The voluntary or striated muscles are under the control of the ego. Chronic tensions in these muscles reflect superego inhibition against the expression of certain feelings. In the beginning the tension was consciously created to block the expression of an impulse that could evoke a hostile response from our parents. In time, however, the tension becomes chronic and we are no longer aware of it, but it still remains a function of the ego. We are not letting ourselves be; we are not letting the flow of excitation move fully through our bodies into expression. We hold against our anger, our sadness, and our fear. We hold in our crying and our screaming. We hold back our love. We do this because we are afraid to let go, afraid to be, afraid to live.
Reich would then say, “Don’t do it.” In the beginning I replied, “But you told me to breathe.” “Yes,” he would say. “You are to let go to the breathing, not do it.” It took me some time to learn that my not breathing was a doing. If I “let go” or did nothing, I would breathe easily and deeply like any child or animal. When I let my body breathe, a number of very significant reactions developed spontaneously in my body. One of these was the body movement that Reich called the orgasm reflex.
One senses that the deeper breathing activates feelings that have lain buried in the unconscious through suppression, and one realizes that holding the breath is an effective way of reducing feeling. This is necessary when the feelings are too painful or too threatening. As long as the person is frightened of these feelings, he will not let himself breathe naturally, that is, easily and deeply. He will control his breathing consciously or unconsciously. But breathing exercises do not help in this situation since they are a form of control. The person will stop breathing when the threatening feelings arise.
Holding,” though unconscious, is an ego defense against feelings that have been perceived as dangerous in the past. For example, a person might be afraid of his sadness, sensing that if he gave in to it, he could fall into a despair so deep that he might not survive it. Or, the feeling could be a fear so great that it becomes a paralyzing terror, or an anger so intense one would want to kill. The sexual feelings can be very frightening because they are associated with the fear of castration. On the other hand, the conscious holding back of an impulse because its expression in a given situation would be inappropriate or inadvisable is not neurotic. The neurotic is afraid of the feeling, whereas a healthy person can accept and identify with his feelings though he may refrain from the action. For this reason neurosis should be seen as a fear of being or a fear of life
With help, a patient can find the courage to give in to his sadness even if it seems to lead to the depths of despair. By venting that despair he will discover that opening the wound to the fresh air may result in a healing that he didn’t believe possible.
Every time a patient makes contact with and releases a suppressed feeling, he decreases the tension that held the feeling in suppression. This increases his energy, because his breathing now becomes deeper and fuller. He can afford to let his body be more alive, because aliveness, being, and feeling no longer pose the danger they formerly did.
Being is the state of aliveness of the body. The more alive, the greater the being. Being is reduced by every chronic tension that restricts the motility of the body, that decreases its respiration and blocks its expressiveness. It is enhanced every time we allow ourselves to feel deeply and to express our feelings in appropriate action.
The neurotic is as much afraid to live as to die. Arthur’s being half in love with death means that he is only half in love with life. His fear of life is connected with his fear of death. He doesn’t dare reach out for warmth because the pain of his longing would be almost intolerable. He cannot risk opening his heart because he feels that if he is rejected, he will die. Thus, his neurotic attitude of being able to take the cold (lack of a warm human relationship) and “holding” against the longing for love is experienced as a means of survival. To live fully is to risk death. The belief that being open to life is dangerous has some validity. When, as a child, Arthur suppressed his longing and held back his reaching out, he may actually have saved his life. I believe that a child can die if the pain of an unfulfilled longing for contact and warmth becomes intolerable. He will give up the desire to live. Such deaths are known.
You may recall that Arthur said he had numbed himself to the pain of being in the cold. The therapeutic task, then, is to restore his aliveness, to warm up his body, and to animate his sensitivity. But in the process of restoring his aliveness, he will reenter the state of pain that he had suppressed through his numbness. There is no way to avoid that. It is like restoring the circulation to a finger that has been frostbitten. It hurts, and so one proceeds very gradually in both situations. But to avoid the pain is to risk the loss of the finger. If Arthur does not reexperience the pain in his body from the hurts suffered as a child, he risks perpetuating the loss of his being.
Like all victims of the oedipal conflict, he was psychologically castrated. He suffered from severe castration anxiety related to extreme tension about the genital area. His pelvis was tightly held and his pelvic floor was pulled up. This tension immobilized the pelvis so that very little pelvic movement was possible. The resulting reduction in his sexual potency made Arthur feel insecure with women and among men. He was afraid that women would use him if he had any strong sexual feelings for them. Toward men he felt both superior and inferior, as with his father. And he was worried about possible homosexual tendencies if he let any closeness to men occur.
Therapy cannot eradicate the past. It deals with the past in terms of its effect on the present. The lack of warmth in Arthur’s infancy cannot be remedied by loving Arthur as a baby now. He can be warmed as an adult only by his sexual passion and the love of a woman. For Arthur to be a man, the oedipal problem has to be worked through and his sexual anxiety alleviated. This means that the patient has to confront his fear of castration physically. Since women, too, suffer from the same oedipal problem, they have a fear of castration that has to be handled similarly.
The higher one rises, the greater is the excitement, and so is the danger. What goes up has to come down. Down is the direction to discharge excitement and to obtain release. Without the ability to come down, the person is hung up and unable to find surcease from his struggle and toil. Normally, coming down or letting down occurs through sex and pleasure. After a satisfactory sexual experience the person feels let down and relaxed in a contented way.
This analysis of Frank’s situation led to a surprising conclusion, namely, that Frank was more afraid of living than of dying. His statement that he was afraid to die is also true because if a person is afraid to live, he is asking to die, and that is frightening. One could see in Frank’s body the tightness in his chest, which severely restricted his breathing. He couldn’t cry, he couldn’t scream, and he couldn’t reach out for love despite his evident emotional deprivation. His pelvis was tightly held, and its muscles were markedly contracted. The fear of castration was clearly discernible in this tension, yet Frank was unaware of this aspect of his problem because of his hypochondriacal preoccupation with death.
I have found this wish to die in every patient I have treated. In some it is weak, in others it is strong. Its strength is directly proportional to the degree that one is afraid to live. The inhibition of life is death. Every chronic tension in the body is a fear of life, a fear of letting go, a fear of being. It can be interpreted as a wish to die.
So many of us are like Arthur, struggling to survive in a “cold” world and denying the desire to give up the struggle. We use our wills in order to keep going on, which means that the living process is a doing, not a being. We are afraid, then, to give up the “willing,” the doing, because we are afraid we might die. If we are afraid to die, we are afraid to live or to be. And if we are afraid to live, we are afraid we might die.
The fear of death is one of the valleys we must cross on the journey back into childhood and infancy. We must confront the fear of death in us and recognize that it stems from a wish to die. The wish, in turn, stems from the struggle we all engage in to prove we are worthy of love, to overcome our vulnerability, and to deny our fear. But these are goals that can never be achieved, and, indeed, there is no real need to achieve them. We can afford to give up the struggle. In fact, if we don’t, we will find ourselves in Frank’s situation: pushing ourselves to the point where death seems the only way out. Giving up the struggle removes the wish to die and eliminates the fear of dying. It opens the door to full living and being.
Saying that people are afraid of sex sounds only a little less absurd than saying they are afraid of life. Yet the reality is that both life and sex have frightening aspects for people. Both are unpredictable, beyond ego control, and inherently explosive by nature. The orgasm isn’t just a flow of feeling. It starts as a flow and ends as a burst. It is like riding on a horse and suddenly being catapulted into space. There are many ways to describe the orgastic response, but common to all is the idea of bursting through barriers, of exploding, of transcending. A scream is similar. When it occurs spontaneously, it bursts forth. Even the reaction of sobbing has this quality. We say a person breaks into tears.
The bursting is always the breaking into light of a process that previously went on in the dark, and it is this aspect that seems magical. There is a sense of liberation, as if a force previously bound breaks free. There is also a sense of creation, as if a new being or new state of being is suddenly there.
Yet it is this very quality of life, this magic, creativity, joyfulness, exuberance, this explosive aspect that our culture is trying to suppress. We seek to control the life process to guard us against its vicissitudes, to protect us from illness and death, little realizing that to do this one must transform life into a mechanical operation. In our attempt to prevent the valleys of experience we must eliminate the peaks. We must flatten life out so that it rolls like an assembly line in a manufacturing plant. At no point should it burst through its barriers, overwhelm its guardians, or confront them with a new creation. We talk creativity, but all our energies go into productive work rather than creativity. We worship doing, not being.
Sex is the most intense manifestation of the living process. By controlling sex one controls life. We do not want to stop the life process; what we want is for it to run smoothly, in ordained and regular channels, predictable, like a machine. We are afraid of the ebullient, bursting quality. We are afraid that if it explodes, it may cease to be; if it rises like a fountain, it will fall like a cascade. We can play with sex in the most sensual ways, but we are scared to death to explode in an orgasm of joy and ecstasy. Reich called this fear “orgasm anxiety.” In his view and mine it underlies all neurotic behavior.
In Love and Orgasm3 I wrote, “The intimate psychological connection between sex and death is the symbol of the round or the cave, which represents both the womb and the tomb. Orgasm anxiety, that is, the fear of ego dissolution that overwhelms the neurotic individual at the approach of the full sexual climax, is perceived as the fear of dying.”
Most of us do not experience a fear of death at the approach of the full orgasm because we unconsciously hold back the discharge, allowing only a partial release to occur. Thus we do not die, but neither are we reborn. The full orgastic release is blocked by tensions in the pelvis. I related these tensions to castration anxiety, which is also closely associated with the idea of death.
From other material that Mike presented it was clear that he equated sexual excitement with life. This is a common equation, because most people feel very alive when they are sexually excited. For this reason the discharge of the excitation can be experienced as dying. This would be true if the person failed to reach an explosive climax and, instead, felt the excitation fade out or drain away. And that can happen if one is frightened of the orgastic release and “freezes” just before climax. On the other hand, the orgasm leaves one with a feeling of satisfaction and a sense of being fulfilled (full, not empty).
Mike’s therapy was focused upon helping him get past the feelings of weakness, tiredness, and helplessness that undermined his manhood. There was no way he could overcome these feelings by an effort of will, since he was using all his willpower just to survive. Moreover, that would not be desirable even if it were possible, since it would increase the “holding” and with that the fear of letting go. There was no alternative but for Mike to give in to these feelings. Whenever I worked on the tensions in his pelvis or in his jaw, he collapsed into crying. This had the effect of deepening his breathing and giving him more energy. Strangely, every time he let himself feel weak, he became stronger. Every time he let himself feel his tiredness, he rested and recuperated. Every time he felt frightened, it turned into anger, which diminished his fear.
One can never get out of a trap by struggling, which is what Martha did. One only becomes more tightly bound. One has to stop the struggle, the trying, the doing. For Martha to do that meant to accept her feeling of hopelessness, not to struggle against it. And the situation was hopeless. She could never get her parents to accept and approve of her, since they did not accept her sexuality. If she accepted that fact, she would have two very powerful feelings, one of sadness and the other of rage. The sadness verges on despair, with thoughts of suicide. The rage is demonic. Given the despair and rage, she would either kill herself or kill her father. To do either, she would have to be mad-crazy mad with anger. She could keep her sanity only by doing and hoping, even though that course must fail.
The identification between the two states, anger and insanity, is expressed in the common word mad. To go mad means to lose one’s head or to be so angry that one loses one’s head. Disorientation occurs when the mind is overwhelmed by a feeling4 that it is trying to control. As the feeling bursts through the protective barriers, the mind is swept off its foundations in reality. The person feels confused, estranged, and unable to orient himself. This disorientation may be momentary if, as the feeling subsides, the person recovers his footing, that is, his orientation in reality. Or, in cases where the individual is vulnerable because of inadequate grounding in reality-the schizoid character structure, for example-the effect may be longer lasting. The person would then experience what we call a nervous breakdown.
Theoretically, any feeling can overwhelm the ego if it explodes with sufficient force to destroy the boundaries of the self. We say the organism is flooded, similar to the flooding that occurs when a river overruns its banks and eradicates the familiar outlines of the land. Practically, the two feelings that most threaten the personality are anger and sex, because both of these feelings are closely linked to fear and guilt. If a surge of anger evokes a corresponding amount of fear, one will attempt to control the anger. Should the anger break through the control, one would be in the position of a rider who has lost control of his horse. The person could be thrown into confusion just as easily as the rider could be thrown off his horse. The same thing would be true of a powerful sex urge if it is associated with an equal quantity of guilt.
But the neurotic does not escape so easily either. He avoids insanity by blocking the excitation, that is, by reducing it to a point where there is no danger of explosion, or bursting. In effect the neurotic undergoes a psychological castration. However, the potential for explosive release is still present in his body, although it is rigidly guarded as if it were a bomb. The neurotic is on guard against himself, terrified to let go of his defenses and allow his feelings free expression. Having become, as Reich calls him, “homo normalis,” having bartered his freedom and ecstasy for the security of being “well adjusted,” he sees the alternative as “crazy.” And in a sense he is right. Without going “crazy,” without becoming “mad,” so mad that he could kill, it is impossible to give up the defenses that protect him in the same way that a mental institution protects its inmates from self-destruction and the destruction of others.
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believed we could free an individual from his repressions and restore him to a state of harmony with himself and with nature. I was firmly convinced that Reich was correct in claiming that the suppression of sexuality was the cause of all our difficulties. The therapeutic aim, therefore, was to reestablish the capacity for full surrender to sexual feeling, which Reich called orgastic potency. This was to be accomplished by a combination of character analysis and body work. The latter was designed to reduce or eliminate the muscular tensions that blocked the giving in to the body and its feelings
I have consistently worked with myself to free my being from the inhibitions and repressions stemming from my upbringing. It would be nice to say that I have succeeded, but, though I have changed in significant ways, I am still aware of tensions and difficulties that disturb me and limit my being. This makes me sad. However, there is nothing to stop me from continuing to work with my body to expand my being, and I am committed to this undertaking for the rest of my life. The idea that I haven’t “made it” yet is not depressing. Rather, it is exciting to think that I could improve in areas where I sense a lack in my being.
What about my sexual potency? It has changed with the change in my being. To the degree that I as a person have grown and matured, my sexual feelings have become deeper and fuller. However, as I became older my sexual drive lost some of its intensity. Sexuality is an expression of a person’s being, and it reflects, therefore, the state of his being. So I haven’t “made it” on the sexual level either. I am not totally potent orgastically in Reich’s sense of that term. I have had some great experiences, which I can credit to therapy. And, most important, the feelings of pleasure and satisfaction that I derive from my sexuality have increased greatly.
Therapy has to help an individual adapt to his culture; it has to help him live and work within that culture. Isolating a person from his culture or setting him up against it can be more destructive. Thus, we are trying to help a person reduce the stress in his life within a cultural situation that subjects him daily to similar stress. It’s like telling a person to be calm and relaxed while the guns of war are booming around him, or to stay sane and rational while living in an insane asylum.
The therapist has to deal with an old conflict, so old that it has become structured into the personality. The person is not even aware of the conflict; it has become repressed. His dis-ease is chronic. He is no longer even aware of its nature and senses only that he is not well. Almost all the conflicts that create the problems that bring people to therapy occur in infancy and early childhood and are buried in the unconscious. To unearth them we must delve into the unconscious. In contrast, the conflicts with which the shaman dealt were current.
Still, one scream doesn’t fully free a person, any more than one swallow constitutes springtime. Both are harbingers of more to come. One can ask how deep is the sadness, how pervasive is the fear, how engulfing the anger?
Feelings stem directly from present-day experiences; however, these experiences are conditioned by the past to the degree that the latter has become structured into one’s way of being. In this way the past is part of the present. Thus, it is not fully correct to attribute a feeling of sadness to a loss of love in childhood. The sadness stems directly from the experience of a lack of love in the present. If one is fulfilled in the present, the loss of love in childhood would be a memory without an emotional charge. But a loss of love in childhood may cause us, in self-defense, to close our hearts, and so, not able to love, we remain unloved. Are we not really sad because our hearts are closed? In the same way our anger, insofar as it is not connected to a present-day situation, is our reaction to the frustration we experience now because we have been forced to close our hearts and our being. And we are also frightened of our anger because we sense that it could erupt in a destructive rage. It is the limitation of our being that makes us sad and angry and constitutes our fear.
But when an experience in the present is similar to one in the past that we have never worked through, we are in trouble. For example, if we suffer a loss of love as young children, the grief may still be in us. Children cannot properly mourn such losses because they cannot conceive of a replacement. Such a loss could be caused by the death of a parent, by loss of contact with one parent through divorce, or by parental rejection. Such a loss is devastating to a young child unless there is a replacement. The child can only react by denying the loss and living in the fantasy that the parent will return with love. Thus, there is no way to vent the grief and the pain, which become buried in the body. The experience is like a wound that never healed. Perhaps it is better described as an abscess in the personality, which the individual does not feel but which drains his energy. A rejection or disappointment in love in the present touches the wound, resulting in a pain that is both new and old. It seems like the operation of fate.
Such an early trauma that becomes encapsulated in the personality as a chronic abscess is manifested and experienced as despair. It affects the body. One sees it in lackluster eyes, drawn or drooping facial features, hanging shoulders, collapsed chest, contracted abdomen, and overall unaliveness. The loss of love results in a person who feels unlovable and looks unlovely. That’s something to be sad about. Until that bodily condition changes, the person has every reason to feel sad and to cry. But in crying for the present, one is also crying about the past. If, as a result of analysis, the present sadness becomes connected to the early loss, the expression of grief through crying and sobbing discharges the abscess and cleans the wound. Healing can now occur.
Feeling unlovable and unlovely, we are afraid to reach out with love, to ask for or demand respect. Fearing a hostile response from people, we do not allow ourselves to speak up freely and be assertive. We hold our natural aggression in check. We shrink back from affirming our being. Or we may become counterphobic and overaggressive to hide our fears. But whether we withdraw or overaggress, our bodies manifest our fear. In the withdrawn state the body is contracted and shrunk inward; in the compensated state it is hard and tight. Both are defensive positions, which by their very nature lead to fear. As long as we are defensive, we are going to be frightened. While it is true that the defensive attitude developed as a result of early life experiences, it is the continued persistence of defensiveness that is causing our present-day fear. Not until the body is freed up from its defensive posture, represented by chronically tight and contracted muscles, can we speak of a release from fear.
fear.
We are angry because our being is diminished. We are angry because we feel frightened and unlovely. And our anger is proportionate to our fear, our pain, and the loss of self. Just as we have every reason to be sad about this state of affairs, so we have every reason to be angry. We can lock this anger up in our jaws, shoulders, back, and legs; that is, in all the muscles that can express our anger through biting, hitting, and kicking. But if we do this, we only make ourselves more miserable and thereby increase our anger, which we then have to work hard to keep suppressed. That is the typical vicious circle that closes tighter and tighter upon the life of the person until it kills him. The alternative is to open up and express the suppressed feelings progressively until the body is freed from its tensions and restored to its natural state of grace and loveliness
Every chronic muscular tension in the body has associated with it sadness, fear, and anger. Since tension is a restriction of our being, it makes us sad. It also makes us angry to be so limited. And we are frightened to show our sadness or express our anger, so we stay locked in a diminished state of being and tied to our fate.
More feeling means more aliveness, more excitation, and more energy in the organism. Tight, contracted bodies cannot tolerate the increased charge or excitation. It threatens the integrity of the personality. Like too much air blown into a small balloon, the charge poses the risk of explosion or bursting, which the person will experience as a fear of dying or going crazy.
At this point I want to emphasize that a therapy for being involves a constant working out of the muscular tensions and working through of the underlying emotional conflicts with release of associated feelings.
The pattern of therapy is the reverse of the vicious circle. Each breakthrough of feeling increases the energy or excitation in the organism, which the individual must now learn to tolerate. This is done by integrating the experience into the personality and life of the individual, so that his being is expanded as a result. Thus, each time the person cries or becomes angry, the feeling is deeper and more charged. There is a corresponding enlargement of awareness, even though the problem confronted is not a new one. In fact, we will confront the same problems over and over again, hoping each time to increase the amount of energy and feeling in the process.
One cannot work through all the problems or work out all the tensions. The wounds produced by the traumas of our life may heal, but the scars remain. We cannot return to our original state of innocence. There will always be some limitation upon our being. The human being is an imperfect animal and an inferior god. Nevertheless, the body’s tolerance for excitation, especially sexual excitation, and its ability to discharge that excitation through pleasure, specifically, the orgasm, can be significantly increased.
I have said earlier that therapy is a voyage in self-discovery. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle, we don’t have all the pieces to start with, but as the therapy progresses, more and more memories become available. Whenever a bit of information fits and locks with neighboring pieces to make the picture clearer, the patient gains insight. He begins to know himself. Although the puzzle is never fully completed, the picture grows in clarity as the therapy proceeds. Knowing his past, a person is in touch with himself, and to be in touch with the self is to be in touch with the body. By reclaiming the past, we reclaim our body. These relationships work in reverse too. Getting in touch with the body gives a person a sense of himself and awakens the memories which have lain dormant in the contracted and immobilized musculature.
Therapeutic growth does not occur as an upward straight line. There are peaks and valleys in the therapeutic experience. The peak is a breakthrough to a higher level of excitation. The person breaks through one protective shell of his defense and steps forth to a new sense of freedom and light. Or it could be said that the person emerges with a greater awareness of self. The neurosis is a protective shell that insulates but also isolates the individual. Shells don’t dissolve. One has to break out of the shell like a newly hatched chick. Similarly, one has to break through the barriers or limits that constrain the self.
A breakthrough may occur in the course of a therapeutic session or as a dream. It is always accompanied by an insight, that is, light is shed upon some dark area of the personality. This light shines through the breach in the shell. In my opinion, therefore, the break comes before the insight, not as a result of the insight. The break is caused by the swelling of life within the container, which is no longer able to hold the excitation or energy and so breaks. In more concrete terms, it is the increased feeling or charge that produces the break, which leads to the insight. No one can predict the time of a breakthrough. It happens spontaneously when sufficient force has been built up inside the self to produce a break in the container. This buildup generally occurs slowly as a result of careful therapeutic work.
When Mark confronted his fear of breaking, he was able to see the events in his life that produced the fear. I have heard very many patients express the fear that if they let go, they would break down. In other words, to break through is to risk a breakdown. It is like birth. When a baby is being born, he has no guarantee that he will make it successfully into the world. Some get caught with the umbilical cord coiled around the neck and die. There is always some risk in life, but ordinarily it is minimal
Neurotics, as we have seen, repeat the same traumas again and again. If the experience of a breakdown is buried in the unconscious, it is also projected into the future. The ego defense system that was erected in the past to deny the trauma and to serve as a safeguard against a future recurrence of the event becomes the magnet that attracts the experience it is designed to avoid. This is what I described as the operation of fate.
To be fully alive is to let one’s self be carried away by a flood of feeling. It provides a moving or a peak experience. It is an orgastic-type response. But such intense emotional reactions should not be too common. If one is constantly being flooded by an overwhelming excitation, one’s boundaries become vague and the self becomes nebulous. One becomes confused about one’s identity, and psychosis is near. Weak egos are particularly vulnerable. A stronger ego can support and contain a higher level of excitation without losing its boundaries. But even a relatively strong ego can be flooded or overwhelmed if the intensity of the feeling increases greatly. A healthy ego can allow itself to be momentarily submerged by a flood of feeling without any damage. Every river occasionally floods and overflows its banks. If it does this permanently, the banks are destroyed and we have a lake, not a river. But a lake is static, whereas a river is flowing. It is one of the contradictions of life that a flow has to be contained to maintain the movement.
These considerations suggest that when a patient gives up his defensive position, he will experience some sense of being mad or crazy. Of course going “crazy” on demand isn’t real insanity, but it comes close enough to make the patient aware that the fear of breakdown is real, that there are suppressed feelings in the personality that threaten the ego, and that one can cross the line from rationality to irrationality and return again without danger. The arousal of strong feelings in a borderline patient whose ego is weak can result in a temporary “break.” He can “flip out” if the excitation becomes too strong. This poses no danger to the patient if the therapist is aware of that possibility, doesn’t panic, and can stay with the patient until the excitation subsides. When that happens, the patient becomes fully rational again. Through the experience he has opened up some strong feelings, which can then be integrated into his personality, strengthening his ego and expanding his being. In this way the patient increases his tolerance for excitation and feeling and decreases the likelihood of a future breakdown.
In the average neurotic patient, the fear of breakdown is hidden behind a seemingly secure and stable ego. If one asks such a patient if he ever thought he could go crazy, the answer generally is no. But this answer is belied by his problem. Every neurotic has suppressed feelings that could flood and overwhelm his ego if they arose with their full intensity. To put it simply, every patient could go “mad” and is afraid of “going mad” if he “let go” fully to feelings. He retains his sanity by keeping the level of excitation within tolerable limits, and he maintains a close guard upon his feelings to make sure that these limits are not exceeded. Relying upon this control, he may be quite convinced that he has no fear of insanity. But the defense itself betrays the underlying fear. One erects defenses only if one is afraid
He then went on to describe an aspect of his mother that explained his personality. “She was so confused that I didn’t know what was truth. I could never reach her with logic or reason. I armored myself against her insanity and my possible insanity.” When I asked him what his possible insanity would be, he said, “I would go mad and kill her, murderously mad. But I was always sure that it would never happen to me.” Then he added, sadly, “I know now why I can never let my anger explode. I’m really afraid I’d go crazy.”
The breakdown as it occurred in the past was overcome by an effort of will. It had been experienced as a sense of confusion, a feeling of being overwhelmed, and a loss of boundaries. The person felt he was falling apart. It was terrifying. He pulled himself together through his will, and he continues to hold himself together as a defense against the fear of falling apart or feeling confused and overwhelmed by life. The will operates through the voluntary musculature contracting the relevant muscles to provide the necessary control. The above patient remarked, “I realize that I struggled to keep my head straight. That helps me understand why my neck muscles are so overdeveloped.”
Insanity may be called a form of psychic death, the death of the self or ego. This also happens at the full height of the orgasm, if one reaches that height. The ego or self disappears momentarily. If we are frightened of being overwhelmed, we will suppress our feeling and our excitement. The greater the fear, the more the suppression. But the suppression of feeling and excitement is death, a death of the body by congelation. We are equally frightened by that specter.
It became evident that tensing his muscles in anticipation of hurt made them painful to pressure, whereas when they were relaxed, he felt the pressure without any pain. We all have to learn that tension is fear.
Working with castration anxiety through this technique is not the answer to all of a patient’s problems. However it is the key problem as the oedipal conflict is the key conflict in the arch of the personality. The failure to achieve a breakthrough on this level means that all other work on the personality remains superficial.
His anxiety in this situation reflects an event that happened in the past. Only by reliving that event emotionally can one become free of the anxiety associated with it
Every patient feels good when the pelvis or ass comes alive. By alive, I mean that there is feeling and spontaneous movement in the pelvis with breathing. The more the pelvis comes alive, the stronger is, the overall feeling. I recall one young woman patient who had confronted her oedipal problem. We had just completed the exercise described above. She was crying softly, her pelvis flooding with feeling. It was vibrating intensely. Then she exclaimed, “I’m so happy! I’m so happy!” I could understand her joy (her pelvis was literally jumping for joy). She had recovered her sexuality and found her being.
A severe lack of oral fulfillment leads to the development of an oral character structure; if less severe, to oral tendencies in the personality. The body of a person with an oral character structure is, typically, long and thin with an underdeveloped musculature (Sheldon’s ectomorph type1). The legs are always thin and rigid, while the feet are narrow and weak. In most cases the arches of one or both feet are collapsed. Since development in the child is caudalward, that is, from the head downward, a lack of fulfillment is manifested by a weakness or lack of development of the lower part of the body.
Psychologically, one finds in this personality a diminished aggressive drive, which correlates with the underdeveloped musculature and dependent needs related to the weakness in the legs. The individual with this character structure seeks to be taken care of, he looks for someone to give him what his mother failed to provide. He does not stand on his own feet psychologically or literally. However, in many cases the weakness in the legs is compensated for by an exaggerated rigidity, which allows the person to assume a position of independence but which collapses under stress or in a crisis. A dominant aspect of the personality is fear of being alone or being abandoned. These traits are less pronounced where the character contains oral tendencies in a different character structure.
An individual with an oral character structure is subject to mood swings of elation and depression. The latter is pathognomic, that is, the typical symptom of oral deprivation in any personality. Elation occurs when the person finds someone who he believes will fulfill his oral needs be a mother to him. Or he will become elated when he thinks the situation will provide fulfillment. This is an illusion, since no person or situation can fill the inner emptiness of an adult. No amount of sucking on a breast can provide the milk that the person needed as an infant. When the illusion collapses, as it inevitably does, the person becomes depressed. In time he will emerge from his depression with a new hope that will develop into another phase of elation, which, in turn, will collapse into a new depressive reaction.
The effect of oral deprivation is to fixate the individual upon the oral stage of development. This means that he is always looking to get, to be fulfilled by others. His sexuality will be oriented in the same direction. Most important to him is the feeling of closeness and contact, and the sense of being loved rather than loving. He will, therefore, seek to prolong the sexual act so as not to lose the contact. This maneuver, however, reduces the intensity of a climax that is already weak because of the person’s low energy level. In this character, orgastic potency is low. Yet it is only through deep sexual satisfaction that the oral character can be fulfilled as an adult. To achieve such satisfaction, the person’s energy level must be raised and his sexual problems worked through.
Deprivation on the oral level has another effect upon the person’s sexuality. There occurs what analysts call a displacement downward. Oral desires and feelings are transferred to the genital function. This means that the vagina becomes like a mouth in that it is used to take in nourishment. For the man, penetration is like the return of a child to the arms and body of its mother. The feeling is one of being held warmly and securely. The trouble with this kind of sexuality is that it reduces the orgastic response. The man may have an ejaculation but not a full orgasm. The woman will probably not reach a climax. Orgasm is the bodily reaction of discharge or ending. It occurs when the organism is filled with excess energy or excitation that has to be released. It does not result from the process of taking in. Oral longing seeks continuous, closeness and abhors separation. Sexual longing seeks the closeness of a shared experience that has a natural termination. Thus, to the degree that oral feelings enter into sexual activity, sexuality in the sense of orgastic response is diminished. And while the feeling of closeness is pleasurable, it is not fulfilling. The inner emptiness remains, and the person is forced to repeat the experience again and again.
This is done by getting the patient to become aware of his oral and sexual tensions. The former are located in the upper part of the body and involve the lips, mouth, jaws, throat, chest, shoulders, and arms. Chronic muscular spasticities in these areas limit the person’s ability to open up and reach out for love. The inability to reach out is an important manifestation of the fear of life. Sexual tensions are located in and around the pelvis also in the form of spastic muscles that restrict the natural involuntary movements of the pelvis. They reduce the ability of the person to tolerate and contain sexual excitation. Both sets of tensions surround the openings of the body, the mouth above and the genital apertures below. They parallel each other in the sense that the same kind and degree of tension exist at both ends of the body.
For example, the floor of the mouth is as tight as the floor of the pelvis. An equivalent tension is found in the throat and in the lower abdomen. This phenomenon is due to the functional and energetic symmetry of the body. A person cannot allow more feeling to come through one opening than through another. This means that sexual problems cannot be resolved unless the corresponding oral problems are also worked through.
My approach to these problems is to work with both areas of the body alternately. Working with the patient to reduce the tension in and about his mouth and throat enables him to breathe more deeply and thus increase the level of excitation. It is necessary, then, to work with the lower part of the body so that this increased excitation can be discharged. This can be done by using the grounding exercises described elsewhere2 or by diminishing the sexual tensions, or both. This physical work takes place within the context of an analytic working through of the person’s history and behavior. When this approach is used, the person’s tolerance for excitation is gradually raised and his capacity to experience life increased.
The oral character is described as being empty and unfulfilled. Since the deprivation occurred when he was an infant, the question arises, What keeps him in that state as an adult? We saw that it was impossible for him to be filled by the love and support of another. The explanation for this situation is that his ability to take in this love and support has been reduced by the tensions that develop as a consequence of his early deprivation. He cannot even take in enough air to fulfill his energetic needs because these tensions restrict his breathing. The suppression of sucking impulses means that the person cannot make a strong inspiratory effort, which is done by sucking air. Unable to take the air in deeply, he cannot let it out fully in expiration or sound (of crying and of screaming). Tensions develop in the arms, shoulders, and chest to inhibit impulses to reach out because of the fear and pain of rejection. In chapter 2 I described this pain as heartbreak.
All tensions serve the function of blocking impulses the expression of which is too painful. It is painful to want to suck a breast when none is available, to reach out when no one is there, to cry when no one cares. By compressing their lips, setting their jaws, and constricting their throats children can block the desire and deaden the pain of a need that will not be fulfilled. But, then, as adults they are similarly blocked in their ability to reach out to another person with feeling. There is no way to regain this ability except by reliving the original experience and expressing all feelings associated with it. This is regression, which is a necessary part of therapy. Freud was aware that his patients tended to relive early experiences. He called this tendency “the compulsion to repeat.” He says, “He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.”3
If one wants to change character, it is not enough to talk about feelings. They must be experienced and expressed. The body must be freed from its chronic tensions and constrictions if the person is to be freed from the fate they represent.
In working with the problems of the preoedipal period, the patient is encouraged to regress to an infantile level. Here is an example. The person lies on a bed or on the floor and reaches out with both arms for his mother. At the same time, he is directed to say, “Mama, Mama,” and to let himself go to the feeling these words suggest. Few patients can do this exercise with any feeling at first. They say, “I don’t feel anything.” Yet each one has been a baby who wanted his mother with all his heart. That feeling is not gone; it has been suppressed and now cannot be openly expressed.
Reliving the repressed conflict will involve the expression of strong emotions such as crying, screaming, kicking, hitting, biting, etc. All of these impulses must be allowed full expression in the therapeutic situation if the patient is to release the tensions of the oral conflicts. Since the tensions developed to block these impulses, they can be released only when the person feels free and able to express them. Letting go all the way to his suppressed feelings may bring up the fear of insanity or of death that froze the person into a structured position that became his character and his fate. But by living out his fate in the therapeutic situation, the patient is freed from it in life.
Releasing suppressed emotions in this way is not “acting out.” The patient is held to the responsibility of knowing that these emotions stem from the past and are expressed in the present only to free the body. All violent actions are directed against a bed, a towel, or some inanimate object. The therapist’s role is to guide and supervise the release of the feeling. It is also his responsibility to avoid any countertransference that could involve him with the patient. Under these conditions the therapeutic situation is the proper setting for the release of these impulses, since there is very little likelihood of injury to the patient or anyone else. For example, my patients will beat upon the bed with their fists or a tennis racquet, twist or bite a towel, or scream their heads off. The office is soundproofed. They can let go because I keep control. If they want to “go crazy,” I will become the guardian of their sanity.
Working through the oral problems in this way helps the person open up to life. He can breathe more fully and deeply, and this increases his energy. He can reach out and take in more life, which fills the emptiness caused by his early deprivation. Actually, the very act of opening up and reaching out overcomes the deprivation that, in an adult, consists of the inability to be fully in life. Let me state that idea again because I believe it is essential to an understanding of how therapy works. Although the child was deprived of love and support, the adult is deprived of his ability to function, that is, to love, to give, and to take in. This disturbance in the adult cannot be remedied with love alone. The person needs to gain an understanding of his dysfunction. To that end, love may be helpful but he must realize that no one can live for him, breathe, or reach out for him. He has to know that to be full means to be fully in possession of one’s self. He has to be able to breathe deeply, reach out freely, and respond fully.
However, if regression is a necessary part of the therapeutic process because it releases feelings, one has to gain the ability to handle these feelings in a mature way. Being an infant or a screaming maniac is not my idea of the goal of therapy. Regression is in the service of progression. And progress in therapy represents the ability to tolerate increasing levels of excitation without going crazy or cutting off the feeling. The ability to contain excitation or feeling is self-possession. It is the third stage in the therapeutic program. The first two are self-awareness and self-expression. Self-possession is the stage in which the ego functions as the standard-bearer of a self that knows who it is and what it has to do. The self possesses an ego. It is the stage in which the self experiences its being as a fully mature man or woman.
The forward movement in therapy involves analyzing the present-day behavior of the patient in terms of his oedipal and preoedipal conflicts. The transference situation with the therapist is especially important in this regard, since neurotic behavior is most clearly manifested in this relationship. Insights gained in the course of regression are applied to current attitudes and actions. Moving forward also involves grounding a person more fully in his legs and feet so that he can stand for what he believes and have faith that he can stand firmly on his own two feet. It involves increasing the individual’s conscious identification with his body through bioenergetic exercises to heighten the sense of self. Thus, the therapeutic process has a dual aspect. The aim is forward toward more sexual excitation and satisfaction, and a greater realization of the self. But this forward movement does not occur unless there is a concomitant backward movement into the past, into the body, and into the unconscious.
A tree grows taller to the degree that its roots go deeper and wider. If we wish to jump high, we must first bend close to the ground to get the impetus for the spring. Like a jet engine, we move forward by thrusting backward. In therapy each backward move provides the energy for the leap forward. Regression and progression go on side by side.
Accepting despair requires more than a statement to that effect. Admitting one’s despair may be coupled with an unexpressed determination not to give in to it. Acceptance means that one makes no effort to fight against the despair. If one accepts it and gives in fully, one cries. Crying is the sign of acceptance. Despair may be defined as a seemingly bottomless pit of sadness and sorrow. The person feels that if he let himself down into this pit, he would drown in his sorrow. To prevent this catastrophe he holds himself up and is afraid to let go. But this holding up requires a tremendous effort of will, and when the person gets tired, he falls into the pit and becomes depressed.
We said in the preceding section that crying is not easy for many people. Severe tensions in the jaw, floor of the mouth, and throat make it very difficult for the person to sob. Tears may come to the eyes, but the voice does not break into the deep sobs that convulse the body. Such a sob is a pulse of life traversing the body. But many people maintain a tight upper lip to prevent any breakdown into sobbing.
When a person sobs deeply, the feeling of despair is always lessened. Sometimes, if the crying is deep enough, the person breaks through into feelings of gladness and joy. However, if the crying is shallow or off the surface of the sadness, it may leave the person feeling more despairing than before. He let himself down into the pit, but, since he didn’t touch bottom, he became more frightened. Such crying can, indeed, be endless, never arriving to release the sadness or sorrow. It is not a question of how much one cries, but how deeply
I said that each sob is a pulse that flows through the body. When the crying is deep and full, the pulse of the sob goes clear through to the pelvic floor, producing a movement in the pelvis similar to that which occurs in orgasm. The pelvis moves forward spontaneously with each sob as in a sexual discharge, but without the intensity or sexual excitement of the latter. In such deep crying the sadness is discharged and the person feels that he came out of the pit into the sunshine. He no longer has a feeling of despair. He has worked through the grief of the lack or loss of love in his early years.
Furthermore, it must be recognized that one breakthrough does not mean that the person is forever free from his despair. The experience may have to be repeated again and again as the patient relives more of the traumas of his childhood. But the bottom was reached and the door opened. It will stay open as he begins to experience in life the joy of full sexual orgasm. If despair is a conviction that one will never feel joyful, the feeling of joy is the best and only antidote.
Since falling or letting down is experienced as a loss or surrender of the will, it can be seen as a danger. On the other hand, living through the will is really dangerous. It requires much energy to use one’s will constantly. How long can a person “hang in”? How long can one exist on an emergency basis? Sooner or later the will gives out, and if that is one’s only resource, one is finished.
One has to let down to renew oneself. One has to lie down to recover one’s strength. Unless one lets go of the day, one can’t enjoy the sleep of night. Symbolically, we die each night, but we are reborn the next day. Without death there can be no rebirth. Unless we go down, we cannot rise.
The will, as I pointed out earlier, is a psychic mechanism that enables the individual to mobilize extra energy to meet a crisis. The effectiveness of the will depends upon the availability of this extra energy. If a person has used up all his reserves, his will is impotent. In that case we might say, “He has no will to live,” but it would be more logical to speak of the person as being depleted energetically. However, it is true that the will as a psychic mechanism is not equally developed in all people. Being a function of the ego, its strength depends upon the strength of the ego. We can say of a person with a strong ego that he has a strong will. But the strongest will is helpless where there is no energy to mobilize. The best general cannot win a war without an army.
Similarly, if the individual labors under a sense of guilt about his depressed condition, he will not recover. This guilt acts like the outside pressure, robbing the person of the peace and rest he so desperately needs to regain his energy.
Breathing increases the energetic charge in the body and activates suppressed feelings. If my patient breathed deeply, she would cry. Crying is associated in her mind with hours of torment that ended with throwing up and choking. Not to breathe is equated with not feeling, not crying, not choking, and not dying. Holding the breath is a way of holding oneself up. Letting down and letting go allow one to breathe fully and deeply.
Generally, a painful situation becomes intolerable when there is no one to share it with. If we can let down into the pain and cry, we would find that it becomes tolerable. If we can accept the pain, the natural healing process will begin. But we can’t let down to nothing. We can let down to the ground if we feel it beneath our feet. We can let down to a friend or therapist who is there for us. But since our mother wasn’t there for us when we were young, we have no sense that if we let down, we will find any support. With that feeling, letting down means giving up and dying.
What can one do? Suppressing the feeling doesn’t make it go away. Burying it merely postpones the day of reckoning. I realized that Mark’s heart had been crushed by his mother. My answer to him was, “Give in to the pain and agony of your desire and longing.”
Mark was silent for a full minute. Then he said, “I just got in touch with something I never told anybody; that if I become substantial and one with my life, I would die. It is my private secret. I’ve always blamed my mother for my reluctance to be in my own life. But I realize now that if I reach out to life and get it, I would have to face a brutal fact-that I am mortal. It would be the destruction of my grandiosity, of my fantasy of immortality, invulnerability, and independence. I don’t need. I can’t stand needing and the pain of not getting. It’s too much. I would rather die and give up the world. And I did it. I withdrew into myself as into a living tomb. Then I was invulnerable. That was my secret.”
The revelation of his secret had a profound effect on Mark. He felt a sense of joyful liberation, as if he had been released from doom and had rediscovered life. He had closed the door of his escape into death. The decision to reach out to life was not a conscious one. It happened, I believe, because his body felt big enough and strong enough to stand the pain. He had experienced pain in bioenergetic therapy and it had not destroyed him. It had actually made him stronger.
It is logical that to the degree that one is afraid to live, one is close to death. The closer one is to death, the more frightened one is of it. Seen in this light, the fear of death reflects the fear of life. People who are not afraid to live are not afraid to die. They do not want to die, but they are not frightened people, and so the idea of death carries no emotional or energetic charge. Frightened people are frightened of dying. However, at the same time, they have a wish for death. For them, it is the dying that terrifies them, not death itself. Dying is a shrinking or contraction of the life energy in the body, which leaves it cold and lifeless. Terror is the same shrinking of the life energy, which stops short of dying. In terror one feels death as in dying one feels terrified. However, dying is experienced as terrifying only when it occurs against the conscious will of the organism. It is a peaceful process when every part of the personality or body surrenders to its fate.
Winnicott says, “Death, looked at in this way as something that happened to the patient but which the patient was not mature enough to experience, has the meaning of annihilation. It is like this, that a pattern developed in which the continuity of being was interrupted by the patient’s infantile reactions to impingement.”7 Winnicott, then, sees the wish to die (Keats’s “half in love with easeful death”) as a need to “remember having died; but to remember he must experience death now.”
What does Winnicott mean by the remark, “he must experience death now”? He does not explain in the article how this happens in therapy. In my view it means that the patient must experience the original trauma (phenomenal death) as if it were happening in the present. He didn’t die then, and, of course, he won’t die now. But he faced death then; he experienced the feeling that he might die (the shrinking and contracting of his life energy), and he became terrified. To overcome his terror-to live he mobilized his will, the will to live. From that time on he lived largely through his will, forcing himself to go on, to do out of fear that if he let go, he would die. It is like living under the sword of Damocles, constantly threatened by death. Such a life is not only exhausting but hardly worthwhile. One wishes the sword would fall, that death would come to release one from the struggle and the torment. That is the basis of the wish to die.
I explained this mechanism to the patient, pointing out that she had a suppressed rage that could carry her away if she gave in to it. It is natural for a strong emotion to “carry one away.” If we are not frightened of the emotion, we go with it. If we are frightened, we contract against the feeling, which then gives rise to a sensation of dying.
We have only one more chance left, but we dare not take it. We have to protect ourself and our heart by locking them away in a closed box or cage (the thorax). We will no longer open our heart to the world, and we believe this will ensure our survival. But by our very defense, we invite the rejection that will finally break our heart for strike number three.
If we can accept the fact that what we are afraid of has happened in the past, we need not repeat the past. We were children then, fully dependent on our parents for love, intimacy, and human contact. Our very lives depended on them. We are adults now, independent in the sense that we can move about and choose those with whom to share love, intimacy, and pleasure. If we open our heart, we can be hurt again, but our heart will not break. A broken heart is caused by a sense of betrayal. As adults, we cannot be betrayed unless we are naive. If we are naive, we have betrayed ourselves by denying our past
Death is the fate no one can escape. The question, then, is, How does one die? A person can die like a hero or like a coward. The difference is that the hero can face death without fear, whereas the coward can’t. But it may be asked, What makes one person a hero and another a coward? To answer that question we have to recognize that the hero is characterized more by how he lives than by how he dies. I would describe a hero as a person who has no fear of life, who can face life squarely. And, because he has no fear of life, he has no fear of death. We
There is a saying that a hero dies once but a coward dies a thousand deaths. When a person has died many times in fear, he ends up being a coward. His spirit has been broken. Too many of my patients have been terrified as little children. Each time a mother looks at a child with hatred in her eyes, it is like a dagger into the child’s heart. If looks could kill, many of us would be long dead. But while hateful looks do not kill us physically, they break us psychologically when they are directed at us by our parents.
By confronting each psychological death through therapy, we regain our courage. Facing death, we lose our fear of death. Challenging the terrors of our unconscious, we are like Greek heroes. Should it not be said that the ultimate goal of therapy is to help a person develop a heroic attitude to life?
“The myth can be understood as a symbol, not of the incestuous love between mother and son, but of the rebellion of the son against the authoritarian father in the patriarchal family; that the marriage of Oedipus and Jocasta is only a secondary element, only one of the symbols of the victory of the son who takes his father’s place and with it all his privileges.”1
The Sphinx was one of the original mother goddesses, imported from Egypt, where she was worshipped as a beneficent deity. To the developing Greek ego she was a monster because she demanded the sacrifice of human life. But as an earth goddess the Sphinx ate all her children since they all returned to the earth at death. The female goddesses of the matriarchal order were the rulers of life and death (the fates as weavers of life). As long as these processes remained mysteries, man stood in awe of women and mothers. By solving the riddle of the Sphinx, Oedipus eliminated the mystery upon which her power depended. Of all Greek heroes, he alone acted without the aid of an Olympian god. His conquest represented the victory of the rational mind. He opposed knowledge to mystery and courage to fear. By this deed he became the first modern man.
The basic conflict in the oedipal situation of the child is, therefore, between the parents. Their relationship forms the base of the triangle, and conflicts in that relationship are the cause of all the problems that develop in the children. I made the statement in the first chapter that where husband and wife are sexually fulfilled by their relationship, the children are not caught in an oedipal situation. We must recognize, however, that in our culture, which is based on the patriarchal principle, the man-woman relationship is rarely free from serious discord. Sexual fulfillment is equally rare. While there are some marriages in which love flourishes, most people erect facades to hide the dissatisfactions and disappointments that exist in their marriages. The facade serves to cover up the failure of the marriage from the public as well as from themselves.
My mother used to say that one should not be surprised at the fighting between nations when there is so much fighting in the home. As long as I can remember, my mother and father were in constant conflict. As a child I was appalled at this state of affairs. I was caught in the middle. Both parents confided in me, and I recognized that each had legitimate complaints against the other. Later, I saw that their personalities were opposites of each other. My mother believed in business before pleasure, my father in pleasure before business. As a result, my mother was joyless and my father penniless, to a degree, of course. Being split between them, I had to find some resolution to my internal conflict, which I did by saying that the business of life was pleasure. But I did not arrive at this solution until I had worked through the fears and anxieties of my own oedipal situation.
Inequality mars the harmony of the man-woman relationship, which should be one of equal sharing in a common effort. The person who feels inferior is resentful of the one who has the superior position. This is especially true where ego consciousness is highly developed, as in our culture. Most people find it humiliating to have to submit to a power they did not grant. One doesn’t feel love in this situation, but hate.
Fighting between husband and wife is not new. In the past women generally complained that there wasn’t enough money, men that there wasn’t enough sex. That situation seems to have changed with the demise of the double standard in the sexual revolution of the fifties and sixties. But this change doesn’t seem to have reduced the fighting that goes on between the spouses. As long as the issue of power enters into personal relationships, there will be conflict. The unfortunate thing is that parents use their children in their power struggles with one another.
He has titular power, but effective power often resides with the woman. Most patients, when asked who was the dominant figure in their homes, said it was the mother. This may have been due to the fact that the home is her domain, a position that society strongly supports because of her responsibility for the children. Actually, family fights are often decided in favor of the person who has the stronger ego and the best developed sense of self. But regardless of who is dominant in the family, conflict between the parents is the base upon which the oedipal triangle rests.
Normally a child sees his parent as a supporter and protector, not as an antagonist. But when the latter is true, yielding amounts to a submission, for which the child compensates by an inner resolve to gain the power that would enable him to win over the parent. Thus, every submission has a twofold effect upon the child’s personality. It diminishes the sense of self, thereby undermining the child’s developing ego, and, at the same time, it increases his commitment to the ego as the representative of power. The child becomes ego conscious and ego centered, that is, power oriented. He enters the oedipal situation with mixed feelings: sexual desire for the parent of the opposite sex, fear and hostility toward both parents, and an awareness that sex can be used in the power struggle. It is a highly charged situation that can have only one outcome for the child: the loss of sexual feeling or psychological castration
The heightening of ego consciousness is not a positive development. It results in an increased self-consciousness, which has an inhibitory effect upon the expression of feeling and upon the surrender to the orgastic release. An exaggerated self-consciousness underlies the schizophrenic state and often ushers in a psychotic break. It is an extremely painful condition. In its less severe form it leads to pathological narcissism.
In this analogy, the horse represents the body while the ego is the horseman. When rider and horse are attuned to each other, like a cowboy and his mount, they can accomplish much and experience pleasure. But a rider who is insensitive to his horse can drive it into the ground. In this manner an ego that is out of touch with the body and under the pressure of a compulsive drive to succeed can push the body to a point where it will break down physically. If a rider is dissociated from his horse, he will get thrown. An ego that is dissociated from the body cracks up.
The look in my patient’s eyes, was his reaction to his father, of whom he had been afraid. It represented feelings that he had never been able to express. By suppressing them he had structured them into his body and into his character. It became his fate to be resentful, hateful, and frightened, although he had no understanding of the origin of these feelings. And unless his character structure changes, it will become the fate of his son.
Feelings cannot be suppressed indefinitely. To suppress feelings is death. They come out often against the most innocent because they are the most vulnerable. Why do parents scream so at children? They take out on children the frustration of their own lives because children are helpless to fight back. Dominating a child gives a parent a sense of power to compensate for the feeling of being powerless that he experienced as a child. This is the essence of the power struggle. If a parent needs someone to dominate, a child is a convenient subject. In addition, parents project onto their children their own sexual guilt and punish them for the same innocent acts (masturbation) for which they were punished as children. In a patriarchal culture the misery is passed on from generation to generation.
In our culture, when a child doesn’t do well in school, the parent often regards the child’s failure as a sign of his own failure. By the same token, the child’s success inflates the parent’s ego. The ego of modern man is more involved in his relationships than is his heart. Thus, when a child disobeys, it is not a question of right or wrong but a challenge to the parent’s ego. Having said no to the child, it becomes a matter of egotistic pride to uphold the no against the pleading or arguments of the child. In many families the child’s assertion immediately leads to a power struggle, a conflict of wills, in which both parties are losers because what should be a loving relationship deteriorates to one of antagonism
The superego is maintained by the energies of the suppressed aggressive impulses, which are turned against the self, creating the sense of guilt. Thus, the sense of guilt is directly proportional to the degree of suppression. The more one suppresses hostility, the more guilty one feels. One feels guilty for the desire to smash the civilization that denies one fulfillment and to kill the father who is its representative.
In my view, the child as he enters the oedipal period is innocent, like any animal. He loses his innocence as he becomes aware of the intrigues and manipulations by his parents to control him, to make him adapt to the culture, and to use him for their own ego needs. In self-defense, he learns to use their tactics against them, but in the process he becomes an egotist like his parents, perhaps even going them one step better. There is a saying: “If one fights the devil with the devil’s weapons, one becomes a devil.”
I don’t agree with Freud that creative achievement depends on the sublimation of the sexual drive. On the contrary, individuals with more sexual aliveness are, often, the more creative persons. But productivity is another matter. If we wish to harness the human animal to the economic machine, we must “break” him as we do other animals that we put to work for us. This can be done only if we tame the free and wild animal sexuality of the person
Erich Fromm came to the same conclusion. In a recent study, he says, “The effort made to suppress sex would be beyond our understanding if it were for the sake of sex as such. Not sex, but the breaking of the human will is the reason for vilifying sex.”
Where the acculturation process is handled with love and respect for the child, he is not severely traumatized. However, I do not believe that even with the best intentions it is possible to raise a child in the modern world without his developing some degree of neurosis. No parent living in this culture can fully dissociate himself from its values. The attempt to do so creates other problems.
If one gauges sexual health by the lack of tension in the body, especially in the pelvic area, one finds more health in the poor people of Latin America than in their richer neighbors to the north. On the other hand, the middle classes everywhere are generally pretty neurotic. Their upward striving for social position and prestige results in great pressure on their children to adjust to the social pattern. In modern industrialized societies, class distinctions tend to break down. In these highly mobile societies, where money and power determine social position, most people belong to the middle class. This is the class in which progress and power are most highly valued.
But resignation is not the correct term for the attitude of a people who have the courage to live such an arduous life. Resignation implies that one had a hope for something better. They have no hope or desire for change because they are content with their life. They accept it with an inner peace and calm that we lack. We are the ones who struggle with life to make it better, who cannot accept it, because it ends in death, and in the end it is the civilized person who resigns and dies painfully
Parents have always had authority, but power is a different thing. Authority directs, but power controls. Power represents the ability to impose one’s will. The person with authority is respected; the person with power is feared and obeyed. Power creates the kind of inequality between people that is the root cause of all conflict, because no person wants to be subject to another’s power. It robs an individual of his freedom, his dignity, and his humanity
Basing his remarks upon the study of sexuality among the Trobriand Islanders by the anthropologist Malinowski, Reich remarks, “Children in the Trobriand Islands know no sex repression and no sexual secrecy. Their sex life is allowed to develop naturally, freely and unhampered through every stage of life with full satisfaction. The children engage freely in the sexual activities which correspond to their age.”18 Their society showed “no sexual perversions, no functional psychoses, no psychoneurosis, no sex murder.”
The children destined for this kind of marriage are, just like ours, brought up in sexual abstinence; they show neuroses and those character traits with which we are familiar in our characterneurotics.”
The importance of agriculture for the development of civilization is that it not only permitted man to settle down and begin to accumulate possessions but it produced a surplus of food. The existence of surplus food allowed a greater degree of labor specialization, since not everyone had to be engaged full time in the production of food. In addition, surplus food constituted power in the hands of whoever controlled it, for with it one could hire workers or soldiers.
Once people rise above the survival level, that is, when they take the first step upward on the social ladder, they become conscious of their social position. They feel superior to those still on the survival level but inferior to those above. They become self-conscious or ego conscious. People who live on a survival level are not self-conscious because all their energies are engaged in the task of survival. Those of us who live above that level would describe their situation as a struggle for survival. But the word struggle is inaccurate. There is no struggle when one accepts his fate and position. It is the ego-conscious individual who struggles to rise higher in the social hierarchy. The higher he rises, the more ego conscious he becomes, which intensifies the ego drive for dominance and the struggle that it entails. This person calls every step upward progress.
Another aspect of this situation is that this ego drive knows no limits. We rationalize the drive for power by speaking of the security, the comforts, and the conveniences it provides, but when all these needs are fulfilled, the drive for more money and more power continues. Even those at the top keep striving for more power. It seems that once this drive takes hold in the personality, there is no stopping it. I know there are many exceptions to this statement, but I believe it has a general validity. In fact the drive is not limited to individuals or families. Nations constantly seek more power to dominate other nations. On the deepest level this ego drive for power represents civilized man’s desire to control life (nature and fate) because he is afraid of life.
this drive affects relationships in the family. Its very existence presupposes a dissatisfaction in the person with his state of being. The self-conscious individual is not a happy person. He suffers from a deep-seated sense of inferiority for which the drive for power aims to compensate. That sense of inferiority stems largely from the psychological castration the person suffered in the oedipal phase of his development. The result, as we saw, is a power struggle with his spouse that produces resentments and hostilities on both sides, eroding the love that existed between them. Their sexual pleasure is decreased, intensifying the feelings of resentment and hostility. The children are drawn into this struggle. Normally they side with the parent of the opposite sex, to whom they are attracted by their sexual feelings. However, the child is aware that each parent has some validity to his complaints
The idea of progress adds further fuel to the oedipal fire. Progress demands that each generation excel the preceding one. The son is to do better and have more power and prestige than his father. The daughter is to have a finer house, a better life, a higher social position than her mother. This demand is imposed by the parents in the name of progress, but in reality to satisfy the parents’ need to rise higher in the social world. For the mother, her son’s success vindicates the sacrifice of her sexual fulfillment and happiness. For the father, the boy’s success is a substitute for his own failure. The interest of the parents in the daughter’s success has a similar motivation.
The conscious eye can be deceived by the appearance of things, which often contradicts their true nature. With people, it is a general rule that the more elaborate the facade, the greater is the inner emptiness. A seer must understand human nature if he is to predict the fate of man.
An ideal therapist should be a seer like Tiresias, able to read character and predict fate. We turn to him for counsel because we expect him to be wise and to have an understanding of human nature. Without that understanding he is not able to help his patients heal the splits in their personalities that destroy their inner unity and harmony. In this chapter let us look at the nature of man and try to arrive at an understanding of wisdom. We shall see that the riddle of the Sphinx contains some important keys to an understanding of human nature if our analysis goes deeper than the accepted answer.
In primitive and nonindustrial cultures children are nursed up to five years, long past the time when the child is able to stand on its own feet, speak, and eat solid food. This long period of nursing not only fulfills the child’s oral needs, it strengthens its animal nature, which is the base of its being. Neurosis is marked both by some degree of sexual disturbance (orgastic impotence) and also by a disturbance of the sucking impulse. The latter is manifested by an inability to suck air fully and deeply while breathing.
Speaking and standing on two legs separates man from the other animals. He now has a different relationship to the world about him. With his focused vision he looks out upon the world, and it is his nature to seek to dominate and control it. He is no longer a passive participant in the events of nature. By his manipulation of the environment, he imposes his will upon nature. He becomes a creator. As a creator man identifies with God, whom he sees as the creator of the universe. In this stage of his life man aspires to be godlike; that is, he strives for omniscience, omnipotence, and immortality, the attributes of the godhead. He looks to the heavens for his inspiration and his knowledge.
What is the meaning of the third stage when man walks on three legs? This is indeed a strange creature, neither man nor beast; or, perhaps, at this point he is fully man and beast like the Sphinx. A third term is always necessary to understand dualities or contradictions. In dialectical thinking this third term is called the synthesis and represents the reconciliation on a higher level of the opposition existing between thesis and antithesis. Birth and death can be viewed, for example, as a dialectical relationship arising out of life. Birth is the beginning and death the ending of life and, thus, they are opposite concepts. The synthesis is rebirth or new life, which emerges from their interaction. Without birth and death there would be no rebirth or new life.
The infant, like all animals, lives fully in the present. An adult, on the other hand, lives partly in the future. He conceives and plans for future needs. Human beings can project part or all of their consciousness into the future, an ability that can produce a momentary disruption of their perceptions of reality. A person can slip into so vivid a daydream that he loses his awareness of what is happening to him. Man’s creative ability is directly dependent on his ability to project his consciousness into the future.
the basic principles underlying human behavior, the pleasure principle and the reality principle. The former states that organisms strive for pleasure and to avoid pain or stress. All living creatures, including man, obey this principle. It completely governs the behavior of a child. But in the case of an adult, there is a secondary principle that modifies the action of the first one. The reality principle states that pleasure can be postponed or a pain tolerated for the sake of a greater pleasure or to avoid a greater pain in the future. The operation of the reality principle depends on the ability to anticipate a future situation. All animals have this ability to some degree, since it is the basis for learning. In the adult human being, however, this ability is so much more highly developed and conscious that the difference in the degree becomes a difference in kind
When the future supersedes the present, when doing negates being, we are in trouble. A proper balance can be obtained when a person or a society is grounded in the body, the present, and being. Then the ego, the future and doing rest upon a firm foundation. On a deeper level, the foundation itself rests upon one’s being part of the earth and of nature.
If understanding is related to the feeling processes of the body, knowledge is related to the thinking processes of the mind. Broadly speaking, understanding is a sensing from below, from the body, whereas knowing is seeing from above, from the mind or head. The distinction between understanding and knowledge is clear when we consider sex. I believe that an infant understands what sex is. This should not surprise us. He is not long removed in time from his conception in an act of sex and closer even to his birth, the end product of that act. Sex is art of his nature, but at this stage he has no knowledge of these things.
We know that power is an important force in this world and that without it we are vulnerable. We are willing, therefore, to make enormous sacrifices for it. We sacrifice our pleasure, our integrity, and our peace of mind for power in the form of money and success. We understand that pleasure, integrity, and, peace of mind are essential to our well-being but we don’t know this is so. It is not a provable fact like the effect of power. So we tend to ignore that understanding
Instead of basing knowledge upon understanding, we try to derive our understanding from knowledge. This is like turning a house upside down and resting it upon the roof. No parent can understand a child by reading books on child psychology, and no therapist can understand a patient by studying books on clinical psychology. Understanding is an empathic process that depends on the harmonic response of one body to another.
Wisdom is the realization that knowledge not based on understanding is meaningless because it has no reference to the whole. On the other hand, understanding without knowledge is impotent because it lacks the factual information needed to control a situation or effect a change. An older
Wisdom is the realization that life is a journey, the meaning of which is found in the voyage and not in the destination. A wise person is like the Sphinx in that he has reconciled within himself the opposing forces in human nature, the animal body and the godlike mind.
Basically, therapy involves the acquisition of wisdom. One looks back to the past in an effort to reach an understanding of one’s self, which, when added to one’s knowledge of life, produces wisdom. Since the past is buried within the self, in the unconscious, looking backward also means looking inward. Understanding that is gained in this search is called insight. In bioenergetics this search is made along two parallel paths: through the analysis of memories, dreams, associations, and the transference situation; and through the body, the repository of all experience. I have elsewhere described the bioenergetic approach, and I would refer my readers to that study.4
Working with the body, in my opinion, is one of the better ways. Family therapy is another effective approach, which by focusing on the interaction between parents and children opens the doors to communication between them.
Gaining wisdom is a process of seeing and accepting the contradictions in human nature, including that of our parents. At first we are angry, even furious, at their lack of love, their manipulation, and their insensivity. We feel the sadness of their unresponsiveness and we experience the fear that their disapproval and hostility aroused. We cry, scream, and rage because of the pain that is in our bodies from these early traumas. These feelings are valid, for they are us and we are them. Every feeling is a self-perception (to feel is to perceive the self in motion-emotion). Denying or suppressing a feeling reduces and deadens the self. But in time, as our pain is released, we also begin to understand our parents in terms of their own life situation. Then, as we become free from our bondage to the past, we realize and sense that our parents did love us as much as they were able. For there is no life without love.
Wisdom means seeing into the heart of things, beneath the surface of our contradictions, where there is neither good nor bad, neither right nor wrong. It means seeing the human being as the animal he is, struggling to gain security yet be free, to be productive but also joyful, to seek pleasure but also to know pain, to hope for transcendence and yet be content that one is contained within a finite body. It is to know that love does not exist without possibility of hatred. It is to know that there is a time for living and a time for dying. It is to know the glory of the blooming of life that seems to fade all too quickly but that leaves behind a seed that will bloom in its season. It is to know that the individual exists to celebrate life.
A person comes for help because he cannot establish significant relationships with other people. He fears rejection, he feels rejected, and he acts in such a way as to provoke rejection. He cannot open up and reach out to people. Though he desperately wants contact with others, he withdraws and closes up when it is offered. Why? In such a case analysis invariably reveals that the person experienced a severe rejection in early childhood, which was so painful that he contracted and closed up in self-defense. As an adult, he feels that he dares not risk another rejection because he may not survive it. He avoids that danger by keeping apart, withdrawn and in a state of being rejected. It does not hurt if one is rejected for not opening up. It hurts only when one opens himself, reaches out, and is then rejected. As long as he stays contracted, there is neither hope nor pain, just aloneness.
If one has been burned touching a hot stove, one will be cautious touching any stove again. But only a fool will take a chance if he has been burned twice. Past experience structures our behavior to ensure survival. We do not close up, armor, or withdraw through choice, but out of necessity. No one deliberately chooses a neurotic style of life, since it is a limitation of being. The armoring process is a means of survival, a way of avoiding intolerable pain. Then, when the closing up or armoring has become structured in the body, that is, has become unconscious, we no longer have a choice in the present whether to open up and reach out or not. A locked door cannot be opened without the key
A person can be made aware that in the closed-up state he will always feel rejected; that if he doesn’t open up, of necessity others will reject him. But he cannot change his way of being by making a decision. This is because the conscious control of behavior is limited to volitional actions. The conscious mind, acting through the ego, commands the voluntary movements of the body. But this command was surrendered over those movements concerned with suppressed feelings. The suppression of feeling entails a state of chronic contraction in the muscles that would express the feeling. Chronic muscular tension is unconscious; that is, the person doesn’t feel the tension or the muscle and, therefore, has no control over its movement. Besides, feeling in general is not subject to volition. A person can will himself to make the action of reaching out, but, without feeling, the movement is mechanical and ineffective. There is no way one can directly affect the unconscious bodily processes that have shaped the personality and determined its responses.
There is overwhelming evidence that even our so-called choices of career, mate, place to live, etc., are largely determined by our early experiences. As we get to know ourselves through analysis we realize how much our responses as adults were conditioned by events in our childhood.
But if a patient is powerless to overcome his neurosis, what responsibility does he have? He is, of course, responsible for his life just as any other adult is. No one can breathe for him, feel for him, or live for him. If he doesn’t live his life it is lost. He owes this responsibility to himself. Part of this responsibility involves self-understanding, which includes a sensing of the fears, anxieties, and guilts that block him from being fully alive. No one can overcome his own fears, for that is equivalent to using the self to surmount the self, an impossibility. A patient doesn’t get better by overriding his difficulties, but by accepting and understanding them. He learns that his fears and anxieties stem from early life situations that no longer exist except in his imagination. If he can surrender the defenses of these situations, he can experience a liberation from the fears, anxieties, and guilts that limit his being.
Giving up one’s defensive posture and attitude requires no effort of will. It is what we therapists describe as “letting go.” If anything, it is a letting go of the will, a surrender to the natural and spontaneous processes of the body and life. While the defensive system developed originally as a means of survival, in the present it constitutes a defense against life and represents a fear of life. It was erected through the use of the will, and its persistence is tied to the continued use of the will, though that use is unconscious. The patient needs to become aware that he is using his will, making an effort, or doing something unconsciously as a defense against life.
The basic mechanism for the suppression of feeling is the inhibition of respiration. By reducing the intake of oxygen we dampen the metabolic fires and lower our energy level. This, in turn, decreases the intensity of our feelings and makes them easier to suppress or control. To mobilize suppressed feeling it is necessary, therefore, to get the patient to breathe more deeply.
My shallow breathing was due to the fact that unconsciously I was restricting my breathing, partially holding my breath, because I was afraid to give in and let the involuntary processes of the body take over. This realization allowed me to let go, and I began to cry. I became aware of how much I held back from expressing my feelings. “Holding” by tensing muscles is a doing, an action of the will. Letting go is a stopping of the doing that allows life to flow. Life is spontaneous movement that doesn’t require the use of the will.
The will is not a negative force, though it can be used against the best interests of the person. It is an extra force that will drive the body when feeling is inadequate for the task. Normally it is used only in emergencies.6 When the will takes command, the body is harnessed by the ego as a horse is harnessed by a driver. The will is also the way an individual is harnessed to the patriarchal system and its values: power, productivity, and progress.
We think of the animal as being a slave to its instincts. But we are equally bound to our system by a sense of guilt, as Freud pointed out. We are literally bound by chronic muscular tensions that limit our respiration, depress our energy, and inhibit the free expression of feeling. In effect, we are dominated by an ego that can be as tyrannical as any despot.
In situations where action flows directly from feeling, one has the greatest sense of being free. Interrupt this flow and the sense of freedom is suspended. We should think of freedom as equivalent to being. We can picture freedom as a stream leaping down a mountainside, as a river flowing to the sea. The river is simply obeying a law of nature, gravity, but in the process of fulfilling its destiny to reach the ocean, it is free. It loses the image of freedom when it is dammed. Stopping the flow denotes a loss of freedom. The river in its flow to the sea is simply being a river. It stops being a river when it is dammed, and becomes a lake. There is also a life current in a person, which flows through time as the river flows through space. Its destiny is to merge at the end of the individual’s life in the great ocean. We can go with the current, or we can try to slow it down or to stop it. In the latter case we will lose our freedom and still not overcome our fate
When feelings are strong, one knows what one wants. Then one has to think only about how to get it. But even here one’s feelings can guide one. The result is a type of behavior that is open, direct, and in most cases, effective. Difficulties arise when feelings are ambivalent or when they are suppressed and the person doesn’t know what he wants. In this case one is required to think and to make decisions that can never work out for the best, since the conflicts underlying the ambivalence or the suppression of feeling have not been resolved.
One of the most common complaints of patients is tiredness. Often the feeling of tiredness becomes more acute as the therapy progresses. It can develop into a feeling of exhaustion. This feeling of fatigue is almost never accepted by the patient as a normal body condition. It is invariably regarded as a mark of weakness, as denoting a failure of the therapy and of the person’s will. He complains that he lacks the drive he formerly had, that he isn’t able to do as much as before. The implication is that being tired is “wrong,” a sign of failure. The belief is that one should be active, productive, and efficient. This image constitutes an ego ideal that the person has incorporated from the teachings he received at home and in school.
By definition, ideals are never realized. This means that the person is driven by a continuing force to do, to produce, to achieve (whatever it takes to fulfill the image). The drive is a compulsion and constitutes neurotic behavior. No wonder the person is tired. Feeling tired can be interpreted as a statement by the body that it is “tired” of being harnessed by the ego to fulfill an image that has no relation to the body’s needs. There is no purpose in achieving if the achievement does nothing to maintain or enhance the pleasure of being.
Both the cliff-hanger and the neurotic have every reason to be exhausted. The neurotic is also holding on physically in the form of chronic muscular tensions designed to suppress feeling. Exhaustion effectively stops the compulsive drive to go and to do. Giving in to the tiredness, which is a giving in to the body, would have the same effect-it would allow, the person to recover his energy and renew his enthusiasm for living.
Letting go does not mean regression to an infantile way of being. Doing and achieving are neurotic only when they are used as substitutes for being. There is pleasure in doing even when it requires an effort, provided it is not a compulsive activity. Success has a sweet taste when it comes by itself but a bitter one if the person has sacrificed himself for it. Also when success comes by itself, the person doesn’t experience it as success. He mightly simply say, “Something nice happened to me.” And since there is no striving, there can be no failure either. Where life is not measured in terms of achievement, there is neither success nor failure, just the pleasure and pain of being and doing.
The attempt to transcend our animal nature must end in failure. We are fundamentally animals, different in degree but not in kind. We are born and die, as they do. We all share in the great adventure of living. What we do is not important; it is how we live our lives that counts. It is not the end that matters (we all come to the same end) but the journey itself. Achievement can add spice to living, but it is not living in itself. Living takes place on the bodily or animal level. And on this level the important thing is feeling. Only living organisms can feel. The question is not whether we achieve anything but whether we live our lives fully. To live fully is to have all one’s senses and feelings available for the experience of living.
Success and failure are ego concepts. On the body level, success is experienced as rising and failing as falling. Falling is part of life. If there is no falling, there can be no rising. If there is no death, there can be no rebirth. Rising and falling, expanding and contracting, are what life is about. If we are afraid of life, we are afraid to fall. We are afraid to fall asleep and afraid to fall in love. Persons who are blessed with health and have fully lived the day welcome the sweet rest of sleep. By surrendering to its oblivion they awake in the morning renewed and refreshed. The best example of this cycle of life is the function of the phallus. It rises with desire and falls when the desire is spent in satisfaction. Who would want to have a perpetual erection? Who would want to be driven by a desire that can never be fulfilled? How beautiful it is to rise and soar on wings of desire when we know that fulfillment is possible and that we shall return safely to earth
The coming down is the important part, for this is where the true pleasure and satisfaction are experienced. Going up is exciting and tensing, but coming down is satisfying and releasing. Children know this from their swings; the pleasure and thrill of the descent is what they seek, that lovely sensation in the pit of the belly as one goes through the fall. The higher the swing flies, the greater the pleasure when it comes down. Riding a roller coaster provides a similar experience. There is excitement, tension, and anticipatory pleasure in the ascent. Then, as the cars reach and pass the crest and start their plunge, one knows the thrill of the fall. And after the ride is over, one has a sense of satisfaction as if one had accomplished something meaningful.
The aspiration to be godlike is expressed in some creative action. It doesn’t matter what one creates. It is the act of creation that is godlike, not the product. Thus, the simple act of making wine or bread, using one’s imagination to effect a transformation of nature, is the kind of creativity that is associated with the godhead. Gardening and farming are similar activities. In all these activities there is a rise and fall of excitement, a buildup and discharge of tension. In making bread, for example, the excitement mounts until the bread comes out of the oven. At this point we turn to the satisfaction of consumption, which is the pleasure of descent. Think how hung up we would be if we were not allowed to eat the bread our mother baked.
am not free from tensions, problems, or daily cares. My books are not best sellers, and my institute is small and struggling. But I have consistent pleasure in my life and my work. However, pain is not absent either. The big change in my life occurred some years ago when I accepted my failure. Since then I have gained peace of mind, inner contentment, and some wisdom. Part of that wisdom is the realization that success and failure are not valid criteria for living.
Failure has always had a positive effect upon me. It has been my best teacher. It made me stop and look at my self-destructive behavior. It enabled me to make a fresh start, with all the excitement and enthusiasm of a new beginning. And by accepting failure I became free from the struggle to overcome an inner sense of failure. I started this study by discussing the problem of people’s inability to learn from experience. I believe that a major factor is their unwillingness to accept failure. They are determined to succeed and so will make the same mistake’s again
Accepting failure is not resignation but self-acceptance. No real character change occurs in therapy until the person accepts himself as a failure. This acceptance liberates the energy tied up in the struggle to succeed and to prove oneself and makes it available for growth. In the same way, the acceptance of fate changes one’s fate. By giving up the effort to overcome fate we let go of our neurotic character structure, and a healthy character can develop, which determines a different fate
