The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'

by Michael Soth
Soth, M. (2000) The integrated bodymind's view on ‘body/mind integration'.
AChP Newsletter 2000
This was written up as an article following a presentation to the Chiron Association's (AChP)
AGM in 1999. During the presentation itself I more or less did the opposite of what I was
talking about and modelled a fairly dis-integrated stance. The learning from that experience
then inspired this article which - amongst other things - formulates for the first time publicly
(at least in Chiron history) a list of strong criticisms of Reich. But it also outlines the
principles of re-integrating the psychoanalytic and Reichian tradition and addresses some of
the conceptual re-formulations which then become necessary. As it is addressed to
association member, friends and colleagues, it is written fairly casually.

Introductory Health Warning

I understand that when I use the notion of
‘body/mind integration’, I am inviting history. I
am inviting collective history and I am inviting
personal history. For the majority of association
members, this should be a loaded, emotionally-
charged concept.
So let me come clean: I do understand that in the
body-oriented tradition it is one of the ‘big values’,
right next to brushing your teeth every evening,
breathing properly and the Holy Grail.
Whatever ‘orgastic potency’ and ‘genital character’
are for Reich, what the ‘integrated adult’ is for TA,
what the ‘order of love’ for Hellinger,
‘enlightenment’ for the buddhists, I suspect
‘body/mind integration’ is right in there - in the
‘higher echelons’ - for AChP as an organisation.
We’re talking serious idealisation. Wherever we’re
talking serious idealisation, we suspect serious
pain and deficiency, some source of urgency and
maybe desperate need. And whenever we put this
explosive mix together, we’re also talking serious
disappointment. It may not be something we have
been warned about when we got the ticket for our
descent to this planet, but any good fairy tale will
tell us that these things hang together.
So let me spell out the fundamental warning right
from the beginning: ‘body/mind integration’ is as
dangerous, misleading, unhelpful a concept as any
other theoretical construct, but especially if used or
imagined as an ideal, goal or objective to be
brought about in a client by the therapist (in which
case it should carry a health-warning!).
I do think ‘body/mind integration’ can be a very
useful concept, if it is used as a ‘perceptual tool’. My
perception of the current (here & now) degree of
‘body/mind integration’ in the client, in me and in
the relationship can tell me about the unconscious
dynamic, the working alliance and possible
‘emergencies’ from an holistic perspective.
Every therapist is internally busy with these
relational preoccupations, but ‘body/mind
integration’ can help us into a fuller, holistic
awareness of them. Essentially, it is an avenue into
fuller awareness of the depth of conflict and pain,
and also the potential for pleasure and
transformation present in the relationship.
When we have theoretical discussions on the theme
of ‘body/mind integration’, what really makes
people idealise or dismiss the concept (and its
possible use as such a ‘perceptual tool’), is their own
longing for integration or their own disappointment in
that possibility.
Just because it’s a suitable label for what most
people intuit to be a desirable state, does not
automatically mean that I am indeed promising or
selling it as a normative ideal or goal for therapy.
Because it’s desirable, it may well be something
which clients expect or demand, but that does not
necessarily mean I take it on as what I’m being
paid to deliver. It is therapists’ own hope for
integration, happiness, transcendence which
attaches itself to any such notion of a desirable
state; they are then susceptible to believing it is
their responsibility to bring it about. ‘Body/mind

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integration’ then becomes a goal, an onerous task
to be urgently achieved or a false, misleading and
ultimately disappointing ideal to be resisted.
Is integration possible ? Many people rather take
refuge in a firm, repetitive ‘no’ than hold open an
uncertain possibility which they intuit they are not
in control of. Many other people, of course, take
refuge in some blind faith that if they follow the
right procedure, integration will be possible,
implying the illusion that they do have control
over it.
‘Body/mind integration’ is, of course, just the other
side of the coin of the ‘body/mind’ split. Because
it’s the cultural soup we’re still swimming in, we
cannot really think from outside it. It is very, very
difficult to experience the split and/or to think
about it without getting split and perpetuating
splitting. It’s hard to be in touch with the pain of
the split, and not take sides, and not try and force a
premature resolution; to look into the abyss and not
be compelled to abort the process by pushing for
closure, one way or the other.
Thinking about this understandable urge for
closure, conclusion, settling the agonising pull
between hope and despair for once and all, always
brings to my mind a particular memory.
I remember the end of a session where a client had had
one of the most serious and devastating external and
internal set-backs that I have ever come across. He was
scraping the existential barrel, and consequently driving
himself to the brink of his suicidal past. It wasn’t even a
question of therapy, and whether it was working or
whether there was a point to it. We both felt hopeless
and despairing, spending most of the session in some
sort of stupor. Me taking any therapeutic perspective or
stance in the face of his experience would have been a
sham, a farce, a joke, and we both knew it. He got up to
leave and said something to the effect of: “what is the
point of coming next time, if I’m still around ?” My
mind was blank, except for one thought (partially a left-
over from the previous evening’s teaching group where
I’d been talking about holding the tension, between
friend and doctor, colluding and objectifying, between
‘something desperately has to happen’ and ‘don’t force
anything to happen’). Something was on the tip of my
tongue - I had actually had the thought several times
and dismissed giving it a voice - I just couldn’t imagine
saying it. I was certain he would walk out and slam the
door in my face if I said it. I would not just be wrecking
any joint future, it seemed I would actually be
trivialising his life struggle (a significant chunk of
which I had been part of).
But something in me pushed me to say it anyway, so I
said it: “isn’t that making it a bit simple for yourself?”
It proved to be one of the most containing little
utterances that have ever graced my lips. The moral of
the story - in prose terms - is that sometimes to
apparently decide to give up is easier than holding the
tension. To polarise to the negative (‘there is no point’),
to put the apparently last and final nail into the coffin, is
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
easier than being in limbo in between the polarities of
hope and despair. In fact, we are usually not in a
position to make that decision - the longing and the hope
cannot be renounced by conscious decision only.
My experience of the AGM and the
purpose of this write-up
In my talk at the AGM I did not hold any of the
tension and I miserably failed the title of my
presentation: I got stuck into the polarisations and
never talked that much from - or even about - the
‘third position’.
We never got near the promised contemplation bit
(I had proposed to contemplate what ‘body/mind’
integration might look like from within an
integrated ‘body/mind’).
This is very normal: we talk about the polarisation
of body and mind, and - surprise, surprise - we
polarise. We talk about how body and mind are
split - and we split. We talk about how the split
may find resolution and we still split. We can talk
about the possibilities of ‘body/mind integration’
from a bias in the body and we construct a whole
therapeutic universe around it. On the other hand
we can talk about the vicissitudes of ‘body/mind
integration’ from a bias in the mind, and we
inhabit the polar-opposite universe. As long as
internally we oscillate between body and mind, as
long as we can’t manage to hold the tension
between them, as long as we sense/feel/think
oppositionally, we will polarise externally.
In discussions on the AGM several questions
emerged:
Is the concept of ‘body/mind integration’ useful ?
Is the concept of ‘body/mind split’ useful ?
What do we mean by ‘split’ ?
I did initially write up the discussions around these
more abstract questions and my responses to them,
but decided to leave them out of this article (I am
happy to send the relevant few pages to anybody
on request). Dialogue about these questions is
apparently meant to achieve a shared meta-
position from which to hold the polarisations, but
in my experience the apparent dialogue actually
replicates the polarisation energetically after all.
So rather than a philosophically watertight
exposition of these abstract questions, here’s the
colloquial version of my response to these
questions:
Little bits of ‘body/mind integration’ happen all
the time, and from within the experience there is
no doubt in anybody’s mind whether it’s ‘good’ or
useful. Of course it is. It happens. Just the same as
shit happens, integration happens. Occasionally.
Temporarily. Not as a permanent undying state,
but as a precious moment in the process
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nonetheless; as a moment we’re also bound to lose
again, because impermanence is ‘rule no 1’ in our
cosmos. If it wasn’t for impermanence, we
wouldn’t lose it, but then we wouldn’t have the
possibility of even deeper integration later.
Whatever experience I associate with the term
‘body/mind integration’, once I’ve tasted it, of
course I want more of it. We can create space, we
can try and hold the space, we can push and fail,
we can even imagine we can make it happen and
torture ourselves, but we can’t make it happen.
Essentially it’s paradoxical: it’s co-created grace.
In this write-up I want to reverse the emphasis of
my talk. I want to briefly summarise the way I see
the polarisation affecting us as an association, then
suggest how it accurately focusses us on certain
blind spots in our tradition, and then concentrate
on how we might begin to imagine a ‘third
position’, particularly in regard to some of the
inherited wounds and how they are reflected in
our theory.
‘Body/Mind’ polarisations within AChP -
idealisations and disappointments
I think it’s fair to say that as a group of therapists,
the majority of us have been swinging from some
sort of idealisation of the body to disappointment
of that idealisation. How often do I hear the post-
certificate cry: “I’ve done all this therapy and
training - now that I’m finally working with
people, I find I just don’t believe in therapy any
more. I end up sitting in chairs and talking. I
wonder whether there is any point to it at all. How
can I work as a therapist when I don’t believe in
therapy myself ? How can I invite clients into a
process when I know it’s not going to deliver what
they’re asking and hoping for ? Isn’t that
fraudulent - how can I offer therapy when I haven’t
got a clue how or whether it even works ?”
This is a well-known process whatever the
orientation of the training: students will be
attracted to a particular approach and organisation
and go through a therapeutic process, not just in
their therapy, but also in relation to the approach
itself and the organisation that provides it.
Students (in any training) wouldn’t bother to make
the initial commitment unless they were first able
to indulge in defensively idealising the approach
they’ve chosen. At this stage ‘good-enough’ is not
‘good-enough’ - it has to be perfect!
Students go on a trip with it: ‘our approach as the
guaranteed and predictable pathway to health,
happiness and general redemption’. The approach
is constructed as an ideal object, promising to cure
at the very least my own, but probably all my
family’s and ideally all of humanity’s ills.
Chiron is no exception. The only thing that is
particular is the object of idealisation: in our case
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
the most likely candidate is the body. The recovery
of the neglected, repressed, alienated, beaten and
abused body and its restitution as a wise, self-
regulating source of being is part and parcel of the
idea of ‘body/mind integration’.
It’s quite close to Rousseau’s notion of ‘the noble
savage’, and as with many ideals: heads had to -
and in the end - did roll.
My proposition is that as association members we
are all in various and often opposing stages of that
swing between idealisation and disappointment,
with various degrees of attachment to what we
individually take to be our current position. I have
the impression that some people cling to the
idealisation for good (as this becomes very
exhausting and draining in practice, this group has
a tendency to shrink).
I see many of us managing to hold on to and
salvage various shreds and pockets of idealisation.
I hear people fight against their erstwhile naiveté
and ‘blind faith’ in the body and Body
Psychotherapy. I hear people take fixed positions
which sound like disappointment elevated into
theory. Rather than still being in some process of
‘swinging’ between the polarities, it then sounds
like they have swung too far and are throwing out
the baby with the bathwater.
My question here is: what comes after
disappointment ? And how do we recognise what
comes after ?
For me, one ingredient of worked-through
disappointment involves some sense of having
owned and embraced my original impulse to
idealise. I guess, this might show itself as the
capacity to forgive ourselves for our initial naiveté
and to lovingly hold that impulse to idealise. We
then might find in it a kernel of inspiration which
reflects a part of our soul that saw something
through and in spite of the idealisation. I don’t see
us as having collectively found such a position
which is true to our original impulse. I think I
would recognise it by the mature passion it would
emanate - a passion that has both ‘patience’ /
equanimity and ‘wildness’ / drive in it.
The most salient feature of the association is that
we’ve all been through the Chiron training. It is an
enormous organisational challenge that for most of
us our emotional position on the idealisation /
disappointment spectrum is bound up with
particular interactions with particular people within
the association. Just imagine, all the exciting and
disappointing objects in the room, when we’re
having an AGM - it’s a miracle that the ceiling
doesn’t come down. To be blunt about it: a
considerable part of whatever we take to be our
‘theoretical position’ (e.g. in relation to the ‘body’
or ‘body/mind integration’) may well be
unresolved transference to Chiron and not at all
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amenable to purely theoretical reflection and
discussion. I do not at all exclude myself and
everything I am saying here from this: I am not
assuming that my ‘theoretical position’ is free from
this.
Considering the creative potential of now about a
hundred individuals, who have collectively spent
at least half a million pounds and countless hours
of their lives working to embody themselves and
their potential, frequent exhortations for
contributions to the newsletter seem to find a
rather pitiful response. Where is our enthusiasm,
creativity, spontaneity, willingness to play ? What
the hell is going on in this association?
I suggest that the main block to people’s
spontaneity, creativity and capacity for making un-
self-conscious contributions within the association
is this underlying, unintegrated, transference-
ridden conflicted spectrum between idealisation
and disappointment.
The polarisation between ‘idealisers of the body’
and ‘disappointers in the body’ reflects the
culturally pervasive polarisation between body
and mind. We are magnets for collective and
primal pain. So it’s not surprising that sometimes
we don’t seem to get much done. I think a
considerable amount of association energy goes
into the polarisations described above, and in my
experience over the last 10 years association
business ends up not being much fun. I feel this
association has suffered and still suffers from the
above polarisations, which - both generally and
very practically - too often block initiative, passion
and creativity. To recent members some of what
I’m saying about us as an organisation may seem a
bit over the top. You have to remember that I have
been with the agonisingly slow process of the
association’s development from the beginning, and
much of what I’m saying here has that backlog of
charge which I’m trying to lay to rest for myself.
I’m also writing in the hope that some of it may be
helpful when you’re in the thick of it and you’re
caught in between being a student and being an
independent therapist, with considerable and
intense ambivalence toward the association,
Chiron, Body Psychotherapy. This is an issue I am
exposed to and struggle with every week in the
training and especially in supervision with post-
certificate therapists as they struggle towards
finding their own style, position, authority.
Training or ‘Chinese whispers’ ?
None of our teaching escapes that fateful
development from idealisation to some sort of
disappointment. Every one of our concepts I see
being used, abused, distorted, misunderstood, re-
translated at both ends of that spectrum. For many
students the moment where gold turns to dust
happens in the third year. The fantasy of the
omnipotent body-magician who slowly but surely
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
disabuses the client of their now unnecessary
defences and melts the client’s character armour
with relentless and persistent midwifing turns into
confusion, helplessness, failure, loss of therapeutic
position. We’re coming home to the wound aspect
of the ‘wounded healer’, not as something that the
therapist has finally outgrown and overcome, as
certificated by the seal of the Chiron diploma, but
as something that we continuously work from as
therapists.
How students hear or use our concepts, our
teaching, our modelling depends largely on where
they are in this idealisation-disappointment
process. There isn’t one concept that I haven’t at
some point seen changed beyond all recognition
(not to say: mutilated), either by the need to
maintain the idealisation or by the impulse to
stamp out the idealisation in bitter disappointment.
Swinging between these two polarities is too
simple. There is more complex and hard work to be
done. All models, concepts and tools can obviously
be used therapeutically or counter-therapeutically.
In my own language I’d say: all therapeutic
models, concepts and tools can become vehicles for
re-enactment of the client’s pattern in the
therapeutic relationship. And each therapeutic
approach inherits its own tendencies to take certain
re-enactments for granted and to miss their
relational significance. There is, of course, an
intricate interweaving of the therapist’s inner
world and the therapeutic training they are
attracted to. So we can say that we inherit a
particular set of insensitivities from our original
parents, and another, related and often
exacerbating set of obliviousnesses from our
therapeutic parents.
These wounds want to be embraced to the point where
we can hold the tension between idealisation and
disappointment.
Disappointment in Reich, in the body, in
Chiron
In the long process of (re-)finding our original
impulse, I have an image of us as the prodigal sons
and daughters of Wilhelm Reich, still fairly lost in
the wilderness. And - it has to be said - we left
Daddy Wilhelm for some very good reasons, which
I haven’t yet heard spelt out bluntly, so here goes.
When we describe a therapeutic approach, we are
used to thinking about its characteristics in terms
of theory and technique. To this I want to add a
third characterising feature: the implicit
therapeutic/relational stance.
If I take all of them into account, the main problem
with the particular combination of theory,
technique and implicit therapeutic/relational
stance which Reich modelled himself is that in my
current opinion it doesn’t actually work. Why not?
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The theory is great for being non-dualistic and
holistic, the techniques are powerful, some of his
scientific findings merit more attention than they
get, his meta-psychology is in some ways original,
ground-breaking, vital.
What really sucks is his therapeutic stance which is
superior, objectifying, medical, righteous (for a
taste of his objectification of the women in his life,
his therapising - according to his criteria - of each
and everyone he came into contact with, read his
letters in the book “Beyond Psychology”). He
seems profoundly incapable of mutual relating,
and his theory is profoundly unrelational, both
internally and externally. He does not conceive of
internal relationship in any significant shape or
form, and therefore doesn’t make use of his own
relationship to himself as therapist, i.e. he does not
work with countertransference in any way I can
recognise.
There can be no doubt that he had extraordinary
perception, incisiveness and clinical acumen (that’s
why he got to leading the Vienna Clinical Seminar
in the 1920’s), apart from a good portion of
narcissistic charisma. And for him, this
combination may have worked ‘well-enough’ in his
therapeutic activities. He certainly won over a
good many of his clients to his cause, and that
wasn’t just because he had a revolutionary theory.
However, for us following in his footsteps 60 years
later, some of Reich’s character traits are reflected
in major blind-spots in our theory and practice,
partly through being exacerbated by his pupils and
followers. To name just a few:
Character structures are the only solidly holistic
typology I know about; if I want to categorise
people, I might as well use an accurate and
organically-rooted model. So far, so good. But
Reich’s version was anything but comprehensive:
significantly Stephen Johnson had to add two
character structures at the narcissistic stage to
make up for a complete ‘hole’ between Reich’s
‘oral’ and ‘masochistic’ stages (that stage between
oral need and masochistic independence is the
crucial turning point in the Kleinian conception of
childhood development (e.g. rapprochement) - so
how come it just disappears in Reich’s version ?
Isn’t is an educated guess that Reich’s own early
history may have something to do with it?).
Reich pays little attention to the ego and its internal
workings (Fairbairn’s notion of the splitting of the
ego into the libidinal and the anti-libidinal ego is
therefore an important complement to Reich;
unfortunately Fairbairn seems to lose the ‘Id’ in the
process) - theoretically he is impatient with the ego
and wants to address and access the neglected and
denied ‘animal’; he therefore wants to undercut the
ego; in his defence it needs to be said that in
practice, however, he is more discerning and
recommends working closest to the ego (e.g. in his
chapter - written in the early 1940’s, i.e. with some
hindsight - ‘On character analytic technique’ in
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
“The Function of the Orgasm”), i.e. this theory,
technique and relational stance are not a
homogenous, congruent system, but his work is
full of inherent contradictions (he ‘preaches’ one
thing and does another).
Reich consequently underrates the importance of
the ego’s capacity for symbolisation, which means
he falls foul of a central pillar of analytic theory.
Analysis relies on the ego and its capacity for
verbalisation, mental understanding and
symbolisation as a central pillar of the ‘cure’, of
therapeutic change. The fact that Reich not only
underestimates and ignores it, but actively tries to
undercut the ego, makes him easy fodder for
attacks both by Freudians and Jungians; but others
are equally offended: Juliet Mitchell (in
‘Psychoanalysis and Feminism’) questions Reich’s
politically radical reputation because of this, and
says that the revolutionary potential of Freud’s
‘unconscious fantasy’ is much more significant
than Reich’s impetus towards sexual liberation.
Without paying much attention to symbolisation,
Reich is liable to underestimate the significance of
fantasy (that’s why Conger is so enthusiastic about
the combination of Reich and Jung, and why - as
Body Psychotherapists - we can learn so much
from the Jungian conception, as for example
expressed by James Hillman, of the primacy of the
‘image’, i.e. fantasy and symbol: Hillman would
argue that there is no such thing as the actual body,
only a variety of - archetypally determined -
fantasies about the body which in turn mediate our
experience of it).
As Reich maintained an active, if not attacking,
stance against the client’s ego, he maintained a
focussed and separate position in the relationship.
Because of this implicit relational stance (separate,
superior, objectifying) - he is liable - if not
guaranteed - to miss projective identification and
other fused states in the relationship. And he
models and inaugurates for the Body
Psychotherapy tradition a therapeutic stance which
essentially constructs the therapist as an enemy of
the client’s ego.
Reich was very sensitive to the patient’s secretly
hostile construction of therapy and the therapist.
He attacked his analytic colleagues for colluding
with the patient’s ego by relying on and indulging
‘positive transference’, and for being naive about
the extent to which the patient’s ego could adapt
and pervert analytic procedure and principles. He
set himself much more demanding standards for
what might be achievable and what he wanted to
achieve: he wanted to develop a systematic and
efficient way of overcoming the ego’s defences
against surrender to organismic and orgastic
experience. He assumed that the only reason why
his analytic colleagues did not join him in his
mission was out of their own fears and inhibitions -
he saw them as trying to dodge ‘the animal’. He
was rightly impatient with their double standards
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(theoretically reducing all human functioning to
primitive, sexual drives, but:
a) excluding their own quasi-scientifc objectivity
and neutrality from this pervasive human
condition,
b) excluding the immediate experience of the
‘primitive’ from the consulting room by a variety
of frame manoeuvres, and
c) excluding the ‘Id’ and the body by giving the ego
primacy in their conception of the healthy
resolution through impulse control and
symbolisation).
On every count he polarised against them and
against the civilised ego which he saw them as
colluding with and succumbing to. He saw them as
underestimating the ego in its effect on the
perpetuation of the underlying neurotic conflict
(sexual and orgastic stasis), and therefore as not
using their theory and understanding consequently
enough to break through and get underneath the
diluting, defensive and resistant functions of the
ego.
But in thinking he had the power to single-
handedly disabuse his patients from their
unnecessarily restrictive ego and liberate them into
immediate experience of health-giving genital
functioning, Reich in turn underestimated the
power of the patient’s ego. He took a fixed, quasi-
medical therapeutic position (against the patient’s
ego) and was then oblivious to the relational
dynamics he was thereby enacting. There must
have been a good number of patients who - by
identifying with the ‘aggressor’ - benefited from
submitting to him and willingly acquired the
gospel according to Wilhelm.
But vegetotherapy or orgone therapy is just as
assimilable or subvertible by the patient’s ego as
anything else. In my view it is perfectly possible
and actually fairly common for body therapists to
re-enact the body/mind split - I have written an
article for Self & Society on this theme (Soth, M.
(1999) "Relating to and with the Objectified Body',
Self & Society, 27(1), p. 32 - 38).
The essential principle which alerts us to this
legacy of obliviousness can be formulated as
follows:
it is impossible for a therapist to construct their
stance and role as having to habitually pursue
strategies of undercutting and circumventing the
client’s ego/defence/resistance without being
experienced as enacting in the transference the
very person/figure/object which that
ego/defence/resistance was originally developed
against.
Analysis as a refuge for ‘human relating’ ?
So in swinging from idealisation of the body into
disappointment, we understandably take refuge in
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
people whom we see as capable of making up for
how we feel Reich failed and betrayed us. We look
for people who will not bypass whatever kernel of
individuality may reside in our ego, but have a
modicum of interest in our thoughts and dreams.
Maybe we don’t want to be reduced to animals,
albeit healthy, orgastic ones. Maybe we’ve
exhausted ourselves in repetitive hopeful catharsis,
trying to re-capture and reclaim an aliveness which
was in fact damaged long ago. Maybe we’ve come
to the end of using regression as an avoidance of
the painful recognition that that damage persists
today; that the extent of the damage exceeds our
control. Maybe we’re ready to look for intimacy in
our woundedness rather than compulsively trying
to overcome it, imagining that we have to rid
ourselves of our pathology as a pre-condition for
intimacy. Maybe we’re fed up with Reich’s
literalness, inflation, quasi-medical unrelatedness.
Reich’s narcissistic idealisation of the body
urgently requires Klein’s notion of the ‘depressive
position’ for containment. Following this urge, we
are then drawn to people who have been talking
about relationship dynamics for a long time, who
are more modest in their promises, who are less
pushy and primitive. Psychoanalysis then appears
as a more solid tradition, more stayed and mature,
more holding. Psychoanalysis has had its own
splits and internal battles, and has steadily
recovered from its original reductionism (see
Greenberg and Mitchell: “Object Relations in
Psychoanalytic Theory” which beautifully outlines
the historic development and the tension between
drive theory and object relations).
Talking about a swing from body idealisation
toward analytic ‘depressive position’ is tricky as
there are quite a variety of analytic positions; as
there are, of course, different ways to inhabit the
‘depressive position’: we can on the one hand
imagine a grudging, resigned acceptance of such
uncomfortable realities as the co-existence of ‘good’
and ‘bad’, the separateness of the other in the face
of our need of them, the limitations to our
omnipotence, etc. Or on the other hand we can
imagine a more creative, pleasurable and joyful
experience of these realities, in Balint’s
‘harmonious interpenetrating mix’ or some of
Winnicott’s descriptions of the delights of play.
However, the move to the ‘depressive position’ - as
necessary as it is - may turn out to be a jump from
the frying pan into the fire. On the whole, analytic
attention to relationship typically comes at a price,
i.e. re-enactment of the ‘body/mind split’ from the
other side: idealisation of the mind (“where Id was
there Ego shall be”). We may be letting into the
back door all kinds of dualistic and patriarchal
assumptions (about linear development, linear
time, hierarchical rather than holistic kinds of
order, mind over matter, and so on) which Reich
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rightly railed against. Psychoanalysis as a
discipline is shot through with 19th century
paradigms - it’s got imperialism, dualism,
reductionism, positivism written all over it in big
neon letters.
A third position ?!?
Neither idealisation of the body nor
disappointment of that idealisation sit comfortably
with me. Neither traditional Body Psychotherapy
nor traditional psychoanalysis help me to hold the
tension enough - between body and mind, between
longing and loss, between omnipotence and
depressive position, between despair and
transformation.
I propose that there is an important death beyond
idealisation. I propose that there is life beyond the
‘depressive position’.
My suggestion is that we’re going to go round in
the cycles of the various polarisations until we de-
construct both positions (idealisation and
disappointment), by remaining open to the
possibility that there is indeed a third. The third
will have something of both in it, something
precious. The good thing about idealisation is that
it has the seeds of passion in it. Because for all his
outrageous literalness, his orgasm-addiction, his
grandiosity, his unwillingness to relate, I still think
Reich was onto something.
I suggest that in all the idealisation of the body
which drew me (and maybe you) to Reich, there is
a kernel of a - let’s call it - ‘spiritual realisation’
which is of incredible value to our time.
The main problem with this ‘spiritual realisation’
inherent in Reich’s original impulse - as with any
other ‘spiritual realisation’, I guess - is what Wilber
calls the ‘Atman-project’. He proposed the notion
that what may in principle be a correct spiritual
intuition inevitably goes through a phase of being
appropriated by the ‘ego’ - Atman turns into the
Atman-project. So when we get disappointed with
the idea of ‘body/mind integration’, we want to be
careful that we don’t throw out the baby Atman of
‘body/mind integration’ with the undoubtedly
dirty and repulsive, but understandably tempting
bathwater of the ‘body/mind integration’-project.
Embracing both the idealised Reichian project and
how it failed me, how I looked elsewhere and how
I come back to the original impulse, I can then
begin to integrate Reich with whomever I escaped
to in my disappointment.
I suggest that the key ingredient in this is to
formulate Reich’s - often precious - concepts not
from an objectifying, but from a ‘wounded healer’
position, which is what I want to begin to do in the
second part of this article by looking at some
central notions of our tradition like ‘body/mind
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
split’, character structure, working alliance, ego,
vasomotoric cycle etc.
Body/Mind Integration Part II
In the first part of this article I suggested that as an
association we oscillate and polarise between
idealisation and disappointment in relation to our
origin: Reich and - let’s call it - the promise of the
liberated, sexually free ‘animal’-body. In reflecting
on my own infatuation with - or shall we say:
appreciation of - Reichian theory and tradition and
my subsequent disappointments, it becomes clear
to me how I have swung between different
approaches, and how I have neatly projected my
primary scenario into the various fathers and
mothers of psychotherapy.
What attracts us to a particular approach ? What’s
the process by which our idealisation swings away
from one of these ‘therapeutic parents’ and gets
hooked onto another ?
We are used to describing each approach in terms
of its theory and technique, but as I suggested
before, a more comprehensive grasp of the character
of a therapeutic position also requires attention to
the implicit relational stance which theory and
technique are both an expression of and often at
odds with. How therapists actually operate in the
relationship may be very different from what they
do or think they do or say they do (or teach they
do).
There are inherent rifts and contradictions within
each of our therapeutic parents (between their
theory and their implicit stance, between theory
and practice, etc) which partially reflect the
historical relationships between them as actual
people. Through our training we inherit these
unresolved issues which then colour the
congruency and tensions between our own theory,
technique and implicit relational stance.
As an association, how can we hope to find a
ground which goes beyond enacting these
historical splits and our own swinging between
idealisation and disappointment ?
I am here reminded of the ‘integrative triangle’ I
used to refer to a few years ago in the Charge
teaching - an oversimplified account of how an
integrative position needs to do at least justice to
Freud, Reich and Jung. We could say that on a
variety of basic issues there is a collusive
agreement between any two of them which
requires the third to counteract and balance it (e.g.
Freud and Reich’s shared focus on sexuality and
biology versus Jung’s ‘opus contra naturam’; Freud
and Jung’s reliance on the mind to access the
symbolic versus Reich’s physicality and gross
literalness, Reich and Jung’s shared optimism
Page 7
versus Freud’s Saturnian sense of limitation and
boundary).
The idea of this Freud-Jung-Reich triangle was that
a position between idealisation and disppointment
becomes more possible the more we plummet the
rifts and conflicts between the three of them - and
the archetypal positions they inhabit and represent
- in ourselves. We really need to identify with - and
maybe get lost - in each of them, before we
recognise the depth of our habitual biases. A useful
exercise, both individually (and maybe for the
association collectively) is to imagine the Freud,
Reich and Jung in myself and each of us, and to
fantasise a continuation of the unfinished struggles
between them. This would include the use of
therapeutic weapons to pathologise each other,
which may open the possibility that they could
actually also be therapeutically helpful to each
other rather than just defensively therapising each
other. In crude terms we could say that Reich,
Freud and Jung respectively champion body, mind
and spirit, and the transformational potential
inherent in each of them.
When I see our association as caught in chasing our
tails round the circles of the various - historically
entrenched - habitual biases, driven by the
polarisations between initial idealisation and
disillusioned reaction, the notion of a third position
becomes increasingly attractive. Reaching for such
a third position, being sorely disenchanted with
some of Reich’s grosser traits whilst remembering
the spark of spiritual intuition inherent in what I
think of as the ‘original impulse’, I arrived at the
conclusion that we need to re-formulate some of
our basic concepts from a ‘wounded healer’
position.
Rule 1: Re-formulating Reich relationally - re-
formulating Freud holistically / energetically
The general principle underlying the suggestion of
a ‘third position’ is to look at Reich’s energetic and
holistic concepts and re-formulate them
relationally. And, from the other polarity - which
many of us had to take refuge in - we look at
analytic relational concepts and ground them in the
body by formulating them holistically and
energetically as ‘body/mind’ relationships. Once
we’re at it, we discover remnants of reductive,
linear thinking as well as one-sided hierarchical
and patriarchal elements both in the Reichian and
in the analytic notion of the therapeutic position.
Thus we find in both approaches aspects which
imply unreflected obeisance to the medical model,
at odds with our notion of the ‘wounded healer’. I
therefore need to prepare the second principle by a
little excursion into ...
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
Excursion: Psychotherapy’s love-hate relationship
with the ‘Medical Model’
In humanistic circles we are accustomed to
vociferous and in many ways justified criticism of
the ‘medical model’, for being unrelational,
objectifying, unequal, counter-therapeutic. This
‘anti-medical model’ position, however, doesn’t do
justice to the complexities of the therapeutic
relationship, either. Paradoxically, the therapeutic
position implies and indeed ‘needs’ the medical
model - we can’t function without it, for several
reasons:
a) first and foremost, the client already has an
objectifying relationship to themselves which will
inevitably be projected into therapy and the
therapist, i.e. the client can’t help but construct
therapy as an objectifying relationship, anyway,
nevermind what the therapist intends or offers or
thinks about it; as therapists we want to meet the
client where they are and be available to be
constructed as ‘objectifying’ objects
b) without the capacity to also objectify the client
and have a reflective quasi-medical diagnosis, we
have nothing to catch up with the pressures for
fusion and merging at work on the more
primitive levels of the relationship; we are then
liable to get drawn into the client’s splits and
enact them unconsciously; the medical model is
both an expression of the fact that within the
‘European Split’ natural, spontaneous primitive
processes are split off and at the same time
provides the frame and the boundaries which
make containment of these same primitive
processes possible; in simple terms: we need our
own experience of being split and objectified in
order to relate to and do justice to the extremes of
splitting in the client - our capacity to relate needs
to embrace intense states of unrelatedness. We
don’t want to categorically rule out these kinds of
states as ‘un-therapeutic’ (along the lines of:
therapy is all about ‘contact’ or ‘connection’, as
opposed to treatment which is all about
objectification) because it is precisely these states
which propel the client into therapy in the first
place. These states of unrelatedness, of
objectification, split constitute the very suffering
which bring and keep the client committed to the
process.
c) as I have suggested before in this newsletter, the
medical model is rooted in an infantile longing
for perfectly-attuned, magical, omnipotent
mothering (the mother as Christopher Bollas’
‘transformational object’) - avoidance of the
medical model also sidesteps and minimises the
charge of this longing. By keeping the medical
model out of the precious relational realm of
therapy, the process thus loses an important
ingredient: the fuel for attachment and urgency
Page 8
Generally speaking, avoidance of the medical
model tends to result in more shallow, ego-
oriented ways of working which circumvent the
vicissitudes of power, exploitation, inequality,
asymmetry, etc. I therefore consider the medical
model an essential ingredient in a relational
therapeutic approach, also knowing that when we
subscribe wholesale to the medical model (or fall
into it unconsciously), we destroy the essence of
therapy. In his own love-hate relationship with the
medical model, Freud also said things like: “the
cure is essentially effected by love.”
Rule 2: formulate the therapeutic position
paradoxically: as conflicted
So a second principle is to not polarise against the
medical model, but to embrace it sufficiently (even
including its culturally assumed supremacy) and
formulate the therapeutic position paradoxically -
i.e. as an ongoing sense of conflict, from moment to
moment, from session to session. The capacity to sit
in conflict, to be used (and abused) as an object, to
hold ambiguity and uncertainty, to endure
regressed states without jumping into ‘solutions’
and ‘contracts’, to survive if not embrace (let alone
enjoy) paradox, is a necessary requirement for
surviving as a therapist.
A third position, therefore, involves embracing all
of the ‘medical model’ linearity and literalness
implicit in Reich’s stance (e.g. the idea of
‘genitality’ as the healthy pinnacle of development,
his one-dimensional focus on orgasm, etc.) and
formulating what’s precious about his perceptions
from the ‘wounded healer’ position as conflict and
paradox.
The ‘medical model’ is associated with the
Apollonic project of modern science, the (to be re-
formulated) notion of the body/mind split, linear,
objectifying, dualistic thinking (the - as Robert Bly
calls it - insult to matter / ‘mater’ inherent in the
assumed supremacy of mind over matter), and
various other unimaginative conceptual traps (e.g.
linearity of time) which fly in the face of
body/mind experience. We therefore want to
attend to unreflected remnants of this thinking in
our theory, not because they’re not ‘true’, but
because they’re not exclusively ‘true’.
Rule 3: formulate all ‘entities’ and ‘psychic
structures’ as energetic processes / relationships
As appreciation of relationship has had a few more
decades to develop in analytic discourse, here the
unreflected remnants of the medical model often
operate in a more hidden, implicit fashion, and are
encapsulated in theory (and meta-psychology)
rather than explicit therapeutic stance. From the
perspective of the third position we want to
appreciate all structural ‘entities’ and ‘objects’ as
they appear in analytic theory and re-formulate
them also as processes, relationships. For example,
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
it’s not only a fixed object that gets introjected
(that’s true in one way), it’s also a whole
relationship (Masterson, for example, comes close
to this when he talks about bi-polar relational
units).
I would now like to attempt to re-formulate a
selection of our basic concepts from an
approximation of such a third position. In
summary, I will do this by attempting to re-
formulate:
• Reichian concepts relationally
• analytic concepts holistically and energetically
• structural concepts as processes and
relationships
• medical model assumptions from a ‘wounded
healer’ position as paradox and conflict
The ‘body/mind split’
Reich had a clear notion that it is the chronic
opposition of body and mind which is at the root of
neurosis. He (and Lowen after him, see Lowen’s
metaphor of horse and rider for the body-mind
relationship) worked with the idea of the
functional identity of body and mind. The neurotic
body and mind are chronically split, the healthy
body/mind experiences spontaneously the
wholeness of that functional identity.
However, the term ‘body/mind split’, if taken
literally, lends itself to being used in a split way (as
illustrated in my article ‘Relating to and with the
Objectified Body’ in Self&Society, also Chiron
website). The tradition of Body Psychotherapy has
suffered from an ‘anti-head’ bias, both in terms of
theory and in terms of practice. It’s perfectly
possible and quite common for body therapists to
re-enact the client’s body/mind split in the
relationship whilst theoretically pursuing a clear
idea of body/mind integration and ‘wholeness’.
It’s very hard to think about the split without
taking sides either way and therefore splitting (e.g.
as Perls used to say: “Lose your head - come to
your senses!”). It was argued on the AGM that the
term ‘split’ in this context isn’t quite consistent
with its general use in analytic language. But rather
than inventing new terms, I’d like to present what I
consider a more refined and differentiated
meaning of the concept.
The term ‘body/mind split’ may remain fruitful if used
as a shorthand for the opposition between spontaneous
processes and reflective processes. This way of re-
formulating Reich’s idea of the conflict underlying
neurosis is not without difficulties, either, but, I
think, is closer to a phenomenological formulation
of my actual experience. It’s also consistent with
complexity theory and notions of ‘emergent’ versus
‘established’ structures. Ken Wilber has
comprehensively described the conflicting modes
of consciousness involved in the underlying
conflict (which he calls - in some ways more
precisely - the ‘European Split’).
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What do I mean by ‘reflective processes’ ? Human
beings (as we know them) seem to be both blessed
with and condemned to the capacity to interrupt,
react against, hold back and reflect on the
spontaneous processes outlined above. In the
context of the term ‘body/mind split’, ‘mind’ is
only useful as a shorthand for this capacity to
interrupt and hold back spontaneous processes.
Again, keeping this tranlation in mind, it is clear
immediately that ‘reflective processes’ actually
include far more than strictly mental ones: in order
to be effective, the force which reflects or reacts
against a spontaneous movement needs to affect all
levels from the mental right down to the physical.
This can be a deliberate, temporary reaction (i.e. a
holding, containing form of reflection), or it can be
a chronic, fixed, habitual pattern which occurs
outside of awareness. The first one is an important
source of human creativity (Jung’s ‘opus contra
naturam’). It’s the latter which Reich considered to
be the root of ‘neurosis’ and which deserves the
term ‘body/mind split’.
I would think that it was one of Freud’s great
contributions that he formulated the apparently
irreconcilable opposition between the pleasure
principle and the reality principle, between what
he calls primary process and secondary process,
and eventually Id and Ego. From within patriarchal
history we pursue the fantasy of mind over matter,
and it appears as if our mind were operating on
our bodies, as if the body/mind relationship was
just a one-way operation. And towards the end of
the 19th century that was the dominant scientific
fantasy (i.e. positivism and reductionism) which
Freud blew a hole into: he dared to say that
rationality was NOT the only or even the dominant
logic controlling experience and behaviour. He
took the risk of saying that there was a meaning
and a logic outside of the rational mind, irrational
but intelligible. He ‘listened’ to hysterical
conversion symptoms as if there might be a
meaningful communication contained in them, in
opposition to rational intention. We can think of it
now as oversimplified to see it as ‘body’ in conflict
with ‘mind’, but it was a revolutionary step then.
And that was what Reich latched onto and saw
himself developing, true to the origins of Freud’s
work.
Following Reich’s intuition, the main reason to
keep the term ‘body/mind split’ is because it does
justice to our experience of internal conflict
between spontaneous and reflective processes.
Within the split, some spontaneous processes are
chronically at war with other reflective ones and
the (at least temporary) potential wholeness of the
body/mind becomes habitually aborted through
being fragmented, split and conflicted.
The essence of the ‘body/mind split’ is that both
‘mind’ and ‘body’ lose their aliveness, their
rootedness in process, their mutual
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
interdependence and become fixed, static,
objectified. Processes turn into static entities.
Relationships (internal and external) turn into
power battles around fixed and habitual positions.
The ‘mind’ becomes dry, sterile and defensive,
rationalising its flight away from life, pain and
conflict. The ‘body’ becomes mechanical and
addictive, oscillating between lifelessness on the
one hand and insatiable greed and compulsion on
the other. Once processes have appeared to turn
into entities (like ‘my personality’, ‘my ego’, ‘my
addiction’), it then becomes essential that as
therapists we have an objectifying language which
does justice to the objectified experience.
So whilst on the one hand it’s experientially
evident that in most of us ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are
separate and at war, it is also true on the other
hand that ‘body’ and ‘mind’ are utterly
inseparable, intertwined, antagonistic and
complementary aspects of the same thing - their
separation can only be an illusory construction. I
see this as one of Reich’s revolutionary
contributions: the idea of the ‘functional identity’
of body and mind. From here, holism (as
comprehensively described and defined by Wilber
in “Sexuality, Spirituality & Ecology”) is only a
step away.
Because we’re clearly dealing with a paradox
(‘body’ and ‘mind’ are one and ‘body’ and ‘mind’
are two conflicting polarities), the term
‘body/mind split’ must remain confusing. On the
one hand I want to hold onto it because it conveys
an important experience and a valid focus for the
Reichian tradition, on the other hand I am trying to
expand the meaning of the term ‘body/mind split’
to the point of it becoming non-sensical. As Walt
Whitman said: “I contradict myself ? Very well
then - I contradict myself! I am large, I contain
multitudes.”
‘Body/Mind Integration’
In my perception of the bodywork tradition, the
notion of ‘body/mind integration’, (in the sense of
‘being fully embodied’) has frequently been used
as a tool for objectification of the client.
Bodyworkers (including myself) have rather
relentlessly pursued it as an agenda, as something
which the therapist brings about in and on behalf
of the client. However, that is to blindly enact the
objectifying relationship which the client already
has with themselves. As body therapists we are
‘using’ the client’s body as a tool and a battlefield
to impose ‘our’ agenda. The fact that many clients
are positively demanding and crying out for this
enactment doesn’t make it any less counter-
therapeutic: they don’t know any better. All they
know is that they experience their body as an ‘it’
which their so-called ‘identity’ or ‘personality’ sits
on top of and is supposed to operate upon. Now
that the client’s ego has admitted failure in this
department (they’re not successfully managing to
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operate on their spontaneous processes), of course
they assume that therapy is more of the same: a
better and maybe cleverer auxiliary ego (in the
form of the therapist) operating more successfully
upon this clearly unruly and pathological ‘body’.
This merely re-enacts the original objectifying
relationship which was the origin of the ‘body’
being split off and repressed in the first place.
The only way we get out of this is by getting into it.
As therapists we do not want to shrink from the
danger of objectification, from the certainty of re-
enactment: it’s an important element of what
brings the client to us. So we want to have it,
experience it - in the room, in the here and now, in
the contact. We want to hold the tension between
co-experiencing the client’s worst reality and/or
their potential release from it into their best
possible reality. If we want to stand a chance of
holding this tension, we don’t want our habitual
assumptions to trip us up. As mentioned above, it’s
therefore important that we don’t habitually
assume ‘body/mind integration’ as our taken-for-
granted normative goal. It is not something any
ego - the client’s or the therapist’s - can force or
bring about. Our intentions, awareness, actions
certainly do have an influence on it happening or
not, but we can’t make it happen.
It’s only when we no longer idealise ‘body/mind
integration’ as a goal or an objective, that we can
begin to use it as a tool of perception. To the extent that
the therapist is at home in their own body/mind
experience (whether that in itself is harmonious,
conflicted, ecstatic or dissociated), their perception
of the current degree of ‘body/mind integration’
(in the client, in themselves and in the ‘energetic
system’ between them) can become an avenue into
inner and outer relationship, into a fuller
body/mind experience of the unconscious
dynamic and into a lived experience of our
intuitive perception of our potential for wholeness.
Character structures
One of the points I did manage to state in my talk
on the AGM was that I consider the concept of
character structures to be clinically dangerous
(precisely because it’s so holistically accurate and
seductive). It is very rare that I see a supervisee
using it helpfully. The opposite is much more
common: whilst being entranced with the overall
indisputable accuracy of the typology, the therapist
misses the relational dynamic in the moment.
However ‘right’ we may be about the client’s past
and inner experience, about their basic life scripts
and statements and what transformations these
may need or want to go through over the long
years of the process, that kind of overview usually
only distracts us from the intricacy, subtlety,
complexity, mystery of the present moment.
But that particular danger inherent in the concept
might be manageable. What’s worse is that the
theory of character formation is in itself
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
contradictory. It leads itself ad absurdum in the
following way:
if we follow through the idea of internalisation
(implicit in Stephen Johnson’s step 4 of character
formation: turning against the self, see “Character
Styles”), then both child and parent position
become internalised physically, emotionally,
mentally. It’s the whole relationship which gets
internalised, not one ‘object’. The internalisation of
the conflict requires the incorporation of both sides
of the relationship: the ‘negative environmental
response’, as Johnson calls it, and the various
layers of the child’s experience (original impulse,
organismic reaction) which is why object relations
theory talks about self and object representations.
The child’s body therefore is inhabited by and
reflects both relational positions: child and parent.
External relationship becomes internal relationship.
The bulk of character theory (body types, relational
patterns, defences etc), however, concentrates on
the client’s body exhibiting only the fixated child
position in the conflict (e.g. the masochistic body is
the humiliated, squashed child; the oral body is the
neglected infant who is stretching to grow up too
quickly, etc). Consequently the application of
character theory to the therapeutic process
conveniently assumes that the therapist’s task
consists of dealing with ‘the child’ (by confronting
the defences against the child experience, or
through re-parenting the hurt and traumatised
child). Although character structure theory
postulates the existence of an internalised parent,
most of its application relies on the equation:
‘client’=’child’. Body techniques are then used to
counteract or circumvent whatever internal parent
there may be, to access the experience (feelings,
pain, impulses) of the ‘child’ more directly.
The bulk of character theory - as it is being applied
- has a conveniently infantilising bias which
habitually allocates the parent position to the
therapist. We all know experientially that this is
not the case: in the countertransference we
recognise how both child and parent polarities are
juggled between therapist and client like a hot
potato most of the time. Somatic resonance
sensitises us to the pervasive nature of projective
identification where it is not at all clear who at any
moment is the parent and who the child.
Many of my supervisees who do rely on character
theory, however, use it in a way which perpetuates
the illusion of the therapist exclusively as the
parent. This assumption then obfuscates awareness
of the intense pressure for the therapist to
experience the child polarity - my educated guess
is that some dynamic like this is behind at least
60% of the confusion which therapists encounter
and bring to supervision.
There is, however, a more significant step we can
take with this which relativises character structure
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theory even further from inside: if internal objects
are not merely mental representations, but complex
embodied relationships (there’s something right
about the Jungian term ‘complexes’), the idea of one
character structure dissolves into multiple internal
characters. The internalisation of the parent(s)
implies that the child’s character contains other -
internalised - characters, on an energetic and a
physical and emotional and mental level. So as
therapists we’re not dealing with just the one client,
but multiple and diverse identities (who in turn are
conflicted and comprised of internal object
relations). Any and all of these identities the
therapist can experience him- or herself as trapped
by and merged with.
Because such projective identification is usually
fuelled by primitive affect, it inevitably constitutes
a disturbing and de-constructing threat to the
therapist’s ego both on an energetic-emotional and
on a mental-symbolic level. The therapist’s own -
maybe too singular and restricted - self-image and
construction of the therapeutic position are on the
line. In the ‘here & now’ of the contact, the simple
idea of the client’s character structure can then be
used to protect ourselves against the multiplicity of
identities and enactments going on in the room.
Our notion of the client’s character structure
oversimplifies and occludes this complexity and
then seriously gets in the way of us standing any
chance of containing it.
Working Alliance
It is quite common for the working alliance to be
viewed as a function of the therapist’s presence,
relatedness and competence, as if the working
alliance was only (or mainly) the therapist’s
responsibility. The assumption then is that the
better the therapist, the more solid the working
alliance, and that any break in the alliance is the
therapist’s fault or mistake.
The biodynamic version of this could be that the
good working alliance comes about through the
therapist’s allowing energetic presence, in which
case the therapist might blame themselves for any
sign of holding back or resistance in the client; the
TA therapist might blame themselves for not
having provided an appropriately contracted frame
if there is any non-cooperation or negativity in the
relationship; the analytic version could be that the
good working alliance is a function of the analyst’s
competent provision of containment in which case
the analyst might blame themselves if any acting-
out occurs.
Even analytic theory as well as integrative writers
like Petruska Clarkson refer to the working alliance
as the relationship between the healthy parts of the
client’s adult / ego and the equivalent aspects of
the therapist’s adult / ego.
Where does the notion go that the mind is a
function of repressed drives or unfulfilled object-
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
seeking needs ? Can we really afford to abandon
our understanding of the client’s internal conflict
which we track in every other department of
mental activity, when it comes to the client’s
thoughts about therapy ? Is it our experience that
the contractual interaction which frames the
working alliance is an adult-adult exchange ? What
should be a fairly anxiety-provoking commitment
procedure for both the “frightened people in the
room”, gets conceptualised as a healthy negotiation
just because we all want to agree that therapy is a
‘good thing’, leading to health and more health ?
We all know that the preconceptions about therapy
which the client brings to the first session are part
of the work. In Charge we say that the client’s
version of the problem is part of the problem, and
that equally the client’s version of the ‘solution’
(i.e. therapy) is part of the problem. A working
alliance contracted around and based on these
preconceptions is untenable, as the client’s version
of therapy already constitutes a major re-
enactment. For example: the habitually humiliated
client demanding a pathologising diagnosis; or the
abandoned client wanting to attend only
fortnightly to maintain their treasured
‘independence’; or the ‘driven achiever’ wanting to
be the best fastest-developing client ever; or the
unassertive client pleasing and placating the
therapist by agreeing with every intervention.
Working alliances offered on the basis of these
patterns, even though they can appear to generate
an ‘adult’ ‘commitment to the work’, are bound to
backfire, and so they should. As soon as we
conceive of the client as an internal relationship
with conflicting needs of therapy, maybe
represented by conflicting therapeutic approaches,
the working alliance becomes a more complex
conundrum. One Chiron graduate wrote his -
highly recommendable - final essay around
imagining the (individual) client as a failing
internal marriage coming for couple sessions, with
hilarious, but profoundly challenging results.
To conceptualise the working alliance as a
homogenous thing, created and maintained by the
therapist’s skill and presence, based on some
notion of an adult-adult negotiated frame is - in my
view - a dangerous way of thinking about it. For a
start it doesn’t particularly invite actual hostility
into the room (which was one of the points which
sent Reich wild: theoretically the ‘negative
transference’ was recognised as an important
element in many a client’s process, but “in practice,
we shied away fom it”). The other consequence is
that the therapist is likely to cling to their
therapeutic position, assuming that loss of
therapeutic position means ultimate failure.
If, however, we work with the parallel between the
inner relationship (including the conflicted and
compromised relationship between ‘body’ and
‘mind’) and the outer relationship to the therapist,
then the ‘success’ of therapy depends on the alliance
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breaking down. If any transformation of the client’s
internal object relations is to occur, these
relationships have to break down. To phrase this in
analytic language: if the therapist recognises the
importance of allowing themselves to be
constructed as an object by the client’s
unconscious, it becomes paramount that they are
also available to be de-constructed.
The de-construction of the therapist as an object
disturbs the working alliance, which in this view is
a paradoxical beast: the working alliance is alive
only to the extent that it can break down and die.
Conversely, any survived breakdown of the
working alliance strengthens it for the future.
Rather than conceptualising the working alliance
as a static ‘given’, to be ‘given’ to the client by the
therapist, it becomes the barometer for the
unconscious process and for those areas of pain,
splits and lack of integration which the relationship
hasn’t been able to touch yet.
Here an holistic and relational perspective can
make an important contribution to the often rather
vague analytic notion of ‘containment’: by
maintaining awareness of the parallel process
between working alliance and ‘body/mind
integration’ we can work towards anchoring
whatever seems uncontained also in the here-and-
now of physical-energetic experience.
The Ego
In my view, the greatest weakness of the Reichian
tradition is its one-dimensional notion of the ego.
In simple terms: the ego is conceived of as ‘the
enemy’ - of spontaneity, of aliveness, immediacy
and vibrancy, of - as Reich said repeatedly: “the
animal”. If as Reichian therapists we take it upon
ourselves to fight against the client’s ego - using
the wide, powerful and indeed effective range of
weapons at our disposal - we are liable to enact
and exacerbate the client’s split (that’s the main
point in my article mentioned above: ‘Relating to
and with the Objectified Body’).
Reich was hooked by the collectively taken-for-
granted notion of the ego as a fixed entity over
time and it was formulated as that by Freud - as a
structural building block of the psyche. And it
certainly can have that kind of subjective
psychological reality: people do think of
themselves as one personality with consistent,
stable, coherent characteristics, attitudes, values,
beliefs, thoughts. Our culture is built on the
assumption that our ‘identity’, (our “Ich”, as Freud
called it), is stable, continuous over time, self-
responsible, with the capacity for choice and self-
control when it comes to action and behaviour.
It is here, I feel, that if we work through Reich’s
heroic anti-ego bias, we can make the greatest
contribution to the field. We need to do justice to
the ego’s idea of itself by talking about it as an
entity, but by also formulating the ego as a process,
as a conflicted relationship itself, and - more
© 1999 - The integrated bodymind's view on 'Body/Mind Integration'
importantly - as a parallel process, we open up a
space beyond identifying with or against ‘the ego’.
This is what I would like to begin to do in another
article in the future, as I feel it deserves special and
detailed attention.
For now, this is my temporary ...
Conclusion
Unfortunately, in my opinion, most Body
Psychotherapy theory is formulated from
narcissistic idealisation, from within the
‘body/mind split’. It tends to idealise the body as
the ‘good’ and ‘exciting’ object. On top of that it
was modelled by the founders in an unrelational,
medical stance. Fortunately we found some
containment and human relating in various aspects
of analysis and object relations theory.
Unfortunately most analytic theory is formulated
from disappointment, as conveyed implicitly even
in the term ‘depressive position’. It tends to idealise
the mind and symbolisation as the ‘good’ and
‘containing’ object.
The good thing about idealisation is: it has passion
in it. If there is a ‘third position’ which we can
move on to beyond idealisation and
disappointment, that quality of passion is an
essential ingredient to be saved over the threshold.
In my view there is a ‘third position’: it is about
holding the tension of the conflict until re-
organisation occurs spontaneously. As the
therapist I want to be able to desperately desire the
transformation, for myself and on behalf of the
other. I equally want to be able to do nothing about
it. It’s about the impossible paradox of unattached
passion - something the sufis and some buddhists
know about. It’s about the impossible paradox of
doing and non-doing, where ‘longing is its own
reward’. And then spontaneous shifts and
transformations do occur, because and in spite of
our longing and intention for them occur.
There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of
desire; when there is no adversary, what avails
thy courage ? Hark, do not castrate yourself, do
not become a monk: chastity depends on the
existence of lust. Rumi
© 1999 Michael Soth
www.soth.co.uk
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