‘Energy’,
‘Character’ and Inner Relationality
A
Relational Critique of Reichian and Neo-Reichian Therapies
Peter
Wilberg
Not all roads lead to Rome.
Not all models of life, the human organism and human relationships are
congruent and capable of being integrated in a grand biological
synthesis. What follows is a critique of the philosophical and
scientific foundations of somatic psychotherapy in its current forms, a
critique that I believe is critical to its further development, to
maintaining its philosophical and scientific seriousness and — last but
not least – increasing its social relevance in the current world. The
principal message of my work is that psychotherapists should cease to
regard themselves as treating the symptoms of a disturbed early relation
to another human being – an external relation to a ‘primary’ other such
as the mother. Instead, they should recognise that an individual’s
‘primary relation’ is to their own inner being and not to another human
being. Then and only then will they be able to see their client’s
problems as the individual expression of a general social pathology of
human relations. This general pathology has two sides:
I am sure that there are many
good somatic psychotherapists who are capable of getting in touch with
their own core and thereby helping others to do so (if only in the
context of their sessions and their professional relationships with
clients). I must admit, however, that I have yet to meet a somatic
psychotherapist capable of making direct contact with others from their
core. Most that I have met, however grounded they may be in themselves,
seem to relate to others outside the context of therapy from their head
and heart rather than from the ‘inner ground’ of their being and from
the core that leads into it – from their hara. Thus whilst
somatic psychotherapy lends itself to the cultivation of ‘deep sensing’
and deep, organismic resonance with clients, I am less sure that it
lends itself to the cultivation of ‘deep response’. By this I mean the
capacity to respond to a client directly from one’s core rather
than with what “comes up” from it – and to directly re-late or bear back
a message to the core of another human being rather than working
with what “comes up” (see Diagram 1).
Diagram 1

Let me emphasise that by the
term ‘core’ I do not mean any ‘centre’ from which energy rays out from
the self towards other people and the world. And I certainly do not mean
the heart, which is neither the physical nor the spiritual centre
of gravity of the human being – all Christian sentiment notwithstanding.
Neither however, do I mean the hara or abdominal centre, if by
this is meant merely one radial centre or ‘chakra’ amongst others,
albeit one that is seen as a centre of strength or an ‘energetic core’.
By ‘core’ I mean a centre of awareness that is precisely no centre, an
‘inner ground’ that is in essence a bottomless abyss (Abgrund) –
for it opens into a sphere of unbounded interiority. It is through our
own unbounded interiority that we are inwardly linked to other beings in
a continuum of being.
What I believe somatic
psychotherapy essentially lacks – not alone but together with
psychoanalysis, science and global capitalist culture as such – is any
concept of inner relationality. This it cannot develop, as long as it
accepts the standard scientific model of the human being as a localised
centre of awareness bounded by the physical body and surrounded by an
unbounded field of extensional space.
This is also the basis of Reich’s pictorial model of the human organism:
a circle with a finite radius and a centre, nucleus or ‘core’. A centre
from which energy can only lead out. A centre from which no breakthrough
can be made into another type of space: an unbounded space of
inner relationality, which I call intensional space.
Reich defined ‘life’ as essentially a movement outwards from an energetic
core to an organismic periphery. A definition that Alexander Lowen
turned into the basic axiom of ‘bioenergetics’, though at the same time
he did openly acknowledge the inherently Western, not to say, American,
bias of this life paradigm and the values it embodies: values that
encourage the individual to ‘reach out’ from a bounded centre or core
towards unlimited ‘expansion’ and ‘growth’.
The paradigm is modified by the understanding that life also involves a
pulsatory polarity of outward and inward movements, of expansion and
contraction, contact and withdrawal, ‘outstroke’ and ‘instroke’. In
order to straightaway offer the reader a framework for understanding
what is wrong with this modified model it is helpful to see it as one of
four basic life paradigms.
THE FOUR LIFE PARADIGMS
The
First (modern Western) Life Paradigm
Life is an outward movement of
energy from self to world.
The
Second (ancient Vedic) Paradigm
Life is an inward movement of awareness from world to self.
The Third Life Paradigm
(found in both Western and Eastern cultures)
Life is a pulsatory cycle or rhythm of outward and
inward movements of energy and awareness.
The
Fourth (mystical) Paradigm
Life is an inward movement from
self to world. The inward movement of awareness from world to self
is the condition for a deep inner relatedness to the world and other
people.
The Fourth Paradigm is a
mystical paradigm, suggesting that inward movement from world to self is
not to be understood merely as a regressive retreat into oneself, but as
a movement that leads into deeper levels of relatedness to the world and
other people. It is not the contraction of an organismic periphery or
the withdrawal of energy to a core. It is an inward movement of
awareness and not of energy, an inward movement of awareness that
reaches into and through one’s own core. This inward movement of
awareness, far from being a withdrawal of energy to a core is the very
condition for the outward release of energy from that core.
Energy is what relates things
externally in extensional space – linking them as bodies in space and
time. But awareness is intrinsically an awareness of ourselves in
relation to something or someone other than self. In opposition to
bioenergetics and what has come to be known as ‘energy medicine’ in
general, I put forward the hypothesis that awareness is the very
inwardness of energy – the medium of inner relatedness between things
and people. What I call ‘inergy’ consists of patterned flows and
figurations of awareness. Organisms are not living ‘things’ that we are
aware of. They are themselves organizing patterns
or figurations of awareness – Awareness Gestalts. The cell is not a
thing ‘with’ awareness. It is itself a figuration of cellular awareness
– not our awareness of cellular activity but essentially the figurations
and flows of awareness that constitute that activity. The human
organism too, is not essentially an ‘energetic body’ – a body composed
of energy whose patterns and flows we can be more or less aware of.
It is essentially a body of awareness, composed of those flows of
awareness that constitute what I call inergy.
To talk of a person’s bodily ‘energy’ seems to imbue it with more
tangible ‘objective’ reality than the mere ‘subjective’ awareness we
have of it. At the same time however, it is an evasion of the basic
question of what is more real or fundamental – measurable properties of
bodies or qualities of awareness as such. When we are aware of a
person’s warmth as a human being or perceive the radiance of their gaze
we are not speaking of any physical heat or light energy emanated by
their bodies. What we are aware of is no ‘thing’ at all – even a thing
we like to call ‘energy’. It is a quality of the other person’s own
awareness of the world – their felt inner relation to it. That is why
it is not energy that relates things and people inwardly. It is aware
inner relatedness that energises. Energy is the outward expression of
inner relatedness – of inergy. All measurable outer energies are the
expression of inergy, of qualities and movements of awareness linking
both things and people. Conversely, there is not a single form of
energy, whether light, heat or electrical charge, that does not have its
own inergetic counterpart.
The distinction between movements of energy and movements of awareness
and their dynamic relation — inergy – is one that somatic psychotherapy,
with its continuing attachment to the principles of bioenergetics and
biodynamics, has yet to grasp even in principle. What I term organismic
as opposed to orgonomic physiology, bio-inergetics rather than bio-energetics,
is the science of these dynamics, based on the understanding that the
human organism is not the physical body nor an energy body but a body of
awareness. What follows is an entirely new set of dynamic laws relating
flows of energy in the body to flows of awareness in the organism, and
in particular the principle that inward movements of awareness from
periphery to the core release an outward movement of energy from the
core to periphery.
Reichian orgonomics and bio-energetics
are based on the idea that character is a form of pathology based on
chronic muscular restriction of the outward movement of biological
energy from core to periphery, embodied in muscular armouring.
Understood organismically, muscular restriction of biological energy
moving from core to periphery is a substitute for true strength and
depth of character. Strength and depth of character is not muscular
character rigidity but the discipline necessary to mentally restrain an
outward movement of awareness. Only through this mental restraint can
awareness be turned inward from one’s entire organismic periphery and
concentrated at one’s core. It is when the concentration of awareness
breaks through the core (as if through a black hole) and into the
unbounded interiority of intensional space that fresh energy is released
from the core (as if from a white hole), energy which then impels and
fuels outward movements towards the world.
The inward movement of awareness from periphery to core is the essence of
the depressive process. Only if this fundamentally healthy
movement inward is halted before it reaches down into and through the
individual’s core, do depressive states result. States of
withdrawal are not failures to reach out and make contact with other
people and the world but the result of a mental failure to actively
encourage and deepen the depressive process — go deeper inside oneself
and make deeper inner contact with oneself and others of the sort that
will then automatically release a new outward movement of awareness and
energy, that will release e-motion. Reich understood fear
physiologically, as a dominance of the sympathetic nervous system
leading to a circulatory withdrawal of energy from periphery to core. I
understand fear and anxiety phenomenologically as a highly charged
awareness that is stuck on the organism’s periphery, fearfully oriented
towards the world, or entirely lost in it and cut off in a schizoid
manner from the core of the self.
Reich opposed fear to love, identifying the latter with a pleasurable
outward streaming of energy from core to periphery, energy that is then
released in orgasmic discharge. From a bio-inergetic perspective, this
is a confusion of love with sexuality and aggression. The latter are
both based on simultaneous outward movements of energy and awareness.
But love itself is an inward movement of awareness, and the felt inner
relation to another human being that comes when awareness breaks into
the intensional field linking us inwardly with other beings. It is this
inward movement that releases the flush of outward moving energy that is
biologically released in sexual activity.
Reich’s error began with Freud, who also identified the human organism
with the human body, and therefore identified human relationality as
such with sexual relatedness – with Eros. And despite all talk of the
‘trans-personal’, somatic psychotherapy still follows in the footsteps
of biological medicine in seeking an individual biological basis for
human unhappiness and relational dis-ease – for example through looking
for clues in embryology and intra-uterine life. Understood bio-inergetically,
the organism is not shaped in the womb. It is the womb that we
never leave, a matrix or organizing figurations and flows of awareness
from which we constantly give birth to our own bodies.
Following Freud, with his concept of opposing life and death instincts,
of Eros and Thanatos, Reich himself was led to the idea of a
life-negative as well as a life-positive energy. A true biology or
science of life does indeed require a true thanatology or science of
death – but this is ruled out in advance by treating life and death,
Eros and Thanatos, as opposing drives or energies. Understood
organismically, thanatological or death processes are an intrinsic part
of life. They include not only the process of aging but everyday
processes such as tiring or going to sleep. The chief characteristic of
these natural thanatological processes is that they involve a
simultaneous inward movement of energy and awareness, leading them back
into the inergetic fields and inner dimensions of awareness, which are
their source.
THE BASIC PRINCIPLES OF BIO-INERGETICS
-
Energy is the medium of outer relationality.
-
Awareness is the medium of inner relationality.
-
Energy is the outwardness of awareness.
-
Awareness is the inwardness of energy or ‘inergy’.
-
Inergetic movements are movements of awareness.
-
The outward movement of energy is the condition of outer
contact with the world.
-
The inward movement of awareness is the condition for inner
contact with the world.
-
Inward movements of awareness from periphery to core release outward
movements of energy from core to periphery.
-
If awareness loses itself in outward movements of energy, its own
inward movement is blocked, resulting in a depletion or inward
withdrawal of energy.
-
Muscular restriction
of the outward movement of energy is a substitute for mental
restraint of the outward movement of awareness.
The
essence of biology can never be grounded in biology as a science.
We
cannot say that the organ has capacities
but must say that the capacity has organs.
Martin Heidegger
In its implicit continuation
of the search for a biological basis for human unhappiness, somatic
psychotherapy is still heavily influenced by Reichian functionalism: the
belief, shared with biological medicine, that human capacities, not
least relational capacities, are the expression of biological or organic
functions. It is the other way round. A pen has functions – it serves as
an instrument of writing. But it lacks any capacity to write. Neither
has the eye any capacity to see or the ear to hear, however much it
functions as an organ of seeing or hearing. As Heidegger put it “We
hear, not the ear”. Likewise we see, not the eye. The human organism is
not a collection of organs and organic functions, but the unity of our
own capacities as beings, capacities which are themselves embodied in
organs and organic functions.
These capacities are our capacity to engage in particular movements of
awareness. Our capacity to breathe, for example, is not a result of
having lungs whose function it is to draw in air and help us to draw
oxygen from it. Rather the opposite: respiratory functioning, seen as so
important in Reichian theory, is the embodiment of our capacity to draw
in or ‘breathe’ our own uniquely coloured and toned awareness of self
and world, absorb inner meaning from it, and in turn let our awareness
of self and other flow out and communicate through a meaningful
comportment towards the world and other people. We can practice
bioenergetic or Yogic breathing exercises for years without this having
any effect on our essential breathing – the in-breath and out-breath of
awareness. Yet we cannot take in a ‘breathtaking’ landscape or feel
‘in-spired’ by a mental vision without this automatically bodying itself
in our physical breathing, deepening our bodily re-spiration. Breathing
as a bodily function is the embodiment of an organismic breath cycle,
the in-breath and out-breath of awareness, which constitutes our
spiritedness as beings and is the basis of essential respiration.
Similarly, digestive and metabolic functions are not the basis but the
embodiment of a truly psychoperistaltic process, the digestion and
metabolism, within our organism or our body of awareness, of our lived
experience of the world. This process begins with mental ‘chewing over’
but does not end until we have a gut feeling of what things mean to us
inwardly. As for the ‘mind’ itself, this is not a disembodied part of
the psyche but the very musculature of the human organism as a body of
awareness. With it we can facilitate different movements of awareness or
restrict them, encourage them or block them.
Only with the help of the mind can we turn suffering from a passive
experience of psychological or physiological ‘processes’ occurring
within us into responsible activity – the activity of intentionally
encouraging and completing those processes by turning them into true
psychodynamics: active movements or dynamics of awareness.
The term ‘psychodynamic’ is
now commonly used to refer to forms of psychotherapy based on
psychoanalytic theory. But its essential meaning has yet to be grasped
that has nothing to do with the dynamic relation between various
contents of the psyche – with things we are aware of such as thoughts
and feelings, sensations and perceptions, dreams and mental images. It
has to do with basic movements or dynamics of awareness as such. It is
through these movements of awareness, that the organism, as our dynamic
body of awareness, translates ontodynamics into biodynamics,
what moves us as beings of movement of and within our own bodies.
Movement as such is not essentially bodily movement in extensional,
physical space. Bodily movements are the embodiment of inner movements
of awareness. The organism is the body with which we translate our
movedness as beings – what moves us inwardly – into inner movements of
awareness. For example moving closer to or distancing ourselves from
another person inwardly. The organism is the body with which we relate
directly to other people as beings – the body of inner relationality.
Through it we feel their inergetic qualities – their inner warmth or
coolness, closeness or distance, luminosity or darkness, levity or
gravitas. Warming and cooling to someone, moving closer to or further
from them, making contact with and touching them, holding them in our
awareness or letting go of them, sounding out or being in resonance with
someone, are all movements of awareness involving different inergetic
qualities of awareness – qualities such as inner warmth, inner light and
inner sound or resonance.
Movements such as ‘grounding’ and ‘centering’, which are given great
significance in ‘bodywork’, are not essentially bodily movements at all.
No physical exercises can ‘ground’ a person in their own being, nor is
the disciplined practice of centred bodily
movement (as for example in Tai Chi) any guarantee that an individual
can relate to other human beings from and through their own core. Just
as we can look into a person’s eyes without meeting their gaze — without
encountering the other as a being, we can touch and feel someone’s body
in a highly sensitive way, aware of its warmth or coolness, its
energetic aura, its muscle tone and texture, without in any way sensing
their organism as such – the felt tones, textures and intensities of
awareness that find embodiment in an individual’s skin and muscle tone,
cell and organ tone.
The distinction between ‘psychodynamic’ and ‘biodynamic’ models of the
human being is an entirely false one. The human organism, as a body of
awareness consists of psychodynamics and nothing else. What both
‘psychodynamic’ and ‘biodynamic’ approaches to psychotherapy have failed
to grasp is that psychodynamics — movements of awareness — are
themselves bio-inergetic movements and as such are the basis of
bioenergetic and biodynamic processes. Organismic awareness is not felt
sensation or felt ‘energy’ but a felt sense of these basic inergetic
movements of awareness itself, examples of which are given below.
None of the descriptions of the ‘inergetic’ movements should in any way
be considered merely as energetic ‘metaphors’ for psychodynamic
movements of awareness. To do so would be to imply, for example, that
‘warming’ to another human being is a less ‘real’ example of warmth than
being warmed by a person’s body. That the inergetic warmth, the soul
warmth we sense emanating from a human being, is less rather than more
real than energetic warmth — the measurable temperature of their body.
Spatio-temporal
Presencing and absencing —
being fully ‘there’ and fully present (Da-sein) or absent and
elsewhere; inwardly nearing or distancing oneself from someone or
something; withdrawing awareness to a periphery or moving into oneself
from a periphery; letting awareness ray out from a centre towards a
periphery or concentrating and gathering awareness at a centre from a
periphery, firming or dissolving a mental boundary of awareness,
expanding or contracting a field of awareness.
Gravitational
Becoming heavier and sinking
into oneself or feeling a lighter and less dense quality to one’s
awareness; adjusting the balance of gravitas and levity, feeling the
gravitational pull of one’s own inner ground or allowing awareness to
float free.
Thermal
Warming or cooling to someone
or something, psychically hotting up or cooling down, glowing with inner
warmth or seeking that warmth.
Optical
Lightening or ‘brightening up’
or being in a dark mood; being aware of oneself and others in a
particular light. Turning the light of awareness inward or radiating it
outwardly.
Electro-magnetic
Exerting ‘magnetism’ or
feeling one’s awareness charged with tension.
Sonic
Attuning to oneself and
others, being in tune or out of tune with oneself or others, resonance
and dissonance, being in ‘sound’ health (Ge-sund-heit), inwardly
sounding others out.
Emotions are outward impulses
or movements of energy expressed in physiological activity and physical
movements. But these in turn are the expression of movements of
awareness, which do not occur in the body or take place in extensional
space. These are inergetic movements from one qualitative tone, texture
and intensity of awareness to another. Inergy does not consist of
indistinguishable ‘quanta’ of energy but of these qualia, which take up
no extensional space but constitute the very fabric of intensional
space. Inergetic fields are specific ranges of these tonal intensities
of awareness – ‘feeling tones’ in short. What I call the ‘self-field’ is
a specific range of feeling tones — not intrinsically limited, but
bounded only by the individual’s capacity to resonate with tones outside
this range. In fact, however, each person tends to attune only to a
small part of their own self-field, capable of resonating only with a
limited range of their own feeling tones. On the other hand they can
expand their attunement to their own self-field through resonance with
the feeling tones of others.
People experience feeling tones that make up their self-field as
different mental-emotional and somatic states – as different ‘moods’.
But perhaps the most critical defect of psychological, psychoanalytic
and psychotherapeutic discourse in general, is the failure to
distinguish emotions and emotional energy from mood or feeling tone.
Moods, as Heidegger pointed out, are not anything we experience ‘in’
ourselves or ‘in’ the world. They are basic tones, textures and
intensities of awareness, which permeate our overall experience
of ourselves and the world, lending it a specific colouration. Our
bodily self-awareness is always coloured and tuned by a specific feeling
tone. Such feeling tones however, are never reducible to a specific
sensation, emotions or thoughts. Instead the latter are our own
cognitive, emotional and somatic interpretations of the underlying moods
or feeling tones that make up our self-field.
A problem shared by both clients and therapists, patients and
psychiatrists alike however, is the failure to distinguish between moods
or feeling tones on the one hand – the basic colouration or tones of
awareness that constitute a person’s self-field — and the way the
latter are psychically and somatically experienced. The very term
‘mood’ is employed in an ambiguous and faulty way, being used both to
describe an underlying feeling tone and the mental, emotional
or somatic states through which this is experienced. Once again,
however, it must be emphasised that what makes a mood a mood is nothing
that we can experience or express but that which lends our
self-experience and self-expression a specific ‘tenor’ – colouring it
like a pair of colour-tinted spectacles with which we both look into
ourselves and out at the world.
If a person has flu for example, the whole tone and texture of their
bodily self-experience is qualitatively altered. They exist in an
altered field-state. What they will tend to focus on however, is not
that organismic field-state as such but specific psychical or physical
phenomena that they experience within that field – for example a sore
throat, annoyance at being ill, worries about being able to get work
done, feelings of tiredness etc. Like the experience of illness,
people’s experience of moods tends to be entirely passive. They find
themselves in a mood that gives rise to pleasurable thoughts, emotions
and sensations or alternatively they ‘suffer’ that mood, experiencing it
passively as a state of depression or despair, agitation or boredom,
excitement or lethargy. This, despite the fact that the specific tone colour
and intensity of each person’s ‘agitation’ or ‘depression’, ‘joy’ or
‘pleasure’ etc is as distinctive as the way different composers express
such moods in their music.
Understanding moods as basic feeling tones makes it questionable to
speak, as clinical psychologists and psychiatrists do, of ‘mood
disorders’. For the only true mood disorder is the inability to
comprehend moods as moods — to attune to the basic tones and chords of
feeling (however harmonious or dissonant), which constitute a given mood
rather than interpreting or experiencing it as a mental, emotional or
somatic state. There is no such thing as a ‘mood disorder’ — only a
lack of attunement to moods and a capacity to let them resonate within
us.
If someone complains of ‘black moods’ of rage or deep depression, for
example, what they are most often referring to is not a mood but the
thoughts, emotions and impulses which a particular mood gives rise to in
them and through which they passively experience or ‘suffer’ it. If they
then get violent or kill themselves this is a way of giving
active expression to a fundamentally passive experience of a
particular mood or feeling tone. What this person lacks is not a
chemical to alter their passively experienced mood from black to some
other colour but the ability to actively attune to
the underlying feeling tone of their ‘black’ thoughts, emotions and
impulses, and to resonate with them. Put in other terms what they lack
in their passive experience of a ‘black mood’ is precisely the ability
to actively blacken their mood or tone-colouration of their
self-experience. Here I am not talking of simply encouraging people, as
Arnold Mindell does, to actively amplify negative mental, emotional or
somatic states as such. This is helpful only in so far as it helps
people to attune to and then actively amplify the basic colouration or
tone of feeling underlying these states. Only in this way can they come
to accept them as self-states or selves — parts of their self-field
with which they were previously afraid of or uncomfortable with.
Comparing moods with colours
let us say that an individual has a certain range of moods which we can
describe as intense red, blue, dull grey, black, murky brown, radiant
yellow, soft pink etc. Alternatively we could give them labels such as
‘anger’, ‘sadness’, ‘despair’, ‘depression’, ‘joy’, ‘warmth’ and
‘softness’ etc. Let us say that they are familiar and comfortable with
certain of these moods and less at-ease with others, which occasion a
definite dis-ease. Or that they are conscious of a conflict between the
way they experience and express themselves in one mood as against
another. Or that certain of these moods are experienced as bringing them
into conflict with the moods of others.
A therapist can focus on the patient’s mental, emotional, somatic, social
and even spiritual experience of a mood or moods, and/or on their bodily
or behavioural expression. Alternatively, the practitioner can seek to
resonate with them as moods in the primordial sense — attuning to the
specific feeling tone of this particular client’s disordered thought or
language, this client’s depression or despair, rage or agitation,
aggressive behaviour, this client’s inner voices etc. Neither clinical
detachment nor emotional empathy are the same thing as this organismic
and essentially musical resonance. Only through this resonance however,
can a therapist:
-
get a feel of the
client’s self-field, of the different qualities, tones and
intensities of awareness they emanate at different times.
-
get a sense of
those qualities, tones and intensities of awareness which they are
ill-at-ease with and which they experience and express in a negative
way, and help them through resonance to resonate with these
unfamiliar feeling tones rather than passively suffering them as
mental, emotional or somatic states.
All this is quite different
from ‘emotional empathy’ — reading the body, registering that a client
is suffering emotionally in a certain way, working to identify the
emotions involved, identifying or ‘empathising’ in a bodily way with
these emotions and encouraging the client to feel and express them. Nor
does it make any difference whether such empathy is experienced in a
deep somatic way and described as ‘somatic resonance’. Once again, to be
aware that someone is in pain does not mean that we feel the specific
quality or tonality of this pain. Similarly, to be aware of a
feeling or emotion, whether in another person or in oneself, is not the
same thing as attuning to its specific quality or feeling tone. Someone
can see that another person is sad and genuinely empathise with their
sadness without attuning to its specific qualitative, tone and intensity
– without attuning to their sadness.
The distinction between ‘feelings’ and ‘emotions’ on the one hand, and
feeling tones on the other is crucial to understanding the difference
between emotional empathy and organismic resonance. In previous writings
I have defined the human organism as the musical instrument or
organon with which we give form to feeling tones, embodying them in
cell and muscle tone, the tone of our voice and of our language, of our
gaze and of our facial expression or look. Organismic resonance means
letting the specific tone, texture and intensity of any mental,
emotional or somatic state resonate within us and thereby permeate and
colour our self-awareness. Only in this way does it cease to be
something we are aware of and instead lead us into a newly toned and
coloured awareness of ourselves. Only in this way can mental, emotional
and somatic states be experienced and understood as the mental,
emotional and somatic expression of organismic states – of self-states.
Every person, as they
experience themselves in everyday life, inhabits only a limited portion
of their own inergetic field – the larger range of tones and intensities
that constitutes what I call the self-field. When we are ill or simply
ill-at-ease, we do not ‘feel ourselves’. That is not because we are
victims of a bodily disease caused by foreign bodies of one sort or
another but because our dis-ease is a transition to a new and
hitherto foreign experience of ourselves, a transition from one
self-state to another. The organismic healing process is not simply one
of getting back to normal and ‘feeling ourselves’ again, but of
allowing ourselves to pass from not feeling ourselves to feeling
ourselves in a different way – feeling another self . By this I do not
mean a ‘sub-personality’ we identify somewhere inside ourselves – a
‘part’ of ourselves that we feel. I mean instead a new mood, tone or
quality of awareness that transforms our overall or ‘holistic’
experience of ourselves and the world. Giving mental, emotional and
bodily expression to this new basic mood or feeling tone is an important
part of the healing process, but only if the starting point of
self-expression is not the mental, emotional or physical state that
disturbs us in the first place but our attunement to the basic mood or
feeling tone underlying it. For only then can we find a mode of
‘self-expression’ that gives form to a new sense of self in resonance
with this mood or feeling tone – rather than experiencing it as a
mental, emotional or somatic disruption of our familiar sense of self.
Organismic healing is ‘self-healing’ in a more essential sense than this
phrase is ordinarily understood – not something ‘I’ do to alter and
transform a psychosomatic state, but the converse: letting that state
alter and transform my very sense of this “I”.
Organismic healing is distinct in principle from any approach to medicine
or psychosomatics, which identifies the human organism with the human
body, which seeks a biological basis for disease in genes or
intra-uterine experience. For organismic medicine understands the human
organism and not the uterus itself as the primordial womb within which
we dwell before birth and in which we continue to dwell after birth.
This womb is not part of the material body but is the very mother body (Mutterleib)
from which we constantly give birth to ourselves — translating inergy
into energy, patterns of awareness into motor and mental patterns,
feeling tones into cell and muscle tone, movements of awareness into
bodily movements. It is dis-ease understood as a form of organismic
pregnancy allowing us to give birth to a new sense of self. It is
healing understood as a form of midwifery or maieusis — allowing
one to give birth to a newly toned sense of self, a newly toned bearing
towards the world.
What role can the therapist play as midwife to this organismic healing
process? By organismic healing I understand a form of therapy based on
the therapist’s own organismic awareness – the use of their own inner
body or psychical organism to receive and respond directly to the
organism of the client. This is a quite different matter to ‘working
on’ or ‘with’ the client’s mental, emotional or somatic states, and the
‘issues’ associated with them. But once again I am calling attention to
a major paradigm shift, this time in our understanding of the
therapeutic relationship and of what has hitherto been called ‘somatic
resonance’ or ‘vegetative identification’. Just as there is an essential
difference between inergy and energy, between the organism and the
physical body, between feeling tone and emotions, organismic resonance
and emotional empathy, so there is also an essential difference between,
on the one hand, things that a therapist or client is aware of – that
‘come up’ in the course of therapy – and, on the other hand, basic
qualities, tones and movements of awareness as such.
A somatic psychotherapist may become aware of a particular posture or
stance, look or facial expression, word or tone of voice that they feel
is significant – indicative of a mental, emotional or somatic state.
Resonant organismic contact and communication with the client is
possible only if they (1) attune to the specific tonality of this bodily
or verbal sign (2) let this tone resonate within their own organism (3)
inwardly ‘read’ this resonance and (4) respond to it inwardly with their
own organism before (or instead of) responding to it outwardly through
some form of therapeutic intervention or interpretation. To do so
requires an unusual capacity to modulate the tone of their own organism,
using it as a musical instrument or ‘organon’ (the root meaning of
‘organism’) to respond to the music being played to them by the client.
It is one thing to hear someone strike a chord on an instrument, feel
its resonance and respond by interpreting its emotional meaning or
helping the player to do so. It is quite another thing, to respond with
a chord of one’s own. The fact that music therapy is one of the least
developed and most marginalized of all forms of therapy, has, I believe,
a deep significance. Its significance lies in the fact that music –
tonality — belongs to the very essence of the human organism, and is the
basis of all human communication. A resonant therapeutic response to a
communication from a client is above all a tuned and toned response, one
that not only echoes the feeling tone of the communication but bears
back or ‘re-lates’ a modulated tone.
Here we need to first of all abandon the notion that the use of the term
‘resonance’ in connection with therapy is in any way a ‘metaphor’
borrowed from physical science. The fact that vibrations are set off in
the ear and in the body as a whole by sound waves coming from a
loudspeaker says nothing about a person’s resonance with the music
being played. It may be an example of resonance in the physical
sense but tells us nothing about resonance in the essential sense – as
an inner relation of beings rather than an external relation of bodies.
In this essential sense one tuning fork can no more be said to
‘resonate’ with another than a chair can be said to ‘touch’ the ground
on which it stands. Resonant contact and communication with another
human being is a form of inner vibrational touch — not merely a form of
deep receptivity to another human being but of active inner response to
that being, one in which what sounds forth from our own being modifies
and modulates the subtle harmonics of the feeling tone we let resonate
within us.
The condition for such a modulated tonal response is the therapist’s
contact with their own ‘inner ground’, a contact that rests in turn on a
listening attunement to their own fundamental tone (Grundton).
This fundamental tone is comparable to a grand chord combining and
supporting all the qualitatively toned intensities of awareness that
compose their own inergetic field. As such it offers infinite potentials
for resonant attunement to the feeling tones of others, for these
feeling tones are essentially wavelengths of resonant attunement linking
us to others through the inergetic field of our own organism. But just
as verbal communication rides on modulations of vocal tone, so also is
there a type of wordless communication that rides on modulations of
feeling tones. This has nothing to do with what is ordinarily understood
as ‘non-verbal’ communication. Indeed, the very term is meaningless –
for what words themselves communicate is in itself nothing
essentially verbal but has to do with their wordless resonances and
the wordless inner communication that takes place through them.
It must be emphasised therefore, that in speaking of tones and tonality I
am referring essentially to organismic feeling tones – to the resonances
or tones of silence that are communicated through a person’s words and
through their tone of voice, through their muscle tones and through the
tone of their gestures and of their gaze. Hearing these tones of silence
demands a type of listening which is the very opposite of whole-hearted
attention to others and heart-felt empathy with them. This is a
listening that in itself constitutes the inward concentration of
awareness from our own organismic periphery towards our organism centre
— a still-point of silence in the hara. Going into this still
point of silence opens up our hearing to a world of inner sound – to the
inner resonances and tones of silence that ring out from the client’s
own organism. Only then can we begin to read these resonances, a process
that can take anything from minutes to days or weeks. To read resonances
however, it is essential that we allow them to linger within us,
sustaining them long past the point at which they were first conveyed to
us though sensory impressions of a client’s words or body language. For
this capacity for active inner recollection of sensory impressions is
vital. Letting a person’s words continue to echo and resonate within us
long after they have been uttered, and recalling the tone of their looks
and facial expressions long after they have changed, are two crucial
elements of this recollective activity.
THE NATURE OF THE HUMAN
ORGANISM
·
a body of awareness
— the body with which we breath in, digest and metabolise awareness
allowing it to circulate within us and drawing meaning from it.
·
an inergetic body
— composed of qualitative tones and textures, intensities and
streamings of awareness.
·
a dynamic body
— translating basic inergetic motions of awareness
·
(‘psychodynamics’) into energy,
e-motions and biodynamic motions.
·
a womb or ‘mother body’
(Mutterleib) – filled with the fluid medium of toned awareness
and made up of organizing patterns of awareness which in-form the
physical body.
·
a musical body
or organon — the body with which we
give patterned form to the fluid medium of toned awareness or feeling
tone, embodying it in cell and muscle tone.
·
a psychosomatic body
— the dynamic interface between the bounded extensional space of the
physical body and the unbounded interiority or intensional space of
the psyche.
·
a relational body
— the body with which we sense, touch, move towards or away from other
beings independently of the physical senses or of physical touch or
movement.
Sylvia Specht Boadella has
spoken of the Deep Sensing and Deep Resonance that lie at the heart of
somatic psychotherapy. She has also alluded to something she describes
as Doubled Presence, and which I would understand as an awareness of the
basic twofoldness of the human being — the fundamental or primary
relation between our outer being or Surface Self (Ego and Persona) and
our inner being or Deep Self — a self from which I believe we can make
direct contact with the inner being of others. To the language of Deep
Sensing and Deep Resonance I would therefore also add the term ‘Deep
Response’, and emphasise also the importance of Deep Reading — our
capacity to stay with and sustain a felt resonance with a client long
enough for it to bring something new and previously unheard into view.
“Our thinking should now
bring into view what has already been heard in the intonation. In doing
so it brings into view what was un-heard of before. Thinking is a
listening (Erhören) that brings something to view. Therefore in
thinking both ordinary hearing and seeing pass away for us, for thinking
brings about in us a listening and a bringing-into-view.”
Martin Heidegger
Deep Sensing, Deep Resonance,
Deep Reading and Deep Response are all aspects of what Heidegger
understood as deep or meditative thinking. Another, and perhaps even
more important way of understanding the general pathology of human
relations in contemporary culture that I referred to at the beginning of
this article is to describe it as Heidegger did – as a flight from
thinking. And another way of understanding my own critique of
somatic psychotherapy is that it fails to recognise that thinking itself
– Deep Thinking — is what is most central to therapy. Why?
Because thinking has essentially nothing whatsoever to do with the
‘head’ or ‘intellect’. Instead it is a practice of concentrated inward
listening – a mindful
attunement to felt bodily sense and ‘resonance’ that leads us into an
awareness of our inner body of awareness – the human psychical
organism.
An organismic understanding of thinking itself allows us to
appreciate why it is that a single deep thought, far from being a mere
intellectual or philosophical ‘concept’, can potentially express a more
profound depth of feeling — and be more profoundly moving
and transforming — than any emotion, action or therapeutic intervention.
Conversely, the flight from thinking manifests itself primarily as an
inability to listen in such a way as to feel thoughts themselves – to
sense and resonate with their deeper meaning or significance. In somatic
psychotherapy, the flight from thinking takes the form of a flight from
felt bodily sense or meaning, from our movedness as beings, into felt
bodily sensations, motions and e-motions. This flight from deeply felt
thinking can comfortably go hand in hand with the shallowest and most
abstract type of intellectual or scientific theorising about
feelings, about the body and the like.
To think the true nature of
the human organism more deeply, to research its depth and physiology and
develop a deep organismic medicine requires first and foremost a new and
deeper way of thinking – an organismic thinking rooted in our own
organism itself. Organismic thinking is the articulation of the
researcher’s felt sense and resonance with the patterned inergetic
tones, intensities, movements and directions of awareness that
constitute the human organism itself. This leads us to a new inner
understanding of primary organic functions such as sensation,
respiration, circulation and metabolism as the embodiment of active
organismic capacities – the capacity to breath in and metabolise sensory
experience. Gone is the bioenergetic notion of bodily life as interplay
of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. In its place is the
understanding that autonomic activity is the activity of an autonomous
self – the inner being that dwells in the womb of our own organism. This
autonomic or organismic self we cannot consciously experience in waking
life. Nor is it the self we dream ourselves to be. It is the self that
dreams us – as it also bodies who we are, being the self that breathes
and metabolises our waking self-experience, not only in dreams but
continuously. Bodying and dreaming are the two principal activities of
this autonomous inner self, exercised through the instrument of the
human organism. All disruptions of organic functioning are disruptions
of inner contact and communication between the ego and outer self on the
one hand, and this autonomous, organismic self or ‘inner ego’ on the
other. The latter is not an ‘unconscious’ but a supraconscious self. It
is only the ego that may be more or less unconscious of its very
existence.
This
understanding of the self and of the human organism was anticipated not
by Freud or Reich, nor even by Jung, but by Nietzsche:
Behind your thoughts and feelings, my brother, there
stands a mighty ruler, an unknown sage — whose name is Self. In your
body he dwells. The senses and the mind would persuade you that they are
the end of all things. That is how vain they are. Instruments and toys
are the senses and the mind — behind them still lies the Self. The self
also seeks with the eyes of the senses; it also listens with the ears of
the mind.
As for the development of a
new organismic medicine, this is something with historic spiritual
dimensions far transcending the contemporary conflict of different
models and methods of somatic psychotherapy or ‘alternative medicine’.
For as Nietzsche suggested: “…perhaps the entire evolution of the spirit
is a question of the body; it is the history of the emergence of a
higher body that emerges into our sensibility.” He adds: “Through the
long succession of millennia, man has not known himself physiologically;
he does not know himself even today,”
The organism as a ‘higher’ or ‘inner’ body is, paradoxically, no body at
all in the ordinary sense – it possesses no measurable physical
extension, nor even a spatially extended energetic aura. It is not a
body ‘in’ space at all. Rather it occupies a transitional space between
ordinary extensional space and an inverse or intensional space. The
inwardness of the organism is not a spatial inwardness but comparable to
the felt inwardness of the word – a space of meaningful
intensities and resonances. The organism is a dynamic ‘mental’ surface
or boundary between the bounded extensional space occupied by the
physical body and the unbounded interiority of the intensional space of
the psyche. It is through the unbounded psychic interiority of the
organism that we are linked inergetically or ‘etherically’ to the
inwardness of both things and people. Paradoxically however, far from
being surrounded by physical space, the inner or intensional space of
the organism actually surrounds and envelops what appears as physical
space. What we perceive as the extensional space or energetic fields
around our bodies open up within the surrounding intensional space and
inergetic field of the psyche (see Diagram 2 for an extensional
representation of this relation). This understanding of the unbounded
psychic and inergetic interiority of the organism is the reason why
Nietzsche’s guiding words are the motto of organismic research and
medicine: “We should study the organism in all its immortality.” But
this is “study” in the deep sense, demanding patient and profound
phenomenological research, the greatest philosophical precision and the
sharpest critical acuity.
Diagram 2
A representation of the
unbounded interiority or intensional space of the organism, showing how
it envelops its ‘outer’ field of extensional space.

Just
as the health of the individual cannot be separated from the health of
human relations, so can the health of the individual human organism not
be separated from the relational health of social organisations, the
workplace in particular. A secretary who feels bullied or demeaned by
her boss, no less than a child who is dominated by its parents, may
develop symptoms – an angry skin rash for example — as a substitute for
support in resisting pathological patterns of relating in organisations.
Neither her physician nor even a body-oriented psychotherapist, however,
may ask the questions necessary to understand the fleshly organismic
text of her symptoms in their organisational context. Doing
so would shift the focus of therapy from the individual to power
relations in society. And whilst a therapist may uncover the buried
pain of an adult whose childhood was dominated by a depressed parent,
they may be less willing to recognise the invisible powers that played a
role in that parent’s depression – for example the anonymous boardroom
in another continent whose downsizing plans led to his redundancy. Just
as the word ‘emotion’ has become an obstacle to a deep psychology of
mood or organismic feeling, so has the word ‘energy’ become an obstacle
to a deep psychology of power in social organisations.
The potential depth and richness of the therapeutic relationship is
itself a challenge to the superficiality of human relations promoted and
sustained by capitalist culture. All the more important then, that this
depth and richness is not kept within the confines of the therapeutic
relationship. The very professionalisation and institutionalization of
somatic psychotherapy, like that of somatic medicine carries the danger
of turning the therapeutic relationship into a substitute for a
transformation of human relations in the social body – the corporate
body in particular. For it is there, more than anywhere else, that no
value is placed on authentic human relations – as opposed to purely
professional or personal relations. An authentic human relation is an
expression of genuine inner relatedness to others as opposed to purely
external role relationships. It is a relation in which every encounter
with the other is taken as an end in itself and not a means to an end
– whether this end be profit, power or therapy. A revolution in human
relations can only come about through a change in the way in which each
of us, as human beings, relates to our own inner being and other beings
– not only within but above all outside the context of the therapeutic
relationship. For it is there in the social and corporate body that the
capacity for resonant organismic contact and communication, for deep
sensing, deep resonance, deep reading and deep responsiveness is most
lacking. As David Smail has argued so forcibly, it is high time for us
to stop seeing the individual as a health problem for themselves and the
world and to once again see the world as a health problem for the
individual – including our clients. No form of therapy, which challenges
and empowers clients to change themselves without empowering them to
challenge and change the world, can have any lasting effect on the
health of the individual or social organism. This was something that
Reich, with his education in socio-critical Marxist analysis as well as
individual Freudian psychoanalysis, certainly recognized. The title of
Myron Sharaf’s biography of Reich – “Fury on Earth” – bears testament to
his outrage at what he perceived as a general social pathology. This
critique of somatic psychotherapy is also an appeal to restore and
revive the revolutionary impetus and energy of Reich’s work. At its
heart is also a basic emotional question to somatic
psychotherapists: where has all the fury gone?
One answer is – to war – for it is war which is all too often used to
give health fury its own pathological expression. The events of
September 11 and the consequent war can be understood organismically as
a conflict between an ego-centred character structure in which head
and heart are connected to each other but both lack a spiritual
link with the hara – and its mirror image, a spiritually-grounded
character structure in which both head and hara and
head and heart are linked, but heart and hara are severed.
The Islamic hara is a spiritual core or nucleus worshipped with
the head and heart but kept well-contained — below the belt and below
the heart. Here it simmers as a dormant but potentially explosive power
to be heartlessly released against the institutional structures and
defences of global ego culture represented by the USA. The explosive
outburst from a contained spiritual core or nucleus leads to a no less
violent counter-reaction. For now an emotionally outraged and enraged
ego wreaks havoc – enheartened, like the Crusaders, to identify the
spiritual core of the human being with a hidden and demonic
power, personified in Osama bin Laden.
Lowen, Alexander;
Bioenergetics
Reich, Wilhelm; The
Function of the Orgasm
Smail, David; The Nature of
Unhappiness, Constable 2001
Wilberg, Peter; Organismic
Ontology and Organismic Healing, Energy&Character 31/1. See
www.heidegger.org.uk
Wilberg, Peter Head, Heart
and Hara – The Soul Centres of West and East
New Gnosis Publications 2003
Wilberg Peter Heidegger,
Medicine and ‘Scientific Method’ – the Unheeded Heritage of the Zollikon
Seminars New Gnosis Publications 2004
Wilberg, Peter The
Therapist as Listener - Heidegger and the Missing Dimension of
Counselling and Psychotherapy Training New Gnosis Publications 2004
Note: books by Peter Wilberg
available from
www.newgnosis.co.uk and
www.amazon.co.uk only. |