The Dodman Blog

THE UNDIVIDED SELF by Ted Dimon.

The structure of this book, its thesis, its grammar and phrasing, its uncompromising nature and, it has to be said, its repetitiveness, all reminded me of the written work of FM Alexander. Such intense conviction, buried in such dense material, without much in the way of either illustration or diagram, are not what we have grown used to in recent years; but the unremitting weight of text does reflect the author’s conviction that the truth behind the Technique is not easily conveyed.

Unfortunately, since Ted Dimon’s approach is academic rather than populist, those most in need of this truth are least likely to find it through reading The Undivided Self. This book is not intended as a primer, and there is little possibility of it being widely read outside the immediate Alexander community. Even within that community, it seems more likely to gather dust on bookshelves than be mined for its veins of wisdom.

Ted Dimon begins his story with the homely account of his own introduction to the Technique. Having a back problem, he found the physical changes brought about by lessons immediately gratifying. At first, these changes happened unconsciously; then, in tandem with an awakening kinesthetic sensitivity, he gained a modicum of control over his reactions.

A problem arose, however, in connection with particularly stressful tasks, when he felt powerless, despite his best endeavours, to influence his use for the better. It was while observing the tenacious hold on his body still enjoyed by subconscious habit patterns, indissolubly linked to the mere idea of fulfilling an action, that Ted Dimon began to appreciate the true significance of consciousness in the way the Alexander Technique worked, and how profound the ramifications of changing the way he thought about doing something, rather than trying to do it differently, could be.

Dimon believes humans and most animals function largely subconsciously (by which he means habitually); but that consciousness is an attribute unique to our species, through which we can bring about change, both in our environment and within ourselves. He concedes that our subconscious processes are more likely than the average animal’s to become distorted, as a result of the peculiar stresses of civilised life; but holds that Alexander’s genius was in recognising we have the ability to rectify this, by raising those distortions to consciousness.

The bulk of The Undivided Self is taken up with exhortations to elevate in this way as much as possible that is currently subconscious. Here, Dimon makes a clear distinction between consciousness of our underlying intentions and awareness of their results. Repeatedly, he stresses that kinesthetic awareness, however accurate, and whatever the degree of control we gain over our muscular condition, is not enough to effect deep change; there must be an acknowledgement of what he calls ‘the total pattern of activity’.

Understanding what Dimon means by this is crucial, since it is the central tenet of his book. He believes that whatever stage we may have reached in recognising and ‘letting go’ of interference on a bodily level, it will be of no lasting avail if we have not developed our consciousness to the point where it is able to encompass our normally subconscious mental conceptions. He claims it is only when we enter a unified ‘state of mind and body’, where we are equally cognisant of both idea and action, that we become able to chose between following an habitual pattern of behaviour or acting non- habitually, however stressful the stimulus.

The problem for most people is likely to be one of recognition. Generally, acknowledgement of a physical reality, such as muscular imbalance, is more readily available to consciousness than recognition of what is causing it. It is relatively easy, as most Alexander students know, to learn to perceive, kinesthetically, the habit of pulling the head backwards and down; over time, it becomes the matter of a moment to stop doing this. It is far more problematic to recognise with equal facility the pattern of thought lying behind such a habit and discover how it might be restructured in order for similarly beneficial – and, Dimon claims, longer lasting – change to take place.

However much we as Alexander students may say we know our mental reaction to stimuli impacts on our muscular state, it is insidiously tempting to address that state directly – albeit through an indirect process – than to search for the intention behind the reaction.

It is precisely this search that Ted Dimon is insistent we must carry out, on a continuing basis. How we might do so remains a matter for ourselves. There are, frustratingly, no obvious guidelines. Asked to direct our attention to our bodies, we all have some notion of where in space they are; and knowing a location allows us to survey it better. Asked to direct attention to the internal processes with which we not only do this surveying but also formulate and carry out our underlying intentions – one result of which is the imperfect use being surveyed – it is hardly surprising we flounder.

It is because what is suggested in this book is so difficult to pin down that so few of us like emphasising it. The notion that we are truly indivisible, that our musculature is an exact reflection of our mental state, but that that mental state is to our physical state what Alexander believed the head was to the rest of the body – in other words, primary – is widely accepted within our profession. This isn’t an insight new to Ted Dimon; we all spend a lot of time talking about it. The problems arise when we try to put the idea into practice.

It would be regrettable if we were to think we had only ourselves, or our teachers, to blame for the deficient way we approach the Technique. One of our troubles is, what we do in teaching is so undeniably physical, with our use of the hands and our reliance on tables, that we rarely pay much attention to the finer points of our mental state. We espouse conscious control and think, naturally enough, that control over the retracting head is synonymous with reining in its less easily recognised cause; but fail to see how many of us have become contented body workers; which is not the discipline Alexander developed.

An alternative reason for our falling short may be that that discipline is incompatible with modern life. It is not hard to agree with Ted Dimon that humans have evolved a complex subconscious mechanism for dealing with the majority of tasks while leaving a more superficial part of ourselves free to get on and do other things. This is what enables us to think, in the abstract way animals can’t; and what allows us to build and maintain increasingly complex societies.

Unfortunately, Dimon’s solution to the resulting ills of use – that of raising as much as possible that is subconscious to a conscious level – raises the question of what we can reasonably expect to bring our attention to bear on at any one time. Of particular importance is whether such a procedure will jeopardise our ability to think about what we are not doing – in other words, to reflect – since it is on this unique skill that all human progress depends.

The trouble is, consciousness is not the same thing as the conscious mind. In many ways, the two are polar opposites. Ted Dimon may believe animals and children are little different from adult humans, in that they function largely subconsciously; but in the absence of our self-conscious veneer, beneath which any such repository of habits must lie, it seems more correct to say that all sentient beings are born in a state of full consciousness, from where adult humans, and growing children, are at various stages of alienation.

Such alienation is an essential feature of the human condition. Its result is the conscious mind, which is what marks us apart from other creatures; but our ability to reason, analyse or work out, is not part of the original consciousness common to us all. Paradoxically, the process of inhibition and direction, through which we hope to attain greater access to this state, depends – as civilisation does – on the same reasoning ability that took us from it in the first place.

The key question is, how much of Dimon’s ‘total pattern of activity’, which he accepts became largely subconscious in humans in order that we could be free to think, abstractly and reflexively, as we made our way in the world, can be allowed back to consciousness without it impacting on that freedom.

The answer may well explain why the Alexander Technique has become primarily a body oriented discipline. It is simply too hard for us to keep a grip on our place in the world without relying increasingly, rather than decreasingly, on our subconscious ability to handle the bulk of the work. The maintenance of society and civilisation depends on our being able to think for extended periods of time exclusively about subjects removed from the present. The less we continue delegating to our subconscious, the less we will be able to do this. Doing less abstract thinking would, of course, have useful repercussions, besides increasing consciousness and improving use; but it runs directly counter to much that we hold dear.

Reading The Undivided Self brings home how easy it is to believe we are conscious when we are not, and how difficult it is to become conscious without leaving behind the ego that feels it should simultaneously be bolstered by the process. It also reaffirms the possibility that animals, who often appear to act without reflection, if not mindlessly, may be already basking in the state we so feebly aspire to. Far from being in the vanguard, it is perhaps more appropriate to view ourselves as having fallen from their heights. What is particularly mortifying, knowing it is only conscious thought that prevents our enjoyment of full consciousness, is the realisation that without it would be unable to call ourselves human.

Selflessly, Ted Dimon has taken it upon himself to update, extend and amplify Alexander’s core beliefs and put them into the most modern context imaginable – the control of stress – without one iota of dilution. Sadly, the end result only serves to emphasise the fundamental impossibility of those core beliefs being realistically taken up by the modern world. That doesn’t make the Technique defunct; although it may not be the next evolutionary step, it is uniquely useful, remedially.

Man’s Supreme Inheritance: by F. Matthias Alexander; edited by Jean Fischer.

Of the available literature on the Technique, the four books by Alexander stand alone. Everything written since has been essentially derivative. Without Alexander’s actual words, we would have little to fall back on but other people’s memories, making his Technique more difficult than it already is to evaluate.

This new volume of Man’s Supreme Inheritance is presented as the definitive version of what was Alexander’s first, seminal publication. Edited by Jean Fischer, it is exemplarily produced, containing most of what made up all previous editions, from 1910 onwards; and, with explanatory notes on its printing history and a contemporary foreword by Walter Carrington, could be considered complete.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. Although Jean Fischer must be thanked for making readily available, in a quality format, a book that is an essential, undeniable part of every teacher’s heritage, he has, as editor, mistakenly seen fit to remove from the text what he terms "part of a sentence which contains a misleading and inappropriate analogy".

The missing passage comes from a chapter entitled Evolutionary Standards and their Influence, which was added to Man’s Supreme Inheritance in 1918, and consisted largely of a diatribe against the nation and people of Germany. To discount any suggestion he later changed his mind about what he had said, Alexander wrote a validating postscript in 1946.

Although it would be understandable for a man of his day to have found little admirable in the behaviour of ‘civilised’ Germany from either period, whether he was justified in similarly deriding savages – as Alexander called ‘uncivilised’ people – for their allegedly far greater lack of adaptability and control, going so far as to suggest that "when confronted with the unusual these people quaked like cowards, and fled panic stricken from the unaccustomed", is debatable.

Alexander’s chosen example of such a reaction was "the case of the Negroes in the southern states of America when the men of the Ku-Klux-Klan pursued them on horseback dressed in white". However offensive or ill chosen these words may appear, it is hard to imagine why Jean Fischer left them out of what is otherwise an original document. After all, there is much in Man’s Supreme Inheritance that could be similarly excised, if it was simply a matter of retrospective censorship.

To tinker with Alexander’s text, other than in a search for brevity, sets a dubious precedent. As teachers, we must learn to accept what he said, whether we think it good or bad, and not try and imagine we know how he would have expressed himself had he been alive today. There is, undeniably, much that is unpleasant, as well as much that is misguided, in Man’s Supreme Inheritance. In recent years, largely because of the difficulty of getting hold of a copy, it has probably been the least widely read of Alexander’s books. Many teachers will never have studied it; some, knowing what to expect, may feel a distaste for doing so now. Brushing Man’s Supreme Inheritance under the carpet is an individual option; but as a society, teachers have to stand, in general terms, for everything Alexander said, however unpalatable or untenable it may seem; unless they decide – again, as a society – to disassociate themselves from certain aspects of his beliefs.

Alexander had a unique insight into the human condition, which he elaborated, somewhat unnecessarily, into a generalised view of mankind ascending an evolutionary gradient. At the lower end sat the primitive races, hardly differentiated from animals, functioning instinctively; with civilised nations, at various stages of progress, further along the way – those of the West, for the most part, in the vanguard; and somewhere in the far distance, an idealised society governed, as he saw it, by ‘conscious control’.

The trouble was, Alexander didn’t devise his Technique to help bring such a society about so much as discover it in curing an irritating voice problem. It was only when he found other people’s disabilities could be resolved in the same way as his own that he formulated his concept of ‘use’, eventually claiming his method of improving this was as much evolutionary as remedial. Through conscious guidance and control, he believed mankind could continue to enjoy the benefits of civilisation without suffering from the ‘debauched kinaesthesia’ which he saw bedevilling its progress. He proudly forecast "a race of men and women who will outstrip their ancestors in every known sphere…"

It is salutary to remember that what Alexander hoped we would achieve, from an increased emphasis on the ‘means-whereby’, was essentially the same physical standard of use ‘savages’ already enjoyed through their dependence on instinct. He may have believed we had a potentially greater degree of mental control over our behaviour than them; but in point of fact, we are unlikely to become, through his Technique, any more conscious – in ‘psycho-physical terms – than those Alexander so freely disparaged.

They apprehended their world differently, hardly disassociating themselves from it. Lacking the propensity for abstract thinking that renders so much of our own behaviour automatic – allowing us to live, for the most part, inside our heads – it is inconceivable they were not more attuned, for more of the time, to themselves and their environment, than their civilised counterparts; or that they were not more aware of the operation of a ‘primary control’, which – assuming it exists – only our insatiable predilection for detachment and abstraction could ever have so completely inured us to.

For Alexander, this capacity for rational thinking, by setting us apart from the animal, and to a great extent, the primitive, world, may have been the unwitting cause of a polarisation of mind and body that made modern man only fractionally attentive; but it had given us what he believed was freedom of choice; and he felt it was our task to make the most of this, rather than eulogising its non-emergence, or lesser development, in others. He certainly saw little virtue in abandoning the reflective, analytic capabilities that had taken humanity so far, however much they may also have lain at the root of its problems.

While admiring Alexander’s insight and vision, his desire to bring within the remit of reason much that would otherwise have remained instinctive was only laudable from the point of view of a troubled society. Imagining his Technique was universally applicable, he ignored the fact that those whose sensory appreciation was reliable, amongst whom would have been the indigines of his homeland, hardly needed a helping hand.

Civilisation, meanwhile, develops apace, largely due to our continuing to do the exact opposite of what Alexander recommended. Leaving our bodies to function unconsciously while we get on with the mental side of things is the sine qua non of progress. Modern society depends on it. For those who suffer as the result of this split, the Technique is a logical way back to health; but since psycho-physical disunity is the price we pay for cultural progress, it was probably over-ambitious of Alexander to think we could lessen our dependence on one without detriment to the other. Man’s Supreme Inheritance offers us the unlikely scenario of recovering consciousness of our use while retaining all the advantages of a civilisation that, by prospering, had deadened us to it in the first place.

Alexander’s solution, that we widen our field of attention to enable us to take in both means and ends, is clearly incompatible with the demands of modern society. His Technique may enable us change the way we react, largely by acquiring better habits, and in doing so, help us get back in touch with ourselves; but in an everyday context, unless we are peculiarly adept, we are unlikely to get much done, particularly cerebrally, while paying simultaneous attention to the way we are doing it. In all likelihood, such a skill, if globally pursued, would have very different consequences to those Alexander imagined when he foresaw future generations entering "new spheres as yet undreamt of by the great majority of the civilised peoples of our time".

TWO ESSAYS by Joroen Staring.

Who is Joroen Staring? Judging by his use of the phrase "…other Alexandrians like Tinbergan, Dart, Perls and Staring…", he considers himself one of a those select few who write about the Technique, innovatively and intelligently, from the perspective of another discipline; but what his is, he doesn’t say.

The second of these essays, "DEWY AND ALEXANDER", is well researched, but essentially repeats a story told elsewhere. Anyone interested will already know how Dewy took to Alexander’s work and stuck with it for the rest of his life; how followers of Dewy, including his biographer, minimised its importance to him; how Alexander, for reasons of his own, failed to capitalise on Dewy’s attempts to fund a scientific investigation of discoveries; and how our legacy of three introductions to Alexander’s books is indicative of the influence Dewy must have hoped the Technique would enjoy.

Reading this essay does serve to remind us of the seriousness with which Alexander expected his work to be taken; and the fact that someone of Dewy’s standing, in the face of considerable opposition from his peers, saw in its practical application so much of his own philosophy, reflects badly on the general conception today that the Technique is a form of remedial bodywork, unworthy of deep or scholastic consideration.

As if to counterbalance this, Joroen Staring’s other essay, "THE HOMO CLAUSUS IN STATU NASCENDI", is erudite to the point of obscuration. The gist of it seems to be that there are contemporary thinkers, working in similar fields to Dewy’s, who subscribe, wholly or partially, to a theory concerning the influence of civilisation on humanity that isn’t dissimilar to Alexander’s; and that if they could be persuaded to study his work, they might realise it provides a means of redressing a universal problem.

This theory is presented as the "homo clausus self-experiences of present-day people in the West". It was developed by Norbert Elias, a German Jew living and working in London before World War II. "Homo clausus" is defined as "closed personality"; and the "self-experience" in question as the increasing tendency for humans to see themselves as individual beings, "cut off" from each other and "closed" to their environment.

Elias believed this process of alienation began around the time of the Renaissance, due to the overpowering need for individual restraint in society. With the consequent development of stronger and stronger "self images", differentiation between people intensified. From his vantage point several centuries later, he considered this to have been a major "civilisation shift".

The problem, as Staring sees it, is that Elias’s was a sociological, and therefore detached, understanding of the human condition, whereas what is needed is an anthropological, or more involved, view, which he believes Alexander supplied. He speculates that Alexander’s description of the head being pulled backwards and down in response to a stimulus was actually the physical manifestation of a homo clausus self-experience; and he suspects anyone who accepts Elias’s theory would, if they were exposed to Alexander work, recognise this in themselves, and realise there is a practical means of addressing it.

Staring devotes much of his essay to the issues of childbearing and birth, pointing out that those about to enter the world do not necessarily do so in a pristine state. Due in part to the size of infant heads as a result of evolution, but much more, he believes, to the degeneration in muscular tone and the over developed individuality of mothers as a consequence of homo clausus self-experiences, birth itself has become increasingly problematic, and gestation, once a time for harmonious intercommunication between mother and unborn child, a disenchanting period of relative isolation for them both.

Unfortunately, as Staring explains, although some of the problems surrounding pregnancy have been recognised, the remedial approaches tend to concentrate on strengthening of the self, often through "rather stupid gymnastic or yoga feats". The result is that women, by inadvertently distancing themselves from the new life within, feel even more cut off than normal; while their baby, wanting to communicate with a mother whose attempts to undo the harm of civilisation make this decreasingly possible, becomes enveloped in a "hard ball" of growing tension. Staring describes the impact of these formative months as "unborn children making contact with closed human beings".

Once deciphered, his is a compelling argument; and the way Staring links the opinions of a wide range of present day European thinkers with Alexander’s philosophy is an indication of what he considers its proper sphere of influence. Rather than being allied with a polyglot of approaches to health that, as he suggests, only increase an individual’s propensity for homo clausus self-experiences, he clearly believes Alexander’s work would fare better if it found common cause with those who study the wider issues of humanity.

The key question for teachers of the Technique, however, isn’t so much why civilisation may have brought about a fundamental change in human consciousness, nor the extent to which any such change will have been accompanied by a redistribution of muscle tension; but whether we should expect Alexander work, with its emphasis on the individual, to be effective in mitigating, rather than perpetuating, or even accentuating, the phenomena of "homo clausus in status nascendi".