Tag: Reich

On the energy economy of the masochistic body type

Some thoughts from personal experience on this topic. This entry is mainly based on self-analysis, on the basis of which I draw some general conclusions; I freely admit the methodological flaw in this way of reasoning (and even more so since I am not a “pure” example of this body type*), but those who are interested in a more systematic account will anyway refer to the literature on the subject. So:

By virtue of repeated violence and threats of violence during early childhood, the masochistic body type (“Maso”) develops two sets of marked body patterns.

Firstly, spasticity of the following muscles or muscle groups: (i) buttocks and thighs (gluteus medius and minimus, pectinius, quadriceps, rectus femoris, and the hip adductors); (ii) the deep pelvic and perineal muscles (the pelvic floor, which consists of three muscles, and the perineal pouch, see here for photo) involved in defecation and urination as well as in maintaining posture and (iii) the transversus and rectus abdominis muscles.

The original purpose of tensing these muscles was to protect the genitals from damage. The need to protect the genitals also has a symbolic interpretation and charge, insofar as it represents an attempt also to defend the ego from assault. The spasticity of these muscles is naturally paired with a lack of tonus in the muscles which move the hip and pelvis upwards and outwards.

Associated with this, a pattern of breathing is developed in response to pain and assault whereby oxygenation of the pelvic region is reduced, and thereby also its sensitivity to pain. This appears to involve primarily the transversus abdominis muscle, which is the deepest of the abdominal muscles and inserts into the linea alba (the line which runs from the solar plexus downwards). Spasticity of this muscle effectively shuts off energy flow along the front of the body, separating the pelvic region from the abdomen. It also limits the depth of abdominal breathing.

In addition to this, the Maso develops constrictions in the jaw and throat, running as far down as the solar plexus and also involving the pectoral muscles. These constrictions aim at inhibiting the vocal expression of anger and pain. The effect of constrictions in this segment is also to draw the shoulders forward and to compress the sternum from the manubrium (upper part of the sternum) which is compressed by the clavicles until the xiphoid process (region of the solar plexus).

In combination, these two groups of muscular spasticities arch the spine in the form of a C, a posture which expresses and communicates resignation and defeat.

Such spasticities develop in early childhood and inevitably have a permanent developmental impact at the skeletal level. The anatomy in particular of the pelvis/hip area is affected by the imbalance between muscle pairs which results from permanent tension in the adductor muscles.

The Maso’s energy economy is characterized by a high level of primary energy in the genital region but a limited ability to circulate and use this energy, requiring discharge at low thresholds, or otherwise manifesting as anxiety. Essentially, the Maso is unable to tolerate a high level of energy is his body, because of the fact that this energy overcharges the genitals. Compulsive masturbation is a way to avoid anxiety. Anxiety manifests itself because the discharge of energy has been blocked. As anxiety increases, discharge scripts are cathected. These scripts are typically sexual in character and develop into more or less developed forms of obsessive-compulsive behaviour. Such scripts may be actually enacted, or merely direct the expression of sexual desire. The masochistic character also has a tendency to overuse and possible abuse of alcohol. In my case there is also a tendency to compulsive eating and obesity, which is a common, but I am not sure whether general, characteristic of the body type.

Clearly, the therapeutic challenge is to loosen these two sets of primary rigidities and to deepen the breathing so that the pelvic area is better oxygenated.

*) As regards physical body armoring, however, I think this type predominates, both based on self-observation and on theoretical grounds which I omit.

Bioenergetics

I just finished reading Alexander Lowen’s autobiography. Certainly a remarkable man, who has understood Reich as few others have and taken his insights to a new level. It is a curious book nonetheless, disarmingly personal, honest about his failures, long on anecdote with no seeming purpose, extraordinarily understated prose that scarcely conveys what the adventure of his life must have felt like.

In relating the Reichian orgasm reflex to bodily vibrations and rigidities and in devising exercises which attempt to release those rigidities and anchor psychotherapy in the body, he is undoubtedly right.

What strikes me about the book though (perhaps I would see it differently if I read some of his others) is the lack of a theory of the emotions and of transference and countertransference; of the interpersonal dimension of human experience and of what this can bring to the transformation of character structure.

Lowen seems to see Bioenergetics as essentially palliative – he does not believe in its ability to change the character structure, and presumably has therefore never experienced this in his practice with patients, or recognized it in himself. Perhaps this is partly semantic. However, I certainly believe the character structure can not only be loosened, but really changed.

When I was in London last weekend at the tantra festival, it was educational to observe people’s bodies during the belly-dancing session that was organized. The essential identity of body and psyche and the different character types were very clearly on display.

Yet at the same event there was at least one person whose body – and presence – clearly expressed a grace of character that she cannot have had in childhood. There was no mistaking this. This was Sarita, and it made a big impression on me. I am certainly not a big fan of all the New Age stuff she proposes (www.schoolofawakening.com). But this is not important; all I want to observe is, that when you are a vehicle of grace, you are transformed organically.

So what is Lowen missing? I believe this starts in the psychotherapeutic paradigm and in his adherence to the Reichian model of charge and discharge, which I have discussed elsewhere. In rehabilitating the body, Lowen has displaced the primacy of the intellectual in therapy, but he has not realized that this is still only a partial vision. Thought has been complemented, supplanted, or subordinated by feeling; but emotion remains, in his worldview, poorly understood, maladaptive, merely a mechanism which imprints the mind’s neuroses on the body; and therapy consists of releasing emotions, as if they were only to be abandoned, overcome, transcended. And Lowen’s book indeed is disarmingly emotionless, though he himself was obviously an emotional man.

Lowen’s exercises have become very popular in tantric circles, though he himself shows no signs whatsoever of having encouraged this or even known about it. In this context, however, their therapeutic consequences are, I believe, completely transformed. By embracing love, acceptance, and sexual transcendence in the moment, complementary mechanisms of healing come into play which genuinely loosen and can ultimately resolve the pattern of neurosis embedded in thought, feeling and emotion. This resolution restores the whole woman or man. It is what we mean by satori, enlightenment; not a mystic concept but the very real end of therapy as in the Freudian tradition it can only be understood – not merely as a palliative treatment for distinct, severe mental disturbances, but as the individual resolution of socioculturally endemic patterns of neurosis and the recovery of healthy human life.

The Emotional Plague Stops Here.

28 Jan 2008

Whilst we may be uncomfortable with his endemic paranoia, pseudoscience and demagoguery – and I am with all three – today no reflective person interested in psychotherapeutic insights into sociology and philosophy would fundamentally disagree with Reich’s view that the state of society is significantly explained by the prevalence of repression of basic drives, nor fail to seek to dig deeper into how it is that, through feelings and emotions, power relationships come into being, trauma is induced and embedded in the body, and spontaneous self-expression is undermined.

Having come at this myself from a variety of angles, it seems to me that there starts to be the basis of an academic consensus in relation to these issues, which have been so unpalatable and remain so in popular and political discourse because scientific abstraction is so difficult to achieve in this contested arena. Reich himself, indeed, extended – understandably and with some justification but very unfortunately from the standpoint of getting his psychotherapeutic insights taken seriously – the notion of “emotional plague” from a concept to explain the diachronic and synchronic propagation of neurosis, to what he perceived as the unwillingness of his peers and of society to apply scientific standards to his own work of the same order of rigor as those they espoused elsewhere, and indeed to use every “dirty trick” in the book to discredit him. An extreme form, doubtless, with paranoiac overtones, of what Kuhn has described in relation to scientific paradigms more generally.

Whilst I share the view that the processes Reich termed “emotional plague” are indeed relevant to the state of society, I am not very concerned, myself, to thrust these notions into public debate, even if I am persuaded and concerned that my children will suffer immensely from being raised in an environment still largely scarred and polluted (possibly, indeed, increasingly so – I pronounce myself agnostic on this point) by the effects of the emotional plague. Indeed, my approach to the issue is absolutely solipsistic. You are free to call this an abdication. To my mind, however, social activism is the easy route, and many a half-truth has been thrust on society as a way of avoiding confronting, deeply, all that the full truth implies for the self; with frequently tragic results. Public debate on the issue will not help at all, or at least it will never be sufficient.

There’s a lot of fuzziness and opportunistic self-promotion in the spiritual marketplace which bears witness to, but at the same time obscures, the simple truths Reich referred to. Although they turn me off, such grandiose constructions do not, by their mere possibility or evocative hyperbole, render the truth other or inoperant, or dispense the seeker from further exploration. Thus we see in the spiritual tradition a fundamental identity between therapy and enlightenment, and between the destiny of the self and the destiny of society; and whilst a few drops of rain may not transform a desert, they may well sustain what life there is in it; and one day there may be more.

In Advaita Vedanta – the non-dual doctrines of Hinduism deriving from pre-Aryan traditions – it is recognized that “for the enlightened, all that exists is nothing but the Self”. Indeed, the moral basis of pure forms of Buddhism lies in this profound identity which links individual and collective salvation through mechanisms which are various and variously described, but in the end endogenous to the awakened state, and therefore of no special interest.

The extent to which the traumas of early childhood can be fully reversed in adulthood is, I think, a disputed matter. I am not necessarily optimistic about it; it seems to me today like a labor that could last forever, with no end in sight and only a constant stream of suffering as more and more hidden traumas bubble their way to the surface. And yet emotional healing is a necessary, imperative and moral path; the only moral path; the only path in fact, to which we are all more or less consciously called.

Let me be clear that I do not believe that our problems in the here and now come from past lives and will be repercuted in future ones. Reincarnation and karma are barbarisms; but they prefigure another truth which is much closer at hand. What I am in life, the type of moral entity I am, is determined diachronically by family precedent and synchronically by the type of society I have been brought up in; and of course these dimensions interplay and have done so since time immemorial. In my life, I play at the margin of these social processes and social revolution is impossible; but even a little light can dispel a multitude of darkness. And so I see that healing myself is what I can give to my children, the most important thing I can give them, maybe the only important thing. This is its meaning, this is its motivation, these are the “future lives” which I can influence. I am not having more fun than when I embarked on this journey, and I don’t know if I ever will; it doesn’t matter. Only they matter. What matters to me is that the emotional plague stops here; if I cannot rid myself of it, I will at least take it to the grave with me.

But there are moments of elation also, in the process of untangling the emotional determinism which wrecks our lives. It is a tremendous feeling of freedom to break through this layer, however episodically. In the lives of most of us, it is a discourse that rumbles on, unquestioned, scarcely perceived, from cradle to grave. But it is in fact not so difficult to break; even intellectual curiosity about what it is that links cause to effect in our emotional functioning is enough to start. When one is free of this, even just a little free, there is only laughter, and not cynical or nervous laughter, but true amusement. I find it genuinely funny in a way I cannot describe.

Let us recall the elements. This isn’t meant to be a complete account of something I’m sure I don’t fully understanding, just what’s needed to set the scene.

Sense-data provoke natural bodily reactions, like fear, lust, anger, and set in process mechanisms to deal appropriately with the situation thus anticipated. This is governed by the reptilian brain and the autonomic nervous system and thus not under conscious control. But the social animal that man is, disallows a part of these reactions; this also takes place not via dispassionate operation of the central cortex, but through the mechanism of emotions. Whilst emotions play a role in bonding and enabling communities to survive, however, they also become frozen in scripts which undermine feelings and natural drives in a way which is maladaptive and frequently acutely so. By this means, the natural response of the body to external stimuli typically comes to take on a habitual character whereby tensions are associated with surrogate and constant stimuli and become a state of being rather than an adaptive transient response. Sentiments like fear and guilt come to dominate our psychic makeup and are used by us in turn to prompt reactions which we find favourable to our interests. It is from this game that we need release – though we may seek the contrary, which is exactly what organized religion gives us…

We believe in and associate ourselves with our emotional scripts, not appreciating that they are not only socially constructed – like aesthetics – but socially conditioned also; whilst they may linger on in solitude, their origin is always in social events. But maladaptive emotional scripts are no more a necessary part of our personality to be held onto and cherished, than any bodily pathology.

To illustrate, a typical process of scripted emotional response may be as follows: stimulus (A innocently switches light on early in the morning, believing B to be awake); B’s reaction (fear; surprise); state of alert; realization that reaction was inappropriate to stimulus; recollection of (or rather subconscious association with) a pattern of similar events in the past, especially in early childhood, which were a source of emotional reactions designed to ward off annoying/malicious intent on the part of a parent, sibling etc.; subliminal transference of such assumed intent onto A; production of the associated emotional reaction; association on the part of A, in turn, of B’s reaction with similar prior events (unfair unpunishment in the absence of intent to harm); emotional counterreaction (anger, outrage, sense of injustice, sense of betrayal); defensive or hostile reaction by B to what is now perceived as or associated with a threat (fight, flight, freezing); situation spirals out of control…

Especially when A is a small child, this type of inappropriate reaction, repeated often, can easily generate trauma and a diminished sense of self. Let us assume now, however, that both B and A are mature and intelligent enough to grasp this sequence of events intellectually, and may also have some understanding of their own conditioning which predisposes them to this type of reaction, which, it must be said, is in one form or another totally commonplace and largely unquestioned; often accepted by adults though invariably upsetting to children.

Then one can start to dissociate the elements and observe them critically. In this way, the spiral is broken. More than this, however, the past events which are brought to life in this way can be processed and dealt with, rather than – as so often happens – repressed anew. In fact, the recollection of these past emotional injuries which happens outside conscious control is an opportunity to be seized. It rarely is, however, because doing so unleashes the full force of the earlier reaction to the traumatizing event, a reaction which is obviously disproportionate to the proximate cause and risks, therefore, further escalating the emotional spiral as reaction and counterreaction become a battlefield for control of the self. The healing process relies on replacing the scripted reaction by one which is appropriately supportive and recognizes the fact that the phenomena being experienced have their origin in something other than the precipitating stimulus, and, thus, do not bear on A’s appreciation of B or the converse.

Even when A and B perfectly understand under normal circumstances that they have a high appreciation of each other and each is happily anchored in their own identity, this dissociation is not easy and can only be progressive. The cumulative effect is, however, liberation from this conditioned reaction and its replacement by one which is more spontaneous, appropriate and joyful. By creating a space which is safe for A to completely enter into reliving and discharging the earlier experiences, B – even through a mechanism which is at its origin maladaptive – succeeds in allowing A to reprogram a part of his emotional armouring. And this is the process which, over time, can defeat the emotional plague; one individual at a time, one moment at a time, because, just as its physical counterpart a virus, the emotional plague infects only individuals; its effect on communities is no more than the arithmetic aggregation of individual infections through whatever contagious process is at work.

In fact, whilst understanding is seemingly helpful (and being of a very academic persuasion I am drawn to it), it is probably not even necessary. In tantra we learn to feel our bodies, to respect their reactions, their capacity to feel, to respond, to respect and honor even what is seemingly maladaptive, knowing that underneath its maladaptive character, which is social in nature and hence contingent, these reactions are in fact individually adaptive, carry a message and meaning, and can bear us to safer and more secure shores.

In the English language, we do not normally place a period at the end of a title. In this case, however, it is deliberate.

The psychopathology of sexual response

18 Jul 2007

I have climbed another mountain.

Reich’s critique of Freud, though apparently unknown in mainstream discussion of the Freudian legacy to Western thought, is poignant. Freud made a pact with the devil: although he knew, he did not say; and as a result his theories are distorted ones, they are half-truths, packaged to take account of the world into which they were born. Although aware of the origins of neuroses in childhood sexual development, and how social conditioning removed spontaneous behavior, he nonetheless accepted that sexuality was dangerous and needed to be channeled into more socially “acceptable” forms of behavior. He called this “sublimation”, and for him, this was a natural stage of adult development. It was not a pathology.

Reich called his bluff. He stated that a fully satisfying genital sexual life and the absence of neuroses were two sides of the same coin. And although Reich has been rebuffed and ridiculed – and quite rightly when it came to his later attempts to create a theory of everything – his position has also deeply affected modern attitudes to sexuality in the West, whereby a woman is not quite normal unless she has three orgasms before breakfast.

But – with all respect to Reich – this focus on genitality is insane. It is just another artefact of the warped world into which both Freud’s and Reich’s theories were born.

Experiencing deep and full orgasmic pleasure does indeed characterize the natural state of man and woman. But it is a consequence of psychic health, a manifestation, it is not a recipe for achieving it or a cosmic status symbol.

In The Function of the Orgasm, Reich argued that orgasm serves to regulate bodily energies, essentially to release energies which otherwise would become stocked in the body and generate neuroses and psychosomatic phenomena.

Now, this is partly true, but it is not the end of the story.

Reich’s account of the orgasm appears to exclude that it may, itself, be used as a mechanism, perhaps even the most powerful mechanism, to rigidify the body and freeze neuroses into place. But a moment’s reflection suffices to see that this is how sexuality functions for many people. Such sexuality is labeled morbid and dismissed, it is not “real” and “healthy” sexuality and hence it is not what Reich is talking about. But this misses the point.

Now, I fully admit to being an amateur with only a limited background on these things, but I still think I’m on to something here. So here is my conjecture on the psychopathology of sexual response. Of course we now know much more than Reich or Freud ever could about the reality of human sexual behavior and it is time to retheorize psychotherapy based on this knowledge. Reich’s theories are based on a very crude metaphysics of bodily energy.

I believe that when our sense of self is under stress, the primary channel of psychosomatic repression is genital. Such repression may manifest itself in the sexual response – whether it is impotence or (exclusively in men of course) “premature” ejaculation. But it also manifests itself in sexual behavior, both direct behavior (what we are accustomed to calling “perversions”, though it is an obviously unsatisfactory term) and in sublimated behavior patterns such as violence, anger and so on, as well as in bodily phenomena playing a role in the ontogenesis of illness. The omnipresence of degraded genital sensitivity, in both sexes, which I have been able to observe in my own experience is ample indication that the primary locus of psychosomatic repression is the pelvic floor. I also believe that most therapists working in the Reichian tradition would agree with this and operate accordingly, but at an intellectual level, as a system, I am unconvinced that the Reichian account itself is complete or coherent.

A satisfying genital sexual life (as, presumably, self-reported) may even have nothing to do with the maintenance of mental health, it may, once again, simply be a manifestation of a satisfying emotional life, which is the primary cause of partial neurotic resolution, and indeed this seems rather more likely.

So the genitals are a battleground. On the one hand, the wounded sense of self directs energy against them and seeks release through them; on the other, reality intrudes by this channel too in the erotic response.

It is important to realize that what we are talking about here is “normal” sexuality, not (only) morbidity. In other words, it is the sexuality which Reich viewed as homomorphic to mental and physical health. Freud argued for sublimation, and Reich for dissipation of sexual drives. But the reality is that the sexual drive which Reich wished to dissipate through the orgasm, is itself stubbornly neurotic and the remedy Reich prescribed merely anchors this neurosis. If it does anything else, then that is merely by chance. It is entirely possible that it is better to dissipate certain energies in this way than to channel and manifest them in available alternative ways, although I am not sure about this because the genitals are at the origin of many psychopathologies and the apparent release may therefore be only temporary – moreover, sex typically involves two people and this release may therefore be, and probably often is, at the expense of the other. In any case, this does not by itself determine that Reich has described healthy sexual behavior. Of course, Reich’s findings are indelibly influenced by the clinical context of his and Freud’s work, even if he went on to well understand, in his most important work on child psychology, the social generation of psychopathology which determined the passing on of neuroses from one generation to the next.

When we observe sexual neurosis, we have not merely to prescribe genital release as a means of managing it; we have to look, in full Reichian logic, at what is generating this neurosis. And what is generating it is the wounded sense of self. In order to heal this, we need to step out of this subjectivity and observe objectively.

Here, sexuality can help, but only if we let it. Instrumentalizing sexuality closes all possibility that it will awaken us. It is merely another manifestation of the defense mechanisms that the wounded self has mastered. Rather, we must seek to deinstrumentalize it, just to experience it, to allow it to surprise us, to ensure it is placed firmly outside of our control so that it may be a gateway to challenge our self-construction and make us confront the fact that reality is other. And this is not only true of sex; it is true of all sensory phenomena. They are either a way out or a way in; and we must make them a way in. When our constructed self, our psychophysical armor, is permanently exposed to contradiction and cannot escape, only then are we free of it and living authentically.

I recognize that some may find this account of sexuality too remote from their own experience. Given that real sexuality has a dual character as both affirmation and effacement of the self, how to enjoy it fully in the present moment and not at some irrealistic future date? Indeed, may not the self-affirmatory aspects of sexuality, and not only the self-effacing ones, have a true therapeutic or energy-management function and value, in addition to being fun? Yes. Certainly. I also reject an ascetic view according to which only sex according to the purest (imagined) tantric canon has any value. Sex is fun, and I revel in all its variety and the humanity of it (though I certainly do not condone actions which are unilateral and predatory). But this is a subject for another blog entry.