therapy – Becoming Human

The neuroscience of fear

Continuing my interest in the neuroscience of emotion, I recently finished reading neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux’s book “The Emotional Brain”(*). This is a quick review and synopsis, in particular of those points relevant to psychotherapy.

LeDoux is one of the best known figures in the field, alongside Antonio Damasio, whose work I have also delved into, but found rather indigestible. Although I found Ledoux more readable than Damasio, I have two major gripes with the book. The main one is the title: there is not a lot in the book about emotions in general; Ledoux rapidly zeroes in on the single emotion of fear, which is his area of specialism. On this subject he is relatively enlightening, but it wasn’t what I expected or hoped for. In addition, some of the statements he does make about emotions in general, even if they may apply to fear are not obviously true of all emotions.

Additionally, the blurb suggests a book which is highly readable, but I did not find this to be really the case. It’s fairly readable, but has a tendency, especially in the later chapters, to get lost in detail. I would say it is not ideally pitched to the non-specialist reader (though likely at the same time to be oversimplified for a specialist), and does not belong to the best in science writing. Having been written in 1998, it is of course also somewhat dated by now, though I have not come across anything more recent.

LeDoux argues convincingly – but it is not very surprising – that there is no single “emotional system” in the brain, but we have to look at each emotion separately. As i said, he focuses on fear, which presumably is one of the easier emotions to study because it has a much longer evolutionary history than some of the “higher” emotions like love and joy which seem more particularly to relate to human experience. It is quite hard to read any conclusions across from fear to these other emotions.

LeDoux argues that we typically have little reliable insight into the factors which trigger our emotions, but a great tendency to make up stories about them and to believe in these stories. Indeed, we are unreliable in our reports of our emotional states as such. Emotions, unlike cognition, are intrinsically linked to the body and prompt bodily response; they evolved as “behavioral and physiological specializations” (p.40). The characteristic “feel” of emotions reflect their different physiological signatures.

Emotions operate below the level of consciousness. This is illustrated by the phenomenon of “emotional priming” whereby the response to an explicit stimulus is influenced by a preceding stimulus the duration of which is too short for it to be captured in conscious memory (p.59). Mere exposure is sufficient; there is no need for any logical connection between the two stimuli.

The study of fear has, of course, a particular relevance to psychotherapy and some of LeDoux’s arguments bear consideration in this context, as he himself notes, though does little to develop. LeDoux argues that fear, and comparable emotions, are registered in the amygdala from where they govern programmed physiological reactions; at the same time there is a feedback loop to cognition which passes via the hippocampus. This latter circuit is obviously much more developed in humans than in lower mammals, but in all species it is notably asymmetric: the hippocampus, which is where new memories are created, has the equivalent of a broadband connection to the medial prefrontal cortex, but the available bandwidth is much less in the opposite direction. This, LeDoux argues, makes it difficult to reprogram the association made in the hippocampus between certain remembered events and the fear response. This sounds plausible, and may reflect experimental observations on the persistence of conditioned fear responses in rodents as well as the observed difficulties of therapy, but it is no more than suggestive of the conclusion which LeDoux draws.

Fear conditioning is the process which “turns meaningless stimuli into warning signs” (p.141). Some stimuli are preprogrammed: “laboratory-bred rats who have never seen a cat will freeze if they encounter one” (p.143). But most, of course, are learned. The simultaneous presence of two stimuli of which only one, the “unconditioned stimulus” (US) is intrinsically unpleasant is sufficient to form a link between them, on the basis of which the second or conditioned stimulus (CS) is subsequently sufficient to evoke the fear response, regardless of its intrinsic link to the US. This link is highly persistent and may indeed be impossible to forget completely even if, subsequently, no link between the stimuli is observed for a protracted period. The best that can be done is to extinguish it by presenting the CS repeatedly in the absence of the US, but there is always the risk of recurrence if relevant circumstances, such as re-exposure to the unconditioned stimulus, or simply a high level of ambient unrelated stress, arise. A CS may be almost anything: a place, a gesture, an expression, a tone of voice… Of course, the atomicity of these candidate stimuli is hard to determine : is being in exactly the same place necessary to evoke the conditioned response, or is it sufficient that a place bear some resemblance and, if so, in what respects?

In stressful situations, memory formation by the hippocampus is impaired. This would imply that traumatic events might not leave a memory trace, but still result in fear conditioning. In such cases, there may be no way to “reverse-engineer” the event out of the conditioned reaction. This has the clear implication that going after memories of traumatic events may be a fruitless strategy, and that resolution of trauma might happen without those underlying events ever being recalled, even if they occurred past the stage of childhood amnesia. However, the stress hormone cortisol has the opposite effect on the amygdala. Thus it is “completely possible that one might have poor conscious memory of a traumatic experience, but at the same time form very powerful implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p.245). At the same time, recreating the emotional state conditioned does facilitate recall of explicit memories (p.212).

LeDoux’s analysis of conditioning and memory therefore sheds some light on problems encountered in therapy and on effective therapeutic strategies. I learnt something from this book, but I suspect that a general book on recent contributions of neuroscience to psychotherapy might have gotten me more rapidly to my goal.

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(*) References are to the 1999 paperback edition published by Orion books.

No Mud, No Lotus – A review

Similarly to Monique Roffey’s book which I reviewed earlier, Maya Yonika’s No Mud, No Lotus recounts her personal journey prior to meeting the well-known sacred sex practitioner Baba Dez Nichols, her experiences at his temple in Sonoma, Arizona and the fall-out from it (link to her blog here; the main website www.ramamaya.com seems to be down at the time of writing).

Most of the book, in fact, is given over to the story of her life before she met Dez, which consists of a difficult childhood and a long subsequent search for her place in the world which is scarred by a series of misadventures, but also a degree of serendipity. Yonika emerges from the book as someone with a remarkable drive to survive and find herself, but nonetheless she seems still in many ways in dialogue with her inner demons. As, for that matter, does Dez. There is also a related film and a long exchange of views on Facebook, in which various practitioners take part, on the subject of whether or not it is ever appropriate for a sexual therapist to have sex with their client (although this is not really the focus of the book).

Maya experiences a lot of the power of sacred sexual healing both for herself and for others, but is left at best ambivalent as to the methods used by Dez. Her path after leaving the temple is not elucidated in any detail in the book, which also does not contain a definitive assessment of her experience. This is left up to the reader.

I would like to start out by quoting something that Dez says in the aforementioned Facebook thread:

“There is a common wound in the feminine experienced by those who have been abandoned, dominated or abused in some way (which is most of us). This wound causes us to lash out at others we perceive to be misusing power (and often misusing our own in the process). As the wound comes near to healing – normally when a masculine energy is willing to brave it out of love for the feminine – a deep battle in the psyche takes place.

“The feminine tests the masculine with everything she has – looking for every imperfection and trying hard to make the projection of abuser fit his face instead of having to reclaim it as part of the dynamic of her own wounding. In women at this stage, often the immature masculine in them attacks the wounded feminine in a man in order to feel some retribution for their inner wound. And in men, the wounded feminine often withdraws and goes into isolation and victimhood.

“In Greek legend there is the story of the archer left behind on an island on the way to Troy because he had a wound that smelled so bad no one could come near. The oracle later declared that someone needed to go back for him as he was required to shoot the winning arrow in the battle.

“I smell such a wound in many communications as we try to heal this collective wound. When real love has appeared in our lives and been deep enough to precipitate that final battle – if we take the lesson from the oracle, the winning arrow can only be fired when we go back to that inner island and brave the stench of the wound we have not (yet) been able to bear.”

This is brilliantly stated and I fully agree with it. At the same time, however, it is one-sided and the context renders it, for me, manipulative. That context, according to the book, is as follows: Dez plucks Maya out of obscurity, catapulting her into the role of his teaching partner despite hardly knowing her and despite her wounded past. She is also asked to offer sexual healing sessions, despite having seemingly little to no training and not having at all achieved a resolution of her own inner conflicts.

Maya has sound intuitions about sexuality, which Dez is portrayed as ignoring. She is certainly projecting on him, but he seems unaware that he is doing the same to her. They squabble in ways that are all too familiar, reenacting the cultural battle of the sexes, with Dez, it seems, unwilling to give any ground. In his role as healer, he seems ego-driven and out of touch with the spiritual heart of sex, as I have described it elsewhere on this blog. He is certainly marked by a considerable degree of attachment to Maya, whilst simultaneously unable to connect with an essential part of her nature.

Perhaps this is not surprising. What Dez and others have invented is not tantra, but a method of sexual healing. It is thus very reduced in scope compared to tantra, lacking in any other meditative practice, and frequently not very therapeutically informed. It may be exactly what some people need, but it is not obvious that many of its practitioners are in a position to make that judgment reliably. This is because it is not really a method, but a transmission; and this transmission, to operate reliably, necessitates a sufficient degree of openness on the part of the receiver – which has to be built progressively – and transcendence of self on the part of the giver. In the case of Maya, and probably in many other cases, it seems to me that Dez places undue reliance on the therapeutic efficacy of methods that are not adapted to many of the situations which they face. She cannot be his Dakini, because they never appear as equals. It seems that, from her, he learns little.

By contrast, a notion of therapy is almost absent in classical tantra, but it does require extensive preparation before devotees are in a position to engage in union in a manner which is spiritually beneficial. Union is certainly not therapy in tantra, or at least not baseline therapy; there is much besides.

Maya intuits that Dez is spiritually unavailable to her because he over-identifies with the role he has created for himself. I am inclined to share that intuition. As a result, she feels that sex loses its power and that she must look elsewhere. This stand-off may appear as a classic struggle between the sexual “natures” of man and woman, and certainly risks reinforcing that stereotype (as did also Roffey’s book), but – given that the notion that our species has been eternally engaged in a game of mutual self-destruction has to be rejected – this would be a naive conclusion. In the end, Maya may be inclined to seek refuge in exclusivity (this is not really clear) and Dez in multeplicity because they are the male and female halves of the same wound. Maya knows that she can love in infinite depth, and so multeplicity seems to her a rejection of profundity; Dez knows that he can love in infinite scope and misses the need for depth. Maya is attentive to his discourse, but reacts defensively because she senses she has another, equally vital discourse, to which he is deaf, and that therefore they cannot meet as Shiva and Shakti, but only on the basis of a subjugation of her feminine essence.

One could dismiss the story on the grounds that a little thought and research should suffice to make clear to any spiritual searcher that what Dez is offering is too limited to achieve a full spiritual transformation. Nevertheless, it does matter, because the need for sexual healing is widespread, and very many vulnerable people are attracted by what is, in essence, a practice which promises far more than it can deliver. This style of sexual healing has a lot in common with mind-altering drugs. At a certain moment in life’s journey, it can be the perfect way to open up to dimensions of existence of which one had been completely unaware. Yet it is valuable only if that is merely the start of a journey and not a substitute for it. The alternative is a state of dependency which may be very destructive.

Paraphilia

As I’ve mentioned before on this blog, Dan Savage, whose work I generally respect, sometimes really grates on me. One of the subjects on which he clearly has no idea whatsoever is sexual paraphilia. In this letter, someone writes to him clearly tortured by extreme violent sexual fantasies (“EVSFs”). Although he does at least urge that person to see a therapist, he also writes:

You could be seeing causation where there is only coincidence. There are a lot of people out there who didn’t suffer the kind of abuse you did—or any kind of abuse at all—but who nevertheless have EVSFs.

This statement is typical of Dan’s views on kinks, but he has never to my knowledge made any attempt to justify it. And, quite honestly, what does he, or does any of us, know about the life experiences of people who may well themselves have repressed all recollection of early childhood trauma? Whilst I support the position of accepting paraphilia and the safe exploration of paraphilia, I entirely disagree as regards its etiology; paraphilia is obsessive-compulsive and it is always attributable to a disturbance in natural sexual development. Persons with a paraphilia, even if they do not experience it as suffering, would have a lot to gain from the path of inquiry to which it invites.

The psychodynamics of paraphilia, predictably misinterpreted by the American Psychiatric Association, have been explored in the path-breaking work of Robert Stoller. As I have mentioned before, Stoller’s view was that paraphilia was ubiquitous but neurotic. He argued for its tolerance, but not for missing its psychoanalytic message. As more recent work has emphasized, the primary biological role of human sexuality is group bonding. Scripted sexual behavior, on the other hand, attempts to discharge ego trauma; it is not oriented to the other but to oneself. This should be only a transient phase in sexual development, but persons with paraphilias are stuck there. (It should also be emphasized that paraphilia is a narrower category than kink – sexual behavior is acquired, in part also cultural and a question of fashion, and interest in certain forms of behavior, even if it may have been formed in somewhat unnatural circumstances in childhood, should not be labelled paraphilia if it is merely a part of repertoire and not an obsession. The neutral label of kink is often misapplied to paraphilia.)

Paraphiliacs will argue that they can be in loving relationships, in which bedroom fantasy does not spill out into all other domains of life. I accept this. We all know that it can be compassionate to indulge another’s addiction, and uncaring constantly to point out that they would be better off without it. Nonetheless one lives a freer, fuller life when addictions are overcome.

Paraphiliacs will also tell us that they are happier than the rest of us. That may also be true. Many of us are walking around with an entire buried world of fantasies in our preconscious, unavowed and unbefriended; they are sought outlets for drives which instead have to find less healthy outlets elsewhere. Embracing this submerged shadow world would make us all healthier and happier.

Nonetheless, Dan makes categorical and unsubstantiated statements in his attempts to normalize kink. Why? It seems this is because, at root, his position on homosexuality tends often to be unreflectingly nativist. He presents matters as if no homosexual has any choice as to their sexual orientation and that it is for this reason that it must be respected. The more other socially frowned upon forms of sexual behavior that can be found and similarly labeled innate, the more he can rally voices behind the (laudable) gay rights agenda.

This is not only unscientific; whilst understandable, and possibly good tactics in the past, it is at this stage in our collective social development a grave mistake. Without loss of generality, I believe it is obvious enough that some people’s homosexual orientation is innate, whereas others engage in homosexual behavior rather because it is, for them, in the nature of a paraphilia. Whether consensual, victimless behavior is native or elective should not matter from the standpoint of the law. After all, religion is the ultimate elective fantasy; if its exercise is protected, all other rights must follow.

Persons with EVSFs have them certainly because they have suffered some form of abuse – they are not innate. Being able safely to avow and explore these fantasies may well be a crucial stage in the process of emancipation from the collective consequences of this abuse in their adult life, which doubtless goes way beyond the fantasies in question. Whether, unaided, BDSM is sufficient as therapy is, to put it mildly, much more open to doubt. Compassion requires us to recall the broader picture and to support the individual in all aspects of their healing process.

On the economics of therapy

The basic elements of effective personal development: bodywork, meditation and support.

In conceiving ones pathway to personal growth and healing, I think it is important to have a proper understanding of the processes involved, an understanding which is frequently lacking.

In a few words, my understanding is as follows. Within the bodymind there are two processes, both of which are needed because they depend on and reinforce each other and the end result is a product of the two. These can be characterized as a feminine and a masculine process. The feminine process involves softening of internal obstacles to the flow of energy, whether these be biophysical obstacles such as muscular hypertonicity or psychic obstacles in the form of existing representations at the conscious or subconscious level – such as the idea that certain behavior is wrong, that one should conform to certain norms, and so on. The masculine process involves increasing the quantitative level of life energy in the body so that these obstacles come under pressure from within, eventually leading to their crumbling or collapse. In terms of this masculine process there is no distinction between the body and the mind.

A simple physical model of this is as follows. We can think of water behind a dam, the release of which can be achieved both by weakening the structure of the dam and by increasing the weight of water bearing down upon it. Or we can think of the process of birth, where hormonal secretions soften the cervix which then opens under the weight of the embryo and the uterine contractions which increase the pressure applied to it.

As energy starts to flow, the process becomes self-reinforcing. We can think of water which, denied its route of least resistance, its natural pathway of flow, by the presence of the dam finds other pathways to bring rainfall to the sea. As the dam weakens, more and more of the rainfall will recommence flowing through its natural channel to the detriment of the diverted routes which had been previously established (this process of diversion is called in Freudian terms displacement).

Our bodies and our minds are always trying to rebuild the dams which we through our therapeutic endeavors wish to weaken. Many factors keep these dams in place. However, all of these factors are themselves due to displacement, because damming vital energy on a long term basis is not natural. (We can indeed restrain our vital energy over the short term by natural processes, under the force of the Reality Principle whereby expression is put off when its immediate expression would have negative consequences. We will also naturally channel that energy in different directions, partly by conscious choice and partly prompted by emotions, so that for example the energy is available to respond to a threat. This ability to control the flow of energy constitutes the biological basis for what is expressed pathologically in neurosis.)

It follows from this that there is always a weakest link in the line of defenses keeping the dams in place. This is the easiest and possibly only route to circumventing the process whereby the body heals breaches in its psychological defenses, and indeed builds stronger defenses if necessary. A direct confrontation of the front line of defense is quite counterproductive, but it may happen that when the underlying restorative mechanisms are weakened sufficiently, the whole edifice is at some point swept away.

At the deepest level, these mechanisms are representational. It is because we believe certain incorrect things about the world that we build inappropriate defenses. Only when we build new representations to replace these beliefs will we stop supplying the neurosis with the energy it needs to resist the energy naturally brought to bear on it by life processes.

All of this implies, I think, that we need to integrate two tracks in our work on ourselves.

Bodywork increases the quantitative level of energy in the body and corresponds to the masculine part of the process. All types of bodywork can help, but the most effective will be that which builds energy and allows it to circulate in the core life centers of the body, namely the pelvis where sexual energy is generated and which is at the crossroads of the flow of energy in the body and therefore the position which most naturally acts as a bottleneck.

Of course by bodywork I do not mean simply any physical practice. The practice must be appropriate, grounded and conscious to avoid being merely a vehicle to reinforce existing tensions. If it is not conscious, it will be manipulated by the mind to this end, or at least rendered inoperative.

The body will always reuse existing scripts if it can. Thus for example while a practice such as running may be marvellously energizing and, aside from its possible opportunity cost, is certainly not to be discouraged, it will not correct disequilibria in the body unless the body has really been deprived of this type of exercise before. Just as there are many ways to skin a cat, there are also many ways to run; the body is always going to use the method it already knows unless this method is not available to it. Thus if the physical movement relies disproportionately on certain muscle groups and inadequately on others, it will continue to do so because this is a perfectly viable, even if not the most natural, way to perform the task in question.

This means that running may be helpful, and there is no doubt that in principle it can lead to increased blood flow in the pelvis, but it is certainly not going directly to the heart of the problem. In order to do this you need to invite your body to do things which, while natural (if perhaps exaggerated for therapeutic purposes), it is not used to doing and therefore has no readily available script to deal with. Consciousness in this process helps to construct new neural pathways which can progressively replace, or remove the excessive strain on, the old.

Whilst bodywork is therefore an indispensable part of an effective therapeutic process, it is important to understand that it is really not adequate alone. I do not believe that bodywork is going to reprogram, in any reasonable span of time, representations in the psyche. Only the psyche itself can do this and in order to do so it needs to be exposed to a reality which is inconsistent with its prior assumptions, in a way which is safe enough to allow it to relax into the invitation which this situation provides to experience new ways of seeing the world.

This is, at a very general level, and as properly understood, the role of meditation. The choice of meditation is, however, hardly to be left to chance. Meditations should be, to a large degree, sexual and embodied. This is for the simple reason that the faulty representations are, to a large degree, sexual and disembodied. Where faulty representations are not directly sexual in nature, they are still sexual at a secondary level. Thus for example we may have a faulty representation of threats to our physical integrity, but as a result of this faulty representation a degree of sexual stasis has also resulted. Moreover, all such representations result in avoidance of behavior which sexual expression calls for, namely contact, intimacy, empathy and so on. I shall have more to say on this in a future post.

Again, both the problem and its solution are fairly easy to understand. We all know that if we are afraid of something in particular we will normally be able to overcome that fear by approaching the situation and becoming familiar with it, until we realize that our fear was not justified. If necessary, we start with baby steps or we take an indirect route. But eventually we become comfortable in the situation we had feared. Progressively, we change the internal representation that we have of the world, and the old one disappears.

To take a trivial (if for me painful) example, I for a long time was afraid to urinate with someone watching. This impeded my ability to use public urinals and was beyond my conscious power to change. This type of blockage is only going to be released by actually engaging in the activity in question under circumstances which are safe enough to relax and drop the subconscious conditioning at the root of the problem. Even if we frequently avoid doing so, it really is very easy in principle. You just find someone you trust, name the problem (by itself an important step), and ask them if they would be willing to observe you urinating. If it is too hard for you, you could ask them to start by watching from behind a curtain, or using a webcam, or merely be present while looking the other way, or whatever you can think of that is sufficiently below the blocking pain threshold not to activate the unwanted reflex. And you take it from there. To actually do this encounters some psychological resistance, but it is not really difficult if you want to.

This is where the methods of tantra come in. These methods may seem physical, and you may even be tempted to label them bodywork (correctly, of course, for a part of the methods). Yet these methods are really working on our false representations of the world in order to replace them with more flexible psychic structures which allow us to experience the world naturally, whilst still safely, especially in the dimension of sexuality and intimacy. Experience of the world as it really is naturally builds trust in our instinctive nature, because we see that this nature is in fact consistent with possibilities in the outside world, and not, as we had always supposed, inconsistent. This recreates the bridge, which in fact becomes an increasingly permeable membrane, between our inner world and the outer world, so that we can recognize these as two aspects of the same reality and move between them fluidly. In this way we have an embodied presence in the world, and not a disembodied antagonism to it. Our needs for intimacy are met and we become increasingly confident that they will always be met. From this reestablishment of trust is borne compassion.

Therefore I think it is really important to recognize and acknowledge ones needs and blockages in relation to sex and intimacy and of course not to hurtle in to situations which may be retraumatizing, but to find a way back to this source of ones being.

In this process, an exclusive preference for bodywork, which I encounter not infrequently, reveals enduring resistance to psychic change and only underlines the need for a complementary approach targeting the heart, emotions and senses. Bodywork is psychologically easy because it typically confronts nothing in ones relation to the other. It is an individual practice. Meditation can only be relational in nature, because psychic representations are relational in nature. Psychic representations, unlike physical representations, do not concern the organization of our body in its physical autonomy, but rather how we relate to others around us. This framework is largely a sovereign abstraction of the mind. It has some use in regard to real threats, but is dysfunctional in relation to imaginary threats. If we wish to change it, we need to allow ourselves to perceive their imaginary nature and reestablish the trust which we have lost.

As we move, of course, along this path, psychic material which underpins these representations may surface, together with the corresponding emotions (i.e. the affect). I am not trying to suggest that it is easy (or even appropriate) simply to plough ahead at such moments. Special talents are needed to help people safely and quickly through these occurrences. It is important to understand that there is not, as such, any psychic danger from this happening, at least in the vast majority of cases which are short of psychiatric in nature. It is only a question of the rate at which one makes progress, because these are critical moments in which either breakthroughs can be achieved or, conversely, one can slip back and have to start again (not of course from scratch, but the material will recede into the subconscious and this is evidence that it has not been processed and continues to affect the psyche). Whence the benefit of an experienced facilitator, coach or therapist.

So that’s the recipe: conscious bodywork (including breathwork), embodied and sexual meditation (once this type of meditation has reached its goal it can be replaced or complemented by others), plus ideally someone you can rely on to help you through the more challenging moments.

Good luck everyone 🙂

Five Rhythms

I have been dancing the movement practice called “Five Rhythms” on and off for a couple of years now, and am presently in the middle of a series of workshops which are subbranded “Heartbeat”. As far as I can gather from the founder’s website, which is not however very clear on this, this is intended to be the second of five “levels” in the Five Rhythms practice (the subsequent ones are “Cycles”, “Mirrors” and “the Silver Desert” respectively – the site is in Java so there are no hyperlinks to individual pages but look under “The Dancing Path” and “Becoming a Teacher”). (Roth also calls these the “first five levels”; afterwards there is still “Embodiment” and “Expression”). Our teacher says that Heartbeat is “the name for the emotional work in Five Rhythms dance”.

Whilst there is a lot of wisdom in some of what Roth says and has transmitted to other teachers, it is time for a working hypothesis of my own in relation to what this practice is and is not, the claims it makes and the place it might occupy in ones personal development practice portfolio.

I dance Five Rhythms and will probably go on doing so basically because I find it a very good integrative practice, as well as an enjoyable way to practice embodiment and embodied meditation. The wisdom of the body is there to be discovered in the practice. Five Rhythms is very popular in the tantra community for this reason.

However, whilst it does not appear to eschew portraying itself as such, which I find very regrettable, Five Rhythms is not a transformative or complete practice, and certainly not a rapid and/or deep one. In my opinion Roth, like so many others, has succumbed to commercial temptation and erected her system into a clumsy systematic “theology” of branded personal growth which is as unconvincing as it is inoperative and unnecessary. Just as access to the Godhead is mediated through layers of priesthood in the folk practice of the church (not in its mystical tradition), so layers of practice are interpolated between the practitioner and his or her full embodied expression in Roth’s schema, and the more there are, the more profitable it is. This is not a new strategy. It has been the strategy of religion through the ages.

I am not of course saying that there is no role for trajectories in such practices at all. But all they are is practices. They are not paths. Roth loses sight of this by pushing her initially perfectly valid observations and frameworks into overarching metaphors which are presented as a kind of key to unlock the secrets of the heart and of being human, but which are no such thing.

As any theory which is helpful enough in terms of what it is designed to explain, its reckless extension by analogy produces only increasing distorsion. Roth’s pentateuchal fetishism in these successive layers of practice reaches levels which evoke the spirit of Pythagorean mysticism. What is to be discovered is no longer innate but increasingly arcane. This strikes me as a dance of the mind, fully disconnected from reality, ungrounded and hopeless.

Let me illustrate. A (supposedly positive) review of Roth’s autobiographical handbook Sweat your Prayers on amazon.de states that as a result of movement work with Fritz Perls (the founder of Gestalt therapy), Roth “came to isolate five rhythms related to five archetypes or states of being“. Now, the description of these as “rhythms” is itself strange, as they of course are not; they are something more like “musical moods”. That there are exactly five such “moods” (flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical and stillness) is hardly a taxonomy which exists naturally and objectively. Rather there is an infinitive variety of musical moods, which fade indistinctly into each other. Thus Roth has at the outset chosen what can only be reasonably considered a metaphor, and goes on to overapply this metaphor to everything that comes within her sight.

The same source goes on to say that “Roth claims that even terminally inhibited people can learn to enter these rhythms and sense how it feels to inhabit ‘mother, mistress, madonna, father, son and holy spirit.’ The three feminine archetypes follow a flowing rhythm, according to Roth, while the energy of the masculine archetypes corresponds to a staccato rhythm. Roth discovered that when the masculine and feminine fuse, a rhythm of fertile chaos results, as in acts of artistic creation or love. The resolution of chaos is the lightness and liberation of a lyrical rhythm, while stillness is the most profound rhythm of all.”

This is once again a fully extraordinary statement. Firstly, the identification of the Christian trinity as a trinitarian aspect of the masculine akin to the three feminine aspects embodied in the ancient European triple Goddess representation is to my knowledge unprecedented and very odd. Although there is a superficial similarity (the number three), the feminine trinity represents the three phases of the moon and of adult womanhood; the “masculine trinity” (the Christian one at least) represents no such thing. Furthermore, the Christian doctrine of the trinity as such is a late innovation which in no way can be or ever was designed to supplant the cult of the triple goddess. The subjugation of female by male deities had been complete millennia earlier. Thus the two have nothing whatsoever to do with each other.

The inherent counter-intuitive and speculative nature of the “discovery” of the fusion of masculine and feminine into “chaos” and the rest of the ontogenesis of the Rothian pentateuch (which looks like a discovery of three additional genders) I leave as an exercise to the reader…

In the workshops we have been invited to experience more exotic combinations of the “rhythms”. The “five” emotions (which is Roth’s own and certainly not a canonical list) of fear, anger, sadness, joy and compassion are paired with each of the “rhythms” in a way which is not really obvious, nor consistent with the characterization in Roth’s own book Maps to Ecstasy of some of these rhythms as “masculine” and others “feminine”, and the proposition of a fivefold classification of character (with no theoretical or experimental basis at all) corresponding to each of the five “rhythms”. In my view this is absolutely no reasonable basis for a scientific psychotherapy. It is basically, as another reviewer on Amazon characterized it, “cumbersome and tiresome psychobabble”.

We are then invited to experience one rhythm within another, the rhythm with and without the corresponding emotion, lightness within each of them … an utterly confusing attempt at embodied “visualizations” which sollicited the head far too much for a technique supposed to be centered in the body.

The workshops have primarily involved actual dance, but there have also been some exercises, mostly with no particular power to them compared to what I have found in pretty well every tantra workshop I have attended. I have found that in Five Rhythms it is very easy to avoid contact with the other dancers and this is what most people in fact do – contact is only fleeting and never to the point of discomfort which might prompt psychosomatic response. I see no real reason why the practice, relying as I said on “embodied visualizations”, should reorganize the psychic armoring. In my view this is a secondary phenomenon in the workshops which mainly draws on experiences outside of them. When a psychosomatic response does occur, it is not built upon to the benefit of the group – the workshop leader does nothing with it, certainly at group level.

This is why I characterize the practice as “integrative”. The best experiences I have had dancing Five Rhythms have been when I entered the room with a quantity of open psychic material, as a result of life events or of other workshops. I have felt it has an ability to “sew me back together”. But not to rip me apart. Of course to some degree it might if the very fact of engaging in such a practice is challenging for the practitioner. But this strikes me as a relatively low bar to clear. Most people will be well able to engage in the practice without troubling their resistances.

In short, I still like the practice notwithstanding its quasi-metaphysical psychobabble and I have certainly also drawn benefit from it, some of which I will hopefully describe in future posts. However, I think it would be far purer and more useful in a form freed from the oppression of the omnipresent pentateuchal metaphysic, and less comfortably solipsistic. There is a place, undeniably, for gentle approaches which are accessible to a wider audience, and for restorative methods, not only the deconstruction of defenses; but these approaches should be honest about what they can and cannot achieve.

Porn as meditation

In which I blast my blog into the outer reaches of cyberspace. Well, we’ll see. There is no intention to court controversy, but, as always, there are some things I just have to say.

Google these two words – porn and meditation – together, and what you’ll get is mostly links to pseudo-oriental “treatments” for (so-called) “porn addiction”. Although many people enjoy (so-called) porn, and sex-positive activists have generally embraced its production and consumption, at least within certain limits/genres, it seems that it has yet to make its way into the mainstream, or even any sidestream, of new spirituality. Continue reading “Porn as meditation”

Why therapy hurts

When we stop telling ourselves that life has it in for us, and start believing in the possibility that the universe may, in fact, be on our side, we often only then start really to feel pain. Many people start to feel this pain, are afraid of it, feel nothing has worked, and then give up.

Why do we only feel our pain more as therapy progresses? Because the negative mantra had become an anesthetic, dulling us to the pain, but also to joy and possibility. Continue reading “Why therapy hurts”

What’s the big deal? Thoughts on resistance

I’ve recently been led to reflect on the question of what it is that makes us so afraid of looking inside to the circumstances which lie historically at the origin of our neuroses – frequently to the point of utter terror and/or total blindness even to the fact or possibility of repression. After all, we frequently face much more objectively threatening circumstances in life, like major illness and operations, with much more stoicism.

It is not a question that I think standard psychoanalytic theory really has an answer for. Sure, we are afraid to dismantle the ego. However, this unremarked importance of the ego simply appears as exogenous or as a mere mediator between the pleasure and reality principles. Its apparent tendency to calcify very early on is not really explained. One might link this to a biological developmental calendar, but then the apparent successes of therapy in sometimes bringing down the edifice would be very surprising. Why then do we freeze emotions in the body and hold them down long after the apparent, original need to do so is past? Why can’t we (or at least why don’t we), like the animals, just pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and move on – years and decades after the event? When you think about it, it is really, really strange that humankind is the only species that appears to have this strange dysfunction of its innate healing capacity. And even if we have some idea of how to unblock it, we have little idea of what gets it blocked in the first place.

I can only offer some clues as to how it appears to me.

At the basis, we need to remember that our species has evolved in small, interdependent tribal groups, and what mattered for the survival of our puny organism was being smart and acting in concert. This has led, via mechanisms which I shall perhaps discuss on another occasion, to an unparalleled emotional attunement to other members of the group. Most of this, of course, is a deep mystery – we do not know why we have a spiritual instinct and in what ways it differs from other species, and we do not know why it is so important for us to receive and to give love. These things I will have to take as a given, at least for now.

The Rousseauian view, expounded also by Osho, and perhaps bought into by Reich – all for their own reasons which I understand – that “observed” man is the product of social processes which have perverted the pristine and beautiful natural state of man, has, I believe, to be dismissed as naive. Freud was not wrong in believing that civilization required a sort of suppression of natural drives. On the contrary, the mechanism of acculturation is innate in our species and even what most defines it; it is not maladaptive; it is just misfiring under the conditions of modern life.

If we are happy enough to trace cerebral patterns back to reptilian times, I believe we should be a bit more accepting of our less remote ancestors and what they have bequeathed us. A scientific view of our, or of any, species cannot consist in simply choosing (and idealizing) one forebear over others. Thus, we cannot identify with certain bonobo traits merely because we do not like those of chimpanzees. That we do not like the warlike, selfish part of our nature certainly tells us something, but it does not disprove its existence – only the lengths to which the acculturation process goes to redefine and rechannel this truculence through mechanisms which are entirely social – social learning processes which result in the transmission of norms of behavior from generation to generation and group to group, norms which constitute as important, though far more diverse, a part of our patrimony as what is chiseled on our DNA.

If Darwin, evolutionary psychologists and classical economists have all made a mistake, as argued in Sex at Dawn, it is a perfectly understandable mistake, deriving from first-order principles which one may not like (for the reasons I just mentioned) but must defer to. In all higher species we see collective behavior which is imposed by social mechanisms on instincts which are far more egoistic. And ultimately, this process of acculturation is what has led to the second stage of evolution and the emergence of a creature such as man. Indeed, only social learning processes can result in cooperative behaviour – it cannot be innate.

So: guilt and shame are primary emotions and manipulation of them is a primary process.

Seeing this helps enormously, because there is no need any more to feel – well – guilty about feeling guilty. It is hardwired into our species to feel guilty when we fall short of social expectations, as it is hardwired to manipulate this feeling in order to obtain and maintain group cohesion.

I guess we would all like our children to be generous and patient. But that is not their natural state. Even allowing for incipient neurosis at the earliest stage, I do not believe any child anywhere on the planet has ever been born naturally sharing and thinking of others. Indeed, this is implicit in the standard developmental model, and pretty much a logical evidence: the child first has to develop a concept of self before it can develop a concept of others; the concept of the other can never be ahead of the concept of self and there is thus always a self-bias. So, the younger child must learn, and the adult or older child must teach.

What drives the young child to accept the social yoke, and what approach to childrearing optimizes the transmission of needed social norms? On the child’s side, this can only be the need for love and acceptance. I do not see any other candidate. That the sense of self is impacted by social disopprobrium – for when being reprimanded, however patiently and lovingly, the child will feel such disopprobrium – is natural. From its standpoint, love and acceptance are maximized and guilt is minimized when the child is aligned to social norms. In fact, I would even go further than this – it is not just the sense of self which is impacted, but the very fact of self. A human being living in isolation is not human.

Trying to bring about such alignment must, however, take account of the child’s natural rebelliousness and nascent sense of self. If the primary motivation to align is love and acceptance, it is obvious that bringing about long-term alignment through fear and violence is an inferior and unstable recourse, because love and acceptance create bonds which fear does not. However, fear and authority are not maladaptive either – they are highly adaptive to situations of stress and highly effective in such situations. The balance has just been lost because the circumstances in which we have evolved to exist are no longer those in which we do exist – and this estrangement becomes self-reinforcing. The child learns to suppress aspects of its behaviour which are perfectly healthy and unthreatening to the group, just because the former-child-now-adult can’t handle them. This repression and these patterns of behaviour maximize its payoff in terms of acceptance under the circumstances which it is powerless to change. However, they do so at a tremendous cost in terms of vitality, which is passed on to the next generation.

So to return to the question with which I started, it must be that the energy which cathects the fear of confronting our inner traumas when we start to do so, i.e. the energy of resistance, is the same energy which holds the neurosis in place at other times, i.e. when it is unchallenged. In other words, our fear is our neurosis. It follows that it is functionally identical to the fear experienced in response to the primal events – ultimately, in almost all cases, the fear of losing the sense of belonging and thereby of what it is that defines our nature as human.

And yet: we will not. Objectively, no such risk exists as adults, certainly in a therapeutic situation, when all the traumatizing factors belong to the past. Why is this not obvious?

I think I detect the reason, and it is this. In fact, our desire for love and acceptance is never met. It was not met during our formative years, and it is still not met today, because the endemic character of neurosis means that there is almost no-one able to love as we are meant to be loved and as we need to be loved. This is why we cling on to the strategies we learnt as children, although in no absolute sense did they work either then or now – they merely optimized subject to inordinate constraints. In fact, we are not failing to substitute them by a better strategy: there is no better strategy available to us. We have also chosen partners subject to the requirement that our strategies to gain acceptance initially worked with those partners. We have grown up emotionally paralyzed because of a lack of nurturing and we realize that we, all of us, continue to face the same situation, and whilst the needs of an adult are not those of a child, the meeting of those adult needs is the only thing that can start to demine the unexploded ordinance buried in our past.

It’s Catch 22.

The notion that we as adults are sufficient unto ourselves and can get all the sustenance we need from our physical environment, with no need for comfort, touch, contact is just a perpetuation of the lie and the violence at the heart of humanity’s traumatized existence.

Love and compassion are necessary to our physical and mental health as a species, and they are necessary to the therapeutic process and personal growth. Our mind, that place where we feel in control, because it works so well without others, strives after technique, but such technique is meaningless and ineffective without compassion, and secondary when compassion is present.

Facing our traumas is terrifying because we are innately afraid, under prevailing and persistent conditions of emotional starvation, to lose the little acceptance we have won in the world, and with which we reluctantly content ourselves. We lose sight and faith that anything more is possible, even though we know, deep down, that this way of existing is impoverished, is not satisfying and is not human.

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (2 – the biological core)

Following his discovery of the link between sexual repression and character, Reich inquired into the nature of the mechanism underlying this link. His starting point was the observation that there existed, even if they were hard to codify, characteristic postures and facial expressions which allowed the most unlearned observer to decipher the character disposition of his interlocutor. Reich hypothesized that these resulted from, in the main, hypertonicity of certain functional muscle groups. Almost all muscles display in equilibrium or at rest a natural level of contraction called tonus. When this equilibrium is disturbed by a constant perception of threat, muscles become pathologically hypertonic. The attitude habitually assumed, be it of aggression, mistrust, helplessness etc, then becomes anchored in the muscular economy with attendent effects (though Reich does not discuss this) on skeletal development as well. Reich contends that the somatic and psychic expression of neurosis are functionally identical and mutually reinforcing. The somatic expression he calls the “biological core” of the neurosis. It is similarly this pattern of muscular spasticity which disrupts the orgastic response.

Reich goes on to make his central conjecture, laid out in Function of the Orgasm, that the natural orgasm serves a purpose of discharging vital energy and thereby regulating the energy economy of the body; this is thus a direct somatic parallel to Freud’s libido theory. Disturbances of the orgastic function compel the organism to regulate its energy economy otherwise, whether by reduced energy production (lethargy) or by other, imperfect mechanisms such as compulsive behaviors which only kick in when the tension has reached an unbearable level and then only partly resolve it.

The hypothesis of the “functional identity” of the neurosis and its somatic expression allows Reich to complement then-existing psychoanalytic techniques with a body-oriented approach and, he claims, achieve more consistent results, more rapidly, as well as penetrate some types of neurosis which were less amenable to traditional methods. His espoused technique advocates alternating opportunistically between addressing psychic and somatic blockages. This he called “vegetotherapy” in an allusion to its effects on the vegetative, or what we would now call the autonomic (i.e. involuntary) nervous system. How he did this in practice seems to be less well documented, perhaps because his discovery of the biological core of psychic neuroses leads him into more speculative areas of inquiry and the period of his interest in psychosomatic therapy is as a result relatively condensed, leaving methodology to be developed by others.

This new period in Reich’s life is underscored by a realization that sexual repression has not only somatic effects with psychic correlates – neuroses – but also that these primary somatic effects have in the long term direct secondary chronic effects at the somatic level in the form of illnesses such as cancer, dementia and rheumatic arthritis. This takes the hygienic challenge a long way from treated self-reported actual neuroses with anecdotal curiosities in turn-of-the-century Vienna to treating major plagues of contemporary civilization, both psychic and somatic.

Part 3: Reich’s legacy

Reich’s economic model of psychosomatics (1 – from Freud’s libido theory to character analysis)

Although the work of Wilhelm Reich in relation to what he called sex-economy lies at the root of many contemporary approaches to psychotherapy and personal development, it is widely misrepresented, caricaturized and misunderstood and a summary of it for the educated layman is, to my knowledge at least, difficult to come by. I am often asked to explain Reich’s thought which has very much influenced my own, and so I thought fit to attempt such a summary. In this and the next article, I propose to set out how he arrived at, and the basis for, the character-analytic approach to psychotherapy and his later vegetotherapy which aimed at directly working on what he called the “biological core” of neurosis. In a subsequent article, I would like to offer a review of his theories in the light of current knowledge, and particularly in what one would hope could be described as a somewhat more accommodating social environment than prevailed at the time of his work. (UPDATE: since I wrote this article, a very good overview of Reich’s life and work has been written by Jason Louv, see here. My own treatment is a bit more technical.)

Reich’s developments of psychotherapy all draw root in Freud’s early work. Subsequent developments of Freud’s psychoanalysis, which Reich viewed as a capitulation to social conservatism, took their work in different directions. They share, nonetheless, a substantial common bedrock, and Reich remained deeply admirative of Freud’s labors even when he disagreed with him on fundamental matters.

As is well-known, the various phases of Freud’s thought never resulted in a single synthesis and different strands within it remained in tension with each other. Freud thus never arrived at an integrated theory of psychic functioning. Reich took his lead from Freud’s libido theory of neurosis; neurosis was thus the result of a binding of sexual energy as a result of developmental factors in childhood. Freud never elucidated how this binding took place or how psychoanalysis was precisely supposed to work in order to dissolve the binding and thus resolve neurosis, but he developed different models of psychodynamics, in each case essentially of a mental nature. The blocking factors in neurosis were thus mental representations and the prescribed route to their dissolution ultimately also mental, although it proceeded from the unconscious, which for Freud could not be directly observed.

Reich’s own approach is quite at ease with Freud’s model of the three stages of consciousness, being the system unconscious, the system preconscious and the system conscious. According to this model, drives which arise in the unconscious undergo a sort of filtering process in order to arrive at the level of consciousness, during which their associations and objects change more or less radically. Thus, for example, the infantile desire to suck, if insufficiently satisfied in infancy, persists in the unconscious and is satiated, though never ultimately satisfied, through ersatz means which could involve actual sucking (thumb, lollipop), other oral actions (obesity and bulimia), fixation with oral sexuality, or other forms of clinging behavior not immediately oral in their manifestation. In order to achieve satisfaction of these ersatz or secondary drives, individuals would develop typical strategems which are in a direct line of descent from those they employed successfully in childhood – all essentially manipulative, solliciting one or other emotion on the part of the caregiver which would then elicit the desired response. Some would focus on solliciting pity, others fear, still others admiration, or benevolence through humor, or distraction, etc. Whilst Freud did not feel he had a social mission and confined himself to the therapy of those cases who presented themselves for treatment, it is easy enough to see how the learning process in early childhood coupled with certain not immediately definable characteristics of the child would lead to characteristic dispositions in adulthood, a starting-point for Reich’s work.

Reich’s interest in character was at first prompted, however, by considerations of methodology. Freud and many of his close collaborators had never taken a systematic interest in determining and assessing what worked in the therapeutic context. It was supposed that individuals needed to “cooperate” in the therapy. If they failed to do so, there was no alternative approach available. Reich realized, however, that the fact of cooperation or of failure to cooperate was endogenous to the therapeutic setting. It itself needed to be interpreted and worked through. The manifestation of resistance was evidence that one was reaching carefully repressed material. To dismiss a patient for refusal to cooperate was to admit defeat, perhaps at the moment when one was closest to achieving a breakthrough.

Reich started with a layman’s concept of personality, but soon progressed it to a developmental model in which typical frustrations of infantile libido led to a freezing of certain character responses, which were then overlaid on each other. In the therapeutic setting, the therapist would work backwards through these layers, to arrive at, and liberate, the earliest material.

Reich also noted that all patients presented with actual disturbances of “natural” genital sexuality. These disturbances were of various sorts but fundamentally there were only a limited number of variables. Decreased or absent pleasure in the genital act could be due to (i) diminished sensitivity of the genital apparatus itself, (ii) its failure to respond to conventional stimuli or at all or (iii) a failure of genital response to (sufficiently) engage adjacent muscles involved in the natural orgastic response. Persons with diminished sensitivity were often, in the male, erectively potent or, in the female, highly flirtatious, but derived little pleasure from the sexual act. Reich saw this as an instrumentalisation of sexuality in the service of a secondary drive. Persons with erectile dysfunction or vaginismus were disinterested in sexuality or conventional sexuality because it conflicted with defense mechanisms they had developed. Persons, finally, with a flat orgastic response curve (premature ejaculation in the male, muted or no orgasm in the female) encountered during the process of sexual arousal psychological obstacles which made full sexual expression impossible. This typology of genital response, Reich was able to correlate, albeit loosely, with the stages in the development of the libido posited by Freud as well as with contemporary character. Frustration prior to the oral stage led to a withdrawal of sexual interest and to schizoid character. Frustration at the oral stage led to oral fixation and a lack of autonomy, expressed as sexual passivity and a capacity for surrender but a diminished response. Frustration at the anal stage led to rigidity and inability to surrender, whilst frustration at the genital stage expressed itself as individuals with strong seductive powers and sexually active, but reporting a lack of pleasure in the sexual act and as seeking it for secondary, narcissistic purposes. In Reich’s view, the vast majority of people presented with some form of neurosis and it had both character and genital expression.

Reich’s approach felt little need for Freud’s later ego theory, but remained compatible with it. In addition to his methodological work, Reich’s greatest breakthrough was his solution of the problem of masochism, discussed at length in Character Analysis. Freud had posited a primary masochism, fruit of a biological drive he termed the death instinct (Todestrieb). For Reich this had no parallel in the animal kingdom and was unacceptable. He derived masochism as a secondary drive when the pleasure principle was frustrated by overwhelming violence to which the individual as a small child was powerless to respond. The frustrated drive first sought an outlet in sadism, turning this sadism against itself when it was further repressed. Constant juxtaposition of pleasure and punishment led to a state where they became psychically interlinked. Reich pointed out that no-one took pleasure in actual pain, only in the expectation of it. Pent-up energy which could not be channeled into pleasurable activity led to tension and anesthesia and the need for more extreme stimuli to break through to the core of the sexual drive.

Whilst Freud brokered a peace with society and seems to have viewed sublimation of sexual drives as in some degree necessary to civilization, Reich presents an uncompromising faith in the natural order reminiscent of Rousseau and Nietzsche; for him it is axiomatic that to recover the natural functioning of the human organism is the one and only path to happiness. Natural man is capable, for Reich, of the highest moral qualities and it is his sexual repression that brings evil and suffering into the world.

Part 2: The Biological Core