Constructive Conscious Control (Abridged by Daniel McGowan)

FOREWORD

It is now more than a hundred years since Frederick Matthias Alexander (1869-1955) began,  as a young  man in  his twenties, to teach his technique of constructive conscious control of the individual by the individual. Nowadays, the Alexander Technique is known to a great number of people around the world from San Francisco to Christchurch. It is taught and practiced in many European countries, in the U.S.A., Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, South Africa, and Israel.

What did Alexander discover? He found the modern human being’s use of the self⎯use of the psycho-physical organism as he called it⎯which is the universal constant in living,  to be in an ever-worsening process of decline. This  misuse  of the self, he claimed, is the biggest cause of all kinds of neuroses, fears, phobias, and so-called physical ills which plague the modern world. He claimed that the first thing to consider when attempting to alleviate many kinds of illness, is the person’s use of the psycho-physical organism in its interaction with people and things in the environment. If someone suffers from misuse of the self, and most of us do, then the person can be taught how to improve it and so to achieve better health.

That a person is taught the Alexander Technique, and not “cured” by it, is an important distinction for the reader to note. This technique is not a therapy, but a process of re-education that almost anyone can learn. Its therapeutic effects, however, can be tremendous, as Alexander deftly and ably demonstrated through-out his sixty years of teaching it to the public, many of whom came to him as a last resort when all else had failed.

Alexander himself only discovered this technique as a process of re-education during his attempts at curing his own throat trouble, which threatened to cut short his career as an actor and particularly to disrupt his one-man recitations of Shakespeare, his great love. When he realized that his doctors could not cure his throat condition, he reasoned that whatever was wrong must be caused by something he was doing to himself. He then embarked on an investigation of himself which lasted some nine or ten years, and which entailed minute observation of his own use with the help of  mirrors.

His investigations led him to realize that his voicework involved the use of his whole body, which he discovered to be a complex network of tension patterns from head to toe. Furthermore, he was startled to see that the mirrors told him he was not doing with his body what his other sensory feedback was telling him. In other words, as he later observed to be the case with the vast majority of us, his “sensory appreciation” had become unreliable.

Traditionally, sensory appreciation is thought of as the instant fusion by the mind of the information passed to it by the five senses⎯hearing, touch, taste, smell, and sight. This instant fusion forms a perception. There exists, however, a sixth sense which could be said to have been “lost” or “blocked out.” In other words, a sense of which most of us are only vaguely aware. This sixth sense is an activity of the nervous system in which sensory nerves connect muscles, tendons, joints, and the middle ear to the brain and spinal cord. Information travels back and forth telling us, not only about the interaction of one part of the body with another, but also of the body’s interaction with the environment. This constitutes our feeling of movement, position, and effort. Current technical terms for this sense are kinesthesia and proprioception, the two terms often being used interchangeably.

This sixth aspect of our sensory appreciation plays a highly significant part in determining an individual’s perception of stimuli and in determining how he or she will respond to these stimuli. When there is faulty sensory appreciation, every stimulus which comes to a person brings a reaction which registers in the senses (to a greater or lesser degree, according to the level of unreliability) quite differently from that which has actually occurred. Because of individual differences, the same so-called objective stimulus can give different experiences and cause varying emotions, movements, or opinions.

Another important observation that Alexander made was that the co-ordination of the whole mind-body complex depends on the co-ordinated relationship between the head, the neck, and the torso. Through improving the balance of this relationship, his own throat trouble⎯a specific symptom⎯disappeared in the process of re-educating his use of himself in general. In other words, he found that specific cures for specific illnesses can have only palliative effects and can cause further specific defects in other parts of the organism. He saw that the human being must be re-educated as a whole and not treated specifically. This is still, in these stressful modern times, the blind spot of the society we live in.

Having realized all this, Alexander then went on to make his most important discovery, the process he called inhibition⎯the ability to stop, to stop at the source, those harmful habits of thinking and doing from which most of us suffer. Inhibition in Alexander’s sense is a vital function of the nervous system which, when brought up to the conscious level, can enable us to achieve the real psycho-physical-emotional change which so many of us wish for and struggle to attain in our efforts at self-improvement in all spheres of life. Inhibition, so conceived, has nothing to do with suppression. It teaches us how to deal with our stereotyped reactions to the stimuli of living, how to react with reason and poise to those stimuli which we habitually allow to put us wrong.

Alexander realized that the proper place for his technique lay in education, and his main concern was for the person he called his most important client–the child. He founded a school staffed by teachers who also taught his technique and could show the children how to keep, as the first priority, their psycho-physical equilibrium. The children were taught not to be concerned about making mistakes, not to be afraid of failure.

It is important to point out that qualified personal “hands on” instruction is essential in acquiring this technique. As Alexander himself writes, “This whole book is devoted to exposing the fallacy of asking any imperfectly co-ordinated person to attempt to eradicate his or her defects by some written or spoken instructions.” Readers are encouraged to contact me or other qualified instructors for a demonstration of this method rather than attempting to practice it without such a demonstration.

During his lifetime, Alexander wrote four books: Man’s Supreme Inheritance, Constructive Conscious Control, The Use of the Self, and The Universal Constant in Living. The four titles run together to give the basis of his teaching as follows: Humanity’s supreme inheritance is constructive conscious control in the use of the self which is the universal constant in living. He explains in the books how we can pass from being the slaves of our subconscious, instinctive, and habitual behaviour to conscious, reasoned behaviour and so claim what he called “the transcendent inheritance of a conscious mind.”

In reading this abridged, edited version of Constructive Conscious Control, the reader is asked to be aware that my aim has been to convey, as accurately as possible, the essential meaning of what Alexander wrote in the original text. I have, therefore, endeavoured to keep the editing of the original text to a minimum, but have made two distinct changes in Alexander’s expressions. The first relates to what he called “orders” to denote the passing-on of messages from the mind to the body. The term in popular usage nowadays is “directions” and I have substituted this term for the original “orders.” An example of a direction is to “think of not stiffening your neck.”

The second change affects his term “means-whereby,” which he used in describing the conscious, co-ordinated manner of carrying out any act. I have simply dropped “whereby” and used only the “means.”

Any person who has sufficient knowledge and experience of Alexander’s work is welcome to send me helpful comments and constructive criticism. I am indebted to Gunda Fielden for her special contribution to the production of this work.

I am the director of a training course for teachers of the Alexander Technique and can be contacted below.

Daniel McGowan
April 1996

Phone: 01803  862 899
Mobile: 07891 296456
Email: ccare.danny@googlemail.com

This foreward was first published in “Alexander Technique: Original Writings of FM Alexander” by Daniel McGowan. You can download the PDF of this book for free here:  FREE DOWNLOAD