VOLUME 1. Mobilizing the Self

Part 2. Manipulating the Self

VI. Retroflection

Experiment 12: Investigating Misdirected Behavior

To retroflect means literally “to turn sharply back against”. When a person retroflects behavior, he does to himself what originally he did or tried to do to other persons or objects. He stops directing various energies outward in attempts to manipulate and bring about changes in the environment that will satisfy his needs; instead, he redirects activity inward and substitutes himself in place of the environment as the target of behavior. To the extent that he does this, he splits his personality into “doer” and “done to.”

Why did he not persist as he started—that is, directing outward toward the environment? Because he met what was for him at that time insuperable opposition. The environment—mostly other persons—proved hostile to his efforts to satisfy his needs. They frustrated and punished him. In such an unequal contest—he was a child —he was sure to lose. Consequently, to avoid the pain and danger entailed in renewed attempts, he gave up. The environment, being stronger, won out and enforced its wishes at the expense of his.

However, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in recent years by a number of experiments, punishment has the effect, not of annihilating the need to behave in the way that met with punishment, but of teaching the organism to hold back the punishable responses. The impulse or the wish remains as strong as ever and, since this is not satisfied, it is constantly organizing the motor apparatus—its posture, pattern of muscular tonus, and incipient movements—in the direction of overt expression. Since this is what brings punishment, the organism behaves toward its own impulse as did the environment—that is, it acts to suppress it. Its energy is thus divided. Part of it still strains toward its original and never satisfied aims; the other part has been retroflected to hold this outgoing part in check. The holding back is achieved by tensing muscles which are antagonistic to those which would be involved in expressing the punishable impulse. At this stage two parts of the personality struggling in diametrically opposite directions are in a clinch. What started as conflict between organism and environment has come to be an “inner conflict” between one part of the personality and another part—between one kind of behavior and its opposite.

Do not jump to the conclusion that we imply that it would be fine if we could all without further ado “release our inhibitions.” In some situations holding back is necessary, even life-saving—for instance, holding back inhaling while under water. The important question is whether or not the person has rational grounds for presently choking off behavior in given circumstances. While crossing a street it certainly is to his advantage if he quells any urge to contest the right-of-way with an oncoming truck. In social situations it is usually advantageous to suppress a tendency to go off half-cocked. (But if fully cocked, aimed and ready, it may be quite a different matter!)

When retroflection is under aware control—that is, when a person in a current situation suppresses particular responses which, if expressed, would be to his disadvantage—no-one can contest the soundness of such behavior. It is only when the retroflection is habitual, chronic, out of control, that it is pathological; for then it is not something done temporarily, perhaps as an emergency measure or to await a more suitable occasion, but is a deadlock perpetuated in the personality. Furthermore, since this stabilized battle-line does not change, it ceases to attract attention. We “forget” it is there. This is repression—and neurosis.

If it were true that the social environment remained adamant and uncompromising—if it were just as dangerous and punishable to express certain impulses now as it was when we were children—then repression (“forgotten" retroflection) would be efficient and desirable. But the situation has changed! We are not children. We are bigger, stronger, and we have “rights” which are denied children. In these drastically changed circumstances it is worth having another try at getting what we need from the environment!

When we suppress behavior, we are aware both of what we are suppressing and the fact that we are suppressing; in repression, on the contrary, we have lost awareness both of what is repressed and the process by which we do the repressing. Psychoanalysis has stressed recovery of awareness of what is repressed—that is, the blocked impulse. We, on the other hand, emphasize recovery of awareness of the blocking, the feeling that one is doing it and how one is doing it. Once a person discovers his retroflecting action and regains control of it, the blocked impulse will be recovered automatically. No longer held in, it will simply come out. The great advantage of dealing with the retroflecting part of the personality—the active repressing agent—is that this is within fairly easy reach of awareness, can be directly experienced, and does not depend upon guessed-at interpretations.

Theoretically, the treatment of retroflection is simple: merely reverse the direction of the retroflecting act from inward to outward. Upon doing so, the organism’s energies, formerly divided, now once more join forces and discharge themselves toward the environ- which had been blocked is given the chance at last to express and complete itself and is satisfied. Then, as is the ease when any genuine need of the organism is fulfilled, there can be rest, assimilation and growth. In practice, however, the undoing of a retroflection is not so straightforward. Every part of the personality comes to its defense as if to head off catastrophe. The person is overcome with embarrassment, fear, guilt and resentment. The attempt to reverse the self-aggression, to differentiate the clinch of the two parts of the personality, is responded to as if it were an attack on his body, his “nature,” on his very life. As the clinched parts begin to loosen, and come apart, the person experiences unbearable excitement, for the relief of which he may have to go temporarily into his clinch again. These are unaccustomed feelings which are being resurrected and he has to make approaches to them and gradually learn to tolerate and use them. At first he becomes anxious and would rather retreat into his deadened state of unawareness.

A main reason for the fear and guilt in reversing retroflections is that most retroflected impulses are aggressions, from the mildest to the crudest, from persuasion to torture. To let these loose even into awareness is terrifying. But aggression, in the broad sense of its clinical usage, is indispensable to happiness and creativity. Furthermore, reversing the retroflection does not manufacture aggression that was not already there. It was there—but applied against the self instead of against the environment! We are not denying that aggression may be pathologically misused against objects and other persons, just as it is pathologically misused when directed steadfastly against the self. But until one can become aware of what one’s aggressive impulses are and learn to put them to constructive use, they are certain to be misused! As a matter of fact, it is the act of repressing them—the setting up and maintenance of the grim clinch of the musculature—that makes these aggressions seem so wasteful, “anti-social,” and intolerable. Once they are allowed to develop spontaneously in the context of the total personality, rather than being squeezed and suffocated in the remorseless clinch of retroflection, one puts quite a different and more favorable evaluation upon his aggressions.

What is also feared in releasing a blocked impulse is that one will then he completely frustrated—for retroflection does give at least partial satisfaction. A religious man, for instance, unable to vent his wrath on the Lord for his disappointments, beats his own breast and tears his own hair. Such self-aggression, obviously a retroflection, nevertheless is aggression and it does give some satisfaction to the retroflecting part of the personality. It is aggression that is crude, primitive, undifferentiated—a retroflected childish temper-tantrum—but the part of the personality that is attacked is always there and available for attack. Self-aggression can always be sure of its victim!

To reverse such a retroflection in one fell swoop would mean that the person would then attack others in ways just as ineffectual and archaic. He would rouse the same overwhelming counter-aggression that led him to retroflect in the first place. It is some realization of this which makes even the imagined reversal of retroflections productive of so much fear. What is overlooked is that the change can be made in easy stages which gradually transform the whole situation as they proceed. One can, to start with, discover and accept the fact that he does “take it out on himself.” He can become aware of the emotions of the retroflecting part of his personality—notably, the grim joy taken in administering punishment to himself. This, when he achieves it, represents considerable progress, for vindictiveness is so socially disesteemed as to be most difficult to acknowledge and accept even when supposedly one spares others and directs it solely against oneself. Only when accepted—that is, when it is reckoned with as an existing, dynamic component of one’s functioning personality—does one reach the possibility of modifying, differentiating, redirecting it into healthy expression. As one’s orientation in the environment improves, as one’s awareness of what one genuinely wants to do becomes clearer, as one makes approaches which are limited try-outs to see what will happen, gradually one’s techniques for expression of previously blocked impulses develop also. They lose their primitive, terrifying aspect as one differentiates them and gives them a chance to catch up with the more grown-up parts of the personality. Aggression will then still be aggression, but it will have been put to useful tasks and will no longer be blindly destructive of self and others. It will be expended as the situation demands, and not accumulated until one feels that he sits precariously atop a seething volcano.

Thus far we have spoken only of behavior which the person was unsuccessful in directing toward others and which he consequently retroflected against himself. Retroflections also include what one wanted from others but was unsuccessful in obtaining, with the outcome that now, for want of anyone else to do it, one gives it to himself. This may be attention, love, pity, punishment, almost anything! A great deal of what originally was done for one by others—notably, by his parents—he takes over and does for himself as he grows up. This, of course, is healthy, provided it does not include trying to gratify for oneself what are genuinely interpersonal needs.

This kind of retroflection combines the absurd and the pathetic. For instance, the story is told of a college student who, though living in a dormitory, was unable to make contact with his fellows. From outside the window of his lonely room he would frequently hear the occupants of adjacent quarters being summoned forth to join their friends. One night he was discovered standing beneath his own window repeatedly calling his own name.

Let us take a look at some typical retroflections. There are those that are simple linguistic reflexives. When we use such verbal expressions as “I ask myself” or “I say to myself,” what is involved? In previous experiments we have often suggested: “Ask yourself …” Doesn’t this seem logically peculiar? If you don’t know something, why ask yourself, and, if you do know it, why tell it to yourself? Such ways of talking (and we employ them all the time) simply take it for granted that the personality is divided into two parts, as if two persons lived within the same skin and could hold conversations with each other. Do you regard this as a mere peculiarity of our language, or can you get the feeling that this quite common manner of speaking stems from being a person divided and having parts functionally in opposition to each other?

Try to get a clear understanding that when you “ask yourself” something, this is retroflected questioning. You don’t know the answer or you wouldn’t have to ask. Who in the environment does know or, so you feel, ought to know? If you can specify such a person, can you then be aware of wanting to ask your question, not of yourself, but of that person? What keeps you from doing so? Is it shyness, fear of a rebuff, reluctance to admit your ignorance?

When you “consult yourself” about something, can you be aware of your motive? Many are possible. It may be a game, a teasing, the administering of consolation, or the making of a reproach. Whatever it may be, for whom are you substituting yourself?

Consider self-reproach. Here you will find no true feeling of guilt, but the mere pretense of guilt. Reverse the reproach by finding that Person X among those you know at whom you are really leveling your reproach. Whom do you want to nag? Whom do you want to reform? In whom do you want to rouse the guilt that you are pretending to produce in yourself?

At this stage the important thing is not for you to attempt the full undoing of the retroflection by immediately rushing out and confronting Person X with whatever you hold against him. You have not yet explored and accepted enough of yourself nor examined the interpersonal situation sufficiently. Let the detailed content of any particular problem go for the moment and content yourself with trying to realize the form of your behavior as a retroflector. Gradually you will begin to see the role you also play in your interpersonal relations. You will start to see yourself as others see you. If you are forever making demands on yourself, you also, explicitly or implicitly, make demands on others—and this is how you appear to them. If you feel angry with yourself, you will feel angry even with the fly on the wall. If you nag yourself, you may be perfectly sure that there are others, too, whom you nag.

A person who retroflects aggression takes the attitude: “If I'm mean to myself, it doesn’t hurt anybody else, does it?” It wouldn’t, if his retroflection were complete and if he lived in a capsule, isolated from others. Neither is true. He lives with others, and much of his behavior—of the same general type as that which he retroflects—escapes retroflection. For instance, specific aggressions which have not been specifically punished and turned inward do find their mark in the environment. He is not aware of these, for his self-concept excludes ‘‘hurting others.” Since he makes his attacks on others in a random, unconsidered way, rationalizing his motives, such actions, just as much as his retroflected aggressions, will be crude, primitive, and relatively ineffectual. Self-aggression can be more easily accepted as genuine aggression—one feels less guilt for hurting himself than for hurting someone else— but aggression toward others exists also in one who retroflects, and it must in the end be made aware and accepted before it can be developed into aggression which is rational and healthy rather than irrational and neurotic.

When a retroflection has been truly realized, reversed, and allowed spontaneously to develop with its proper objects, the meaning of what was retroflected always undergoes changes—for instance, reproach turns into approach. In the long run any interpersonal contact is better than retroflection. We do not mean by interpersonal contact “mixing with people,” “being with others,” or “going out more”—for such activity, while masquerading as “social contact,” may be nothing more than contactless confluence. Making genuine contact sometimes involves what conventionally would be regarded as breaking or avoiding contact. For instance, suppose someone invites you to a gathering in which you haven’t the slightest interest. You would greatly prefer to spend the time otherwise. But if you frankly say so, the common view would have it that you are declining “social contact.” This is “bad,” for we are taught early and late that some special virtue is inherent in gregariousness, even when it consists of nothing more than meaningless. insincere, time-wasting chitchat. But we say, “Yes, I'd be delighted,” instead of, “No, thank you, I’d rather not.” Thus we avoid breaking confluence with prevailing stereotypes of what constitute good manners. But we must then be rude to ourselves and treat with high-handed disregard otherwise possible activities which are matters of spontaneous interest and concern for us.

When we say, “Yes, I’ll come,” and thus commit ourselves to what we do not wish to do, we are, in effect, saying “No” to alternative ways of spending the time which are of more importance to us. By preening ourselves on having a “positive personality”—being yes- man for every Tom, Dick or Harry—we retroflect the negative and say “No” to ourselves.

Let us look again at the nature of the retroflecting process. In deliberate suppression one identifies oneself with both the suppressed and the suppressing behavior. As a very simple example, consider the suppression of urination. Suppose one feels the urge to void his bladder at a time and place which is inappropriate. He simply contracts the urethral sphincter to offset the contraction of the distended bladder. This is a temporary retroflection. He has no intention whatever of making it permanent, and he does not disown— alienate or reject from his personality—either side of the conflict. As soon as convenient he reverses the retroflection. This consists, obviously, of merely relaxing the sphincter and allowing the bladder to press forth its contents. The need is satisfied and both tensions released. Persons differ, of course, with respect to how much tension of this sort they will endure before seeking relief. If their attitude toward eliminative functions is that they are “not nice,” they may be too embarrassed to excuse themselves from a social group.

In contrast to a simple suppression like this, where both contenders in the conflict are aware and accepted by the “I” as belonging to it—“I want to relieve myself, but I prefer to wait"—one may identify with and accept as his own only one side of the conflict. In forced concentration, as noted in a previous experiment, one identifies himself only with the “chosen” task—that is, he identifies himself with the taskmaster who insists that he do whatever the job consists of. He dis-identifies with—alienates and disowns—those counter-interests which he calls distractions. In terms of the structure of the conflict this is similar to the simple suppression cited above; the difference is in the attitude adopted toward one side of the conflict. Although various needs are pitted against each other and working at cross-purposes, the “I” is not split in this situation because it refuses to include in itself (refuses to identify itself with) those background needs which run counter to the task. Not much gets accomplished; it frequently would clear the ground if the “I” could identify with the more urgent of these “distracters,” give them priority, get them out of the way, and then conic back to the task. However that may be, what we are trying to point out here is that in the type of retroflection which constitutes fighting the “distracters” in forced concentration, the “I” feels it-self to exist only in the efforts to get the task done.

Sometimes in retroflections the “I” plays both parts—it is identified with both the active, retroflecting part of the personality, and also the passive part which is the object of the retroflection. This is especially true in self-pity and self-punishment. Before discussing these further, suppose you examine instances of self-pity or self-punishment in your own life and find out what answers you can obtain to the following questions:

Whom do you want to pity? Whom do you want to pity you? Whom do you want to punish? Whom do you want to punish you?

“Pity,” “sympathy,” and “compassion” are grossly synonymous, and all are in good standing as “virtuous” words. They have shades of meaning, however, which, while subtle from the linguistic standpoint, are profoundly significant from the psychological. The dictionary distinguishes them as follows: “Pity is feeling for another’s suffering or distress, and sometimes regards its object as not only suffering, but weak or inferior. Sympathy is fellow-feeling with others, esp. in their grief or affliction; the word implies a certain degree of equality in situation, circumstances, etc. Compassion is deep tenderness for another, esp. under severe or inevitable suffering or misfortune.” (Italics ours) These words, all expressive of attitudes toward the sufferings of others, are graded in terms of the amount of actual participation in, or closeness to, or identification with, such sufferings. Pity is the most remote, and we contend that most of what passes muster as pity is actually disguised gloating. Tennyson speaks of “scornful pity,” and most of us have heard the recipient of pity shout, “I don’t want your damned pity!” Such pity is condescension. We apply it to those who are in such low estate that they are not or have ceased to be our own serious rivals. They are “out of the running.” By pitying them we emphasize the discrepancy between their lot and ours. Such an attitude, we believe, motivates much so-called charity.

When concern for the sufferings of others is genuine and not a mask for stand-offish, jubilant self-congratulation, it entails the urge to help in a practical fashion and to assume responsibility for changing the situation. In such cases we are more likely to speak of sympathy or compassion, an entering into and an active participation in the sufferer’s situation. These attitudes enmesh themselves with the actuality and are too engaged in it for the luxury of sentimental tears. Tearful pity is mostly a masochistic enjoyment of the misery.

When this is retroflected we have the situation of self-pity. A part of oneself is now the object, but the pitying attitude is still one of scornful, aloof condescension. If the split in the “I” (the division into pitier and pitied) can be healed, the stand-offish enjoyment of the punishment being administered changes into the active urge to help, whether the object of succor be someone else or neglected portions of oneself. This new orientation leads to the task of manipulating the environment to bring about appropriate changes.

The desirability of self-control in our society goes unquestioned; on the other hand, there is little rational consideration of what it involves. This whole program of experiments attempts to develop self-control, but on a much broader and more comprehensive basis— in fact, on quite a different basis—from what is envisioned in the usual, naive, frantic seeking after it. When a person demands, “How can I make myself do what I ought to do?” this can be translated into, “How can I make myself do what a strong part of me doesn’t want to do?” In other words, how can one part of the personality establish an ironclad dictatorship over another pan? The wish to do this, together with more or less successful attempts to bring it about, is characteristic of compulsion neurosis.

The person who treats himself in this fashion is a domineering bully. If he can and dares to behave like this with others, he may sometimes be an efficient organizer; but where he must accept direction from others or from himself he becomes passively or actively resistant. Usually, therefore, the compulsive accomplishes very little. He spends his time preparing, deciding, making sure, but he makes little headway in the execution of what he has so laboriously planned. What happens within his own behavior is similar to what occurs in a shop or office where the boss is a slave-driver; the “slaves,” by slow-downs, errors, sickness, and the myriad other techniques of sabotage, wreck his best efforts to coerce them. In the compulsive, the “I” identifies with rigid objectives and tries to ram them through; the unconsulted other parts of the personality, whose interests are disregarded, retaliate with fatigue, excuses, promises, irrelevant difficulties. In the compulsive, the “ruler” and the “ruled” are thus in a continuous clinch.

Although few of us would be diagnosed as compulsive neurotics, all of us have some degree of compulsiveness, for it is the outstanding neurotic symptom of our times. To the extent that we do, it will color most of our behavior. If the doing of these experiments is taken as an example, it is undoubtedly true that at times they feel like an onerous task imposed from outside and the issue is merely to get through them as expeditiously as possible. You respond with irritation, annoyance, or rage if all does not go according to the cut-and-dried order of your preconceptions. To wait for spontaneous developments is the last thing that the slave-driver in you will tolerate.

Reverse a situation in which you compel yourself. How would you set about compelling others to perform the task for you? Would you try to manipulate the environment with magic words? Would you bully, command, bribe, threaten, reward?

On the other hand, how do you react to your own compelling? Do you turn a deaf ear? Do you make promises you do not mean to keep? Do you respond with guilt and pay the debt with self-con- tempt and despair?

When you try to force yourself to do what you yourself do not want to do, you work against powerful resistances. The prospect of reaching your goal brightens if, instead of compelling yourself, you clear the ground of whatever obstacles you can find standing in your way (or of yourself standing in your own way). This is the great principle of the Tao-philosophers: make a void, so that nature can develop there; or, as they also express it, stand out of the way.

What obstacles, for instance, can you find to doing these experiments? If you say, “I must do them,” who is supplying the “must"? You, apparently, for you are not compelled from outside. What if you didn’t do them? No blow would fall. Your life would continue in its customary pattern uninterrupted. Suppose you say, “I want to do them but some part of me objects.” What is the objection? Waste of time? Are you equally severe toward other ways of wasting time? If you saved the time that you spend on these experiments, would you have some urgent, “important” task to which you are sure that you would then devote the time?

Suppose you object to the lack of a guarantee that these experiments are going to “do you some good.” Are you able to get such a guarantee on other things that you do?

Whatever your objections, don’t blame yourself for them. Blame whomever or whatever you think is responsible for the way you feel. After discharging some of this aggression that you have been turning against yourself, you may respond to the situation quite differently.

Another extremely important retroflection to consider is self-contempt, feelings of inferiority—everything that Harry Stack Sullivan called the weak self-system and considered the essence of neurosis. As he put it, when one’s relations with oneself are disturbed, all interpersonal relations are likewise disturbed. One is on chronically bad terms with himself when he has the habit of forever taking stock of himself, evaluating himself, and, on the basis of comparative judgments, dwelling all the time on the discrepancy between his actual performances and those which would meet his high-flown specifications. If he reverses the retroflection, he will let up on himself and then start evaluating the persons in his environment. Once he ventures to do this, he will soon come to regard such verbal evaluations, whether applied to others or himself, as of secondary importance. He will realize that his retroflected evaluations were merely a mechanism for dwelling on himself. When he directs the same kind of elaborate evaluating to others, he may soon see the futility of it and stop. Then he will notice persons with simple awareness of what they are and what they do, and will learn either how to manipulate them in a genuinely satisfying way or to adjust himself to them.

What do you doubt about yourself? Mistrust? Deprecate? Can you reverse these attitudes? Who is the Person X whom you doubt? Who makes you suspicious? Whom do you wish to pooh-pooh and take down a peg? Can you feel your inferiority as concealed arrogance? Can you undo self-effacement and recognize it as the retroflected wish to wipe out Person X?

Still another important type of retroflection is introspection. When you introspect, you peer at yourself. This form of retroflection is so universal in our culture that much of the psychological literature simply takes it for granted that any attempt to increase self-awareness must of necessity consist of introspection. While this, definitely, is not the case, it probably is true that anyone who does these experiments will start by introspecting. The observer is split off from the part observed, and not until this split is healed will a person fully realize that self-awareness which is not introspected can exist. We previously likened genuine awareness to the glow produced within a burning coal by its own combustion, and introspection to turning the beam of a flashlight on an object and peering at its surface by means of the reflected rays.

Examine your procedure when you introspect. What is your aim? Are you searching for a secret? Ferreting out a memory? Hoping for (or fearing) a surprise? Do you •watch yourself with the sharp eye of a stem parent to wake sure you don't get into mischief? Are you trying to find something that will fit a theory—for instance, the theory developed in these pages? Or, on the other hand, are you seeing to it that such corroboratory events do not take place? Then try directing these attitudes toward persons in the environment. Is there someone whose “insides” you would like to search? Is there someone on whom you would like to keep a strict eye? Who is it that you feel bears watching?

Apart from the aim of your introspecting, what is your manner? Do you dig? Are you the brutal police officer who pounds on the door and bellows, “Open up there?” Are you timid or furtive with yourself—that is, do you sneak your glances? Do you stare at yourself unseeingly? Do you conjure up events simply to fulfill your expectations? Do you falsify them by way of exaggeration? Or do you soft-pedal them? Do you abstract only what coincides with your immediate aims? In short, notice how your “I” is functioning. This is far more important than the specific content.

The extreme case of introspection is hypochondria—the search for symptoms of illness. Reverse this and search for symptoms in others. You may be an inhibited physician or nurse. What is the aim of such searching? Is it sexual? Have you ever been told that masturbation produces a tell-tale appearance of the eyes? Have you searched your own eyes or those of others for such a symptom? Do you introspect your body for signs that punishment has started for your “sins”?

A few students, in reporting their reactions to this experiment, expressed indignation over what they took to be its “insulting insinuations” and hunched themselves upon a defense of the “goodness” of their personal motives.

“You assume that all of us have an innate desire to pity or punish someone, and likewise to be pitied or punished. I must reject such a position as utterly preposterous.”

* * *

“When I pity someone, I vehemently deny that there is any disguised gloating in it.”

* * *

“You certainly talk as if you regarded us as a bunch of ‘abnormals’ Or is it that you’re ‘abnormal’ yourself?”

* * *

“You make it sound as if I ought to hold myself responsible for the situation I’m in. That may hold for some, but not for me. You just don’t know how I’ve been treated!”

* * *

“Some of the statements you make seem to me quite unnecessarily harsh.”

Most reports, on the other hand, indicated attempts to grapple frankly with whatever was turned up.

“I don’t want ordinary kinds of pity, but I want people co pity me when I’ve made some important sacrifice.”

* * *

“I have had to acknowledge that what I took to be my kind-hearted pity for my step-sister does involve a considerable amount of secret gloating.”

* * *

“My pity goes to those who, as you say, are ‘out of the running.’ ”

* * *

“I’ve discovered that I actually want to punish my girl. This bothers me, because I really love her. Fortunately, it’s not all the time, but just when I’m blue and down in the dumps.”

* * *

“I couldn’t believe that the wish to punish or be punished applied to me. But then I thought of the dreams I’m forever having of punishing someone, usually female, and doing it in a rather violent way. When I was younger the dreams were of someone punishing me physically. I enjoyed it. My parents didn’t punish me physically, but by the threat of withdrawing their love. This would go on for quite a while, and I thought how much better I would like it if they actually beat me and got in over width.”

Rather than cite short comments from a number of students on the various other parts of the experiment, we give the following rather extended quotation from a single report:

“. . . . While there is no-one I would constantly want to shower with pity, there are times when I would like to pity my sister, for I feel she has embarked on an undesirable marriage. But when I see her and have to realize that she is very happy, I know my pity is misplaced. ... I am very happy, for I am deeply in love with my fiance. I am very fond of his parents, and they’ve been wonderful to me.

“. . . . At times I would like to punish my father for venting his anger on my mother. If I had to choose someone to punish me, it would be my mother. She is so lenient and good-hearted that the punishment would not be severe. I would like to avoid punishment by my fiance, because he is so stubborn that the punishment, though it would probably be nothing more than prolonged silence or absence would be worse than any sort of fast, violent punishment.

“. . . . When I try to compel myself, I make promises to myself. I promise that I’ll never let my affairs get into such a mess ever again where I have to put myself under pressure. I also promise that, after doing a certain amount of work. I’ll give myself the chance to relax. This works pretty well when the relaxation period doesn’t go on and on, as it does tend to do.

“. . . . What I doubt most about myself, and this doesn’t recur too frequently, is whether I’m entirely ready for marriage. I still have a wonderful, romantic picture of marriage which doesn’t include washing dirty socks and economizing on the groceries. I doubt whether my sister, although she is married, is ready for that. She doesn’t have her own apartment yet, and hasn’t been faced with these things.

“. . . . The terms you use are particularly strong. There is no one I would like to ‘wipe out.’ If my sister were Person X, I certainly would have no wish to destroy her. Before she got married our relationship was a particularly close one, but I can’t say I am jealous of her husband for separating us. ... For the first time I’ve become really antagonistic toward you. Something inside me seems to be asking, ‘What are they driving at; what are they trying to find out?’ It is almost as if you had me backed against a wall with a strong spotlight on me. There is a certain anxiety; it is as if some cobwebs were being pushed aside, but I can’t identify what is beyond. I only know that it is disturbing.

. . . When I introspect, it is as if I were waiting for something to turn up—something that is elusive. I’m not sure if it is pleasant, but I think not, for it makes me slightly anxious. ... If there is one person who bears watching, that is my fiancé’s mother. She is a wonderful person, and has been more generous and gracious to me than most future mothers-in-law would be, but there are times when I am with her when I fear that she will come to dominate me as completely as she does her husband and daughter. My fiancé, fortunately, has gone through the period of revolt and been almost completely successful in getting out from under her thumb.

“. . . . When introspecting, I first stare at myself, unseeingly. Then, almost furtively, I try to sneak glances. ... If the events I hit upon are distasteful, I tend to soft-pedal them, or they become blocked out by other thoughts.

“The symptom for which I found myself searching was a sexual one. It probably can be traced to a particularly disgusting French film of which I saw only the smallest part. I suddenly got the idea that women who had had intercourse sat with their legs spread, rather than crossing them at the knees. I looked for this in my sister when she came to visit us. The symptom was there. It has been three weeks since I saw the picture, but it still, from time to time, comes into my mind.”

Experiment 13: Mobilizing the Muscles

In this experiment we come to grips with the mechanics of retroflection. When your approaches to objects and persons in the environment are frustrated or evaluated as too dangerous to continue, so that you turn your aggressions inward against yourself, the muscular motions by which you do this may retain their form or be modified to conform to the substitute objects. If with your fingernails you scratch your own flesh, this is precisely what, without the retroflection, you would do to someone else. On the other hand, when you control an urge to pound someone with your fist by contracting the antagonistic muscles and thus immobilizing your arm and shoulder, the retroflection does not consist of pounding yourself; it is, instead, a statically maintained counteraction.

It is a doing of one thing and also its opposite at the same time in such fashion as to achieve a net effect of zero. So long as the conflict endures, the use of the arm for other purposes is impaired, energies are squandered, and the state of affairs is the same as the military situation of a stabilized battleline. Here the battleline is within the personality.

Retroflections are manipulations of your own body and impulses as substitutes for other persons and objects. Such self-manipulation is unquestionably useful and healthy when it constitutes withholding, biding your time, adjusting yourself to the surroundings, in situations where you need to exercise prudence, caution, selectivity, in the service of your own over-all best interests. The neurotic abuse is when you have once and for all censored a part of yourself, throttled and silenced it, so that it may no longer lift its voice in your aware personality. But no matter how squeezed, choked off, clamped down upon this censored part may be, it still exerts its pressure. The struggle goes on. You have simply lost awareness of it. The end-result of such censoring, whether recognized or not, is invariably a more or less serious psychosomatic dysfunction: impairment of powers of orientation or manipulation, ache, weakness, or even degeneration of tissues.

Consider how ineffectual is retroflection in the following example. A patient undergoing treatment may display an extraordinary frequency and amount of weeping, perhaps several outbursts in a single session. The crying occurs whenever one might expect the patient to come forth with a reproach or some other kind of attack. What happens is this: the patient feels like attacking, but, not daring to, retroflects the attack against himself, feels hurt, and bursts into tears as if to say, "‘See how harmless and how abused I am.” The original aim, of course, is to make some Person X, perhaps the therapist, cry. When this cannot be achieved, the crying spells and the chronic resentment persist until the aggression can be reorganized and turned outward.

Other cases may have frequent headaches which are, as the Freudians would say, “converted” crying. Here the mystery of the “conversion-process” is readily solved when one recognizes that the headaches, like most other psychosomatic symptoms, are retroflected motor activity. They are produced by muscular tensing against a swelling impulse.

If you open a water tap slightly and attempt with a finger to hold back the water against the pressure in the pipe, you find this increasingly difficult. There is a strict analogy between this and many internal conflicts where you squeeze or hold black an urge to defecate, to have an erection or to become tumescent, to vomit or belch, etc. If you clench your fist hard, after a while it will ache from cramp. The “psychogenic” headache—or, as it used to be well called, the “functional” headache—is the same type of phenomenon. In a given instance, you start to cry, but then you control the impulse by squeezing your own head so as not to be a sissy or to give others the satisfaction of seeing they have made you cry. You would like to squeeze the life out of Person X who has so upset you, but you retroflect the squeezing and use it to hold back your crying. Your headache is nothing but your experience of the muscular straining. If you de-tense the muscles, you will start to cry and, simultaneously, the headache will disappear. (Not all headaches, of course, are produced in this way; also, crying may be inhibited by tensions other than those in the head—for example, by tightening the diaphragm against the clonic movements of sobbing.)

We repeat once more our opposition to premature relaxation. Suppose you manage to relax the muscles of your neck, brow, and eyes and burst out crying. This by no means solves the original conflict. It merely by-passes it. An important part of the symptom—namely, the tendency to aggressive squeezing—goes unanalyzed. When someone has hurt you, there is the wish to retaliate by hurting him. This tendency gets some expression—you do some hurting—even if it is but the retroflected squeezing which makes you the victim of your own aggression as well as of that of the other person. If, instead of reversing the retroflection, you simply give up the retroflecting behavior—in this case, your self-squeezing—you can succeed only by somehow also getting rid of your proneness to be hurt. This requires a technique more serious than retroflection, namely, desensitization. Not wanting to hurt depends on nor being hurt, which depends on ceasing to respond emotionally to the environment. This process can go as far as depersonalization. Admittedly, one may be hypersensitive and “have one’s feelings hurt" by almost everything; one has, correspondingly, a heightened urge to “hurt back.” The solution for this condition is reorganization of the personality, not further disorganization in the form of going numb. The healthy organism, when genuinely attacked, fights back in a way and to a degree appropriate to the situation.

Furthermore, when muscles are willfully relaxed, they are less at your disposal even for behavior not involved in the conflict. You lose agility, grace, and mobility of feature. This accounts for the relaxed facelessness of some “analyzed” persons. They have “mastered’’ their problems by becoming aloof—too aloof to be fully human.

In the healthy organism the muscles are neither cramped nor relaxed (flaccid), but in middle tone, ready for the execution of movements which maintain balanced posture, provide locomotion, or manipulate objects. In beginning the motor-muscular work of this experiment, do not relax. Later we shall amend this by saying do not relax until you can cope with the excitement which will thereby be released. If relaxation occurs prematurely and you are surprised and frightened by unblocked excitement, you will clamp against it harder than ever and experience great anxiety. With correct concentration, however, on the motor manipulation of yourself, slowly and methodically adjusting to pressures as you feel yourself exerting them, the loosening of tension will often take place as a matter of course.

From the beginning be prepared for sudden urges to break out in rage, to cry, vomit, urinate, behave sexually, etc. But such urges as you experience at the start will come from near the surface of awareness and you will be quite able to cope with them. Nevertheless, to spare yourself possible embarrassment, it is advisable at first to perform the muscular experiments in solitude. Furthermore, if you are prone to anxiety attacks, before attempting intensive muscular concentration, work through what you are going to do by internally verbalizing it.

While lying down, but not deliberately relaxing, get the feel of your body. Notice where you have an ache—headache, backache, writer’s cramp, belly-cramp, vaginism, etc. Realize where you are tense. Do not “give in” to the tension, nor do anything about it. Become aware of the tensions in your eyes, neck, around the mouth. Let your attention wander systematically (without making a fetish of system) through your legs, lower trunk, arms, chest, neck, head. Should you find that you are lying in a crooked position, adjust it accordingly. Do not move jerkily, but let the self-sense develop softly. Notice the tendency of your organism to regulate itself—the tendency to pull back into a better position in one place, to stretch out in another.

Do not fool yourself that you are feeling your body when you are merely visualizing or theorizing it. If prone to the latter, you are working with a concept of yourself, not yourself. But this concept is imposed by your “I” and its resistances; it is not self-regulating and spontaneous. It does not come from the felt-awareness of the organism. By waiting, refusing to be put off by visualizations and theories, can you get the glow of awareness which arises directly from the parts attended to?

As you proceed, consider what objections you may have to each particular bit of self-awareness. Do you despise physical functioning? Are you ashamed of being a body? Do you regard defecation as a painful, dirty duty? Are you frightened by a tendency to clench your fist? Do you fear that you will strike a blow? Or that you will be struck? Does the feeling in your throat disturb you? Are you afraid to shout?

In parts of your body where it has been difficult for you to get any feeling at all, what you are likely to experience first as feeling is restored is a sharp pain, a painful numbness, a cramp. When such pangs occur, concentrate on them.

(It goes without saying that we are dealing here with functional or ‘‘psychogenic’’ pains, not those resulting from ‘‘physical’’ lesions or infections. Try not to be hypochondriacal, but, if doubtful, consult a doctor. Get one, if possible, who has an understanding of functional symptoms.)

An extremely useful method of grasping the meaning of particular aches or tensions is to call up appropriate expressions of popular speech. These invariably contain long-tested wisdom. For instance:

I am stiff-necked; am I stubborn? I have a pain in the neck; what gives me a pain in the neck? I stretch my head high; am I haughty?

I stick my chin out; am I leading with it? My brows arch; am I supercilious? I have a catch in my throat; do I want to cry? I am whistling in the dark; am I afraid of something? My flesh creeps; am I horrified? My brows beetle; am I full of rage? I feel swollen; am I ready to burst with anger? My throat is tight; is there something I can’t swallow? My middle feels queasy; what can’t I stomach?

Now, assuming that you have begun to rediscover your bodily existence, your tensions, and their characterological and interpersonal significance, we must take the next step. What you have been doing—searching and softly adjusting so as to orient yourself further—must now give way to the other functions which are latent in contracted muscle. With orientation we must begin to integrate overt expression, to change the muscular contractions into controllable behaviors available for manipulation of the environment.

The next step in solving the problem of chronic muscular tensions —and of every other psychosomatic symptom—is to develop adequate contact with the symptom and accept it as your own. The notion of accepting the symptom—precisely what you feel you want to be rid of—always sounds preposterous. So let us try, even at the risk of unnecessary repetitiousness, to get this perfectly clear. You may ask, “If I have a symptom that is painful or some characteristic that is undesirable, should I not try to get rid of it?” The answer is, “Certainly!” The issue then is reduced to the selection of a means which will work and the abandonment of any means which superficially looks as if it ought to work—but actually doesn’t. The direct means of condemning the symptom, of regarding it as something which has been imposed upon you, of appealing to others for help in making it disappear, will not work. The only way that will work is an indirect one: become vividly aware of the symptom, accept both sides of the conflict as you—this means to re-identify yourself with parts of your personality from which you have dis-identified yourself—and then discover means by which both sides of the conflict, perhaps in modified form, can be expressed and satisfied. Thus, for your headache it is better to take responsibility than aspirin. The drug temporarily dulls the pain, but it does not solve the problem. Only you can do this.

Pain, disgust, repulsion, are all disagreeable, but they are functions of the organism. Their occurrence is not accidental. They are nature’s way of calling attention to what needs attention. You must, where necessary, learn to face pain and to suffer, in order to destroy and assimilate the pathological material contained in the symptom. Reintegration of dissociated parts always involves conflict, destroying and suffering. If, for instance, you are on guard against some “infantile” behavior, you must, nevertheless, learn to accept it as yours in order to give it a chance to grow up and find its proper place in the general integration of your personality. If not allowed to claim attention and do its work, whatever this may be, it cannot be altered. Given attention and allowed to interact with the rest of your behavior, it is sure to develop and change.

To gain confidence in this hard task, start with “mistakes” that you are prone to. In playing a piece of music perhaps you keep making the same mistake. If so, instead of being upset about it and trying to block it out, become curious and repeat it deliberately to find out what it means. Possibly your “mistake” is a natural fingering of a passage and the “correct” fingering quite wrong.

Repeated mistakes or acts of clumsiness are often retroflected annoyance. If someone has annoyed or upset you, instead of striking back at him, you upset the next glass of water and upset yourself still further.

For a while allow your pronouncements of moral judgment on yourself to remain in abeyance. Give yourself a chance. When the impulses which you customarily alienate on moral grounds can learn to speak in their own voices, you frequently will find that you change your evaluations of the right and wrong of the matter. Do not, at least, be any more harshly critical of yourself than you are of others. After all, you are a person, too!

Soon you will discover that facing neurotic pain or some “immoral” tendency is not as bad as you feared. When you have acquired the technique for dissolving the pain and reintegrating the “immorality,” you will realize that you are freer, more interested, more energetic.

Apply to a headache or some other symptom the method of the concentration-experiment. Give it your attention, and let its figure/ground spontaneously form. If you can accept the pain, it serves as a motivating interest; it is a concernful sensation. The important thing in dissolving the pain is to wait for development. Permit this to occur of itself, without interference or preconceived ideas. If you make contact, you will get a clearer figure and be able to dissolve the painful conflict. For a considerable period after you have started work on this technique the changes that occur may be so subtle— especially if you are expecting heavy drama from the outset—that you lose patience.

The pain will shift about, expand or contract, alter in intensity, transform itself in quality and kind. Try to feel the shape, size and direction of particular muscles which you contract. Be on the alert for any trembling, itching, “electricity,” shivering—in short for any signs of biological excitement. Such excitement-sensations, vegetative and muscular, may come in waves or be constant, may swell or subside. When an itch develops, see if you can keep from prematurely scratching or rubbing it away; concentrate on it and wait for it to develop further. Allow the excitement to come to the foreground. Correctly carried through, this procedure should leave you with a sense of well-being. The same technique is applicable not only to psychosomatic aches and pains, but to fatigue depressions, unspecified excitements, and attacks of anxiety.

In the performance of these experiments you are likely to suffer anxiety, which we have seen to be a self-regulating attempt to counteract faulty breathing during mounting excitement. Whether anxiety is present or not, practice the following respiratory experiment:

Exhale thoroughly, four or five times. Then breathe softly, making sure of the exhalation, but without forcing. Can you feel the stream of air in your throat, in your mouth, in your head? Allow the air to blow from your mouth and feel the stream of it with your hand. Do you keep your chest expanded even when no air is coming in? Do you hold in your stomach during inhalation? Can you feel the inhalation softly down to the pit of the stomach and the pelvis? Can you feel your ribs expand on your sides and back? Notice the tautness of your throat; of your jaws; the closure of the nose. Pay attention especially to the tightness of the midriff (diaphragm). Concentrate on these tensions and allow developments.

In your daily activity, especially in the moments of interest—in your work, when near someone sexually desirable, during an absorbing artistic experience, while confronted by an important problem-notice how you tend to hold your breath instead of breathing more deeply as the situation biologically requires. What are you restraining by holding back your breath? Crying out? Shrieking? Running away? Punching? Vomiting? Deflation? Weeping?

At the time of writing their reports on this experiment students varied tremendously in the amount of progress they had been able to make on this phase of the work—from virtually none to important unblockings of excitement. We repeat that there is no standard time-table for assimilation of the concepts introduced here, and it is certainly not to your discredit if at this stage the procedure is, so far as you are concerned, a “bust.”

“There is nothing that puts me to sleep more quickly than trying to do these exercises. This applies whether I intended to go to sleep or not.”

If we say that this person “flees into sleep,” it is without any moralistic implication that he ought not to. This is simply the way he functions at present. Structured as he is, he prefers to avoid his problems rather than to solve them. He can continue to exercise this preference so long as he subscribes to one or both of the following propositions: (1) the problems do not exist; (2) the problems are inevitable and cannot be solved.

“In permitting one’s attention to wander over the body noticing tensions, switchings, pains, etc., 1 can report success, if success is to be measured in terms of finding that I do have these physical sensations. It is no great trick to focus attention on parts of the body and experience them. But may not the very focusing of attention, where the result has been foretold by the authors, be responsible for getting such results? How far would one have to go in getting uncomfortable physical sensations before cither the help of a doctor was needed or the person worked himself into the position of the hypochondriac? I can’t help but be dubious of the theory that every twinge in a tense muscle is associated with some long forgotten experience.”

This man still insists on separating his “body” and “mind” so that “never the twain shall meet.” For him the sensations are “physical sensations” which are natural to “parts of the body” and which anyone may have for the looking. But in the next breath they owe their existence to our having predicted that they will be found if looked for, that is, they are due to suggestion. At this point he apparently becomes quite able to resist “our influence,” for he balks at the theory that the tensions have meanings as conflicts which can be discovered and worked through. Instead, he sees the more unfavorable outcome of having to get a doctor. To do what? Restore inattentiveness to the “body”? Unsuggest what was suggested? Prescribe aspirin in lieu of his previous pain-killer, inattentiveness? Tell him to forget it—or, as is actually the case, tell him that it is psychosomatic?

The last sentence quoted above may be an example of misstating an argument to make it easier to di pose of. Muscles may be painful for a number of reasons, including ordinary fatigue, inflammation, or various dietary deficiencies. We are concerned here not with such instances but with chronic contractions which one may, if attentive, notice time and time again in the absence of the usual explanatory factors. It is these which, if developed and analyzed, may lead to remembrance of situations in which they were learned as a means of squelching conflict. But such recapture of memories, if and when it occurs, is incidental, a mere by-product of discovering and expressing the conflict’s component tensions.

“I did not have a headache to experiment on, so I had to use a ‘barked shin’ and its resulting pain.”

While concentration on actually injured parts of the body does increase blood circulation and in this way promote recovery, this has no pertinence to the purpose of the experiment.

“I had no measure of success whatsoever. I followed through all the directions, but was unable to achieve anything more than a feeling of wasting my time and futility.”

“. . . This experiment has produced an interesting block. If, while lying down, I feel an ache or itch and concentrate on it, it disappears rather than comes to the foreground, and another in a totally different parr of the body begins to distract my attention.”

“I’m getting awfully tired of this whole over-rated rigmarole. I am not upset by any of my urges, and am completely aware of all of them. I have no desire to vomit, to go on a rape rampage, or to commit suicide. I am ashamed of nothing—absolutely nothing—about myself. I am not afraid of my desire to murder people. I am not afraid to holler good and loud, but out of consideration for the neighbors I try not to. I alienate no impulse on moral grounds. I am doubtless a psychopathic personality. I have stolen cars, taken dope, and lived with women. Try to prove it!”

“The tensions I feel around my shoulders, neck, and at times my legs, are due to the fact that I am worried and nervous of late. I feel all tightened up inside and this seems to manifest itself in the parts of my body just mentioned.”

The next quotation is from a student who, at the time of writing her report, had permitted considerable development, but was still confused on what to express and how to express it:

“I have great resistance to putting my actual feelings on paper. Let me say that, whereas previously I regarded your statements as very confused, now they seem much clearer and I’m aware that it was I who was confused. Until now I’ve refused to face the responsibility of awareness—and I’m not really reconciled to it yet. But I realize that I must bring back many suppressed conflicts and either try to live with them or resolve them. I’ve gone back to the beginning experiments again and now, with reduced resistance so far as they are concerned, find them easy. However, when I attempt these present ones I’m afflicted with a nervous irritation which seems to start in my legs and spread slowly through my whole body, so that I scratch and seem to want to tear myself apart. In fact, even as I type this it begins again. I’m banging at the keys as if the aggression and irritation aroused by the experiments could be dissipated by the noise of the machine. Suddenly I have a pain in my left arm which seems to be in the bone. The whole lower part of my left arm is stiff. My right arm is unaffected. I’ve been trying to remember when the nervous reaction of scratching began.

“I can’t keep thinking about the scratching, but start to think about crying instead. So I’ll say something about that. I come from a family in which any display of emotion, especially of this sort, is frowned upon. At the moment I’m in conflict with my parents, and it is something that produces a guilt conflict, as I feel I’m in the wrong for making them suffer needlessly. I refuse to go home. When I’m there I feel materially very secure, bur suffocated in every other direction by their only half-concealed distaste for my ideas and way of life. I have received a letter from them that makes me want to cry. When I got it and read it, or whenever I think about it, I get a lump in my throat, a tightening behind the eyeballs and a tenseness throughout my body. This is repeated now as I report it. But I won’t allow myself the luxury of crying about it. What strikes me as peculiar is that I cry easily over a film, book, play, or work of art, but in my own personal relationships it is a privilege that so far I will not allow myself.

“Now I am aware that suddenly I feel very aggressive, as if I want to do something violent, and the way I'm pounding the typewriter is in keeping with this feeling. The pain has come back to my left arm.

“In regard to inner thinking I'm aware that the odd words and disjointed phrases ‘in my head* have begun to crystallize. My thoughts seem to be about conflict, about compromise, and about the facades behind which I’ve hidden myself, a different one for every group I’m in. In one life one plays many roles. Which is the true one that represents the self? The awareness which has shaken me the most is the size of my resistances and their strength.’’’

This person certainly has “unfinished business” with her parents. What, for example, does one owe to parents who will not accept one as he is? How can one make them “come to realize”? What life shall one live—what he chooses or what is chosen for him? Or something in between? This person will have to discover that, of the various roles she plays, there is not a “true one which represents the self.” Instead, a part of her self is invested in and finds expression in each of the roles. The problem is to integrate them so that all of her self comes together and lives her life continuously.

The following excerpt is not very specific about the content of the conflict discovered and developed, but we include it because of the partial discharge attained and the consequent differentiation of the primitive impulse:

“While trying to be aware of my body certain feelings do arise; certain people are involved in the potential fulfillment of the aroused feeling; and certain embarrassments follow inevitably. I’m really seriously angry at the authors, for what has turned up was, to say the least, somewhat unorthodox and shocking with no chance whatsoever of fulfillment. All that has happened is that I’ve become aware of a certain function or desire and have become just as aware that its fulfillment is out of the question. I realize that the desire was there before, because I just lay on the bed and suddenly this thing popped into my mind, full-blown, completely developed in all its various details. The whole scenario was complete from beginning to end. I don’t think it grew during the short course of the experiment. It probably was there latently all the time, but till now, at least, I was unaware of it. It has merely brought about a state of active, constant seif-vituperative frustration. How can I release this by socking a pillow or screaming? There’s only one way of getting rid of this. That’s by doing it—and I can’t!” (The report was interrupted at this point and not resumed until several days later.)

“Upon rereading the foregoing part of this I was tempted to destroy it and start all over. But I include it because of what I consider a rather curious aftermath. The sudden awareness of the cause of my bodily tension and the discovery of an unfulfillable need had actually made me so angry that I lost sight of what I now believe was important. Since starting on this report again a little while ago, I deliberately tried to imagine the whole sequence being acted out, although I knew it could never actually happen. I suddenly found myself blushing to the roots of my hair, not because it was the forbidden act, but because it was so silly! What a ridiculous way of trying to ‘wreak vengeance.’ I sincerely think that if the opportunity were now offered to do what I thought I couldn’t, that now I wouldn’t simply because it’s so silly and ineffectual. There are other much more adequate ways of dealing with the situation. And now so many of my attitudes and poses in regard to X become meaningless.”

What is important in the present context is that the primitive retroflected aggression and the act which it prevented did not for their relief require that the repressed wish be literally carried out against Person X. Once in awareness and fantasied with embarrassment, the primitive aggression underwent differentiation into “other much more adequate ways of dealing with the situation.” It 'was the repression itself 'which kept the aggression primitive and incapable of discharge.

In the following example a symptom of the alimentary tract was subjected to concentration:

“For some months—in fact, on and off for a year—I have been suffering from diarrhoea, which, since there has been no physical basis found for it, was probably psychosomatic. During my awareness experiments I concentrated on the stomach and solar-plexus muscles to see if I could become aware of tensions there that might be causing this. I found many tensions in that region, and spent a good deal of time and several sessions isolating and testing them. Since then my diarrhoea has completely vanished. It is too soon to say whether it has gone for good, but, since I have changed neither my diet or anything else in my life-situation, it seems encouraging.”

As a final example, we quote some effects obtained by a student which ordinarily require much more prolonged work with these techniques:

“I relaxed on the bed, getting the ‘feel’ of my body. After a short while I was in full contact with it, and felt around in first one part and then another. Then I breathed deeply, exhaling completely.

Excitement kept starting forward. I’d feel a little surge of it, and then it would recede. That happened several times, and I realized that I was preventing my breath from coming faster. So I deliberately started panting—and there came the excitement! It surged all through me. It was as though my hands and feet were strapped down while tremendous bolts of electricity were being shot into me. My body strained upward, this way and that, twisting and turning with the force of the current—pelvis, shoulders, back, legs, head. All of me moved circularly and in every way. My body was as hot as fire; I actually burned, and my hands and feet felt as though they were blazing. The perspiration poured off me, tears streamed down my face, my breath came in huge gasps, and I was saying, ‘Ohh . . . Ohh . . . Ohh . . .’ I don’t know just how long this lasted, but it was for at least several minutes. After it was over (that most intense part) I looked at my hands to see if they were scorched. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find that they were. Little chills went through me for about another half hour, and I felt very alive and strong.

“There is a place in the back of my head that has to be retaxed before I can experience all the excitement. Work on that spot and the diaphragm resulted in my being able to have the above experience. By relaxing that little spot in the back of my head I can have little chills run up and down my spine any time.

“The word ‘softly’, which appeared twice in the instructions, was of great importance to me in performing this experiment.

“Although I don’t know what’s around the next bend in the road so far as these experiments are concerned, I’m damn-well going to find out. So far it has just been the ‘honeymoon phase’ that you spoke of in the introduction. Maybe it will be over for me with the next experiment, but I shall continue to try."

Experiment 14: Executing the Re-reversed Act

This is the third and final experiment on retroflection, for which the preceding two were preparation. In them, when you discovered and muscularly explored some retroflecting activity, we suggested merely that you reverse it in fantasy or imagination. The crucial stage, of course, is to reverse it in overt action directed outward upon the environment, for only in this way can your “inner conflicts’’ be changed back into strivings to obtain what you need in contact with people and objects in the “outer world.”

You are not ready for this—and it would be premature to attempt it—unless you have, by concentrating on the muscular clinch, succeeded in loosening it somewhat and differentiating it into component parts. Assuming that you have, next comes the work of making approaches to overt reversal of the retroflected activity. As an example, suppose that you have been choking yourself to prevent screaming and that now, finally, you can feel in your throat the impulse to scream and in your fingers the impulse to choke. However bizarre this may sound if you have not yet become aware of this or a comparable conflict, we mean it literally —not just as a figurative way of speaking. If you do feel something of the sort, what to do about it?

Certainly it would be no solution to rush up to someone and, while screaming at the top of your voice, throttle him! The two parts of the conflict do have this meaning—the wish to scream and the wish to choke—but they are primitive and undifferentiated, and it is precisely their static clinch in your musculature that has kept them so. If you do not become paralyzed by the “silliness” of it, you can now give some overt expression to both sides in a way that is perfectly safe. You can choke a pillow! Dig your fingers into it as if it were a throat. Shake it as a mastiff shakes a rat. Show it no mercy! While doing this, fiercely absorbed in squeezing the life out of your enemy, you will also sooner or later find yourself vocalizing—grunting, growling, talking, shouting. This part will come sooner if you can perform the experiment beyond the earshot of others, but once you get into it fully, you are unlikely to care what the neighbors think.

Before such an occurrence you might feel that you want to scream, to pound, to squeeze, but that you “couldn’t possibly do it if you tried.” The muscular tics holding the appropriate activity in confluence may be so subtle that even with the best concentration they are not loosened in their last details. Various approaches to expressing the impulse, such as the kind suggested above, may be made abortively without having the behavior come to life and be meaningful. It remains dead, a deliberate bit of play-acting. If you persist, however, extending the variations, going along with and falling into whatever absurdities, antics, posturings suggest themselves, eventually the deliberateness will change suddenly to spontaneity; you will become strongly excited, and the behavior will become a genuine expression of what was previously blocked. At this moment what was before impossible for you will now, paradoxically, become possible and be done.

Mere physical execution of what you are aware of wanting to do, be it yelling, punching, choking, or whatever, will be useless unless; accompanied by a growing awareness of the meaning of the act, by recognition of its particular role in your own interpersonal situation—at whom you want to scream, whom or what you want to pound—and by the executive sense that it is you who are doing it and are responsible for it. Otherwise, the action is a bluff and a mere forcing. If you bully yourself into doing something on the ground that it is what you are “supposed” to do to fulfill the experiment, you will rasp your throat, strain your muscles, wrack yourself with new false excitements, but you will not achieve the integration you are seeking.

Here the truth of the unitary conception of the organism— unitary functioning of body, feeling, and environment—may dramatically be demonstrated. For if your orientation, your feeling, and your overt actions come together spontaneously and with the proper timing, you will suddenly find that you understand, feel and can act with an unexpected new self-awareness and clarity; you will spontaneously recover a lost memory, recognize what your true intention is in some present relationship, see clearly what is the next thing for you to do, and so on. It is because of the importance of parallel development of all factors involved that we have been reiterating: use an all-round approach—fantasy, analysis of the interpersonal situation, verbal or semantic analysis, emotional training, body-expression; do not prematurely relax and thus bypass some of the factors; do not force yourself or impose preconceptions, but allow for spontaneous developments.

When expression is overt, there normally is a release of pent-up energy—for instance, the seeming lethargy of depression will, if unblocked, be replaced by what it concealed and held in check: raging or the clonic movements of sobbing. When fears or social pressures remain so great that such expression cannot break through, the miniature and wholly inadequate motions of “thinking” are substituted for them—in this instance a kind of subvocal whining. The big movements which would suffice to discharge the energy are in a clinch with self-controlling tensions in the diaphragm, throat and head. Since the only way to release the energy is to express it and since the self-controlling “I” has no intention whatever of letting this particular impulse find appropriate outlet, the clinch does not change; without change it does not hold attention but becomes “forgotten”—an isolated, unaware conflict in the organism. If the cramped muscles give rise to psychosomatic pains, the “I” does not understand and accept these as consequences of its unrelenting self-control, but regards them as imposed upon it from “outside” and feels victimized. The energy of the organism cannot flow.

On the other hand, if you concentrate on a headache and permit development, you may sooner or later become aware that the headache is produced by muscular squeezing of your head. You may realize, further, that you are sad—in fact, that you want very much to cry. Unless you are alone, you may be unable to loosen the muscles and let go. To make it easier, retire to a place where you can have privacy. Even there, if you are a man, it may be difficult to let yourself weep, for you probably have been brought up on the fiction that “big boys don’t cry.” (Experiments to follow on “introjection” and “projection” will assist in overcoming this anti-biological prejudice.)

When you discover an impulse to do something which cannot reasonably in its primitive form find a direct expression, try above all not to turn it back against yourself; turn it, instead, against any kind of object that is convenient. Don’t throttle yourself again, but throttle a pillow, meanwhile allowing the fantasy to develop of whom you really want to choke. Squeeze an orange instead of your own eyeballs. Punch a bag. Wrestle for sport. Kick a box. Allow your head to shake from side to side and shout “No!” At first you will do such things rather lamely, but after a while, if you are convinced that they are not “silly”—that they are, instead, safe first approaches to what you will later be able to do on a less primitive basis—you will permit yourself to express with full emotional force all the kicking, pounding and screaming of a child’s tantrum. Despite conventional notions to the contrary, this is the healthy device by which the organism exteriorizes frustrated aggressions.

Symptoms may often be more deeply concealed than indicated in our discussion so far. If the pain of a particular conflict has been too much to bear, you may have desensitized its context, and so developed blind-spots (scotomata). In that case, you may find during body-concentration, not aches and pains, but sensations of numbness, fogginess, nothingness. If so, then concentrate on these until you have them as a veil or blanket that you can lift, or as a fog that you can blow away.

In theory, male and female sexual frigidity are merely such blind spots and are curable by correct concentration. In practice, though, most eases of this sort have extremely complicated resistances. The chief muscular block in frigidity is the stifling of the pelvis, mainly in the small of the back and in the groin. This frequently is linked up with incorrect masturbation. And, since masturbation is a sexual kind of retroflection, normal or neurotic depending on the context, let us discuss it briefly.

Up to a generation ago masturbation was considered extremely sinful and harmful. Now it is approved of in many circles, even encouraged by “progressive parents,” though often with great embarrassment on their part. Both attitudes—the condemnation and the approval—are over-simplifications. Whether masturbation is healthy or harmful depends on the urge which it expresses, the accompanying attitude, and the method employed.

It has been said that it is the guilt and remorse which constitute the damage that can be done by masturbation, and this is correct; without these feelings a person suffers no injury. But there is a general misconception on this point. The guilt does nor so much concern the act itself as the fantasies which accompany it—for instance, sadism, watching for someone to ambitious self-glorification, etc. Since healthy masturbation expresses an outgoing drive—is u substitute for intercourse—the healthy masturbation fantasy would be that of approaching and having intercourse with a beloved person. Where masturbation gives rise to guilt, the problem is to notice the guilt-producing fantasy and to deal with it separately from the sexual act.

The second point of danger in masturbation is the lack of pelvic activity. The act becomes one in which the hands are the active, aggressive partner to intercourse, while the genitals are merely raped. A man, lying on his back, conceives a passive-feminine fantasy. Or, in the absence of spontaneously developing sexual excitement, the situation becomes a struggle, a striving for victory—the hands try to rape while the genitals resist and defy the rapist. The pelvis, meanwhile, does not move in orgastic waves and jerks, but is immobilized, tense and rigid. No satisfactory orgasm results, the artificially stimulated excitement is inadequately discharged, and there ensues fatigue and the need to try again.

Masturbation, furthermore, is often an attempt to live out tensions not sexual at all—for instance, non-sexual loneliness, depression, annoyance. Or, on the other hand, it is sometimes a non-sexual expression of general defiance and rebellion.

In healthy masturbation, as in healthy intercourse, the lead has to come from the pelvis or—what corresponds to this—genuine sexual need. If the small of the back is rigidly tensed and if the legs are pulled up into the trunk, no orgastic movements are possible. The sexual act, to give satisfaction, requires that one surrender to the sensations. If one “thinks” during intercourse, has fantasies which are not an integral part of what one is doing, avoids bestowing attention on one’s partner, or omits to feel one’s own pleasure, one cannot hope for the profound relief of consummated sexual expression.

Let us return now to the more general problem of the systematic undoing of retroflections. By concentrating on localized muscle-cramps or areas of numbness as you permit developments to occur, you will release a certain amount of energy that was previously bound up and unavailable. But after a time you will find that you cannot make further progress without giving attention to functional relationships among the larger divisions of the body. The felt-contact between one part and another must be reestablished before reintegration can be achieved. These parts are not detached from each other, of course, since they all go with you when you walk down the street; but still it is necessary to explore and feel vividly the structural and functional connection of upper with lower body, head with torso, torso with legs, right half with left half. As you do this work, you will be fascinated by the novel and yet obvious relationships that will assert themselves. You will comprehend at first hand what is meant by the Freudian notion of “displacement upward”—for instance, that repressed sexual and anal functions appear on an inadequate substitute basis in speech and thought, or the converse, that oral blocks repeat themselves in anal tensions. This presents no mystery, for, since the system is functioning as a whole, when one end of a large sub-system like the alimentary tract is disturbed, the other parts adjust progressively to compensate or at least to maintain a functioning, though less efficient, unity.

Detailed interrelatedness of various parts of the body vary with each personality. By now you should be able to discover and work out the special features of your own particular mode of functioning. For further discussion here, let us restrict ourselves to a few remarks on balance and on the relation that exists between left and right.

When muscular action is retroflected, it is obvious that posture must be deformed in every kind of way. For instance, if you hold your pelvis rigid, there can be no flexible base for any movement of the upper torso, arms and head. Attempts to recover correct posture and grace by “setting up exercises’ will prove fruitless unless there is also a loosening of the rigidity. Mothers produce nothing but exasperation in their children by constant admonitions to “stand up straight,” “throw back your shoulders,” or “hold your head up.” The “bad” posture feels “right” and will continue to as long as certain parts are held in a vise-like grip and not allowed spontaneous movement. For proper posture the head, unconstrained by taut neck muscles, must balance freely on the torso; and the upper torso, without any pushed-out chest or pulled-in back, must ride easily on the pelvis. These body-segments have been likened to three pyramids, each resting on its point, so that it can pivot readily in any direction.

Conflict between head and trunk often expresses itself elsewhere as a struggle between right and left hands. When the head, for instance, is moral and “right,” the person is stiff-necked—afraid of losing his precarious balance. In this case the neck serves, nor as a bridge between head and trunk, but as a barrier—literally, a muscular bottle-neck—between the “higher” and the “lower” functions of the personality. The shoulders, afraid to expand and work or fight, are held contracted. The lower body is well “under control.” Ambidextrous cooperation is lacking. One hand tends to hold down and nullify the activity of the other, and the same is true for the legs. In sitting, balance is precarious; the upper carriage bears down on one buttock like a crushing piece of lead.

By concentrating on right/left differences you can regain much of the subtle balance required for adequate posture and locomotion. Lie on your back on the floor. Work first on the hollow small of the back and the arch of the neck. Although neither of these spots would remain up in the air as you lie there were your posture correct, do not try to relax or to force the vertebrae to flatten. Bring your knees up and spread them slightly apart, resting the bottoms of your feet on the floor. This will ease the tension along your spine, but you can still notice the rigidity of your back, and the short, pulled-in feeling of your legs. Allow any spontaneous adjustments that may occur in the direction of a more comfortable position. Compare every part of your anatomy on the right side with the left. You will observe many discrepancies in what should be bilateral symmetry. Your feeling that you are lying “all crooked” expresses, though in an exaggerated way, what is actually the case. Following the organism’s own pressures as you notice them, softly correct your position—very, very slowly, without jerky movements. Compare your right and left eyes, shoulders, feet, arms, hands.

Throughout this work keep the knees somewhat apart, arms loose and uncrossed. Notice the tendency to bring them together. Consider what this tendency may mean. Do you want to protect your genitals? Do you feel too much exposed and defenseless to the world if you lie open in this manner? What will attack you? Do you want to hang on to yourself for fear that otherwise you will fall to pieces? Is your right/left discrepancy expressive of a wish to hang on to Person X with one hand and to push him away with the other? To go somewhere and not to go, at the same time? As you try to adjust your position, how are you doing it? Are you squirming, wriggling? Are you in a trap?

A highly important connection and discrepancy is between the front of the body and the back. For instance, while to all appearances your gaze is directed ahead, it may be that you are more concerned with what lies behind, in which case you can never see where you are. What unknown thing do you fear from behind? Or what are you hoping will overtake and assault you? If you tend to stumble and fall down easily, concentration on this discrepancy between front and back will prove useful.

As you allow muscular developments to take place, at times you may experience a vague, but fairly strong, urge to perform some particular type of movement. It may be, for instance, a kind of reaching out. If so, go along with it by experimentally reaching out. Should the feeling intensify, then reach out, not just with your hands, but with your arms, and, if it is the natural continuation of what you are doing, with your whole body. For whom are you reaching? Your mother? An absent beloved? At some stage does the reaching out begin to be a pushing away? If so, then push. Push against something solid like the wall. Do it with a force adjusted to the strength of your feeling.

Similarly, suppose you feel your lips tighten and your head draw away. Then let your head move from side to side and say, “No!” Can you say it firmly and loudly, or does your voice break? Do you plead? Or, quite the opposite, does your refusal develop into a general sense of defiance and rebelliousness, with pounding, kicking, and screaming? What does it mean?

In performing such mimetic movements, nothing is gained by forcing. It then becomes mere play-acting and throws you off the track. Your sense of what to express and act out must grow out of the exploration and development of feelings and their significance. If the movements are the right ones and properly timed, they will crystallize your feelings and clarify meanings in your interpersonal relations.

In quoting reactions to this experiment, we begin as usual with some of the more antagonistic ones.

“I’m a creature of habit and quite comfortable with my present posture. I’m not going to lie on the floor and do gyrations. I don’t go reaching out for mother or an absent beloved, push things away, plead, kick, scream, or bellow ‘No!’”

“I don’t have aggressive drives. When younger I was temperamental, aggressive and self-righteous. It was quite a struggle learning to control these things during the past ten years, but I did it! It’s really not that I now control my temper; the truth is that I don’t have a temper any more. What I hoped to get out of these experiments and have completely failed to get is, not an invitation to develop a temper again, but rather to learn how to be self-assured. That's my problem! Where are the experiments that deal with that?”

“When I’m aware of an itch, I scratch it. If I’m uncomfortable, I change my position. Going around asking, ‘Do I feel something?’ isn’t going to make me a happier or better-adjusted person.”

“What’s all this stuff about wanting to protect myself from things that obviously aren't there? This is all getting farther and farther out into left field."

“The frank discussion of sexual fornication and masturbation shocked me. At the risk of sounding like a prude, which I’m not, I may say that this shock has prevented me from doing this whole experiment.”

“The assumptions in this experiment are utterly ridiculous. I fear nothing in back of me! After reading this kind of stuff, I begin wondering about the authors. The more I wonder, the more I think that the only benefit I’m getting out of these experiments is typing experience.”

We now sample reports from those who describe more positive results:

“When. I inhale, my stomach seems to move naturally, but my jaws are extremely tight, as is my throat and the rest of my face. I experience this as restrained shouting. I had a chance to make sure of this when my father was dressing me down over something where I felt positive I was right. I got this very same choked up feeling, but I couldn’t let very much come out even when he demanded what was ‘eating me.’ The way it felt to me then was that I mustn't hurt his feelings. But that’s precisely what I know I did do by sulking and moping around afterward. Next time I’m going to spare myself this pain—and spare him my sulking—by speaking my piece.”

“Last week when I came home late from a party I had a terrific headache. Instead of taking aspirin, I tried, as you suggested, to take responsibility for it. I lay there quite a while, exploring my forehead from the inside, and gradually it seemed that the pain, which I had supposed was a general one, was actually centered in two, distinct points, one over each eye. It then became very clear that it wasn’t just a pain, but very definitely a muscular ache. After concentrating for a while on the muscles around my eyes, without trying in any way to relax them, all of a sudden, with no effort on my part, they relaxed, and the pain was gone! It was a wonderful sensation of relief, and, naturally, I fell asleep almost immediately. It wasn’t until next morning that I wondered what the meaning of the ache had been, but by that time I guess it was too late to do anything about becoming aware of that."

“The first tension I felt was this tenseness in the diaphragm, and in a heightened state of awareness I felt a subtle urge to vomit. As the awareness increased, I fell several convulsive heaves in the diaphragm region, but these, never too severe, stopped in a short while, and the whole area seemed relaxed. Throughout the whole period of nausea (actually it wasn’t nausea in the usual sense) I tried to let my feelings come out, and almost spontaneously I felt my hands clench. The shaking of my head as if to say ‘no’ quite vehemently also came quite easily, and before I knew it I was saying the word ‘no’ out loud—and saying it quite loudly and with much emotion. I followed through with the experiment to the point of strangling a pillow, and it was while doing this that I saw some visual images which were exceedingly interesting and revealing to me. I don’t feel that they should be described here, for they were of a rather intimate personal nature. The diaphragm tensions can’t be found now, and I have hopes that they won’t return with any degree of severity.’

“There was no-one in the house for once and wouldn’t be for a while, so I decided to do this experiment in the living room, since by pushing the table aside I would have considerable room for movement. At first, when I stretched out on the floor, I was completely dressed. This hampered me. It was the first time I really could go all out on a manipulation experiment and know I wouldn’t be bothered, so I threw a blanket on the floor, drew the blinds, and stripped.

“I was more successful in body awareness than I had ever been. I was excited, and my breathing was rapid. I concentrated on it until, though it was still rapid, it was slow enough to permit full breathing. I tried to verbalize my various feelings — the throb of my chest, shoulders, and upper arms, and it was while I was working on these sensations I realized I was developing an erection. Involuntarily I tried to check this, and then I got an ache in my back. This was very interesting to me, because that particular ache is an old acquaintance, and now I’m beginning to put two and two together.

“. . . My spine was extremely tight. Neither the small of my back nor the arch of my neck touched the floor. When I drew my legs up I felt somehow uncomfortable. The base of my spine pressed into the floor and it was quite an effort to put my feet down squarely. My legs felt very tense.

“When I began to compare the two sides of my body, I found the right side far more relaxed than the left. My right shoulder was slightly raised and most of my weight was on my left shoulder and left buttock. I had the distinct feeling that my pelvic arch was raised up. As I explored various muscle groups I suddenly had a terrific urge to stretch. I raised my arms high and stretched my shoulder muscles. I then spontaneously ‘bridged,’ as do wrestlers, raising my whole body and suspending myself on my feet and neck. When I lay back I felt relaxed and strangely relieved. My spine wasn’t so tight and the small of my back was much closer to the floor, although both my neck and back were still ‘held high’ . . . . . Although the meanings of all this don’t come through very clearly, I can feel that they are starting to emerge, and in a general sense I don't feel nearly so confused as I did.”

“While lying on my bed and trying this experiment I became aware of feeling ashamed of my genitals. I wished to get up and cover myself, but continued to lie there to see what might develop. The desire to cover myself with my hand became very strong, and I remembered my mother telling me that ‘nice girls never expose themselves.’ I was brought up in a family which put tremendous weight on moral virtue. Emotions, particularly those related to sexual adjustment, were suppressed in strong verbal warnings and lectures.

“In doing this experiment I realized my natural desires and at the same time I felt the fears and warnings that had been implanted in me in childhood. I realize I have a great deal of reappraising and working out to do before I can finally come to terms with myself. There is a great deal of unfinished business in my life, but I’m getting clearer on ways and means of going about the job, and already I feel I’ve made a good start.”

“Before doing this particular experiment I felt I had already gained some insight about the matter, but to discover how opposed forces act upon the body was something quite amazing to me. Until recently I was unable to experience anger, no matter what the circumstances. Instead, I felt hurt. I would become nervous and later develop a splitting headache.

“As I was lying on the floor with knees brought up and my feet flat, I became aware that my right arm was limp at my side and that my left arm was curved away from the body with fist tightly clenched. To me the right side represents the meek and non-aggressive tendencies in me, and the left side repressed aggressive tendencies. It is amazing to me, but not amusing, that although one might repress aggression, it inevitably comes to the surface in another form.

‘‘I used to be very sarcastic, but eventually denied myself even this more or less subtle way of striking. I believe that when I gave this up I became unable to be aware of anger. This awareness has come back with the doing of these experiments, but I’m still unable to do much about it overtly. It somehow feels cruel and unjustified to attack anyone for any cause whatever. I know, though, that I actually want to do this and that in certain situations it is not only justified but necessary. I’m making some progress in that direction, but I’ve got an awful lot of retroflecting to undo and I’m trying to resign myself to its taking quite a while.”

“I started shadow-boxing and allowed different people to wander In and out of my fantasies. Finally Sir X arrived. At this point I stopped throwing punches at my imaginary adversary and let go with my right foot. Immediately I felt a cramp in my shin. It surprised me considerably, not so much the cramp, as the thought of kicking someone. I had always abhorred such action and considered it impossible for me even to comprehend. Yet here I was attempting to stomp Mr. X’s face! Since the experiment stopped at this point, naturally the cramp in my shin subsided. However, as I’m typing this I can feel tensions in my shin developing again!

“I now ask myself whether this is an example of retroflected behavior. Does it mean that I’ve been kicking myself all these years when I wanted to kick someone else? As yet there is no clear answer to these questions, but I shall pursue them again soon.”

Because of its fine attention to detail we quote the following report at some length:

“As time went by I found that I could do the motor-muscular experiments for greater and greater stretches, and also that there was a quicker and more complete awareness of internal activities and tensions in each succeeding attempt. The first time I tried it, I got no results for some time. Then I became aware of my heart-beat, and then the results of my heart-beat, namely, circulation through my limbs, and the throbbing of the blood-vessels. Then I lost my gestalt and fell asleep.

“The second experiment started negatively. Suddenly I became aware that I was introspecting —doing nothing but stare internally in an attempt to force results. The moment I stopped this the results were instantaneous. I took no notes during the experiment, so I cannot report all the sensations I felt. I can only say, as I report those that I do recall, that they were multitudinous and came so fast that I could not have reported them without interfering fatally with the flow of awareness. First I felt the circulatory awareness I had felt the first time. On this occasion, however, I maintained the gestalt, and soon was rewarded with definite motor-muscular awareness. There were all sort of twinges, electric currents, and, especially, little internal jumps in the extremities. There seemed little or no anxiety, except a continued over-eagerness, which I noted as part of a compulsive drive toward premature success. At one time I almost fell asleep again, but as I reestablished the figure-ground, I felt a fine feeling of having overcome this resistance to awareness.

“Then I felt a severe pain in the stomach muscles, almost as if someone had kicked me in the solar-plexus. As I tried to concentrate on it, however, it disappeared. Then I felt a severe pain in my upper arm. This remained and intensified as I concentrated on it for about five minutes. It moved slightly, and alternately faded and increased in strength. I now tried to make free-associations with my life-situation to observe whether any connection could be made with this pain. I honestly do not remember what my train of thought was at this time, but something came to the surface which seemed to cause the pain to explode like an internal mushroom bomb. I can describe my feelings by saying that I felt as if I were about to have an orgasm in the area of the arm. This feeling mounted to almost unbearable tension and then faded without resolution, leaving me feeling very much as if an expected orgasm had not taken place. However, when I ceased the experiment I felt well, rather than having the typical unpleasant after-effect of an incomplete orgasm; I did, however, have the feeling that something terrific had almost occurred. I must now report further that, as I typed this report, memory of the experiment returned spontaneously in greater detail than I would have imagined possible, and suddenly I felt the same pain in the same region of the arm. It is there right now. This interests me, but also alarms me somewhat.

“I interrupted my report at this time to concentrate on the repeated pain in my arm. Internal awareness came at once, and the pain remained present. Suddenly it spread out over my entire body and I began to tremble with fear (literally), an emotion which both surprised and disgusted me. As I did this, I felt that I wanted to stretch my arms out to someone—my mother. Simultaneously an incident came to mind of when I had done just that. It occurred when I was four years old. I was traveling with my parents, and had taken an intense dislike to the manager of our hotel. I did something or other that was naughty, and my mother said that if I didn’t behave she would go off and leave me behind with the hotel-manager, who was present at the time.

“I started to cry and ran to my mother with my arms outstretched. She consoled me, and assured me that she was joking, while the manager laughed at me and called me a ‘mama’s baby.’ All this may be cooked up, and I wouldn’t blame you for being sceptical. I am myself. However, to the best of my knowledge, I hadn’t thought of this incident since the time it occurred, and now I remember it as clearly as if it had happened yesterday. The pain in my arm still persists, but it seems to be less acute and to cover a wider area.

“In my next muscle-tension experiment, awareness came a little more slowly than the previous time, possibly due to anxieties that had been aroused by the results of the previous one. It took about fifteen minutes for strong awareness to form, and this time it was in the area of the face. I first noticed a tendency of the muscles at the comer of my mouth to twitch upward in what I imagined was an attempt to smile. Ten minutes approximately passed before I realized that this upward twitch was not a smile, but actually part of the facial movement of a crying-spell. I thereupon proceeded to cry! This I hadn’t indulged in since a small child. Embarrassment at my own behavior interfered with developments at this point. I could not associate my action with anything in my life-situation, except possibly the death of my mother two years ago, on which occasion I had been unable to cry although I wished to. I did become aware, however, that the pressure of my lower lip against my upper and the tension across my forehead—two tensions which I reported previously—existed to prevent my crying. After the experiment I felt fine and extremely happy to have made this outgoing action available to myself.”