Tag Archives: Alexander’s Ideas

Introducing Frank Pierce Jones

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My teacher, Don Weed, spoke with great fondness of his own teachers from whom he learned so much about Alexander and his work. Majorie Barstow – a student of FM’s and the first to whom FM awarded a certificate following his first training course in the 1930s – was talked about often and with great humour. And with no less affection did we hear of Frank Pierce Jones. We studied Frank’s book Freedom to Change, which, if I recall correctly, was edited and published posthumously.

Don introduced Frank’s book with a somewhat surprising couple of sentences: We don’t study Frank because he’s right about everything. We study Frank because he can be wrong in such illuminating ways. And this thought opened up so much freedom in our own approach to studying and to education in general. It is easy to set up books, and authors, as a source of unquestionable wisdom. But it is far more valuable to set them up as tools for learning, as a stimulus for critical analysis. And this critical analysis wasn’t limited to Frank Pierce Jones (hereafter known as FPJ), but applied to every book and every text we studied, including Alexander’s own writing.

Here I will consider FPJ’s first chapter of Freedom to Change, which he titled: Escape from the Monkey Trap: An Introduction to the Alexander Technique.

As FM began Man’s Supreme Inheritance with an epigraph, so does Frank. He starts with a quote from C. Judson Herrick:

In an expanding system, such as a growing organism … freedom to change the pattern of performance is one of the intrinsic properties of the organization itself.

C. Judson Herrick

Judson Herrick was an American neurobiologist who lived from 1868-1960, so a contemporary of FM Alexander. As I mentioned in my previous blog, Alexander lived through a time of great change, a time when many of the scientific models with which we are now familiar were coming into being. An example of this is the development of neuroscience. During the ITM training course we study the structure and function of the neuromusculoskeletal system in order to understand the physiological basis for voluntary movement. The hypothesis that the functional unit of the brain is the neuron was based on work done in the 1890s by Golgi and Ramón y Cajal, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1906. Interestingly, one of Judson Herrick’s students was George Coghill, a man whom Alexander had met, had demonstrated his principles to, and who wrote an “Appreciation” of Alexander’s work, which was included in Alexander’s fourth book, The Universal Constant in Living. (We shall revisit Coghill in a few weeks.)

FPJ adds a second epigraph, this time from the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins:

I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

From ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I love this quote. It speaks to me of what, with so much effort, we lose when we act in opposition to Alexander’s principles of conscious, reasoning guidance and control. We expend energy in the utterly futile, and sometimes even harmful pursuit of distorting ourselves by blocking our natural movement. In the ITM we talk about ease of motion. We sometimes call it the Fred Astaire Principle: the concept of using just as much effort as a given task requires, and no more. I wrote about it here. And now we might hypothesise the antithesis of the Fred Astaire Principle: the Manley Hopkins Principle, that makes us into our sweating selves but worse.

Frank starts his writing with an arresting opening sentence: “What can I do to be saved?” It’s a deceptively disjointed sentence that starts active and ends passive. Frank’s opening paragraph speaks to the ongoing appeal of self-improvement, self-help, personal development, and a common dissatisfaction many experience with the lives they are living.

He goes onto introduce the Alexander Technique thus:

The Alexander Technique doesn’t teach you something new to do. It teaches you how to bring more practical intelligence into what you are already doing; how to eliminate stereotyped responses; how to deal with habit and change.

Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change, p2

Frank’s writing has the advantage of clarity: he can express complex ideas in a refreshingly simple way. However, I think he also makes claims that do not stand up to scrutiny. For example, when he states that “FM discovered a method for expanding consciousness to take in inhibition as well as excitation, and thus obtain a better integration of the reflex and voluntary elements in a response pattern.” I am not sure there is a sound neuroscientific basis for this claim.

Frank had taken lessons with both FM and his brother, AR (Albert Redden Alexander), and extrapolates his personal experience of learning the work to make claims which do not apply universally. He talks of pupils gaining the experience of performing a habitual act in a non-habitual way. I think this is true, and we see this consistently in receiving, observing and teaching lessons in the Alexander Technique. He then claims that the technique changed the “feeling tone” of a movement, producing a “kinaesthetic effect of lightness” that was the “distinguishing hallmark of non-habitual responses”. Well. Let’s deal with the KEL (kinaesthetic effect of lightness) first. It is true that often students describe experiencing a sense of lightness, or fuzziness, or a floaty feeling in all or part of their body. But not always, and not every student so we can knock down the claim that the KEL is the hallmark of non-habitual responses. We have too many counterexamples for that to be true. However, the belief that if you’re experiencing a KEL you are somehow ‘doing it right’, opens up the risk that students, instead of applying their reasoning processes to a movement, will instead use some sort of trial-and-error approach in order to chase the feeling that they believe they ‘should’ feel as confirmation that they are moving correctly. Using feelings – feelings that occur as a result of a movement, and so by definition must occur after the movement – in a futile attempt to guide a movement is not the Alexander Technique.

In quoting FM, FPJ writes:

No matter how many specific ends you may gain, you are worse off than before, [FM] maintained, if in the process of gaining them you have destroyed the integrity of the organism.

Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change, p3

I like this quote. It is a riposte to the questionable idea that ‘the ends justify the means’. Frank goes on to claim that “Alexander’s ideas have had little influence on educational theory or practice.” I think this is true, and that’s a shame. I have had a lot of involvement in education over the years. After school I studied at three different universities. I have one child who has been all the way through the school system and is now at university. I have a second child who is almost all the way through the school system. And a persistent frustration is the ineffectiveness of commonly-used educational approaches. As John Dewey says in his introduction to Alexander’s third book, The Use of The Self:

[The Alexander Technique] bears the same relation to education that education itself bears to all other human activities.

John Dewey, introduction to the 1939 edition of The Use of the Self, p12

In my own experience, I have become a far better student and a far more effective teacher (in everything I teach, not solely in the Alexander Technique) since my ITM training in Alexander’s ideas and principles.

Frank then goes onto claim that Alexander’s ideas have “made a greater impact on the newer mind-body therapies,” however “in none of them does there appear to be any grasp of his basic discovery.” Again, I think it is true that Alexander Technique has been categorised, I might even say pigeonholed, in the complementary health bracket. Again, I think this is a shame, and I say this not to disparage anyone who finds use in complementary health techniques. I say this for two reasons. Firstly, the very fact of it being considered, even in error, as complementary health will alienate a proportion of people from engaging with the ideas. And secondly, I don’t think we need to make any health claims at all for the Alexander Technique in order for it to be a valuable contribution to society. Sure, we as teachers have students whose self-caused aches and pains have reduced as they have gained skill in the Alexander Technique. But these are byproducts of the process of thinking through, with deliberate reason, the most rational way to approach any task.

… the one great principle on which I claim man’s satisfactory progress in civilization depends – namely’ the principle of thinking out the reasonable means whereby a certain end can be achieved.

FM Alexander, Constructive Control of the Individual, p44 (emphasis author’s own)

As ITM teachers we ask “what would your life look like if in everything you do, you used just as much effort as was necessary and no more?” But I also want to ask: what would the world look like, if everyone in each interaction, in each goal, thought through and put into practice the most reasonable means by which their desired end could be achieved?

Frank ends his chapter by explaining what he means by The Monkey Trap.

It is said that a simple way to trap a monkey is to present him with a nut in a bottle. The monkey puts his paw through the bottle’s narrow mouth, grasps the nut, then cannot withdraw his paw because he will not (and hence cannot) let go of the nut. Most people are caught in monkey traps of unconscious habit. They cannot escape because they do not perceive what they are doing while they are doing it.

Frank Pierce Jones, Freedom to Change, p4

I think this is a really nice analogy. I have quibbles with it: just because the monkey will not let go, it does not follow that he cannot. He always has the choice. Just as we always have the choice over our own voluntary movements. It may not feel like we have the choice, but, by definition, we do.

I really like Frank’s book, and will be writing more about what he says in further chapters. FPJ gives us a useful perspective: that of a student of the Alexander Technique, a student of Alexander himself, a trainee, a teacher. Sometimes when I read FM’s books I get the sense that he struggled to put into words ideas for which we hadn’t yet developed the language or the concepts. I find it helpful, as I consider my own ideas on FM’s work and how to communicate them, to consider what Frank had to say, and how he said it. Whether I agree or disagree, Frank’s writing offers a helpful arena in which to think through my own ideas.

From Primitive Conditions to Present Needs

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One thing that baffles me about the common perception of the Alexander Technique is that it’s about having good posture (whatever it is that we mean by “good posture”). That it’s about imagining that there’s an optimal arrangement of our body parts, and making sure we keep ourselves in that arrangement.

If Alexander’s chief concern had been good posture, what do you imagine he might have titled his first book, the encapsulation of his thesis?

Because what he called it was “Man’s Supreme Inheritance”, and to me that doesn’t sound like a man concerned that we all sit up straight.

Like many of his contemporaries, Alexander’s imagination had been captured by the relatively new theory of evolution. (Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, just ten years before Alexander’s birth.) And evolution is where he starts his first book. His first three sentences take my breath away every time I read them.

The long process of evolution still moves quietly to its unknown accomplishment. Struggle and starvation, the hard fight for existence, working with fine impartiality, remorselessly eliminate the weak and defective. New variations are developed and old types no further adaptable become extinct, and thus life fighting for life improves towards a sublimation we cannot foresee.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p3.

This remains the most elegant, parsimonious description of evolution by natural selection that I have ever seen.

FM opens with a quote from The Golden Bough by J. G. Frazer. This is neither a book, nor an author, that I’m familiar with, however wikipedia tells me he was a classicist and social anthropologist who was influential in the study of mythology and comparative religion. His book offers the thesis that “mankind progresses from magic through religious belief to scientific thought.” This fits with FM’s ideas of an increasing capacity for conscious reasoning thought.

FM goes on to explain that his principles may be equally embraced by the materialist, the atheist and the religious believer. Whatever we believe it is that gives humanity its capacity for self-awareness and conscious thought, FM’s ideas about how to constructively direct that ability apply to all.

The section where FM talks about man evolving the capacity to counteract nature itself is similarly breathtaking:

But through whatever influence these new powers in man came into being I maintain that they held strange potentialities, and, among others, that which now immediately concerns us, the potentiality to counteract the force of evolution itself.

This is, indeed, at once the greatest triumph of our intellectual growth and also the self-constituted danger which threatens us from within. Man has arisen above nature, he has bent circumstance to his will, and striven against the mighty force of evolution. He has pried into the great workshop and interfered with the machinery, endeavouring to become master of its action and to control the workings of its component parts. But the machine has yet proved too intricate for his complete comprehension.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p4.

Reading this made me wonder about what was happening in the world when Alexander was writing. Man’s Supreme Inheritance was first published in 1910. Looking at a list of world events for the first years of the 20th century, I see grand engineering projects like the start of work on the panama canal. There are tragedies where nature overcame our attempt to control it, such as the collapse of a dam in Spain, whose purpose was to hold back a reservoir near Madrid, a disaster that killed hundreds. Many mining disasters and tragedies of ships lost at sea are also recorded around this time. In 1905 London’s Natural History Museum exhibited a replica of a diplodocus skeleton, and two years later the skeleton was discovered of a Neanderthal boy, fuelling the popular interest in evolution. The world saw the beginning of scientific ideas that we now take for granted. In 1905, Einstein published three seminal papers, one of which earned him the Nobel prize, and this was a full decade before his most famous contribution of the general theory of relativity. Thanks to the work of geologists like Richard Oldham, we started to understand the structure of the planet itself, with its dense inner core and liquid outer core. There was political upheaval, such as the Russo-Japanese war and the Romanian peasants’ revolt. There was a call for political reform in the UK from the Suffragettes. There were medical breakthroughs such as a vaccine for TB, technological achievements such as transatlantic radio communication, and new modes of transport: taxis, buses, the beginnings of car ownership, large passenger ships, and the very earliest aeroplanes.

Alexander lived through a time of immense change, where a world we might recognise today was beginning to come into existence.

Edwardian Britain, around the time Alexander moved to London.

It therefore makes perfect sense when FM goes onto say “Man has ceased to be a natural animal… He has changed his environment, his food and his whole manner of living.” This statement seems even more true today than it did in 1910.

However, FM warns against atavism and lays out his central claim:

Conscious guidance and control is the one method of adapting ourselves not only to present conditions, but to any possible conditions that may arise.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p7.

Conscious guidance and control then forms the theme of this and his other three books, exemplified in the title of his second work, published in 1923: Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual. However, the claims that form the culmination of this first chapter of his first book are even more bold:

The physical, mental and spiritual potentialities of the human being are greater than we have ever realized, greater, perhaps, than the human mind in its present evolutionary stage is capable of realizing. And the present world crisis surely furnishes us with sufficient evidence that the familiar processes we call civilization and education are not, alone, such as will enable us to come into that supreme inheritance which is the complete control of our own potentialities.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, pp7-8.

I was curious as to what FM meant by ‘the present world crisis’. I found the original text of the 1910 edition, and this paragraph has been added at a later date. Given a whole new chapter entitled ‘Evolutionary Standards and their Influence on the Crisis of 1914’ was also added, I can assume that the ‘present world crisis’ refers to the first world war. He seems to be making the claim that we are not yet (maybe cannot yet be) aware of what we are capable of achieving, physically, mentally, and spiritually (and I do not know what he means by spiritual potentiality), but if we stick with our unreasoned processes of civilisation and education, we will never gain control of these potentialities.

And, to emphasise this point, his final paragraph of this opening chapter is as follows:

For in the mind of man lies the secret of his ability to resist, to conquer and finally to govern the circumstance of his life, and only by the discovery of that secret will he ever be able to realize completely the perfect condition of mens sana in corpore sano.

F. M. Alexander, Man’s Supreme Inheritance, p8.

It is clear FM has grand ambitions of reeducation. Do I believe that we can govern the circumstances of our lives? I don’t believe we have complete control over our lives. I think there are events in our control and events we have no (or little) control over. I do believe, in general, it is possible to make the best of the situation you are in, and I think it is possible to reason through the best course of action and put that into practice. It is clear that my ideas are smaller than FM’s. However, at this point in time I am more concerned with the soundness of the ideas than the scope of the ideas. I will also point out that in the twelve years I have been associated with this work I have seen the simple, rational process of reasoning out the most effective means whereby a particular end can be achieved has brought about profound changes in individuals, in their life circumstances, and in their personal happiness. I think I do agree with FM that the process he describes in his books does give us control over our potentialities – i.e. those aspects of our lives that we have control over. I differ somewhat in what I think those potentialities actually are.

So, although these are not FM’s first writings (he had published pamphlets and articles since 1894), it is the first chapter of his first book. What does he want to say to us? He’s an educated man, interested in the world. He’s interested in ideas, in human discoveries, in human progress, and the gifts and dangers that brings. He’s considering how humans – shaped over millions of years by the processes of evolution – adapt to this now rapidly changing world. Rapidly changing because humans have reached a stage of development where we are able to exert such huge influence over nature. And he thinks the subconscious control that fitted us as slowly-evolving natural animals is no longer suitable for the unnatural, rapidly changing environment. He proposes the answer to be conscious control: direct our powers of intellect constructively so that we might rationally adapt ourselves to this and any future situation. And in doing so, realise our full potential.

FM thinks conscious control brings us into our (titular) supreme inheritance, which he defines as the complete control of our potentialities. He thinks we can govern the circumstances of our life, and realise the perfect condition of a healthy mind in a healthy body. In any situation.

I really don’t think this is about sitting up straight.