Reich, Deleuze & Robbins

Therapy without Psychology

Therapy and Psychology have been bedfellows for a long time. In fact, some might claim that they are that rare example of a married couple who are content to be together for life. I’m not so convinced.

For sure, we can try to fix our life without getting involved in our personal story or our unconscious mind - the cornerstones of psychology. There are pills, for a start. All sorts of stuff that we can ingest, be they prescribed meds for anxiety or depression, or alternative supplements, or weird and wonderful things from the Amazonian rainforest.

And then there are all these different lenses through which we can view our personality - astrological charts, enneagrams, corporate profiling, this kind of thing. We can learn to “work around” having Scorpio in the ascendant or being a #8.

But I think that there is yet still this sense of really looking inside, really taking oneself on, when one sits down and starts to get real about one’s life and childhood. It’s something that you can’t get from pills or horoscopes.

And yet, there are thinkers who have made inroads into challenging the dominance of psychology, for those of us who still want to get real about therapy.

Wilhelm Reich, whilst firmly in the Freudian tradition, nevertheless developed his concept of “vegeto-therapy” - the notion that the human body, on a certain energetic level, was analogous to an earthworm. The worm has rings that run laterally around it’s body. In order to move, it must shift one ring forwards and then pull those behind after it. Should there be too much tension between adjacent rings, this won’t be possible. It will get stuck.

In a similar manner, so Reich hypothesized, the human body should experience a natural flow of energy, from toe to head, if in a state of psychological health. He mapped out seven lateral rings - ocular, oral, cervical, chest, diaphragmatic, abdominal and pelvic. Any excess muscular binding, which he termed “armouring,” between these rings would cause psychological issues.

Reich and his therapists learned to physically work these rings, with both hands-on manipulation techniques and specific physical exercises. He wrote of his theory in his 1933 book, Character Analysis. The theory and techniques became known as Reichian Segmental Armouring.

A few decades later, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a pair of French philosophers of whom I have written before, developed their notion of a machinic unconscious.

They challenged the classic Freudian position that the unconscious mind was anthropomorphic in nature and instead considered it to be a collection of what they called “desiring assemblages” - individual machine-like structures that require certain behaviours to be undertaken, such as seeking sex or food, in order to allow feel-good chemicals to flow. Whilst the psychologists threw up their hands in horror, and it’s true that the pair never developed the theory into an actual therapy, nevertheless their model continues to attract attention some fifty years after it was first published.

Finally, and moving forwards another generation, I feel it is most definitely valid to here include the work of dynamic, American motivational speaker, Anthony Robbins.

Robbins formulated the notion of “breakthrough experiences” - getting participants at his conferences to undertake activities, such as firewalking or standing up all day, that would up their energy to such a level that they would change their lives.

Whilst Robbins’ techniques also relied on the group energy effect to support this shift in mindset, something that later wouldn’t be present in the attendee’s life, leading to many falling back, nevertheless, as Reich showed, energy is important.

If you can get enough energy moving within a client, they will change. This has been my experience as a therapist. They will change because every time they back down upon themselves, the sheer level of self-beating-up behaviour evoked by their higher energetic state will be so tormenting, that they will have little choice! Whilst not suitable for all clients, this approach absolutely has validity in my experience. Get the energy up and change will happen.

I’ve explored above three therapeutic avenues that can be pursued without recourse to traditional psychology. When you add a little psych in their too, the combo can be pretty phenomenal. Bring your body on board, don’t get stuck in anthropocentric models of the unconscious, do the work you need to get your energy up… and throw a little psych in for good measure, if you feel to. Change will happen. A more authentic You will progressively emerge.

One last thing… if you really don’t want to do psychology - watch out! There absolutely is a class of client that really does not want to talk about their relationship with their Mum, or the traumatic time they had in school. This act of avoidance fuels their search for alternatives, techniques that don’t require them to go there. This likely won’t work over time. In a sense, what goes in through the ego, seeks to come out that way too. You likely will have to face that stuff at some point on your journey. Just to mention.