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Frank Pierce Jones: His Life and Work
By Missy Vineyard
In the
nearly 100 years since F. M. Alexander developed his approach
to psychophysical reeducation, no one has done more to
scientifically demonstrate the physiological mechanisms
underlying its principles than Frank Pierce Jones. Jones
hoped his research would scientifically validate Alexander’s
discovery and help to establish its credibility. He believed
that the Alexander Technique contributed decisively to our
knowledge of human behavior and offered a new and more
effective approach to maintaining health and enhancing
wellbeing. He wanted the work to reach public awareness, and
he wanted the scientific and educational communities to
seriously consider its implications.
Jones
began lessons in the Alexander Technique in the spring of
1938. At the time he would have seemed an unlikely candidate
for the role of scientific researcher. A professor of
classics at Brown University, who wrote his dissertation on
Greek participles, Jones, age thirty-three, had never set foot
in a laboratory. Yet in a little over ten years, Jones would
become not only a teacher of the Alexander Technique but a
scientist who in 1951 would begin publishing his own research.
What prompted Jones to undergo a
three-year training in this little known field and then to
spend twenty-five years conducting a thorough scientific
investigation of it? Jones’s early lessons and the benefits
he experienced from them convinced him that the primary
control worked but he was dissatisfied with Alexander’s
explanations about how it worked. Later, as a teacher, he was
further frustrated by the inadequacy of his explanations to
students’ questions. In short, he was motivated by an innate
curiosity and desire to understand. Jones also believed that
experimental research could provide the essential next step of
validating Alexander’s discovery. He hoped to prove that
Alexander had identified a fundamental principle governing
human behavior, not simply an isolated phenomenon that
depended for its success on Alexander’s charisma, on
autosuggestion, or on a placebo effect. Jones believed that
scientific validation would help to establish the credibility
of Alexander’s method in the mind of the public. He believed
that it benefited people and he wanted them to know about it.
Jones eventually found a home for
his experiments at The Institute for Applied Experimental
Psychology at Tufts University. In time he also resumed his
classics career becoming a member of the Tufts Classics
Department in 1954 and a professor in 1964. During this
period Jones published twenty-four scientific papers in such
prestigious journals as The Psychological Review and
Science. He received his license to practice psychology
in the first year that licensing exams were instituted. And
just before his death in 1975, Jones completed a book on the
technique, Body Awareness in Action.
Early Years
Frank Pierce Jones was born to
George Jones and Maude Sackett in Appleton, Wisconsin, on
April 10, 1905. Although he was their first child, Jones had
an older stepbrother by his father’s previous marriage to
Ella, Maude’s older sister. Ella had died in 1888. Several
years later George and Maude were married. Shortly afterward
they moved from northern Wisconsin, where George owned a
lumber mill to Appleton, where Frank and his younger brother,
Bob, were born. According to Bob Jones, their parents were
glad about the move to Appleton. Their father was eager to
establish his business there, and his mother looked forward to
the cultural life in Appleton. Lawrence College, founded
fifty years before, had acquired a reputation for its liberal
arts and conservatory of music. Frank’s mother had a fine
voice, played the piano, and hoped to continue her musical
studies at the school. 1
Maude Jones also sang in the
Methodist choir, eventually becoming their leading soprano
soloist. George, who was intelligent, quiet, and hard
working, served on the board of trustees of both the Methodist
Church and Lawrence College. They had many friends in the
community, and Bob Jones recalled that their home was a
stimulating place, both intellectually and culturally, that
provided the growing young boys with a nurturing and
intellectual environment. 2
Indeed, Frank’s childhood seems to
have been marred only by annual summer bouts of hay fever.
But this tranquil life was suddenly and sadly disrupted when
Maude Jones died unexpectedly. Frank was just eighteen and a
freshman at Lawrence College. The following year he
transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and
then transferred again the next year to Stanford, where he
received his BA and then his MA in English literature.
Jones began his doctoral studies in
1929 at the University of Chicago but transferred yet again,
this time returning nearer to home. He later received his
Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1937.
During this period he met Helen Rumsey, also a graduate
student in classics. Helen remembered that she was asked to
give up her graduate fellowship so that the department could
hire a scholar from the University of Chicago. She
reluctantly—although politely—acquiesced, but later came to
feel that she hadn’t received such a bad deal after all. The
scholar was Frank Jones, and they sat next to each other that
year in a class on Homer. Helen wore a handsome pair of
hand-embroidered Norwegian gloves, which opened the
conversation. They were married in 1931 and spent their
August honeymoon in Europe.
Their lives and happiness were soon
interrupted, however, when Frank was diagnosed with
tuberculosis and entered a sanatorium in the fall of 1932. He
appeared to recover, returning to his teaching duties and
working on his doctorate, but the following autumn he suffered
a relapse and returned to the sanatorium on total bed rest for
the next year. Helen described this as the worst period of
her life, undoubtedly compounded by the challenges of new
motherhood (their oldest son, Tom, was born in 1932), and by
the doctor who told her Frank might not survive. 3
When asked how this illness changed
her husband, Helen recalled that Frank learned to “savor and
appreciate the simple things.” 4 Even after his recovery,
Frank’s health remained affected, however. They both learned
to adapt to this, keeping their lives relatively simple and
uncomplicated to conserve Frank’s strength. They left parties
early, didn’t socialize a lot, and when he felt a cold coming
on Frank got to bed early with a drink of hot rum. Frank also
learned what mattered to him. “He didn’t want to waste time
doing something he didn’t want to do,” Helen remembered. 5 He
also continued to suffer from the allergies that required the
family to move annually to a less pollen-filled environment
during ragweed season.
Despite the results of a
psychological test which declared that Jones’s talents would
best be utilized as a lawyer, and that the one thing he should
not do was teach, Frank loved to teach and remained a teacher
all his life. He liked to share knowledge and believed that
if something were interesting to him it would also be
interesting to others. Frank was well informed about world
affairs and often connected classic texts with current events
in a way that made them come alive. Although he wasn’t an
extrovert, Jones liked people and was not shy. He also had a
wry sense of humor. Helen recalled an incident when she
inadvertently put her hand into some steam and burned herself
slightly, exclaiming as she waved her hand up and down that
she’d burned her hand in boiling water. Frank wryly replied
that if it was steam it wasn’t boiling water, which, of
course, annoyed her but also made her laugh and eased the
pain. 6
Jones had a wide range of
interests. He especially enjoyed traveling, playing bridge,
and singing. He also enjoyed reading ghost stories to his
children, who remember his warm and resonant voice. Frank
enjoyed life, and although he was sometimes hindered by ill
health, his prevailing mood was one of determination and
optimism. Frank remained conscious of his limitations,
however, and accommodated to them wisely. Perhaps it was this
practical self-awareness of his problem, rather than a
tendency to deny or exaggerate it, which determined his
matter-of-fact response the first time he read about the
Alexander Technique in Aldous Huxley’s book, Ends and
Means. Although he’d never heard of this rather
unorthodox system, Jones respected Huxley and decided to try
it.
By this time Jones was an instructor
in Greek and Latin at Brown University. He had received his
doctorate the previous year in ceremonies conducted in the
stock pavilion at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Helen laughingly recalled that Frank was escorted during the
procession by Professor Laird, while the orchestra played the
Bach chorale “Come, Sweet Death.” The family, which now
included a daughter, Emlen, born in 1937, managed the move to
Providence and took up residence.
First Lessons
Aldous Huxley’s book, Ends and
Means was published in 1937 two years after Huxley himself
began having lessons with Alexander, or “F.M.” as he was
known. It is a philosophical work and Huxley begins by noting
that humanity has always shared the common goals of “liberty,
peace, justice and brotherly love” but has not yet found a
means of achieving these goals. Instead, he says, humanity
has been hindered by “the clash of contradictory opinions
dogmatically held and acted upon with the violence of
fanaticism.” 7
In the chapter on education, Huxley
defines and discusses the role of physical education in
helping us to achieve these ideals:
A
good physical education should teach awareness on the physical
plane--not the obsessive and unwished-for awareness that pain
imposes upon the mind, but voluntary and intentional
awareness. The body must be trained to think . . . The
awareness that our bodies need is the knowledge of some
general principle of right integration and along with it, a
knowledge of the proper way to apply that principle in every
phase of physical activity . . . Mind and body are organically
one; and it is therefore inherently likely that, if we can
learn the art of conscious inhibition on the physical level,
it will help us to acquire and practice the same art on the
emotional and intellectual levels. What is needed is a
practical morality working at every level from the bodily to
the intellectual. A good physical education will be one that
supplies the body with just such a practical morality. It
will be a curative morality, a morality of inhibition and
conscious control, and at the same time, by promoting health
and proper physical integration, it will be a system of what I
have called preventive ethics.
8
After
this stirring preamble, Huxley comes to a bold declaration:
“So far as I am aware, the only system of physical education
which fulfills all these conditions is the system developed by
F.M. Alexander.” 9 He continues:
I
am sure, as a matter of personal experience and observation,
that it gives us all the things we have been looking for in a
system of physical education: relief from strain due to
maladjustment and consequent improvement in physical and
mental health; increased consciousness of the physical means
employed to gain the ends proposed by the will and, along with
this, a general working on the physical level to prevent the
body from slipping back . . . We cannot ask more from any
system of physical education; nor, if we seriously desire to
alter human beings in a desirable direction, can we ask any
less. 10
Huxley’s words attracted Jones’s
attention and inspired him to make an appointment for his
first lesson with Alexander’s brother, “A.R.”, who was living
in Boston at the Braemore Hotel on Commonwealth Avenue. Helen
recalled that when Frank came back from the lesson she
immediately noticed the change in him and told him, “Whatever
it is, you’ll have to keep on with it.” 11 Frank later
recounted that his health began improving rapidly. Breathing
was less labored, he felt lighter, and moving was easier. In
time he began throwing out bottles of allergy medication, and
his energy returned. Soon Frank, Helen, and their oldest son,
Tom, were traveling to Boston for lessons with A.R. In his
book, Jones later vividly describes his first experience of
standing up out of a chair while being guided gently by A.R.’s
skilled hands:
The
most striking aspect of the movement, however, was the sensory
effect of lightness that it induced. The feeling had not been
present at the start, nor had it been suggested to me; it was
clearly a direct effect of the movement. While it lasted,
everything I did, including breathing, became easier. After a
short time the effect faded away, leaving me, however, with
the certainty that I had glimpsed a new world of experience
which had more to offer than the limited set of movement
patterns, attitudes, and responses to which I was accustomed.
12
It was Huxley’s description of the
Alexander technique, which launched the quiet, personal
revolution that led Jones to study the technique; but it was
the global upheaval of the Second World War that presented him
with the opportunity to become an Alexander teacher. Due to
the heavy bombing of London and their fear that Alexander was
on Hitler’s “enemy” list, Alexander’s friends urged him to
leave England. 13 He wasn’t eager to go but eventually
acquiesced. On July 8, 1940, a group consisting of Alexander,
several of his assistants, and a number of children from his
school sailed to Canada. Two months later Jones took his
first lesson with F.M. Alexander in Southwest Harbor, Maine,
where Alexander was staying with friends. By October the two
Alexander brothers were alternately teaching in New York City
and Boston, and Frank began having regular lessons with F.M.
Of his lessons with the Alexander brothers during the waning
months of 1940 and into the winter of 1941, Jones later
explained in his book that the lessons were now convincing him
that Alexander’s method held the potential for yielding
benefits--both physical and emotional--far greater than he had
originally imagined. 14
However, the future of the technique
itself was looking bleak. The war caused the suspension of
the teacher-training program in England, the number of private
students had dropped off sharply, and several of Alexander’s
limited number of trained teachers were serving overseas in
the armed forces. Alexander did not advertise to attract
potential students to undertake his teacher-training course,
but when he spotted an individual with education and talent
who might serve to advance the work, he didn’t hesitate to
suggest it. Thus it was Alexander who raised the idea of
training to Frank, and Alexander’s temporary relocation to the
United States, which made it possible. 15
Frank’s decision to become a teacher
was unusual. Some would even characterize it as risky. He
was thirty-six; he and Helen now had three children (a second
son, Evan, was born in 1939); he was an assistant professor at
Brown University and his career in classics showed every
indication of enjoying continued success; and the family was
comfortable and happy in Providence. Moreover, there were
only a handful of Alexander teachers practicing in the U.S.,
which meant it would be a distinctly solitary and uphill
career path. Jones also had reservations about whether he had
sufficient talent for it, believing that he wasn’t good with
his hands. 16 But despite the many difficulties and
reservations, Jones decided to do it. He was convinced the
technique held significant implications for both education and
the health sciences. Since the Alexander brothers were both
in their seventies, their opportunity to train more teachers
was starkly limited. Many of those who had been trained were
now serving overseas and Jones thought it likely they would
not return. It seemed to Jones that the technique could
disappear, surviving only in obscure literary references to
Dewey and Huxley. 17
Although several of his friends
attempted to dissuade him, Helen recalled that it wasn’t a
particularly difficult decision. “It meant so much to us
personally, we didn’t worry too much about what others
thought.” 18 In Helen, Frank had a partner who shared his
keenly felt sense of the importance of the technique and the
precariousness of its future. They also shared an altruistic
sensibility, which enabled them to value, and to dedicate
themselves, to something larger than themselves. Thus,
despite the inconvenience, the insecurity of a career change,
and the reservations of colleagues, Jones chose to commit his
future to the technique.
The New
Profession
In January 1941, F.M. settled in
Stow, Massachusetts, with his small staff and the school
children that traveled with them from England. The group
lived in a large, Victorian house known as the Whitney
Homestead that belonged to the Unitarian Society. It was here
that Frank began his training in July 1941. At first he was
the only student on the course and enjoyed a great deal of
personal attention from F.M. Then Helen joined Frank on the
training the following summer. Although it was wartime and
the circumstances were unusual, Alexander was meticulous about
stating in writing the terms of their agreement. It was
understood that, because at least initially, Frank was unable
to attend class regularly, F.M. would schedule the course in a
way that fit Jones’s schedule. 19 Alexander also specified
that, in the event that he returned to England before Jones
finished, his brother A.R. would complete his training. 20
Frank traveled to Stow in the summer
and in the winter to Boston where A.R. and F.M. conducted the
course on alternate weeks. Then, in the spring of 1942, the
Jones family put their belongings in storage and moved into
the Homestead for the summer. Those few months proved to be a
bright spot in the midst of the pressing bleakness of
wartime. Alexander, his teachers, staff, the school children,
and several American families shared residence in the two
large old buildings. Helen recalled her days there as some of
the easiest and pleasantest of her young adulthood. Her
children were schooled on the premises and had ready
playmates. Meals were prepared by the staff. And F.M. and
his teachers were stimulating company.
Just five months later, however,
Alexander was forced to close the school, since the Unitarians
decided to sell the Homestead. In addition gasoline was being
rationed so students found it difficult to travel to their
lessons, and hired help for the large group was difficult to
find. 21 Alexander moved into an apartment at the Hotel
Blackstone in New York City, and the training class moved to
Boston under A.R.’s tutelage. The Jones family relocated to
Chestnut Hill outside of Boston and four new students entered
Frank and Helen’s class.
That winter Frank wrote his first
article on the technique, which was published in January in
School and Society. It examined Alexander’s influence on
the philosophy of one of his most famous pupils, John Dewey.
22 Shortly afterward Alexander wrote to Jones from New York
complimenting him on the article and requesting reprints. 23
Then in June, homesick and tired of being so far from friends
and family who were enduring so much at home, Alexander and
his staff sailed for England.
In September A.R. moved the training
course once more, this time to Media, Pennsylvania, where it
became affiliated with a Quaker school known as the Media
Friends School. The Jones family had to move again but took
it in stride. They stayed in Media for two years, during
which time Frank completed his training and assisted A.R. He
also taught English part-time at the Pennsylvania Military
College and kept his classical interests alive by publishing
two papers, The Role of the Classics in the Emancipation of
Women 24 and Anthony Trollope and the Classics.
25 In June 1944 Jones received his certificate to teach
signed by A.R. “in lieu of F.M. Alexander.”
That summer A.R. suffered a stroke
and had to stop teaching for several months. Jones received a
letter from F.M. in London asking about A.R.’s condition and
requesting Jones’s help in recovering the belongings he had
left behind: books, personal effects, a box of cigars, and 27
1/2 pounds of tea that had been given to the school. 26 The
latter was by far the most important item since it was wartime
and tea in England was nearly as prized as gold. Thus began
what Frank was to refer to as “the tea correspondence,” as
Frank and F.M. battled the many government regulators, and
regulations, that delayed the return of the goods. The matter
was not completely settled for a year and a half. In the
meantime Frank and F.M. corresponded over a wide range of
topics.
F.M.’s letters were mostly concerned
with the tea, A.R.’s health, and the state of the technique in
England where it was beginning to flourish. He wrote to
Jones, “The future of the work is assured in this country.
The trouble is we cannot supply the demand for the books even
with the extra permits for paper granted the publishers.” 27
Due to shortages caused by the war, special permits for paper
had to be obtained in order to continue publishing Alexander’s
books. In November, F.M. commented to Jones that he wished A.R.
could write to him: “I hope that A.R. is making progress and
look forward to the time when he will be writing me again.
Have not had a letter from him for a long time now.” 28
Cared for in part by Frank and the other students on the
course, A.R. recovered sufficiently to teach again that winter
but his health was clearly deteriorating. In a letter written
in February 1945, F.M. counseled Frank on starting to teach:
I
am glad that you have made a start in teaching and wish you
all success. Don’t take people whose conditions are such that
your experience does not meet your needs in dealing with
them. Believe me, a sound warning. If all those who come
into the new Profession will heed it they will succeed, but
not otherwise. 29
Several months later Frank gave a
talk on the technique to the parent’s council at the school in
Media and again sent reprints to F.M. 30 In May, when the
Joneses were preparing to leave Media and move to Boston, F.M.
wrote: “I am so glad that you are pleased with your
preparations for starting in Boston and Providence where you
should soon gather in A.R.’s connections and build up from
that. It could prove a very sound foundation.” 31
Unfortunately, things didn’t quite
go according to plan. After four moves in four years, the
Jones family was expecting to settle down at last. A.R.,
whose health had improved but wasn’t yet fully recovered, left
for a vacation in England. Frank was to begin building his
teaching practice by contacting A.R.’s former students. But
Dolly Dailey, who entered the teacher training course when it
moved from Stow to Boston and worked as A.R.’s
secretary/housekeeper, had A.R.’s address book and
inexplicably refused to let Frank have it. 32 Helen spoke of
this chapter in their history with a frustrated shake of her
head and a perplexed expression. There was nothing they could
do. Frank had to begin from scratch.
Certified
Teacher of the F.M. Alexander Technique
Frank wrote to F.M. often,
requesting his advice on building a practice and teaching. In
a letter dated July 16, 1945, Jones asked F.M. how to identify
himself in the phone book. Alexander replied, “Regarding the
telephone. Well, now, you put me ‘on the stand.’ What about
‘Body Mechanics’, or ‘Animate Mechanics,’ or ‘Re-education of
Animate Mechanisms.’” 33 Two months later Alexander revised
his advice: “Regarding your query, I advise that you put in
the telephone book--’Certified Teacher of the F. Matthias
Alexander Technique.’” 34 It seems that even Alexander
himself had trouble deciding on what to name his method.
Later that fall Alexander again
advised Jones: “have a sheet . . . printed telling that you
are a trained teacher and giving some short quotations which
you think will attract people.” 35 Frank sent him a copy of
what he had written. He titled it, “Lessons in the
Application of F.M. Alexander’s Principle of Primary Control
in Individual Problems.” It began: “The primary control may
be defined as the mechanism by means of which thought is
translated into action.” 36 Alexander wrote back, suggesting
instead:
The
primary control of the use of ourselves in the activity of
living may be most accurately defined as that relativity of
the head to the neck, and the head and neck to the body, at a
given time, which makes for the integrated use of the
mechanisms of the self as an indivisible whole.
37
In truth, neither description shed
much light on the technique for an uninitiated reader. But
this small exchange between them highlighted Frank’s dilemma.
Because he couldn’t explain the technique in a satisfactory
way, he knew that he didn’t yet understand it fully. As a
classicist-turned-scientist, Jones would devote himself to
doing just this: to scientifically demonstrating the
physiological mechanisms underlying the primary control, by
means of which an almost infinitesimally small change of the
head and neck could so radically alter a person’s
coordination, behavior, and consciousness of himself.
A.R.
Alexander
The next year and a half mark a sad
chapter in the story of the Alexander Technique as A.R., who
had intended only to visit England for a short time, found
himself unable to return. The U.S. authorities were insisting
that due to his poor health he had to obtain the guarantee of
an American citizen to support him in the event that he should
become sick and unable to support himself. Furthermore, they
required this guarantee in spite of the fact that A.R. was
financially secure and could always have received, if
necessary, further support from his brother. 38 Jones and
F.M. discuss this problem throughout their letters of the
period, as it becomes increasingly clear that Dolly Dailey and
Esther Duke, who had been responsible for bringing A.R. to
Media, would not grant the necessary guarantee. 39 In
September Jones told Alexander that there were now nine people
in the training class in Media, which was being run by Dolly
Dailey--herself only a beginning teacher. F.M. replied:
I
could not approve of people with the experience of those
concerned teaching--or rather trying--to teach people to
teach. It is absurd and unjust to those foolish enough to be
led into it . . . It is a sad, sad experience for me at my age
to find this occur after the way I have protected the
interests, present and future, of the work in your country and
elsewhere. Of course, my brother’s illness must have
completely upset his judgment and his difficulty in getting
back to [the] USA is entirely due to this.
40
In January 1947, A.R. himself
learned of their refusal. F.M. wrote to Jones:
Mrs. Duke has written to tell A.R. she will not give the
guarantee required. This after leading him to believe that
she would. From the first I was certain that she never
intended to do this but A.R. placed complete faith in her
promise and that of D.D. [Dolly Dailey]. It has proved a
great shock to him I can assure you, from which I fear he may
not quickly recover . 41
Indeed, A.R. died three months later
in England at F.M.’s home in Kent, Penhill House.
Jones and Dewey
Amid these events Jones was going
about the business of building his practice in Boston and
teaching once a week in New York. His ideas and questions
about the technique, however, continued to percolate and the
closing years of the decade saw Jones entertaining the idea of
research. 42 Perhaps the strongest force propelling him in
this direction, in addition to his own intellectual curiosity,
was the renowned American philosopher, John Dewey.
Dewey had studied with Alexander
during World War I and in the early 1920s, when Alexander
taught in New York for several months each year. Dewey
assisted Alexander with one of his books and wrote
introductions for three others. 43 He also specifically
referred to the technique in several of his own works. 44
Dewey was well versed in the practice and theory of the
technique and even tried to get foundation support for a
scientific investigation of it.
In Dewey, Jones found a compatriot.
Dewey shared Jones’s sense of the importance of such an
investigation, as well as the belief that Alexander had made
an important discovery about human behavior but did not fully
understand how it worked. Their letters reveal Jones
grappling with a number of difficult questions and offer an
interesting glimpse into Jones’s thinking at the time. Much
of what he discussed with Dewey proved to be key themes
underlying his future research.
Early in their correspondence in
1947, Jones sent Dewey a draft of the article he was working
on entitled, “A New Field for Inquiry.” Dewey replied with
praise commenting that he liked the way Jones spoke of his own
experience in studying the work. Dewey’s only advice was that
Jones should emphasize the fact that, “’naturally’ we have the
required organic mechanism and that the [Alexander] lessons
are but a recovering [of] what we have lost by our own
misuse.” 45
Jones replied to Dewey explaining
that the difficulty he had in writing the article was in
clarifying his own thinking about the technique. He said that
neither Alexander’s writings nor the lessons had explained the
experience to his satisfaction, and that he’d had to puzzle it
out for himself. 46 He added that he took issue with F.M.’s
definition of the primary control as a certain relativity of
the head to the neck, and the head and neck to the body, as
Alexander had defined it to Jones in his letter in 1945. “To
me, this relativity is the index of how the organism is being
used at a particular moment; the control is the thinking
itself.” 47 Commenting further he added:
. .
. the instant I begin to think . . . to take in the
relativity between my head and neck, a control is established
even though there has been no overt change anywhere…
This was then followed, he added, by
an awareness of an ‘integrating force’ that worked within him
to improve his overall coordination and balance. 48
Dewey replied agreeing with Jones.
“The ‘relativity’ of the head etc., etc.’ is not a name for
[the] primary control but rather for the mechanism by which
the control is erected or is missed.” 49
The conversations with Dewey helped
Jones to test and hone his thinking about Alexander’s work.
In 1948 Jones wrote Dewey to tell him that he had been reading
Dewey’s Art as Experience:
. .
. to say that I find it helpful and stimulating would be a bad
understatement. . . I had never considered before the fact
that there is a time-space relationship in all perception.
The fact is vital for an understanding of the primary control
and the experiences related to it.
50
In fact the book had an important
influence on Jones’s thinking and strengthened his interest in
kinesthetic perception. He told Dewey that the book helped
him to understand that kinesthesia, the felt sense of our
bodies, could be made conscious and that our perception of
this kinesthesia has “order, movement, [and] extension in time
and space.”51 It also has “a freshness,” said Jones, since
the self is always changing, too, and these changes in the
self are reflected in a continually changing perception of the
kinesthetic experience.
From his earliest lessons, Jones had
been struck by the improvement in his health, the increasing
clarity of his kinesthetic perception, the ease with which he
found himself able to move, and particularly by the sense of
near weightlessness of his body as he moved. This sensation
of lightness intrigued him. Since it was so consistently a
result of the lessons--not only for him but for others as
well, Jones reasoned that there must be some “organic
mechanism,” as Dewey put it, that the Alexanders were
activating in their students when they moved the head and
neck. 51 And, whatever they called it--the primary control
or otherwise--it was the manner in which they moved the
student’s head and neck, both prior to and during a movement,
which appeared to determine the lightness effect. But this
experience was not achieved only through the teacher’s
physical manipulation of the student. Alexander gave precise
directions, or ‘orders’ as he sometimes called them, to the
student to think--to sustain a clear and conscious intent
about the way one was to use oneself in the movement--before
actually beginning to move. This change in the student’s
thinking facilitated both the lightness and ease of movement.
It also served to heighten the student’s self-perception
throughout the movement.
In addition to the kinesthetic
change which lessons produced, Jones was impressed by the
change in thinking and awareness, which the technique taught
him to sustain. The technique was a method that improved his
functioning during the early phase of the lessons and, over
time, taught him how to change his manner of thinking so that
he could also bring about the changes for himself.
The fact that Jones was so intrigued
by the experience and by “how it all worked” gives us a
glimpse into his nature. Although not yet a scientist, Jones
was scientifically minded in the best sense of the term. When
presented with the technique for the first time, he reserved
judgment until he tried it for himself. And then, even when
it proved to benefit him markedly, he didn’t become infatuated
with it as a cure-all or accept it simply on faith. 52 He
was not afraid to question how the technique worked or to
disagree with Alexander. Jones wanted to understand, and to
do that he required the freedom to explore fully: to
question, observe, experiment, and draw his own conclusions.
Like Dewey, Jones thought that Alexander had not simply
created a method to improve posture, as some believed, but had
opened the door on an entirely new field--a field that
provided a means of increasing our knowledge of ourselves. 53
Dewey’s impact on Jones, then, was
pivotal. The conversations with Dewey gradually evolved from
a cordial correspondence to a friendship between like minds.
Jones occasionally gave Dewey lessons at his apartment in New
York. And the issues they discussed, in person and throughout
their correspondence--primary control, kinesthetic perception,
and the interrelationship of thought and behavior--would form
the framework upon which Jones would later build his
research. Dewey’s belief in the importance of scientific
investigation, as well as his direct encouragement to Jones,
helped strengthen Jones’s resolve. In his book Jones says of
himself during this period in the late 40s when Dewey was
encouraging him to do research:
It
was increasingly frustrating for me that I was unable to
produce any objective evidence for a principle that my senses
told me was true and my experience convinced me was of
fundamental importance. I did not consider myself qualified
by temperament or training to undertake a scientific
investigation, but no one else seemed prepared to undertake
one… 54
In
1949, one of Alexander’s pupils, Alla Libbey, gave Jones $500
to spend on research. Jones was poised for yet another
career.
Early
Investigations
Before he could undertake a
scientific investigation of the technique, however, Jones had
a lot to learn. From the most immediate and practical
standpoint, he needed at least a working knowledge of anatomy,
physiology, and experimental psychology. He also needed
advice on how to approach the topic experimentally.
Jones was fortunate in many
respects. Although a classicist, he had the willing help of a
number of eminent and well-placed scientists. His friend and
colleague, Harold Schlosberg, was an experimental psychologist
who had been on the faculty with Jones at Brown and, at the
time, was revising a textbook on experimental psychology. He
was well acquainted with experimental techniques for studying
sensorimotor phenomena. He and another eminent psychologist,
J. McVicker Hunt, gave Jones the idea that the technique could
be investigated within the framework of experimental
psychology. Next there was Grayson McCouch, a professor of
neurophysiology at the University of Pennsylvania Medical
School. Jones met McCouch when he was enrolled in the
Alexander teacher training class in Media. McCouch had done
extensive research with Charles Sherrington on postural
reflexes in animals. He believed that the primary control
Alexander had discovered enhanced the functioning of the
postural reflexes in humans. He, too, wanted to see someone
conduct a scientific investigation and counseled Jones to
develop a theory of mechanism to account for the phenomenon
that could be tested experimentally.
These people, in addition to
advising him, steered Jones toward pertinent reading material,
critiqued his writings, and introduced him to other scientists
in the field. Among these were Don Fawcett and Paul
Chatfield, both professors at Harvard. Fawcett taught anatomy
and let Jones sit in on his gross anatomy class. Chatfield
assisted Jones with neurophysiology and helped him gain enough
familiarity with the field to enable him to read and
understand technical papers.
Then Schlosberg introduced Jones to
John Kennedy, who was director of the Tufts Institute for
Applied Experimental Psychology. With the $500 from Miss
Libbey and the assistance of Kennedy and Dr. Mason Crook, the
institute’s scientific director, Jones got started using
electromyography. This enabled him to study muscle activity
when subjects sat in their “habitual slouch,” when “sitting up
straight,” and when they had been “guided” into a new sitting
posture by Jones. The results of this pilot study done in
1949 were not published, 55 but Jones sent a privately printed
copy to Dewey who replied:
There isn’t much use congratulating you personally but the
whole movement is to be congratulated on the most important
event scientifically that has happened since the anatomical
location of the coordination centre at the base of the brain,
and potentially more important, I believe.
56
The results of this study were cited
several years later in a paper delivered by Dr. Wilfred Barlow
to the British Association of Physical Medicine. 57
In 1950 and 1951, Jones began
studying the “startle pattern,” a reflexive response of muscle
tension, which spreads throughout the body with the stimulus
of a sudden, loud noise. During this time Jones was also
corresponding with Alexander about the work of American
biologist George Ellett Coghill 58 and the book that had
recently been published about Coghill by Judson Herrick.
Herrick wrote about Coghill’s recognition of Alexander’s work
and its bearing on Coghill’s research. 59
Coghill spent forty years
researching the embryonic and larval stages of amblystoma,
a primitive vertebrate, and demonstrated a total pattern of
response in the organization of its nervous system. He showed
that the development of the animal’s movement responses began
first at the head, and then proceeded downward through the
trunk, spreading secondarily into the limbs. Coghill wrote
that Alexander’s work corroborated his own findings by
demonstrating that the principles of organization of movement,
which he had discovered in the primitive amblystoma
were present and operative in humans as well. 60
When Jones wrote to F.M. in
early 1952 and told him of his recent research effort and its
results, his comments clearly show that he had Coghill’s work
in mind. “I have been interested in finding a way to record a
‘total pattern’ of response,” he wrote, adding that their
money ran out so they couldn’t continue the study, but that
their results gave a “graphic” demonstration of the nature of
the subject’s reaction to a disturbing stimulus. 61 The EMG
results showed that the pattern of tension began in the
trapezius muscle at the back of the subject’s neck and then
proceeded downward through the trunk and into the limbs.
Jones published the results of his research in the Journal
of Psychology in 1951, his first published scientific
study. 62
About this time Jones met Dr. Arlie
Bock, director of student health at Harvard and professor of
hygiene. Bock had heard favorable reports about the Alexander
Technique from some of his patients who were also students of
Jones’s. Bock decided to help Jones launch a scientific
investigation. In 1952 Jones wrote to Bock proposing an
investigation of muscle tone. Bock showed the proposal to Dr.
Stanley Cobb, chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General
Hospital. Cobb replied in a letter dated June 13 that Jones’s
difficulty was that he was proposing an investigation of an
entire field, including techniques spanning from psychological
studies to physiological and clinical research. He offered
that Jones had to decide how to reduce his plan to a “single,
workable research project” that could answer one of his many
questions. 62
Cobb went on to suggest fifteen
specific questions culled from the broad outline Jones had
made, which he thought would be worthwhile research projects.
Cobb’s letter represents another critical point in Jones’s
development as a scientist since it pressed him to more
precisely address the question of what he wanted to
investigate. In order to do this, Jones needed to do more
than just pick a topic from the list. He had to grapple with
what it was he wanted to know and how to find it out.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is
possible to see that Jones thought deeply about these
fundamental questions because the direction his research
ultimately took was not random or haphazard. His research was
shaped by his belief in what he was doing (reinforced by
Dewey) and by the clarity and force of his intellect.
Specifically, Jones wanted to know how Alexander’s primary
control worked. 64 He wanted to develop a theory of
mechanism to account for the phenomena and to test his theory
experimentally. With characteristic directness and
simplicity, Jones went straight for the crux of the matter.
We can now appreciate Jones’s
motivation to undertake research and understand the importance
of the questions he wanted to answer. But we can easily fail
to recognize the enormity of the problem he was attempting to
solve. On the pragmatic side, he had garnered advice and
gained the necessary scientific background; but before he
could go on to solve the problem of how to investigate
Alexander’s primary control, Jones had to contend with the
prevailing attitudes of the day--about the technique and about
science itself.
Obstacles to
Research
Jones was not the first person to
consider conducting a scientific investigation of the
technique. By this time Dr. Wilfred Barlow, a physician and
teacher of the technique practicing in London, was conducting
clinical trials using before-and-after photography. 65 But
the prevailing attitude among Alexander teachers, including
F.M. himself, was that the technique couldn’t be successfully
investigated and that it didn’t need to be. In addition
Alexander’s work had been criticized as unscientific and his
students described as a kind of cult. The implication of this
view was that the technique wasn’t worth investigating.
Important questions, then, loomed before Jones. Was it
possible to scientifically demonstrate the validity of the
technique? What was to be gained by such an investigation?
Was it worth doing? Why was the technique attacked as
“unscientific”? In order to understand how Jones resolved
these questions we must begin by examining the criticisms of
Alexander’s work.
By the 1950s the word “science”
typically meant an established body of knowledge dealing with
laws governing the physical world. The term “scientist” was
reserved for those who had undergone lengthy study in an
established, scientific field; and research was the province
of scientists, working in laboratories, armed with devices to
measure external phenomena. The goal of science was to remove
the internal, “subjective” self from the process of
investigating this external, “objective” reality. 66, 67
The popular concept of subjective
versus objective was not only a dichotomy, which split reality
into an outer world and an inner self, it removed the self
from the realm of valid scientific investigation. It had
become an almost immutable belief that because our perceptions
of ourselves were difficult to measure, inconstant, and
seemingly unique to each individual, they couldn’t be
verified. 68 In short, self-perception couldn’t form the
basis of “hard” scientific research.
It wasn’t surprising, then that
Alexander’s technique was criticized as unscientific:
Alexander wasn’t a scientist. His method investigated the
self rather than the external world. And his method of
investigation was considered subjective, i.e., faulty, because
he obtained his information by means of his own sensory
perception rather than by filtering it through the medium of
an “objective” external instrument. Another explanation for
the criticism was offered by Mungo Douglas, a physician and
student of Alexander’s. In an article written in 1946,
Douglas pointed out that there simply wasn’t any existing
scientific proof of the method’s validity because it was not
based on a body of previously established facts. “It is
original, and is nowhere an offshoot of any predecessor,”
wrote Douglas. 69
In the same article, Douglas
addressed another important question: was a scientific
investigation of the technique necessary to establish its
validity? Douglas began by reminding his reader of an older
and broader definition of science as “the pursuit of knowledge
or truth for its own sake.” 70 He added that John Dewey
defined science as “a matter of perfected skill in conducting
an inquiry” not “something finished, absolute in itself” but “
. . . the result of a certain technique.” 71 Thus, if
science was not a prescribed body of facts but the pursuit of
them, then a scientist was someone who did the pursuing: who
observed, gathered information, and sought to determine a
causal relationship among events.
As a scientist--in this broader
sense--Alexander did indeed conduct a scientific
investigation. Because of a recurring hoarseness that
threatened his acting career, he began to observe himself in a
mirror and discovered that his felt sensations of what he was
doing as he spoke did not correspond with what he saw himself
doing when he watched in the mirror. In particular he noticed
that he was tensing his neck and pulling his head back. He
also realized that he hadn’t been aware that he was doing
this. Alexander began experimenting with using a mirror to
guide him as he altered the position of his head and neck. He
eventually found a new poise of his head, which seemed to
improve his overall functioning as demonstrated by what he saw
in the mirror and by the improvement in his voice, breathing,
and coordination. He also noticed that as he maintained this
new poise of his head over time, he gradually became able to
maintain it without having to look in the mirror. Alexander
discovered that his subconscious habit of tensing his neck
muscles was causing his vocal problem. More importantly he
learned to know when he was doing this and he learned how to
stop it.
Alexander went on to frame a
theory based on his empirical findings about our
psychophysical functioning and unity. First, we do not always
know, inherently, what we are feeling. Feeling and knowing
what we are feeling must be considered different aspects of
our kinesthetic sense. Feeling is innate but knowing, or
understanding, what we feel is learned and may be interpreted
inaccurately. Next, there is a physiological mechanism (the
primary control), governed by the relative position of the
head and neck, which plays an important role in determining
our overall level of functioning. Once we learn to maintain
this relationship consciously, the functioning of the whole is
improved. In turn, this same mechanism enhances our ability
over time to more accurately perceive or understand what we
are feeling.
Objective and subjective experience
do not arise, then, from the outer world and the inner
self--both exist on a single continuum that is our
perception. Alexander found that unnecessary and unconscious
habits of malcoordination alter the accuracy of this
perception. If the primary control is interfered with, our
feeling and understanding become skewed; when it is operative,
feeling and knowing become aligned ever more precisely and
accurately with each other. Alexander had accomplished
nothing less than opening the door to a means of
scientifically examining ourselves--objectively--using our own
self-perception. As Douglas expressed it:
If
science is the pursuit of knowledge or truth for its own sake,
then the primary task of the scientist is to make observations
and the first task of the observer is to prove that his own
means of making observations are reliable, and it is to this
service Alexander has applied himself.
72
Douglas concluded, then, that by
learning the technique itself we generate our own scientific
evidence, or proof, of the validity of the method. Since by
learning to use the primary control our overall functioning is
improved, as is our ability to perceive this change, we have
gained a means of knowing--for ourselves--that we are using
the method successfully and that it works. Inherent within
the process of learning and using the technique, then, was its
own means of scientific validation and no further proof was
necessary. The technique was, as Douglas put it, “a unique
example of operational verification” 73 since the student
could experience and demonstrate its validity for himself.
After reading Douglas’s article,
Jones wrote to Alexander to tell him how impressed he was with
it. Jones added that critics of the technique seemed to think
it could be proved or disproved in a clinical study, in the
same way that drugs were shown to be effective. Instead, he
pointed out, Alexander had made it possible for each of us to
use scientific method in the study of ourselves, and to gain
an “expanding control” over the self in the same way that
scientists had been using scientific method for hundreds of
years to expand their understanding of the external world. 74
Although Jones agreed with Douglas
that the technique offered a ‘unique example of operational
verification,’ he did not agree however with Douglas’s
conclusion that further scientific validation was
unnecessary. As many teachers of the day expressed it, “Don’t
worry about proof--just get on with teaching.” Jones,
however, continued to believe that a scientific investigation
was important. But before he could begin to address the
matter, Jones also had to give some thought to the views of
Alexander himself. Why was Alexander so obstinately opposed
to such an investigation?
Up until this time, the few
scientific studies that had been attempted were clinical
trials. For example, Dr. Wilfred Barlow was conducting a
clinical experiment using before-and-after photography of
students who had had a series of Alexander lessons. 75 The
photographs showed that the subjects experienced a variety of
physical changes, such as increase in overall height. The
goal of clinical research, such as Barlow’s, is primarily to
demonstrate that something has produced a given result or
effect--for instance that a particular drug lowers blood
pressure. However, clinical research has important
limitations. For example, clinical research does not
establish how or why a specific effect, such as lowering blood
pressure, has been achieved. Clinical research can’t
definitively establish that the Alexander technique, for
example--and nothing else--has produced a given result, since
it is too difficult to control all the variables that are
affecting a subject at a given time. Finally, clinical
research can’t account for a possible placebo effect or for
autosuggestion; and it doesn’t prove that the same results
couldn’t be achieved by other means.
Another problem, of which Alexander
was well aware, was that the lack of a successful test outcome
wasn’t necessarily proof that the technique “didn’t work.”
Alexander understood that the very nature of the technique was
a process of self-inquiry that rendered sensory impressions
more reliable and by means of which the individual could learn
to activate the primary control to enhance his functioning.
But Alexander also knew that the effects of the primary
control varied according to the pre-existing state of each
individual. More importantly, since the technique was an
educational process that gave the student the means to change,
it was the student who possessed the freedom and the
responsibility to choose to use it or not. Thus, Alexander
knew it was impossible to predict with certainty what specific
improvements or changes a student might experience or when.
Dewey claimed that Alexander had
discouraged his efforts to launch a scientific investigation
of the technique but we can now better appreciate that
Alexander understood--and feared--its potential pitfalls. Any
investigation launched by scientists who hadn’t experienced
the technique and didn’t understand what it did, applying
methods of investigation antithetical to its essential
hands-on learning process, seemed to him to have little chance
for success. Alexander also knew that the technique was not
an attempt to cure anything, despite the criticisms that it
failed in this respect. The “effect” of the technique was
itself a process that the student had to learn and then
implement. Testing for a specific result of that process was,
in Alexander’s mind, a faulty basis on which to conduct an
experiment and sure to fail. As Jones put it in his letter to
Alexander, it wasn’t at all like taking a drug, whose effects
could be clearly demonstrated and predicted. So Alexander
believed it wasn’t possible to prove the validity of the
technique. He also feared that if it was attempted and
failed, the developing reputation of the technique, for which
he had worked so long, would be set back. 76
Jones understood the limitations
inherent in clinical studies. He understood Alexander’s
argument that such an approach sought to prove that the
technique produced a certain result, whereas the aim of the
technique itself was a learning process, not a specific
physical change or health benefit. However, because of the
advice and guidance he received from the scientists he knew,
Jones--unlike Alexander--understood that the methods of
experimental research, as opposed to clinical research,
offered a fundamentally different approach to scientific
investigation. Experimental research offered the possibility
of getting at the more fundamental question of demonstrating
the existence of the primary control and how it worked. This
is precisely what Jones hoped to do.
In order to better understand what
experimental studies can accomplish, it is useful to return to
Alexander’s discovery. Alexander, acting alone, began by
making empirical observations of himself as he watched himself
speaking, and then posed a theory to explain those
observations. Many scientific discoveries have been made in
this way, seemingly by accident, often by individuals
untrained as scientists. Typically they have been astute and
patient observers, watching carefully, testing their
observations, trying out new possibilities, and then forming
their conclusions. Initial discoveries such as these are
sometimes the dawning of new sciences: first, the simple act
of observation; next, the formulation of a theoretical
framework to explain the relationship among the observed
events.
However, a third stage must then
take place in the evolution: the process of scientific
validation. As Dewey said, the theory must be tested.
Through experimental research, a cause and effect relationship
is established by reducing the variables so that it can be
determined what mechanism has caused the phenomenon; then data
is gathered, analyzed, compared. Through painstaking study
and repetition, the phenomenon must be shown to be an
occurrence that can be recreated by others and reliably
predicted to occur under given conditions. In the process,
experimental studies offer a means for determining how and why
an observed phenomenon works and for validating or refuting
the truth of the theory that has been developed to explain it.
Alexander identified the existence
of the primary control in humans, formulated a theory to
explain it, and then developed a method for teaching people to
use it consciously. But Jones, with the instinct of a
scientist, was facing the challenge of the next step. He
understood that experimental research could yield a better
understanding of the underlying physiological mechanism of
Alexander’s primary control and validate the discovery
itself. Through this means he sought to prove that Alexander
had discovered a fundamental principle of human behavior and
to advance the technique as a new field for inquiry. He hoped
to show that it was the beginning of “a new science of man.”
77 In order to conduct an experimental study, however, Jones
had to find a way to conduct his investigation through the
translating medium of existing technology and the methodology
of operationalism. In other words, he had to find a way first
to record, then to precisely measure, and finally to analyze
the movements of the head and neck using existing technology
and applying procedures that could be precisely
described--cookbook fashion--so that another scientist could
repeat his methods and yield similar results. Jones was
fortunate to have ample advice from some excellent scientists
and to have the opportunity, through John Kennedy, to work in
an experimental psychology laboratory. But the clarity and
intelligence with which he approached the problem, his
motivation, and his unique suitability--as a scientist and an
Alexander teacher--created an amalgam of personal strengths
which, in the end, contributed greatly to Jones’s success.
In 1952 Jones found himself
contemplating his response to Cobb’s long and thoughtful
letter suggesting possible areas of investigation. He wasn’t
satisfied with Douglas’s idea that there already existed
sufficient validation of the technique within the method
itself. Like Alexander, Jones concluded that a clinical
investigation was designed to prove something he did not want
to prove, couldn’t answer the question he was asking, and
wasn’t conclusive enough. Unlike Alexander, however, Jones
enjoyed the benefit of the guidance and insight of a number of
renowned scientists. They gave him reason to believe that
through experimental psychology he could find a means to test
and demonstrate the mechanism Alexander discovered and bridge
the gap from Alexander’s new and solitary discovery to the
larger, more professional, and more public arena of scientific
research. About this time Jones received a second gift for
research. He used it to explore a multiple-image photography
technique. This appeared promising because, unlike still
photography, the method could capture on film relative changes
in the position of body parts such as the head and neck over
time.
In 1954, on the basis of letters of
recommendation from the scientists who had been helping him
and his findings from the study on the startle pattern, Jones
applied for--and received--a two-year grant from the Carnegie
Corporation to study the role of postural reflexes in human
behavior. By this time he had also received a research
assistantship at the Institute for Applied Experimental
Psychology. In the five years since he received his first
financial support for research, Jones had acquired the
knowledge he needed formulated an initial plan and method of
investigation, and found a place to conduct his studies. A
year later he and his research assistant, Marshall Narva,
published their first paper. 78
Research
Jones was finally ready to delve
into the concrete question of how to begin: how to record the
small, subtle movements of a subject’s head and neck so that
these movements could be measured, and the measurements
analyzed and compared. The method would need to be relatively
uncomplicated, and it had to be inexpensive since funding was
limited. From 1955 through 1958, Jones would devote himself
largely to testing and refining his recording techniques. He
began with still photography but quickly moved on to
multiple-image photography which allowed him to capture on
film a succession of images of a simple movement, such as
standing up or sitting down. In 1956 he published an article
detailing his technique for using strobe lighting with the aid
of techniques developed by Harold Edgerton at M.I.T. 79
Initially, in order to obtain sufficient lighting and to
create identifiable marks on the subject’s body for
measurement, light bulbs were attached to the subject’s
clothing. For the subject, who was being photographed while
moving, this was quite an encumbrance. Jones tried Edgerton’s
strobe lighting using reflecting tape on the subject’s
clothing and achieved better results.
Jones also experimented with the
placement of the reflecting tape in order to obtain more
accurate measurements of the movement of the head and neck,
and with different flash rates of the strobe light. By 1958
he added a revolving wheel in front of the camera lens. 80
The wheel had five apertures, each covered by a gelatin filter
of a different color. This color-coding technique helped him
to more easily determine which of the many overlapping images
on the film corresponded with each other and to more easily
calculate the rate of movement of body parts relative to each
other.
Throughout this period, Jones was
refining his methods for measuring the movements he had
recorded. He placed reflecting tape on the head, midway
between the tragion of the ear and lowest point of the orbit
of the eye; on the sternal notch; at the top of the seventh
vertebrae; and on the upper arm and thigh. The first three
markers, when connected, defined a triangle; the angles that
were created by the sides of this triangle, and the angles
created by a single side of the triangle and the line of the
horizon, provided the source of quantitative data which he
needed to study the movements of the subject’s head and neck.
As Jones filmed a subject moving
from sitting to standing, for example, he could now
quantitatively determine how much, and in what direction, the
head had moved relative to the torso. With markers on the
arms and legs he could also note the rate of speed of body
parts during different phases of the movement and follow the
trajectory of the head in space. By now Jones had a workable
methodology for obtaining data that was increasingly
sophisticated and precise, and was yielding valuable
information.
In the early 1960s he continued
adding to this data on the head and neck through the use of
x-rays to examine the changes in the cervical vertebrae after
he had guided a subject’s head and neck into the
“experimental” position, 81 and EEG studies to measure
activity in neck muscles, particularly the sternocleidomastoid
and the trapezius. 82
Now, rather than defining the
placement of the head as “forward and up” or as a “relative
position of the head to the neck, and the head and neck to the
torso,” as Alexander did, Jones could speak with more
precision. He found that the poise of the head which
Alexander had utilized so effectively could also be described
in these terms: the center of gravity of the head moved
forward and up relative to the top of the spine creating a
slight stretch on the extensor muscles of the neck and back.
This increased their tonus or strength, enabling the back
musculature to easily support the torso in an upright poise
against gravity. There was also an increase in the distance
between the first two vertebrae and a decrease in activity in
the sternomastoid and trapezius muscles.
As early as 1958, Jones was using
his increasing knowledge to expand on the familiar concept of
posture. “Our concept of posture is based on the principle
that all other relations between parts are subordinate to the
relation of the head to the trunk.” 83 Jones explained that
with multiple-image photography he could examine posture as a
dynamic rather than static phenomenon--as “the manifestation
of a changing relationship among the parts of an integrated
whole.” 84 In other words his methods allowed him to obtain
a record showing posture as a relationship between the head
and the spine and as a function of time as well as space.
Now that Jones was able to define
the poise of the head, he could go on to record, measure, and
analyze what this change produced. He set about the task of
documenting its effect on the subject’s total pattern of
movement and its role in creating the kinesthetic effect of
lightness and ease that subjects experienced. The following
year he conducted a study in which subjects were given twenty
lessons in the Alexander technique, rather than just being
guided briefly by Jones during the photographic sessions. 85
With greater time allotted to learning the method, Jones found
that the subject’s overall patterns of movement changed
noticeably. They were more coordinated, and there was greater
uniformity in the movement from subject to subject. For
example, the head and trunk followed a different trajectory in
the movement from sit to stand. This trajectory was smoother,
with less forward movement of the torso before the subject
began to rise. The movement itself was completed in less
time, although subjects recounted the seemingly contradictory
sense of having more time in which to move. Jones also found
that the subject’s upward movement of the head began
simultaneously with the movement of the thighs and that the
velocity of the torso didn’t slow down at the point at which
the subject began to rise from the chair.
He documented the lightness effect
by giving subjects an adjective checklist and asking them to
select the words that best described the felt sense of the
movement. Seventy-two per cent of the subjects chose the word
“lighter.” Later, in 1970, Jones used a strain gauge force
platform to determine that the subject’s felt sense of
reduction in effort corresponded with the amount of force used
as measured by the force platform. 86
In 1963 Jones introduced the concept
of ‘postural set,’ which was an important adjunct to
Alexander’s concept of misuse. 87 Alexander saw that when a
student altered the poise of the head by pulling it back and
down into the neck, there was an accompanying pattern of
malcoordination that was produced throughout the body. He
termed this ‘misuse.’ To elaborate on this idea, Jones drew
on psychology’s use of the term ‘set,’ which is an attitude of
expectancy that limits our ability to respond. 88 Jones
expanded on this idea by coining the phrase ‘postural set’
which referred to a “postural change that precedes and
accompanies movement.” 89
He went on to show that the
position of the head and neck could be used as an index of
this postural set. After being told to stand up but before
doing so, subjects typically responded to their intent to move
by pulling the head back and down. This postural set affected
the characteristic pattern of the movement that followed.
When Jones guided the subject to achieve a better poise of the
head prior to moving, thus altering the postural set, the
movement response also changed. He points out that our usual
notion of posture is that it consists in a particular
configuration of body parts that can be held and maintained
with exercise and achieved through will power. Instead,
posture should be seen as dynamic to allow for continual
changes and adjustments. Jones concluded that our postural
sets limit our problem-solving behaviors. In contrast, “the
value of this direct kinesthetic experience is that it serves
to break up a set and thus facilitates the formation of a new
concept.” 90
Jones was beginning to establish the
all-important link, which so fascinated him when he first
started to study the technique, between the intent to act, or
thought of moving, and the nature of the response that
followed. By guiding the subject’s head to achieve the
improved poise before he began to move, Jones was helping the
subject to change his postural set and thus to significantly
change the movement itself. As Alexander had discovered, the
key ingredient in the subject’s ability to change his postural
set was the kinesthetic experience he received from the
Alexander teacher’s hands. Once he had experienced it, he
learned to alter the postural set himself, thus enabling him
to change his habitual response.
In 1965 Jones published perhaps his
best work, “A Method for Changing Stereotyped Response
Patterns by the Inhibition of Certain Postural Sets.” 91 It
was a thorough summary of his research to date and included an
introspective report of his own experience learning the
technique. Jones concluded the article by explaining that by
learning to inhibit the postural set which interferes with the
poise of the head, we gain conscious control of a stereotyped
response. “In so doing, says Jones, we “greatly enlarge the
area of behavior where choice can operate.” 92
Jones was then able to explore a
wider range of problems and questions. Since his data enabled
him to precisely define a normal pattern of movement, he
compared this with the movements of neurologically impaired
patients, suggesting that his methodology could become an
important diagnostic tool. 93 He also compared his findings
with studies done by other researchers concerning the effect
of posture on heart rate 94 and neck muscle tension. 95
Jones introduced his data into the investigation of these
questions and suggested that the results of these studies
should be reevaluated in light of his findings.
In a paper published in 1964, Jones
reexamined the startle pattern and linked the overall lack of
muscle tone that is characteristic of the startle reaction
with the malposture of old age. 96 He suggested that the
startle reaction was a paradigm of malposture and that it was
akin to the organism’s pattern of response to stress. The
malposture that comes with aging is a result of the
individual’s lifelong accumulation of stressful reactions.
Jones proposed that instead of recommending exercise to
counter this, we ought to be examining the nature of our
postural responses to stress and finding ways to change our
responses as they occur.
Near the end of his research career,
Jones had acquired the knowledge, techniques, and data
necessary to launch a simple but important clinical study.
Now that he had a means for documenting changes in the
subject’s head, neck, and back, he could correlate these
changes with results from a sound spectroscopy test. Jones
used the spectroscope to compare changes in a singer’s vocal
quality before and after receiving lessons in the Alexander
Technique. These results, as well as independent judgments of
musicians who listened to recordings of the singer’s voice,
verified that as the singer’s primary control improved, so did
the resonance of her voice. 97
This clinical study was the
culmination of two and a half decades of research. Its
significance lies chiefly in the fact that since Jones had
developed a methodology for recording and measuring the
relative change in the head, neck, and back, he could then
establish that this change, and nothing else, was responsible
for the improvement in the singer’s voice. Conducting
clinical studies to show the physical benefits of the primary
control had not been Jones’s objective. Rather, he sought to
use experimental research techniques to develop a method for
measuring the head, neck, back relationship and demonstrating
that this relationship played a role in determining the
overall coordination of the subject, and for developing a
theory to explain how this mechanism worked. 98 As the
result of his research, Jones presented this hypothesis:
-
The reflex response of the
organism to gravity is a fundamental feedback mechanism,
which integrates other reflex systems.
-
Under civilized conditions this
mechanism is commonly interfered with by habitual, learned
responses, which disturb the tonic relation between head,
neck, and trunk.
-
When this interference is
perceived kinesthetically, it can be inhibited. By this
means the antigravity response is facilitated and its
integrative effect on the organism is restored.
99
In addition to his own research,
Jones gathered further support for his theory from the
existing scientific literature, most importantly the work of
Rudolf Magnus. Magnus investigated postural reflexes which
are involved, for example, in enabling a cat, when held upside
down and dropped, to right itself in midair by first orienting
its head to the horizon and then rotating its body in relation
to its head, thus landing on its feet. Magnus’s studies led
him to the conclusion that in vertebrates there exists an
array of reflexes which, acting together organize the animal’s
movements so that the head leads the body in movement. 100
The existence of these reflexes had
thus already been established through the work of Magnus,
Sherrington, and others. But Alexander observed that our
learned habits of malcoordination and tension imbalance
prevent these reflexes from functioning fully. This then
creates a sort of internal “tug of war” between reflexes and
our learned behaviors. Alexander’s technique is a means by
which we can learn to r |
