The Betrayal of the Body - Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D.

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the social realm the image has its positive as well as its negative aspects. The alleviation of suffering and misfortune on a large scale would not be possible without the use of an image to mobilize a mass response. Every humanitarian effort has achieved its goal through the use of an appealing image. But an image can be used negatively to incite hatred and to bring destruction upon others. When a policeman is pictured as a symbol of suppressive authority he becomes an object of distrust and hatred. When the Red Chinese portray the American as a devilish exploiter of people he becomes a monster to be destroyed. The image blots out the personal humanity of an individual. It reduces him to an abstraction. It becomes easy to kill a human being if one sees him only as an image.

      If the image is dangerous on a social level, where its function is openly admitted, its effects are disastrous in personal relationships, where its action is insidious. One sees this in the family where a man tries to fulfill his image of fatherhood in opposition to the needs of his children. Just as he sees himself in terms of his image, so he views his child as an image rather than as a person with feelings and desires of his own. In this situation, upbringing takes the form of trying to fit the child to an image that is frequently a projection of the father's unconscious self-image. The child who is forced to conform to a parent's unconscious image loses his sense of self, his feeling of identity, and his contact with reality.

      The loss of the feeling of identity has its roots in the family situation. Brought up according to images of success, popularity, sex appeal, intellectual and cultural snobbery, status, self-sacrifice, and so forth, the individual sees others as images instead of looking at them as people. Surrounded by images, he feels isolated. Reacting to images, he feels unrelated. In attempting to fulfill his own image, he feels frustrated and cheated of emotional satisfaction. The image is an abstraction, an ideal, and an idol which demands the sacrifice of personal feeling. The image is a mental conception which, superimposed on the physical being, reduces bodily existence to a subsidiary role. The body becomes an instrument of the will in the service of the image. The individual is alienated from the reality of his body. Alienated individuals create an alienated society.

      A person experiences the reality of the world only through his body. The external environment impresses him because it impinges upon his body and affects his senses. In turn, he responds to this stimulation by acting upon the environment. If the body is relatively unalive, a person's impressions and responses are diminished. The more alive the body is, the more vividly does he perceive reality and the more actively does he respond to it. We have all experienced the fact that when we feel particularly good and alive, we perceive the world more sharply. In states of depression the world appears colorless.

      The aliveness of the body denotes its capacity for feeling. In the absence of feeling the body goes “dead” insofar as its ability to be impressed by or respond to situations is concerned. The emotionally dead person is turned inward: thoughts and fantasies replace feeling and action; images compensate for the loss of reality. His exaggerated mental activity substitutes for contact with the real world and can create a false impression of aliveness. Despite this mental activity, his emotional deadness is manifested physically. We shall find that his body looks “dead” or unalive.

      An overemphasis upon the role of the image blinds us to the reality of the life of the body and its feelings. It is the body that melts with love, freezes with fear, trembles in anger, and reaches for warmth and contact. Apart from the body these words are poetic images. Experienced in the body, they have a reality that gives meaning to existence. Based on the reality of bodily feeling, an identity has substance and structure. Abstracted from this reality, identity is a social artifact, a skeleton without flesh.

      A number of experiments have shown that when this interaction between the body and the environment is greatly reduced, a person loses his perception of reality.2 If an individual is deprived of sensory stimulation for a length of time he will begin to hallucinate. The same thing happens when his motor activity is severely curtailed. In both situations the decrease of body sensation caused by the absence of external stimulation or internal motor activity reduces the person's feeling of his body. When a person loses touch with his body, reality fades out.

      The aliveness of a body is a function of its metabolism and motility. Metabolism provides the energy that results in movement. Obviously, when metabolism is reduced, motility is decreased. But this relationship works in reverse too. Any decrease in the body's motility affects its metabolism. This is because motility has a direct effect upon respiration. As a general rule, the more one moves, the more one breathes. When motility is reduced, oxygen intake is diminished, and the metabolic fires burn lower. An active body is characterized by its spontaneity and its full and easy respiration. It will be shown in a subsequent chapter that breathing and motility are severely restricted in the schizoid body. As a result, its energy production tends to be low.

      The intimate connection between breathing, moving, and feeling is known to the child but is generally ignored by the adult. Children learn that holding the breath cuts off unpleasant sensations and feelings. They suck in their bellies and immobilize their diaphragms to reduce anxiety. They lie very still to avoid feeling afraid. They “deaden” their bodies in order not to feel pain. In other words, when reality becomes unbearable, the child withdraws into a world of images, where his ego compensates for the loss of body feeling by a more active fantasy life. The adult, however, whose behavior is governed by the image, has repressed the memory of the experiences which forced him to “deaden” his body and abandon reality.

      Normally, the image is a reflection of reality, a mental construction which enables the person to orient his movements for more effective action. In other words, the image mirrors the body. When, however, the body is inactive, the image becomes a substitute for the body, and its dimensions expand as body awareness recedes. “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” is one vivid portrayal in fiction of how images may compensate for the passivity of the individual.

      Image formation is a function of the ego. The ego, as Sigmund Freud said, is first and foremost a body ego. As it develops, however, it becomes antithetical to the body—that is, it sets up values in seeming opposition to those of the body. On the body level an individual is an animal, self-centered and oriented toward pleasure and the satisfaction of needs. On the ego level the human being is a rational and creative being, a social creature whose activities are geared to the acquisition of power and the transformation of the environment. Normally, the ego and the body form a close working partnership. In a healthy person the ego functions to further the pleasure principle of the body. In the emotionally disturbed person the ego dominates the body and asserts that its values are superior to those of the body. The effect is to split the unity of the organism, to change a working partnership into an open conflict.

      The conflict between the ego and the body may be slight or severe: the neurotic ego dominates the body, the schizoid ego denies it, while the schizophrenic ego dissociates from it. The neurotic ego, afraid of the nonrational nature of the body, attempts merely to subdue it. But when the fear of the body amounts to panic, the ego will deny the body in the interest of survival. And when the fear of the body reaches the proportion of terror the ego dissociates from the body, completely splitting the personality and producing the schizophrenic condition. These distinctions are clearly illustrated in the way these different personalities respond to the sexual urge. To the healthy ego sex is an expression of love. The neurotic ego sees sex as a means of conquest or ego glorification. For the schizoid ego sex is an opportunity to obtain the physical closeness and warmth upon which survival depends. The schizophrenic ego, divorced from the body, finds no meaning in the sexual act.

      The conflict between the ego and the body produces a split in the personality which affects all aspects of an individual's existence and behavior. In this chapter, we will study the divided and contradictory identities of the schizoid and neurotic personalities. In the following chapters other manifestations of this split will be examined. As part of this study we will want to find out how the split develops, what factors produce it, and what techniques are available to treat it. It should be evident at this point that the split cannot be resolved without improving the condition of the body. Breathing must be deepened, motility increased, and feelings

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