How
Does One Uncover Neurotic Fixations?
Q: You
mentioned on The Great Virtues Lecture Tapes that the Great Virtues,
if I remember do not work—you could not exactly use The Great Virtues to dig
out neurotic fixations. Later, in another tape, you stated that neurotic
fixations might stop you from advancing along in the study of the Great
Virtues. What programs could you recommend for, first of all, discovering
your fixations and then beginning to pull them up?
RK:
Well, of course, the most common things are psychoanalysis. Those are the
things which most people have heard about. But, I think there are ways which
are even faster at getting at things like that. Many of the people here have
used a process called, “Radix,” which is a neo-Reichian type of therapy.
Reich discovered that—he was a psychotherapist—discovered that he was able to
get more quickly to people by manipulating their muscles because it turned
out that many of the painful experiences that a person buries—the memory of
that, of course which are in the brain—has an equivalent memory in the
musculature someplace. He was able to unlock some of these memories by poking
people’s muscles; the muscles that related to those particular problems.
Indeed, people tend to armor themselves against repeated hurts by deadening
those muscles in which the emotions give feeling.
We make the distinction between emotions and feelings—that everybody
has emotions—even if you are not incarnate you have emotions—but you cannot
have feelings unless you have muscles to have those feelings in. So, a
feeling is the physical body’s response to emotions, which are mental. By
locking things up, tightening up muscles, or breathing a certain way so that
you diminish feelings when the emotions come up, you tend to armor yourself
against feelings thereafter.
A lot
of little children really respond to constant griping by pulling in their
neck more and more. That kind of yelling really does give you a physical pain
in the neck and that may go around for the rest of their lifetime; pulled,
kind of with their muscles, arms, or shoulders pulled up and hunched up and
carrying a lot of tension—armoring themselves against this constant pounding
by verbal abuse. In Radix, for instance, you work on loosening up those
muscles and the feelings that were defended against and locked up in there
for a long time and suddenly the feelings come forth. Bit-by-bit you can get rid
of the feelings that were never long-discharged. They were being held there
for a long, long time since childhood. I mean, you can carry around stuff
like that for fifty, sixty, seventy years. Of course, it takes energy in
order to keep those muscles bound up like that and that diminishes the amount
of energy you have for doing something creative or useful or happy.
And with Radix, you do not
necessarily have to go through the conscious remembrance. Just getting rid of
the feelings saves a lot of time and a great deal of money and we are very
much interested in what is effective and accomplishes the job.
The Great Virtues are very valuable and very readily useable for
overcoming the bad habits that we have learned from our culture. All the
things we have seen done around us from the time we were children, which were
not necessarily the right way of doing things, are something you can change
by seeing a better way and then developing a habit which supersedes the old
habit.
But, as I said before, the
neuroses are hidden from us—we are not able to deal with them consciously so
we are not able to change them very well. Once we get them up on the table
and see what they are, we can get rid of childhood embarrassments, which we
have been carrying around for a long time and, in view of our adult
understanding, just allows them to fade away. There are some fantastic “ah
ha’s” a person can have when you suddenly see the connection between
something like that.
Q: Is this
something a person can do on themselves?
RK: Hardly.
Q: Or should
they find a practitioner?
RK: Right. It
is almost like making love to yourself. I mean you may not find that very
satisfying and useful. It seems like whoever put us together kept putting us in
or driving us into situations where we need other people and that by
interaction with one another we seem to provide the greatest satisfactions in
solving our problems. Infants are totally dependent upon being held in-arms
and being touched and cuddled and things of that sort. If they do not get
that they never grow up to be proper human beings. As a matter of fact, they
may not even grow. So, it seems like that lasts for all our lives. We always
need other people to be better. As a matter of fact, we need other people
just to verify our own sanity.
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