Book Review - the Potent Self by Moshe Feldenkrais

Moshe Feldenkrais was born at the beginning of the last century in Russia. At the age of 14 he moved to Palestine and worked as a labourer, going on to study engineering. He then moved to France, escaping to Britain on the eve of the second world war, where he worked on Sonar resarch in Scotland.

Moshe was not only an engineer, but also a martial artist - practising Jujutsu and then Judo with it's founder Jigoro Kano. The combination of his martial and scientific background, along with an injured knee lead him to develop a method of bodywork which is gaining in popularity today.

Feldenkrais wrote the Potent Self in the 1940's - though it was not published until the 1980's for various reasons. As I read it in 2006 I was amazed at how well the book stands the test of time. There are some details that research has shown to be not completely accurate, but the overall theme of the book and it's style holds true.

But what is the theme? Feldenkrais talks about the development of the individual, how in human beings almost all behaviour is learned, and depends on patterns of muscular tension to be enacted. These patterns of tension are intimately bound up with emotional sensation. As such he shows that the mind and body truly act as a single system.

His idea is that these patterns of tension become automatic, and often inefficient for the task at hand. But because these patterns were often learned at a time when we were dependant on adults for survival, trying to change them requires overcoming the survival anxiety on some level. The result is that people get hemmed into patterns and behaviours, not daring to go outside of them, and in time forgetting that there is an outside.

Feldenkrais contrasts this with the mature or potent self, who has relearned how to learn, and can change these patterns, act efficiently in the face of anxiety and in doing so lose the anxiety. A fair amount of the book is about sex, and how it is affected by the gap between the age of biological sexual maturity and the age of socially condoned sexual behaviour.

While Feldenkrais acknowledges that the origins of problems may be in the past, the patterns that maintain them exist in the present, in the way the muscles are held now. So treatment of these problems is through movement - creating a new awareness of possibilties that have been forgotten.

Feldenkrais was an influence on NLP, I believe that Bandler modelled him. Feldenkrais met up with Erickson in who's methods he saw a parallel - Erickson working with words (and obviously non verbally) while Feldenkrais worked directly with movement (often explained verbally).

I found this book excited me intellectually, clarified certain ideas for me and has also led me down new avenues of research. If you are curious about the NLP presuppostion that 'mind and body are one system' then this book is well worth a read.