Freedom to Change: The Development and Science of The Alexander Technique by Frank Pierce Jones

Author:Frank Pierce Jones [Jones, Frank Pierce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mouritz
Published: 2021-06-05T21:00:00+00:00

Fig. 2. John Dewey and F.M. Alexander

Courtesy of Irene Tasker

I asked Dewey about his early experiences with the Alexander Technique. He said that he had been taken by it first because it provided a demonstration of the unity of mind and body. He thought that the demonstration had struck him more forcibly than it might have struck someone who got the sensory experience easily and quickly, because he was such a slow learner. He had always been physically awkward, he said, and performed all actions too quickly and impulsively and without thought. “Thought” in his case was saved for “mental” activity, which had always been easy for him. (Alexander told me that when Dewey first came to him he was “drugged with thinking” and used to fall asleep during lessons.) It was a revelation to discover that thought could be applied with equal advantage to everyday movements.

The greatest benefit he got from lessons, Dewey said, was the ability to stop and think before acting. Physically, he noted an improvement first in his vision and then in breathing. Before he had lessons, his ribs had been very rigid. Now they had a marked elasticity which doctors still commented on, though he was close to eighty-eight.

Intellectually, Dewey said, he found it much easier, after he had studied the Technique, to hold a philosophical position calmly once he had taken it or to change it if new evidence came up warranting a change. He contrasted his own attitude with the rigidity of other academic thinkers who adopt a position early in their careers and then use their intellects to defend it indefinitely.

I asked him if he thought the Technique had implications for the moral as well as the intellectual side of life, and he agreed emphatically that it had. In his own case, he said that once he had decided on a course of action as the right one to follow, the Technique made it much easier for him to carry it out. In the introduction to The Use of the Self he spoke of “the great change in mental and moral attitude that takes place as proper coordinations are established,” and in a letter to me he said that these aspects of the Technique were “an intrinsic part of the whole scheme.” Irene Tasker told me that when she first went to South Africa Dewey had given her a letter of recommendation in which he spoke of her teaching as “contributing to the physical, mental and moral improvement of the child.”

In the face of Dewey’s positive statements about the moral and intellectual value of the Technique, I have always found it difficult to understand the insistence by his disciples that its application was purely physical—as if the Technique were a kind of Australian folk remedy which Dewey in the kindness of his heart had endorsed in order to help Alexander sell his books. I ran into this attitude long before I met Dewey. Sidney Hook had given a lecture at Brown on some aspect of Dewey’s philosophy.

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