Fear of Life. Dr. Alexander Lowen M.D.

could be deduced from the severe tension in his pelvic area, which limited the flow of sexual excitation into the pelvis. I asked Bill about his early sexual experiences with his wife.

      Bill related the following: “We were very strongly attracted to each other. Joan let herself go with me as she had not done with other men. We engaged in heavy petting, but we did not have intercourse. I did not want to do that until we were married. Joan came from a good family, and I respected her. Strangely, after we got married, all her passion disappeared. We have had problems ever since.”

      Bill did not realize that in protecting Joan's chastity, he rejected her sexuality just as her father had done. Joan desperately needed to feel that her sexuality was normal and healthy. Bill could not help projecting his own sexual guilt on her. In his mind's eye, he saw Joan as the mother of his children and he unconsciously identified her with his own mother. Having suppressed his sexual feelings for his mother, he could not fully transfer them to his wife. Throughout his marriage, Bill suffered from some degree of erective impotence. He blamed it on his wife's fear of sex and lack of passion. It is not difficult to see that she was disappointed in her marriage by Bill's lack of manhood. At bottom, he proved to be not so different from her father.

      At our next session, Bill said, “I realize I am both opposite and similar to Joan's father. She treats me with the same guilt and fear she has toward her father. From time to time I will experience failure in my ability to hold the erection. I feel terrible. I feel impotent. I feel like a failure.”

      We have now uncovered the common factor that identified Bill with Joan's father. Bill had characterized Joan's father as a failure financially. He now recognized that he, too, was a failure, not only because of his difficulties with erection but because his wife had never reached a sexual climax. He blamed himself for this, and he felt guilty toward his wife for his failure. The situation was like a vicious circle, slowly enmeshing the two of them in misery, each outwardly blaming the other but inwardly blaming himself.

      Having suppressed much of his sexuality in “resolving” the oedipal situation, Bill could not approach a woman manfully. He was too sexually insecure. His structure only allowed him to pick a girl-woman who needed him. He could then be sure she wouldn't abandon him. In return, he assumed the responsibility to help her, to protect her, and to fulfill her. He played the role of the father, but he was still the boy. As a boy, he had to pick a nonorgasmic woman, which only confirmed his failure to be a man. The harder he tried to overcome his weakness, the more he failed, for he was denying a fate that he had structured in his body.

      The idea of fate as body structure is more clearly shown in the following case.

      Ruth was a woman about forty years old who complained of depression and a lack of feeling. Her sexual desire was very low. However, she could be excited by a woman, especially when she fantasized kissing a woman with tongue penetration. One other complaint was about severe ulcer type pains in her stomach. In other areas of her life Ruth was a highly successful person. She had her own very profitable business. She had many friends and was socially active. She was married and had a family. Publicly, Ruth was one kind of person; privately, she was another. This denoted a split in her personality that was also manifested physically.

      Ruth's problem was clearly revealed in her body. The upper half of her body was slender and well shaped and had a very girlish quality. Looking at this part of her body, one would have estimated her age to be about twenty-six, whereas she was considerably older. In contrast, her hips and thighs were disproportionately large and heavy, suggesting a more mature woman. The skin in this area had a coarser quality than that on the rest of the body. From the knees down, however, her legs were shapely. The pelvis looked “dead,” that is, without much life. Its motility was greatly reduced, and she didn't breathe with her belly. The deadness was also apparent in the masklike expression of her face and in her mechanical smile. This deadness in the face and pelvis was responsible for the lack of feeling about which she complained.

      A person's body structure tells us something about his history when interpreted bioenergetically.¹² Each experience leaves its mark on the body. Significant experiences shape the body as they shape the personality. A bioenergetic therapist who is trained in reading the language of the body can make some good guesses about those experiences. Often, these guesses are confirmed by the patient when he senses the conflicts manifested in his chronic muscular tensions.

      The marked discrepancy between the two halves of Ruth's body reflected the split in her personality. In the upper half of her body she was a young girl, seemingly innocent about the facts of life. This innocence was belied- however, by the masklike facial expression that reminded me of the Sphinx and suggested that she knew more than she said. The lower half of her body told a different story-of a person who had more than a casual acquaintance with the excitements and frustrations of sex.

      Bioenergetically, the heaviness, deadness, and disproportionate bigness of the hips and thighs in a person are the result of a stagnation of energy and sexual excitement. Stagnation occurs when an area of the body that is strongly excited and charged with feeling is immobilized to hold or contain the feeling because discharge is not possible. If this happens occasionally, it is painful but has no effect upon the body structure. The constant exposure of a young child to sexual stimulation under circumstances that prevent any discharge of the excitation and make the child feel guilty for sexual feelings can result in an overfullness and enlargement of the pelvic area. Since the pain is continuous and intolerable, all feeling in the area must be suppressed. This is accomplished by developing strong tensions about the pelvis, which immobilize it and thereby deaden and numb it.

      Ruth was completely out of touch with this area of her body. She had no feeling of it or in it. The respiratory movements did not descend into the lower abdomen. She lived from the waist up.

      The interpretation this body dynamic suggests is that the patient had in early life experienced a constant sexual excitation, probably from her father. She, of course, responded to it with sexual feelings as any girl in the oedipal period will. At the same time she was not allowed any expression of her sexuality and was forced to “cut it off.” The mechanism she developed to cut off sexual feeling was evident: muscular tension in the waist and diaphragm that blocked the flow of any excitation into the belly. Even such emotional expressions as belly crying or belly laughing were impossible for this patient. In addition, the immobility of the pelvis prevented the buildup of any deep sexual excitation. We can hypothesize that the oedipal period ended in such a painful way that Ruth was forced to repress her memory of the event to avoid feeling the pain. The fear of her mother was so strong that she had to suppress all sexual feeling to protect herself.

      Psychologically, Ruth could be described as a “castrated” woman. (The expression “cut off her sexual feelings” says the same thing.) She was terrified of her mother (whom I regard as the castrating person), but this fear was completely denied. In its place there was the submission to penetration of her mouth by another woman's tongue. The displacement of sexuality to the mouth and its inversion allayed her castration anxiety.

      If one was to help Ruth get out of her depressed state, it had to be by helping her get some feeling into the lower half of her body. Psychology is relatively helpless in this task. One had to work intensively with her on a physical level to effect some change in her personality. Her breathing had to be deepened, the muscular tensions in the lower abdomen, pelvis, and thighs had to be reduced and released, and the pelvis had to be mobilized. Often the procedures were painful, due to the severity of the tension, but as the tensions let go, the pain diminished. The body work was done in conjunction with a continuing analysis of her relations to her father, her mother, to me, and to a former female therapist.

      What emerged from the analysis was the lascivious behavior of her father. She recalled a number of incidents in which her father displayed a prurient interest in her girl friends, at the same time deriding them as dirty and loose. These memories were related without any feeling or emotional charge. The first breakthrough occurred in the form of a dream following the development of some sexual feeling in her pelvis through the body work. She related: “I dreamed that I was in a room with a giant. He was more than nine feet tall. I felt a strong sexual desire for him, and I pressed close against him. My head came just to the level of his pelvis. I wanted to sleep