Earlier this year I had the good fortune to be awarded a scholarship from the Ida P. Rolf Research Foundation and the Rolf Institute® Research Committee to attend the Fourth International Fascia Research Congress (FRC) in Washington, D.C. I would like to start by expressing my gratitude to both organizations for their support.

My report will offer some general thoughts about my experience as well as a more detailed focus on the two presentations given by Dr. Jaap van der Wal. The second and longer of these was a whole-day workshop that provided a whistle-stop tour of some highlights from a longer (four- day) course he offers on embryology, Erich Blechschmidt, and a phenomenological approach to understanding movement and form. In the meantime, I am aware that Tom Myers has also written about van  der  Wal’s  presentation  (his  post, “A Day with Jaap van der Wal,” is available at www.anatomytrains.com/news/2015/09/30/ a-day-with-jaap-van-der-wal/), so in what follows I will aim to give the briefest flavor of van der Wal’s ideas whilst also seeking to place them in a more critical context.     I will also briefly introduce the work of Wilfred Bion, whose elaboration of the idea of the ‘caesura’ can add a note to Rolfing Structural Integration’s ‘embryological turn’ and provide an additional pointer for clinical practice.

This question of clinical implication – how does this affect me, as a Rolfer? – was my constant companion (along with my jetlag) throughout my stay in Washington. The FRC is a curious affair, both nourishing and alien, that brings together lab scientists and somatic practitioners in one place (I like to think that it was the Rolfers who were slowly migrating to sitting on the floor as the conference progressed). Many of the research presentations (focusing on specific chemical interventions, or discussing the clinical outcomes of, say, applying thirty seconds of osteopathic manipulation to a lab rat . . .) seemed tangential to my clinical practice, to say the least. I am nevertheless pleased that this work is being done, and the nature of the more quantitative end   of sports science requires that scientists proceed slowly and methodically with their experiments.

What was markedly lacking, though, in much of what I saw, was an awareness of the role of relationship (be that the therapeutic relationship of client to practitioner, or the relationship of parts of the body to each other) in bringing about positive clinical outcomes. Serge Gracovetsky, who effectively argued for ‘one therapeutic modality to rule them all’, seemed to provide the most egregious example of this relational and hermeneutic blind spot, questioning the value in there existing a plethora of differing schools of thought to address, as he saw it, fixed and impersonal physical pathologies. There is, of course, enormous potential in joining the dots that lie between different therapeutic schools, and in aiming for both greater efficacy and efficiency in our interventions. Part of the strength of the Rolfing community has lain in its marked ability and willingness to absorb the insights of new research (in such areas as neuroscience) and to extend our interest to neighboring modalities such as craniosacral therapy and osteopathy. But to suggest that modalities as diverse as yoga, Rolfing SI, The Feldenkrais® Method, or functional fascial taping might be mined for a common ore along purely physiological lines is to return the body to a simplistic and dualistic conception in which mind (the worlds of meaning, thinking, and relationship) is somehow quite separate from the world of the body. Rolfers and other practitioners offer ways of thinking about the body that in themselves do some of the work, and yes, there is ‘hard science’ to back this up (see, for instance, Haines and Standing 2015): our beliefs about pain, resilience, and the architecture of the body play a statistically significant role in our experience of illness, recovery, and health.

‘Fasciasophy: philosophical aspects of an organ of innerness’, van der Wal’s presentation, provided a much-needed counter to the reductionist approach that was in evidence elsewhere. Van der Wal is one of a growing number who have recently drawn our attention to the way in which the traditional anatomical practice of the dissection of cadavers has contributed to the neglect of fascia (or fasciae) as a pervasive and continuous tissue system within the body (see, for example, van der Wal 2009). Introducing himself comprehensively as a medical doctor, anatomist, philosopher, embryologist, organicist, biologist, morphologist, and phenomenologist, he held the floor for ninety minutes to a packed audience willing to be moved by his unarguably romantic account of our human embryological development, in which morphology can be seen plainly to precede anatomy (we were treated to wonderful time-lapse videos of the embryo and fetus in formation). There is, he argues, a ‘pre-physiological exercise’ of movements and gesture within the womb that drives the creation of our anatomical parts, and not the other way around. We reach, gather, and bend quite prior to having the specific muscles, bones, and joints that the anatomists would hold responsible for those movements post-natally.

According to this view, form comes out of motion, and we are not best understood simply as ‘machines’ assembled from parts in order to fulfil this or that function. Contradicting the poet Sylvia Plath, love does not “set [us] going like a fat gold watch,” but rather, for van der Wal, we are whole humans – wholly human and individual – almost from the word go. I say ‘almost’ because for van der Wal it is in the third week post-conception that we begin to grow fascia’s embryological precursor: the mesenchyme, mesoderm, or, simply, meso. He is keen to stress that meso is no –derm (implying a skin or environmental boundary), but the very fabric of our capacity for innerness (he also uses the word ‘soul’) as distinct from ectoderm and endoderm. Meso is literally a connective tissue creating links and spaces between the boundary structures of our outer and inner (digestive, assimilative) ‘skins’.

Van der Wal’s reading of the meso lends fascia an existential, even spiritual quality derived from a non-religious perspective, even while his emphasis on the mesenchymic ‘ensoulment’ at three weeks recalls the older, religious idea of a ‘quickening’ of the babe within the womb. As such, his ideas continue the work of Rudolf Steiner and others who have sought to found a scientific or philosophical spirituality (Steiner’s school of thought is known as anthroposophy), in combination with the embryological ideas of Blechschmidt and the poetry of Goethe.

Van der Wal is a deeply engaging public speaker whose rigour, commitment, and depth of expertise are certainly beyond question, and I was happy to join the rest of  his  audience in  contributing to a standing ovation at the end of his presentation. Nevertheless, I wondered at the phenomenon of both my own and the audience’s enthusiastic captivation by van der Wal’s ideas: an atmosphere of mild rebellion against the prevailing scientific framework of the FRC was discernible, in spite of (and perhaps bolstered by) van der Wal’s impeccable scientific credentials.

The relational aspect (here, of the embryo to its mother) was again notable by its absence, despite his rich articulation  of the potential relational interfaces of the ecto- and endo-derms. I was reminded of Donald Winnicott’s (1965, 39) contention that “There is no such thing as an infant. There is only the infant and its mother.” In this he draws attention to the absolute and non-incidental relational dependence of the infant to  its  mother: the  embryo  is not the ‘dancing homunculus’  sitting up smartly in  the  womb  as  appears in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century representations. Moreover, some further reading about the historical foundations of anthroposophy drew my attention to less palatable aspects of the worldview that accompanied its development. I  simply do not know enough about this aspect to comment on it here; I mention it simply  to draw our attention collectively to our responsibility to retain a constructively critical attitude to that which inspires and fascinates us.

Notwithstanding this note of caution, van der Wal’s presentation made a compelling case for the idea that we remain ‘embryological’ throughout the lifespan, with capacities for the creative development of our body-mind-selves. We can change, and we can grow. In this connection I was reminded of a well-known quotation from another historically controversial figure, Sigmund Freud. In Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety he wrote, ‘There is much more continuity between intra-uterine life and the earliest infancy than the impressive caesura of the act of birth allows us to believe’ (Freud 1959, 138). While Freud is not  focusing  on  the  development  of the embryo, he is alerting us to the existence of pre-natal experiences – properly human experiences – that have a role in shaping our nervous system and our cues for safety and parasympathetic activation.

Rephrasing Freud to draw attention to our lifelong physical experiences, the British analyst Bion (1989) writes that ‘there  is  much  more  continuity between autonomically appropriate quanta and the waves  of  conscious  thought  and feeling than  the  impressive  caesura  […] would have us believe’. Like van der Wal, Bion also points to the existence of intelligence in the body that pre-dates the official beginnings of our official intelligence and functional systems. He places emphasis on that little-used word, caesura, as a place where we can productively focus our attention as therapists: that is to say, on the gaps, hesitations, interruptions, and changes in physical state that we perceive in our clients, and in the moments where new physical experiences (a fuller breath, the sense of groundedness and connection through a limb) give way to new ways of talking, thinking, and moving (talking and thinking are also ways of moving).

Bion likens the moment of caesura to layers of onionskin in which something becomes newly available to consciousness. By paying attention to the moments where something changes or something new becomes possible, we become integrators rather than fixers, helping to establish a new reality for the client (whether that is improved range of motion at a specific joint, pain reduction, or a sense of the body’s resilience) that was previously only there in embryo. Integration requires relationship; fixing (though it has its uses) does not. This is a whole-body notion of therapy that does not reduce us to physical machines only in need of a sufficiently standardized, technical repair kit.

Naomi Wynter-Vincent is the founder of London Rolfing (londonrolfing.com). She trained at the British Academy of Rolfing Structural Integration in London, and is currently completing a PhD thesis on Wilfred Bion at the University of Sussex.

Bibliography

Bion, W. 1989. Two Papers: The Grid and Caesura. London: Karnac.

Freud, S. 1959. The Standard Edition of the Complete  Psychological  Works  of Sigmund Freud:  Volume  XX  (1925-1926). London: Hogarth Press.

Haines, S. and Standing, S. 2015. Pain is Really Strange. London: Singing Dragon.

van der Wal, J. 2009. “The Architecture of the Connective Tissue in the Musculoskeletal System – An Often Overlooked Functional Parameter  as  to  Proprioception  in the

Locomotor Apparatus.” International Journal of Therapeutic Massage and Bodywork 2(4):9-23.

Winnicott, D.W. 1990 [1965]. The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theoryof Emotional Development. London: Karnac.

Integrating the Fourth International FRC[:]