The vision of human embodiment that Rolfing embraces has important consequences for the ethics of its practice. James Drane writes that, “At some point ethics is about our vision, and an ethical question pushed to its final point represents a search for vision.” (Drane, 1982, p. 39). In this paper I will discuss some of the dynamics between ethics and the vision of Rolfing.

There are many ethical questions for Rolfers. Some of these have to do with the scope and identity of Rolfing: How should Rolfing present itself to the public; what claims should it make? What should be the interface between Rolfing and other professions such as medicine and psychotherapy? How can a small and widely dispersed group of individuals maintain professional standards and ethics? Other ethical questions have to do with the relationship between the client and the individual practitioner.

A Brief History of Rolfing

Rolfing was created by Ida P. Rolf, Ph.D. (1896-1979). Rolf received her Ph.D. in biochemistry from Columbia University in 1919. From the time that she began her graduate work until 1928 she worked at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research where she investigated the chemical structure of nervous system lipids (Downing, 1976; Johnson, 1977). Family health problems interrupted her research career. When these problems did not respond to conventional medical treatment, she pursued alternative methods and in time, this pursuit led her to develop her own system, Rolfing (Feitis, 1978).

She drew on wide ranging sources for her thinking. She studied yoga, homeopathy, Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics, the psychotherapy of Wilhelm Reich, and quantum mechanics at the Max Planck Institute. Her teachers included Amy Cochran, an osteopath and proponent of a health oriented system of physical movement; Georges Gurdjieff, P.D. Ouspensky, John Bennet, and Pak Subuh, mystical philosophers whose work included physical movements for spiritual development; and Mathias Alexander, the originator of the Alexander technique (Feitis,1977, Feitis, 1978; Hutchins, 1983). He reclecticism and her interests in the spiritual and the metaphysical are currents that continue to run through Rolfing.

The revelation that Ida Rolf believed to be central to her work is that a human being is a smaller energy field that continuously interacts with the enormously larger gravitational field of the earth (Rolf, 1977). The body tissue most responsive to the dynamics of this relationship is the fascia, which is a tissue that is a single continuum throughout the body. Fascia is extremely plastic and it can be considered the principle organ to give shape to the body (Rolf, 1962; Little, 1969; Oschman, 1984; Varela & Frehk, 1987).

Because of its colloidal structure, the fascia can be literally reshaped through manipulation (Little, 1969; Rolf, 1978). By using this characteristic of fascia, Rolf developed her method for changing human bodies so that they function more efficiently.” Rolfers make a life study of relating bodies and their fields to the earth and its gravitational field, and we so organize the body to that gravitational field.” (Rolf,1978, p. 86.)

The key idea of Rolfing is that when a person is standing upright, the body should be oriented around a vertical line (Rolf, 1962; Rolf, 1977). Rolf sought a dynamic interrelatedness of all of the segments of the body. Rolfers refer to this axis as the Line and it is essential to the theory of Rolfing. In Rolf’s view, when the human body exhibits this sense of verticality, it utilizes energy more efficiently, and a wide range of physiological and psychological benefits result.

By 1955 Ida Rolf had refined her work into a ten-session format which she taught in England, Canada, and the United States (Feitis, 1978; Horvitz, 1979). Osteopathic physicians were among the first to appreciate Rolf’s work and the students of her first classes consisted mainly of osteopaths and chiropractors. Rolf herself regarded her work as an outgrowth of osteopathic methods (Rolf, 1978).

Rolf’s frustration was that while these physicians were content to adopt her techniques of soft tissue manipulation, they largely ignored her theoretical emphasis: the importance of a vertical relationship with the gravitational field (E. Hutchins, Faculty, Rolf Institute personal communication, August, 1983). It was Rolf’s conclusion that her work could not be accomplished through a clinical perspective, that is a focus on identifying pathology and alleviating symptoms. The perspective that she adapted was aesthetic, to organize the body around her imaginary vertical line, identifying and working with force vectors through the fascial matrix (Rolf, 1978).

Perhaps taking a cue from Mathias Alexander who also wanted to distinguish his work from medical practice (Cottingham, 1985), Ida Rolf asserted that her method was education rather than therapy,

“This is the important concept: that Rolfers are integrating something; we are not restoring some-thing. This puts us in a different class from all other therapists that I know of. It takes us out of the domain designated by the word’ therapy’ and puts us into the domain designated by the word education.’ It puts our thinking into education: how can we use these ideas behind Rolfing? How do we put the body together so that it’s a unit, an acting efficient energy unit? One of the differences between practitioners of medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic,naturo pathy, etc., is that the latter are all relieving symptoms. They make no effort to put together elements into a more efficient energy system.
From the first day we see a client, we are putting him together, we are integrating him… if, in our presentation to the world, enough stress can be laid upon this, we will have a certain amount of publicity, indicating that we are less therapists than we are educationists. I am not hiding behind a bunch of words here. This is what I mean, this is my goal: an educational process.”(Rolf, 1978, p. 40.)

In 1965, Dorothy Nolte, one of Rolf’s students, introduced her to Fritz Perls, one of the originators of Gestalt therapy. With Perl’s encouragement, Rolf came to the Esalen institute in Big Sur, California and there he referred many of his students to her. After a time, she began to teach classes there. Rosemary Feltis writes,

“Esalen brought IPR [Rolf] a different kind of student, frequently out of sympathy with mainstream cultural values. Some had been successful-a heart specialist turned Esalen dishwasher, a former space engineer; some were pioneers in the field of humanistic psychology; some had refused to find a place in the ‘system,’ becoming instead craftsmen and wanderers. It wasn’t always easy to educate this heterogeneous mix, and to make sure they were adequately prepared for Rolfing training in terms of educational, psychological, and physical qualifications. IPR had no time to teach anatomy and physiology, or to qualify her students to deal with emotional and other issues that might come up in a Rolfing session. She had to depend on outside institutions to supply what students didn’t already have. It seemed ideal to ask that applicants attend medical or premedical classes, but we soon found out that these focus primarily on pathology, not on the functioning of the healthy body… The new group practices at Esalen, particularly Gestalt therapy, were excellent training for the necessary emotional insight.” (Feitis, 1978, p. 19.)

In 1970, these practitioners formed the original Guild for Structural integration. With the formation of the Guild, both the scope and reputation of Rolfing expanded. At the urging of Guild members, Rolf developed work that extended beyond her ten-session format. This consisted of four sessions, later expanded to five, called the Advanced Series (E. Hutchins, personal communication, August,1983).

During this era, research on Rolfing began. By 1973 five research projects on Rolfing had been completed and seven more were underway (Hall, 1973). Valerie Hunt, then director of the UCLA Movement Laboratory, was the principle investigator for the most ambitious of these studies. Completed in 1977, her research group studied the effects of Rolfing on 24 experimental subjects across a broad range of variables including EEG, EMG, and psychological effects (Hunt, Massey, Weinberg, Bruyere, Hahn, 1977).

Unfortunately, Hunt chose to include indices, bioelectric fields and auras, that made her study controversial and obscured its other, positive results. Research has continued since that time, but on a reduced scale.

During the 1960’s and 70’s, Rolfers began to develop movement work, a modality that relied on verbal cues and gentle, guiding touch to evoke structural integration. In 1962, Ida Rolf taught Dorothy Nolte, a Rolfing student, a series of patterned exercises to reinforce the effects of Rolfing. Nolte, later joined by Rachael Harris, took these exercises as a starting point for movement work called Structural Awareness. Nolte and Harris currently practice this work independently of the Rolf Institute (Harris & Nolte,1989).

In the early 1970’s, while a student of Ida Rolf and with her encouragement, Judith Aston developed her own form of movement work, initially called Structural Patterning (Aston, 1980). Structural Patterners were trained as a separate discipline, but were still affiliated with Rolfing. In 1975, after considerable debate and turmoil at the Rolf institute, Aston decided that her basic approach conflicted with Ida Rolf’s method. With Ida Rolf’s blessing, she founded her own school of bodywork, Aston Patterning. The Structural Patterners who remained with Ida Rolf pursued their work under the name of Rolfing Movement Integration (RMI). The relationship between movement work and Rolfing continued to be problematic. RMI is no longer taught as a separate discipline and it is currently being integrated into Rolfing training.

Present Structure of the Rolf Institute

In 1973 the Guild was formally incorporated as the Ida P. Rolf Institute for Structural Integration (Feitis, 1978). In its charter, the Institute describes itself as a school for inquiry into the relationship between human beings and gravity. To attain legal control of the name of the work and who might claim to do the work, Ida Rolf copy righted the words Rolfing and Rolfer which were assigned to the Rolf Institute. In order to call oneself a Rolfer and claim to perform Rolfing, a practitioner must belong to the Rolf Institute. The Rolf Institute has approximately 700 members worldwide, as opposed to the American Psychological Association, which in 1991 had some 100,000members (Kovaks, 1991). Of the members of the Rolf institute, only about 200 have been practicing for ten years or longer.

The training program, which is part of the Rolf institute, continues to evolve. Ida Rolf’s classes originally lasted three weeks and were later expanded in the 1960’s to fourteen weeks (Johnson, 1980). At this time the training consists of two nine week segments separated by a two to twelve month interim period. Class size for the second segment is limited to six students.

Prerequisites for training include completion of a basic Rolfing series, a basic Rolfing Movement Integration series, usually a college degree, and completion of the Foundations of Bodywork program or demonstration of equivalent education. The Foundations program is offered through the Rolf institute and consists of four weeks of classroom study and eleven weeks of home study. It is designed to prepare candidates in anatomy, physiology, kinesiology, psychology, and massage.

Within three to seven years of the basic Rolfing training, a practitioner must complete the Advanced Rolfing Training. Rolfers who have completed this six week program are certified as Advanced Rolfers. The prerequisites are a minimum of three six-day Rolfing workshops.

There are no permanent, residential faculty at the Rolf Institute. Faculty are geographically dispersed and all of them are in private practice. Classes are taught by an instructor and an assistant. Often classes are taught in the city where a particular instructor lives, e.g. Santa Fe and Phoenix, rather than at the Rolf Institute in Boulder. Classes are also taught in Europe, Brazil, and Australia.

The reasons for the brevity of classroom training are both economic and logistical. Training is expensive for the student to attend and for the Institute to conduct. With no substantial endowment to draw upon, the financial history of the Institute has been tumultuous. Instructors teach at a certain financial sacrifice and weeks spent teaching disrupt their Rolfing practices. Although it has been suggested at Board and faulty meetings that creation of a full-time faculty at the Boulder school is extremely desirable, there are no available funds and faculty members have expressed considerable ambivalence toward this idea. In my opinion, the geographic isolation of the faculty from one another and their part-time status create a significant barrier to the development of the work.

The Institute is administrated by an executive director and an elected Board. 1991 has been the first year that a non-Rolfer has been elected to the Board. I believe that having a Board filled with only Rollers defeats its oversight purposes and it is my understanding that this is a highly unusual practice (J. Walter, personal communication, March 1991). Another unusual feature of the Institute is that while technically, the faculty are governed by the Board, in practice, they hold a high degree of political power with the membership.

In 1981 a standards of practice document and a code of Ethics were adopted by the Rolf institute (appendix). Ethics committees were established in each of eight geographic regions. Currently, a regional ethics committee consists of two to five Rolfers. Decisions of regional committees can be appealed to the International Ethics Committee of the Institute.

Identity and Social Responsibility

I have described the history of Rolfing in order to offer a sense of who we are and what we aspire to be. These are some well-known statements of our aspirations: Rolfing is something new in the world, profoundly concerned with human potential and transformation (Rolf, 1977). Rolfing is a school of inquiry into the relationship between human beings and gravity. Rolfers are educators who teach a client something of “the potential inherent in his or her structure.” (Code of Ethics, p. 2).

Many ethical questions arise from this vision of ourselves. Does the reality of what we do correspond to what we wish to be? Does Rolfing actually produce the results that we claim? How can we insure the informed consent of our clients when for most of them, our work is such a departure from the familiar?

Mythology vs. the spirit of inquiry

Ethics must begin with honesty. Rolfing’s deepest ethical issue is the unspoken conflict between the mythology of Rolfing and the actual experience of Rolfers. We have good reason to believe that Rolfing benefits most of our clients. Yet every Rolfer encounters failures: the painful back that does not improve, structural changes that do not occur, the client whose symptoms worsen.

The myth of Rolfing is that rather than simply moving someone along a continuum of change, ten sessions of Rolfing should transport a person into a special category-they are “Rolfed.” According to this myth, Rolfers should be able to precisely “see” even extremely subtle body structures and body changes. If a Rolfer fails, it is not because of the inadequacy of Rolfing theory or training, it is because of the inadequacy of the Rolfer. In my opinion, allegiance to this myth and a collective inability to openly discuss our personal limitations and the limitations of the work have been at the heart of two decades of internal conflict at the Rolf Institute. This myth has perpetuated insecurity among Rolfers and stifled the development of the work.

The myth has been with us from the beginning. In 1962, Ida Rolf postulated that, “Actually the original manipulation in this programme is purely for the purpose of removing restrictions so that the body can move in accordance with its structure. Once the body knows its appropriate movement, manipulation becomes superfluous.” (p.14). As a description of an ideal, I like her remarks very much, as a statement of practice they are untenable. I have never seen a human body that has reached the state of grace that she describes.

Ida Rolf admonished Rolfers not to take clients much past ten sessions because then the somatic issues become too nebulous (Rolf, 1978). This admonishment is not consistent with the experience of Rolfers. According to a 1991 poll, ten sessions of Rolfing do not always make adequate changes, “For most Rolfers, a substantial percentage of their client load consists of post-10 and ongoing work.” (Newton, 1991, p. 47.)

There are many other examples of the disparity between the mythology of Rolfing and the actual experience of Rolfers. The most significant is that, as a group, Rolfers cannot support claims of being able to “see” fascial structure and the effects of Rolfing. This ability to “see” is supposedly the cornerstone of the training of Rolfers. The 1991 poll, however, indicated that “There was a sense in classes of not being able to say ‘I don’t see that.’-of going along but not really seeing for themselves.” (Newton, 1991, p. 47.)

While there are many studies documenting the benefits of Rolfing, there only two validation studies of the methodology of Rolfing. A validation study might ask, for example: To what extent do different Rolfers agree when assessing what should be done in a Rolfing session? Or, can Rolfers identify how many sessions of Rolfing an unfamiliar client has had?

In the first of these validation studies, Richard Carrera (1974) presented experienced Rolfers with video taped sequences of Rolf and un-Rolfed people. The Rolfers were unable to distinguish Rolfed subjects from un Rolfed subjects with a reliability much greater than chance. The Rolfers performed no better at this task thangroup of judges whose only exposure to Rolfing was a one hour lecture.

In a 1987 study, Wolf Wagnei showed Rolfers before and after pictures from four groups: 1) subjects who had received a session of Rolfing 2) subjects who had received a Reik treatment; 3) subjects who had received a massage; 4) subjects whose hair and underwear had beer rumpled, but who had no treatment He reported three results:

1) “Rolfers can in general recognize the photographic change: when confronted with the photographs of a Rolfing session and a session of another method on the same person. (p. 6);

2) Rolfers were not able to distinguish the results of a Reiki session from Rolfing between different subjects;

3) Rolfers were significantly able to distinguish Rolfed subjects from those who had received no treatment.

Although the third finding o! Wagner’s study contradicts the results of the Carrera study, taken together, these two studies suggest that we should not be too confident of our ability to “see”.

The studies undermine the absolutist myth that I have been discussing. A decade ago, Don Johnson, a former Rolfer, railed against this kind of absolutism (Johnson, 1980). In an article, called Somatic Platonism, he accused Rolfers of seeing what we believe we should see, rather than what is, and of being procedurally rigid. It was easy to rebuke Johnson’s strident tone, but the issues he raised have never been fully addressed by the Rolf Institute.

I disagree with Johnson’s argument that Rolfers are trying to impose an ideal form on human beings. I think that in fact, we are trying to evoke something that is natural and implicit in human bodies. However, I agree with Johnson that as Rolfers, we have been rigid in our methodology. This is a consequence of being uncertain about exactly what it is in our work that produces our desired results (Wagner, 1991).

This is reflected in the contradictory statements of the Standards of Practice. In the preamble, it states, that Rolfing is “defined primarily by intention rather than techniques.” Later, it asserts that “Rolfing is initiated by a standard series of ten sessions … By following the standard outline of ten sessions, Rolfers provide clarity and continuity in Rolfing for their clients, their colleagues, and the public.” (section III, p. 3.) In short, the only way that we have of assuring ourselves and the public that “Rolfing” has occurred is to insist that the practitioner perform ten sessions of Rolfing.

A diversity of methods directed towards similar goals at the Institute would demonstrate a robust spirit of inquiry. This diversity does not exist. In fact, although Ida Rolf recognized that there could be many methods of structural integration (Rolf, 1977a), divergent points of view have usually been met with criticism, if not outright hostility.

The schism between Judith Aston and the Rolf Institute is a case in point. This might have been inevitable, but the faculty exacerbated the conflict. Gael Ohlgren (Ohlgren, 1991), a faculty member, recalls that Aston wanted to explore work using gentle touch and departing somewhat from the Rolf template of the Rolf Line. “Judith was getting impatient, she wanted to change her training; it’s a long and arduous process getting agreement from the faculty …it wasn’t about Judith and Ida (Rolf] fighting. It was about Judith wanting to explore the things that she was tracking and the faculty saying, ‘Hold it! Slow down!'”(p. 8.)

In 1991, a large faction of the Rolfing teachers resigned from the Institute to form a separate organization, a second Guild for Structural Integration (GSI). While there were many long-standing personal conflicts involved, the dissenting group held that the ten-session recipe is sacrosanct. Jan Sultan, one of the faculty who remained with the Institute, writes that “the body must be what we come-to understand, to the extent that is possible, rather than the recipe.” (Sultan, 1991).

In 1989, the faculty resolved to create a receptive forum for its members to discuss with one another their doubts about their personal abilities and about the work. In the opinion of the organizational consultant who helped them come to this resolution, they have not fulfilled it (J. Walter, personal communication, November, 1991); I share this opinion. The geographic separation and in frequent contact between faculty members is a severe obstacle (Ohlgren, 1991). This is one of the most pressing issues for the Institute. I believe that we need to actively solicit open discussion and exploration of our limitations. In their iconoclastic, sporadically published Notes on Structural Integration, Hans Flury and Wolf Wagner have pioneered this kind of open inquiry among Rolfers. The response of the membership to Flury and Wagner’s invitation to participate has not been overwhelming-of the 22 articles published in Notes since 1986, Flury and Wagner have contributed 19. Only one faculty member has contributed an article.