Kitty Merrick Wielopolska Archives

In my memoir, The Scenic Route: A Way through Madness (coming out in the New Year), I devote part of a chapter to The Alexander Technique. In researching the technique, I came across the name of Kitty Merrick Wielopolska who was a student of the technique in the 1930s. I haven’t read her book, but it seems that it would be well worth adding to a collection of schizophrenia memoirs that have credited healing to a non-mainstream approach. In this interview, I also learned for the first time about a relatively recent psychotherapy (phenomenological psychotherapy) which my experience tells me shows great promise in breaking the habitual patterns of thought that Alexander termed a “misuse of the self.”

Never Ask Why

THE LIFE ADVENTURE OF KITTY WIELOPOLSKA (1900-1988)
Her experience with the Alexander Work, schizophrenia and the psychic state

Published by Novis Publications, January, 2002. www.novis.dk

(NOVIS is a small publishing company specializing in publishing literature on the Alexander Technique)

The following is from Joe Armstrong’s interview with Kitty that was published in 2001 several years after her death

From the moment I met Kitty (Catharine Merrick) Wielopolska in 1966 – over ten years before we began recording these stirring conversations about her struggle with schizophrenia 1 – I felt she was an extraordinary person. But after hearing for the first time in these talks about her many breakdowns and the inspiration for getting herself well that she found in the Alexander Work, 2 I realized that there were many more reasons why she was so very remarkable than I could ever have imagined.
While these conversations don’t claim that Kitty used the Alexander Work itself as a direct means to her recovery, 3 I believe they do show that her intensive experience of it had a substantial indirect influence on her ability to find her way to health. This is because the Alexander Work is based on the conception that it is impossible to separate “mental” and “physical” processes in any form of human activity, and it would therefore require us to regard a condition like schizophrenia not just as a “mental disorder.” It would also require us to take into account the “use” of the whole person when diagnosing the disorder and searching for ways to treat it. “Use,” in Alexander terminology, refers to our combined manners of responding, moving, and thinking as they are manifested in our overall behavior at any given moment, whether the behavior is governed subconsciously by our habits or is consciously guided by our chosen intention.

With that in mind, it’s very interesting to read that at least one branch of psychiatry has recently been taking a psychophysical approach to schizophrenia and is focusing on the same area of concern that F.M. Alexander found to be central in re-educating the use of ourselves as a whole. Phenomenological psychiatrists such as Shaun Gallagher are considering the possibility that the “voices” heard by people diagnosed as schizophrenic stem essentially from a breakdown in what he calls our “protentional function.” This governs our ability to “anticipate experience which is just about to happen,” in contrast to our “retentional function,” which governs how we “retain previous phases of consciousness and their intentional content.” Gallagher also says that our sense of “agency” in both motor action and cognition “depends upon Continue reading “A psychophysical approach to treating schizophrenia”

Later, I sent Dr. Stern an e-mail to inform her that I had deliberately stayed out of influencing Chris’s decision (not to go back on meds), in large part because I was tired of parenting him and that it was long overdue that Chris should learn to make his own decisions. I also said that in the unlikely event that Chris killed himself, that would be his responsibility, not mine, not hers and not Chris’s holistic psychiatrist. I added that, had Chris made the decision to go back on the meds, I had no intention of monitoring his intake as I did previously. The chances were high that, left to his own devices, he would be non-compliant with predictably disastrous results, but that’s a problem that I no longer wanted to deal with. I was tired of thinking for him. Dr. Stern remained unconvinced about the risk, but Chris and I had made our position clear.

We had escaped the medications but were back to the problem of Chris. If there are multiple reasons for a single event (Chris’s wobbly recovery or relapse – what is it?), then there must be multiple solutions. Chris could go through years of psychotherapy (as many patients do) or we could try to hasten his recovery by adding to the mix.

I have yet to personally encounter a psychiatrist who is forthcoming about any therapies outside of their own bailiwick that might help speed the healing process. I hit upon the idea of more Alexander Technique because I was encouraged by the overdue wellspring of emotions it may have provoked in Chris. There was another reason, too. In the 1930s, Kitty Merrick Wielopolska trained under F.M. Alexander and later wrote a book about her eventual recovery from schizophrenia using the Alexander Technique. It only made sense to me that diligent adherence to the Alexander Technique could produce remarkable long term changes in one’s life approach.

Chris needed a little convincing because he was wary of further perceptual changes. I tried the tell it like it is approach.

“Chris, do you consider yourself handicapped?” I asked him.

He looked startled. “Uh, no, not really, why?”

“I don’t see that you are handicapped, either, but you act handicapped, Chris. Other people may perceive you as handicapped.” I was specifically referring to his trouble entering a room, walking across a room, sitting down in a chair. Entering a room has always been problematic for him as he is so silent that it seems he just pops up out of nowhere. His noticeable recent problems, in addition to making an entrance, were that he didn’t seem to know what he was doing in a room. He pauses, walks a bit, pauses some more, reverses direction, etc. He stands while others are sitting, making it socially awkward. When he tries to sit down, it takes him a while to negotiate through the process. Knees bend, it looks like he’s going to position himself, and then he hesitates and loses the momentum. I used to think this behavior was due to the medications, but the problem persisted with varying intensity since discontinuing the medications.

I remain convinced there is a large element of acting to his condition. His negotiating his way through a room is also a stage management problem, is it not? Where people refer to schizophrenia as a particularly associated with highly creative people, I take that further to mean that they are also equally creative in the subtle manipulation of emotion. Please hear me out on this. Gary Craig, the founder of Emotional Freedom Technique and others believe that unresolved emotional issues are the main cause of 85% of all illnesses. Resolve the emotional issue and it is very likely that the physical problem will resolve itself. Therefore, what you see is something masquerading as something else, rather like acting. Some cancers, for example, have been know to reverse themselves when underlying anger is resolved.

Chris, I felt certain, was very, very angry.