An Introduction

Chariclia Gounaris

As a matter of fact, feeling is of much more use than what they call “mind” when it´s right.
(F.M. Alexander)

The Alexander Technique is a practical technique dealing  specifically with the re-education of the sensory-motor system (kinesthetic perception), involving in the process a psychophysical  re-education of the individual. Improved co-ordination is primarily conveyed sensorily through the hands of a teacher.

You can’t tell a person what to do because the thing you have to do is a sensation.
(F.M. Alexander)

The technique was developed  by F.M. Alexander  (1869-1955) as a result of long-term empirical experimentation on himself to cure a recurrent vocal problem (loss of voice) that threatened his career as an actor and Shakespeare recitator. He describes the sequence of his observations and experiments in the chapter “The Evolution of a Technique” in his book from 1932 The Use of the Self.

In his foreword to this book the American philosopher John Dewey writes:“Those who do not identify science with a parade of technical vocabulary will find in the account the essentials of scientific method in any field of inquiry. They will find a record of long-continued, patient, unwearied experimentation and observation in which every inference is extended, tested, corrected by further more searching experiments; they will find a series of such observations in which the mind is carried from observation of comparitively coarse, gross, superficial connections of causes and effect to those causal conditions which are fundamental and central in the use which we make of ourselves.”

Alexander used to refer to his work in terms of “the practice and theory of my technique”  - with emphasis on the practice, not vice versa. In his four books spanning the years between 1910 and 1941 (titles available at www.mouritz.co.uk), he wrote extensively on human nature  as he encountered it in his experiments on himself and through the experiences gathered in teaching his technique to others. Especially his second book, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual, offers  exceptional insights  on the correlation between use, functioning, habit, on the one hand and, on the other, perception, feeling (Alexander’s term:“sensory appreciation”) and conception. In point of fact, the book was written in close co-operation with John Dewey and could suitably constitute the pragmatic anchorage of the Mygdal project.

Sensory appreciation conditions conception  - you can’t know a thing by an instrument that is wrong.
(F.M. Alexander)

The technique is now taught worldwide, mainly through individual lessons www.alexandertechniqueworldwide.com