PRIMORDIAL REGRESSION AND FULFILLING SEX : AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

PRIMORDIAL REGRESSION AND FULFILLING SEX :
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNT

Malcolm A. Brown, Ph.D.

About the Book

The book is essentially an autobiographical account of a happy monogamous relationship. It also portrays the sexual woundedness and emotional suffering of the author caused by his overzealous adherence to the beliefs of orthodox Christianity and its intermingling with a puritan style of family upbringing. It is also a portrayal of how one middle-aged couple found in passional sex an authentic royal road to emotional fulfillment and religious spiritual enlightenment.

The book is addressed to anyone who remains lost, skeptical, or cynical about what constitutes the finding of feeling fulfillment and religious enlightenment through sex. It is not a manual of how to perform sex correctly, nor does it even suggest any precise set of formulas that will cure sexual failure and dissatisfaction. At most it proposes a broad outline of preconditions for finding sexual fulfillment. Sex is too private, exclusive, and multi-dimensional a phenomenon to be dissectable into rules and techniques. What is suggested is that the Reichian concept of character-muscular armoring provides our best approach for understanding the failure to find feeling fulfillment through sex.

Fulfilling sex has little to do with how the genitals interact and behave during orgasm. It has everything to do with the letting go of one’s familiar boundaries of egoic self-identity. It is an adventure in total feeling/sensation boundarylessness. The primary prerequisite is the capacity to regress creatively backwards in time into both the personal and the transpersonal primitive past. This requires a psyche and an embodied soul that are fluidly self-regulated by the vegetative blood flow that runs spontaneously throughout the organismic totality during lovemaking. Chronic armoring is the enemy of such blood flow. Armoring must be slowly exorcized from the body and psyche before lovers can discover the primordial self-and-other healing waters of the Fountain of Youth.

The basic message of the book is to risk letting go of your usual self-identity and allow yourself to fall backwards in time as far and as hard as you can tolerate again and again until you find your own rigidities of armoring and then later your own armor-free God-likenesses. Be prepared to undergo many anxieties and frightening images from your primordial unconscious before you find your God and Goddess-likenesses.

About the Author

Malcolm Brown received his B.A. in Philosophy and Literary Criticism from the Boston University College of Liberal Arts in 1951 and his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of London in 1969. For the past 40 years he has lived and practiced as a body psychotherapist in London, Berkeley, Corfu, Northern Italy, and Atlanta. With his wife and colleague Katherine he has Co-Directed the European Institute of Organismic Psychotherapy located in Northern Italy from 1977 until 1993 and the USA Training Institute in Atlanta from 1993 until 2004. Together they have offered postgraduate training programs in Organismic Psychotherapy in the form of four-year international training groups to European and American professional psychotherapists. Malcolm is one of the founders of the European Association for Body Psychotherapy that held its first international congress in Davos, Switzerland in 1987. He is the author of The Healing Touch, LifeRhythm Press, 1990. The book has been translated into four European languages.

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CHAPTER ONE

A PROMISING FIRST EVENING

It was the year 1971. I was 42 years old. I had come to Atlanta from my residence in Berkeley, California to conduct a training workshop for professional psychotherapists in the art of body psychotherapy. I had just arrived at a church where I would be giving a public lecture on the topic of the mature man-woman relationship, even though I knew very little about the topic.

I was walking along one of the down-stairs corridors of the building an hour before the lecture began. As I walked along beside my male host we passed by a woman with her arms full of flowers. I hardly noticed her until she said, with an easy lilt to her voice, “You must be Malcolm Brown.”

I came to a full stop, turned toward her, and looked closely into her smiling face. She was wearing a simple but elegant, loosely fitting dress. Her eyes, limpidly expressive and greenish-brown, were looking directly into mine. The smile on her face could have been a child’s for its quality of earnestness. It was the face of an honest and guileless soul with eyes that seemed to radiate an inner integrity and simplicity.

I felt drawn towards, even magnetized by her face and its beauty: oval-shaped, compact, with a finely chiseled nose and prominent set of broad cheekbones, suggesting that she might be part Native American. Her skin was a creamy brown and seemed at one with her greatest feature, those limpid, large, wide-set, expressive eyes. Her lips were expansive and generously fleshed out, hinting of a developed sensuality. The body underneath her dress suggested a responsiveness that was soft and feminine. The slightly discernible curvature of her breasts promised average sized, compact bosoms.

After gazing into her eyes for no more than ten seconds I had to cut myself off from the intense vibrations she was beginning to stir up within me. This was no time to become involved with the mystery of an unknown woman, so I turned away from our eye contact and resumed my egoic outer stance. Yet some strangely whimsical impulse from within made me respond to her question if I was Malcolm Brown, “No, I am not.”

A twinkle in my eye must have given my pose away for she instantly responded, “Are you sure you’re not? You must be Malcolm Brown, because I’ve never seen your face before, and I know everybody around here.”

I appreciated her persistence, but I just grinned back at her in silence, turned away and walked down the corridor without looking back at her.

As I turned away she said: “I’ve come to hear your talk.”

* * *

After the lecture, refreshments were served in the same lower hall and corridor area where I spoke to the green-eyed woman three hours earlier. I found myself half-consciously looking around to find this mysterious woman who had spoken to me before the lecture, given me a ten-second spin towards the unknown, and whose name was still unknown to me. I got caught up into a long conversation with an attractive woman from Spain who had been formally introduced to me by a colleague of my host. The woman from Spain seemed unusually warm and appreciative of my lecture and after a long conversation I asked her for her phone number and she gave it to me. In the meantime I had forgotten all about my mystery woman.

About an hour later after everyone left I was waiting alone on the front doorsteps of the church for my host’s wife to take me to my hotel when the woman with the green-brown eyes came up to me. There was a brightly beaming smile on her face when she said that she wanted me to know how much she had enjoyed my talk, that she was basically in agreement with my position, and that she hoped I didn’t feel too overwhelmed by all the feminist women in the audience when they had disagreed with my precepts during the general discussion after the lecture.

An appreciative response to her supportive remarks would have been the civilized if not compassionate thing to do. Instead I largely ignored her remarks that seemed designed to protect me from the feminist attack. I did not want her protection, being the self-sufficient and self-assured phallic kind of male that I was. I was too focused upon her embodied presence, not her words. I was aware that her voice had a softness and a barely discernible throaty fullness to it that conveyed to me that she was a person who lived in her body and not just her head. More than her attractive voice, her eyes once again dominated the foreground of my awareness for their winsomeness.