"This story of perceptiveness, of intelligence and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice." Nikolaas Tinbergen, 1973 Nobel Prize for Medicine/Physiology
F. M. Alexander was born in Wynyard, on the northwest coast of Tasmania, Australia, in 1869. At a young age he became passionately interested in acting and reciting, but was plagued by a tendency to become horse and lose his voice when reciting. He eventually consulted a doctor who told him to rest his voice before performing. However, during one important performance, before which he had rested his voice for two weeks, he again lost his voice halfway through the performance. Extremely distressed, Alexander went back to the doctor, who could only tell him to rest his voice again. Alexander, however, asked the doctor a simple but important question: if his voice recovered when he stopped speaking, and got worse when he recited, must he not be DOING something that caused him to lose his voice? The doctor said he supposed so, but had no advice to offer.
Alexander left the office, determined to discover the cause of his problem on his own. By assuming responsibility for his problem, Alexander had taken the first step on the long path which eventually led him to his discoveries. He spent several years observing himself with mirrors, watching what he did as he recited or performed other movements and experimenting with different ways of reciting. As time went on, he observed that when he recited, he had a tendency to contract his body, beginning by retracting his head back into his spine. After further observations, he learned that this tendency existed, at a more subtle level, when he decided to perform any activity. He also learned, however, through more time and more experiments, that there was a lengthening, expanding pattern of response which he was able to elicit in himself. This expanding pattern represented the recovery of the natural, biological engagement of the postural muscles of the body.
He gradually discovered that his problem was more subtle than just learning how to recite with the "lengthening" pattern which he had discovered. The problem was that the idea of speaking, or of "doing" anything, automatically stimulated a pattern of excessive neuro-muscular tension which involved his whole psycho-physical self, not merely his voice or whatever part was being focused on. The only way to change his pattern of response was to learn not to respond automatically to the idea of doing an activity. He had to consciously maintain the more open pattern of response that he had discovered, in his whole psycho-physical self, in the face of a stimulus that ordinarily caused an automatic response of tension and strain. Because the idea of “doing” stimulated the wrong response, he could not focus on how to “do” an activity “correctly:” instead, he had to focus on preventing the wrong response. He discovered that the only place we have a potential for freedom from our habits is in this space between a stimulus and a response. The result of these experiments and observations became what is now called the Alexander Technique. The ability to work at this deep level of ourselves, a level at which "mind" and "body" are not separate, is what sets the Alexander Technique apart from other approaches to our "mental" or "physical" problems.
Eventually, he not only corrected the problem that was causing him to lose his voice, but had raised his general level of health and functioning and learned how to free himself from the slavery of subconscious reactions. His years of investigation were referred to by NikolaasTinbergen, in his 1973 Nobel Prize speech for Medicine/Physiology: "This story of perceptiveness, of intelligence and of persistence, shown by a man without medical training, is one of the true epics of medical research and practice."
As he continued to develop his discoveries he learned how to teach them to others, and soon he moved to London, where his reputation grew among doctors, actors, thinkers, and writers of his day. Doctors such as Peter MacDonald, who later became chairman of the British Medical Association, endorsed his work. A group of physicians wrote to the British Medical Journal, suggesting that his principles be included in medical training. Thinkers such as Aldous Huxley, John Dewey, and George Bernard Shaw took lessons with him. A number of famous scientists, among them Sir Charles Sherrington, winner of the 1932 Nobel Prize for medicine, also endorsed his work, seeing it as consistent with scientific discoveries in neurology and physiology. The Alexander Technique today is taught in a wide variety of academic and institutional settings around the world, and is recommended by many doctors as the best approach to chronic, musculo-skeletal problems.
