Naming the line of descent
Ida was meticulous about intellectual debt. In her September 1974 Open Universe lecture at UCLA, with Valerie Hunt's electromyography research already presented and the room primed for talk about energy, she paused to do something her audiences rarely heard her do: she named her sources. The chain runs from Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American founder of general semantics, to Gaston Bachelard, a French philosopher of science who had been a trustee in the general-semantics group, to Sam Bois, the French-Canadian who translated Bachelard's papers into English, to Ethel Longstreet, who had presented the material in Ida's class the previous week. Ida placed herself at the end of this line — not as originator but as inheritor. The naming mattered. It signaled that the framework she was about to deploy was not her invention, and that Structural Integration's claim to operate in a world of relationships had philosophical pedigree.
"There's another possible option here. Mrs. Longstreet gave you a fleeting glimpse of it. At the time she spoke, she acknowledged the line of descent of this way of thinking. It runs Korzibsky Bachelore Bois, and she delivered it to us Longstreet. I'd like to send a special thanks to Doctor. Sam Bois, who made it available and known in the English speaking world. Had it not been for Doctor. Sambois, they'd still be hanging on to it over in France."
From her 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, naming the chain of transmission that brought Bachelard to her:
The naming was characteristic of how Ida handled influence. She rarely positioned herself as an original thinker in epistemology — she was a research chemist by training, a Barnard PhD of 1916, comfortable in the laboratory but always borrowing her philosophical frame from people she trusted. Bois in particular she singled out. Without him, she said, Bachelard's work would have stayed in French. That kind of acknowledgment, in front of an audience of UCLA students and practitioners, was Ida's way of teaching that intellectual honesty was part of the work. She made the same point in a 1976 advanced class in Boulder when she scolded students for not knowing whose shoulders they were standing on.
"And the books never integrated it, because they never had the idea that a body was one. This is a random notion. Anybody know where the idea of a whole man came from? Very nice place. No? No? He do that? No. It came from the man Jan Smuts. He was the Governor General of South Africa. So again, it's like the idea of the Tarot practice that I was giving you in the last class. You people should know to whom you are indebted to. I mean, this is the job of an educated person, to know where ideas come from."
From her 1976 Boulder advanced class, pressing students on the duty to know where ideas come from:
The five-stage profile
Bachelard's epistemological profile maps five stages by which humans organize incoming experience into knowledge. Ida taught it again and again, most fully in her 1974 UCLA lectures and again in the 1976 Boulder advanced class, and her teaching version was always built around the same vignette: a little girl walks to the edge of the lake, sticks her toe in, and declares it cold. That is the first stage — primitive, immediate, the felt experience reported as the world's fact. Her older brother says, who says it's cold, and fetches a thermometer. That is the second stage — measurement, the linear grid laid over experience, the world reported through an instrument. The third stage is the world of Newton's apple — cause and effect, one cause, one effect, logical explanation. The fourth stage, the one Ida wanted her practitioners to live in, is the world of Einstein, of relativity, of relationships between phenomena as the determinant of outcome. The fifth is intuitive and harder to name.
"There was a man. He may still be an Islam. He was a he was a French professor in one of the French universities. I think Leo. His name was no. I'll think of it in few minutes maybe. But, anyway, he was a member of the group who worked with Kozipski. He was at one time a trustee, I think, of the generalist group. And he went home to France, and he sat down and he thought. And what he came up with was the recognition of the open ended process, which is thinking, which is analysis, which is evaluation, which is an attempt to get the meaning of something that you are seeing or you are experiencing. And this is called the epistemological profile."
From a public RolfB tape, Ida walking through the profile as a teaching device for evaluating any line of thought:
The vignette of the little girl and the thermometer was Ida's hinge between the first and second stages — between primitive perception and instrument-mediated measurement. She used it as a teaching joke but also as a serious indictment of the science of her own time. Ninety percent of doctors, she said, were still working in the second stage. The thermometer had become the world. Whatever the instrument reported was reality, and whatever the instrument could not measure did not exist. This was the position Ida had to fight against constantly. Valerie Hunt's electromyography research, which appeared throughout the 1974 Healing Arts lectures, was Ida's strategy for meeting second-stage critics on their own ground — give them a measurement, then ask them to come further.
"First is the view of the primitive man, and is the view of the child, children throughout the world, namely that that which he experiences is necessarily the fact. The original illustration of this was a little girl who goes down to the lake, and she sticks her toe in, and she says, Oh, it's cold! And nothing and nobody could persuade her that it isn't cold. It's maybe 80 degrees or 85 degrees, only her temperature is up at 98. And this is that element of primitive thinking which we are all dealing in our own minds, to tell you the honest truth. The second category you see is let's measure whether it is cold. Thank you, Bob. Let's measure this. Let's analyze it. And for this purpose, man develops various and sundry assistances, machines. Now, this also, this is a linear grid, as Wernherhardt expressed it, this is a linear grid which is laid over experience, and that's all it is. But it is the second area of this five area spectrum which Mr. Bachelard postulated."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, recapitulating the first two stages of Bachelard's map:
The third stage, in Ida's teaching, was Newton's. It was the stage of cause-and-effect explanation, of logical laws, of one cause producing one effect. Ida treated this stage with more respect than the second — at least it sought explanation rather than mere measurement — but she was still clear that it was not where Structural Integration lived. The work could not be reduced to a single causal chain. There was no one thing the practitioner did that produced one effect. The body did not obey Newtonian logic. The shift to the fourth stage was the shift Einstein had forced on physics in 1905, and Ida's claim was that Structural Integration was a fourth-stage practice in a culture still dominated by third-stage explanation.
"courses, college physics. That there you have a phenomenon which goes out and it looks for logical explanations to account for it, and it considers that that logical explanation makes it a thoroughly scientific something. Mr. Newton and his apple lived in this world. There is a cause in this world and an effect. There is one cause and one effect in this world, and only one cause and one effect in this world. And then you see, as Bacheloren's original paper said, It's not enough. We have to go on. There must be more. It isn't That is another linear world. As you see, most of us do a lot of skating back and forth along this spectrum of these various areas. We then, however, we tend, however, to live and think predominantly in one area. And if you'll examine your own thinking, you will probably find that you are predominantly thinking in one of these areas that I have described. Maybe not. Maybe you're a fourth conventional person. Maybe you are a raffle."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, situating Newtonian cause-and-effect as the third stage and naming its limit:
Relationship as the determinant
The fourth stage was the doctrinal payload of the whole framework for Ida. It is where she located the work. The fourth stage, in Bachelard's analysis, is the stage at which a thinker recognizes that relationship between phenomena — not the phenomena themselves — is the determinant of meaning. This is what Einstein's relativity had brought into physics, and it was what general systems theory was now bringing into biology and into the human sciences. Ida's claim was simple and consequential: a practitioner of Structural Integration spends the working day in this fourth stage. The practitioner is not adding chemical X to produce result Y. The practitioner is restoring relationships between fascial sheaths, between body segments, between the body and the gravitational field. Outcomes follow from the quality of those relationships, not from the quantity of any single intervention.
"In the analysis of men's thought called the epistemological profile, which was postulated by Doctor. Bachelard, the postulate is made that at a certain point in understanding his world, relationship becomes the determinant. Not the fact itself, not the datum, but the relationship of one fact to many other facts. This is the something new which has been added to our world of thinking in this century."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, the central claim that relationship — not the datum — is the determinant:
Ida pressed this point hard because it changed what counted as a successful practitioner. In a measurement-stage culture, you proved your worth by producing numbers — degrees of cervical flexion, pounds of force, before-and-after photographs reduced to angles. Ida was not opposed to measurement; she invited Valerie Hunt and Julian Silverman to bring their instruments. But she insisted that the instrument could not reach what the practitioner was actually doing. What the practitioner was doing was reorganizing a set of relationships, and the practitioner's sophistication was measured by the quality of their attention to those relationships. In the 1973 Big Sur class she made this explicit by walking the students through the word "structure" itself.
"Structure wherever you use the word structure, the next time you use the word structure, look at it. See whether you aren't always talking about relationship. See whether you can ever talk. Use the word structure and be talking about something other than relationship. And every time you use the word structural integration, You are talking about the relationship between various gross, unitary parts that fit together to make the aggregate that we call the man. Now many of you are aware of the fact that the various parts of the body operate on energy, with energy, by energy, creating their own energy, taking in their own energy. They are individual energy machines."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, parsing the word "structure" to expose what it always means:
The move from third to fourth stage was, for Ida, the move from a closed universe to an open one. A closed universe is the universe of Newton — bounded, fully describable by a small set of laws, in which every effect has its accountable cause and every measurement can in principle be made. An open universe admits that the systems being studied are too many-dimensional and too entangled with the observer for any closed description to be adequate. The body, in Ida's understanding, was an open universe. It was a collection of systems whose behavior emerged from their relationships, not from any internal essence. This was why she insisted on calling the lecture series Structural Integration and the Opening Universe rather than the closed-universe framing her medical colleagues would have preferred.
"Open and closed universes have certain other qualities significant to us. Open systems tend to be a minimum entropy situation, a minimum of disorder, a minimum of disintegration. Because they are complicated structures. And this complicated structure requires that energy be added or put in constantly to maintain its complication. An open universe can be maintained at a distance from the equilibrium point in what physicists call an improbable state by that continuous addition of energy. None of this is true of the closed universe. Man is not a closed order, not even in purely biological terms. The biological man must be looked at as a collection of systems, not of atomistic aggregates. This in itself takes him out of a closed universe. You can't keep collections of systems in a closed universe. The characteristic of such systems is that relationship is the determinant of what you get out of it. Described in these words, life is not a substance, it is a process. And the determinant is relationship. And I hope that your speaker, Mrs. Longstreet, when she goes into this at a later point, will give you the sense of wonder that I always get as I look at the shifting of dimensionality in approaches to life, because this understanding of dimensionality came through the work of Korzybski, was initiated through the work of Korzybski, shall I say. And I hope she's going to go into that in sufficient detail for you to have that wonder. But this process world, this relationship world, is the world, the stuff with which we deal in structural integration."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, characterizing the open universe as a non-equilibrium system requiring continuous energy input:
The production archive's cached response cites the following passage on this point. It is preserved here for the bibliographic continuity readers expect.
"If you are a raffle, you spend an awful lot of time in the day living in a world of relationships, trying to understand relationships between what you see and what you see. As we move on into the twentieth century thinking, we find a great many people doing their living in an area which is a fourth dimensional area. That fourth area, and you remember that it was originally brought into consciousness by Einstein's concept, is that area of relativity, that area of relationship existing between phenomenon, and this relationship, this relativity determining the outcome, the mutual expression that you are going to see as an expression."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, placing practitioners of the work in the fourth dimensional area of relativity:
Energy as a question of relationship
Once relationship was named as the determinant, energy itself stopped being a substance to be poured into the body and became a question about how the body's parts were related. This was Ida's most counterintuitive teaching, and she repeated it constantly in 1974 because the new-age culture around her insisted on treating energy as gasoline. Students would arrive from Werner Erhardt's est seminars announcing how much energy they had, and Ida would push back — what did they mean? In the Open Universe lectures she made the argument structurally: energy might just be another word for the right relationships, and order itself might be the operative variable. This is the move from Bachelard's fourth stage toward something more like a fifth.
"Perhaps it is this relationship which determines what we call energy. Perhaps it's relationship. Perhaps it isn't something that you pour in the tank like gasoline. Perhaps you have to restore relationships or create relationships in order to attain to energy. And while you're at it, give consideration to the fact that relationship is another word for order. It implies order, and it implies disorder. It implies the organization of what has seen in the Ralph body. It implies the disorganization of what Ralph has called the random body."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, redefining energy as a function of relationship rather than a substance:
Having dissolved energy into relationship, Ida pushed one more step. The spectrum of order-disorder — entropy in physical terms, integration-disintegration in human terms — was the spectrum along which an open universe could be navigated. The random body sits at one end of that spectrum. The integrated body sits at the other. The practitioner's job is not to add some mystical substance but to move the body along the order-disorder spectrum by reorganizing the relationships of its fascial sheaths. This reframing let Ida claim that the work was scientifically intelligible in twentieth-century terms without surrendering to the second-stage demand that everything be measured before it could be discussed.
" This idea of the spectrum of order disorder is on the way to a truly open this idea the spectrum of order dash disorder is on the way to a truly open universe. Here you have a clue to what Ralfas see as their role in a progression tow"
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, naming the order-disorder spectrum as the path toward an open universe:
The work this framework did for Ida was to give her a way to talk to scientists without conceding their epistemological frame. When Julian Silverman in the 1974 Healing Arts lectures argued that the changes brought about by Structural Integration could be described by the two laws of thermodynamics — that the body becomes more ordered and that its energy flows more freely — he was offering Ida a second-stage validation in third-stage scientific language. Ida accepted it gratefully but kept reaching for fourth-stage formulations because she did not believe the thermodynamic description captured everything that was happening. Energy and order, in her teaching, were aspects of a deeper question about the relationships among the body's parts.
The fifth stage and the limit of language
Bachelard's profile, as Ida taught it, did not end at the fourth stage. There was a fifth stage, harder to describe, sometimes called the intuitive or psychic stage, sometimes called the participating stage. Where the fourth stage knew that relationships between phenomena determined meaning, the fifth stage stopped treating the world as something out there to be related to and recognized the observer as a participant in whatever was being observed. In the 1974 Open Universe lectures Ethel Longstreet — Ida's longtime collaborator in teaching general semantics — laid this out at length. Ida's own treatments of the fifth stage were more elliptical. She wanted her practitioners to live there but knew she could not teach it directly.
"By this, he means from my semantic transaction, if I am an artist, a scientist, or anybody. I allow a hunch, a notion, a postulate to come to me. I accept it as mine, and I go ahead and use whatever other logics I want to. Deduction, experimentation, induction, testing, back and forth. If it works, I only say that at this point, this particular postulate gets me my results. And that's all. I don't take it as a law forever. There's another stage of a different order, stage five. Boyle calls it participating beyond these particular constructs, where understanding and logic and order seems secondary, where acceptance without understanding may be going towards the kind of humanness that he dreams of, that many of us dream of, Where asserting my rightness and my wisdom and my point becomes unimportant. Where categories and the cliches of our Western culture and of my own personal culture become secondary to the feeling that we can have together. For our fields at this particular stage five, we can come to through functioning at stage four. At stage four, I no longer see the world as going on out there."
From a 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture by Ethel Longstreet, Ida's collaborator, describing the fourth and fifth stages of Bois's reformulation of Bachelard:
Ida's own version of the fifth stage was more material. She placed it at the limit of language and at the threshold of what she called the energy body. In the 1974 Open Universe class she returned to an old Bragg dictum — that what science needs is not new facts but new ways of thinking about them — and argued that the move from fourth to fifth stage was such a new way of thinking. The fifth stage did not abandon relationship as the determinant; it dissolved the boundary between the observer and the relationship. For a practitioner, this had practical content. The practitioner's hands were not outside the relationship they were trying to organize. The practitioner was already inside the open system.
"Has taken a hold of this idea, which I think is a very useful measuring stick by which to look at ideas, in which by which to look at by which to evaluate how the other guy is thinking when he begins to present an idea to you. And then this is still an open ended system. This is not the last last way in which you can look at and get more information about your environment. And the final way is this way of the intuition, the intuitive perception, the psychic perception, the what's the most to most people, most even the top level of the generation, cannot control this area so that they can go into it at will and get information from it. Some people think they can. Most of them are not. What I mean to say is they're the far out people. They're the people who are not regarded by scientists as reliable sources of information. And we don't regard this area as contributing to our scientific information as of 1970. But you see what it is doing is beginning to swing the line all the way around on the spiral, ready to come into the first area on a higher level because this fifth area is an I am perceiving. When you say intuitively I know there is nothing there except a perception. It seems to me, and I it seems to me so vividly that I know that I know that this is so."
From a public RolfB tape, naming the intuitive fifth area as the swing point of the whole spiral:
The fifth stage was also where Ida's reading of Bachelard met her reading of Einstein, Bohr, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger. Throughout the 1974 Open Universe series, Ida and her collaborators recited the famous twentieth-century physicists' quotations as a way of unsettling the audience's third-stage common sense. Niels Bohr's claim that physics does not find out what nature is but only what we can say about nature; Heisenberg's claim that we observe not nature itself but nature exposed to our methods of questioning; Korzybski's reminder that whatever you say something is, it is not — these were all fifth-stage utterances dressed in fourth-stage language. They were what the participating observer had to keep saying.
"the third notion, the map is not a map of the territory, but a map of the mapper himself in interaction with the territory. Vois says this, the prism, P R I S M, for self analysis is our language and the logic we derive from it. We are immersed in a world of energy manifestations, out of which we abstract only a very small proportion. Werner Heisenberg these are all men of the last thirty, forty, fifty years, sixty years. We have to remember that what we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning. Well, we see human nature, in quotes, as seen through the lens of our common sense language. Schrodinger. Science is a fashion of the time, or as some have said, the errors of our time. And Suzanne Langer, got a woman in here. Artistic expression is an expression of ideas, constructs. The artist's ideas of what feelings are like, how they rise and take shape, grow, culminate like breaking waves, and spend themselves. Alfred Krzybski. Whatever happens, happens at the silent level."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe series, reciting the canonical twentieth-century quotations that frame the participating-observer doctrine:
Korzybski, Bois, and the discipline of epistemics
Bachelard reached Ida through Korzybski's general semantics, but the working framework she used in her classes was more often Sam Bois's reformulation, which Bois called epistemics. Where Bachelard had given the five-stage profile, Bois had built a discipline around it — a way of teaching people to notice what stage they were operating in and how to move across stages deliberately. Ethel Longstreet had studied with Bois directly, and in the 1974 UCLA series she laid out the distinction between three nested terms: episteme, epistemology, and epistemics. The distinction mattered to Ida because she was running a training program. She did not want her practitioners merely to think about epistemology; she wanted them to practice an epistemics — a discipline of noticing their own thinking in motion.
"Epistemics views the whole of humankind and each individual as organisms engaged in the process of evolution. It takes Homo sapiens as the only form of life that can influence the course of his own evolution. It has, for its objective, the knowledge, and the practice of the skills of awareness and self management. In a sense, this is a new science and a discipline. It's an attempt to translate into scientific terms, if you will, the wisdom of all time, including our own as the most advanced. Epistemics covers the whole range of man's activities in the arts, science, politics, administrative work, business transactions, and in person to person encounter, in family life, in education, and wherever and whenever human beings are functioning. And I grant you, it sounds so presumptuous. And I don't care. The work is not original in the research and data. As a methodology, it is the only one that I know of. And I'm going to give you the basis for the work we do. I'm talking about it now. And eventually I'll come to the importance of the work that Ida Ralf is doing. An attempt to jump into the twenty first century and to become aware of our options, our responsibilities, and the freedoms we have."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, defining the three terms episteme, epistemology, and epistemics:
Bois's contribution was to develop the logic appropriate to each stage. The first stage had signal reactions, undelayed and unexamined. The second had measurement. The third had deduction and induction, the great logical tools of Galileo and Newton. The fourth had a new logic Bois called abduction — the acceptance of a hunch as a working postulate, then the testing of that postulate with whatever other logics fit, with the explicit understanding that the postulate is never converted into a permanent law. This is, in effect, the logic of an open universe. It was the logic Ida wanted her practitioners to learn because it described how the work actually proceeded — by the practitioner accepting a hunch about what a body needs and then testing it on the table.
"Of course, the great names here, Einstein, de Broglie, Dirac, Niels Bohr, the men who fashioned the bomb, the great physicists, the great astronomers. And here we come up with relativity. We come up with participant observer. We come up with indeterminacy. We go back to something unknown as doing what we don't know what, and we say, become at ease with this. Become at ease with this. Become at ease when for thousands of years we have looked for regularity, we have looked for security, we have looked for little change and something I can really depend on. And now the suggestion is easy does it. Hang loose. Things are in constant transition, you and everything around you. From this very shoddy little drawing, I want to give you the epistemological profile and give you some notion of how I see some of our now shock for some people. The future is not in it at all. It's right now. Let's take the forty thousand years to the first conceptual revolution, and it's called stage one. The people of stage one are those who take their own experience adequate to what is going on. What I feel is really so. I feel it and it's going on."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, locating the twentieth-century moment when relativity, complementarity, and indeterminacy displaced Newtonian certainty:
Ida treated this framework as practitioner training, not academic philosophy. In a 1974 Open Universe class, after Longstreet had introduced epistemics, Ida thanked her publicly and noted that her own work with Bois had shaped her approach to the work for years. The remark was a small one but consequential. It locates the doctrine of relationship-as-determinant not at the periphery of Ida's thinking but at its center, and it confirms that the chain of transmission from Korzybski to Bachelard to Bois was a working part of how Structural Integration came to be formulated.
"An introduction to non Aristotelian systems. After a while, this will become clearer. I know that Doctor. Rolfe, in her study with Doctor. Sam Bois, who has developed the work Epistemics following Alfred Korczewski, became a friend of Ida Rolfs. And she attributes a good deal of her approaches to the work of Rolfing to this work. Anyway, back to Krzybski. He said, the maps we make, the map is not the territory, or the word is not the thing. The map does not represent all the territory. And three, the map is not a map of a territory, but a map of the mapper himself, an interaction with the territory. Are you with me? I'd be glad to. It took me about eight years to understand what it was all about, so The map is not the territory. Whatever I say it is, it is not. The word is not the thing. And again, I'm using the verb to be, is, and that in itself becomes a trap. A trap in the grammar or the geography of language. The map does not represent all the territory."
From a 1974 UCLA Open Universe lecture, naming the three central propositions of general semantics that Ida absorbed through her work with Sam Bois:
Structural Integration inside an open universe
The payoff of the entire Bachelard apparatus, for Ida, was the ability to redescribe Structural Integration as a fourth-stage practice carried out inside an open universe. The body is not a closed system to be measured and adjusted; it is an open thermodynamic system maintained at a distance from equilibrium by the continuous addition of energy. The practitioner is not a third-stage Newtonian agent imposing a cause to produce an effect; the practitioner is a fourth-stage participant restoring relationships. The recipe is not a sequence of one-cause-one-effect interventions; it is a graduated series of moves through which a random body becomes ordered. This is the doctrinal architecture Bachelard's profile gave Ida the language to articulate.
"As you realize, this is a heretical idea, then I seem to have found my place as a chief of heretics who talks about the value of a structural body integration, who expects through integration of that structure to create an integrity of function, not merely a bodily function, but a purpose in the individual. Many of you have been exposed to the physical technique of structural integration, which is, as you know, a method of creating order in the body. But at this point and in this class, we propose to look not only at the world of physical flesh, which your Ralphing represented, but also at the world of ideas in which we, that is man, have been living, from which we have recognized the need for escape. We will look particularly at the establishment versus the world of fringe ideas, a burgeoning expansion of ideas. We've called these talks structural integration and the open universe. Perhaps we should have called it structural integration and the opening universe. Perhaps now we need to define some of our terms."
From the September 1974 Open Universe lectures, naming order as the keyword of the moment and Structural Integration as its physical instantiation:
Inside this framework, the work was no longer competing with medicine on medicine's terms. Medicine, in Ida's reading, was a third-stage discipline — a Newtonian search for causes and effects, a chemistry of one cause producing one effect. Structural Integration was a fourth-stage discipline, operating in a domain where the body's parts had to be related to each other appropriately for any function to emerge at all. The two were not at war; they were operating on different rungs of Bachelard's ladder. This positioning let Ida defend the work without claiming it could do everything medicine did, and without conceding the premise that the only valid knowledge was second-stage measurement.
"Now the behavior patterns that change a human are relatively easy to spot. They are inability of the various parts of that human to relate appropriately, to integrate, as we say. This is something which it takes us a while to see because we have been taught that a body is a body is a body is a body, this kind of notion has been going on down since the days of Aristotle. But we, the modern thinkers, say a body is not necessarily a body. A body is an aggregate, an aggregate of parts, and those parts, in order to properly function, in order to give you the best possible function, have to be related properly. And so we get to the place where we begin to see that structure, relationship, is something which we need to consider. We've never needed to consider it. We've never thought that we needed to consider it before. We've always thought that by introducing some alien substance, it, the alien substance, would do the job. Now we're getting to the place where we are beginning to accept the fact that we have responsibility for getting those parts of that body into a relationship which makes it possible for them to work. I wonder how many of you have ever looked at bodies in that light aside from the people who are- there are a few teachers of Rolfing around here."
From an early-1970s IPR lecture, distinguishing behavior at the chemical level from behavior at the level of structural relationship:
The fascia is the physical site at which the fourth-stage doctrine lands. Connective tissue is the organ of structure because it is the organ of relationship — it is what holds the body's parts in their spatial relationships to one another. Adding energy to the fascia by pressure changes those relationships, and the body's behavior changes accordingly. This is the mechanism by which a fourth-stage epistemology becomes a working manual practice. Ida walked her students through the connection repeatedly, often returning to the language of physics — energy added, structure altered, behavior modified — to keep the doctrine grounded in physical reality rather than metaphor.
"And the structure basically the word, where we use the word structure, we are referring to relationships in free space. Relationships in space. There's nothing metaphysical metaphysical about it. It's pure physics as it's taught in physics laboratories. Now the strange part about it is that that organ of structure is a very resilient and very elastic and very plastic medium. It can be changed by adding energy to it. In structural integration, one of the ways we add energy is by pressure so that the practitioner gives deliberately contributes energy to the person on whom he is working, to not energy in the sense that you let a position throw it around, but energy such as they talk about in the physics laboratory. When you press on a given point, you literally are adding energy to that which is under that point. And in structural integration, by way of an unbelievable accident of how you can change fashion structure, you can change human beings. You can change their structure and in changing their structure you are able to change their function. All of you have seen that structure determines function to a very great degree, to a degree which we can utilize."
From the 1973 Big Sur advanced class, naming pressure as the means by which energy is added to the fascia to alter relationships in space:
The body talks: abduction on the table
Bois's logic of abduction — the fourth-stage logic of accepting a hunch as a working postulate and then testing it — turned out to be a precise description of how Ida herself had developed the ten-session recipe. When students asked her how she had figured out which session should come before which, she did not give them a theoretical answer. She told them the body had talked to her. She had worked with an arm, and the arm did not fit the body, so she went further. She had worked with a foot, and the foot pointed at the leg. The recipe emerged not from deduction but from a long sequence of abductive postulates — hunches accepted, tested, retained when they worked, abandoned when they did not.
"Like, why what stage comes before another stage in structural integration? The body talks about it. That's all I can say. The body talks about it and those people who are in the audience, and I imagine there are a good many of them, a number of them, who have studied in my classes, know what I mean when I say the body talks about it. And if you will start with a program, start with your first hour, which I teach you, lo and behold, by the time they come in in the second hour, every one of those 10 people will show you the same mal symptom. Mhmm. Will show you that their legs are not under them. Will show you that their feet aren't walking properly. The body screams at you. So to stop it screaming, you get down there and you try to do something with it. And if you stop it screaming, then it begins to scream somewhere else and you do that in the third o. It's less than You just chase the scream until it has no place to stay. Until it has no other place to go, and then you tell them you'd kiss them goodbye and tell them it was nice knowing them. Now, aquaporin' screaming, There it has been said, and it varies with different people and different bodies, that rofting is Painful."
From a 1974 Structure lecture, describing how the recipe emerged from listening to what each session's body offered the next:
This was not a casual methodology. It was the explicit fourth-stage logic that Bois had named, and Ida had inhabited it for thirty years before Bois put a name to it. Every session was a postulate. Every body was a test. Every result either confirmed the postulate or sent the practitioner back to revise. The recipe that emerged was, in Bois's terms, a stabilized set of working postulates rather than a deduced set of laws. This is why Ida resisted being asked to prove the recipe in third-stage causal terms. The recipe had not been built by deduction and could not be reconstructed by deduction. It had been built by abduction, and its only validation was the next body.
"A revolutionary idea develops first as an intuitive perception in the mind of the pioneer or the innovator. At this point in in its life it is practically an art form. It is an art form perceived as a whole embodying a total idea demanding a total expression, and this is where Rolfing was in the days of Esselen, the days which I have been describing. This was an art form that caught the imagination of a lot of people. At the time of Fritz Perles and those other those other founding friends this fairly expressed its level. But like so many ideas this has progressed to a level where it is now being examined and analyzed and fitted with words suitable for the current idiom. In other words, the idea progresses, I'm talking about ideas in general and Rolfing in particular, The idea progresses from an odd expression into a scientific understanding and thorough analysis, and you can see to what extent this is beginning to describe what you are seeing around you here. Do I think scientific analysis is the answer to all problems? Definitely not, certainly not. I think synthetic integration is a far higher form, and this is what, by the grace of God, we will still be able to call integration. I think for one thing science, but science is not all that bad, you can't just dam it out of hand. For one thing it permits and it encourages replication."
From a 1971-72 IPR lecture, tracking the development of an idea from intuitive perception through analysis to synthetic integration:
Coda: the spiral closes
By the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida was teaching the epistemological profile as standard advanced-class material. Her presentation had become economical. She walked the students through the five stages quickly, asked who remembered them, and noted with mild exasperation that she had taught this material in Los Angeles a year earlier. The profile was no longer a discovery. It had become part of the practitioner's working vocabulary. What had once required citation of Bachelard, Bois, and Korzybski could now be invoked by name alone. This integration of the epistemological framework into Ida's standard teaching is the last evidence we have of how deeply it had shaped her thinking.
"And it's just a process of starting over again. It's a process. It's not a. Do all of you remember that epistemological profile that I usually give a fairly good Oh, Oh, for heaven's sake, I've forgotten all about that models come in at 10:15. Is it 10:15? It's 10:20. No worries. All right, just sit down for a minute and I will stop talking very shortly. Chuck, turn up the light under the water for the coffee and assume we're on another level. Do all of you remember my talks about the epistemological profile and what it is? Who doesn't? Now you see in that formulation that was made by this Frenchman, you differentiated these five different levels of how you can look at any situation and evaluate. Primitive And one is you look at it and you report that which you feel has a fact. A little girl goes down to the water and she sticks her toe in and she goes, Oh, it's cold! And then if you're still in your room, she'll come in and she'll tell you, The water is cold! It is cold because she feels it cold. She doesn't differentiate because she's too young. Now, brother who is older has learned that the next step in sophistication is to measure it."
From the 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida giving the profile its compressed final form for an advanced audience:
What Bachelard gave Ida was not a metaphysics but a measuring stick. The profile let her diagnose what stage of thinking any interlocutor was operating in, and then meet them where they stood. To a second-stage interrogator, she could offer Valerie Hunt's measurements. To a third-stage interrogator, she could offer Julian Silverman's thermodynamic formulations. To a fourth-stage interlocutor, she could speak directly about relationship as the determinant. To a fifth-stage interlocutor, she could speak — as she did with her closest students — about the participating observer, the energy body, and the spiral closing back on direct perception. The framework gave her a kind of intellectual mobility that few of her contemporaries had. It let her be a scientist and a heretic at the same time.
"He bases this particular construct on Gaston Bachelard's epistemological profile. Bachelard, a Frenchman, was a friend of Korzybski's. And this work is only an original systematizing of what is already known. It offers a valuable way of evaluating people, writings, our behaviors in light of this particular evolutionary plan. Are both these gentlemen written books or are they simply Yes, they have many books. Ball has five books: The Art of Communication as Creative Experience."
From the 1974 UCLA Open Universe series, naming Bois's framework as a way of evaluating people, writings, and behaviors in an evolutionary frame:
The Bachelard framework outlived Ida by decades inside the training. Practitioners who never read Bois or Korzybski still know in their hands that relationship is the determinant, that pressure adds energy, that the recipe is a tested set of postulates rather than a deduced law. The doctrinal vocabulary remains — order, integration, the random body, the structurally integrated body — and the vocabulary still encodes the fourth-stage move Bachelard's profile authorized. Whether Ida's later students could name Bachelard or not, they were thinking, when they worked, in a framework he had helped her build. That is perhaps the deepest tribute his profile could receive: it became invisible because it became the way the work was done.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA5 public tape — an extended autobiographical recollection of how she came to Bachelard through Sam Bois in Montreal, including her first encounter with general semantics through the little-girl-at-the-lake vignette. Useful for readers interested in the personal route by which the framework reached her. RolfA5Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ethel Longstreet, 1974 UCLA Open Universe series — three additional lectures (UNI_062, UNI_063, UNI_071) develop the epistemics framework, the participating-observer doctrine, and its educational implications at greater length than this article quotes. The full lecture series is the closest thing in the archive to a systematic exposition of how Bachelard's profile became practitioner training. UNI_062 ▸UNI_063 ▸UNI_071 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1975 Boulder advanced class (B3T12SA) — a sidebar in which Ida revisits the profile while discussing the "three cherries" image of integration in the tenth hour, and links the doctrine of relationship explicitly to what an advanced practitioner is looking at when they evaluate a finished body. B3T12SA ▸