The Korzybski sentence and where it came from
Ida Rolf received her PhD in biochemistry from Barnard in 1916 and spent the 1920s at the Rockefeller Institute. In the late 1920s the Institute sent her to Europe, where she sat in on Erwin Schrödinger's lectures in Zurich and began to suspect that human behavior was tied directly to body physics and body chemistry. Out of that period she also absorbed the work of Alfred Korzybski, the Polish-American author of *Science and Sanity* (1933), whose general semantics taught that the structure of language predetermines the structure of thought. The sentence Ida quoted for the rest of her teaching life — *if you start with Grandpa's premises, you come to Grandpa's conclusions* — is her compression of Korzybski's argument that you cannot reach a new place by reasoning more carefully from the old assumptions. You have to change the assumptions themselves. In her Pigeon Key soundbyte, she names him directly and uses the line to break open a student's question about why anyone would bother working with gravity at all.
"He says, If you start with Grandpa's premises, you come to Grandpa's conclusions. Now, Grandpa wasn't very happy, but he managed, because he was so darn busy, pushing the hole in the plow and so forth and so forth, that he couldn't remember how his back ached. But Grandson sits at a desk all day and he isn't that busy and his back is killing him, quote."
At Pigeon Key, pressed by a student named Dale on why the existing approaches to the body were not sufficient, Ida invokes Korzybski:
The image is precise. Grandpa is not a fool, and Ida is careful not to make him one. He is a man who had a workable set of starting assumptions for his life — physical labor, weight-bearing through the day, a body kept upright by use rather than by furniture — and those assumptions carried him through. He managed. The trouble is not Grandpa. The trouble is that Grandpa's premises produce, in his grandson, a different and worse body, because the grandson lives in a different world. The grandson sits. The grandson is not too busy to notice the ache. And the medical, chiropractic, and physical-education answers offered to the grandson are still operating on Grandpa's assumptions about what a body is. They produce, predictably, Grandpa's conclusions — which is to say, no exit.
Pittsburgh, and the cab driver who would not start from here
Ida liked the Korzybski line so much that she paired it, in the same Pigeon Key session, with a folk joke she had been telling for decades. The joke makes the abstraction concrete: a man drives into a small town and asks a local how to get to Pittsburgh. The local refuses to answer. Eventually he says, *if I wanted to go to Pittsburgh, I wouldn't start from here.* It is a stupid joke and Ida knew it was a stupid joke; that was the point. The premises you begin with determine the conclusions available to you. If the destination is Pittsburgh and you are starting from a town where Pittsburgh cannot be reached, the answer is not to drive faster. The answer is to be somewhere else when you begin.
"And he shouts out at a native walking along the sidewalk, Hey, how do I get to Pittsburgh? Pittsburgh? And the native doesn't say anything. And he shouts a little louder, Hey, I asked you how I got to Pittsburgh. And there's no answer. And finally he says, Hey, you, are you deaf? I asked you how I got to Pittsburgh. And the guy turns around and he says, Well, when I have a, If I wanted to go to Pittsburgh, I wouldn't start from here. Now, you see, you can talk about that story in terms of the Pittsburgh story, or you can talk about it in terms of Klauszewski's story. If you're going to start with Grandpa's premises, you're going to get to Grandpa's conclusions because grandpa was a pretty bright boy."
Still in the Pigeon Key dialogue, immediately after the Korzybski quotation, she tells the Pittsburgh story and draws it back to the Grandpa line:
The pairing is pedagogical. Ida had standing in front of her, at Pigeon Key and in Boulder and in Big Sur, a room of students who had been trained in chiropractic, in osteopathy, in medicine, in physical therapy, in massage, in dance, in yoga. Each of them had arrived with a set of premises already installed. The Korzybski quote — formal, attributed, philosophically respectable — gave her authority. The Pittsburgh joke — concrete, funny, repeatable — gave her students something they could carry home and tell their families when asked what they were doing with their summer. Both versions deliver the same argument, which is that the work of Structural Integration begins not at the body but at the question of what one is willing to start over with.
The teacher's job is to change the premises
In a 1976 Boulder advanced class, Ida laid out her own role as a teacher in the most explicit terms available in the archive. She was not, she insisted, primarily teaching a technique. She was changing assumptions. The technique would follow from the premises; the premises would not follow from the technique. This is one of her sharper teaching statements, because she names what she is doing while she is doing it — and she names it in the language of systems analysis, which by 1976 had begun to enter her vocabulary as a way to mark the difference between the world her students were graduating into and the world Grandpa had lived in.
"Therefore, as your teacher, it becomes my job to change some of those fundamental premises. And the fundamental premises that you were all brought up with was, if you do so and so, you get so. Because with this, it is there. Now the only way you're going to get further is by taking all of those premises and changing them. And you can't do it one by one and piecemeal. You gotta do it by way of systems."
Boulder 1976, in front of an advanced class drawn from chiropractic, osteopathic, and medical backgrounds:
There are two ideas locked together in that paragraph. The first is that Grandpa's premises produced if-then thinking — apply a treatment to a part, get a result in that part. The second is that the world her students were entering had moved past if-then and into systems thinking, where you cannot change one variable without changing all the related variables. The body, on the older premises, is a collection of parts that can be treated one by one. The body, on Ida's premises, is a system that has to be addressed as a system or not at all. The teaching point is not that systems thinking is fashionable. The teaching point is that the body actually does behave that way, and any practitioner who refuses to update their assumptions will be defeated by the body itself.
"There are people who have been trained in And what we're trying to do is to make some sort of an integration to get out of this level and up to someone new. How do you do that? Mr. Gorcevsky said, there's only one way to do it. You have to change your premises. If you're going to use grandpa's premises, you come to grandpa's conclusions because grandpa was really right, smart boy. And with the premises that he was working with, he got as far as they would take it. And there's"
In the same Boulder class, returning to the Korzybski line after a long teaching exchange about energy and the unique standing of her students within the broader healing professions:
The three premises that replaced Grandpa's
Ida did not leave her students with a critique and no replacement. In nearly every advanced class she taught, she required her students to recite the new premises out loud, until the recitation was automatic. The premises were three. The body is segmented. The body is plastic. The body is in gravity. These three sentences, repeated through the transcripts like a catechism, are the alternative starting points she had spent forty years assembling. Together they replaced Grandpa's working assumptions — that the body is a unified whole treated by chemistry, that its form is fixed after childhood, that gravity is the irrelevant background against which medicine operates. From the three substitute premises, an entirely different sequence of conclusions becomes available.
"You probably wanna know what structural integration is or what it was. Yeah. What structural integration is a system approach to changing the body. And we based on certain assumptions. The assumptions are, one is that the body is segmented, and second, the body is plastic. And the third assumption is that the body is always is in relation to gravity or is in gravity. So once we have those three assumptions, we can start the approach to the body. Well, why do you want to get pre assumptions? People have been in this world for an awful long time."
At Pigeon Key, Ida coaches a student named Dale through the recitation she required of all her advanced students:
Each premise reverses something specific in the inherited common sense. *Segmented* breaks the assumption that the body is one indivisible whole — Ida is asserting that the head, the thorax, the pelvis, and the legs are functionally distinct masses related to each other in space. *Plastic* breaks the assumption that the adult body is fixed — Ida is asserting that connective tissue remains modifiable across the lifespan. *In gravity* breaks the assumption that the body is operating in a neutral environment — Ida is asserting that the single most constant feature of the body's environment is the gravitational field, and that whether the body is supported by gravity or destroyed by gravity depends on how its segments are stacked. The three premises, taken together, generate the entire ten-session sequence. Without them, the sequence collapses back into massage.
"Now what you enumerated, but what you summarized is that set of premises which you are now or I am now or we are now coming up with as the different set of premises. But you see, you have to know why you want different premises. You have to make this clear to the guy that you're trying to convince that he's interested in structural integration. He doesn't care. All he wants is for you to get the pain out of his back. He's had that pain for ten years, and he's so sick of it. Can you get it out? But part of your job is a teaching job of teaching this guy why what you are going to do might get it out. Do I make myself really clear, Dale? Because, you see, this is a problem that everyone in this room faces."
Continuing at Pigeon Key, she gives the practitioner's homework — translating the new premises into a sales pitch the layman can hear:
Why the old premises failed
Ida's account of what went wrong with the older premises is historically specific. She located the rupture about a hundred and twenty-five years before the moment she was speaking — that is, in the middle of the nineteenth century — when chemistry as a science matured enough to synthesize biologically active compounds. From that moment, she argued, the entire focus of Western medicine swung toward the chemical school, and the structural school, which had operated for thousands of years before that, was simply forgotten. The mechanical understanding of the body did not lose an argument; it lost an audience. Ida's task, as she saw it, was to bring the structural premises back into the conversation at a higher level of sophistication than they had ever previously occupied.
"Is a very basic consideration which I just offered you. It is the basic consideration that makes all manipulative techniques something to be considered. You see, our dominant school of healing is not manipulation, as you all know. It's medicine. It works through chemistry. And the reason this is so is because the chemical school of healing came to its own about one hundred and twenty five years ago. I'm not going into this at this moment, but I will discuss it at some later date with you people. The chemical school came in and everybody was so enamored of it that it spread out in all kinds of directions. The mechanical school of healing that I'm talking about, the structural school went out at that time. It had been in for several thousand years, I don't doubt."
At Big Sur in 1973, lecturing on why the structural school went out of fashion:
The historical claim matters because it changes what the substitute premises have to do. If Grandpa's premises were simply wrong, you could replace them with the correct ones and be done. But if Grandpa's premises were the residue of a real and useful chemical revolution — one that produced antibiotics and anesthesia and modern surgery — then the substitute premises must do something more careful. They must restore the structural understanding without dismissing the chemical understanding. Ida was not anti-medical. She had trained as a research chemist at Rockefeller. Her quarrel with the medical school of her day was not that it knew chemistry but that it had forgotten structure, and had therefore handed her grandson a back he could not stand up in.
"as far as I know. And anytime you want to get into an argument with your medical through they'll realize that this is so. It is the fascial aggregate which is the organ of structure. 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."
Continuing at Big Sur, she names the basic claim of the structural school in physics-laboratory terms:
Posture versus structure: a premise hidden in a word
Ida had a habit of using the etymology of words to reveal the premises hidden inside them. Posture, she pointed out, comes from the Latin past participle of *ponere*, to place — it literally means *it has been placed*. The word itself encodes the older premise that body shape is something done to a person by an external agent, maintained by effort. Structure, by contrast, is a word about relationship — the way parts of a thing stand to each other in space. To shift from posture to structure is to shift from an effortful imposition on the body to a description of how its parts actually relate. The vocabulary change is also a premise change. You cannot say *structural integration* in Grandpa's idiom; the words do not work there.
"You talk about this beautiful structure, you are talking about the way the top relates the middle, relates to the floor, the shape of the ground. All of this is implied when I say, I was in a beautiful structure tonight. Structure, wherever you use it, is relationship, and it is particularly relationship of parts in a body. This constitutes structure. Now posture is something else again. And the boys that devised the word posture knew what that something else was because the word posture means it has been placed. It is the past participle of a Latin word, to place, and it means it has been placed. And when you use the word posture, you are saying it has been placed. Somebody has placed something somewhere. Somebody is maintaining the placement of something somewhere. Somebody is working to keep something placed somewhere. And I guarantee that there is no one in this room who doesn't know that in this day and age of the what is it? Nineteen twentieth century, last part of it, last quarter of it, that to keep any of these bodies in posture takes effort, constant continuous effort."
From the Topanga public talk, working the difference between two ordinary English words:
The example is small but the move is large. Every time Ida used the word *structure* in front of a class, she was performing the premise change. The students who walked in still thinking about posture — about maintaining a placement, about holding themselves up — had to be brought across to thinking about structure, which is to say, about whether the segments of their body would relate to each other in such a way that gravity could pass through without imposing rotational moments. The difference, she said, is the difference between effort and ease. Effort is what Grandpa's premise produces. Ease is what the new premises make available, if the structure is in fact assembled properly.
What Madame Mensendieck got wrong
Ida liked to use specific named figures from the early-twentieth-century body-mechanics world to show what working from Grandpa's premises looked like in practice. Bess Mensendieck — the Dutch-American physician whose system of corrective exercise reached Yale and several other elite American institutions in the 1930s and 1940s — was her recurring example. Mensendieck was, in Ida's account, a determined and capable woman who shared the goal of getting bodies out of dysfunctional positions. But her premise was that the body could be corrected by instruction and repetition: stand straight, do this exercise, come back next week. When the body did not change, the prescription was simply more of the same. The premise produced its own dead end.
"energy to go up to Yale University and to persuade those good old conservative New Englanders that they wanted to put this kind of a system into their physical education program. Now, Madame Mensindeep had a way of getting where she wanted to go. The thing is that she and I didn't see the same place as the same goal. I never knew. And when somebody came in with a curved curvature of the back, for example, Madame Mensenby thought that she could cure that curvature of the back by telling them to stand straight or to do such and such an exercise. The next week they came in and they looked just as bad, and she says, Well, go home and do it twice as many times every day. Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting."
In a 1976 advanced class, Ida revisits her contact with the Mensendieck system to show how Grandpa's premises sabotaged an otherwise serious effort:
The Mensendieck story is not a piece of malice; Ida and Mensendieck were both trying to do something the medical orthodoxy of their day refused to take seriously. The point is that goodwill is not enough. If the starting premise is that bodies are corrected by repeated instruction, the response to failure will always be more instruction. The starting premise has to change before the next move becomes available. Mensendieck's student would have needed someone to recognize that the curvature in her back was a structural matter in a gravitational field — that it could not be exercised away because the segments were already organized into the curvature, and the exercise was being performed by the curved body, reinforcing it. Without that premise, the work cannot land.
Grandpa's premises in the consultation room
Ida warned her students repeatedly that they would have to face Grandpa's premises not only in their own thinking but in every consultation. The person who walks into the practitioner's office with a ten-year backache does not arrive premise-neutral. He arrives with a fully formed account of why his back hurts and what would fix it. That account is almost always assembled from Grandpa's premises — that the pain is local, that it should be addressed locally, that some technique applied to the painful spot will remove the pain. The practitioner's job is not to argue him out of his account before working on him. The practitioner's job is to begin teaching, while working, why a different set of premises might actually produce the relief he came in for.
"But part of your job is a teaching job of teaching this guy why what you are going to do might get it out. Do I make myself really clear, Dale? Because, you see, this is a problem that everyone in this room faces. There isn't one of you that's going home on Tuesday, but is going to be asked, Well, what's this nonsense you're spending your time on? And you better have a dispenser. Otherwise, they won't let you out again. But this is the story. Now, from there, you go along and say specifically, we can get a different set of answers if we start with some different premises. And then you enumerate. Premise number one, the body is not a single thing. It is a summation of segments. Those segments are united by material which has a peculiar property, which is a private little gift of God to men."
Back at Pigeon Key, Ida tells her students what to say to the man with the ten-year backache:
Ida is making a tactical point as well as a philosophical one. A practitioner who works on someone for ten hours and never explains why the work was done at the foot in order to change the shoulder, or why the second hour returns to the pelvis the first hour began, will produce a confused client. The confused client will not be able to maintain the change, will not be able to refer other people in a way that makes sense to them, and will eventually drift back into the body Grandpa's premises predicted he would have. The teaching, in Ida's account, is what allows the work to stick. And the teaching has to be delivered in language the client can hear, which means the practitioner has to have done the premise change for themselves first, deeply enough that they can translate it into the layman's idiom.
Replication, science, and why the new premises must travel
One of the reasons Ida insisted so heavily on premise-changing was that she had decided, by the early 1970s, that Structural Integration could not survive as an art form transmitted only by personal apprenticeship. The work had to become teachable in some standardized way, or it would die with the first generation of practitioners. The clean transmission of a technique requires clean premises. If each new student had to reassemble the foundational assumptions out of whatever they had picked up from their previous training, the work would degrade with every generation. The Korzybski sentence, in this light, is also a curriculum problem: how do you guarantee that a new student starts where they need to start, and not where Grandpa was standing?
"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. And before the method can be taught replication must be possible. You all remember, I'm sure, hearing me the wail, the shortcomings of Rolfers."
On an IPR public tape from around 1971-72, Ida names the historical arc of any revolutionary idea and where Structural Integration sits within it:
There is a quiet admission in that passage. Ida was prepared to say in public that her own students often could not yet put a body back together. The criticism is not casual. It is connected directly to the Korzybski sentence: a student who has not made the premise change internally will continue to dismantle the body the way one dismantles a clock, expecting that when the parts are loose the whole will reassemble itself. It will not. The reassembly only happens if the practitioner is thinking from the start about the body as a system in gravity rather than as a stack of muscles to be unstuck. Without the premise change, the student can produce the appearance of work without producing the integration the work is named for.
The premises and the recipe
The ten-session series — what Ida and her students called the recipe — is the operational consequence of the substitute premises. If the body is segmented, you can work the segments in sequence. If the body is plastic, you can expect the work to hold. If the body is in gravity, the sequence has a direction: first hour up at the trunk and down at the legs, freeing the breath and the pelvis, then back to the supports underneath, then to the back, and so on, always working toward a stack of segments that will let gravity pass through cleanly. The recipe is not a fixed protocol imposed from above; it is what Grandpa's three substitute premises generate when you ask them what to do first.
"What does matter is you understand you have to lift that up off the pelvis to start getting mobility in the pelvis. Uh-huh. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth hour. Okay? Uh-huh. The second hour is a follow-up of the first hour. Uh-huh. It's just the second half of the first hour. Okay? And the third hour is the second half of the second and first hour. It's literally a continuation. I clearly I clearly saw, you know, last summer that continuation process and how and, you know, Dick talked about how, you know, the only reason it was broken into 10, you know, sessions like that was it because the body just couldn't take all that work. Couldn't take it right. But I just sitting on just trying to figure out how the hell she ever figured out that process, and then began to see it. What she did is what most of of us need to do more."
In the 1975 Boulder advanced class, Ida and a senior student walk through how the first three hours of the recipe follow from the premises:
Ida's premises also explain why the recipe could not be shortened. If the body were not segmented, you could not work it in segments. If it were not plastic, the work would not hold and you might as well stop after one session. If it were not in gravity, there would be no organizing direction, and the order of the hours would not matter. The recipe is what it is because the premises are what they are; change the premises and the recipe collapses into either a single massage or an infinite series. The Grandpa joke has, hidden inside it, an entire curriculum.
"It's the splinting compensating that goes on in the rest of the body, then giving rise to various symptoms etc. Etc. This is what is the predicament. Then the muscles begin to be used as structural That's right. Is right. And that is very well expressed. And I hope that got on the tape. Shall I repeat that Don said then the muscles begin to be used as structural components instead of motor components. Okay."
On the RolfA3 public tape, working through the additional premises the recipe depends on:
Premises about energy: the harder substitution
If the segmented-plastic-gravity triad was the basic substitution Ida required of every student, there was a further substitution she pushed for in her advanced classes — one that did not always travel as easily. She had decided, partly through her exposure to Schrödinger in Zurich in the 1920s and partly through her own laboratory background, that the body should be understood as an energy phenomenon as much as a material one. Mass was just a particular aggregate of energy. Gravity was an energy field. The body's relationship to gravity was therefore an energy relationship. This premise was harder to install because it crossed wires with the metaphysical vocabularies floating around Esalen and the Human Potential Movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Ida wanted the physics version, not the New Age version.
"And that is the set of generalizations that we name mechanics. And mechanics is actually a study, a registration of the laws masses behave in a gravitational space. Now there was a time, and again it's not that long ago, when we considered a mass as being a physical material something and that's what it was. But the days are changing and the idea which came in within this century that actually any material mass is a special aggregate of energy, this idea is beginning to come into consciousness and to be used by us to examine this sort of thing. And so all of a sudden we begin to realize that when we are talking about a man in an environment, we are talking about a material aggregate that is operating in an energy field, the field of gravity. And now we begin to have something new, something that we can begin to look at and say, we have here a new set of premises. Where will it take us? You'll remember, some of you I'm sure, that Mr. Klosebsky used to say, if you're going to work by grandpa's premises, you get to grandpa's conclusions because grandpa was pretty smart too. And if you're going to go further than grandpa went, you have to get some new ideas, some new premises. And here, you have them. Now there are a couple of other new ideas which you don't get just by looking at it, but you do get in terms of what comes out from what we do."
At Topanga, Ida pushes her audience through the harder premise change — from material to energetic descriptions of the body:
The energy premise was the one Ida watched closely because it was the one most likely to be misunderstood. She told her students that when she said *energy* she did not mean what some of them meant by the word — not the vague sense of vitality, not the chakra-mapping enthusiasm, not the laying-on-of-hands tradition. She meant energy in the sense it is measured in a physics laboratory: how much work the body has to do to accomplish what it is being asked to accomplish. A body operating on Grandpa's premises does far more work than necessary because its segments are fighting gravity instead of being supported by it. A body operating on the new premises does less work, and the *less work* is measurable, in principle, the way any thermodynamic quantity is measurable.
"Now you must understand if you are going to be promophis of Rolfing, you must understand what it is we're promoting. We are promoting energetic efficiency in bodies. I don't mean the kind of thing by energy that some of you are thinking of. I mean, it's not this, this, this, Oh, he's so energetic. Not that at all. It's the kind of energy as is measured in a physics laboratory. How much work does your body have to do in order to affect what it is that you're being paid to do. Something of an oversimplification, but I think you get what I'm doing. As we turned to come down here this morning here out in the rain, it's a well meaning young student jogging. I looked at him and I thought to myself, Well, he's got lots of goodwill, he's got lots of rage, but there was no way in which he transmitted the movement from his legs up into his torso. It just stopped right there. Was he doing what he was supposed to do? Namely getting blood and circulation and energy around in his body?"
In the same 1976 advanced class, Ida specifies what kind of energy she is and is not talking about:
The premise behind validation: Hunt at UCLA
Ida's insistence on premises grounded in physics rather than metaphysics had a practical consequence: she actively sought out laboratory measurement of what the work produced. By the mid-1970s, the kinesiologist Valerie Hunt was running studies at UCLA on subjects who had received the work, measuring electromyographic and electroencephalographic changes before and after the ten-session series. Hunt had received the work herself, and Ida cited her project repeatedly as the kind of validation the new premises invited. The point was not that the work needed scientific permission. The point was that if the substitute premises were correct — that the body is segmented, plastic, in gravity, an energy aggregate — then conventional measurement should be able to detect the changes those premises predicted.
"This validation is going on under Doctor. Hunt's direction, and as I know and as you know, she needs no introduction. It is noteworthy that Doctor. Hunt has herself had the personal experience of the Area 5 burgeoning, blossoming. But now, being a good scientist, she goes back to Area 2, the area of measurement for scientific evaluation. Up to this point, her pilot projects have seemed highly significant. We have every reason to believe that this project will lend itself to measurement. Her findings seem to be saying loud and clear that as a man approximates the vertical, that is ears over shoulders, shoulders over hips, hips over knees, knees over ankles, certain very significant changes occur in the kind of neuromuscular behavior, can and these changes can be registered and they can be recorded by electromyographic and electroencephalographic measurements. Ralfas in general are not sufficiently scientifically sophisticated to demand measurements. They're willing to settle with contour, with form, without with recognizing the outward form of contour."
In a 1974 Open Universe Class, Ida describes the Hunt project as the validation arm of the premise change:
This is the deeper bite of the Korzybski sentence. New premises are not merely a different way of talking. They generate different predictions. Grandpa's premises predicted that bodies, once formed, stayed roughly the way they were. They predicted that gravity was irrelevant to medicine. They predicted that the connective tissue was not worth studying. All of those predictions turned out to be wrong, and the new premises predict the opposite — that bodies are modifiable, that gravity is decisive, that connective tissue is the organ of structure. If the predictions hold up in the laboratory, the premises were the right ones to change to. Hunt's project, in Ida's hands, was the empirical follow-through on a philosophical move.
Coda: the premise-change as the work itself
What emerges from reading the Korzybski sentence across the years of transcripts is that Ida did not treat the premise-change as preliminary to the work. The premise-change was the work. Every hour at the table was, at the same time, an act of teaching — a demonstration that the body in front of her could be modified, that its segments could be related differently, that gravity could be made to support what it had previously deformed. Every consultation began with a client who arrived inside Grandpa's premises and left, after ten hours, occupying at least the beginnings of a different set. The hands-on technique was the proof that the new premises produced the conclusions they predicted. The folk joke was the dispenser the student could carry home.
"But you are living in a world where some of the people have learned systems analysis and they're not going to tolerate anything that is less sophisticated than systems analysis. Depends on where you want to be. If you want to be just another second leg of culture, it's easy to get to. But if you want to have something that you can really add to the culture and change the culture, it's not easy to get there. You've got to look at the what every thing that's in that environment. And is a fact of time. And this is part of the story of energy. This is about the first time, I think, that I've begun to understand and talk about premises. Why don't you once in a while come to my office? At least stay here while you're here."
Closing the 1976 Boulder advanced class, she returns to the premise-change as the deep agenda of her teaching:
The closing sentence of that passage is unusual in the archive. Ida rarely admitted that she was still working something out. Here she says that the 1976 class is about the first time she has begun to understand and talk about premises. After sixty years of work, including the chemistry training, the Rockefeller years, the European trip, Schrödinger, Korzybski, Fritz Perls, the founding of the Institute, the recipe, the advanced classes — after all of that, the explicit articulation of premise-changing as her actual task is something she is still finding the words for. The Grandpa joke is the popular form. The Korzybski citation is the formal form. The work itself is the demonstration. And the demonstration was still, in 1976, two years before her death, the thing she was teaching her senior students to learn how to deliver.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Big Sur advanced class 1973 — extended discussion of the historical eclipse of the structural school by the chemical school in the late nineteenth century, and the conditions under which the structural premises could return. SUR7308 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Topanga public talk — sustained exposition of the structure-versus-posture distinction and its grounding in the etymology of the two words, included as a pointer for readers interested in how Ida used vocabulary to perform premise-changes in real time. TOPAN ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Boulder 1975 advanced class — discussion of the recipe as continuation rather than discrete sessions, with student commentary on Ida's own decades of watching bodies as the empirical foundation of the substitute premises. T1SB ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Boulder 1975 advanced class — the anterior superior spine, the crest of the ilium, and Ida's argument that external structural organization is the projection of internal aesthetic understanding, a passage relevant to readers interested in how the substitute premises shape what a practitioner sees in a body. B3T9SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, Boulder 1975 advanced class — extended discussion of the tensegrity model as the next-generation premise her senior students were being asked to develop, and how to popularize it without losing its rigor. B3T11SA ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 advanced class on the seventh hour and the autonomic nervous system — the premise that there are flows in the body beyond the recognized fluid circulation, and the disclaimer Ida attached to her own speculative thinking about a finer body. RolfB5Side1 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfB6 public tape — extended dialogue with a student on the relationship between the finer body and the physical body, and the question of whether the body left to its own resources will find its own correct place once the practitioner has cleared the structural obstacles, relevant to readers interested in how Ida's premises about causation between subtle and gross bodies sat alongside the physical-mechanics premises. RolfB6Side2c ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 advanced class — discussion of regression after the ten-session series and Ida's insistence that what appears as regression is usually the differential rate of change between segments, a corollary of the segmented-body premise. 76ADV202 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, mystery-tape recording from 1971-72 — discussion of the tenth-hour test and the criterion of an uninterrupted wave through the spine as the embodied confirmation of the substitute premises. 72MYS191 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, RolfA2 public tape — discussion of the four-hour pelvic patterns and the distinction between understanding the body and accepting the body, relevant to readers interested in how the premise-change shows up in the practitioner's perception during the fourth hour. RolfA2Side2 ▸