Schultz's proposition and Ida's adoption of it
Lewis Schultz was an anatomist working closely with Ida in the mid-1970s, dissecting alongside Ron Thompson and developing what Ida would describe as a revolutionary view of human development. In the 1971-72 IPR conference talks, and again in the 1976 New Jersey advanced class, she credited Schultz with theories she considered foundational enough that she wanted them in print. The core claim was disarmingly simple: that the human being is not a finished organism. The pelvis at birth is not yet under the child; the legs cannot bear weight; the feet are barely formed. What Schultz pressed further — and what Ida took up — was that this developmental incompleteness does not resolve at maturity. The adult body continues to carry the marks of an embryo that never quite caught up. The work of Structural Integration, in this framing, is to do consciously what the developmental process left undone.
"which Lewis has developed some very challenging and intriguing revolutionary theories concerning the development of the life manifestation which we call a human being. I do so hope he will get these ideas into print soon, see Lewis Ida, so that we may all share them because when this happens we will be able to take great pride in this contribution. Great pride that such a contribution, such a revolutionary contribution, has come out of the insights which have been fostered, created by Rolfing."
Ida, opening her 1971-72 IPR conference address, names Schultz directly and presses for publication of his theory.
The pedagogical moment is striking. Ida rarely deferred to colleagues in this way; her advanced classes are full of moments where she corrects, redirects, or simply overrides what students and assistants have offered. But on the matter of human embryonic incompleteness, she stood aside and let Schultz be the source. The 1976 New Jersey class transcripts show her returning to the idea repeatedly, treating it as settled doctrine even as she pressed Schultz to publish so the rest of the field could absorb it. The implication is that she saw in his framework something she had been groping toward for years — a developmental account of why bodies are the way they are, rather than merely a structural account of how to change them.
What unfinished means in the infant
Before Ida and Schultz could claim that adults remain unfinished, they had to establish what unfinishedness looks like in the infant — and here the evidence is plain to anyone who has watched a newborn. The pelvis is not yet a load-bearing structure. The legs cannot turn the body over. The feet are barely articulated. The 1976 advanced class transcripts contain a long passage in which Ida walks her students through this observation, building the case that what we call 'normal' development is actually the gradual finishing of an organism that arrived underdeveloped.
"Now just look at that last sentence that came out of my mouth and realize how much trouble there is available in that He looks at the child and the child conforms to the average and he says, Well, this is a normal child. It's not a normal child at all. It's an average child and that average is made up of all kinds of unfinished businesses and children. Because you all know. There isn't one person in this room, I don't believe, who doesn't know that when a child is born, that pelvis is completely out of his kin. His legs are undeveloped. They can't take his weight. To a certain extent, he has control of them in the sense that he can lie in his crib and kick, but he can't turn over and put his weight on his legs, even even on arms and legs in the forefoot position. He's just plain unfinished business. Now what Dicchultz feels is that we are all unfinished business during the entire process of our life. I'm at what roughing is."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida lays out what every parent of a newborn already knows, then pivots toward Schultz's larger claim.
The pediatric move Ida flags here — confusing average with normal — became one of her recurring critiques of medical training. The averages a pediatrician encounters are aggregates of bodies that have only partially completed their developmental program. To treat that aggregate as the normative target is to bake unfinishedness into the standard of care. Schultz's framework gave Ida a way to articulate what she had long sensed: that the body she met on the table was almost never a fully finished organism, and that her work was at least partly developmental in character — completing what was left incomplete.
"Now what Dicchultz feels is that we are all unfinished business during the entire process of our life. I'm at what roughing is. It's a conscious effort on our part to bring ourselves nearer to finished business in the sense of an organism which is capable of working easily, economically. Dick Schultz feels that this procedure goes on during much of the man's lifetime. And I don't doubt that Watt Dick is right."
Continuing in the same 1976 lecture, Ida names the doctrine in Schultz's own voice and then claims it for the practice.
The unfinished adult
Schultz's extension from infant to adult is the move that gave Ida her doctrine. If the pelvis, legs, and feet of a newborn are obviously incomplete, what Schultz saw — and what Ida ratified — was that the same incompleteness persists in adult bodies in less visible forms. The fascial planes that should differentiate and free have remained partially fused. The segmentation between thorax and pelvis has not fully resolved. The lumbars carry compensations that belong, structurally speaking, to an earlier developmental stage. The work of the ten-session series, in this reading, is to continue the finishing that biology started and left incomplete.
"part of the development pattern. I think so, yes. They used to hang like this. Well sure and you see as the gut develops it does hang at first until the body grows around it. Well I wonder about that because you And of course it's the right back here that's necessary to allow that and if we think then that we're not only loosening erectors, quadratus and psoas but we're also loosening the attachment of the gut in the back here. There's a lot more application of dysmosis. This is just showing the shoulder. This is the view right down almost on the apex of the acromion of the scapula. This then is the fascia coming up covering the deltoid and the trapezius coming up in this region. Here's the sternocleidomastoid and the pile up of stuff on the clavicle. And you can see then how things pull together here toward the clavicle. And you can see, often I've been thinking more and more that in the immature stage the deltoid acts just a continuation of the trapezius and that again what we need to do is get a separation of function of those two areas."
In a 1976 dissection-room discussion, Ida and a student work out what fascial separation between trapezius and deltoid means developmentally.
This is what Schultz contributed that Ida had not articulated in her earlier teaching: a developmental vocabulary. Before Schultz, Ida talked about bodies that had been knocked out of place by accidents, by habits, by the slow accumulation of stress. After Schultz, she could also talk about bodies that had never fully arrived in the first place. The fascial fusion between trapezius and deltoid is not the result of injury or habit — it is the residue of an embryonic state that the body never grew out of. The practitioner's pressure, in this framing, is not merely corrective; it is completing.
"There is what we call an ectoderm, a mesoderm, and an endoderm. Now what this refers to is that one of the systems which is going to be the leader in the development of that human being for the rest of his life. The mesomorph develops primarily a myofascial system. This is the leader in his human beingness. He thinks he works. He lives through that system which we call the mesoderm from which develop all connective tissue, great deal of blood work, But primarily, it is a structural system. It determines structure, it maintains structure, it builds structure, it repairs structure. And this is the man whose muscular system takes the lead in his development of his humanness."
Teaching the 1976 advanced class, Ida walks her students through the three embryonic germ layers and what each contributes to adult constitution.
The recipe as finishing process
If the body is unfinished, then the ten-session series is not a treatment in the medical sense — it is a developmental sequence. The 1975 Boulder advanced class transcripts contain a remarkable passage in which Bob Hall, working through the logic of the recipe alongside Ida, articulates this directly. The first hour is the beginning of the tenth; the second hour continues the first; the third continues the second. The reason the work was broken into ten sessions, in his account of what Ida had said, was simply that the body couldn't take all that work at once — not that the sessions were conceptually separate stages.
"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. She just sat and watched bodies."
In the 1975 Boulder class, Bob walks a student through the continuity of the recipe and credits Ida with having simply watched bodies long enough to see the sequence.
Read alongside the Schultz proposition, this becomes a structural claim about why the recipe has the shape it has. If the human being is unfinished business across the entire lifespan, then no single intervention can complete the work — the body cannot absorb that much developmental change at once. The ten hours are spaced not because they teach ten different lessons but because the organism needs time, between each addition of energy, to settle the new structural relationship into its function. The sequence reflects the rate at which an unfinished organism can be brought nearer to finished without breaking.
"And so I started thinking about the logic of the sequence and how it evolved, you know, and trying to back myself up to Ida's perspective, you know, and see what she saw. You know, why did the recipe evolve this way? And I think one of the things is that by working and this is a level of abstraction above the physical body, but I think it's relevant that by working on the chest and the pelvis, you deliver the most experience of what we're trying to do. So that when someone gets a first hour, you're establishing in their cells what it is that Rolfing's about. You know, before you put their hands on them, they've only got ideas, abstractions. And in the first hour you're giving them an experiential look at what goes on. And you get the most done for the least amount of doing by freeing the breathing and the pelvis."
Continuing the same 1975 discussion, Bob asks why the recipe starts at the chest and pelvis — and answers his own question in terms of teaching the body what the work is.
The colloid that can be changed
Schultz's developmental framework rests on a more basic fact that Ida returned to constantly: the body is a plastic medium. The fascial system, derived from the embryonic mesoderm, retains throughout adult life the colloidal character it had in development. A colloid can shift between gel and sol states by the addition or removal of energy. The pressure of the practitioner's fingers is, in this sense, the energy that returns the tissue to a more sol-like state — to a state where it can complete a movement it began in the embryo and never finished.
"As most of you know, these segments are bound together thanks to the myofascial system, that system of the body that derives from the embryonic mesoderm. These derivatives we think of as an organ. All these derivatives of the mesoderm we think of as an organ, or rather as the organ of structure. Let me refresh your memory for a minute and call on your training in embryology, which most of you, I suspect, have some acquaintance with. The mesodermal system of the embryo develops into bones and myofascia. All the tissues of the body which are collagen based derive from the embryonic mesoderm. And collagen has a unique characteristic. This is what makes Rolving possible. Like all body proteins, collagen is a colloid. It has a very high molecular weight. It is very complex. And it consists basically of three chains, protein chains, interlinked by mineral and hydrogen atoms. It is characteristic of all colloids that their physical state alters drastically by the addition of energy. You have experience of that right in the kitchen. You heat the colloidal aqueous suspension of jello, and it becomes clear what you think of as a solution, and it takes a chemist to see that it is a naceous sort of a thing that you realize, if you're a chemist, that it's not a true solution. It's a suspension. But at any rate, it flows, and it flows easily, And the chemist would say, it is in a sol state. And then you take it off the fire, and you put it into the refrigerator, and lo and behold, in very few minutes, you begin to get solids in the bottom. You begin to get a solid bottom, and presently it is solid throughout. And the chemist says, it is now in the gel state. And in his mind, he's going over the fact that you take energy away from the sol, and you get a gel. You add energy to the gel, and you get a sol."
In a 1974 Open Universe lecture, Ida walks her audience through the embryology of the mesoderm and the colloidal chemistry of collagen.
The colloid explanation matters here because it answers an obvious objection to Schultz's claim. If the body is unfinished at birth and remains unfinished, why doesn't time itself complete it? Why doesn't the organism eventually grow into its design? The answer Ida and Schultz converge on is that the fascial colloid, once it has set into a particular pattern, will hold that pattern in the absence of new energy. Time alone does not finish the body; time merely fixes whatever partial finishing the early years accomplished. Energy must be added — and that addition is what the practitioner provides.
"Two factors contribute to this: the first that the body, seemingly a unit, is in fact not a unit but a consolidation of large segments: the head, the thorax, the pelvis, the legs. The relation of these segments can be changed because the connecting myofascial structure is a structure of connective tissue of collagen. This is what that myofascial body is about. And collagen is a unique protein. The collagen molecule is a very large protein and it is a braiding of three strands a special braiding. These three strands are connected by various inorganic hydrogen sometimes, sodium sometimes, calcium sometimes, and undoubtedly other minerals. These minerals are interchangeable within limits. Thus, as the body grows older and stiffer, undoubtedly a larger percentage of calcium and a smaller percentage of sodium are present in these bonds. But by the addition of energy and what is energy? In this come in this context, it can it is the pressure of the fingers or the elbow of the ralpha. This ratio may be varied by the addition of this energy, and the joint or the connective tissue becomes more resilient, more flexible."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida details the molecular structure of collagen and the mineral bonds that stiffen with age.
The mineral exchange Ida describes is the bridge between Schultz's embryological account and her own chemical training at Rockefeller. The collagen molecule does not need to be replaced for the tissue to change; the bonds between its strands can be re-mineralized. This means that the unfinishedness of an adult body is not, in principle, irreversible. It is held in place by a particular distribution of calcium and sodium that the practitioner's pressure can shift. The plasticity that allows the body to be finished is not a metaphor but a description of how colloidal proteins behave when energy is added.
"and having altered it, you can alter it back again. That's what makes it plastic. You see, if you alter the structure and the structure insists on not altering back, it is not plastic. And the body is a plastic medium. And this is the incredible thing that has taken us thousands of years to discover. Why? God alone knows it's written right in front of you all the time. So your job is to find out where and how that body is when it works best and get it there which you can do because the body is a plastic medium. And even though it has been knocked out of that place by some childhood accident, the body is a plastic medium and can be replaced. This is why you are Rolfus because you are studying what to do next to bring that body not taught perfection but taught better usage. That is your goal. To be able to live in that body, to be able to perform with that body more economically in terms of energy. Now I don't I thing is that the children are not not sure sure I'm I'm not not unfinished. Sure And how they will finish depends on how much mama and papa and cousin Tilly and the pediatrician know about what a child should look like."
Earlier in the same 1976 lecture that opened with the unfinished-human framing, Ida lays down the plasticity principle that makes the doctrine workable.
Bob Hall on watching bodies
One of the recurring observations in the 1975 and 1976 advanced classes is that Schultz's developmental framework did not arrive in Ida's teaching from theory. It arrived from sustained observation — from years of watching how bodies actually present themselves on the table. Bob Hall, who taught alongside Ida in the Boulder advanced classes, returns to this point repeatedly: Ida's method was simply to look long enough that the patterns revealed themselves. Schultz contributed the embryological vocabulary, but the underlying observation that bodies are unfinished was something Ida had already collected from thousands of hours of practice.
"She just sat and watched bodies. And she just kept on doing it. And put unfortunately, she's a little bit more brilliant than the rest of us. She just Ida what Ida did is what she's trying to teach how to do, and that is that you have to stay within your your trade. You have to make structural integration in your life. She integrated her life towards understanding structural integration. And she still does that. And she's still Her body is still her her whole being is integrated towards into structural integration. Being structurally integrated herself, structurally integrating us, the guild, the teaching process, and people per se. And to me, word spectrum really comes to mind here. We're not only taking people along the spectrum of life, we're taking them on a very special spectrum. You can't be wishy washy about this. Every time you get wishy washy and people come in and they just want to have their head straightened out, know, they want some emotional release."
Continuing the 1975 Boulder discussion of the recipe, Bob describes how Ida arrived at the sequence and what it costs to follow her example.
What Bob describes here — the practitioner's life integrated toward the work — is the human counterpart to Schultz's doctrine of the unfinished body. The body is unfinished and can be brought nearer to completion. The practitioner is also unfinished and can be brought nearer to completion only by the same kind of slow, sustained attention. Ida's pedagogy treated practitioner development and client development as variants of the same process. The 1976 dissection-room sessions, where Schultz and Thompson laid out the photographic evidence of fascial fusion, were as much about training the practitioner's eye as about training the practitioner's hands.
Lewis, what do we do with his legs
The 1976 advanced class transcripts contain a moment of working partnership between Ida and Schultz that captures the texture of their collaboration. They have organized a student's thorax — the upper structural block — and Ida turns to Schultz on the matter of what to do next. The legs remain. The pelvis remains. The unfinished business of the lower body is still unfinished. The exchange is brief, almost domestic in its register, but it reveals how Ida treated Schultz: as the one she turned to when the developmental question moved below the diaphragm.
"Dick Schultz feels that this procedure goes on during much of the man's lifetime. And I don't doubt that Watt Dick is right. Hey, Lewis. You and I got lost. We've only got that guy's thorax organized. What do we do with his legs, his poor legs?"
In the 1976 New Jersey class, Ida pauses mid-session and turns to Schultz with a working question.
Ida's question to Schultz here — what do we do with his legs — is the operational form of the unfinished-human doctrine. The legs are the part of the body that arrived most incomplete at birth and that often remain most incomplete in adults. The 1976 transcripts contain many passages in which Ida walks her students along a row of bodies and points out that the lower legs and feet, in particular, look as though they have never quite become what they should be. The thorax can be organized; the pelvis can be horizontalized; but the legs are the place where Schultz's developmental framework most directly becomes the practitioner's daily problem.
"Look along these bodies below the knee and tell me honestly, if you are making human beings, would those be the kind of lower legs you put under? So one of the things that we can say is that all pieces of the body don't match. Lewis said to you yesterday Lewis called your attention yesterday to the embryological fact that the head of an embryo develops first, that the feet develop last. And this you all know because you've all seen very young babies, and you all know that their legs and their feet just they look like nothing we've ever seen before. They don't look as though they're ever going to be able to stand on them. They don't look as though they can ever get them under them. And as you look along here, you become aware of this, and you wonder how in heaven's name all of these people reached the age they reached with such perfectly inadequate stuff under them between them and the earth. Look at them. Do they look adequate? Now this is what I'm talking about when I'm talking about the experience and not what it says in the book. What it says in the book is, Oh yes, these are perfectly normal legs. Are they? What constitutes normality? What constitutes a good silent level? Now interestingly enough, that silent level often reflects something that's going on up in here or in the emotional body in general."
In a 1976 advanced class, Ida walks the row of students and points out the inadequacy of the legs they all stand on.
Energy and the finishing of the body
If the body is unfinished and the practitioner's pressure is what completes it, what kind of energy is being added? This question runs through the 1974 Healing Arts conference, where Valerie Hunt, Bob Hall, and others worked alongside Ida to give the energy claim a scientific footing. The colloidal mechanism gives one answer: pressure shifts the gel state toward the sol state, making the tissue more responsive. But a fuller answer emerges in the dialogue with Hunt — that the work raises the body's coherent energy, in something like the sense physicists use the word, and that coherent energy is what completes a body.
"Movement behavior changes as the body incorporates more and more order. The first balance of the body is a static stacking, but as the body incorporates more changes, the balance ceases to be a static balance. It becomes a dynamic balance. These are the physical manifestations of the increasing balance, but there is an outgoing psychological change as well toward balance, toward serenity, toward a more whole person. The whole man, the whole person evidences a more apparent, a more potent psychic development. This means that the rate that the ratio man energy to gravity energy energy has changed has increased. The ratio has therefore increased the force available to reverse the entropic deterioration. That is and greater. Our world is no longer running down. It seems capable now of building up."
In a 1974 Healing Arts lecture, Ida moves from physical contour to psychological wholeness, framing the work as a finishing of the person.
Hunt's measurements at UCLA, which Ida cited repeatedly during this period, tried to give this language an empirical foundation. The auras she measured around clients widened from a half-inch to four or five inches after a complete series. The bioelectric baseline shifted. The movement patterns smoothed. Whether these particular measurements would survive replication is a separate question; the point is that Ida and her colleagues understood the finishing of the body as an energetic event that ought, in principle, to be measurable. Schultz's developmental framework named the structural side; Hunt's energy framework named the functional side; together they constituted the late-career account of what the work was doing.
"Rolfing upsets the disequilibrium, there isn't any doubt about it, of connective tissue realigns it. In relationship to the environmental field, that is obvious. We've accepted that as an idea. But it also brings the thought to the surface many of these thoughts I am talking about, the thoughts and emotions and our interpretation of those which is the physical manifestation of the body. And it is through this channel that I think Rolfi makes a tremendous contribution. It is not one that is easily evaluated in our laboratories. This is why I think there is a more permanent change to this kind of education than there is to track and field. I am not against track and field now. I think it has a role but I do not think it has the same kind of role in the development of body that we have thought of in the past. Then if Roelfing upstates the static thought forms which allows thought as well as body plasticity to take place, as well as structural realignment, there will also be realignment in alteration in not only the conform the the confirmation of the body but in its repair, in its mitosis, in its continual evolution. We know that our bodies change approximately every seven years but have we ever thought that our body changed on every breath? I'm talking about belief systems now."
At the 1974 Healing Arts conference, Valerie Hunt extends the unfinished-human framework into thought, emotion, and the continual evolution of the body.
Schultz, Asher and the fascial planes
Schultz's developmental theory was inseparable from the dissection work he and Ron Thompson were doing in the mid-1970s. Jim Asher contributed photographic and anatomical documentation of fascial continuity. Ida pressed her advanced classes to abandon the textbook picture of discrete muscles and absorb the actual continuity of the fascial planes — a continuity that, in Schultz's reading, reflects the body's embryological origin in a single mesodermal layer that never fully differentiated. The fused fascia in the adult is, in this sense, embryonic residue made visible.
"This is the job and the understanding that's necessary for hours eight, nine, and 10 and the more advanced hours. This synthesis of systems and those systems are laid down in the body in terms of great fascial planes and Lewis will be talking about them I imagine in one of the smaller sessions. To a certain extent this is happening to the insights resulting from the more advanced ralphing technique and given in the more advanced hours, But to a greater degree, it is appearing, as we begin to understand under the leadership of Lewis Schultz and documented by Ron Thompson, of the interrelationships, the interplay of fascial planes in a normal body and also the aberrations to which fascial planes are subject, how this happens, why this happens. You see we are now getting out of the art level of our task and we are beginning to get a greater understanding through the application of scientific methods. Analysis, replication, does this mean that we are abandoning the creative aspect? Heaven forbid, by no means. We are, or at least we should, be adding to our tools to enable us to create a more effective whole."
At the 1971-72 IPR conference, Ida names Schultz's contribution and frames the advanced practitioner's task as understanding fascial planes as developmental phenomena.
The framing here is important. Schultz's theory was not a freelance speculation; it was, in Ida's account, a contribution that emerged from the insights of the practice itself. Practitioners working with adult bodies had been encountering the fascial continuity that the dissection work then made visible. Schultz's developmental account explained why the continuity was there — not as the result of injury or habit, but as the residue of an embryonic stage the body never grew out of. The unfinished-human doctrine, in this sense, is the theoretical articulation of what advanced practitioners had been touching in the tissue for years.
"You can't explain life to a five year old in terms of the same symbols that you use to a 45 year old. He doesn't understand them. And the same is true as you begin to get into an understanding of what constitutes a body. You've got to start there. But in order to get a more sophisticated, advanced, shall I say control of the body body is what I really mean. You have to then work your way out of it, beginning to see the actual realities as they emerge. Now those old anatomy boys that worked in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century and so forth were mighty smart babies and I can't understand how just cannot imagine how they got the kind of understanding that they put into this old anatomy books. They did and it worked and it works up to a certain point and then it doesn't work anymore. Then you've got to go on from there. And that is what that advanced class hopes to do. It hopes to take you people who have been brought up on classical anatomy and give you an understanding of the kind of anatomy which a rolfa needs to know in order to create what he's looking for. Now, I would like at this point to throw a question into you. What is Rolfing? Does anyone Anybody want to answer that question? Oh, come now. I'm gonna fire all you advanced students. Be no class tomorrow. What is wrong? Come on. Come on. Come on. Give it to us. That's right. And the rougher is somebody who understands how to make those changes."
In the 1976 advanced class, Ida explains why the textbook anatomy of discrete muscles fails the practitioner and why the spider-web image is closer to what the body actually is.
Average, normal, and the finishing project
One of the recurring sharpnesses in Ida's late teaching is her insistence on the distinction between average and normal. The pediatrician, as she frames it, looks at statistical averages and calls them normal. But the averages are composed of unfinished bodies. Calling them normal commits the field to a target that is itself developmentally incomplete. Schultz's framework gave Ida a vocabulary for naming this distinction with precision: the normal body is the finished body, which almost no one has, and the average body is the unfinished body, which almost everyone has.
"An eighth of an angel do it. And you no longer have possible the energy pattern, which is the most economical energy pattern. Now you have a new pattern. And while the man is young and vigorous, he can handle it. He can take his vital energy, and he can force himself to do this, that, and the other thing. But as he gets older and he loses some of this vital energy, he can no longer force himself as satisfactorily to him. And the little and the little, that body begins to break down until all of a sudden it comes to a crisis, and then it breaks down a lot. Because you see you do not have the reciprocity of pull, the reciprocity of energy field activity, which makes it possible for it to spontaneously come and restore itself. So that your first law, your first manipulative law, is to take the structure and bring it toward the position which it normally should occupy. And I don't say which it averagely should occupy. Which it normally should occupy, which it's designed to occupy, which an examination of the skeleton and the physiology of the in of a human say it has to occupy if it's going to work best, work most easily, work with least energy expenditure. You bring it into that direction and you demand physiological movement. Now in working in that first hour as you worked on the thorax over and over again we said, that's right, breathe please, take another breath please. This is physiological movement for the thorax."
In a public lecture, Ida lays out the difference between average and normal and frames the practitioner's task as moving the body toward design.
This distinction has consequences beyond Ida's classroom. If the goal of practice is to move bodies toward what they were designed to be — toward the finished form they never quite reached developmentally — then the practitioner is doing something different from medicine, different from physical therapy, different from any approach that takes the existing population as its reference class. Structural Integration, in this framing, has an internal standard that does not depend on what bodies typically look like. It depends on what bodies could look like if they finished the work biology started.
"It's relationship wherever you use the word structure, you are really talking about a relationship. 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."
In a public lecture, Ida distinguishes posture (what has been placed) from structure (what is in relationship) and argues that posture without structure requires constant effort.
What the unfinished body lacks
If the unfinished body is recognizable by the effort it must expend to stand upright, what specifically is missing? The 1976 advanced class transcripts, where Ida pushes her students to see what they have not yet seen, return repeatedly to one answer: the unfinished body lacks the dynamic balance that would let standing be effortless. The static balance can be achieved relatively quickly. The dynamic balance — where antagonistic forces are in such precise relationship that movement itself becomes a form of balance — is the developmental achievement most adult bodies never reach.
"Even the first day that we started the advanced class. Look at the first day of the elementary class, look at the first day of the advanced class and look at what you are talking about this morning. You see those other two first days. You saw radicality as being so much more important. And as of today, you are beginning to recognize that it isn't verticality. It's no longer the static, it's the dynamic. Now the problems that, the questions that you bring in and that fall into these two groups, you think that the dynamic is further along the static. It's something has to be added to the static before you get the dynamic. And you've been adding to it in these four hours. The first hour, the eleventh hour so to speak, doesn't add very much dynamic. If you notice what you see is the static improvement of the whole body below the waistline. But that is the road, that is the sort of bridge by which you bridge into the dynamic. Once again, it's the legs you see. But you somehow or another have to get this intuitive feeling for the change from static to dynamic. Now you get the beginning of that when you get that tenth hour balance, you know, where you take the head and you feel the relation that there is between the intrinsics of the spine and the extrinsics of the sleeve. But the person is not sufficiently experienced, shall I say, at that time to be able to get ahold of intrinsic musculature and hang onto it, use it, demand from it."
In an August 1974 IPR lecture, Ida walks her students from static verticality to dynamic verticality and locates the unfinished work in the legs.
This is the developmental endpoint Schultz's framework was pointing toward, even when Ida did not invoke his name directly. The body that has been brought toward dynamic balance — where the legs carry the weight without effort, where the lumbars hold their length without being held, where the breathing happens without being managed — is the body that has finally finished the developmental project the embryo began. The unfinished-human doctrine implies a finished human, even if neither Ida nor Schultz claimed to have produced one. The recipe is a step in that direction; the advanced work is a further step; the lifetime of practice in a finished body is, in this framing, the project itself.
"We got off on this table one day last week. Function can, will, and does What goes on to change it? Is it just God sitting up in his heaven and saying let that be? I certainly don't believe it. There is a man child down on this earth who wants to throw balls, who wants to fight with his fellows, who wants to climb a tree, who wants to do all kinds of things, and whose desire keeps edging out toward us. And he cannot attain this desire until the day comes when he creates new muscular patterns or more muscular patterns and the greater muscular stress evokes an answer from the body And then by that he's got the mechanism that he needs to give him the greatest strength. And the whole history of growth is a history any living human being by putting it into bed and keeping it. Now I realized I am talking about like to have, there is a level of abstraction which is essentially identical when you talk about protein molecules. Out here, from the hip, from the hip, except here."
In a 1973 Big Sur advanced class, Ida sketches the developmental drive that pushes the child to create new muscular patterns.
Coda: a more human use of human beings
The phrase Ida returned to when she spoke of Schultz's contribution was Norbert Wiener's: a more human use of human beings. The phrase carries the right doubled meaning. The body is being used more humanly — with less waste, less effort, less compensation. And the human being is becoming more fully human — finishing the developmental project that biology left incomplete. Schultz gave Ida the conceptual frame for that doubled meaning, and she returned the favor by treating his theory as central to what the work was about. The 1971-72 IPR address closed with the same phrase, and the 1976 advanced classes returned to it again and again.
"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."
Closing the 1971-72 IPR address, Ida frames Structural Integration as a revolutionary idea moving from intuitive perception to scientific articulation.
The unfinished-human doctrine, then, is not the final word in Ida's teaching but a stage in the work's own development — Structural Integration becoming articulate about what it had long been touching. Schultz contributed the embryological vocabulary; Hunt contributed the energy measurements; Asher and Thompson contributed the photographic and dissection evidence; Ida held the whole thing together as a practice and as a teaching. What none of them claimed to have completed was the project itself — the production of a finished human being. The doctrine remains, in Ida's late voice, an articulation of what the work is for. The finishing is left to the practitioners and to the bodies they touch.
See also: See also: Ida Rolf's 1974 Structure Lectures (STRUC1, STRUC2) — Ida's biographical framing of the work as it emerged from her Rockefeller training and her Zurich encounter with Schrödinger, plus the exchange with Bob Hall on how the recipe evolved from individual sectional work into the ten-session sequence, with Ida describing how 'the body talks about it' as the source of the order. STRUC1 ▸STRUC2 ▸
See also: See also: 1973 Big Sur advanced class on the open-ended nature of the work (SUR7332) — Ida insists that Structural Integration is not a closed-end revelation, and that the developmental drive of the child to create new muscular patterns is the engine the practitioner's pressure attempts to restart in the adult body. SUR7332 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1974 Open Universe public talk (TOPAN) — Ida's lecture on growth as an adult possibility, challenging the Aristotelian assumption that humans peak in their twenties and decline thereafter; offers the cultural backdrop against which Schultz's developmental theory becomes intelligible. TOPAN ▸
See also: See also: Valerie Hunt's 1974 Open Universe lectures (UNI_071, UNI_072, UNI_073) — extended development of the open-system view of the human being and its implications for education, including her argument that current education produces 'ego rigidity' that parallels body-image rigidity. UNI_071 ▸UNI_072 ▸UNI_073 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1976 New Jersey advanced class on embryology and on the spider-web body (76ADV141, 76ADV11) — Ida's fullest single account of how mesoderm, endoderm and ectoderm produce constitutional types, alongside her instruction to advanced students to abandon textbook anatomy for the meshed continuity Schultz and Thompson were documenting in the dissection laboratory. 76ADV141 ▸76ADV11 ▸
See also: See also: Ida Rolf, 1974 Healing Arts conference on collagen chemistry (CFHA_01) — Ida's detailed account of the colloidal structure of collagen and the mineral bonds that stiffen with age, providing the molecular mechanism by which the practitioner's pressure can re-open an unfinished body's developmental possibilities. CFHA_01 ▸