Sir,

Your recent account of the conception of a control over the workings of the self providing results conveyed in the expression "de-tensing" leads me to draw attention to the work of Mr. F. Matthias Alexander. Over fifty years ago he showed that man had reached a stage in his evolution when instinctive reaction could no longer be relied on to provide the best possible working of the self. The reason was that the sense informing a person of what he was doing with himself worked in a way that gave misleading information. Consequently persons reacted in their daily living so that their self became maladjusted while remaining completely unaware of injuries they might be doing to it. The constant influence of such maladjustment made for friction in the working of the self and, consequently, for friction between persons.

He found that if a person was prepared to employ a technique enabling him to withhold consent from reacting under the dictates of habit or instinct, and, instead, reacted in accordance with the plan of allowing his head to go forward-and-up, he was in this way provided with a primary control of the use of the self which afforded him many otherwise unattainable advantages. Provided with improved and more reliable means of guidance of the self, he was enabled to adjust the self as a whole so that he was able to control muscular tension so that it became the least possible.

This desirable adjustment of the self as a whole allowed the breathing, circulatory, digestive, nervous, bone, joint, and other mechanisms to work at their best. Habits of worry, of nursing grievances, of being unco-operative and of cultivating egotism, were replaced by a pleasure in the acts of living, by a reasoning optimism, by tolerance and a respect for freedom and by a modesty and humbleness engendered by the knowledge coming from the experience that he could gain wellbeing in no other way than by obedience to nature's principles in the matter of a correct use of the head-neck adjustment, head forward-and-up, called by Mr Alexander primary control.

The great Dutch physiologist, the late Rudolph Magnus, demonstrated by his life work that animals provided an integrated self adjusted to work in the best possible way by reacting by means of a controlling adjustment of the head in relation to the neck, and the equally great American physiologist, the late George Ellett Coghill, showed by means of a lifelong devotion to the most carefully controlled experiments an lowly forms of life that the growth and development of the living organism could be seen to unfold in accordance with the plan of the head leading and of all else following in relation thereto.

The late John Dewey, Bernard Shaw, Sir Stafford Cripps, and Sir Charles Sherrington have all borne testimony to the essential service Mr Alexander has performed.

Yours &c.,
Mungo Douglas
134 Ainsworth Lane, Bolton.