When I took up the body map in this column, I described how there are two maps, body image and body schema, and how a person is constantly rewriting them, consciously in the case of body image and unconsciously in the case of body schema (see The Body Map and the Phantom Limb). This time I would like to take up body image.
Once the Phase III training begins, there are more occasions to receive feedback on how words are used in communicating.
This has to do with body image. I have written in this column about how a client can come to feel denied when their body image is touched on (see Case Presentation (2): After the Seventh Session). Why is it that a client sometimes feels denied? Seen from the standpoint of NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming), it becomes intelligible.
Robert Dilts, one of the trainers in NLP, drew on the thinking of Gregory Bateson to sort the levels of human awareness into five kinds of perception, and organised them into a single model called the Neurological Levels.
- Environment: the level of awareness of one’s surroundings (WHEN, WHERE)
- Behaviour: the level of awareness of particular actions (WHAT)
- Capability: the level of awareness of talents and abilities (HOW)
- Beliefs and values: the level of awareness of what one holds important (WHY)
- Identity: the level of awareness of one’s reason for being, one’s mission (WHO)
These are the five levels of recognition.
As an example of body image, I took up in this column a client who did not want to become like a South American woman. Placed within the framework of the Neurological Levels, which of them does it correspond to? Did the thought come from her environment, that is, from culture? Did she arrive at it through her past behaviour? Through capability? Is it grounded in beliefs and values? Or is it held as her own mission?
When I lay out the cards, I find myself asking without thinking which of the five levels the person in front of me is speaking from.
The fifth, identity, is the one I most want to know. This is because identity shapes what lies beneath it: beliefs and values, capability, behaviour, environment. And when identity is denied, what is felt is that the ground of oneself has been denied.
Body image is closely bound up with how a person thinks about their own body. And when that becomes tied to identity, what is felt is denial of oneself.
In taking up body image from here on, I want to choose words with an eye to which of these five standpoints matters most to the person, and in that way to work with body schema, which is what counts in Rolfing.
Note, August 2026
The subject of this article, as the title says, is the choosing of words. Seeing which of the five levels matters most to the person in front of you, and choosing words directed there. The reading it offers is that when a client feels denied as their body image is touched on, it is because what reached them arrived at the level of identity.
Four and a half years later, in the final part of the Rolf Movement Training, the same thing was handed over as the subject of teaching. Who is being taught, and which words are chosen for them. Each person has a way of using language that carries their own culture behind it, and so what is to be learned should be learned through the process of teaching itself.
The person who handed it over was Rita Geirola. In August 2014, in the first part of the basic training, she was the teacher responsible for Movement. And in December 2019, it was she who granted the Rolf Movement certification. She stood at the entrance, and she stood at the exit.
A question raised for oneself in March 2015 turns out to have been the very subject of the classroom at the exit. And a question posed about words directed at a client came back as a question about words directed at those being taught. The direction had turned by one step.
There is also a coarseness in this article. Body image and body schema are divided by whether they are conscious or unconscious. As an understanding at the time, that is not wrong. But the history of the two terms does not lie there.
Body schema was put forward by Head and Holmes in 1911, body image by Schilder in 1935, and the two belong to separate lineages, the first in neurology and the second in psychiatry. Twenty-four years lie between them, and they were not built as a pair with reference to one another. They were paired later, on the grounds that they pointed at something similar: one a physiological construction, the other a phenomenological construction.
Dividing them by conscious and unconscious sees only the pair as it came to look afterwards. Why the two terms were needed separately does not appear from there.
And this account was written out on a handout given in the first part of the basic training. It was a chronology of research into postural control, running from Sherrington through Magnus, Rademaker and Bernstein to Penfield. Gamma innervation and muscle spindles were set down on it, and the first body maps were placed at Penfield. In that chronology the term body map appears as a map in the cortex of the brain. Concepts that would later stand at the centre of understanding Tonic Function were already laid out on a single sheet in the course at the entrance.
A paper on body schema and body image was handed out at the same time. I did not read it. And so I brought in the framework of NLP and divided the two terms in my own way. An article that treats them properly will be written separately, once this series is finished.