Looking at the history of Rolfing, it overlaps with the history of the rise and fall of alternative therapy.
According to Rolfing and Physical Reality, written by Ida Rolf, Ida Rolf (1896–1979) was born in New York in 1896 and grew up in the Bronx.
She graduated from Barnard College in 1916. It was the time of the First World War (1914–1918), and because young men were being taken for military service, she was hired as the first woman research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute (now Rockefeller University). Rockefeller University is a university supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, which was promoting allopathic medicine. It is interesting that its roots are in the center of allopathic medicine.
In fact, that anatomy and physiology come at the very start of Rolfing training conveys a respect for the thinking of allopathic medicine.
Eventually, she obtained a Ph.D. at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University. Her specialty was biochemistry, the foundation of Western medicine. What I specialized in when I obtained my own doctorate (Ph.D.) was molecular biology, which links biochemistry and molecular genetics. Curiously, I feel some connection in the fact that our specialties are similar. She continued working as a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute and published many papers on lipids. Eventually, she came to obtain the position of Associate.
In her time as a research fellow, she absorbed knowledge in various fields, not staying within Western medicine. She had opportunities to study mathematics, physics, homeopathy, osteopathy, and the like, and reportedly visited Switzerland, Germany, and France.
Homeopathy holds that:
“Disease is the symptom itself, and disease can be treated by administering, in as small a dose as possible, a drug that causes the same symptom in a healthy person.”
It considers that the factors of symptoms arise in combination, and ultimately, by tracing the past medical history, it searches out the ultimate factor of the symptom.
In 1918, there were reportedly 22 homeopathic medical colleges in the U.S. (said to be 22% of the whole), more than 100 homeopathic hospitals, and over 1,000 homeopathic pharmacies. Ida Rolf, who lived in that period, reportedly read voraciously a homeopathic academic journal called Materia Medica in Geneva, Switzerland.
Osteopathy has points in common with seitai and chiropractic, but rather than adjusting the skeleton alone, it performs treatment based on medical knowledge, including the musculoskeletal system, the circulatory system such as the arteries and lymph, and the cerebrospinal fluid of the brain and nervous system. In the U.S., just as there is a graduate program in medicine (a four-year course), there is a graduate program in osteopathy (a four-year course), and deep knowledge of the human body is essential.
From osteopathy, Ida Rolf learned that:
“The structure of the body determines the working of the body.”
And from homeopathy, she learned to:
“Approach the root of the symptom.”
In terms of Rolfing’s five principles, this corresponds to Wholism (see Rolfing Column Vol. 68).
What gave the hint for the characteristic of Rolfing — paying attention to the fascia — was Alfred Korzybski’s General Semantics.
Korzybski stated:
“The map is not the territory.”
Even if there is a symptom (a place), it should be viewed from the whole body (the map) rather than from the place of the symptom, and he noted that at that time the fascia is the key.
All the fascia overlap and connect, forming one great network. To compare the fascia to a single taut sheet of cloth, when a wrinkle forms at the end of the cloth, it affects the tension of the whole.
From this comes the idea of:
“Not treating the symptom, but adjusting the balance as seen from the whole.”
According to Ida Rolf:
“The main purpose of yoga asana (poses) is to widen the space between bone and bone (this space is the joint). That is, yoga requires the body to lengthen, and this is achieved by the two sides of the body pulling against each other, or by rotating.”
There, the working of a muscle is brought to its fullest only by giving it two directionalities. To compare a muscle to a rubber band, it may be easy to understand by saying that when force is given in the two directions of left and right, the space between the muscles widens.
In terms of Rolfing’s five principles, this corresponds to two-directionality (Palintonicity).
Ida Rolf retired from the university in the 1920s for family reasons, and began the bodywork called Rolfing around 1940. In the 1950s, she began to teach. At first, she conducted training in one-week units for osteopaths and chiropractors.
Before long, unable to agree with the technique-focused thinking of osteopathy and chiropractic, in order to spread the thinking that emphasizes philosophy over technique, she designed the ten-session series herself and came to teach at the Esalen Institute and in Boulder.
Very briefly, I have considered the history of Rolfing from the history of alternative medicine. I would like to keep thinking about this theme in the future as well.