The Law of Organic (Functional) Thinking

The second of John Strasberg’s Nine Natural Laws of Creativity is the Law of Organic (Functional) Thinking. Strasberg acknowledges that his “organic” thinking derives from Wilhelm Reich’s “functional thinking.”

Reich was a close associate of Sigmund Freud – a fellow member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, and Freud’s first clinical assistant at his Psychoanalytic Polyclinic. A controversial figure, Reich was in many ways ahead of his time. A 2015 biography titled “Wilhelm Reich, Biologist” – the first to appear after 2007 when Reich’s personal archives were made available to researchers after a 50-year embargo – suggests that Reich’s controversial work with “bions” – possible precursors to living organisms – may have prefigured recent studies of entities such as nanoparticles, prions, and cancer viruses.

Consistent with his interest in biology, Reich faulted Freud for focusing too much on the mind, and not adequately considering the observable behavior of the body. Reich believed that the split between body and mind was the cause of much human suffering, including interpersonal conflict, war, and the environmental destruction of the planet. His therapy included work on the body (“somatic energy”), as well as psychotherapy. The Alexander Technique, a frequent component of acting programs, derives from Reich’s theory of “muscular armoring” – basically somatic embodiment of suppressed feelings and emotions.

In an early essay (1929) Reich discusses the origins of his functional thinking in the philosophical approach known as dialectical materialism. In thinking about the world this way, Reich writes, the observer

1. Doesn’t “endow matter with what exists only in his thought; on the contrary, he directly apprehends through his sensory organs … the material happenings of objective reality”
2. Considers any kind of developmental process to be based on contradictions that break down the current state of things and create a new one (that in turn develops its own contradictions, and so on)
3. Does not consider contradictions to be absolute. “At a certain point quantity changes into quality. Every cause of an effect is at the same time an effect of that effect, which is also a cause….”

Reich developed and refined his functional thinking over the course of his whole career. His most extensive discussion is probably in the book Ether, God & Devil, originally published in 1949. In it he contrasts functional thinking to “mechanistic” and “mystical” thinking.

“Mechanistic thinking favors differences,” he writes, whereas functional thinking tries to identify commonalities. The model of mechanistic thinking is the machine, Reich says, and a machine must be perfect. “Perfectionism is an essential characteristic of mechanistic thinking,” whereas “Nature is imprecise. Nature does not operate mechanically but functionally.”

Mysticism, on the other hand, says Reich, puts a wall between the stimulating event and the sensation. The blocked "direct organ sensations” reappear as what Reich calls “the pathological perception of ‘supernatural powers’,” changing “sensory impressions … into something unreal and beyond this world.”

Functional thinking:

• Puts sensation at the center of experience. “Seen functionally, sensation is a sampling of reality,” Reich writes. “The functionalist will always order his intellectual activity so that it is in harmony with his ‘sensations.’” In functional thinking it’s important to observe nature as it is, not an idea that we impose on it. “… I study nature and not my modifications of nature,” Reich writes.
• Is concerned with ‘process,’ or in Reich’s words “Functional thinking does not tolerate any static conditions.”
• Values common patterns that can be found across diverse phenomena, “simplification and unity versus complexity.” Reich writes “… [B]y differentiating common functions from specific variations, the functionalist reduces diverse facts to functional interconnections, the functions to energy processes, and the various energy processes to a generally valid functional law of nature.”

In correspondence during the preparation of these blog posts John Strasberg acknowledged that of his nine laws, this may be the hardest to define and explain. The difference between real and intellectualized thinking, he suggested "... is in the perception that real thoughts are expressions of what we sense and feel. You recognize the difference because you feel it." In acting terms, mechanical and mystical thinking manifest as “incapacity to tolerate contact and deep feeling.” Real thoughts, by contrast, “are spontaneous expressions of feeling and perception.”

In this framework, acting methods such as that developed and taught by Strasberg’s father, Lee, can be seen as mechanistic. The focus is on a result, and techniques such as Sense Memory represent a “mechanical process for creating and expressing emotion.” In turn, writes John Strasberg, such techniques lead to a “kind of analysis that trained the actor to stand outside the situation and judge it impersonally.”

By contrast, in the Organic Creative Process the actor uses organic thinking to find the “core of life” in the play. In the process the actor “becomes involved” in the world of the play and explores it with all his/her feelings and senses. This mirrors functional thinking: it acknowledges the natural forces at work in the play – what Stanislavski called the “given circumstances,” while identifying the process of human interaction with them, and the choices made from the array of possibilities. Like functional thinking, it incorporates both the conscious/rational, and the unconscious/intuitive. And it does not presume to arrive at something universal, but rather a characterization that is very specific and personal to the individual actor. “Organic thinking explores from object to object, fact to fact,” Strasberg writes, “until it reaches the deepest possible truth that we are capable of perceiving.”