“The experiences which followed my awareness of this were forerunners of a recognition of that relativity in the use of the head, neck, and other parts which proved to be a primary control of the general use of the self.”
F.M. Alexander (The Use of the Self – Chapter 1 p9)

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Introduction

PM: One of Alexander’s discoveries and one which has immense significance in the learning of the Technique is what he called “The Primary Control”.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p6)

LW: He used these words to describe a relationship of the head, neck and back in which the neck became progressively freer, the head tended to go forward in relation to the neck and up, and the back tended to lengthen and widen.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 1 p10)

WC: The relationship between the head and the body is very complex and not at all easy to define. Alexander was perfectly right in not attempting to define it but in saying that the primary control is a certain relationship of the head and the neck and the body. A “certain relationship” is really the best you can say about it in words.
(Thinking Aloud – Primary Control p85)

LW: When this relationship or pattern is working, all parts of the body involved in use and movement work cooperatively together and to the best advantage. Such right use in the ordinary activities of everyday life had a dramatically powerful effect on functioning, posture, bodily contours, and alignment.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 1 p10)

Discussion

FPJ: When the primary control is functioning as it should, it is sensed as an integrating force that preserves freedom of movement throughout the system, so that energy can be directed to the place where it is wanted without developing strain either there or elsewhere. Misuse of the primary control, on the other hand, is always reflected by misuses somewhere else; this appears in the form of awkwardness, fatigue, and what Wilfred Barlow, a London physician and pupil of Alexander, calls “maldistributed muscle tension,” or overtension at one place accompanied by undertension (lack of tone) at another
(Freedom to Change – Appendix C p184)

LW: The pupil attains this new relationship of the head, neck and back through thought. When he is working alone, it is his own unaided conscious thought that brings it about; when he is working with a teacher, it is the association of the teacher’s hands and the pupil’s thought that brings it about.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p18)

WC: It is absolutely primary in the sense that when you’re working on somebody, let alone when you’re considering yourself, it is the freedom and poise of the head and neck that is the indicator that you’ve got to watch all the time, from start to finish, to assess what is going on. You can never neglect the head and neck.
(Thinking Aloud – Primary Control p86)

PM: Do not forget that right and wrong change, and should change as your body and co-ordination change. What is right for you today should be wrong for you tomorrow. Do not, therefore, try and fix a picture of a specific co-ordination in your brain as the right one; it will have to be modified, perhaps many times, over a long period. You must learn to think in trends and tendencies, and not in fixed positions. Everything (so they say) is relative, not least the proper relationship of the neck to the head, the neck and head to the back and neck, and the head and back to the rest of the body. If you can learn to think in tendencies (which is the way I teach you) you may continue to teach yourself.
Remember, you are slowly eliminating the wrong. Finality, for most of us, and that includes me, is not in sight.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p2)

WC: Now, it’s very common among scientists to commit the fallacy which is known by the rather grand phrase “the hypothesisation of the context”. The hypothesisation of the context means that you have an idea, a notion or a belief, and after a little while, having got familiar with it, you accept it and come to treat it as though it were a real concrete thing. And you lose sight of the fact that it’s an idea. Now a classic instance of hypothesisation of concept is how everybody misunderstood Alexander’s primary control. You see, lots of people took the phrase “primary control” to mean that there was a mechanism – these are the controls of the washing machine or the controls of the motor car. They were looking for a primary control as a physiological structure in the body. Of course Alexander never meant any such thing or any such idea at all.
(A Talk on George Coghill, Integration, Total and Partial Pattern.)

LW: He had discovered this ‘Primary Control’ in an exhaustive research undertaken to meet an urgent personal need. A reciter and actor by profession, increasing trouble with his voice was jeopardizing his career. Doctors had been unable to help him, though they agreed with his own premise that it was something he was doing with himself when he used his voice that caused his trouble. He set out to discover what this was. The first finding showed him that his voice difficulties were linked up with what he was doing with his head, neck and back. The head, neck and back always functioned together as a pattern. After prolonged experimentation with different patterns of the head, neck and back, he finally discovered one which he called the Primary Control because when he maintained it in speaking and reciting, he completely conquered his voice trouble.
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 1 p12)

MB: But FM always used to emphasise that it’s the preparatory work that matters. You can’t take someone straight up out of the chair until you’ve got the head, neck and back working well. When all that’s in place, there’s normally no problem – it all works very easily, particularly if the pupil is instructed to come back to the teacher’s arm. You’ve only got to watch FM working on the young man and the other people in the short film that’s now available to see what I mean.
(Alexander Technique: the Ground Rules – part 2 p80)

LW: ‘I am not interested in the particular manifestation of a pupil’s wrongness’, he went on to say. ‘I do the same thing for everyone, whether he comes to me with flat feet or nervous tension. I help him to get his Primary Control working again, and when this happens, the pupil will be on the right total pattern and his use and functioning will be at their potential best.”
(F. Matthias Alexander, The Man and His Work – chapter 2 p22)

FPJ: The primary control is a dynamic relationship between the centre of gravity of the head and the vertebrae in the neck which allows the head to move in an orbit which promotes maximal lengthening of the spine and facilitates movement throughout the body. If this equilibrium of forces is perceived kinaesthetically the mechanism can be brought under conscious control by inhibiting the shortening of muscles that would displace the centre of gravity from its natural orbit.
(Freedom to Change – Appendix E p200)

Conclusion

WC: It must be a focal point in our study and thought about use. Inhibition and direction, sensory appreciation, means whereby and end-gaining – all these things are terribly important and relevant – but the main focus of our concern and interest is on the head/neck relationship.
(Thinking Aloud – Primary Control p88)

PM: An individual need not have a good neck-head-back relationship in order to do things, play games, etc., well. But it helps.
(The Alexander Technique As I See It – Notebook Jottings p8)

WC: The direction and, as Alexander says, the employment, of the primary control, is very complicated. It’s something that you can’t possibly understand in a few minutes. You can’t understand just from me talking to you about it. The only justification that there is in me speaking about it is to remind you to review and question your own thinking on the subject so that you won’t take for granted that you know what is meant by the head/neck relationship, that you know what’s meant by the primary control, the head going forward and up, or the head being pulled back.
(Thinking Aloud – Primary Control p88)

FPJ: As a footnote to this account Alexander told me that while he was in Gainesville he had an opportunity to demonstrate the principle of the primary control with one of Coghill’s chickens as well as with Coghill himself. The chicken, which was one of a group of newly hatched chicks, was walking around in a peculiar fashion which intrigued and perplexed Coghill. Alexander picked it up, examined it carefully, and discovered that a bit of yolk-covered shell was caught in the down at the back of the chicken’s neck and was pulling the head back and down. Alexander freed the neck from the shell and the chicken ran off, its gait indistinguishable from that of the others.
(Freedom to Change – chapter 7 p63)