Need Anarchist Therapy for Uptight Statists!

Saturday, July 1st I attended a video showing of "Soma: An Anarchist Therapy" (DVD shot in Brazil, partially English, partially subtitles). Seventy-nine year old Roberto Freire spent twelve years in prison under the Brazilian military dictatorship of the 1970s and 1980s. According to the e-mail description of the workshop, he developed somatherapy as a form of group therapy "incorporating the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, the politics of anarchism, and the culture of the martial art/dance capoeira angola developed originally by black Brazilian slaves. Soma is used by therapists organized in anarchist collectives to fight the psychological effects of authoritarianism." Shades of the 1960s and 1970s when activists tried to made personal and political liberation two sides of the same coin.
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This form of therapy is very physical, using a variety of touching and role playing exercises to help bring out emotional issues so that people can deal with and release them constructively, as opposed to letting them fester, creating rage and/or depression, not to mention the tendency to turn to some addiction (food, booze, drugs, sex, sports, email, blogging) to block out the pain or fill the hole of separation from other humans. It is a therapy created and taught by the people, for the people, without state interference.
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Most inspiring to me was when Freire emphasized that "anarchism is a higher level of order" than the state. He meant anarchism as a philosophy of being without rulers but using voluntary principles of self-organization. Later one of his co-workers repeatedly used the phrase "self-organization."
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And I was reminded of scientist Ilya Prigogine who describes self-organization as a basic principle of the universe. I believe a primative consciousness including awareness, imagination and the will to create a reality to actualize fully and enjoy a magnificance of experience. Something humans are quite capable of right now, once they abondon the notion that the purpose of reality is to obey the rules allegedly laid down by ancient prophets and the leaders who claim to rule in their name - and claim god commands them to organize society through the threat of violence and punishment.
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Only when we create our own realities for our own happiness, voluntarily self-organizing without violence lifes lived in communities we freely choose, will we actualize our most primal, cosmological urge to be, to love, to learn, to experience. There are a variety of means for dealing with the trauma in living in tightly controlled -- or overly chaotic -- dysfunctional families and societies. I'm a big fan of 12-stop programs and chakra meditation myself. But any therapy that combines personal and anti-authoritarian political liberation is something worth exploring.