Symbiosis: What we unconsciously live with.
Lecture by Thomas Geßner, May 2022 in Nettersheim, Spring Academy Nelles Institute
Shortly after the Peaceful Revolution and the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a student, I led a university council in the auditorium maximum of the University of Leipzig together with a fellow student. Something like that was possible back then. I had just dared to interrupt the rector, who thought he could tell those present what needed to be done in the style of the recently defunct GDR. He argued persistently with someone, I took the microphone and said, ‘No dialogue, please!’ In front of several thousand people. The rector complained about my rudeness, I shrugged my shoulders and continued with the agenda.
Five minutes later, the fog rolled in. I could hardly hear or see anything, didn’t know who I was, what my name was or what I was doing there. I just realised that I couldn’t go on, gave the microphone to my colleague and asked him to take over. After a few minutes, the fog cleared and I was ‘back’. What was that? I encountered similar phenomena later in my constellation work. My first self-led constellation, during my training at EURASYS, went like this: The guest lecturer asked who in the plenary, i.e. in front of 30 people, would like to lead a constellation themselves. ‘Me!’ It started off well, but after five minutes, it came to a standstill. I suddenly had the same emptiness in my head as I had twenty years earlier in Leipzig. It’s hard to imagine a more embarrassing situation.
The guest lecturer waited until I was able to speak again, which felt like an eternity: ‘I think I need help.’ She replied dryly, ‘It’s about time,’ and got the constellation back on track with a few interventions, and I sat down again. She signalled to me that this was completely okay – unlike the fog that had enveloped me back then in front of the Auditorium Maximum in Leipzig. Her composure at the time probably contributed to my even considering getting involved in this work myself. After all, my first attempt had ‘hit a brick wall’.
In the course of the many constellations I have been privileged to accompany, I have seen something that I initially couldn’t make sense of at all. Here is a typical example: Someone is standing in the adult position (4) as a client in the Life Integration Process. Their representative for the unborn period opposite them (position 1) reacts to them as if they were not the adult they are today, but the abusive father from the past. The client had previously told me that they were beaten a lot as a child.
I have seen time and time again how representatives in positions 1, 2 or 3 regarded the woman or man in position 4 as their mother or father from the past. They also reacted as if these parents were still as dangerous or needy, sick or absent as they had actually experienced them during their childhood or youth.
I then asked the clients on 4 to clearly state what was happening in the present moment: ‘I am not your father or your mother.’ The representatives on 1, 2 or 3 reacted immediately and very strongly with physical signs of trauma release: they shook, began to sweat or tremble. Some felt dizzy, nauseous or their vision went black, and some began to retch violently. It happened again and again, in a wide variety of constellations.
I couldn’t explain this phenomenon until the word ‘symbiosis’ popped into my head. ‘Symbiosis’ means that I live with something that is not myself, without having the slightest idea that I am living with it. For the unborn child in the womb, symbiosis is the most natural process in the world: ‘I live with a woman who is not myself, and I know nothing about it because I don’t know anything else.’ We have all experienced this. This woman then becomes our mother when, sometime after birth, we begin to perceive her as another person. This is how we come into existence.
I asked myself: how can it be that this original process of symbiotic coexistence happens again and again outside the womb? My guess is that symbiosis always seems to arise when something life-changing happens. The first life-changing situation we were exposed to is undoubtedly our conception or conception. Before that, our life did not exist. With conception or conception, it is there, we are there. There is nothing more life-changing than that.
It seems that everything that is present in the environment of this life-defining situation enters into symbiosis. In the case of conception, this would be language, the geographical area, i.e. the country, the city, the village, the parental families and their life stories. Later in life, when this symbiosis translates into a feeling, we call it ‘home’. Everything that is there falls into this fundamental symbiosis at the moment of conception or procreation.
In my case, this means that as a native of Halle, I still live with the original impression of ‘Halle’. I continue to live with the original impression of ‘Mum’ in the concrete form of Dagmar Luise Geßner, née Gottschling, born in 1938, as well as with the original impression of ‘Dad’ in the concrete form of Horst Alexander Geßner, born in 1935. That cannot be erased.
The original symbiosis apparently means: ‘I am one with it. And I know nothing about it.’ When I was conceived, I did not know that I had been born into a Protestant pastor’s family. No child knows at the moment of its conception whether it will be conceived or born into a family of Amish people, the Sami in Lapland, an African tribe or a Saxon teacher couple. But it seems to be the case, and from then on you live with everything that has shaped that family.
The second thing is that I did not create my life, but rather I received it, or more precisely, I came into being through the fusion of two lives, my father’s and my mother’s. One cannot even say that one has received life, but rather that one is a life that has been passed on. Where does this obvious and undeniable tendency of life, or of being alive, to connect with circumstances, people and things that are crucial to life come from?
First, a few more examples to illustrate how radical this phenomenon actually is: I once had a constellation with a woman who had been born by caesarean section. The constellation initially ‘got stuck’. Something was missing, similar in quality to a twin who had died before birth. On a hunch, I added the scalpel that had been used to perform the caesarean section. That was it. From the moment of her birth by caesarean section, this woman had been symbiotically connected to the experience of the ‘scalpel’, because the scalpel had saved her. And so was her mother. A life-changing event can therefore be a rescue or a threat that is experienced as devastating.
In Dresden, I worked with people who, as teenagers in February 1945, had seen Dresden being bombed and burned from a few kilometres away. One woman had suffered from inflammation, flames and heat her entire life. In her constellation, a representative for the fire that burned Dresden at that time had to be added. It became apparent that this woman, as a fourteen-year-old at the time, had connected herself internally with the fire. Since then, she had been living symbiotically with the experience of ‘fire’ without realising it. Here, too, the constellation developed in a similar way to people who detach themselves from intrauterine symbiosis with a twin who died before birth. Only: it was not a twin, it was the experience of Dresden burning in 1945.
The next question for me was: If it is indeed true that our lives have an undeniable tendency to connect with events, people, circumstances or objects that we subjectively perceive as life-changing, and we have to live with this from then on without being aware of it, what is the point? For me, something new became apparent here: it could radically increase our chances of survival.
An example: In body psychotherapy, there is the experience that the event of birth, as it took place in a practical, concrete, physical way, is repeatedly reproduced and staged by the affected person themselves when they have to embark on something new in the course of their life. I remember the constellation of a woman who had been born in breech position. Wilfried Nelles said to her: ‘Look, you’re still doing it: you’re going into the new with your bum first.’
In some people, the umbilical cord wraps around their neck once or twice during birth. As a result, towards the end of the birth, they often cannot move forwards or backwards. The pressure of the pushing contractions – out into life – simultaneously means to them: ’This could kill me!’ I came across this when working with people who found it difficult to make decisions. They couldn’t clearly say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ or ‘I’m going to change jobs’ or whatever. In their constellations, we often ended up at birth, with the message: ‘I had the umbilical cord around my neck.’ For me, this means that we seem to live with the subjective experience of our birth for the rest of our lives.
My birth in 1964 was a long time ago. When I embark on something new, I am always cautious at first, and then suddenly things happen very quickly. As a little boy, I heard that my birth had been agonisingly long and very painful. This always made me feel guilty. I wasn’t aware of any guilt, but I still felt bad. In my case, this became an inner habit. The guilty conscience still accompanies me today when I embark on something new.
I have tried almost everything that can be done therapeutically to get rid of it, but to no avail. I now call this phenomenon ‘primary symbiosis’. It relates to our ‘past’. It arises when my life connects with something else because, for the very first time, I have the subjective impression that ‘this is a matter of life and death!’ This process cannot be perceived directly; it takes place behind our backs, so to speak. The primary symbiosis remains. In my opinion, it cannot be dissolved by any form of therapy, no matter how great the constellation, hypnosis session or whatever else it may be.
How can something that shaped me back in 1964 still be so active today? How can a woman’s life, after almost 70 years, still be dominated by the impression of burning Dresden, with physical hot flashes, recurring fires, etc.? How can it be that 50 years after her birth by Caesarean section, the sharpness of the scalpel still had a place in the life of the client described, a place that, in terms of the magnitude of its influence, can otherwise only be occupied by deceased twins or other dead siblings?
I call this phenomenon ‘secondary symbiosis’. It affects our ‘now’. It determines how we still live today with a symbiotic event from the past without being aware of it. How this is possible becomes clear in the opening scene, where I describe clients whose representatives from the past do not recognise them as the adults they are today, but instead believe them to be the abusive father from back then. In the inner process, this means that they consider themselves to be the abusive man from back then or the mother who died early or was otherwise flawed.
Unlike primary symbiosis, secondary symbiosis can actually be dissolved. This seems to be the process we work with in constellations and counselling sessions to achieve something. The secondary symbiosis dissolves when we see it. It can only exist as long as it is unconscious. However, symbiosis will do everything it can to remain unconscious because, as already mentioned, it serves our survival. It will defend itself.
This can be seen in the behaviour of every unborn child in the womb. As long as it can stay there, its life is safe. If it has to come out, separation from the womb would mean the dissolution of the symbiosis and, at the same time, death. From the perspective inside the womb, there is no such thing as ‘outside’. ‘Outside’ would be synonymous with absolute danger to life, because until it is ready to be born, the unborn child can only survive as a completely symbiotic being embedded in its mother.
The child inside does everything it can to stay inside. It therefore seems to be part of the nature of symbiosis as a phenomenon that it wants to remain. So if I had the experience at birth that ‘this is how it happened,’ and it hurt those around me, and my natural reaction to that is a guilty conscience, then that is the way someone with that specific birth experience enters into something new. It worked as a ‘total package’ back in 1964, it will most likely work again and increase my chances of survival when I step into something new. Just like with the woman who gave birth bottom first or the woman who had a caesarean section: it worked.
The primary symbiosis with birth provides a manual, a set of rules, a paradigm, an instruction manual inscribed in our bodies on how to enter something new with greater certainty of survival. Because: it worked back then, it will work again. This is an achievement that, in my opinion, requires ‘consciousness’. It also seems to be an achievement that may have played a role in the emergence of ‘consciousness’.
I am thinking here of Wolfgang Giegerich’s essay on ‘Violence from the Soul’. In it, he speculates on the origins of the human perception of ‘I am here’, which distinguishes us from animals, who presumably do not perceive this with the same certainty. Giegerich assumes that this specifically human self-perception comes from ‘trauma,’ the trauma of communal killing. His image for this is the collective big game hunting of early humans, in which wild horses, buffalo or whatever are driven over steep cliffs and killed.
Early humans witness the death of their prey. In doing so, they have the collective experience: ‘These animals are dead, we saw them die, and we were the ones who killed them. Then we look at each other and realise: we are still alive.’ Does the cat that catches the mouse, bites it and tastes its blood know that it has just killed that mouse? No idea. The people who drive a herd of wild animals into a deep gorge and then help them die at the bottom so that they have food, fur, bones and tendons, seem to have developed a knowledge at some point, initially in the form of pure perception: ‘These animals are dead, but we are not. And it was we who did this.’
The second, secondary form of symbiosis can only arise when a circumstance arises in the present that is similar to the one that led to the emergence of the primary, first symbiosis. When I start school, when I fall in love, when I choose a career, when I move house – whenever something new happens, these circumstances activate the renewed coexistence with the original primary symbiosis at birth – now in the form of the secondary symbiosis. In this example, as an adult today, I am once again living with the experience of the past without realising it.
I have the impression that the primary symbioses that occur in the womb not only encompass the relationship with the environment, i.e. with the mother, until birth is complete, but also everything that the mother and father and the world in which one is conceived and experiences pregnancy, and the people who also live in this world, contain decisive elements, i.e. their symbiotic inner landscapes.
It is difficult to understand why, even 77 years after the end of the Second World War, people still feel as if they are at war, not because of reports on television, but because their bodies behave as if they were sitting in a bomb shelter. Only back then, it wasn’t them sitting in the bomb shelter, but their grandparents. The place where the symbiotic phenomena of previous generations come to us, or where we grow into them, seems to be the womb. Through primary symbiosis, we embody all the symbiotic connections that are still active in them.
I am thinking of a man who often became so angry that he was afraid of killing his wife or children. He had already considered separating from them, simply so as not to kill them, even though he loved them very much. I asked him a little about what had happened in his life and in his family. I never ask this to find out the facts, but to be able to see and hear what a person is living with inside. Not what they might be ill with – that would be a completely different question – but what someone is living with completely unconsciously inside themselves. In other words, what is a person symbiotically connected to?
Shortly after his son was conceived in the former GDR, this man’s father was sentenced to five years in prison in a political show trial. He spent those years as a young man between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, legally innocent, in prison among serious criminals. His son was carried to term, born, went to kindergarten and now sat in my practice as an adult man.
His constellation then showed that the anger that tormented him and his family was his father’s anger. Life in the unborn boy had become connected to his father’s life at that time – through anger. This original symbiotic condition could not be changed. Today, however, he could see where his anger had its place, its seat in life, and how he could be with his father by living symbiotically with this life-changing period and the feelings associated with it – namely, anger.
When he was able to see this, he was shaken once again. Then he was able to stop living with his father’s old anger. ‘Seeing’ here means taking something in with your whole body and soul. We stop resisting it and let it into our hearts. That is the process of seeing in this context. This process can make the symbiosis visible. It becomes visible when I see it and feel it at the same time, allowing what is to come to me.
When I perceive my actual distance from the events of the past, it can begin to cease. Then it will no longer be necessary for the old rescuer from back then – the anger was a rescuer for the child because it established a living connection to the father behind his prison walls – to rescue him again today. In this sense, a secondary symbiosis seems to be able to dissolve.
However, if you look closely, there is nothing you can ‘do’ about it. Because it can only dissolve if the soul allows it. No one knows when that will be. It could be a year after the primary symbiosis began, or it could take five generations. No one knows. You can do a little to help by realising that you are safe now (in the case of the man, that his father did eventually come home and that all this happened 50 years ago), but will the soul believe you? It is not obliged to do anything.
Let’s look a little further away from the individual to the collective. Here, too, the following seems to apply: symbiosis always arises when life-changing events occur and people subjectively feel that their very existence depends on what is happening. I notice this phenomenon in the relationship between East and West Germans. After the end of the Second World War, with total defeat and the simultaneous undeniable impression among the survivors that ‘we started this,’ and not a single family left untouched by the war in some way, whether on the side of the perpetrators, the victims, or both, Germany was divided into occupation zones.
This meant that from then on, there were people and systems that had absolute power over their occupation zone, over life and death and over all essential developments. In East Germany, the Soviet occupation zone, this meant that everything of value, about half of the existing industry, was dismantled and transported to the Soviet Union, in addition to reparations that were three times higher than those paid by the other three occupation zones. Furthermore, anyone who appeared politically reliable was transported to the Soviet Union, thoroughly vetted and trained, and then sent back to the East German occupation zone to implement the Soviet social and political system in a kind of vassal dictatorship.
In my opinion, this led the East German population into an inevitable and, of course, unconscious primary symbiosis with the Soviet system and the occupiers of the Red Army. (In fact, this deepened the previous symbiosis with the Nazi dictatorship in their own country in the form of ‘anti-fascism’).
The same phenomenon occurred in the occupation zones of the Western Allies, only with completely different experiences. The people there did not experience deindustrialisation, but the opposite: the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift. This also led to a primary symbiosis with the systems in power, including language, culture, worldview, etc. (here too, inevitably as a deepening of the previous symbiosis with the Nazi dictatorship in their own country in the form of silence).
The symbiotic connections of that time seem to be active in their secondary form to this day. A symbiosis does not want to end. It imposes an obligation. I am not surprised that the alienation between East and West Germans often persists or even intensifies after all these decades of reunification. We can’t do anything about it. It’s like in dysfunctional patchwork families, where everyone is constantly at war with each other because the structure is flawed. Where each of the half-siblings and step-siblings is internally symbiotically connected to someone from a different system and loyal to them, without having chosen to be so and without being able to change it.
I know people in Germany who are still afraid of ‘the Russians,’ not because they have ever personally met Russian men and women and been treated badly by them, but because they continue to live in symbiosis with the fear of communism instilled in them by the American system. I also know people who still repeat everything they learned in former East Germany in civics classes about evil capitalism and agree with it. At the same time, they are highly successful entrepreneurs and multimillionaires in their outer lives. It is possible to live both lives.
If you get into the symbiotic relationship of the past with these people, things can get pretty heated because we suddenly find ourselves fighting the battles of the past with the means of the present. Then you have someone who is committed to the Soviet system and someone who is committed to the American system, and when things get nasty, they hold their nuclear missiles in each other’s faces. It seems to me that this happens everywhere and all the time.
I don’t have a solution for this. I’m just showing what I see in these processes and how inevitable they are. Symbiosis cannot be politically re-educated. All the failed major political attempts show this. It’s not going away. In my personal life, I have gone through hundreds of ‘rounds’ with my personal issues and always fallen into the same hole, i.e. always ended up in the same symbiotic situation and the inner place that goes with it, until one day it became possible not to go down that path again, but to cross the street and leave the hole behind.
A society consists of millions of such individual lives, which is why I consider it illusory to want to somehow collectively resolve the alienation between East and West Germans. What might help is time, in the sense that I am not betraying anyone by acknowledging my symbiotic views at the time and yet moving on today. I no longer perceive it as dangerous as I did then. But I don’t know for sure.
Returning from the collective wide angle to the individual: the desire to ‘solve it’, as radically as possible and once and for all, is itself an expression of a deep symbiosis with what contemporary self-awareness wants. And this symbiosis cannot be dissolved either. In its primary form, it lives in human biology: in order to live, children must belong to a family. Young people must leave their families in order to pass on life. To do this, they must find something where they can say ‘I’ and be congruent with it, something that is different from what was before and at the same time is halfway bearable inside, because one always unconsciously (symbiotically) takes the past with one.
The contradiction between childhood belonging and adolescent autonomy cannot be resolved, but the desire for a solution lives on in the ego consciousness. All therapeutic schools known to me, including the corresponding psychologies, have emerged from the ego consciousness, from depth psychology to humanistic psychology, hypnotherapy, systemic therapy, behavioural therapy and many more. They all contain the promise: ‘We can solve this. We just need to look more closely.’ This promise and the associated desire for a solution are expressions of a deep primary symbiosis with the adolescent desire to find something of one’s own (and remain innocent in the process). The desire is not wrong; it is even inevitable, but it has nothing to do with how life works. That’s just the way it is.
A few weeks ago, a seminar was held on symptoms and symptom constellations. I briefly mentioned that, in my experience, when someone is ill, it is helpful for three areas to work together: classical emergency medicine, which we know today as ‘conventional medicine’ with all its possibilities, together with ‘empirical medicine’ in the form of homeopathy, TCM, natural medicine and whatever other wonderful things there are, and thirdly the ‘spiritual’, as a form of introspection, initiated in whatever way, into the unconscious (i.e. symbiotically conditioned) motives and loyalties that live in the symptoms, e.g. with constellations, supervision or other appropriate forms of therapy.
During the break, a young woman approached me and said that she had been deeply hurt by my statement that conventional medicine had nothing to do with the soul and was limited to apparatus-based medicine and life-saving measures. She said this was very unfair and that, as a medical student, she was learning something different and focusing particularly on the soul.
I thought, ‘Great. Communication should be banned, as dangerous as it sometimes is.’ I had been talking about something completely different. My impression was that she was trying hard and was completely at one with herself, and her aspiration was: ‘I will become a doctor who does more than just save lives by technical means using medical equipment.’ As a white man almost three times her age, I had mentioned a different context, and she had to defend it. There was nothing I could do except look at her kindly and say, ‘You are well on your way to becoming a doctor who does exactly what you set out to do.’ What I had said in the seminar and the hurt she felt as a result had nothing to do with each other. Her perception of my speech was dictated by the symbiosis with her idea of what kind of doctor she wanted to be.
Something similar can be observed in every group. When a group comes together, there are always people who behave like alpha animals. Then there are the more reserved ones, then there are subgroups who spend the breaks together or feel similarly, then there are the outsiders who don’t feel they belong, and then there are people who don’t want to belong at all, but prefer to come and go as they please: Each of these inner possibilities of experiencing oneself and a group is perfect. They all have their symbiotic origins in the way we were in the family we grew up in.
It’s about the primary symbiosis with a feeling that arises a thousand times during childhood. An example: there are people who were not noticed as children. I have seen this when there were dead children in the sibling line. Then the parents are often so inwardly preoccupied with their dead children that they do not notice the living child. The living child then tries to be like a dead child in order to somehow get into the field of vision of the parents, who are inwardly focused on dead children. As adults, they often struggle with not being noticed in secondary symbiosis until this secondary symbiosis with the childish strategy of ‘playing dead’ can be seen. Until then, they will feel ‘unseen’ in all groups and will most likely not be noticed.
In all the examples mentioned, it is not about what actually happened. It is never about what actually happened. It is about what the primarily symbiotic coexistence with an event, a person, an object, a feeling, an idea or whatever else tells us internally. The day after tomorrow, I will tell you what this inner narrative then means for the psyche in the secondary symbiosis (the unconscious connection with the ‘then’) and thus for the relationship between the inner and outer worlds.
