New tickle therapy

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33534, 15 May 1974, Page 6

New tickle therapy

(By

JOANNE WILLIS)

LONDON.

In a London livingroom, a young housewife named Jane lay across the lap of eight people sitting in two rows facing each other.

Her head rested on the lap of a young psychiatrist who was asking a series of penetrating questions about her personal life.

Whenever Jane tried to evade the questions, the doctor put his hands around her waist . . . and tickled. After two hours of this, Jane, totally exhausted, left happily. “I feel terrific,’’ she said. “I can deal with life again. I’ve sorted things out for the first time in years.”

“Ordeal by tickling” — a cross between childish horseplay and medieval Chinese torture — is a strange and startling new therapy designed to sort out our mental problems, devised in America a year ago and now moving into Europe. Z-THERAPY Called Z-therapy, after its originator, Dr Robert Zaslow, of San Jose State College in California, this ordeal by tickling is said to solve in two sessions, emotional problems which would take years to get at with conventional psychiatry. But not everyone agrees; a jury in San Jose recently awarded $170,000 damages to a girl who claimed the treatment had had a disastrous effect on her mental state.

Other psychiatrists believe Z-therapy can be dangerous if practised by laymen, and say that, in any event, far more research should be carried out before it is used again.

On the telephone from San Jose, Dr Zaslow told me that tickling therapy “is a kind of

crash course in venting pentup emotions, while forming new personal attachments at the same time. ‘‘WE CURE THEM"

“With Z-therapy, we don’t coddle patients, we cure them.” Dr Zaslow’s tickle-torment works on the principle that most of us need such drastic treatment to persuade us to reveal our innermost problems. And the more we refuse, the more we’re tickled.

Often the patient, held firmly by the assistant therapists, is reduced to a state of helpless rage; the perfect state, says Dr Zaslow, for releasing bottled-up emotions.

But it’s important, he adds, for the patient to express love as well, and sessions always end with smiles and hugs all round. Children, too, are claimed to benefit from the unorthodox tickle treatment. An autistic child who couldn’t speak, is now reported to be talking and writing three years after undergoing Z-therapy. But still the critics are not impressed. Says one: “If you want to believe enough, almost any therapy will work with some people.” MYSTERIOUS

But medical science agrees that tickling is a rather mysterious process and one which contains an uncanny link between pleasure and pain;

If we could understand just why most of us react so violently to being tickled we could be near a breakthrough which would lead to the control of pain. The mechanics of being tickled are fairly simple: a touch in the areas where the nerve-endings lie close together — as in the soles of feet — is relayed by the peripheral nerves and the

spinal cord to the cortex of the brain.

The cortex, which sorts out touch sensations, interprets the sensation as a tickle. So active is our response that the latest theory is that tickling could be some form of sixth sense, ranking with hearing, seeing, smelling, taste and touch, and perhaps having a separate set of nerve-endings. IN THE MIND Proof that tickling is at least 50 per cent in the mind is provided by the fact that we can’t tickle ourselves. Yet let someone else do exactly the same action and we’re soon speechless with laughter. , Studies have shown that the area around the ribs, the hairs in our nostrils and the surface of our palate are excruciatingly ticklish. To a slightly lesser degree, so are the eyebrows, eyelids, the ear and, of course, the soles of the feet.

We are at our most ticklish around the age of 16. After that we grow up and assume responsibilities and worries, we grow less ticklish, particularly on the soles of the feet.

But it’s not only humann that pass the tickle test. Dr Louis Robinson, a London doctor who researched ticklishness for years, spent many happy hours tickling animals at London Zoo. The least ticklish, he found, were hooved species like fawns and colts. Most ticklish were kittens, monkeys, and hens. (Features International).

Sexing.—The Australian welter, weight champion. Rockv Mattioli, beat the French champion, Jacques Van Mellaerts. in Noumea when the Frenchman retired in the tenth and final round.

Cycling.—J. Fuente, of Spain, won the Tour of Spain cycle race which ended in San Sebastian on Sunday