Therapy in the Gym

George, six years old and puny, put on a pair of heavy boxing gloves and squared off. "Good luck," he chirped at his sparring partner, a pudgy, middle-aged man with an embarrassed grin on his face. Then, summoning his fiercest look, George hauled off and belted his dad not once but twice, smack on the nose. His father, an eminent Boston psychiatrist, looked pained--but pleased.

George's triumph occurred recently at the Academy of Physical and Social Development in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton Center. A year and a half ago, the little boy was timorous, overattached to his mother, and the victim of two badgering sisters. Now, say academy staffers, he is "quite a tiger." (A few days before socking his father, he had flailed away at a sister.) The transformation is typical of changes wrought by Sumner ("Mike") Burg, an unpretentious man whose lack of professional credentials has not kept him from winning the respect of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists. Using his remarkable rapport with insecure children and adults, Mike builds their self-confidence by teaching them to use their bodies more effectively in individual and team sports.

Words of Advice. Mike's academy looks much like an ordinary gym, with boxing, judo and karate lessons, plus hockey and football games usually going on. What is unusual is that so many fathers take lessons along with their sons. Mike himself is always on hand, seeking to straighten out the father who is too competitive with his son, too demanding, or even too shy. He constantly offers words of praise or advice to the kids. "Control, control," he says. "Think what you're doing! If you're the boss of you, you can become the boss of the other guy."

Physical activity, Mike thinks, can be "a sneaky way of getting to everything about a person's life." With children, he says, "we try to establish that feeling in themselves so that they have that pride--'I am an individual'--to make the boy accept himself as what he is." About his role with grownups, Mike explains: "They see me out there, knocking myself out, whether it's bleeding or yelling or talking, and then in the office I can talk to them about intimate things, and it's informal, you know. It's not a matter of me being a psychiatrist; I don't know any better than they do, you know what I mean?"

No Unconscious Hostility. Professionals have a more formal explanation of Mike's success. Says Psychiatrist Miles Shore of Tufts University medical school: "Mike understands that behavior is communication. He understands that when a kid backs away from a ball that's thrown at him, that says something about the kid's comfort with his body, or his conflict about aggression." That conflict, Psychiatrist Lawrence Salvesen of Massachusetts General Hospital believes, often comes out in a child's fantasy that he is either "superman or super-egg (exceptionally fragile)." Mike relieves a child's anxiety, Salvesen explains, by teaching him that he can neither destroy nor be destroyed in an ordinary fight. To Psychiatrist Joae Selzer of Boston, the key is Mike himself, "one of those charismatic, enthusiastic, down-to-earth people, who does things right intuitively because he doesn't have a lot of unconscious hostility" to get in the way.

Though Mike is free of handicapping emotional problems now, he was once beset by self-doubts. The only child of a very poor Jewish family in Chelsea, Mass., he ran away at 17 from a mother who spoiled him and a father who was forceful but "kinda scary." He became, successively, a dishwasher, carnival worker, Army drill sergeant, and newspaper advertising manager and publisher. Then, one arm went dead. There was nothing physically wrong with it, as Mike learned from his doctors. "I was afraid I couldn't stand the pressure, and I didn't want to look like a bum, so I just got myself sick with the arm." To cure his arm--and his psyche --Mike worked out in a gym. From there, he moved to his academy and other people's psyches.

Mike deals mostly with children. One small client, born with half a nose, learned to face the world without excessive self-consciousness. An asthmatic child whose parents had once been afraid to let him exercise developed enough self-assurance to control his asthma attacks without medicine, and a chronic bedwetter learned to keep dry. Among adults, a professor was taught to ride a bike so that he could go out with his son, and a frail teacher, taunted by students in his rough high school, learned self-defense. So far, Mike has worked with neurotics. But he is becoming interested in Boston State Hospital and its psychotics. These patients, explains Psychiatric Resident George Sigel, "use their psychosis as a defense against their fears" of their own violent impulses. With Mike's help, he believes, patients might conquer these fears and use their aggressive energy constructively.

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