By Kevin Murphy, MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
Every once in a while you will hear people say that their experience of going to therapy is one of indulgence. They are indulging themselves. They are indulging their sense of having something worth talking about. They are over-estimating the issues they have to deal with. In short, they are saying it is a form of vanity.
If someone feels this way then the common sense approach would be to let them go with their instincts and simply stop attending therapy. This is the outcome for some. For others, though, the belief that they are indulging themselves is actually an element of their problem. Distinguishing between the two is important for the therapist to do his or her job properly, although in reality it is usually the person in question who makes the call. And not often the right call.
The belief that one is indulging oneself might play well with the current social discourse that people who go for therapy just need a stiff talking to. It plays into the ‘pull yourself together’ school of thought. But the lived experience of people who come for therapy is that they have repeatedly tried this route. They are in therapy because they actually have tried to ‘pull themselves together’ and it hasn’t worked.
Once they start coming, though, something else happens for them. A gradual lifting of their discomfort, of their fears, or of their sadness, and with it a glimmer of personal well-being, and suddenly, often quite quickly, a negative tone emerges. A little voice says, you see, there was nothing ‘wrong’ with you. The broader social discourse kicks in with plenty of examples of people who do not go to therapy. There are any number of ideal lives out there we can imagine that are trouble free and that we want to imitate.
This negative tone with regard to being in therapy contains within it aspects of a broader attitude that people have towards themselves. The negative, punishing sense of indulging oneself, of being vain enough to believe you have problems, of seeing oneself as unworthy of even attending therapy can, for some people, be part of a wellspring of self-criticism that runs deep. It is the voice that doesn’t allow us feel good about pretty much anything we decide to do to improve ourselves. It makes itself known in company, with new people, when new opportunities for career or relationships emerge. It even seeps into existing relationships and ensures we occupy a back-seat position, even while seeming to be fully in control. It is most felt at times in our lives when we need to move forward.
It can often be hard for someone to see this for themselves, although some people are acutely aware of it. It is easiest for an independent observer to pick it up, often immediately. The message that we give ourselves about therapy being an indulgence can be so strong that people simply drop out and leave all possibilities for change unexplored. There is a comfort in that. The opposite of the no-pain, no-gain mantra favoured by sports coaches is the no-change, no-risk mantra of those in this situation.
There is a part of ourselves that wants us to remain as we are, unchallenged, unchanged, unquestioned. If a person is happy that way, then that is fine. But if a person sees therapy as an indulgence, decides to walk away and then finds that their life is still a confusing, dissatisfying, badly joined-up jigsaw, then that is probably clear evidence that the experience of it as an indulgence was designed to stop them in their tracks. After all, that is essentially the effect it had. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is possible to want to feel better but not want to feel better at one and the same time.
On this basis, you could say that the experience of therapy as an indulgence could be the signal that a degree of resilience against it is required, so as not to believe wholeheartedly in what it appears to be telling us. The negative image about ourselves that it tries to portray can often be designed to stop us moving forward, to keep us fixed in the same place. If it arises, the negativity implicit in it, along with its consequences, can usually be found in many other aspects of our lives also.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
The Death of a Famous Man
By Kevin Murphy, MSc,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
In the wake of the untimely death of broadcaster Gerry Ryan I was talking with a group of people about it and one of them said he could not understand the huge emphasis that was put on it across the Irish media. He felt that more important news was being downgraded while news of the death was given prominence. Now you could put this down to what we call Irish begrudgery. Or was it a genuine astonishment at the outpouring of sorrow, one that pushed everything else off the front pages? Or was it a cynical response to the fact that a mere entertainer could have had such a place in the country’s collective heart?
Why would we not mourn the untimely death of someone who was so well known? It seems such an obvious question doesn’t it? But not everyone gets it. And yet we did display, through the media, a large outpouring of grief for him. You could say we did it for Princess Diana too. Or that we did it for Michael Jackson. Or for any number of famous people who died young or tragically.
The individuals themselves had become symbols of various kinds for us and so we mourned their passing for many reasons. The common element was that each encountered death with all its finality and bluntness. As such, we too had to encounter some of that finality and bluntness in their passing. Death ensures the speaking stops, that no more questions about future possibilities get asked or answered, that all relationships are truncated, that impenetrable absences are created and that living memory must now become a precious archive.
Such deaths bring us face to face with the unexpected. We don’t encounter death as a possibility in our daily lives. It is discreetly veiled off. No matter how many war reports or crime reports we read about or watch, death remains subtly out of view. It is a human thing. We drive cars at break-neck speed because we believe it will never happen to us. No soldier goes to war believing he will meet death. Even though death is the inevitable end to all of us, we could not jump out of bed in the mornings if we kept that thought to the forefront of our minds. You could say we know it and we don’t allow ourselves know it at the same time.
And of course we are helped in that by science which through its advances helps us live longer. And by medicine which ensures that we can overcome most of the serious setbacks and recover, thus continuing on life’s long road. Civil laws too ensure, for most but not all, that we can walk home safely, that our homes will not be invaded, that our towns will not be overtaken by some marauding gang and our lives abruptly ended. Despite the risk of national wars, the prospect of close, imminent, unpredictable death has been staved off. Yes cancer and other bodily diseases threaten us but we don’t expect to be randomly murdered on our doorstep. The possibility has been edged further and further off toward the far horizon of most of our lives. We simply expect to be around for a long, long time. The untimeliness of the deaths of famous people upsets this mindset.
Yet for most of mankind’s history, life was short, brutal and bloody. Our ancestors who built the Newgrange megalithic tomb some 5000 years ago had a life expectancy of 35 years. The same thing existed until recently in remote tribes that still lived in a traditional way. But the onset of democracy ensured at least we had a right to a life without oppression. Along with that, we had advances in medicine culminating in the mass production of antibiotics in the late 1940s thus making us immune to many traditionally fatal infections. Our lives may have gotten longer but the untimeliness of the death of someone famous triggers a dim recollection of a time when life was short, or could be cut short by the most unexpected circumstances.
And so our lengthening life expectancy has brought with it an inevitable belief that life will be long. Not only will it be long, but the enduring peace that has existed in Western society since World War 2 has convinced us that we will not have to face our own death until a long life is behind us. Until someone famous or someone close to us dies, we carry on whistling past the graveyard, as the saying goes.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
In the wake of the untimely death of broadcaster Gerry Ryan I was talking with a group of people about it and one of them said he could not understand the huge emphasis that was put on it across the Irish media. He felt that more important news was being downgraded while news of the death was given prominence. Now you could put this down to what we call Irish begrudgery. Or was it a genuine astonishment at the outpouring of sorrow, one that pushed everything else off the front pages? Or was it a cynical response to the fact that a mere entertainer could have had such a place in the country’s collective heart?
Why would we not mourn the untimely death of someone who was so well known? It seems such an obvious question doesn’t it? But not everyone gets it. And yet we did display, through the media, a large outpouring of grief for him. You could say we did it for Princess Diana too. Or that we did it for Michael Jackson. Or for any number of famous people who died young or tragically.
The individuals themselves had become symbols of various kinds for us and so we mourned their passing for many reasons. The common element was that each encountered death with all its finality and bluntness. As such, we too had to encounter some of that finality and bluntness in their passing. Death ensures the speaking stops, that no more questions about future possibilities get asked or answered, that all relationships are truncated, that impenetrable absences are created and that living memory must now become a precious archive.
Such deaths bring us face to face with the unexpected. We don’t encounter death as a possibility in our daily lives. It is discreetly veiled off. No matter how many war reports or crime reports we read about or watch, death remains subtly out of view. It is a human thing. We drive cars at break-neck speed because we believe it will never happen to us. No soldier goes to war believing he will meet death. Even though death is the inevitable end to all of us, we could not jump out of bed in the mornings if we kept that thought to the forefront of our minds. You could say we know it and we don’t allow ourselves know it at the same time.
And of course we are helped in that by science which through its advances helps us live longer. And by medicine which ensures that we can overcome most of the serious setbacks and recover, thus continuing on life’s long road. Civil laws too ensure, for most but not all, that we can walk home safely, that our homes will not be invaded, that our towns will not be overtaken by some marauding gang and our lives abruptly ended. Despite the risk of national wars, the prospect of close, imminent, unpredictable death has been staved off. Yes cancer and other bodily diseases threaten us but we don’t expect to be randomly murdered on our doorstep. The possibility has been edged further and further off toward the far horizon of most of our lives. We simply expect to be around for a long, long time. The untimeliness of the deaths of famous people upsets this mindset.
Yet for most of mankind’s history, life was short, brutal and bloody. Our ancestors who built the Newgrange megalithic tomb some 5000 years ago had a life expectancy of 35 years. The same thing existed until recently in remote tribes that still lived in a traditional way. But the onset of democracy ensured at least we had a right to a life without oppression. Along with that, we had advances in medicine culminating in the mass production of antibiotics in the late 1940s thus making us immune to many traditionally fatal infections. Our lives may have gotten longer but the untimeliness of the death of someone famous triggers a dim recollection of a time when life was short, or could be cut short by the most unexpected circumstances.
And so our lengthening life expectancy has brought with it an inevitable belief that life will be long. Not only will it be long, but the enduring peace that has existed in Western society since World War 2 has convinced us that we will not have to face our own death until a long life is behind us. Until someone famous or someone close to us dies, we carry on whistling past the graveyard, as the saying goes.
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Women in Love*
By Kevin Murphy,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
What would you say to a woman who repeatedly gets herself into relationships in which she is exploited? Or what would you say to a woman who is cheated on repeatedly by the same partner? Or what would you say to a woman who knows she has an emotionally abusive partner but still believes it is her best hope of love?
It would make you wonder, wouldn’t it? And I don’t mean make you wonder about these particular women. Rather it would also make you wonder about the position of women generally.
There are many, many women who are intelligent, educated, independent and living contemporary, liberal lifestyles who yet operate on an almost old-fashioned model of what it means to be in a relationship. They find themselves playing curious second fiddle to their partner. And yet in their more public life, if anyone suggested they take up the same position with regard to career, society, or education, they would instantly oppose such a move and rightly so.
Why is that? I ask because we are at the tail end of a revolution in terms of women’s position in Western culture, one that has seen a great deal of the unfair, unequal and undemocratic practices of previous generations completely abolished. Yet now, at a time of greatest freedom and opportunity, we find a great many women occupying a paradoxical position. They enjoy the right to display their femininity as powerfully as they wish – in varied lifestyle and career choices – and yet despite this some can still display profound uncertainty around their position within emotional relationships.
Now obviously there are women who remain impervious to these issues and who can rise above most interpersonal obstacles through sheer force of will. They are interesting too but we might consider them another day. For the moment, it remains a conundrum that so many women can ‘appear’ strong and resilient and yet find themselves on the receiving end of disrespectful and undermining behaviour. And while most who find themselves in this situation can articulate what is going on, few find themselves able to do much about it.
I was reminded of this while reading an article by psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller** in which he sought to apply some deep theoretical notions to this area. Key to any psychoanalytical understanding of the different positions that men and women take up, is the idea that women occupy a rather special place in terms of the road they take to adult maturity. Not for them the rather uniform developmental path that exists for men. Instead, contemporary psychoanalysis sees something of a healthy incompleteness in the path that girls take to becoming women. That’s not to say that women are incomplete, far from it. It is an attempt to show that women are to be found, because of this incompleteness, on the side of the infinite, emotionally unbounded and yet sharing in a connection to enigmatic forces, whereas men are pretty much a finite set.
What this means in reality is that when it comes to love, women are directed at much, much more than a satisfaction of bodily pleasures, although that is important too. There is something of a ‘beyond’ at work to which they intuitively respond.
And if men, by contrast, are pretty much a finite set well that makes them ideal for forming armies and churches and nations and all those other institutions that centre around distant, and not-so-distant ideals. The women we are referring to, on the other hand, have a greater understanding of the here and now, the importance of ordinary things, the basics, the necessity of speech in the conduct of love relationships, the place of human-ness, love and mystery.
But how does this impact on the place some women, such as those suggested above, find themselves in their relationships today? Well, according to the contemporary theory of sexuality, the first action at work in keeping women ‘stuck’ in these kinds of situations is this very thing. Their sense of infinite-ness is one that orients them towards love as a quantifiably different thing from men’s love, a love that, as outlined above, is based on a living, demonstrable, almost tangible sense of itself. This is their way of evaluating the ultimate success of a relationship.
The second action at work is that the person they choose to remain ‘stuck’ with will have, from the outset, represented an ideal so powerful that they will find themselves emotionally invested to a degree they would not have imagined possible. This unconscious ideal will have formed around a great deal of the experiences of the woman’s past life, the figures in it who were important to her, the values they will have represented and these will have combined with her own inner forces driving the imaginative constructions that place the man in this ideal position.
The third action usually at work is the absence of satisfaction, a desire not met, a dream unfulfilled in the relationship but, paradoxically, with the promise of it happening always just out of reach. We are never more hungry than when we are given the promise of food and likewise our desire remains strongest when it is not wholly satisfied.
This is the contradiction of our times. Freedom is available to most women in the developed world, a freedom fought and struggled for, and one that is allied to financial, intellectual and emotional independence. Yet some women, despite partaking in these new freedoms, find an older regime is at work within them when it comes to love relationships.
*The next blog will appear on Tuesday 11th May, 2010.
** ’Of Distribution Between the Sexes’, J-A Miller, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, A Review of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, Issue 11, London, December 2003, pp.9-27.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
What would you say to a woman who repeatedly gets herself into relationships in which she is exploited? Or what would you say to a woman who is cheated on repeatedly by the same partner? Or what would you say to a woman who knows she has an emotionally abusive partner but still believes it is her best hope of love?
It would make you wonder, wouldn’t it? And I don’t mean make you wonder about these particular women. Rather it would also make you wonder about the position of women generally.
There are many, many women who are intelligent, educated, independent and living contemporary, liberal lifestyles who yet operate on an almost old-fashioned model of what it means to be in a relationship. They find themselves playing curious second fiddle to their partner. And yet in their more public life, if anyone suggested they take up the same position with regard to career, society, or education, they would instantly oppose such a move and rightly so.
Why is that? I ask because we are at the tail end of a revolution in terms of women’s position in Western culture, one that has seen a great deal of the unfair, unequal and undemocratic practices of previous generations completely abolished. Yet now, at a time of greatest freedom and opportunity, we find a great many women occupying a paradoxical position. They enjoy the right to display their femininity as powerfully as they wish – in varied lifestyle and career choices – and yet despite this some can still display profound uncertainty around their position within emotional relationships.
Now obviously there are women who remain impervious to these issues and who can rise above most interpersonal obstacles through sheer force of will. They are interesting too but we might consider them another day. For the moment, it remains a conundrum that so many women can ‘appear’ strong and resilient and yet find themselves on the receiving end of disrespectful and undermining behaviour. And while most who find themselves in this situation can articulate what is going on, few find themselves able to do much about it.
I was reminded of this while reading an article by psychoanalyst Jacques-Alain Miller** in which he sought to apply some deep theoretical notions to this area. Key to any psychoanalytical understanding of the different positions that men and women take up, is the idea that women occupy a rather special place in terms of the road they take to adult maturity. Not for them the rather uniform developmental path that exists for men. Instead, contemporary psychoanalysis sees something of a healthy incompleteness in the path that girls take to becoming women. That’s not to say that women are incomplete, far from it. It is an attempt to show that women are to be found, because of this incompleteness, on the side of the infinite, emotionally unbounded and yet sharing in a connection to enigmatic forces, whereas men are pretty much a finite set.
What this means in reality is that when it comes to love, women are directed at much, much more than a satisfaction of bodily pleasures, although that is important too. There is something of a ‘beyond’ at work to which they intuitively respond.
And if men, by contrast, are pretty much a finite set well that makes them ideal for forming armies and churches and nations and all those other institutions that centre around distant, and not-so-distant ideals. The women we are referring to, on the other hand, have a greater understanding of the here and now, the importance of ordinary things, the basics, the necessity of speech in the conduct of love relationships, the place of human-ness, love and mystery.
But how does this impact on the place some women, such as those suggested above, find themselves in their relationships today? Well, according to the contemporary theory of sexuality, the first action at work in keeping women ‘stuck’ in these kinds of situations is this very thing. Their sense of infinite-ness is one that orients them towards love as a quantifiably different thing from men’s love, a love that, as outlined above, is based on a living, demonstrable, almost tangible sense of itself. This is their way of evaluating the ultimate success of a relationship.
The second action at work is that the person they choose to remain ‘stuck’ with will have, from the outset, represented an ideal so powerful that they will find themselves emotionally invested to a degree they would not have imagined possible. This unconscious ideal will have formed around a great deal of the experiences of the woman’s past life, the figures in it who were important to her, the values they will have represented and these will have combined with her own inner forces driving the imaginative constructions that place the man in this ideal position.
The third action usually at work is the absence of satisfaction, a desire not met, a dream unfulfilled in the relationship but, paradoxically, with the promise of it happening always just out of reach. We are never more hungry than when we are given the promise of food and likewise our desire remains strongest when it is not wholly satisfied.
This is the contradiction of our times. Freedom is available to most women in the developed world, a freedom fought and struggled for, and one that is allied to financial, intellectual and emotional independence. Yet some women, despite partaking in these new freedoms, find an older regime is at work within them when it comes to love relationships.
*The next blog will appear on Tuesday 11th May, 2010.
** ’Of Distribution Between the Sexes’, J-A Miller, in Psychoanalytical Notebooks, A Review of the London Society of the New Lacanian School, Issue 11, London, December 2003, pp.9-27.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
The Question of Sexuality
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It’s easy to presume that when the word sexuality is mentioned nowadays that we are talking about homosexuality or transsexuality or some strident form of heterosexuality. Either way, the word conjures up some exceptional connotations.
Indeed the flip side of this is that the other kind of sexuality, the ordinary business of being a man or of being a woman, is beyond question.
But the 'ordinary' business of being a man, or of being a woman – an issue central to the whole notion of sexuality – is very far from being beyond question. At the heart of most problems that surface in the consulting room of therapists the world over is this very thing. I am not talking – as my presumption above might lead you to believe – about the question of whether one is a transsexual man or a gay woman. I am referring to the 'ordinary' question that has relevance for everyone as to ‘what kind of man or woman am I?”
I suppose I ask this question because a major international congress of psychoanalysis is taking place in Europe in June and it is going to bring speakers from all over the world who will give their ideas on these very topics. The 8th International Congress of the New Lacanian School is taking place in Geneva on June 26 and 27 and the theme – Daughter, Woman, Mother in the 21st Century - is very much around these ideas.
Psychoanalysis has, since Freud and latterly since Jacques Lacan, focussed a great deal of its attention on the issue of sexuality. In particular it has edged further and further into the notion of what it is to be a woman. Now any consideration of what it is to be a woman naturally brings you into considering what, equally, it is to be a man. Hence the focus, in the first instance, on these seemingly obvious issues.
But there is nothing obvious about them. What is it to be a woman? Or to be a man? We take the questions so much for granted that we don’t even ask them anymore. Why should the questions even be asked? A man has a penis and he loves women. A woman has breasts and a vagina and she loves men. Is there any more to be said?
If we move for a moment to consider those who offer a clearly different perspective on this question, where does it leave men who love men? Or women who love women? These men have penises. These women, too, have female genitalia. The object of their sexual attentions however is for people of the same sex. Are they any less men? Or women?
And where does it leave someone like Caster Semenya, the South African 800m Olympic champion who, according to latest reports, has male reproductive organs and yet is a woman?
Psychoanalysis has long said that biology does not determine gender. You can adopt a male position even with a woman’s body. One can equally adopt a female position with a male body. There are no guarantees when it comes to the sex that we evolve into. And although social conditioning does have a part to play in it, why has it not influenced the growing population of homosexual people around the world?
The answer, according to psychoanalysis, is that the more powerful determinant of what we decide we are comes from within. The recent biographical movie with Sean Penn as US activitist Harvey Milk is a case in point. During his life, particularly his political life, he had almost an entire society telling him he was wrong. And did it make any difference? No, it didn’t.
Because to have accepted what society was telling him – much as it is for anyone with a different sexuality – would have been to deny who he was; it would have been to deny the person that he knew and believed himself to be. To accept that, is to live each day as a lie. And since we only get one life, one has to ask how bearable can that be?
And that, interestingly enough, brings us back to my first point. The ‘ordinary question’ of what it is to be a man and the ‘ordinary question’ of what it is to be a woman suddenly becomes a much richer thing now. We are no longer dealing in clichés anymore. It is no longer as simple as the man goes to work, the woman stays at home, the man plays golf, the woman has babies, the woman dresses pretty, the man acts tough, the woman uses her charm, the man uses his brawn, the woman is emotional, the man is not… The list goes on and on, added to over the centuries by various ideas about what makes a man and a woman.
Freud puzzled over the woman part of the question and didn’t quite answer to his, or anyone else’s, satisfaction. Jacques Lacan took up the challenge after him and brought it to a much more elevated psychoanalytic place. We choose our sex, at an unconscious level, and we choose it under the influence of our parents in the first instance. And that choice is not made until after puberty.
There is no instinct at work that tells us how to be a man and how to be a woman. We puzzle over it long after we have reached adulthood. To help us know what to believe we use whatever cultural sign posts are available and very often some of these are least helpful to us. Consider the body image issues that afflict people today.
Quite simply, as Jacques Alain Miller, Lacan’s son in law, has said, there is an absence of real knowledge available to us about what one must do, how one must live, as a male or a female. And it is from this perspective, from the almost ‘never settled’ position of our chosen sexuality, that we engage in relationships and adopt ideas about ourselves and live up to ideals throughout our lives.
In the context of the consulting room, it is not so much about having all the right answers, as having the broad theoretical framework with which to ask the right questions.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
It’s easy to presume that when the word sexuality is mentioned nowadays that we are talking about homosexuality or transsexuality or some strident form of heterosexuality. Either way, the word conjures up some exceptional connotations.
Indeed the flip side of this is that the other kind of sexuality, the ordinary business of being a man or of being a woman, is beyond question.
But the 'ordinary' business of being a man, or of being a woman – an issue central to the whole notion of sexuality – is very far from being beyond question. At the heart of most problems that surface in the consulting room of therapists the world over is this very thing. I am not talking – as my presumption above might lead you to believe – about the question of whether one is a transsexual man or a gay woman. I am referring to the 'ordinary' question that has relevance for everyone as to ‘what kind of man or woman am I?”
I suppose I ask this question because a major international congress of psychoanalysis is taking place in Europe in June and it is going to bring speakers from all over the world who will give their ideas on these very topics. The 8th International Congress of the New Lacanian School is taking place in Geneva on June 26 and 27 and the theme – Daughter, Woman, Mother in the 21st Century - is very much around these ideas.
Psychoanalysis has, since Freud and latterly since Jacques Lacan, focussed a great deal of its attention on the issue of sexuality. In particular it has edged further and further into the notion of what it is to be a woman. Now any consideration of what it is to be a woman naturally brings you into considering what, equally, it is to be a man. Hence the focus, in the first instance, on these seemingly obvious issues.
But there is nothing obvious about them. What is it to be a woman? Or to be a man? We take the questions so much for granted that we don’t even ask them anymore. Why should the questions even be asked? A man has a penis and he loves women. A woman has breasts and a vagina and she loves men. Is there any more to be said?
If we move for a moment to consider those who offer a clearly different perspective on this question, where does it leave men who love men? Or women who love women? These men have penises. These women, too, have female genitalia. The object of their sexual attentions however is for people of the same sex. Are they any less men? Or women?
And where does it leave someone like Caster Semenya, the South African 800m Olympic champion who, according to latest reports, has male reproductive organs and yet is a woman?
Psychoanalysis has long said that biology does not determine gender. You can adopt a male position even with a woman’s body. One can equally adopt a female position with a male body. There are no guarantees when it comes to the sex that we evolve into. And although social conditioning does have a part to play in it, why has it not influenced the growing population of homosexual people around the world?
The answer, according to psychoanalysis, is that the more powerful determinant of what we decide we are comes from within. The recent biographical movie with Sean Penn as US activitist Harvey Milk is a case in point. During his life, particularly his political life, he had almost an entire society telling him he was wrong. And did it make any difference? No, it didn’t.
Because to have accepted what society was telling him – much as it is for anyone with a different sexuality – would have been to deny who he was; it would have been to deny the person that he knew and believed himself to be. To accept that, is to live each day as a lie. And since we only get one life, one has to ask how bearable can that be?
And that, interestingly enough, brings us back to my first point. The ‘ordinary question’ of what it is to be a man and the ‘ordinary question’ of what it is to be a woman suddenly becomes a much richer thing now. We are no longer dealing in clichés anymore. It is no longer as simple as the man goes to work, the woman stays at home, the man plays golf, the woman has babies, the woman dresses pretty, the man acts tough, the woman uses her charm, the man uses his brawn, the woman is emotional, the man is not… The list goes on and on, added to over the centuries by various ideas about what makes a man and a woman.
Freud puzzled over the woman part of the question and didn’t quite answer to his, or anyone else’s, satisfaction. Jacques Lacan took up the challenge after him and brought it to a much more elevated psychoanalytic place. We choose our sex, at an unconscious level, and we choose it under the influence of our parents in the first instance. And that choice is not made until after puberty.
There is no instinct at work that tells us how to be a man and how to be a woman. We puzzle over it long after we have reached adulthood. To help us know what to believe we use whatever cultural sign posts are available and very often some of these are least helpful to us. Consider the body image issues that afflict people today.
Quite simply, as Jacques Alain Miller, Lacan’s son in law, has said, there is an absence of real knowledge available to us about what one must do, how one must live, as a male or a female. And it is from this perspective, from the almost ‘never settled’ position of our chosen sexuality, that we engage in relationships and adopt ideas about ourselves and live up to ideals throughout our lives.
In the context of the consulting room, it is not so much about having all the right answers, as having the broad theoretical framework with which to ask the right questions.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Escaping the Phantasy
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
What is it that goes wrong for us when, say, our relationships seem to end in disaster? Or when we repeat patterns of behaviour that are not good for us? Or when our lives are plagued by a sadness that we cannot understand? Or when we simply find it impossible to be ourselves when we meet a potentially interesting partner, sometimes to the point of avoiding new prospects? When I ask this question, I suppose I am asking it in the broadest sense of ‘what is it’ that goes wrong.
I was prompted into thinking along these lines while listening to Paris-based psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean-Gerard Burzstein who was in Dublin last weekend giving a lecture on behalf of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland (APPI).
Now most therapies might start looking for answers to these questions in the actual conditions of the complaint. So if it was to do with relationships, they’d immediately start looking at the way you view relationships and so on. If it was a repeating pattern, they’d begin looking at the triggers that make that behaviour swing into action. And if it was a lifelong sadness, they’d start examining the things that made you sad. Burzstein was in Dublin to remind his audience of psychoanalytic practitioners that while psychoanalysis might begin similarly, the ‘thing’ it looks for is entirely different.
As far as he was concerned, and I concur with his views, contemporary psychoanalysis operates on the basis that what goes wrong is something of a different order. People engaging in difficult, problematic, symptomatic, negative and unproductive patterns of behaviour are, even to an outsider, easily perceived as being ‘stuck’ . In psychoanalytic terms, however, this being ‘stuck’ is elaborated even further to include the notion of being ‘trapped’.
And what is it that people are trapped in? Well, to put it simply, we become trapped in ideas we have about ourselves and the world that we inhabit. Now it is not just a case of coming up with ideas that do not serve us well and then becoming trapped by them and in them. There is, according to Bursztein, a little more to it than that.
From the very earliest age our thinking becomes conditioned by what we see around us of our close family, particularly mother and father. This in turn gives us our main set of ideas about who we are and who or what we perceive ourselves to be. This process happens incredibly early in our lives and it happens at the imaginary level, often contrary to things as they appear in real life. We are filling in with our imagination what we are still incapable of understanding fully. This helps explain why good folk can sometimes produce confused kids. Equally it helps explain why sound adults can emerge from troubled backgrounds. But it also helps explain why in an age of relative peace, of greater sexual and personal freedoms, along with great strides in science and social progress, we have increased numbers of depressions, anxieties, phobias and addictions.
According to Bursztein, each of us develops a fundamental phantasy within ourselves. This is a core notion, if you like, about what our position in the world is in relation to our primary carers, usually our parents. It works invisibly, behind the scenes, informing our actions, our choices and our ideas. It can inhibit us, prohibit us and can see us doing the same thing over and over again with no positive results. It comes into being as our way of dealing with the realisation - that each and every one of us comes to very early in our childhood - about our place as either a male or female child of male and female parents. It is, in turn, determined by the nature of the adult people who are raising us, by our adaptation to the myriad developmental changes taking place, and by our capacity to accept the necessary ups and downs of the process.
Positive people are marked by a sense of resilience. They get that from an early age. People who can enter into successful relationships have a confidence about them. They also get that from an early age. People who do not spend their lives repeating patterns of behaviour are relatively free of the need to re-find something that was lost; they have accepted loss, whatever it might be, as part of the human condition and they move on. This too is learned at an early age.
For those people who are unable to live in this way, the fundamental phantasy is at work, strongly tying them to an unyielding and unhelpful set of convictions about themselves. Psychoanalysis does not work by simply telling someone that they must change their beliefs about themselves. Bursztein made the important point last weekend that it works by using the person’s own language to trigger and unlock the old meanings.
He called this effect, ‘retroaction’. The key to psychoanalysis is retroaction, in a sense. It is not speaking for the sake of speaking. It is the release of new meaning by an effect of going back. In the same way that each sentence we utter is only possible to understand when the last word has been spoken. We understand every sentence in this retro-active way. And so too with the experiences of our lives, like half-finished sentences our experiences are made clearer to us by the act of speaking them out, of finishing them in the dynamic presence of a trained other. And where is this retro-action being directed? Towards the fundamental phantasy, first in establishing what it is and then in allowing the person step away and free themselves from it.
Sometimes this happens without the person even realising it. I have written before about people saying they have no idea how they feel better after therapy but they do. For others it does not happen because they have been unable in their speaking to allow themselves get close to the simple experiences of their lives. By that I mean simply speaking about themselves.
But the act of speaking still remains the great liberator. It is not rocket science. But it is not simple either. It involves a continuous effort to overcome our own resistances to speaking, particularly about ourselves. Yet if we manage to allow ourselves the ultimate freedom, as psychoanalysis requires, to speak about ‘everything and anything’ that comes to mind, without censorship, without editing, then we are half way there.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
What is it that goes wrong for us when, say, our relationships seem to end in disaster? Or when we repeat patterns of behaviour that are not good for us? Or when our lives are plagued by a sadness that we cannot understand? Or when we simply find it impossible to be ourselves when we meet a potentially interesting partner, sometimes to the point of avoiding new prospects? When I ask this question, I suppose I am asking it in the broadest sense of ‘what is it’ that goes wrong.
I was prompted into thinking along these lines while listening to Paris-based psychoanalyst and philosopher Jean-Gerard Burzstein who was in Dublin last weekend giving a lecture on behalf of the Association for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis in Ireland (APPI).
Now most therapies might start looking for answers to these questions in the actual conditions of the complaint. So if it was to do with relationships, they’d immediately start looking at the way you view relationships and so on. If it was a repeating pattern, they’d begin looking at the triggers that make that behaviour swing into action. And if it was a lifelong sadness, they’d start examining the things that made you sad. Burzstein was in Dublin to remind his audience of psychoanalytic practitioners that while psychoanalysis might begin similarly, the ‘thing’ it looks for is entirely different.
As far as he was concerned, and I concur with his views, contemporary psychoanalysis operates on the basis that what goes wrong is something of a different order. People engaging in difficult, problematic, symptomatic, negative and unproductive patterns of behaviour are, even to an outsider, easily perceived as being ‘stuck’ . In psychoanalytic terms, however, this being ‘stuck’ is elaborated even further to include the notion of being ‘trapped’.
And what is it that people are trapped in? Well, to put it simply, we become trapped in ideas we have about ourselves and the world that we inhabit. Now it is not just a case of coming up with ideas that do not serve us well and then becoming trapped by them and in them. There is, according to Bursztein, a little more to it than that.
From the very earliest age our thinking becomes conditioned by what we see around us of our close family, particularly mother and father. This in turn gives us our main set of ideas about who we are and who or what we perceive ourselves to be. This process happens incredibly early in our lives and it happens at the imaginary level, often contrary to things as they appear in real life. We are filling in with our imagination what we are still incapable of understanding fully. This helps explain why good folk can sometimes produce confused kids. Equally it helps explain why sound adults can emerge from troubled backgrounds. But it also helps explain why in an age of relative peace, of greater sexual and personal freedoms, along with great strides in science and social progress, we have increased numbers of depressions, anxieties, phobias and addictions.
According to Bursztein, each of us develops a fundamental phantasy within ourselves. This is a core notion, if you like, about what our position in the world is in relation to our primary carers, usually our parents. It works invisibly, behind the scenes, informing our actions, our choices and our ideas. It can inhibit us, prohibit us and can see us doing the same thing over and over again with no positive results. It comes into being as our way of dealing with the realisation - that each and every one of us comes to very early in our childhood - about our place as either a male or female child of male and female parents. It is, in turn, determined by the nature of the adult people who are raising us, by our adaptation to the myriad developmental changes taking place, and by our capacity to accept the necessary ups and downs of the process.
Positive people are marked by a sense of resilience. They get that from an early age. People who can enter into successful relationships have a confidence about them. They also get that from an early age. People who do not spend their lives repeating patterns of behaviour are relatively free of the need to re-find something that was lost; they have accepted loss, whatever it might be, as part of the human condition and they move on. This too is learned at an early age.
For those people who are unable to live in this way, the fundamental phantasy is at work, strongly tying them to an unyielding and unhelpful set of convictions about themselves. Psychoanalysis does not work by simply telling someone that they must change their beliefs about themselves. Bursztein made the important point last weekend that it works by using the person’s own language to trigger and unlock the old meanings.
He called this effect, ‘retroaction’. The key to psychoanalysis is retroaction, in a sense. It is not speaking for the sake of speaking. It is the release of new meaning by an effect of going back. In the same way that each sentence we utter is only possible to understand when the last word has been spoken. We understand every sentence in this retro-active way. And so too with the experiences of our lives, like half-finished sentences our experiences are made clearer to us by the act of speaking them out, of finishing them in the dynamic presence of a trained other. And where is this retro-action being directed? Towards the fundamental phantasy, first in establishing what it is and then in allowing the person step away and free themselves from it.
Sometimes this happens without the person even realising it. I have written before about people saying they have no idea how they feel better after therapy but they do. For others it does not happen because they have been unable in their speaking to allow themselves get close to the simple experiences of their lives. By that I mean simply speaking about themselves.
But the act of speaking still remains the great liberator. It is not rocket science. But it is not simple either. It involves a continuous effort to overcome our own resistances to speaking, particularly about ourselves. Yet if we manage to allow ourselves the ultimate freedom, as psychoanalysis requires, to speak about ‘everything and anything’ that comes to mind, without censorship, without editing, then we are half way there.
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Therapy? Are You Mad?
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.*
If you need therapy you must be mad. So runs the old fashioned attitude. But it is not so old that, despite our modern attitudes and enlightened approach, it still doesn't linger in many people’s minds. The word ‘mad’ is long since gone from medical and therapeutic usage. But it lives on in the popular imagination.
I mention this because the predominant unspoken, and sometimes spoken, fear that people have about coming to therapy is that they are mad. Either they are mad to need therapy or else they will be diagnosed as mad once they are in therapy or if anybody they know finds out about them they will be labelled as mad. There is a recognisable degree of paranoia here but the greater part of this fear is reasonable and is due to the product of social stigma which is a very powerful tool.
The word itself is short-hand for not being normal. Normal people don’t need therapy. Normal people have happy lives. Normal people fall in love with the perfect person and have perfect relationships. Normal people don’t need to go to someone to ‘talk’ about their problems. It’s all pretty attractive stuff, this normal world occupied by normal people.
I was reminded of this listening to a seminar last weekend by London based psychoanalyst Gerry Sullivan. He was in Dublin speaking on the topic ‘The Role of the Father; Decline or Displacement?’ for the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland. He pointed out that for Freud the three broad structures that operated within society were psychosis (clinical madness), perversion (of the sexual kind) and neurosis.
The last of these is the largest category by far and the one into which all our obsessions, hysterias, phobias, compulsions, addictions, depressions and anxiety-related conditions are grouped. This, for Freud, was the category that underpinned society, this was normal. To be normal, for Freud, is to be neurotic.
One can only wonder, therefore, where this message has disappeared to in the past one hundred years or so? How have people suffering from sadness, fear, inadequacy, inability, hidden prohibitions, and all the other afflictions that make dealing with reality difficult, come to consider themselves as abnormal? It is a hard question to answer without taking into account the societal changes in the past century. But we can safely assume that somewhere along the way we have forgotten how flawed human beings actually are. Or maybe not forgotten but chosen not to recognise it. And so we now find ourselves in the 21st century believing that any flaw is not just unacceptable but is a sign of some inherent abnormality.
Advances in science, while undoubtedly welcome, have also had the unpleasant side-effect of creating a body of thought in which there is no place for ordinary flawed humanity. The popular social discourse, too, requires our young people to be word-perfect and looks-perfect pretty much from the start of their lives. There is very little room now for difference or anything that falls short of the imaginary norm of perfection. Anyone unlucky to find themselves in this position, and there are very, very many, is then left dealing with a potentially uncomfortable relationship with themselves, to whatever degree it manifests.
Why? Because we have come to believe too much in ideals. An ideal way to live, an ideal way to look, an ideal way to interact with others, an ideal way to think. And while that might serve us reasonable well in our relations to the outside world, what one often finds is that the very place it breaks down is when the person is left to their own devices, isolated to whatever extent, in their own company and with their own thoughts. The reason is because this pursuit of ideals is often one that is devoid of meaning, in the sense that it does not satisfy us or answer our questions at a core level. This is not to say that having achievable goals and setting out in a defined way to reach them is not a good thing. No I am talking about demanding of ourselves that we become flawless and display no weaknesses or deficiencies in the living out of our lives. One is a reasonable ask. The other is not.
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday April 13th, 2010.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.*
If you need therapy you must be mad. So runs the old fashioned attitude. But it is not so old that, despite our modern attitudes and enlightened approach, it still doesn't linger in many people’s minds. The word ‘mad’ is long since gone from medical and therapeutic usage. But it lives on in the popular imagination.
I mention this because the predominant unspoken, and sometimes spoken, fear that people have about coming to therapy is that they are mad. Either they are mad to need therapy or else they will be diagnosed as mad once they are in therapy or if anybody they know finds out about them they will be labelled as mad. There is a recognisable degree of paranoia here but the greater part of this fear is reasonable and is due to the product of social stigma which is a very powerful tool.
The word itself is short-hand for not being normal. Normal people don’t need therapy. Normal people have happy lives. Normal people fall in love with the perfect person and have perfect relationships. Normal people don’t need to go to someone to ‘talk’ about their problems. It’s all pretty attractive stuff, this normal world occupied by normal people.
I was reminded of this listening to a seminar last weekend by London based psychoanalyst Gerry Sullivan. He was in Dublin speaking on the topic ‘The Role of the Father; Decline or Displacement?’ for the Association for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy in Ireland. He pointed out that for Freud the three broad structures that operated within society were psychosis (clinical madness), perversion (of the sexual kind) and neurosis.
The last of these is the largest category by far and the one into which all our obsessions, hysterias, phobias, compulsions, addictions, depressions and anxiety-related conditions are grouped. This, for Freud, was the category that underpinned society, this was normal. To be normal, for Freud, is to be neurotic.
One can only wonder, therefore, where this message has disappeared to in the past one hundred years or so? How have people suffering from sadness, fear, inadequacy, inability, hidden prohibitions, and all the other afflictions that make dealing with reality difficult, come to consider themselves as abnormal? It is a hard question to answer without taking into account the societal changes in the past century. But we can safely assume that somewhere along the way we have forgotten how flawed human beings actually are. Or maybe not forgotten but chosen not to recognise it. And so we now find ourselves in the 21st century believing that any flaw is not just unacceptable but is a sign of some inherent abnormality.
Advances in science, while undoubtedly welcome, have also had the unpleasant side-effect of creating a body of thought in which there is no place for ordinary flawed humanity. The popular social discourse, too, requires our young people to be word-perfect and looks-perfect pretty much from the start of their lives. There is very little room now for difference or anything that falls short of the imaginary norm of perfection. Anyone unlucky to find themselves in this position, and there are very, very many, is then left dealing with a potentially uncomfortable relationship with themselves, to whatever degree it manifests.
Why? Because we have come to believe too much in ideals. An ideal way to live, an ideal way to look, an ideal way to interact with others, an ideal way to think. And while that might serve us reasonable well in our relations to the outside world, what one often finds is that the very place it breaks down is when the person is left to their own devices, isolated to whatever extent, in their own company and with their own thoughts. The reason is because this pursuit of ideals is often one that is devoid of meaning, in the sense that it does not satisfy us or answer our questions at a core level. This is not to say that having achievable goals and setting out in a defined way to reach them is not a good thing. No I am talking about demanding of ourselves that we become flawless and display no weaknesses or deficiencies in the living out of our lives. One is a reasonable ask. The other is not.
* The next blog will appear on Tuesday April 13th, 2010.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Staying Away From the Talking Cure
By Kevin Murphy
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
As I was saying last week, there are reasons why people should not do psychotherapy. And while it may seem counterproductive for a psychotherapist to say so, I am outlining some of those reasons in order to help people who do choose to enter into therapy to do so with a greater sense of purpose. Last week I mentioned the concepts of relationship, commitment and change that are inherent in the process. I said that if people had difficulty with any of these areas then it might be a good idea for them not to do therapy.
This week I wanted to look at an often overlooked area: speech. It might seem like an obvious thing to say but psychotherapy is a talking therapy. The phrase comes from Freud who essentially invented it and it has been taken on since then in many other forms of therapy. But as the name suggests, the talking cure, as it was known in Freud’s time, is about, well, talking.
It is always interesting to notice how many people do not do much talking in their lives. Naturally we can’t go around talking about how we feel to total strangers. Even friends and family can get tired listening to us if we talk too much about ourselves. But, as an exercise, try and notice next time you opt to say nothing when there is something important you want to say to people you know well and you would otherwise be comfortable speaking to.
The art of speaking, at least from a therapeutic point of view, is not about knowing exactly what you want to say or having the words to describe deep or complicated ideas about ourselves. The first thing people are asked to do in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to simply talk about the first thing that comes to mind. We are not referring to buried things, or deep things, or complicated things, or meaningful things. We are simply referring to whatever is foremost on one’s mind.
After that, it is about allowing oneself to follow on to the next thing that comes to mind, and then the next and so on. The experience, generally speaking, is that by the end of the session we are usually on to a subject we had no idea we were going to speak about and one that engages our interest fully. And it is all done by not directing the person to talk about anything in particular.
Now this might sound like a simple process but there are people who have difficulty with this very simplicity. And, in fairness, it is easier to understand how it works once one has done it a few times rather than explain it in cold print. Be that as it may, it can pose a problem for some people. The freedom of speaking about whatever one wishes can be too much. The requirement to speak about whatever comes to mind can often be problematic for some, despite its simplicity. And so if the business of speaking – and remember, the act of speaking requires us to put ourselves into the forefront of what we are doing – is too difficult or too onerous then psychotherapy might not be the ideal choice for you.
And finally on this subject, we come to the notion of freedom. Without going in to it too obscurely or too deeply there are broadly two types of freedom at work when it comes to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The first kind is the kind I referred to a little earlier and it is the freedom to speak about whatever comes to mind, in whatever way you wish. By this latter point - in whatever way you wish - I mean that it doesn’t have to be in a formal beginning-middle-end style of narrative. So, you see, this first type of freedom is quite extensive. Psychoanalysis allows us to speak about things that come to mind in whatever loose order they happen to come. There doesn’t have to be a big point at the end of it. Stylistically speaking, we don’t have to begin in a flourish and marshal all our points to an overwhelming conclusion.
Once we are speaking out the things that come to mind, as they come to mind, then we are doing it properly. Again, this is easier to do in practice than to explain in print. But if allowing yourself the freedom to speak without having to come to neat conclusions about everything, or have a definite reason for choosing to speak about something in particular, might not be for you, then you might want to reconsider doing psychotherapy.
The second form that this freedom takes is the freedom that comes when the mistaken illusions under which we operate begin to lift. This takes place some time after we have begun the work properly and it is first noticeable in small ways. We stop seeing things in exactly the way we always have and it is first brought home to us when we experience the sensation of having a completely new and refreshing take on something ordinary. This is a sign that a new freedom is emerging in how we view the world and our place in it.
Naturally, such a shift can mean giving up on old illusions we have had – I can never succeed, I will never be loved, I will never change – and with it comes a degree of resistance. Why? Because, paradoxically, we might want to change but we might also want to remain as we are. I touched on this when I spoke about the concept of change and here I am simply broadening it out to include the notion that freedom from old ideas is the ultimate form of change. If, however, you think you might have difficulty with that kind of thing, then maybe psychotherapy is not for you.
So the conundrum exists that although people might opt for therapy in order to change themselves or aspects of their lives, they can resist it at the same time. Some even believe they can change parts of themselves as if they were somehow unconnected to the totality of who they are. Psychotherapy works best when it approached with a degree of open-ness and honesty. It does not work when change is sought while holding on to and refusing to give up on old ways of thinking about ourselves. Why? Because the old ways of thinking about ourselves are usually the reason we seek out therapy in the first place.
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.
As I was saying last week, there are reasons why people should not do psychotherapy. And while it may seem counterproductive for a psychotherapist to say so, I am outlining some of those reasons in order to help people who do choose to enter into therapy to do so with a greater sense of purpose. Last week I mentioned the concepts of relationship, commitment and change that are inherent in the process. I said that if people had difficulty with any of these areas then it might be a good idea for them not to do therapy.
This week I wanted to look at an often overlooked area: speech. It might seem like an obvious thing to say but psychotherapy is a talking therapy. The phrase comes from Freud who essentially invented it and it has been taken on since then in many other forms of therapy. But as the name suggests, the talking cure, as it was known in Freud’s time, is about, well, talking.
It is always interesting to notice how many people do not do much talking in their lives. Naturally we can’t go around talking about how we feel to total strangers. Even friends and family can get tired listening to us if we talk too much about ourselves. But, as an exercise, try and notice next time you opt to say nothing when there is something important you want to say to people you know well and you would otherwise be comfortable speaking to.
The art of speaking, at least from a therapeutic point of view, is not about knowing exactly what you want to say or having the words to describe deep or complicated ideas about ourselves. The first thing people are asked to do in psychoanalytic psychotherapy is to simply talk about the first thing that comes to mind. We are not referring to buried things, or deep things, or complicated things, or meaningful things. We are simply referring to whatever is foremost on one’s mind.
After that, it is about allowing oneself to follow on to the next thing that comes to mind, and then the next and so on. The experience, generally speaking, is that by the end of the session we are usually on to a subject we had no idea we were going to speak about and one that engages our interest fully. And it is all done by not directing the person to talk about anything in particular.
Now this might sound like a simple process but there are people who have difficulty with this very simplicity. And, in fairness, it is easier to understand how it works once one has done it a few times rather than explain it in cold print. Be that as it may, it can pose a problem for some people. The freedom of speaking about whatever one wishes can be too much. The requirement to speak about whatever comes to mind can often be problematic for some, despite its simplicity. And so if the business of speaking – and remember, the act of speaking requires us to put ourselves into the forefront of what we are doing – is too difficult or too onerous then psychotherapy might not be the ideal choice for you.
And finally on this subject, we come to the notion of freedom. Without going in to it too obscurely or too deeply there are broadly two types of freedom at work when it comes to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The first kind is the kind I referred to a little earlier and it is the freedom to speak about whatever comes to mind, in whatever way you wish. By this latter point - in whatever way you wish - I mean that it doesn’t have to be in a formal beginning-middle-end style of narrative. So, you see, this first type of freedom is quite extensive. Psychoanalysis allows us to speak about things that come to mind in whatever loose order they happen to come. There doesn’t have to be a big point at the end of it. Stylistically speaking, we don’t have to begin in a flourish and marshal all our points to an overwhelming conclusion.
Once we are speaking out the things that come to mind, as they come to mind, then we are doing it properly. Again, this is easier to do in practice than to explain in print. But if allowing yourself the freedom to speak without having to come to neat conclusions about everything, or have a definite reason for choosing to speak about something in particular, might not be for you, then you might want to reconsider doing psychotherapy.
The second form that this freedom takes is the freedom that comes when the mistaken illusions under which we operate begin to lift. This takes place some time after we have begun the work properly and it is first noticeable in small ways. We stop seeing things in exactly the way we always have and it is first brought home to us when we experience the sensation of having a completely new and refreshing take on something ordinary. This is a sign that a new freedom is emerging in how we view the world and our place in it.
Naturally, such a shift can mean giving up on old illusions we have had – I can never succeed, I will never be loved, I will never change – and with it comes a degree of resistance. Why? Because, paradoxically, we might want to change but we might also want to remain as we are. I touched on this when I spoke about the concept of change and here I am simply broadening it out to include the notion that freedom from old ideas is the ultimate form of change. If, however, you think you might have difficulty with that kind of thing, then maybe psychotherapy is not for you.
So the conundrum exists that although people might opt for therapy in order to change themselves or aspects of their lives, they can resist it at the same time. Some even believe they can change parts of themselves as if they were somehow unconnected to the totality of who they are. Psychotherapy works best when it approached with a degree of open-ness and honesty. It does not work when change is sought while holding on to and refusing to give up on old ways of thinking about ourselves. Why? Because the old ways of thinking about ourselves are usually the reason we seek out therapy in the first place.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)