Being a Therapist

A Practitioner's Handbook

Mavis Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429911279
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría en psicología

This handbook discriminates clearly between the responsibilities, cognitive understanding, and the feelings of the practitioner. It is intended to be useful to all "humanistic" therapists and counsellors irrespective of their particular theoretical orientation.

Chapter One

Zeitgeist

In and out of time

It is unlikely that the total span of recorded history has been a long enough time for evolution to have wrought any noticeable changes in “human nature”. Whenever and wherever people have recorded their reflections on the problems inherent in human beings’ relationships with each other and the universe, the same difficulties and perplexities are met with the same solutions and wisdoms over and over again.

“There is nothing new under the sun” and much evidence of circularity in the “truths” espoused by human beings. Those people we call original thinkers usually utter old truths afresh in a voice better attuned to the tone of their own time. Copernicus revised the Greek idea of a Sun-centred universe; Darwinian evolutionary theory had been espoused by various others since before the Common Era; the unconscious mind had its place and was at home in literature long before Freud; and in matters pertaining to love, the advice expressed by Ovid two thousand years ago is as popular in today’s magazines as it ever was. Apples falling on people’s heads and causing uniquely revelational moments in human thought are a romantic myth.

Our contemporary voice

Notwithstanding the timelessness and immutability of our deepest concerns—love, death, meaning, fate, and free will—we are so constituted as to keep wondering and struggling to find better ways of understanding ourselves than have so far been achieved. In the parlance of today, this quest may be seen as a reflection of our homeostatic disposition, the constant pull— push of arousal and quiescence that is written into our biology and which has amongst its spin-offs all of art, science, and philosophy.

Probably the longest cycle in the history of ideas is the alternating orientations of holism and atomism. Although neither orientation has ever been entirely absent, the general tenor of human thought seems to have begun holistic and then started swinging towards atomistic about two and a half thousand years ago, apparently reaching its apogee in the twentieth century, from which time it has begun to turn. Physics seems to have reached the turning point first, expressed in Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and Einstein’s theory of relativity, but biology is still engaged in the tri-umphalism of the human genome and atomistic brain research. And psychology, which only began to be atomistic when most other fields of endeavour were nearly finished with analysis, as an academic discipline is wildly out of step with the current Zeitgeist.

Outside academia, psychology seems to have found its contemporary voice by blending itself with philosophy and medicine, both of which fields have branches that seem precisely to reflect the compromises between materialism and mystery, determinism and choice that characterise humanity’s present hovering outlook. In philosophy, existentialism is the name of the game; in medicine, it is homeopathy. Psychology that blends itself with these calls itself humanistic. Contemporarily, we are aware of the homeostatic balance between left-brain atomism and right-brain holism in what we call “New Age” thinking.

But the mundane reality of people’s professional lives has lagged behind the movement of theories. The twentieth century was still one of increasing specialisation in which people were required to know more and more about less and less in order to procure their PhDs and ensure their viability in the employment marketplace. In many subjects, knowledge continued to be particularised to its limits; and perhaps more importantly for the general human condition, academics and others became more and more unhappily isolated in the autism of their specialisms.

But towards the end of the twentieth century and continuing to the present, there has been a burgeoning of interdisciplinary conferences and cogent but popular writing about science that extends communication and nourishing strokes for intellectual givers and receivers alike. It is no longer infra dig for academics to step out of their ivory towers and communicate simply with the intelligent lay public. Not only has this represented a backlash against the loneliness of those whose expertise is ultra-specialised; it is also a manifestation of a contemporary cultural climate in which academia is called upon to justify the funds it receives, and academic salaries are relatively low. Books such as James Gleich’s Chaos (1988), John Gray’s Straw Dogs (2002), and Dava Sobel’s Longitude (2007), as well as many science-made-easy television programmes, have flourished, and such authors and television presenters are now envied rather than disdained by their colleagues for their popular acclaim and monetary gain.

While the particular preoccupations of any age may be seen with hindsight to be transient or even trivial, to the people alive at a given time they are imperatively demanding of attention. Though I am conscious of the unavoidable blinkeredness of my own here-and-now perspective, I believe there are a number of contemporary conditions that are stretching our innate adaptability to critical limits. Those of us alive today are suffering the Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times”.

Population explosion

By far the biggest change in human consciousness over the past fifty years has been the emergence of universal awareness of the world’s population explosion. This was not the case even in the 1950s. Especially in Australia, where I was then living, there was plenty of room for everybody, full employment, and government hoardings that exhorted us to “populate or perish”. Our individual existences were valued and useful to the collective, we knew we were needed and so were full of buoyant self-esteem.

Now, we all know there are far too many of us and the world could well do without us individually. Collectively, self-esteem is low, especially among the working classes whose unskilled labour has greatly diminished in value. In the developed countries with which we are familiar, the contented, conservative, reliable, conscientious working-class personality, full of pride and dignity, has been replaced by a personality type that is envious, bitter, pugnacious, amoral, hostile, and despairing. As a species, we have become like rats in an overcrowded cage.

The most extreme outcome of this critically unstable scenario is that, one way or another, like countless other species, we will fail to rise to the challenge and will become extinct. Yet there is already a spontaneous corrective response to our crisis of overpopulation that suggests we may save ourselves. Notwithstanding the desperate bids of many infertile couples to overcome their infertility with the aid of science, there are now many people—and especially women—who are voluntarily renouncing parenthood out of their own free will. This was virtually unheard of when I was first married fifty years ago, when having babies was the unreflective desire of all couples; and the small proportion of infertile couples would almost surely adopt the surplus of unwanted births as quickly as possible. Although the rise in declared homosexuality in some developed countries is clearly associated with its decriminalisation, it may be that its rise is factual as well as apparent, that is, an unconscious collective response to the world’s population crisis. And the proscription in China against having more than one child certainly suggests that a species-preservative adaptation is under way.

Even the use of “weapons of mass destruction” may have an ecological purpose. Only time will tell; but we are meanwhile faced with the here-and-now reality of many individuals with deeply undermined self-esteem associated with their perception of their personal redundancy. Responsively, it behoves us, as therapists and counsellors, empathically to philosophise with our clients on this contemporary contingency of the human condition.

The death of God

For the whole of recorded history, mankind has found in its gods and their commandments the justification of turning away timidly rather than braving the excitement and terror of uncertainty. The major monotheistic religions counteract all our fears of uncertainty in espousing an all-loving, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God to whom we are obliged. Conceptually, we are thus made safe and certain; pragmatically, the commandments of God leave us little scope, if we are obedient, for doing much that might excitingly imperil our lives. If those who flout God’s commandments seem to survive His wrath unscathed, in societies where judicial legislature is religious, punishment is meted out by human judges in the name of God; in societies where secular authorities are less vengeful towards sinners, the obedient majority are reassured that the sinner will at least receive his or her just deserts in the world to come. Psychologically speaking, the function of religion is to console us by justifying the sacrifices of adventure and excitement that we make for the sake of safety.

Our fear of death—and of the unknown generally—which is, throughout the world, rationalised and justified by our obedience to our understanding of God’s will, is intellectual as well as physical. Not only must we do and not do certain things in order to avoid punishment in this world or the next; we are also required to have pure thoughts and to refrain from heresy. God’s own punishment for a too open mind is insanity. For public heresies, men are publically punished—at least made to recant; for heresies that take place in the privacy of a man’s mind, the influence of God within him persuades him to make public his confession, or at least to experience the private punishment of guilt.

In the last hundred years or so, the Western world has become, at least nominally, a great deal more secular. For individual human beings, it now seems possible—perhaps for the first time in history—to disavow the existence of God without being out of line with the ethos of the culture. Humanism espouses “enlightened self-interest” as the new rationalisation of the old, God-imposed controls on our self- and other-destructive impulses, but increasing competition for jobs and homes, and the tenuousness of sexual relationships, seem to have invoked in us self-interest that tends to be more unbridled than “enlightened”.

Our new-found collective willingness to challenge the authority of God is less courageous than it superficially appears. At least until very recently, we were able to relinquish the reassurance of God only by replacing it with the reassurance of science. During the course of the few centuries since the Renaissance, God has trembled at the presumed insults to Him by men of science, most notably by Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud, who respectively disavowed man’s centrality in the universe, his specialness as a species, and his self-awareness. At first, God fought back valiantly, bringing down His wrath on hubristic mankind in the form of the Black Death and sundry other collective calamities, and on particular men and women in the form of inquisitions, burnings, and derision. But by the beginning of the twentieth century, the theories of science could confidently account for the most horrendous acts of God in materialistic terms. To very many more people than ever before, God was toppled and presumed dead.

But the new-found materialistic security of human consciousness has been very quickly found wanting. In the wake of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s theory of relativity and post-Einsteinian cosmologies, full of uncertainties and such nihilistic horrors as black holes, have permeated the everyday existential consciousnesses of large numbers of people. Without God to fall back on, we are left trembling at Nothing.

We are presently left floundering around in our quest for certainty and meaning in a choppy sea of possibilities. As yet, our lack of resolution is expressed in a primitively volatile mixture of despairing nihilism and despotic religious fundamentalism.

Fundamentalism is the bid to make God a fact, like scientific knowledge. Its literalism misses the point that there cannot be just one interpretation of anything. Out of its adherents’ desperate terror of death, fundamentalism avows the absolute one and only truth with absolute certainty of eternal life through privileged absolute knowledge of God. Unavoidably, it must righteously murder all infidels, whose mere existence threatens its precariously teetering security.

But notwithstanding the perils of fundamentalism, there is also peril in nihilism. Absoluteness, which is the ugly defence against existential terror, unites the two extremes. Dogmatic atheism and religious fundamentalism are opposites that are identical in their expression of contemporary spiritual disease.

The dissolution of trust

In parallel to the dissolution of our trust in God—the super-duper Parent who makes everything all right in the end—we are also beset by the dissolution of trust in and respect for secular authority.

Professionalism is a function of the Parent ego state, encompassing the balance of caring responsibility and autonomous authority. A hundred years ago there were few professions, and the professions there were—doctors, lawyers, teachers, and the clergy—were revered and trusted for their unquestionable integrity and selfless concern for the people they served. Now, professionalism is democratised to include multitudes whose orientation is me-first Child rather than you-first Parent, so we feel justified in mistrusting the plethora of “servants” we rely upon to keep our cars, televisions, computers, plumbing, and roofs in states of repair; and we also call to account the traditional professions there were, discounting their authority and suspecting their integrity. Constant invigilation insults professional autonomy; complaints procedures abound; professionals who touch those in their care risk being charged with criminal abuse; targets are set for doctors and teachers as if they were manufacturers of consumer goods. The frightened Child in us all escalates its rebellious tyranny in the name of freedom while actually desperately seeking the containment of a confidently and lovingly controlling Parent. And the deposed Parent, divested of authority and respect, resorts to indemnity policies against litigation, or else bows out completely. At the time of writing (November 2010), according to a recent survey, one-third of teachers say they want to leave their profession within the next five years, and one-quarter of doctors want to quit their jobs. In America, in some high-risk areas of medical practice like neurosurgery, doctors are choosing to retire early rather than pay malpractice insurance premiums of up to $200,000 per annum.

For psychotherapists, too, litigious action has become a constant risk and, even when not threatened legally, therapists are regularly taken to task and even disenfranchised by ethical committees which no longer tend to support their practitioners against complainants but, in the interest of protecting their politically correct status, fearfully presume the Child/Victim to be “right”. The deeply mutually challenging, complexly private relationship between therapist and patient, whereby the therapist plays out the controlling and nurturing Parent to the needy Child of the patient and to the satisfaction of both of them, has been democratised to “helper and client” and fast approaches “seller and customer”, which, in the context of psychotherapy, means the “customer” does not get what he or she most needs.

Undoubtedly, there are abuses of Parental power— in the home and in society at large—that need to be addressed and dealt with by any civilised society; and maybe our present Zeitgeist in this regard is a backlash against such abuses in previous generations. Nevertheless, I maintain that our present Zeitgeist is an extreme that both reflects and reinforces the profound existential dis-ease that is the hallmark of our time. A psychotherapist today is challenged to go against the politically correct orthodoxies and to be the stalwart, confident, assertive, authoritative Parent that his or her patients/clients are deeply seeking.

Parents and children

As for God and professional practitioners of all kinds, ordinary parents are today undermined in their authority and unconfident in their role.

Materialism

It used to be the case that children stayed innocent of greedy materialism at least until their teenage years, when their desire for fashionable clothes and other possessions bears witness to their burgeoning need for sexual display. But in response to the market forces of capitalism, communicated to children principally through television advertising, over the past forty or fifty years children have become “consumers” and “customers” at ever-earlier ages, their innocence ruthlessly exploited by canny manufacturers of “must-haves” for every tiny tot. Birthday parties c...