Thinking of Becoming a Counsellor?

Jonathan Ingrams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429922961
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

If you are thinking of becoming a counsellor, you may be wondering if you could put to good use your own life experience by offering support and understanding to those trying to cope with difficulties that you may have encountered and worked through yourself. The ancient Greek aphorism "know thyself" is immensely important in this regard. For unless counsellors are in harmony with themselves they cannot truly relate to the needs of those they seek to help. It is not enough for the counsellor to play the role of the therapist. He or she has to be the therapist - a very different concept. This book explores the journeys of self-discovery that prompted the pioneering practitioners to direct their skills in particular ways and the influence exerted by their backgrounds, ambitions, and personal histories. The overall objective is to help intending therapists to arrive at an understanding of the inner resources they will need to embark on a counselling career, and to help them determine which approach might best accord with their temperament and lifetime's experience.

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

It seems only right that we start with Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the Big Bang from which all psychotherapy emerged. He’ll almost certainly be the first authority you’ll be introduced to if you go on a counselling course. But although a huge influence on the development of psychotherapy, he didn’t emerge from a vacuum, or practice in isolation. Before Freud, superstition and magic were often believed to be the prime controllers of mental functions. A contemporary of Freud, William Walter Atkinson (1862–1932), in his book Mind and Body or Mental States and Physical Conditions, published in 1910, observed: “Mental Healing operates under a thousand names, forms and theories in every race, nation and clime in all ages past and present”.¹ This remains true to this day. Proof of this can be found in an incident as recently as 2007 in which the actress Phyllida Law had two gargoyles stolen from her garden. She erected a notice warning that she had put a hex on the culprit. Some time later, the statues were returned, with a note from the thief pleading her to lift the curse as he had been very ill since he stole the gargoyles. Law duly put up another notice: “Thank you for returning the statues. All curses lifted.”²

I leave it to you to decide what was going on here!

The manipulation of the human mind has, of course, been exploited since time immemorial by witch doctors, shamans, and various faith healers practising their art. In the Middle Ages, Edward the Confessor instituted the Royal Touch, a laying on of hands which was believed to cure scrofula, a disfiguring form of tuberculosis known as the “king’s evil”. (The fact that every supplicant received a gold coin may have encouraged people to present for the cure!) There was even a service laid out in the Book of Common Prayer to accompany the process. Although the practice was abandoned in England after the death of Queen Anne in 1714, it continued sporadically in France for a further hundred years.

Next up to the stand is Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815). Mesmer developed the concept of “animal magnetism”. He claimed that a powerful magnetic field surrounded the body, which, if disturbed or broken, resulted in the person becoming ill. If this “field” were to be repaired or rebalanced, however, then good health could be restored. Mesmer achieved this by touching his clients with an iron rod so that beneficial magnetism flowed into them, and also by “mesmerizing” his clients—that is, looking into their eyes and performing passes up and down their arms.

The huge success of this venture later encouraged him to treat his patients en masse by seating groups of them in a large wooden tub in which bottles of “magnetized” water, resting on a bed of iron filings, were placed at strategic intervals radiating from the centre. The tub had holes in it through which jointed iron rods were placed. Mesmer would instruct assistants to direct the iron rods to different parts of the participants’ anatomies. Unsurprisingly, in this heady atmosphere, his patients would sometimes exhibit signs of hysteria or undergo convulsions. The king of France offered Mesmer a large sum of money if he would publish his secret, but Mesmer (wisely) refused.

For all they might look like music hall acts, it is sobering to recognize that interventions like the Royal Touch and mesmerism could not have gone on as long as they did without getting results. Many thousands put themselves forward for treatment and, indeed, mesmerism continued to be practised after the death of its originator.

It is unlikely, if you take up counselling training, that you’ll be introduced to the philosophy of a watchmaker with an enquiring mind rejoicing under the name of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802–1866), but he certainly deserves to be included in pre-Freudian history as he was arguably one of the very first to practice a form of psychotherapy. In 1838, after witnessing a demonstration of mesmerism, Quimby started practising it himself, and initially was a firm believer in animal magnetism. But although he achieved good results, he started to evolve the idea that his patients’ disorders were often brought about not by disease, but by their beliefs about their conditions. Talking sympathetically to them, he would help them understand that their suffering was an error of mind. He would propose alternative ways of thinking (what he called “the Truth”) and so restore them to health, or at least bring about an improvement of their condition. He was a religious man and related his cures to the methods he perceived to have been used by Jesus. He treated rich and poor alike and never charged for his sessions.

Moving one step closer to Freud, in 1841 James Braid (1795–1860), a Scottish physician, having witnessed a demonstration of mesmerism by the Swiss practitioner, Charles Lafontaine (1803–1892), was convinced that the trance induced in the subject was psychological and had nothing to do with magnetism. Nevertheless, Braid was intrigued by the phenomenon of trances, and carried out some simple experiments on volunteers. He would tell them to gaze at bright objects held in front of their eyes and found he could achieve sleep states by suggestion alone. In order to make a clear distinction from mesmerism, he called his process “hypnotism”, after the Greek word hypnos, meaning “sleep”.

In an acerbic letter to the editor of The Lancet in 1845, Braid stated:

I adopted the term “hypnotism” to prevent my being confounded with those who entertain those extreme notions that a mesmeriser’s will has an irresistible power over his subjects … as well as to get rid of the erroneous theory about a magnetic fluid, or exoteric influence of any description being the cause of the sleep.

He went on:

Further, I have never been a supporter of the imagination theory. My belief is quite the contrary. I attribute it to the induction of a habit of intense abstraction, or concentration of attention, and maintain that it is most readily induced by causing the patient to fix his thoughts and sight on an object, and suppress his respiration.³

As will be seen, the dismissive and scornful tone of this letter is quite typical of the clashes that have featured throughout the development of psychotherapy.

Braid’s intervention should finally have put paid to the witchcraft and magic that had dominated the interpretation of induced emotional states, but this didn’t stop wild practices and claims for mental healing continuing to proliferate. William Atkinson describes the invention of Elisha Perkins (1741–1799) who conceived the idea of curing disease by means of a pair of tongs, one of brass, the other of steel.⁴ These so-called “tractors” were stroked over the affected areas of the body for ten minutes. Almost miraculous cures were achieved by this process and, in Europe, it was reported that one and a half million people were cured by “Perkinsism” (much to the frustration of the medical profession).

But if you think the attributes of Perkinsism seem questionable, how about this:

During the healing session the practitioner will place his hands lightly on different parts of your body. Some practitioners will follow a predetermined sequence of hand placements, allowing their hands to rest on each body placement for 2 to 5 minutes before moving on to the next. Energy automatically flows where the imbalances are in the body, regardless of where the practitioner’s hands are placed.⁵

This is a description of Reiki, a healing technique that supposedly involves using “life force energy” (translation of Ki) to achieve its effects. Whatever your instinctive views, this is a method widely and successfully practised in the UK today, so there are no rules as to what counts as legitimate.

But there are three factors that can be derived from these “treatments”, all of which will be seen to impact on counselling.

The first of these is that a high level of focused, personal attention can, in itself, be extremely therapeutic for the person receiving it. The second is that the human psyche, when programmed to do so, exerts impressive powers to impact on both the physical and psychological states of the individual. The third is the potentially dangerous human tendency to respond unquestioningly to instructions from someone they believe to be in a position of authority. This last phenomenon has been demonstrated in chilling experiments, of which more later.

The ability of the human mind to be open to suggestion, whilst vital in hypnosis, has been something of a bugbear in both psychiatry and medicine. This is what produces the placebo effect in which an inactive substance, such as a sugar or saline solution can improve a patient’s condition simply because the person has the expectation that it will be helpful. There is now a recognized classification called MUS (medically unexplained symptoms) in which patients present with physical manifestations that lack an obvious organic basis and which appear to be psychologically induced. We’ll be exploring the implications of this for psychotherapy later in the book.

Meanwhile, back to James Braid. Following his identification of hypnosis, the psychological value of this process rapidly gained respect and authority. The French physician Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault (1823–1904) formed the Nancy school of “suggestive therapeutics” in which Liébeault would propose to patients he had hypnotized that they would recover from a range of disorders they saw themselves as inflicted with, from indigestion to coughing to sleeplessness. In 1889, his colleague, Hippolyte Bernheim (1840–1919), wrote a comprehensive book on the subject, Suggestive Therapeutics: A Treatise on the Nature and Uses of Hypnotism, which is still in print to this day.

This was the fertile ground in which Sigmund Freud was able to make his huge contribution to psychotherapy through the development of psychoanalysis. As is so often the case with therapeutic approaches, the development of psychoanalysis was strongly influenced by past endeavours to understand the human psyche and Freud’s own characteristics, background, and training.

Freud initially set out to become a doctor in the accepted sense. He joined the medical faculty at the University of Vienna, but found his principal interests lay in the science of physiology and the links between cause and effect in biology. He gravitated towards research, and from 1876 to 1882 worked on the anatomy of the central nervous system in the laboratory of Ernst Brücke (1819–1892), a pioneer in developing an understanding of fundamental life processes. Brücke sought to break down complex organic structures and processes into basic components, the better to understand their interactions. This form of investigation—termed “reductionism”—perfectly suited Freud’s analytical mind. Freud stated that Brücke was the highest authority that ever had influence on him.

For his part, Brücke was pleased with Freud’s thoroughness and dedication. He arranged for him to go to Paris and study the experimental work of the French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot (1825–1893). Charcot was a brilliant physician doing pioneering work in joint disease and the impact of diabetes. As part of his research, Charcot was exploring the use of hypnosis on patients in an attempt to discover the origin of a variety of unexplained physical symptoms including paralysis, seizures, and contractures—a form of muscle spasm that results in the body adopting bizarre postures.

Charcot believed that these symptoms were all manifestations of hysteria, a description for excessive or uncontrollable emotional disturbance. Charcot designated hysteria as a neurological disorder, but speculated that some episodes may have their origins in a particular traumatic event from the past, such as a fall or other accident. Hypnosis could bring out the memory of these events, which had previously been hidden. Freud was intrigued by this idea and began to form the notion that the conscious and the unconscious could be separate entities not always connecting with one another.

Here Freud had a stroke of luck. Just as he was taking his final medical exams a friend of his, Josef Breuer (1842–1925), some ten years his senior, told him about a young woman he was treating, under the pseudonym of Anna O, who was suffering from a range of disturbances following the death of her father. She first developed a cough, then distortions of vision, then headaches, and then episodes of paralysis and loss of balance. At times, she became muddled in her use of language, or would speak only English. Freud thought that these symptoms might not be related to physical causes, but could actually be a reflection of her grieving emotional state. The most significant aspect of this case was that Anna O would alternate between a world of bizarre mental disorder and periods of complete lucidity—a clear indication that her unconscious mind had been intruding on her conscious perceptions. Inevitably, given the prevailing climate, her case was diagnosed as hysteria.

Importantly, Anna O was able to recognize in her lucid periods the impact of her unconscious disturbances and under light hypnosis was able to talk of the issues that had been troubling her. Breuer found that this “talking cure”, Anna’s own description of the process, relieved her of the associated symptoms—a process she described as “chimney sweeping”. As therapy proceeded, Breuer found it wasn’t always necessary to hypnotize Anna. Just letting her talk freely was calming in itself. Freud was fascinated by the idea that the way to cure a particular symptom of hysteria was to recreate the memory of the incident that had originally led to it. He was also intrigued that a suggestion could be made to someone under hypnosis and that she might later act on it, having forgotten what it was she had been told to do.

Breuer’s treatment of Anna O is sometimes referred to as the first example of psychoanalysis, but although it represented progress towards a psychological approach to therapy, there was much that remained unexplained. Freud realized that the lapses in memory Breuer had recovered from Anna O were a product of part of the mind which ordinary enquiry would not reveal. But just what was being revealed and what was being held back? And not only what, but why?

Freud completed his medical degree and after a spell at Vienna General Hospital went into practice as a specialist in the treatment of psychological disorders. As would be expected, given his training and expectations, all his patients were women and all “hysterics”, referred to him because they seemed to display the physical symptoms associated with hysteria. Initially, he dealt with them using hypnosis to uncover the traumatic incident that supposedly gave rise to their symptoms. But he felt the response to hypnosis didn’t tell the whole story. There were gaps, and on his own admission, he wasn’t very good at hypnotism. Instead, he put his patients into a state of concentration, sometimes applying pressure on their foreheads to facilitate the process. Following on from Breuer’s treatment of Anna O, he encouraged his patients to talk about whatever came into their minds—a process called “free association”. But he found that at some point the patient’s stream of words would often falter. Freud detected resistance—a force separate from the person’s will that intervened to stop the flow.

Freud’s scientific background, developed through his training under Brücke and Charcot, provided the impetus to explore more deeply the elements that comprise the human mind. He formed the hypothesis that the mind was a dynamic entity of several parts, conscious and unconscious, operating sometimes in harmony and sometimes in opposition to one another. He determined that there were active parts of the mind that were not always available, either to the patient or the therapist.

He developed a compelling metaphor to describe three aspects that comprise the personality: the id, ego, and super-ego. The id (Latin for “it”) he defined as the most primitive part of our psyche, the dinosaur concerned only with pleasure and the avoidance of pain. The id is impulsive, and demands immediate gratification. (Far too much id around today, some might think!) The id has no interest in anyone’s well-being, only its own.

The ego, or “I”, is that part of us which tries to modify the demands of the id by reference to the real world. The ego, too, is concerned with gratifying our desires, but recognizes that a strategy may be needed to achieve this. Freud suggested that if the id is a horse, then the ego is its rider. But to continue the analogy, it could be said that the horse is wilful and the rider too easily led in directions of the horse’s choosing. If challenged, the ego is likely to defend the demands of the id on the grounds that its actions were justifiable.

The final component, the super-ego, represents the moral part of the personality and consists of two parts: the conscience and the ideal self. It is the super-ego that is our inner voice, the one that tells us how we ought to be. On the one hand, it is the reward we feel when we have behaved in accordance with our moral codes, but equally it is the voice of reproach when we haven’t performed as well as we know we should, and which is responsible for emotions like guilt and shame. Both ego and super-ego are very much the product of our upbringing and the society in which we live.

A simple example illustrates the concept. A small child, on seeing that another child has a bag of sweets, might well crawl over and help himself to some. This is the id, pure and simple. As he gets older, the child knows he must first ask—not out of any moral drive, but because he’ll be in trouble if he doesn’t. This is the ego seeking a way of satisfying the id. If he is refused, he might wait until the other child isn’t looking and then steal a sweet. If he does this and is caught, he will likely be very defensive because he knows he has misbehaved.

But even if he gets away with it, he may feel ashamed or guilty. This is the super-ego stepping in, reminding him that if everyone carried on with disregard for other people’s possessions, life would be imp...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About The Author
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Chapter One Beginnings
• Chapter Two The age of psychoanalysis
• Chapter Three The impact of childhood
• Chapter Four The road to self-discovery
• Chapter Five How we construct our world
• Chapter Six Inter-relationships
• Chapter Seven The power of conditioning
• Chapter Eight Automatic thoughts and irrational beliefs
• Chapter Nine The counselling environment today
• Conclusion
• Suggested Reading
• index