Doubts and Certainties in the Practice of Psychotherapy

Josephine Klein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429912931
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is a collection of occasional papers on the practice of psychotherapy for pre-qualification students and for more experienced professionals, focusing on the development of some psychoanalytic theories into their social and historical context.

Part One

Concerning Values

Chapter One

Imagination and the institutional mind

For more than twenty years, before I became a full-time psychotherapist, I was an academic, a university teacher of theories of social life. The move from the one profession to the other was eased by four transitional years at the University of London’s Goldsmiths College, nurturing an experimental unit for community and youth workers. The course was intended for an older age-group with some experience of the world, and it compelled me to think about the particular problems of teaching mature adults and about the problems that arise generally in interactions between people in the caring and helping professions and the to-be-cared-for-and-helped.

More than ten years later, the College invited me, by now an established full-time psychotherapist, to give a lecture in memory of Ian Gulland, who had been eminent among those instrumental in setting up the course. What the other tutors and I had learnt while teaching the students, and what I had suffered during my training as a psychotherapist, came together under the title Imagination in Adult Education. That lecture was addressed to people in the world of adult education but when, more than ten years later again, I rediscovered it among my papers, it became the basis and inspiration for the present collection. This chapter is a version of that lecture, somewhat adapted, where I could do so without falsifying the tone, to make the ideas more accessible to the world of psychotherapeutics. Then, when I was preparing it for the printer early in 1994, I came across a review of a poet by a poet, which brought home to me the extent to which my own felicitous defences, at the time I was training, had protected me from being crippled by encounters with the theories of psychodynamics and therapeutics as mediated by all too many teachers and colleagues—though not, I record with continued gratitude, by my training therapist.

One night, as a student at Cambridge, Ted Hughes had a strange dream. For some time he had been finding his weekly essay a torment to write, and once again he had ended up sitting over a blank page till 2 am before giving up and going to bed. He dreamt that a fox—a very large fox, as big as a wolf—walked into the room on hind-legs. It looked as if it had just stepped out of a furnace, its body scarred, its eyes full of pain. It came up to his desk, laid a bleeding hand on the blank page, and said: “Stop this—you are destroying us”.

Ted Hughes recounts the dream early on in his new book of occasional prose writing. Winter Pollen. It is almost caricaturely Hughesian: the wild animal; the appeal from nature to man “to stop destroying us”. Hughes prints it without comment. What does it mean? It seems to describe, or allegorise, his feelings about literary criticism. He had chosen to read English at Cambridge, he tells us, because he thought this would help his own writing; the dream, we infer, changed his mind, warned him that literary criticism is unnatural, intrusive, a danger to creativity. For his Finals, Hughes switched to anthropology and archaeology. [Blake Morrison in The Independent on Sunday, 6 March 1994]

Ted Hughes’ dream warned him—and should warn us—that what passes for education, or care or help, may destroy what we value. This is hardly ever what educators or helpers or carers intend. Education, I said in my 1984 address, particularly the education of adults, should enable people to open themselves to the stimulus of new ideas—to take in more, make sense of more, make use of more, bring more to, the riches that human culture has made available. This idea of education, I said, has implications for teachers in general, and also for educational institutions, and those who make policy or administrative decisions on educational matters. Ten years later I can add that it has implications for sister-disciplines in the caring and helping professions, and in counselling and psychotherapy, At its core is Imagination. Those who make policy need it, and those whose profession it is to teach and to help and to care need it, and so do those who are subjected to those processes of education, help, and care.

Imagination: creative or escapist

According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, imagination is

1. The action of imagining, of forming a mental concept of what is not actually present to the senses; the result of this, a mental image or idea (frequently characterized as vain, false, etc.).
2. The mental consideration of actions or events not yet in existence
   • (a) scheming or devising
   • (b) expectation, anticipation (1654)
3. That faculty of the mind by which we conceive of the absent as if it were present (frequently including the memory): the “reproductive imagination”.
4. The power which the mind has of forming concepts beyond those derived from external objects: the “productive imagination”.

You can see, I said in 1984, that imagination maybe either productive or reproductive, defensive or creative. The same, I said, is true of education. Imagination can keep you in your world dreaming up things to keep you feeling fine—so can education. Or it can make you reach out to discover new things—and so can education.

Psychoanalytic literature tends to subsume imagination under the heading of phantasy, and it has a similar difficulty in deciding whether phantasy (imagination) is escapist or creative, defensive or adaptive. Thus, according to Rycroft’s Critical Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, imagination “is the process, or faculty, of conceiving representations of objects, events, etc. not actually present. The process produces results which are either (a) imaginary, in the sense of being fictitious, unreal, or (b) imaginative, in the sense of providing solutions to problems which have never previously been solved, or, in the arts, creating artefacts which nonetheless reflect or enhance experience.”

We cannot always be sure what imagination is at work. One of Giradoux’s characters in The Tiger at the Gates is quoted as saying, “There’s no better way of exercising the imagination than the study of law. No poet ever interpreted nature as freely as a lawyer interprets truth.” Here imagination equals lies.

The compilers of Roget’s Thesaurus are less ambivalent. They put “Imagination (515)” under Section 7: Creative Thought, together with “(514) Supposition” and “(516) Meaning”. Creative Thought, incidentally, is itself a sub-heading of “Class 4: INTELLECTUAL POWERS”, not of “Class 6: SENTIMENT AND MORAL POWERS”.

Of particular interest for us is the empathic imagination, empathy being “the power of projecting one’s personality into, and so fully understanding the object of, contemplation” (Shorter Oxford English Dictionary). Or, as Rycroft (1968) puts it:

The capacity to put oneself into the other’s shoes. The concept implies that one is both feeling oneself into the object, and remaining aware of one’s own identity as a person, [p. 691

The proviso that one retain the sense of one’s own identity is important: empathy is not about being one of the lads or lasses. You must remain your individual self and have something to offer and be willing to receive what the other offers: a fair exchange between different people who each have something to offer the other.

“The capacity to put oneself into the other’s shoes”! Here, Rycroft’s good plain English already points up one limitation to our imaginative empathy. What about those who have no shoes? Does all the human race have shoes? Yes, as far as our imagination normally goes. We had better call empathy the capacity to put ourselves into another’s place. Once we have been in that place where the other lives, we are not ever the same again. We identify with the other, we rejoice with their joy, agonize in their distress.

Empathic imagination

Imaginative literature, novels and such, help us to be empathic and imaginative. However, we must not make too much of the power of our imaginative writers helping us see things we are not ready to see. When Howard Brenton published a play in 1982 to show the corrupting influences of conflict and conquest, with each succeeding wave of rescuers and liberators inevitably screwing the peasantry who remained oppressed, it did not broaden Mrs Whitehouse’s imagination. She took the author to court! The play was Romans in Britain.

Perhaps the metaphor used by Brenton was too much for our unstretched imaginations—not only for Mrs Whitehouse’s, but also for many others’. I would want to consider Brenton’s point seriously. To that extent, Brenton was unimaginative—did he want to communicate with us or did he want to shock?

I do not know. I know I am often angry at you, when I think of you not as the people I know, but as “the public” or “people” or “educators”. In that frame of mind I can easily think that communication with you is impossible unless I shock you. When I am angry I find it easy to believe that being shocked is good for you, and a good way of communicating with you. My anger has limited my empathic imagination. In my anger I have used my imagination to falsify you, to imagine what is not, to imagine what is good for you without consulting you, to imagine an untruth, as the dictionaries warned I might.

Imagination as empathy, as identification with the other, can be contrasted with imagination as phantasy, as a projection of one’s wishes or fears onto the other person without checking the truth of one’s ideas, not caring how the other person sees the world, not meeting the other person and not becoming vulnerable to correction where one was mistaken.

For the artist, communication with any particular set of people is optional. For the educator or carer or helper, however, communication is of the essence, is part of the definition of the work. We can fail to communicate, blinkered by anger and the wish to shock, or by lack of empathy in some other direction. Indeed, we can have very unrealistic and vapid, and very nasty and hating, phantasies about those we are meant to serve.

Aunt Dot’s world

Other people’s blinkered imagination has often been used with great comic effect. Take Rose Macauley’s portrait of Aunt Dot in The Towers of Trebizond (1956), a novel that begins:

“Take my camel, dear”, said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass.

I should say for those who have not come across this pearl among funny novels, that Aunt Dot was living in St John’s Wood at the time. The Towers of Trebizond is also a serious novel, about the conflict of personal values that seemed so important to us in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and in particular about conflict where the individualist wishes of a person stand over against the systematic values of a religion or ideology. Being a comic novel, it is therefore very funny about religious adherence as well. Aunt Dot belongs to that small proportion of people whose allegiance is to Anglo-Catholicism. But it does not matter what the target is. It could be monetarism or Marxism or psychoanalysis.

One of the main characters traces some of the influences which have shaped her family and her Aunt Dot.

We have inherited a firm and tenacious adherence to the Church of our country. With it has come down to most of us a great enthusiasm for catching fish. Aunt Dot maintains that this propensity is peculiarly Church of England. She has perhaps made a slight confusion between the words Anglican and angling. To be sure the French fish even more, as I sometimes point out, and, to be sure, the pre-Reformation monks fished greatly. “Mostly in fishponds”, said Aunt Dot. “Very unsporting, and only for food”.

Aunt Dot had married a missionary who had, as was then the convention, shot himself when in danger of capture by a heathen tribe. He also tried to shoot Aunt Dot, but fortunately he had missed. She was taken into the harem of the tribe.

“How did you escape from the harem?” I would ask her, when she told me this story in my childhood.

“One of the wives, who didn’t want me to wait until the chief came back, bribed one of the tribe to take me away into the jungle and kill me. But he was afraid to do this, as I was a goddess, so he showed me a path out of the forest that led to a Baptist missionary settlement. I had never cared much for Baptists, but they were really most kind. You must never forget, Laurie, that dissenters are often excellent Christian people. You must never be narrow-minded”.

I promised that I never would.

Other people’s worlds

For more immediately relevant implications I turn to Bob Hescott, in the 1970s an actor at the Nottingham Playhouse, who became involved first in the theatre’s Saturday morning drama workshops for children, and from there developed a number of other very interesting projects. He wrote a small book about his experiences (The Feast of Fools, 1983), illustrated with his own sketches.

At Broad Oaks, a hostel for adults of sub-normal intelligence, we played drama games, devised shows and discovered the inmates’ delightful talent for giving new lyrics to old tunes. To describe Broad Oaks as a hostel makes it sound like roughing it and making do, but it wasn’t like that it was a real, warm, comfortable home with private and communal facilities for people who would never have experienced a home life without it. It was quite new and some of the older inhabitants had spent years previously in hospital wards.

“How long were you in hospital?” I asked Eileen.

“Seventeen years four months three days”, she said. [p. 39]

I am learning something here. And again,

The inmates of Broad Oaks would quite happily devise mini-operas of their day’s experiences. One of the inmates, Cathy, had a boyfriend, Jimmy, a young Irish alcoholic from St Mary’s hostel. She would talk to us after sessions about Jimmy’s drinking problem. She had a grasp of relationships, in her supposedly sub-normal mind, that was sophisticated to the extreme. “He has to do it for himself. I can’t make him give up drinking for me. If ever we broke up he’d just start again. I don’t want to be in charge of him like people have always been in charge of me”.

I think before we ever begin to get it right, we must become attuned to all the wisdom that is available at all the levels throughout society. There is a certain kind of ignorance which is an advantage in Great Britain. I know exactly how to help my son “get on”. I should keep him in ignorance. I should take him out of the community and put him in a public school where he will see and experience little of his fellow men. Then, on the strength of this selected ignorance he can go off to university, the more select and cut off the better—Oxbridge would be ideal, and a course like Classics divine. Finally, thoroughly ignorant of the life style and the needs of the mass of his countrymen, he would be considered qualified to govern them, to practise medicine on them, to dispense law and judgement on them. … [p. 40]

He goes on to say,

It is hard to hurt a friend, and therefore much better to build a wall to govern behind. It is easy to close down the hostels for the sub-normal when you don’t know Cathy or Eileen, [p. 41]

In the same vein, Richard Hoggart (1958):

No doubt these things are better arranged now, but when I was a boy our area was shocked by the clumsiness of a Board of Guardians visitor who suggested to an old woman that, since she was living on charity, she ought to sell a fine teapot she never used but had on show. “Just fancy”, people went around saying, and no further analysis was needed. Everyone knew that the man had been guilty of an insensitive affront to human dignity, [from the chapter on “Them and Us”, p. 59]

Since then our imagination has expanded a little. Many of us do now know that this old lady should not have been made to feel ashamed of living on charity, but was morally entitled to support when she had worked all her life at useful things—keeping a house going, keeping an industrial worker fed and clothed and comfortable, bearing and caring for children some of whom may have died for their country while others lived and worked to keep the economy going. But not everyone’s imagination, then or now, has yet sufficiently expanded to know this. Even now, when one of these instances of breath-taking heartless lack of imagination comes to me, I hear the people of Hunslet say: “Just fancy!”

The point to note here is how what is commonly called education may diminish rather than bring out the talent for empathic imagination. There may even be an idea afoot that in order to make good decisions you must be educated in a way that makes you remote from the people you will make decisions about. The process of what is commonly called higher education can be very damaging in this respect. Perhaps it was with this in mind that Lionel Trilling, in The Liberal Imagination, wrote that there is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

Experiencing differences in status

Thes...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• PREAMBLE
• PART ONE Concerning values
• PART TWO Concerning theories and techniques
• PART THREE Concerning the development of ideas
• REFERENCES
• INDEX