Why Don't Psychotherapists Laugh?

Enjoyment and the Consulting Room

Ann Shearer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138899612
• eBook ISBN: 9781317480730
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The capacity for humour is one of life's blessings. So why is it so lacking in the theory and even the practice of analysis and therapy? Why Don't Psychotherapists Laugh? is the first book of its kind about a neglected and even taboo topic: the place of enjoyment and good humour in psychotherapy.

Why Don't Psychotherapists Laugh? traces the development of professional psychotherapy and its almost exclusive focus on life's tragedies. This may naturally suit some practitioners; others may learn that a proper therapeutic persona is serious, even solemn. But what are they and their clients missing? Ann Shearer draws on ideas about humour and its functions from antiquity to contemporary stand-up comedy and beyond, to explore how it works in both mind and body. Shearer demonstrates how even the blackest humour may yield psychological information, and how humour can help build therapeutic relationships and be a catalyst for healing. Through real-life stories from consulting rooms, told by both therapists and clients, the author shows how a sense of enjoyment and good humour can restore life to people in distress- and how destructive a lack of these may become.

This book offers food for thought about the theory and practice of psychotherapy. It encourages analysts and therapists from different schools to look again at some of the assumptions on which they base their practice and teaching, and provides a resource for further reflection on the therapeutic task. Taking a psychological look at where humour comes from, what it's about and why we need it, this book will also intrigue anyone who wants to know more about the kinds of people psychotherapists are, what they do and why.

Written in a highly accessible style, Why Don't Psychotherapists Laugh? will appeal to psychotherapists with a range of trainings and allegiances, their teachers in vocational and academic institutions and their clients, as well as to readers with an interest in psychotherapy, humour and psychology.

Chapter 1
Starting points

Looking back over more than two decades as a Jungian analyst, I count myself fortunate. I think of all I’ve learned about the extraordinary, even awe-inspiring endurance of the human spirit, of the infinitely subtle ways of psyche in its quest for self-fulfilment, of the variety of people in whose stories I’ve been privileged to participate, of friends and colleagues in many parts of the world and of abiding intellectual stimulation. As in life itself, there have been times of boredom, irritation, anger and grief. But these have been hugely outweighed by the interest, affection and flashes of shared delight. Overall though, one thing seems to have been in short supply: an enjoyment, even celebration, of what makes life a humorous business as well as a testing and sometimes tragic one. This quality is not easy to define – not least because each person will find it in their own way. But we recognise it when it comes to us, when we smile or laugh or even guffaw. And we know the dull heaviness that can weigh on us when it’s not there. In this book, I call it ‘humour’ – a catchall for that sense of the humorous which enables us to live more good-humouredly with what life may bring, and so be more open to its joys as well as its sorrows.

That this quality has been neglected in discussions within and about psychotherapy seems peculiar, when we consider that the rest of the world has known since time immemorial about humour’s power to heal the suffering mind and heart. The colleagues I know best have been other analysts and depth psychologists who at least (and sometimes at most) share a perception that the conscious world of rational mind is underpinned and often subverted by something we call ‘the unconscious’. Within that spectrum, I count myself a fairly classical Jungian. That must inevitably inform my perceptions, but I have travelled more widely too and found the same: psychotherapy and humour just don’t seem easy together. The literature seems to bear this out: I’ve been quite surprised to discover how seldom humour gets even a mention in professional textbooks. This book is about why this might be so, and what psychotherapists, those who consult them and indeed others might be missing.

Whatever may be going on in the confidentiality of the consulting room, something seems to happen once we therapists appear in public, once we present a professional persona to the wider world and even to each other. I think of professional gatherings of reverent heaviness, the downward shift in the speaker’s voice and demeanour as they set their face to serious, rustle their papers and read their lecture in tones of a deliberate gravity. I think of drowsing over books and journals, weighed down by their tone, wondering how an occupation so potentially enlivening can get to sound so ponderous. Of course psychotherapy is a serious business. The therapy of psyche, the witnessing of the soul’s stirrings as someone becomes more attuned to their own complexity, better able both to accept their limitation and darkness and to rejoice in a wider sense of meaning in their life: there is nothing in the least unserious in that, for the individual, those around them and even, as Jung believed and I hope, for the collective consciousness of our time. But do we have to be solemn about it?

The gravity of psychotherapy’s persona may weigh particularly heavy at the analytic end of the spectrum. But it’s by no means restricted to it. In Britain at least, the rigours of psychoanalytic technique seem to have cast a miasma over ‘psychodynamic’ consulting rooms and counselling ones as well. My friend Elizabeth Wilde McCormick recalls the delighted relief with which her students of transpersonal psychology greeted her clinical seminar on ‘Are we allowed to laugh?’ Already they, who might be thought immune from the miasma, had somehow picked up the idea that laughter might not be part of responsible practice. Perhaps they felt that it would be an insult to the pain and distress that impels people to seek therapy, or simply confirm their clients’ fears that they will not be taken seriously, even laughed at behind their back. Yet, as I hope will become clear through these chapters, the raw material of psychological distress is precisely what humour may help to heal. People who entrust themselves to psychotherapy may both lack and need its blessings.

Academic writers about humour like to talk about gelasts and agelasts; their concern is with the gelastic mode. All these derive from the Greek meaning ‘laughter’: those who laugh, those who don’t and what makes for the difference between them. But it’s tempting to play with the sounds to hear as well something about ‘elasticity’, even the wobbly jelly which still manages to keep its essential shape. This is what humour can do for us. It can bring a greater flexibility to over-rigid and one-sided attitudes; it can expand our self-awareness and help bridge the discrepancy between conscious and unconscious tendencies in which neurosis thrives. Humour can bring much-needed perspective. One of the unbearable aspects of depression is that in its blackness there is no sense that the world could be different. One of the curses of a malign perception of personal ‘specialness’ – of being either superior or inferior to everyone else – is that it cloaks such a terrible sense of isolation from the rest of the human world. To such states and others too, humour can bring the possibility of relief.

So whether psychotherapists make place for humour, or even encourage it, may matter quite a lot to people who consult them. It may also matter more widely. Especially at the psychoanalytic end, psychotherapy can seem remote indeed from everyday life – a ritual that people ‘go to’ once a week or more to make them ‘feel better’. The more often people attend the ritual, the more obscure it may appear to outsiders, couched now in ideas and language that can seem frankly incomprehensible. This is no new perception. Already in 1955 the American psychoanalyst Robert Lindner, himself a great populariser, was finding that

around psychoanalysis there has been built a fence of mystery and something resembling awe. Its practitioners, if not yet the objects of veneration and fear, are well on their way to elevation as priests of a certain kind; and the initiates – those who have lain on couches, that is – threaten to become a confraternity of the saved, a latter-day community of saints whose cancelled checks comprise a passport to heavens denied to those less (or more?) fortunate.¹

Psychotherapists are not perhaps concerned enough about this sort of perception, not interested enough in communicating more widely ideas that people other than themselves might find interesting, even helpful – or in learning from what ‘everyone knows’. The idea of their calling as set apart from the world’s rough and tumble may even suit them. They tend to be introverted; many of them seem to enjoy spending a lot of time talking to and squabbling with each other about what their work is about and how to do it. But any psychology is inevitably a product of its practitioners and the culture of which they are a part. They need connection with the wider world too, if they are keep attuned to what I take to be a central aim of all this hard work: that people find a greater ability to live with good humour, enjoyment, creativity and kindliness outside the consulting room.

For all the obscurities, psychotherapy and the world are hardly strangers. The ideas of depth psychology have long since found their way into European and North American culture. People may no longer be surprised, though perhaps they may still be discomfited, to think there is ‘an unconscious’ with which our rational mind is often in painful conflict, or that we all have a shadow side which we would rather project onto others than acknowledge as our own. While Freud’s ideas have had a pervasive intellectual afterlife in the arts and academia, Jung’s have possibly travelled more quietly and widely, providing both the basis of psychological testing for job suitability and inspiration to poets, dreamers and seekers. So what psychotherapists believe about the human condition matters not just to their patients and clients: it makes its way subtly, even unconsciously, into the wider culture. And there are a great many therapists. Each therapeutic encounter creates another psychological ripple, which stretches from the individual patient or client to their intimates and through them to who knows how far beyond. The world needs more good humour in its relationships, not less: if it is unwelcome in the consulting room then an opportunity to foster it more widely may be lost.

And really, outside the consulting room, doesn’t the entire world know that laughter is the best medicine, that a merry heart does us good? The association of humour and healing is age-old. To take just one instance: today’s European pantomime routines have been persuasively traced back to the ancient shamanic rituals of death and re-birth, still glimpsed in traditional societies in many parts of the world.² These days, ancient truths have scientific backing. Ever since the 1970s, when Norman Cousins laughed his way out of agonising pain and into health with doses of Marx Brothers films, Vitamin C and focus on positive emotions, there’s been research into the beneficial effects of humour on body and soul. Laughter exercises heart and lungs, releases pain-killing endorphins, raises mood. Clowns visit sick children; laughter therapists participate in cancer treatment. Humour works in the mind as well. Exploiting as it so often does the incongruities between expectation and actuality, it enables us to negotiate this uncertain world. ‘You’ve got to laugh’ we say when we know the alternative is to weep – and so we find the capacity to survive. ‘It’s being so cheerful as keeps me going’ intoned the lugubrious Mrs Mop in ITMA, the British radio comedy beamed out in the darkest days of the Second World War, and everybody roared with laughter; the catchphrase continued to raise ironic mirth in my family long after the war was over, and I suspect in many others as well. We know that it doesn’t do to take ourselves and our troubles ‘too seriously’ and that humour offers us that small step back from our situation which restores it and so us to proportion. Humour helps us find companions along life’s way. ‘GSOH’ comes high on the wish-lists in lonely hearts advertisements; humour can bring people together, build a sense of shared humanity that transcends difference.

And the beauty of it is that the capacity for humour seems to be innate, part of our physiological and psychological makeup. It appears to have been present in the earliest human societies, its origins shared with other primates and maybe other mammals too. In classical Jungian terms, it is an archetypal attribute, an inbuilt potential for both instinctual and psychic experience. For the contemporary affective neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, its origins may lie in what he calls PLAY, one of the seven primary process emotions encoded in the mammalian brain. He sees ‘joyful, rough and tumble social interactions’ as providing a fundamental substrate for social learning as well as individual epigenetic modifications of higher social brain functions.³ Humour is embodied. The very word derives from the Latin ‘umor’, meaning ‘liquid’ or ‘moisture’, and medieval psychosomatic medicine was based on finding the right balance of the four ‘humours’ in the body of each individual. Too much blood made people sanguine and over-excitable, and an excess of phlegm made for sluggishness; too much black bile led to melancholia and depression, while too much of the yellow sort made people choleric and irritable. When the humours were in balance, people became ‘good-humoured’, in both body and mind. This old work with the flow and counterflow of our fluidities and fixities is also the craft of the alchemists, in which Jung found such a powerful metaphor for the work towards psychological wholeness. In many texts, it was the ceaseless alternations of solutio et coagulatio, dissolving and bringing together, that would finally yield the ‘uncommon gold’ which for Jung was the Self as image of psyche’s totality. Working to bring solutio to a self-perception that has become too rigid, or coagulatio to an ego that does not yet know its own ground, is still an important part of the therapeutic endeavour, whether ‘Jungian’ or not.

So it’s strange that something as fundamental to human nature seems to have been so left out of psychological writings – and hard too to see why something as usefully revelatory of an individual as their sense of humour should not be encouraged in consulting rooms. Perhaps it is, and these are humorous places after all. Perhaps the startling lack of reference to this aspect of the work is simply one more illustration of the gap between theory and what therapists actually do. Perhaps it is simply too hard to write about. Everyone knows that humour finds it hard to travel between cultures and even individuals. A whole cultural story could be told about American ‘humor’ and British ‘humour’, and already my perception of the lack of humour in psychotherapy may simply tell you that I don’t get it. Jokes are lost in translation, as anyone who has drooped over Freud’s Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in English could confirm; every comic knows that a joke that needs explaining is a joke that has died. Humour is of the moment. How often does the recounting of an extremely funny experience tail away into a limp ‘Well, you had to be there …’? Perhaps this is one reason that there is so little humour in psychotherapeutic case reports: its actions may be too hard to convey with conviction beyond the interactive moment. When that moment is already obscured by the necessary fictionalising of one of the people involved and the habitual reticence of the other, then what chance is there of readers really getting the point?

Yet when I’ve mentioned the title of this book to colleagues, the range of reactions suggests that something else may also be going on. Some have immediately smiled, or chuckled appreciatively, cheering it on as a topic worth exploring. But others have looked dubious, even bristled. Perhaps they suspect that I am not properly serious. Lightness of heart is one of life’s great blessings. But ‘light-hearted’ can too easily be interpreted as ‘frivolous’. The comic mode has always been less valued than the tragic; comedy is traditionally seen as lightweight by comparison with tragedy’s concern for the great themes of human suffering. There are many valid answers to the title’s question. But some colleagues have responded rather crossly, as if they have detected a challenge. ‘Well’, said one, ‘I laugh – when it’s appropriate’ – as if I had suggested something shockingly different. The reaction of other people has been telling too. Most often they have burst out laughing in delighted recognition, though some have seemed somewhat puzzled by the juxtaposition of ‘therapy’ and ‘laughter’. Both these reactions might encourage psychotherapists to wonder about their public image. Importantly, two people thought their own therapist had laughed too much: they felt that their troubles were not being taken seriously enough.

Already here’s a hint of complexities ahead. Some are built into the project itself. I’ve been constantly aware of the potential pitfalls of generalising about ‘psychotherapists’ when individuals and groups among them may follow very different understandings of the human psyche and ways to work with it. I have tried to be even-handed between different approaches, but my swithering between referring to psychotherapists as either ‘us’ or ‘them’ will probably tell readers quite a lot about my own sympathies and practice. They will notice too a related indecisiveness about whether to call the people who consult therapists ‘patients’ or ‘clients’. Both terms carry a weight of cultural association. My own preference is for ‘patient’, not because it makes psychotherapists sound grander, but because it seems more associated with the complexities of healing than the straightforwardness of commercial transaction conjured by ‘client’. I like the old associations of ‘patient’ – one who is capable of suffering, or experiencing, emotions and enduring these through time.

But these are minor difficulties compared to engaging with the complexities of humour itself. When is it (see above) ‘appropriate’ or ‘too much’? How can we ever be sure it stays the first and doesn’t burst out into the second? Humour is unpredictable in its very nature, erupting when we least expect it to take us beyond our intended selves. Hyperbole and exaggeration are its idioms; transgressing established boundaries and challenging fixed certainties are what it does. The more we try to think about it, the more it slips our categorising grasp. Humour is a universal, inbuilt human attribute. Yet it travels along so many paths: from ironical lift of an eyebrow to spluttering belly laugh, from the precision of wit to the snorting of an uncontrollable giggle. How do we even tell that it’s there? We often assume a connection between humour and laughter – I’ve done it myself in this book’s title. But of course the two may be quite unrelated: there’s nothing good-humoured about a ‘mirthless laugh’. Joking may be no more sure a guide. As the tortured personal lives of many professional comedians attest, a saving sense of life’s humour is not at all the same as an ability to crack or appreciate a joke. And even when we can detect that there’s humour about, its intent is notoriously hard to read. It may be gentle and encouraging or mocking and cruel, an expression of empathic communication or a weapon of power. And we may really not know when it’s one or the other. The distinction between laughing with and laughing at depends almost entirely on the perception of the person on the receiving end. As the philosopher Mary Midgely points out, to understand laughter at all depends on grasping the state of mind of the person making these strange grimaces and snorts, and that in turn depends on the recipient being capable of something like it themselves.⁴

So humour can be dangerous, both between individuals and among them. The beginning of 2015 saw an extreme and terrible example of that, when two Islamist gunmen murdered 11 of the staff of Charlie Hebdo, a small, stridently secular humorous magazine in Paris; one other person and a policeman also died. In subsequent attacks, five further people died and others were wounded and terrorised. The Charlie Hebdo murders ignited a huge, international outcry: the magazine’s scurrilous and often scatological cartoons of religious leaders, whether the Prophet Mohamed or the Pope, became emblems of the freedom of expression. ‘Je suis Charlie’ became a mantra across the world, as cartoonists published in support and people gathered in huge numbers to assert the inalienable right to free speech. A memorial rally across France drew together more than three-and-a-half million people, about one-third of them in Paris, where nearly 50 world leaders joined them with linked arms in a show of international solidarity. Only later did some people begin to ask publicly about whether freedom of expression has limits when it is deeply offensive to others.

The Charlie Hebdo murders are a world away from the consulting ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Starting points
• 2 A goddess laughs
• Humour and the healers
• What's so funny?
• In the consulting room
• Bibliography
• Index