Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing

Towards Creative-Relational Inquiry

Jonathan Wyatt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138897625
• eBook ISBN: 9781351714419
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Research & Methodology in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Therapy, Stand-Up, and the Gesture of Writing is a sharp, lively exploration of the connections between therapy, stand-up comedy, and writing as a method of inquiry; and of how these connections can be theorized through the author's new concept: creative-relational inquiry. Engaging, often poignant, stories combine with rich scholarship to offer the reader provocative, original insights.

Wyatt writes about his work as a therapist with his client, Karl, as they meet and talk together. He tells stories of his experiences attending comedy shows in Edinburgh and of his own occasional performances. He brings alive the everyday profound through vignettes and poems of work, travel, visiting his mother, mourning his late father, and more. The book's drive, however, is in bringing together therapy, stand-up, and writing as a method of inquiry to mobilise theory, drawing in particular from Deleuze and Guattari, the new materialisms, and affect theory. Through this diffractive work, the text formulates and develops creative-relational inquiry.

With its combination of fluent story-telling and smart, theoretical propositions, Therapy, Stand-up, and the Gesture of Writing offers compelling possibilities both for qualitative scholars who have an interest in narrative, performative, and embodied scholarship, and those who desire to bring current, complex, theories to bear upon their research practices.

Part 1

Openings¹

1 ‘Opening’ not only as beginning but also as break, as a way to make movement possible, as a signal of the “promise of possibility for difference”. Boldt and Leander, “Becoming Through ‘the Break’ ”, 2017, 423. Three ‘opening’ chapters follow.

Chapter 1

An Introduction

June and July 2018, Edinburgh²

Therapy: Karl

“Time to stop”, I say.

“It always comes around so fast, doesn’t it?”, Karl replies. “No, that’s not quite true”. He pauses for a moment. “Sometimes it’s like we stand still. Like this all stands still”.

He begins to rise from his chair, as do I, but, halfway to standing, left hand on the armrest, he freezes, crouched, staring ahead. “Sometimes, here feels like this”, he says.

“Thanks for the demo”, I laugh.

Stand-Up: Sunday 23 October 2017, The Stand Comedy Club, Edinburgh

I am standing at the back, a glass of Twister Thistle IPA beside me on the turquoise, distressed shelf, waiting for Fern Brady’s show to begin.³ It is 8.05pm, for an 8.30pm start. The place feels subdued and not yet full. I am on my own in this corner. A man with a beard and jacket has joined me and I appreciate the company, though we haven’t spoken. I am not interested in conversation. I have been standing alone here since I arrived. There were seats free but I feel less intrusive being here with my notebook than writing squeezed between others, who would understandably wonder why. It is not an innocent, neutral act to be writing in a comedy club.

Writing, 20 June 2018, Edinburgh

Not long now: this book is close to completion, the deadline of 31 July in view. The text has been calling for an introduction and the clarity introductions promise.

The writing-story of this introduction is one characterized by a dynamic of approach and retreat.⁴ At times, sentences have formed themselves into definite, purposeful shape, engendering in me a sense of solidity, like pegging the ropes of a tent in a strong wind. In those moments I can stand back and grasp what this book is doing, can see its contours. However, at other times, as with most of my tent-assembling experiences, there have been shaky, fractious moments—maybe it has to be so—and I have had to turn away for a while (to stretch my shoulders and back, to revise a sentence I am not happy with elsewhere, to make coffee) so I can consider how to come back to it differently. You might not hear this movement, this approach and retreat—forth and back, back and forth—in what follows, but it is there, pulsing between the lines.

* * *

Therapy, Stand-Up, Writing

In this book I put therapy and stand-up comedy in circuit with each other, through and with writing, to see what happens. The book, in this sense, is experimental, playful: it is serious play.⁵

The book is not about therapy and stand-up, nor even about writing, for their own sakes, but about what they do together, how they speak to and with each other about, for example, surprise, directness and relationality. The book’s heart—heart as rhythm, movement and flux, not heart as static core or centre—is in how, one through and with the other, therapy and stand-up connect with writing as a method of inquiry, engaging and breathing with—and mobilizing—theory throughout.

This theory, these theoretical bodies, these theoretical energies that inform the book, is/are those of Deleuze and Guattari, new materialism (or the new materialisms)⁶ and affect theory.⁷ Such bodies of theory see affect, for example, not as belonging to one or more individual body but as a “varied, surging capacit[y]” that “catch[es] people up in something that feels like something”,⁸ a capacity that, in Erin Manning’s terms, ‘de-phases’⁹ in us before moving on elsewhere. Furthermore, from these theoretical perspectives, the ‘people’, the ‘us’, are not humanist individual subjects but entities ‘intra-acting’ with material, human and more-than-human others¹⁰ within a flattened ontology,¹¹ part of and produced in ‘assemblages’¹² of times of day, space, bodies, objects, movement and more.

I say these theoretical bodies and energies ‘inform’ the book, which suggests passivity on both their part and mine. Instead, I intend ‘inform’ to work in Erin Manning’s active and processual sense of ‘in-form’ (after Simondon), of being active in, and party to, the book’s taking shape.¹³ I tussle, I dance, I breathe, with these theories, and they with me; they shape me, they shape this book. As St. Pierre says, theory produces us.¹⁴

I use ‘counselling’ and ‘therapy’ (and counsellor, therapist) interchangeably in the text, with ‘therapy’ shorthand for ‘psychotherapy’. While there are arguments within the field about how counselling and psychotherapy differ, there is much they share.

I began my training as a counsellor in the early 1990s, completing it in 2001 at the Isis Centre, Oxford,¹⁵ my training throughout being psychodynamic. Psychodynamic theory and practice are located within the 20th-century psychoanalytic tradition of Freud, Jung, Klein and their successors, and is concerned, for example, with the links between past and present experiences, and with the significance of our unconscious life.

I have long thought of myself as a psychodynamic counsellor, and that continues to be a story I tell, though the label feels slippery and happily complicated. I am influenced by other approaches, like narrative therapy,¹⁶ and over the past ten or more years I have been energized in my life and practice(s), including my therapeutic practice, by the theoretical charge of those I draw from in this book, in particular Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari’s work is challenging of psychoanalysis, yet Guattari continued to practise as a psychoanalyst at the innovative La Borde clinic throughout his working life. I embrace Guattari’s (and Deleuze and Guattari’s) concept of ‘the refrain’ in relation to therapy in Chapter 5.

I assume throughout the text that counselling is face-to-face, rather than, say, online or by telephone. Similarly, for stand-up, the particular interest of this book is in live performance, where a performer and audience share material(izing) space together, rather than recorded performances I watch or listen to.¹⁷ In both stand-up and therapy, what is crucial for this book’s purposes is the immediacy, the here-and-now, flesh-to-flesh presence of bodies in/of rooms; the ebbs and flows of energy, how tension builds and is released: how affect, elusive and mercurial, happens, flows, erupts;¹⁸ how affect—humour, sadness, anger, etc.—arrives in, moves through and changes, becomes, the space. English comedian Ross Noble’s comments concerning stand-up’s immediacy speak to both stand-up and therapy:

The joy and the secret of it is in that moment. It is not a passive medium—all the elements must come together, the ideas, the performance and the environment must perfectly align and the comic must merge all of these elements perfectly, controlling and timing everything just right while the audience gets lost in the moment.¹⁹

Noble does not go far enough here, though. It is not only the audience (and client) but also the performer (and therapist) who needs to allow themselves to become lost.

There are a number of stand-up genres and styles:²⁰ amongst current, well-known UK-based comics, the likes of Milton Jones work with puns and word-play, others such as Mark Thomas work with big- picture politics and still others, like Michael McIntyre, do ‘observational’ comedy. The connections I make here are not with these but with the genres of performers such as UK-based North Americans, Reginald D. Hunter and Katherine Ryan, on the one hand, who work with personal and often painful material from their own lives (apparently),²¹ and also with the deconstructive, postmodern work of Stewart Lee, whose attention and commentary is as much upon the here-and-now relationship with his audience and his own process as on his show’s content.

This is not a pedagogic text about therapy or stand-up. I mostly wear the theoretical and technical complexities of therapeutic practice lightly, aware there is much more to say, understand and explore; nor do I claim expertise as either a comedy connoisseur or performer,²² knowing many of the form’s subtleties and histories pass me by. Nor (my final disclaimer) do I do justice, I know, to the breadth and depth of the scholarly and theoretical literature on each of these sets of practices. Instead, the purpose of this book is to tell their stories, stories of being in the counselling room with clients and of witnessing, and occasionally offering, stand-up performances, seeking for those stories to speak to and with each other, as well as to and with writing and the book’s theoretical forces. Writing through such stories enables me to live in and with both therapy and stand-up differently. It is my hope readers also will find this ‘diffractive’ work—putting one through the other through the other²³—productive. I hope, too, that my renderings of therapy and stand-up convey the respect and love I have for both the therapeutic and stand-up encounters, and the sense of mystery in what is made possible in both, alongside their inevitable muddle, mess and struggle.

Writing as a Method of Inquiry

Laurel Richardson’s proposal in the mid-1990s that writing is a method of inquiry was groundbreaking.²⁴ Julie White’s 2016 volume, Permission, explores the influence of Richardson’s work over the years since, speaking both from her own experience and through tributes collected from over fifty scholars to how Richardson’s writing has inspired and shaped their work.²⁵ As one such contributor, Larry Russell, writes,

Many of us write because of [Laurel Richardson]—not writing like her, but writing into the silence at the end of her stories. She invites a level of disclosure found only in old friendships or fine writing. We are drawn into a conversation so faithful to our experience, so intimately radical, that we must carve out new ground to meet her.²⁶

The impact of Laurel Richardson’s scholarship, and in particular writing- as-inquiry,²⁷ on qualitative research theorizing and practice has been far-reaching. Radical and provocative, disruptive and generative, writing- as-inquiry continues to open both itself and ourselves as qualitative scholars to new possibilities as we respond to the calls and challenges at the theoretical, methodological, ethical and political edges.

Having made those claims for writing-as-inquiry, and notwithstanding White’s book, I would propose there is a ‘quietness’ to the ways in which Richardson’s (and Richardson and St. Pierre’s)²⁸ work on writing- as-inquiry has been taken up. While qualitative research conferences host special interest groups on other (arguably) closely related methodological approaches like autoethnography and, similarly, journals publish special issues and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Part 1. Openings
• Part 2. Refrains
• Part 3. Reframings
• Part 4. Reframings (Continued): SHAME
• Epilogue
• References
• Index