The Labyrinth of Possibility

A Therapeutic Factor in Analytical Practice

Giorgio Tricarico

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429921209
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book proposes a model that aims to capture what happens between analyst and patient when a therapeutic relationship is effective. It outlines a series of insights that have led to the emergence of the subject in question, via analysis of the image of the labyrinth from historical point of view.

PART I

MAIN THEME

CHAPTER ONE


Tuning—questions

One of the first things you must practise, when learning to play the guitar, is tuning. Long before I had started to consider exploring the psyche, and thanks to my father, I embraced this instrument—physically too, because as you play the guitar sitting down, you embrace it.

When tuning the guitar, you have to start from just one note, a “La” (“A”, in English) and from this practice was born the expression “dare il La” in Italian (literally, to give an “A”), meaning a starting point, an incipit, the beginning of something. In the study of the psyche, the “La” triggering reflections is often clinical experience with the patients themselves.

Even this work had a “La”; actually two, to be precise. The first line of enquiry arose from a frequent observation in psychotherapy, one that may plausibly have occurred to anyone involved in this work: when dealing with a case, it often happens that situations that seem to represent a serious obstacle, a core problem, a point at which the therapy has clearly run aground, actually turn out to be extremely important, even useful, to the therapy process or helpful in progressing towards change, if cultivated and exploited.

For example, in the session following a supervision, sometimes the therapist simply having gained a different view of what is happening can be somehow “perceived” by the patient and, most importantly, this leads to some form of progress, so the situation is diffused and progresses in a new direction.

I was particularly struck by this notion. And yet I should have known that something of this nature had already happened, as I had read extensively on the subject, on the history of analytical thinking, right from its beginnings.

At the end of the nineteenth century, for example, the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenics and psychotics were seen as meaningless events, fruit of the mysterious malfunctioning of a weak and sick mind. But when we began to treat them as having sense/meaning, significant changes were seen in certain patients.

C. G. Jung was amongst the first to see a meaning in the delusional symptoms of what at the time was known as dementia praecox, as is reflected in The Content of the Psychoses (Jung, 1908/1914). About this work, Frey-Rohn speaks aptly of “a new approach to psychotherapy”, in which “instead of dismissing the systematized fantasies of demented persons as bizarre and nothing more, [Jung] found it more appropriate to arouse in the patient a feeling that his fantastic formations had a meaning common to all humans” (Frey-Rohn, 1990, p. 78).

Even the idea of the neurotic symptom as a failed attempt at healing, developed by Jung throughout the evolution of his thinking, and the prospective view of disorders, associated with this idea, are further examples of new ways of looking at a mental subject. These ways pioneered a new direction in the approach to the patient’s discomfort and often saw changes deep within the patients themselves. A different perception of the clinical situation on the part of the therapist, somehow picked up on by the patient, clears the way for new horizons in the therapy process, opens new ways. But why?

Let’s leave this question for a moment and move on to the second “La”. The second observation that led to further questions and considerations is that our mind, in order to visualise how certain phenomena unfold, tends to make use of metaphors of movement within a horizontal space.

With regard to psychotherapy, spatial metaphors are without a doubt the form of expression par excellence, used by both the patient and the therapist. Significantly, the therapy itself is often called a journey.

The common feelings of many patients dealing with psychic discomfort are described with expressions such as: finding oneself at a dead end, in a bottomless pit, in a situation with no way out; lost, disorientated, like being in Dante’s dark forest, a meaningful representation of the psychic condition of the poet at the beginning of his inner journey.

The sense of searching for something implicit in the idea of a therapeutic journey (search for greater balance, understanding, meaning, integration, thinkability, transformation, individuation) is often expressed with images linked to a horizontal spatial representation, as can be seen in use of expressions such as taking steps forward, rather than backwards, finding oneself at a crossroads, exploring one’s own story, crossing a bridge, going in circles, looking for a way out, a door, treading new ground, a new path, charting a course, finding oneself back at square one, and so on.

There are also images that refer to movements on a vertical axis, such as fluctuating between highs and lows, aiming to cheer up, feeling down, picking oneself up.

These expressions seem to be linked to the positive connotation associated with reaching a higher point, as if recalling what happened in terms of phylogenetics in the evolutionary process which led to standing upright, use of the hands, and, consequently, considerable development of the brain—a process that every human being reflects throughout their own lives starting from birth.

Finally, in reference to vertical movement, patients and analysts make use of images related to going into the depths, to the core, to the heart; expressions that, unlike the previous ones, imply a negative connotation to remaining on the surface.

At any rate, the horizontal spatial metaphor seems to be the most commonly used, omnipresent in references and publications about psychology, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy, and it is along this dimension that these psychological theories produce explanatory principles which translate, perforce, into a method.

In fact, hodos in Greek means “road” and metà means “beyond”. Therefore, “method”, the metà-hodos, can be defined as a road (to be travelled) which goes beyond, which leads to new scenarios and opens up broader horizons.

One of the best concepts to effectively express what an analyst tries to do with the patient during sessions is “opening up meaning”, where the last word in Italian, “senso”, also refers to direction (the same happens with German “sinn”). Opening up means imparting “sense” (meaning plus direction) to the unique and personal stories of our individual lives, as is also the case with the still short history of psychology, of a little over one hundred years.

***

I saw Laika for a period of almost four years in a rather flexible setting, due to her work and the fact that she came from a far-off city.

She had shown two very distinctive traits during therapy. The first was the way she talked: in a loud voice and an agitated manner, always accompanied by effusive gestures and non-verbal emphasis. The second was that she took up almost the entire duration of the session with her story, leaving me with only the last five minutes to express what I felt or thought (the reason why with her I was rarely able to restrict the session to fifty minutes).

Another peculiar trait of her therapeutic journey was its cyclical nature. First there was a series of positive sessions in which important aspects initiating a dialogue between conscious and unconscious would emerge. Laika herself experienced new situations in reality and started behaving more constructively (being fully aware of this herself, moreover), on cue. But along would come a session in which nothing that she had done was of any value.

In her words, my efforts to help her were in vain; she was worth nothing; she had never learned anything; time was passing by relentlessly and her life was always unhappy, whilst other people could live so much better than her as they created far fewer problems for themselves; who knew how long she would have to come to therapy with me, and so on.

In these situations, my (sometimes ill-concealed) countertransferal reaction was of deep anger. Other times, however, I felt the same disappointment as Laika and a deep sense of uselessness and powerlessness.

Thinking back on it now, the image of a child comes to mind, who, after painstakingly and carefully building a sandcastle on the seashore, methodically destroys it and then despairs. It truly seemed, to use a spatial metaphor of my own, like a situation with no way out.

Valuable support, in theoretical terms, was offered by reading Jung’s complex theory and also an interesting book by Donald Kalsched, which we will cover later. Instead of standing helplessly by when faced with her destructive behaviour, I tried to ask myself what meaning this could have.

I had begun to feel that when the patient was feeling this way, she seemed very similar to the ward sister she worked under at the hospital, and of whom she often spoke: this sister was described as hypercritical, able to breed ill-feeling among colleagues, biased, terribly jealous, destructive, and in hindsight, not very good at her job. I took to calling this person whom I found in front of me, cyclically, after a few useful sessions, the “inner sister”, and to say it, in the same terms, to the patient as well.

When Laika arrived with the unmistakeable attitude of destruction and belittlement of the work that she herself, up until the previous session, had recognised as useful, I said “Ah, today we have our inner sister as well” and pulled up a chair next to the one she was sitting in to accommodate “the other one”. (I had never used this practice before and have never used it since, not with Laika or with any other patient, but with a very concrete patient, as she was during that phase of therapy, it turned out to be much more useful than a metaphor.)

In addition to this visible act, I started to hint that probably this “inner sister” wanted to tell us something when she turned up, and that she should be listened to somehow. In other words, we should have tried to get in touch with her together and engage her in what we were doing.

In the next session, the patient came with a dream—a rather rare and unexpected occurrence for her. In the dream, she was in a very distressing situation. Someone in the family was dying or had already died, and the rest of the patient’s family (father, mother, other people) were behaving as if nothing was happening, ignoring the gravity of what was going on, to her great dismay. She started to shout furious abuse at everyone for their indifference and, running to a phone box, disconsolate, she would call her ward sister (the same despised sister!) to tell her what was happening. The patient’s surprise when faced with this dream situation was great.

Without delving any deeper into the interpretation of this dream (for which we would need a more detailed history and the patient’s associations), I would like to highlight how it showed that she could interact with the “inner sister” and not only suffer her ill-effects. In fact, not only could she interact with her but, in a painful and distressing situation, it was this very person, so unpleasant in real life, who seemed to be of help and comfort, in total contrast with what the patient might consciously have thought.

The interesting point for the purposes of our discussion is that when the factor that seemed to be standing in the way of the therapeutic process was viewed as something that perhaps was not simply blindly destructive but rather useful, even if in a way that was not altogether clear, we were able to take a step forward, and thus get out of a vicious circle in which the patient herself suffered greatly.

After that session, Laika still brought out her destructive side but much less frequently than before, and moreover, an important channel (or to stick with the spatial metaphors, one could also say “a path”) to work on was opened up.

The ever-critical and deprecating attitude of the real ward sister was discovered to be very similar to that of Laika’s mother, as well as being a characteristic of that part of herself that we had dubbed the “inner sister”. In Jungian terms, the dialogue between the ego complex and a negative mother complex (a dialogue initiated by the phone call in the dream) represented the beginning of a possible path, which led, towards the end of therapy, to greater collaboration between the parts.

I remember fondly the time when, in one of our last sessions, Laika genuinely acknowledged having faced many difficulties in her life and having done so many things, though she was feeling very bad, including painstakingly carving out a space for therapy for herself. “I have been really good”, she said, with modest firmness—a phrase that was no longer being attacked by the “inner sister”. This, in fact, seemed to have become useful for protecting Laika from people in the external world who were, in various ways, dangerous, and thus was being put to a much healthier use.

By presenting certain aspects of this case, we can highlight the opening up of meaning that came about when some potential and usefulness was seen in something that seemed to be nothing but damaging and useless. A possible path materialised before us, where previously there had been only a sterile and cyclical vacuum.

***

The question we left aside a few pages ago (“why a different perception of the situation on the part of the therapist, which the patient has somehow picked up on, opens new paths in the therapeutic process?”), and the contemporary view of the natural use of spatial metaphors, continually brought to mind an image that had never interested me previously: the image of the labyrinth.

Being lost and looking for a path, finding yourself in blind alleys, retracing your steps, finding yourself back at square one, great anxiety and confusion, these typical expressions of the psychic process in therapy all seemed to me simultaneously related to the experience of being in a labyrinth.

As with the action of an automatic reflex, the mere word immediately evoked other images, such as the Greek myth of Theseus, the palace of Minos, the Minotaur, Ariadne, and her famous thread.

But what does the symbol of the labyrinth refer to? What does it reveal, beyond the myth, by which I mean even “before” the Greek myth that has immortalised it?

What happened during the period when this question was prowling along my mind is interesting. By chance, when scanning the bibliography at the end of a book I was reading, I was struck by the title of a collection of papers by Kerényi, the same Kàroly Kerényi who had collaborated with Jung, peremptorily entitled In the Labyrinth.

So, led by the hand by the many reflections contained in that collection and with the help of other authors who wrote on the subject, I delved into the passages on the symbol of the labyrinth and its various interpretations, to finally emerge with a clinical hypothesis.

The tuning was finished.

The playing could begin.

CHAPTER TWO


First tunes—the labyrinth between archaeology, etymology, and symbology

As a Jungian, I could probably begin with a detailed analytical presentation of the myth of Theseus, knowing that mythical tale is the living expression of the reality of the Soul and thus of inestimable value to a psychologist, who should deal with the Soul itself. But this has already definitely been analysed from every possible point of view (literary, historical, linguistic, archaeological, and even symbolical).

For the purposes of this work, thus, let us leave the famous mytholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• Foreword
• Preface to the Italian Edition
• Preface to the English Edition
• Part I: Main Theme
• Part II: Chorus
• Part III: Middle-Eight
• Part IV: Development and Closing Chords
• Conclusion Suspended cadence
• Notes
• References
• Index