Embodied Theories

Ernesto Spinelli, Sue Marshall

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN: 9780826452085
• eBook ISBN: 9781446227404
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

`I think this book may well act as both a stimulus for therapists and an important reminder of the vulnerabilities that we all have, but do not always choose to share? - Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis

This book sets out to explore the various ways in which a therapist can be a living expression, or embodiment, of his or her chosen theoretical approach. The book consists of expert practitioners articulating their own particular ?embodied theory? answering the questions: how do we live different psychotherapeutic theories? How do they guide or clarify the lives of therapists? What aspects of theory resonate with the ways therapists understand themselves and relate to others?

Contributors

Michael Jacobs, Windy Dryden, MalcoLm Partlett, Dorothy Rowe, Miles Gorth, Anthony Stevens, John Rowan and Alvin Mahrer.

1	Embodied Theories: An Introductory Overview
	Ernesto Spinelli and Sue Marshall

THE INITIAL IMPETUS for this book originated in a fascinating passage recounted by Sigmund Freud in his autobiographical study (Freud, 1925). During one of his first meetings with the French neurologist, Jean Martin Charcot, the young Freud was stunned to hear him pronounce: La theorie, c’est bon, mais ca n’empêche pas d’exister (‘Theory is fine, but that does not negate what exists’). It had occurred to us that, of the great diversity of factors that exists for all psychotherapists, the most directly accessible yet least considered is that of their current stance toward, and relationship with, their chosen theoretical model. More specifically, we were interested in addressing the general question of how psychotherapists’ lived attitude toward their preferred model serves to shape not just what they do and who they present themselves as being when interacting with their clients, but also how it reflects and impacts upon their more general currently lived way of being and the varied attitudes and concerns which shape and inform it.

All therapists rely to a great extent upon their theoretical models in order to give meaning and purpose to their work with clients. If one were to ask a therapist what model or theoretical framework he or she subscribes to, it would be surprising not to be given a straightforward reply. Further, if that same therapist were to be asked to provide an outline of the preferred model’s principal tenets and assumptions, one would expect that the task would not be experienced as being overly onerous or challenging. And, if one were to persist and ask the therapist how he or she came to be allied to that model, it is not unlikely that an autobiographical account specific to the question under consideration could be presented without too much difficulty. Indeed, various worthwhile and educative texts have already been written examining various representative therapists’ personal journeys of discovery leading to their association with a particular model of psychotherapy (Dryden, 1992; Mullan, 1996).

What has not been sufficiently considered or written about, however, is how such representative therapists have subsequently come to interpret – and, likely re-interpret – their theoretical models from an embodied standpoint. If one’s adopted theoretical approach can be likened to the clothes one wears with which to both cover and delineate the overall shape, contours and expressive potential of one’s body, then our interest lies in questions that seek to address and explore such issues as: How does this theory ‘fit’ you? What sense of ‘movement’ does it allow, encourage or restrict? When you first came across it, was your initial reaction one of ‘This is just what I had in mind and have been searching for for years!’? Or was it ‘How odd and unusual! I wonder what I’d look like if I tried it on?’ What parts or aspects or features of it do you continue to appreciate and treasure, feel irritated with or concerned by, or don’t notice or pay attention to at all? All these questions, and many more that could be conjured up with relative ease, point to the overall concerns and focus of this text. Its primary aim is to provide a context through which various psychotherapists attempt to explore and communicate what and how it is for them to embody their chosen theory.

As such, the contributors have been encouraged, wherever possible, to avoid the more common approach of considering their theoretical model from a primarily abstract perspective designed to provide readers with a general outline of its most salient and unique characteristics. In much the same way, the authors have been asked to keep to a minimum the recounting of those parts of their autobiographies which seem pertinent to their development as practitioners or which have led them to the adoption of the model. Both these focus points, while undoubtedly interesting and deserving of analysis, serve to distance the account from its author either because, as in the first case, the emphasis lies on the abstract and general rather than upon the concrete and personal/specific; or because, as with the latter, it shifts the temporal focus toward the past rather than seeks to address that which is current in the author’s lived experience.

Instead, the contributors have been presented with the task of addressing the issue of how they ‘embody’ the theories they practise; that is to say, they have been invited to write an account that attempts to examine those features and aspects of their chosen models which significantly and currently inform and clarify their professional lives as expert psychotherapists, as well as those aspects of their more personal lives which they are willing to disclose to public awareness and scrutiny.

But, the reader might well ask, why should we, and our contributors, concern ourselves with such questions? What makes them sufficiently significant that they should merit the interest of our authors and readers alike? In part, we could simply state that there exists something about the very enterprise of psychotherapy – perhaps as distinct from most, or all, other professions – that requires such unusual explorations. It seems, to us, to be something about ‘the very nature of the beast’ that deems it pertinent, if not necessary, to engage in these enquiries. On further reflection, however, this type of enquiry also seeks to address a broader, if no less relevant, set of concerns.

Psychotherapy has never been so popular nor as much in demand as it is today. Over the last decade, training programmes and academic courses in psychotherapy have increased dramatically in Britain, Australia and North America. In a similar fashion, both Britain and Australia have encouraged the development of various ‘umbrella’ organizations such as the United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy (UKCP), the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) and the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA). These organizations have begun to register and accredit psychotherapists and counsellors who fulfil specialist criteria for practice. In addition, the British Psychological Society (BPS), the Australian Psychological Society (APS) and both the American and Canadian Psychological Association (APA and CPA, respectively) maintain Divisions and Sections whose professional focus lies in the allied territories of psychotherapy and counselling psychology. Recent developments in Britain – mirroring, at least in part, those of their counterparts in North America and Australia -have moved to the point where it is highly likely that during the next few years the statutory ‘licensing’ or regulation of psychotherapeutic practitioners will become a reality.

At the same time, however, the ‘boom’ in psychotherapy has also generated wide-ranging concerns about the enterprise and its consequences – concerns which have focused principally upon instances of abuse (be they sexual, physical, financial and/or psychological) perpetrated by therapists upon their clients. More generally, the tendency – potential or otherwise -for both psychotherapists and their clients to assume that therapy alone can ‘make things right’ for people or, alternatively, that therapy alone can provide the means for serious and beneficial critical self-awareness and insight have been rightly criticized as being arrogant, dangerous and just plain stupid.

Much of the current ‘backlash’ against therapy seems to us to be in part a reaction to the presentation of psychotherapy as the panacea for all our psycho-social ills. This view of the profession is a deplorable misunderstanding and debasement of psychotherapy. For, rather than being about the attainment of certainty, security, ‘perfect harmony’ or whatever other final and fixed stance to life one might fantasize, psychotherapy, if anything, is geared toward the recognition that uncertainty and insecurity are ‘part of the package’ of living. The psychotherapeutic encounter, therefore, is but one means available in which to explore the experiential options individuals may have (which, admittedly, may be very few indeed in many instances), not only so that they may ‘live with’ the uncertainties and unknowns with which we are all confronted, but also that these ‘givens’ of life may even be exhilarating and joyous as well as frightening and painful.

All psychotherapists – ourselves included – act as representatives of a model or theory. However ‘sensible’ or ‘way out’ any one, or all of such models may reveal themselves to be, whether as a whole or in part, when their assumptions and hypotheses are more carefully considered, the current scientific research evidence which exists (whether its focus lies in either the exploration and clarification of variables within the psychotherapeutic process itself, or whether it is concerned with evidence-based outcome studies) remains both problematic and inconclusive. While it is almost certainly the case that, in general, psychotherapy is more likely to provoke beneficial rather than harmful outcomes, it is also the case that we continue to know next to nothing as to why such outcomes occur or what the most pertinent variables influencing such outcomes may be (Spinelli, 1994). Just as significantly (and, perhaps, more so) there exists a distinct lack of evidence to indicate that any one of the plethora of psychotherapeutic models is inherently superior to, or more likely to produce better outcomes than, any other. Such a current state of circumstances should not lead us to conclude that ‘all models of psychotherapy are of equal worth and beneficial impact’. Rather, all that can be stated at present is that we just don’t know whether some models are superior or inferior to others with regard to their outcomes. In part, this is likely to be due to the complexity of quantitative and qualitative variables that are present in any psychotherapeutic encounter which, in themselves, make research a difficult, if not ‘impossible’ enterprise (Kline, 1992; Roth and Fonagy, 1996).

Although such disturbing questions are by no means new to the profession, we have sought to consider their impact and implications by contextualizing them within what we believe is an original and worthwhile investigative structure whose basis rests in the broader attempt to discover whether there is anything in the way that psychotherapists themselves interact with and make personal sense of their theories that might serve to provide potentially valuable new perspectives on these recurring problems.

We start from the premise that since psychotherapists in some way do live out the theories which they espouse, then the attempt to explore how and in what ways they do this, which aspects of their theories play a significant part in their daily lives, which do not and, in general, how their theories inform and challenge the therapists’ way of being and living their current lives both professionally and from a personal context, may prove to provide future research with useful and novel information. This may clarify just what there may be about psychotherapy that, as yet, has not been sufficiently delineated and understood as ‘necessary conditions’ to desired outcomes.

Embodied Theories sets out to explore the various ways in which a therapist can be a living expression, or embodiment, of his or her chosen theoretical model. In approaching several major representatives and internationally renowned practitioners of psychotherapy and inviting them to write about the ways in which they each live their chosen theory, our hope is to discern a number of possible recurring themes that may be elaborated further in subsequent research analyses.

Specifically, the questions we posed for each of our contributors to consider and address were:

• How do you currently give expression to your chosen theory from the context of your own currently lived personal and professional experience?
• In what specific ways, if any, does your chosen theoretical model impact itself upon your life – both professionally and in general?
• How, if at all, does your chosen model significantly inform, guide and/or clarify those aspects of your life that remain of particular interest and/or concern to you?
• What aspects of the theory influence and resonate within your way of being and understanding yourself and your relations with others? What aspects bear little, or no, relevance to your life as currently lived and experienced?
• To what extent, if at all, has your chosen model challenged views, attitudes, beliefs and behaviours that you had previously maintained with regard to your practice of psychotherapy, and with regard to your personal life?
• What would you have been like as a psychotherapist, or as a person, if you had not come across your model?

Those readers who maintain an interest in the varied approaches to research will likely have noted the distinctly phenomenological influence that underpins our questions. As a primary contributor to qualitative research methods, phenomenological investigations place central emphasis upon descriptive analyses whose intent is to tease out descriptively focused statements designed to illuminate a wide range of ‘meaning possibilities’ that can emerge within a structured focus of inquiry (Colaizzi, 1978). It seemed to us that this approach was the most adequate, and potentially rewarding, through which to address the issues that interested us, our contributors and, hopefully, the readers of this book.

On reflection, the task we asked our contributors to undertake was far more arduous and challenging (and, perhaps, more arrogant) than we had initially suspected. That they have all responded so openly and engagingly to it should be seen primarily as an outcome of their own willingness to bring an unusual degree of openness to a profession whose more typical insistence upon its practitioners’ maintenance of an attitude requiring mystery and concealment remains the subject of much debate and satire.

As editors, we were both well aware, from our own initial attempts to pursue the enterprise that, once initiated, it was highly likely that each would present original – perhaps even surprising – ‘lived interpretations’ of his or her relationship to a specific theoretical model. In turn, we suspected, this novel perspective might well serve to clarify, de-mystify and certainly ‘humanize’ the relationship between psychotherapists and their theoretical models in ways which patients or clients, students, and, indeed, most practitioners are likely to encounter in a more detached, abstract form.

Following this introductory chapter, the text is divided into eight chapters, each dedicated to one particular ‘living theory’ as embodied by an expert representative.The closing chapter of the book then attempts to consider some of the more pertinent and intriguing issues and themes that emerge from the authors’ accounts.

The models under consideration have been selected on the basis of their distinctive features and import to the world of contemporary psychotherapy. These include analytic models (such as psychodynamic psychotherapy and analytical psychology), humanistic models (such as gestalt psychotherapy and humanistic-integrative psychotherapy), cognitive-behavioural models (such as rational emotive behaviour therapy), experiential models (such as personal construct psychotherapy and experiential psychotherapy) and existential-phenomenological models (such as existential psychotherapy).

Of course, a great many more specific or derivative models remain to be considered. While no single text of this sort could ever hope to cover all, or even the greater percentage of the 400-plus currently existing models and theories, our initial attempts sought to gain the interest of as wide-ranging a selection of approaches as could be reasonably represented. While we are unequivocally pleased with both the quality and diversity of approaches represented here, and hold every expectation that our readers will be similarly satisfied, nonetheless we must also acknowledge some degree of disappointment with regard to two significant – and obvious – factors.

First, it had been our hope to maintain a more even gender balance among our contributors. As it stands, however, seven of the eight contributions are by male psychotherapists. All that we can say with regard to this lop-sidedness is that we tried long and hard to attract the attention of several well-known and respected female psychotherapists, but, in the end, failed to gain their sufficient interest in the enterprise. Why this should be remains, frankly, something of a mystery to us. One possible answer may begin to emerge via the consideration of the second factor: the reticence to participate expressed by the great majority of psychoanalytic practitioners whom we approached. While some were willing enough to express the view that the aims of our project compromised their model’s insistence upon the maintenance of the practitioner’...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Introduction
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Embodied Theories: An Introductory Overview
• 2 Reflections (Psychodynamic Psychotherapy)
• 3 How Rational Am I? Self-help Using Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy
• 4 On Being Present at One’s Own Life
• 5 An Infant Personal Construct Theorist (Personal Construct Psychotherapy)
• 6 The Body I Am: Lived Body and Existential Change (Existential Psychotherapy)
• 7 The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (Analytical Psychology)
• 8 Authenticity in Action (Humanistic-Integrative Psychotherapy)
• 9 How Do I Embody the Experiential Model of Human Beings? (Experiential Psychotherapy)
• 10 Embodied Theories: A Preliminary Analysis