ALTEREGO: Who is
this person I call my therapist?
About twelve
years ago I went for my first session with a new psychotherapist, who worked in
a large psychotherapy centre. The chair
wasn’t good for my back and I asked him if he had a cushion I could use. He said he didn’t and so I asked him if he
could get me one from somewhere else in the centre. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but
essentially he replied that it wasn’t possible, in what I remember as a brief
and seemingly indifferent manner. I felt
surprised and irritated but also curious – why wasn’t he willing to go and find
me a cushion, didn’t he care about my comfort, what therapeutic rationale
informed his response, what sort of person was he? My questions remained un-asked and
unexplored, and whilst I wondered about him in this way, my therapist showed no
interest in my curiosity about him.
In any therapy
room there are at least two people intensely interested in and wondering about what’s
going on inside the other, but only one of them gets paid for it, and they’re
called the therapist. The client does it
for free, which is maybe why it’s generally given relatively little
attention. The therapist’s curiosity is
called diagnosis or attunement for example, whilst the client’s is usually
labelled projection, transference or script.
Stephen
Mitchell tells a story of a female client and her curiosity in what was going
on for her therapist. Since he was never
particularly forthcoming about himself she became increasingly interested in
his squeaky chair. She imagined,
probably with some degree of accuracy, that the squeaks betrayed the therapist’s
discomfort. She used the squeaks to
guide what she said, or didn’t say, sometimes changing what she was saying when
a squeak occurred or, alternatively, defiantly continuing! These stories – mine and Mitchell’s,
illustrate the therapeutic significance of the client’s irrepressible curiosity
in the therapist, even if ignored.
I hold Sigmund
Freud responsible for this state of affairs.
In the late nineteenth century beginnings of psychoanalysis he was very
keen on his new method being seen as scientific, and in distinguishing it from
its precursor, hypnosis, in which the influence of the hypnotist was
fundamental. To accomplish both these aims the influence of the analyst had to
be minimised, but along with the bath water of the therapist’s unwanted influence
out went the baby of the patient’s interest in the analyst. He, as a person, was supposed to be
irrelevant, hidden.
I’m talking
here about the client’s interest in, and perceptions of, the therapist not just
in terms of the client’s transference onto the therapist, but about their
interest in the person of the psychotherapist, including of course the
therapist’s script, defences, transference, and in the role of the therapist as
the initiator of interactions in the
co-created therapeutic relationship.
From this perspective we can understand the client’s process,
resistance, games etc as an attempt to manage the relationship with this particular
therapist. From this point of view the
client’s interest in the therapist becomes central.
We learn about
ourselves, from birth, through our interactions with others. It follows that we
are fundamentally interested in what’s going on inside the other, and particularly in how they are impacted by
us. For example, effective empathy is
not simply about the giver, but also has to include a recognition in the
receiver of how the giver is impacted – their emotional resonance,
understanding, fellow-feeling. As Carl
Rogers puts it, for constructive personality change to occur it is necessary
that the client perceives the
acceptance and empathy which the therapist experiences for him. In TA language, for recognition hunger to be
received it has to encompass a recognition of the giver’s subjective experience, ie it has to be mutual recognition.
Likewise,
intimacy is partly co-created out of the repair of inevitable ruptures in relationships. This happens, for example, where we can be fully, angrily, differently
ourselves and experience the other as
responding without withdrawing, collapsing, retaliating, or placating.
In retrospect I
wish my therapist had shown an interest in what I had made of his response to
my request for a cushion. I would have
liked him to have been open to exploring his part in our interaction, and to
have accounted my reluctance to initiate that exploration - could he deal with
it, crossing a boundary, too exposing of his vulnerabilities? Writing about this now I wonder what his attitude
was to self-disclosure, although now I would be less interested in him
verifying or refuting what I imagined about him, since it would most likely have
simply closed off both a mutual exploration of what happened, and how I made sense of it. And
anyway his self-disclosure was inevitable, in his actions and ulterior
transactions. In responding in the way
he did to my request for a cushion he revealed himself, but something got lost
in that we just didn’t get to talk about what was hidden.
Who knows now
but like many therapists he probably struggled with intimacy and being
known. We spend most of our time with
clients listening and exploring their experience whilst remaining relatively
silent and hidden. Our clients’ interest
in us can raise our anxieties about
being seen, and touch our struggles
around longings to be known and defensive temptations to hide.
However, as is
often the case, paradoxically, I have learnt a lot with him, not only from who
and how he was but from who and how he wasn’t.
Thanks Alan.
