Category Archives: branches of psychotherapy

Queries Concerning Psychotherapy and Privilege

May 14, 2013 By in branches of psychotherapy, Countertransference, Ethics, Morals & Ethics, narrative therapy, psychotherapy, Quakerism, social justice, The shadow of psychotherapy, What to talk about in therapy Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Every time we ask a question, we are generating a possible version of life. (~ David Epston in Cowley and Springen, 1995 , p. 74)

Friends (Quakers) approach queries as a guide to self-examination, using them not as an outward set of rules, but as a framework within which we assess our convictions and examine, clarify and consider the direction of our life and the life of the community. (~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice, page 205)

Does psychoanalytic psychotherapy as a profession make sufficient assessments of conscious and unconscious, explicit and implicit racism, sexism, heteronormativity and bias in all its forms in ourselves and others, and the destructive consequences to all parties?

Do we believe that healthy relatedness demands well-developed empathy, mutuality, and parity? Do we recognize bias in all forms, personal and institutional, implicit and explicit, acknowledged and unacknowledged as a failure of empathy, an objectification of others and as an obstacle to healthy relatedness and psychological well-being?

Do we accept that the conscious and unconscious empathic failures surrounding bias and oppression are certainly a more profound loss for the oppressed, but a loss to all parties nonetheless?

Do we consider Lacan’s and Foucault’s idea of the privileged “Gaze” of the therapist? Do we see ourselves as people who gaze out from inside a dominant narrative, a “regular” story requiring categorization or explanation from all who we see as “different”?

Do we understand the differences between individual prejudice, institutional racism, and unexamined privilege?

Do we examine the narratives of success, of health, of family, of connection, of development that are viewed as “normal” regular, ordinary, usual, and taken for granted as universal by the dominant culture?

How do we take this made-up story about who is “regular” for granted, and wittingly or unwittingly put these narratives forth as better, more important, more normal than others?

Do we examine our own participation in how “othering” or “normaling” stories get disseminated or disrupted? Do we critically examine how the institutions in our culture – media, government, schools, religious institutions, and graduate and post-graduate psychotherapeutic training institutions – inform us as to what is “regular”?

Do we advocate for inclusivity in our psychotherapeutic practice and training institutions? Do we feel an institutional environment, or our own caseloads are sufficiently diverse when in actuality very few of people of color, differently abled, or LGBT people are represented?

Do we recognize that we speak through our inaction as well as our action? ~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice

Do we participate in panels, conferences and workshops, peer groups led entirely or predominantly by those in the dominant culture?

How have the dominant stories about race, gender, homosexuality, disability, and class determined and shaped our psychotherapeutic practices and training institutions, fee setting, size and composition of our caseloads, choice of colleagues, and our preferred psychotherapeutic models?

Do we, as psychotherapists ever place ourselves in professional, or social circumstances where we are not in the majority? How might such experiences help us to better empathize with those who carry narrative burdens, who are regularly challenged to explain, defend, or advocate for themselves within the dominant culture, and those who are on the receiving end of bias and oppressive circumstances more often than we are ourselves?

Do we cultivate relationships with adults with whom we have racial, ethnic, cultural, or religious differences outside of the psychotherapeutic setting?

Do we cultivate therapeutic relationships with clients who differ from us in identifiable ways?

What life experiences or personal characteristics, if any, have made you feel “gazed at”: forced to explain, alienated, ignored, misunderstood, distorted, or excluded by most people or by institutions? What circumstances, if any, have you found yourself in where you were instantly and visibly identified as an outsider in someway?

How might these experiences be useful in practicing psychotherapy with a concern for social justice? How might these transitory experiences offer only limited insight into what it is like for a client who lives with more chronic or different forms of oppressive, exclusive, or unjust circumstances?

Do we listen deeply without becoming defensive or competitive when clients friends, or colleagues or people online share experiences of oppression, even if we feel implicated, guilty or uncomfortable?

Are avenues for exploring differences kept open? To what extent do we ignore differences in order to avoid possible conflicts?
~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice

Do we allow ourselves and our worldview to be changed by hearing stories of other people’s discomfort, anger, grief and pain from experiences of oppression, exclusion, bias, and prejudice?

Do we monitor ourselves for defensiveness, minimizing over-identification, excessive or non-generative forms of guilt, hopelessness and indifference?

How can racial, gender, sexual/gender identity and/or class differences between therapeutic partners affect the way they tell and hear each others story?

Do we proactively and thoughtfully confront, explore and examine biased narratives when we experience them in our office, with friends and colleagues, and in ourselves?

Do I treat conflict as an opportunity for growth, and address it with careful attention? ~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice

What do you worry people will assume about you?

What do you hope people will assume about you?

What do we understand about our clients’ hopes and fears about the assumptions of others?

What assumptions have we made about clients that were inaccurate, injurious, or unrecognized (by us)?

How do we respond when confronted with the inaccuracy or injuriousness of our assumptions?

Am I careful to speak truth as I know it and am I open to truth spoken to me? ~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice

Do we consider that there are parts of our client’s stories that are never given words, are essentially deleted, or never even noticed by themselves, by us, or by others because they just don’t fit in with the dominant story, or with our assumptions as psychotherapists?

How can we learn from clients and colleagues who are different from us without making them feel unduly burdened or pressured into teaching and explaining?

Are we mindful that those with experiences of oppression and narrative burden need to protect themselves from scrutiny and the unempathic Gaze of individuals, institutions and environments that are distorting, enraging or exhausting?

Do we condone or assume that narratives of privilege are healthy for privileged people? Do we remind ourselves that none of us are free unless all of us are free?

Do I examine myself for aspects of prejudice that may be buried including beliefs that seem to justify biases based on race, gender, sexual (and gender) identity, disability, class, and feelings of inferiority or superiority? ~ Philadelphia Yearly Meeting Faith and Practice

What is my psychotherapeutic practice doing to help overcome the contemporary psychologically wounding effects of past and present oppression?

Questions, and more questions, and questions as yet unformulated.

No answers please.

Deeper questions.

Balancing Act

April 25, 2013 By in Archetype, branches of psychotherapy, Depth psychology, Ecopsychology, New therapists, psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapy Tags: , , , , , ,

Objects fly through the air, stars wheel through the universe. All fall eventually. If we become obsessed with definitively mastering the decline, we are lost. If we achieve peace within the intervals of rising and falling, we find grace.

(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)

In the minor arcana of the Rider Waite tarot deck, a juggler is depicted, in the act of balancing, exchanging, juggling the flow of energy between two large coins. In more ancient decks, The Juggler (now more commonly titled The Magician) was considered a symbolic entity important enough to be placed in the front of the archetypal gallery of Major Arcana.

The cards are said to represent balance, as a positive action. Reversed, the card implies imbalance, the need to recover the center and rhythms necessary to keep the balls steady and flowing movement through the air between human hands. The message of the Juggler is this:

Learn at first concentration without effort; transform work into play, make every yoke that you have accepted easy, and every burden that you carry light.
(Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, p. 8)

The conception of medical, physiological homeostasis permeates psychological diagnosis. Traditional western psychology and psychiatry seek to identify and quantify the archetype of a perfectly balanced mind, as well as create diagnostic codes for all the ever multiplying transient or enduring ways that we can find ourselves out of balance. Even the Diagnostic Manual’s Global Assessment of Functioning Scale (which assigns all human functioning a number between 1 and 100 – 1 equaling imminent death and 100 representing The Perfectly Balanced Human) evokes the archetypal Master Juggler:

100-91 Superior functioning in a wide range of activities, life’s problems never seem to get out of hand, is sought out by others because of his or her many positive qualities. (DSM IV Global Assesment of Functioning Scale – emphasis mine)

And certainly, a preoccupation with the processes of balance, counterbalance and imbalance in all its forms: equivalence, compensation, correspondence, fairness, justice, homeostasis, equilibrium, equality, symmetry, evenness, centeredness, quid pro quo, and tit for tat have been woven into the very fabric of all psychotherapeutic contemplation.

In Freudian thought all dreams, slips and symptoms are potential solutions to states of internal imbalance. The uncoordinated triplet team of consciousness – Id, Ego, Superego – attempt to pass and juggle conflicting needs between each other. One member aggressive and full of appetite, another practical and concerned with working the crowd, and the third, the conscience of the troupe trying to keep the other two in check. A symptom, in this model, is merely one aspect of the self over-correcting for the wild toss of another. The analytic therapist’s job is to help the bickering internal troupe get their act together.

For Jung, dreams, and unconscious phenomena are acts of counterbalance and compensation for whichever stance we have consciously identified with. The Unconscious swings and tilts to balance out whatever it is we believe to be true about ourselves in our waking Conscious life.

In narrative, social and environmental therapies the circle widens. The individual is embedded in a system which is inherently out of balance. Personal imbalance is seen as an extension of and appropriately reactive to injustice, narrative burden, unsustainability, or unconscious guilt stemming from being the un-entitled beneficiary of or hoarding resources without true entitlement.

And each of these seem to me, as always, to be single facets of a still incomplete truth, all of them more incomplete without the others.

An overcommitment to consciously maintaining personal balance creates its own form of disease: A life that is seemingly, superficially never “out of hand” simply banishes chaos to its hidden depths.

A perfectly and consistently balanced human, if one were to exist, would be inert, fixed, stagnant, immobile, inanimate. How monstrously impervious this perfectly balanced human, would be, more of a “thing” than a “who.”

The existential therapies remind us that we are no thing, nothing at all, and that teetering on the brink of meaninglessness, discombobulation and existential dizziness are necessary to apprehend the brevity of our lives, and begin to take real responsibility for our choices and our effect upon each other.

Some ascetic Sadhus, Hindu holy men, spend many years standing on one foot, discovering the balance that can only emerge from negotiating an asymmetrical stance.

Life is inherently out of hand; death, illness, pain, loss, grief, war, disasters natural and man-made, trauma, heartbreak, abuse, cruelty, racism, sexism homophobia and heteronormativity, oppression and injustice in all its forms, including the depletion, exploitation, and hoarding of the earth’s resources. In the face of all that life can throw at you there are times when blatant mental imbalance is the sanest, healthiest most healing response.

We are all embedded in enormous systems, familial, social and planetary, which are also cycling, swinging wildly, falling in and out and passing through imbalance, equilibrium and back again. Living and breathing balance requires and contains imbalance within it.

We will all lose our footing.

No one is impervious. We will all drop the ball.

The universal deadly sin of every routine is The Drop. Dropping is so common in juggling that every performer must come to terms with the inevitable accident that breaks the rhythm of the routine and calls one’s skill into question.
Since drops are inevitable, and even the most accomplished professional jugglers drop in public performance of their routines, one might well ask why a drop should be considered such a disaster.

Part of the reason has to do with the psychological interaction between the audience and the performer….Admiration for the juggler becomes submerged in the more general feeling of wonder at what the human mind and body can accomplish together. It is the overcoming of gravity with style and grace, and produces the kind of internal affirmation that comes with any art or sport done supremely well.

The drop breaks the spell. The audience is reminded of human fallibility when the juggler has to stop and start all over again. Now the creeping doubt has entered everyone’s mind: will the juggler drop again? The second drop confirms this doubt, and the audience now sees only a struggling human being endeavoring to ward off disaster. After the third drop, even the memory of the magic is gone, as both performer and audience only wait for the ordeal to conclude.
(Arthur Chandler, On the Symbolism of Juggling: The Moral and Aesthetic Implications of the Mastery of Falling Objects. http://www.juggling.org/papers/symbolism/)

Extreme imbalance, too many too repetitive “drops” become destructive in their own way. They break down the faith that others have in us, along with our faith in ourselves, our resilience and the world around us.

One of the most common early by-products of imbalance in intimate personal relationships is resentment. If the spirit of quid pro quo is violated, exploited, or ignored, and the energetic, logistical and personal exchange becomes too chronically lopsided resentment compounds, festers and mutates into toxic contempt, hopelessness, and love-killing exhaustion.

Learning how to make necessary corrections and adjustments to preserve the loving core of intimacy is the work of couples and family therapists: Do I accept and try to accommodate the low ball, hold out for a higher toss, or stop trying to feed my partner the ball in just the way they demand it? Should I ask for more, settle for what I’m getting or give less?

When one member of a family or social system changes their rhythm or their stance – the entire network is thrown out of its precarious homeostasis, everyone reels and teeters. “Change back!!” they seem to cry, as their footholds crumble out from under them. A deeper equilibrium, a truer justice often requires that we mourn the loss of an unjust balance and pass through a period of disorienting imbalance before we find a stance that allows everyone to have some part of their need acknowledged and met.

Our relationships, and perhaps Love itself require some balancing component in order to thrive, and without it, we will too soon reach breaking points, beyond which the old center can never be recovered.

We hold many apparently imbalanced relationships as sacred in the service of growth and nurturance: Parent and child, teacher and student, sponsor and sponsee, therapist and client. There are vast power differentials, discrepancies in knowledge and experience and attention, the most obvious giving flows in one direction. Yet, there are symmetries, larger circles of justice exchange and evenhandedness at play: Someone gave this to me, so I now give it to you. In caring for you, I care for untended aspects of myself.

The mystic symbol of justice, that is equivalence and equation of guilt and punishment. …In its most common form two equal scales balanced symmetrically on either side of a central pivot. A Dictionary of Symbols, J. E. Cirlot

All of our theologies and most of our philosophies circle around cycles of cosmic balance and justice. We construct an evenhanded tit for tat, eye for an eye, the equivalence of opposites: Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil. Alternately we embrace the long view of cyclic karmic justice: what goes around comes around. Souls are weighed and balanced in the afterlife in the mythic psychostasis: in ancient Egyptian cosmology, the human heart is weighed on cosmic scales against the feather of Maat, the goddess of order and justice – while a monster “waits below the scale, ready to devour the unbalanced heart.” (The Book of Symbols The Archive for research in archetypal symbolism pp. 512)

Individual psychological equipoise and the ultimate cosmic balance intersect to complete the hermetic formulae and the Master Juggler’s circuit: As it is above, so it is below. As it is below so it is above, As it was in the beginning, so it will be at the end. As it is within, so it is without.

The therapist, is only supposedly, a skilled juggler and juggling teacher – able to keep many balls in the air, managing their own internal and external challenges to equanimity and flow while incorporating all that the client throws at them, and passing back the ball at the right speed, spin and rhythm so that the client can receive it, polish up their own act, and expand their bag of tricks. Therapists make split second assessments as to whether a client is trapped in sticky bullshit stasis, if they need to pushed off of a false-too-comfortable standpoint – or if they are reeling too near to dangerous overwhelming imbalance requiring all the therapist’s skills to help them stabilize. Young clinicians often wonder, when they have fallen on their asses, in life or in session, if they themselves are stable enough to go forward in the work.

I am no Master Juggler although in session I have learned to keep quite a few balls up in the air. Usually just one or two more than any given client, (although sometimes, admittedly, I must scramble to keep ahead).

Just as the Juggler or magician has had to train and work for along time before attaining the ability of concentration without effort, similarly, he who makes use of the method of analogy on the intellectual plane must have worked much, i.e. to have acquired long experience.
(Anonymous, Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, p.10)

I’d better at least look like I’m good at it by now. I’ve been practicing almost everyday for nearly two decades – and perhaps for long stretches I can manage to appear as if it never gets out of hand.

But it does. Of course it does. I get knocked off my pins, blown off my center, lose my flow and rhythm and toss out ill-timed passes with humbling regularity.

The drop is inevitable.

And although I can still be shaken when my act has inadvertently slipped into an ordeal for the most part I have learned to enjoy the momentary peace within intervals of rising and falling.

copyright © 2013 All rights reserved Martha Crawford

New Tricks

December 1, 2012 By in branches of psychotherapy, Creative process, Ecopsychology, Ecotherapy, Psychotherapy and climate change, The shadow of psychotherapy, What to talk about in therapy Tags: , , , , ,


Therapists become ecotherapists when we… look to nature (both our own human nature as well as the natural world) as a teacher and source of healing; when we see that human suffering is intimately connected with the destruction of the web of life, and that healing is about making deep changes in the way we live and relate to the world around us.
~ Why and How Do Therapists Become Ecotherapists, by Mary-Jayne Rust
from Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind

Its happening again. Its happened before – so I know a little about how this goes but it is never an entirely comfortable process.

My stance is shifting, my professional identity reorganizing, my perspective and world view heading in a new direction.

There are always anxieties: How will I bring these new to me thoughts into the room, how will my clients respond? How will this change things? Will my colleagues think I’ve gone off the rails? Will I lose clients, income, reputation, momentum if I veer unexpectedly off to the left? Will I recognize myself in this new model, am I being true to my skills, my gifts, my values, my training, my clients needs, and my community?

When the therapist changes, the work itself changes. The questions we ask, the metaphors we choose, the subjects we become animated about or feel distance from, the defenses we challenge or suddenly accept, all have intended and unintended affects on the content of the work and the client’s communications.

More than that, when the therapist explores new aspects of their own identity – it impacts the client’s experience of themselves, invites new content into the room, changes prior assumptions of what therapy is for, opens up new challenges, and closes down old expectations.

What psychotherapists direct their attentions toward, what we express authentic, energized interest in, and what we consciously or unconsciously overlook has a powerful shaping influence on what clients feel is legitimate to discuss in session. By nodding, or staring blankly, our clinical mirror legitimizes or undermines a notion about the clients idea of themselves and what might be “good” grist for the mill.

A common clinical synchronicity: the very moment that a therapist is able to face down their own anxious conflict and incorporate the previously split off aspects of the Self that live behind it – clients suddenly and spontaneously speak up, initiating dialogue about the very same conflict within themselves.

A supervisor of mine would say with a twinkle in her eye:
“They must have been eavesdropping on your supervision session again.”

Bion says: “When two people meet an emotional storm is created” as their unnamable, ineffable unconscious bits swirl and entangle, exchanging information without our awareness.

My stance has shifted, mutated and incorporated new bodies of thought many times since my original training and clinical inheritance. Trained through social work school in ego-psychological models, and an analysand in a object-relational/self-psychological treatment my earliest clients were used to a certain kind of response from me: one that avoided conflict, was primarily “supportive” of strengths. I saw aggression as a secondary response to injury, as a regressive obstacle to relatedness, or a developmental phase. I believed that it was my job to accept and “absorb” aggression from the client, withstand it, and if I could survive it without retaliating, it would support the clients’ developmental journey to mature relatedness.

For some cases, it provided what they needed – but I noticed that for certain clients, it wasn’t working at all – and perhaps it wasn’t doing me any good either. I began seeking supervision and studying Modern Analytic models and suddenly I found a new voice.

I was joining resistances!
Confronting treatment destructive behavior!
Allowing my aggression into the room to protect the treatment!

New words came out of my mouth and into the room that I would NEVER have thought to say before.

To a client that continually questioned whether or not I was experienced enough:

“It’s certainly a possibility. Would it be more helpful if I referred you to better therapist?”

To another who complained repeatedly about their previous therapists failures:

“When I disappoint you will I get to hear about it do you think? What are all the ways that I am likely to fail you? “

After great prodding in supervision, I finally confronted a client who constantly sought validation by men and regularly missed therapy appointments:

“Perhaps, therapy would be more of a priority for you if I were a man.”

As new concepts trickled down into practice and tentatively inched out of my head into actions and language, it was both terrifying and exhilarating. I never knew what would fall flat, what would be soundly rejected, what might provoke rage or scorn, what error I might make in this new schema or where the unforeseen dangers might hide.

As shocking as it felt to say such things – each time I did it, far more often than not – I saw the client feel safer with me, an obstacle surmounted, a test passed, a barrier between us, removed – and the work would flow again.

Not all clients needed this, but some did – and learning to form these words with my mouth, figuring out what to say – how to implement a theoretical idea about resistance and aggression and make it come alive in practice, was like learning a new language, while simultaneously trying to teach it to someone else.

When I dove into Jungian thought several years later it happened again: a new vantage point, a new clinical language, new tools, added to the old favorites in the box, a new bee in my bonnet, a new schema to try on, and incorporate. A new model to figure out how to make my own, to sort through what was useful, and practical in the consultation room for me for any particular client, and what was not.

I’d always included exploration of dream work, metaphor and symbol in my practice, but this was so much more explicit: I began bringing in more metaphors and analogies drawn from myth, folklore and sacred texts, discussing archetypes, ego inflation, shadow, encouraging clients with sufficient ego strength to reach for their underdeveloped aspects.

I explicitly asked newer clients to keep a dream journal and tried to introduce the notion to “older” ones. Some bit, some nibbled and others spit out the hook.

I encouraged appropriate clients to court and consult their psyches about the topics they were consciously focusing on. We began to bring the Unconscious into the office as a full collaborator to assist and guide the treatment, rather than scorn it as a mere symptom-generating, conflict-laden mess-maker.

I felt the same nervous sense of exposure as I tested out new ways of being in the room while playing with constructs that I was just beginning to understand – and would only be able to integrate and comprehend through use, failure, success and practice.

In ecotherapy we venture beyond the traditional questions. The ecotherapist is curious about human-nature relationships as well as human-human relationships radically expanding the range of discussion. ~ Asking Different Questions: Therapy for the Human Animal by Linda Buzzell from Ecotherapy: Healing with Nature in Mind.

I am yet again, finding myself trying to wrap my mouth around new words, trying to engage in unfamiliar dialogue about how the natural world effects us, and how we affect the natural world. Attempting to summon the same confidence and professional aplomb that I would draw on to explore any “legitimate” mutually interdependent relationship.

I’ve had more and more outdoor, walking sessions, through the parks of lower Manhattan and the Brooklyn riverside. We notice the urban wildlife as we walk – plantings, and wildflowers, cormorants, hawks, mockingbirds, nuthatches, and Zelda the wild turkey.

The hurricane forced many outdoor walking sessions, as well as sessions in the community garden – with clients I wouldn’t have considered interested candidates otherwise – while the office was inaccessible with no power or heat. It has opened up a new world of connection and communication for some clients, and it is clearly second choice, too diffuse and distracting for others.

Words flow differently as our bodies move, as we watch the waves along the river and scan the horizon side by side.

In and out of the office a new realm of connection emerges, as I meet and invite and clumsily try to introduce new aspects of myself and my clients to each other.

To a client who focuses regularly on perceived conflicts with neighbors and co-workers:

“Wait! Did you just say that you were feeding the birds when you spied your neighbor? Do you do that every morning?”

The client no longer clenched with fear and agitation – brightens, and tells me about the taming and feeding wild birds by hand, the fruit trees, past and present that have thrived and died behind the house, and shares photos of carefully tended rose bushes in bloom next to the garage.

To another, a parent, chronically fretful, obsessive and sometimes completely panicked about toxins and contaminants in their child’s environment:

“What if there is nothing you can do? What if you are absolutely right and there are chemical hazards all around? What if our culture has filled our environment with so many pollutants that there is nothing that you can do to prevent exposure? What if there is no way, as things stand now, to keep our children ‘safe’ from toxins in our air, food, water and homes?”

The client breathes deeply as if for the first time in many weeks and says softly:

“Then I guess I’d just have to live in the moment and face each day as it comes.”

Following the hurricane, a client who had avoided the worst disruptions of the storm describes it as a “no big deal for me personally.” When I ask if they had any thoughts or concerns about climate change, and how related events might effect them in the future, the client shuts me down:

“I prefer to focus on things I can control”

It seems a uncontestable given, a unilaterally accepted rule of life, an obvious and practical mandate for healthy coping, proof that the through-line I am pursuing is pointless. I surrender, just a matter of days after the city flooded, to talk of families and jobs, and online dating.

On the subway ride home the response I wished I’d had surfaces -my thoughts too slow, and my new learning too unintegrated to parry-repost in real time:

“Why, I wonder? What would happen if we talked about all the things we cannot control and how we might feel about them? What might we be avoiding in ourselves and in the world around us by focusing only on what we might be able to control? What if that makes your life feel unbearably small, and is not actually safer in the long run? What if that is an illusory construct ? Is it frightening to feel out of control? Too vulnerable? Might there be something reliving or even healing in it?

What if feeling whole in this lifetime comes from understanding our real relationship to benevolent, destructive and wild forces far beyond our control?”

You can lead a horse to water, but perhaps before you can teach old dogs…

You have to learn the new tricks yourself.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

Confessions of a Wanton Theory-Wonk

May 28, 2012 By in About Me, branches of psychotherapy, New therapists, psychoanalytic theory, psychotherapy, Self Care, Supervision Tags: , , , , , , 18 Comments

Commonly, at the beach, at the playground, in waiting rooms, on the subway people notice whatever paperback have my nose stuck in. “A little light reading?” they say, with just a little Seinfeldian snark in their tone. Or “Catchy title!”

I never know how I am supposed to respond.

I think the satisfying answer would be to say that I am being forced to read whatever theoretical, psychoanalytic, philosophical or mythological esoterica I am currently dog-earing the corners of – as required reading for something or other. I suspect that the friendly commenter is actually asking me to betray the theory that I am devouring, (that I in fact find more delicious than any small talk or chit chat with a distant, if pleasant, acquaintance) by saying something derogatory about it. Maybe they want me to confess that I find it dry, or incomprehensible, or a bunch of nonsense and that I would prefer to read a detective novel. They want me to tell them that its not for pleasure. Its for work.

I just can’t ever bring myself do it.
In this I am loyal.

“Heh, heh, yeah, well… This is just the stuff I always read. I’m guess I’m weird that way”

It always seems to put them off, although I don’t mean to.

Its as if I’d just insisted that I think myself very fancy for reading it.

Listen, I have plenty of room in my heart and mind for both you and the book. I’ll happily close it to chit-chat if I sense that you have a strong need, and I think it would be relieving or occupying for you in someway.

But, please don’t make me choose between you and the book.
Or I will choose the book.

Although I might refuse to break faith with the book on my lap for a chatty interloper, I will show the theorist who wrote it little fidelity. I’ve admitted to myself that I am incapable of theoretical monogamy – and have never been able to bring myself to accept one body of thought as enough to keep me interested for life.

Commitment issues? Problems with authority? Introversion? Self-sabotage? Fear of engulfment?

I’ve committed to many many people for the long term, but I remain steadfastly polyamorous when it comes to those I study. Any attempt I’ve made, and I’ve made several, to approach one therapeutic path always seems to reach a crossroad, where I am asked to promise my whole brain, to forswear, at least for a significant amount of time, all other contradictory theories. The thought of it makes my breathing constrict. The freedom to follow my nose from book to bibliography to book, to wander the spaces between the tribes is like oxygen to me.

Many years ago, after I’d completed a post-graduate advanced certificate program in clinical social work at NYU, it seemed natural that I would apply to psychoanalytic institute. I was flooded with a low-grade panic as I looked around the room and listened to the aspirations of other candidates during the group interview. They all seemed to be so hungry for things that I wasn’t: They were excited about taking on identities as analysts, and being initiated as devotees to specific psychoanalytic camps. They looked forward to building networks and study groups, belonging to a professional community, doing committee work together, committing to a set of beliefs and a process. They were apparently gung-ho to give class and group presentations, expose and defend their treatments choices among competitive peers, and earn certificates and titles that had little or no appeal to me.

I’d had a long-term analytically informed, therapeutic process that was rich and satisfying to me and that I had no wish to disrupt. Access to supervisors, and peer supervision that I trusted and admired. A private practice that was building nicely. What was it that had motivated my application to post-graduate analytic institute?

I realized that I really just wanted to get my hands on the bibliographies to every single seminar. And the designated time and quiet to read through it all.

I respectfully declined my acceptance to the institute.

And just kept reading.

When my son was in second grade he said to me: “I like reading non-fiction better than fiction- because who wants to think about other peoples Central Problems all of the time?”

I almost never read fiction. I hear enough stories. I don’t need any more direct exposure to central problems in my off-hours.

I’d much rather read the words of someone else who also spends all day immersed in other people’s central problems and see how they make sense of it all. Preferably someone really smart, who can tell me something new, inspiring and useful.

Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Rogers, Mahler, Kohut, Bion, Lacan, Sullivan, Searles and their interpreters and followers and apostates. Ego psychology, object-relations, self-psychology. The modern group analysis theorists (ie: Ormont and Rosenthal) the existentialists and logotherapists, the contemporary relational analysts, the inter-subjectivists. Buddhist psychotherapists, and depth theorists, Jung and the Jungians. Narrative therapy, feminist therapy and queer theory.

(I won’t bother to list the moral, existential, spiritual and religious philosophers and theologians. That would just get ridiculous.)

When my kids were babies, until my youngest about 6 or so, I was too exhausted to digest such a fibrous literary diet – and lived instead on a daily intake of myth, fairy tale, and sacred literature. (I lapped-up the hidden parental guidance I found there too, from the parents and defacto adoptive parents that support heroic journeys, and the angry, competitive, devouring, oblivious and narcissistic evil “step” parents who thwart the hero’s way.) Adding a little Von Franz, or Bettelheim, or Joseph Campbell on the side when I needed to think a little more, and my intuition was occupied elsewhere.

As the children became more independent – and I got more of myself back – Jung became the main course in my private studies.

Though I am certain no true Jungian would claim me as one of their own.

And in New York City, the psychoanalysts I encounter just want to know what institute I am affiliated with.

The social workers usually think I’m too psychoanalytic to represent my profession.

And frankly, when I am sitting, off to the side, listening to a bunch of analysts discussing the hostility expressed by the strong, unpleasant odor of a newly paraplegic, depressed, post-traumatic client my unexpressed impatience mounts: Do you even know if his shower is accessible yet? But I don’t throw my impatient wrench into the conversation because I know that when I am sitting with a group of social workers who are over-focusing on getting the necessary accommodations and accessibility in place – I am just as likely to squirm in my seat and groan internally : Do you think perhaps he smells of urine to tell you how pissed off he is?

And certainly both camps are entering into the same empathic contact through different doorways.

I am particularly drawn to those who write from in-between the therapeutic tribes, the disloyalists, the contrarians, the ecumenicists, the synthesizers: Mitchell, Eigen, Barbara Stevens Sullivan, Guggenbuhl-Craig, Bromberg and many others – those who have let their clients lead them off the grid to attempt find the threads between theorists who may have even explicitly rejected each other.

With a long a personal self-psycholgical/intersubjective analysis, individual and peer supervision drawing from modern/group psychoanalytical models, a belly full of mythology, a contrarian and introverted nature, and my hunger for undisturbed reading I claim identifications with many therapeutic tribes and belong to none.

I feel real love and gratitude toward my favorite theorists, although that doesn’t mean I will be faithful to them, or agree with them categorically. Reading their works feels extremely personal: I hear their words and their tone, I sense when they are defending themselves against anticipated or real criticism, I follow them as they take great intellectual leaps, and sometimes crash before they reach solid ground. I’ll flip quickly through the paragraphs where they have buried their thoughts alive with professional jargon until they return to straight-talk.

But I do love them all. And I hate them too. I wrestle with all of them – and pit them against each other. I disrespect their words with snotty, snarky marginalia: shocked and rejecting exclamation points, (really!) multiple question-marks (but how do you account for ?????) and scribble out the ways their enemies would counter their arguments – especially the passages I disagree with.

Their ideas and schemas negate, debate, enhance, expand and argue with each other: many of my dearest theoretical guides would loathe each other. (Anyone else want to see a Klein – Kohut cage match? Melanie might take him down in the first round with all that biting, and poisoning and destructive aggression but Heinz could still win on sheer endurance…)

And I ruthlessly batter every book, with dog-eared pages – random dreams and tangents scrawled on the inside covers. I underline and asterisk everything that speaks to me. Everything. Paperbacks in pen. Hardbacks in pencil, if one is handy, pen if not. Kindle? Highlights everywhere – but a tablet can’t offer as much opportunity for spontaneous insubordinate back-talk. Theory is my football. Half the fun is yelling at the screen.

Their words and word-paintings float through my mind in session: bad breasts, tantalizing-bad-objects, oedipal triangles, unconditional positive regard, distorted mirroring, split archetypes, alchemy, O, therapeutic play, joining the resistance, hatching, security operations, enactment, empathy. Different clients call us to different self-states, and each aspect of my professional identity wants its own mentor. I can’t imagine practicing without every one them

In Quaker process – the Truth is not seen as something that one person can posses. We must struggle together, with our little crystal clear partial truths – committed to the sliver of clarity that we posses, and search for ways to incorporate it with the truth that others hold.

And although I deeply respect those who have found one teacher to follow -
I know that I need all these voices whispering in my ear, to supervise and guide me.

copyright © 2012
All rights reserved Martha Crawford

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