The Shadow Aspects of Body Psychotherapy - Summary

This is a brief and incomplete summary, in response to a current project by Courtenay Young, long-standing president of the European Association of Body Psychotherapy (EABP), co-editor with Michael of the English version of the 'Handbook of Body Psychotherapy' alongside the original editors of the German original (Halko Weiss & Gustl Marlock), to be published next year, and currently writing a series of papers on the shadow aspects of the Body Psychotherapy tradition (published in the International Journal of Body Psychotherapy). Courtenay had asked me for a summary of my current ideas on the subject, which I jotted down quickly, based on more detailed previous writings on the topic (see references below - Soth 1999, 2000, 2004, 2005, 2010).

Michael Soth has also published several articles that address some of the 'shadow aspects' of Body Psychotherapy, where he tries to work through some of the inherited 'wounds' of the tradition - thinking about this in very similar terms to how we inherit 'wounds' from our family ancestors, by applying the notion of character formation to ourselves as a tradition and a community of practitioners. What is the character of our tradition? What are the dynamics of its origin and early development which we inherit? What are the wounds of our therapeutic ancestors and how do we still carry them today in our theory and practice?

He suggests that unless we attend to these shadow aspects, it is possible for Body Psychotherapists to actually end up perpetuating the body-mind split, rather than helping to integrate or transcend it (which is the declared intention and aim).

In order to offer a process of characterological transformation - which is indeed what most Body Psychotherapists think they are doing - a particular kind of relational space is required to contain the deconstructions, transformations and re-integrations of the client's existing sense of self and personality structure. Soth argues that for several reasons most traditional Body Psychotherapy is not managing to generate the relational space needed to truly achieve its promised objectives. In order to access the unconscious dimensions of the client's characterological reality, the therapist needs to be capable of 'allowing themselves to be constructed as an object' by the client's unconscious, i.e. via the transference. This is different from observing, interpreting and even exploring the transference somatically, as these interventions are only possible once the therapist has already recognized and articulated what the transference actually is. However, we cannot presume such a nonchalant grasp of what are after all deeply unconscious processes - in both client and therapist - without compromising our notion of the unconscious, its reach and depth and extent, and what the processes are by which we may become aware of it. We can become aware of the depths of the client's unconscious only by processing our countertransferential responses in such a way that the relational unconscious manifests in the therapeutic relationship in the first place.

The relational space needed for characterological work starts with un-knowing on the part of both client and therapist. The therapist then needs to take a stance which allows the transference to manifest, via 'allowing themselves to be constructed as an object' (taking into account that there are a multitude of ways of interfering with such unfolding of the transference). Only when these conditions are met, can a relational process emerge and deepen to the point where therapist (and client) slowly become aware of unconscious processes through getting caught in co-created enactments. Character transformation occurs via enactment - the therapist needs to be able to surrender to the enactment and respond from within it (rather then presuming to be able to operate on it from outside, as was traditionally assumed). This 'theory of therapeutic action' requires the therapist not only to be attuned, but to survive being - and being experienced - as the 'wounding object'.

The relational space needed for characterological work needs to include the therapist's flexibility between all the relational modalities (Petruska Clarkson - working alliance, authentic, reparative, transference countertransference, transpersonal; plus - as added by Soth - the therapeutically inescapable 'medical model') and kinds of therapeutic relatedness (Martha Stark - one-person, one-and-a-half person and two-person psychology). The relational space needed for characterological work also needs to include what Bollas calls the 'transformative object'; this implies the relational capacity on the part of the therapist to move along the full spectrum between the extremes of one-sided, power-over dynamics (what Jessica Benjamin calls 'doer' and 'done-to' dynamics of 'complementarity') on the one hand and intersubjective mutual recognition on the other (in humanistic language: the extremes of I-it and I-I relating).

Traditional Body Psychotherapy does not meet these criteria, for several reasons and inherited tendencies which constitute its habitual position: • A general obliviousness regarding countertransference as a parallel process (as understood in modern psychoanalysis, i.e. since the 'countertransference revolution in object relations') and therefore a systematic unawareness of the enactments of the 'wounding relationship' between therapist and client (i.e. how the client's 'wound' - as body-mind split - enters the therapy room and how the therapist and the therapeutic process enact, replicate and exacerbate the wound - whether or not the therapist's own wound enters or not, which it frequently does in significant ways). • The many disavowed and hidden 'medical model' assumptions that come down to us across the Body Psychotherapy generations, which tend to objectify the client, using body-mind terms and values: - this particular shadow aspect can be traced all the way back to Reich's (as well as Lowen & Pierrakos') medical training, Reich's own narcissism and thus the objectification of others; • A strong 'humanistic' bias against psychoanalysis, and also the cognitive-behavioural tradition, because they are largely - and correctly seen by Body Psychotherapists - as disavowing the body altogether (until recently) and failing to deeply understand somatic process in a body-mind-psyche context; • Therefore, what follows is a body psychotherapeutic idealisation of the body, that makes it significantly unlikely that therapists attend to the actual phenomenology of the body-mind relationship: the whole approach and movement could be seen to be defended against the depressive position, for instance, by holding on to a merger of the symbiotic/narcissistic aspects, thus avoiding a differentiation of the body and mind (Jung's opus contra naturam); what we need instead is a paradoxical understanding of embodiment, which is not polarized against its opposite pole of disembodiment, but embraces it as a dialectical (and therefore dynamic and evolutionary) antithesis. • A lack of differentiated and detailed understanding of cognitive (and imaginative) processes, as they are all being lumped together as defensive 'head' manoeuvres; • Some of the defensive aspects of character typology, where insufficient attention is paid to embodied object relations and internalisation processes; •An over-emphasis of the reparative aspects of the modality of Body Psychotherapy.

To be continued ...

References:

Relating to and with the Objectified Body (1999)
The Integrated BodyMind's View on 'Body/Mind Integration' (2000)
What Therapeutic Hope for a Subjective Mind in an Objectified Body? (2004)
Current Body Psychotherapy - a Relational Approach for the 21st Century? (2005)
The Return of the Repressed Body - Not a Smooth Affair (2010)

Evaluation & feedback from recent workshop in Brighton

What are therapists looking for in their CPD training? I think I'll try and organise a mini-survey soon, once my new website is up and running. Just had some properly evaluated feedback collated from recent workshop in Brighton - have a look here: http://bit.ly/1hkH3n2

A critique of Martha Stark’s model

[this is still a draft ... so far written for Body Psychotherapy audience]

Stark’s groundbreaking work addresses several issues – all of great significance in the historical development of psychotherapy: the therapist’s phenomenological stance; the therapist’s relational stance (not quite the same thing); the mind-over-body dualism; the systemic perspective; the post-modern, pluralistic shift generally and psychotherapy integration specifically.

On all these dimensions, tectonic paradigm shifts have occurred over the last 100 years; assumptions that were taken for granted a century ago have been questioned and a diversity of positions and theories has evolved around each one of them.

The problem with Stark’s contribution is that she conflates the different dimensions (and how they interact with each other) into one - too simplistic - narrative. This creates problems, especially for Body Psychotherapy, which need to be addressed.

Stark structures her argument around one main line of development: from what she calls ‘one-person psychology’ to a modern intersubjective ‘two-person psychology’, with a middle position which she – half-tongue-in-cheek, but on the basis of a serious, valid and helpful distinction – calls ‘one-and-half-person psychology’. This is a valid and significant line of development. It’s essentially a phenomenological-philosophical argument, which refuses to reduce humans to objects and establishes a fundamental and qualitative difference between the epistemology of natural versus human sciences: rocks do not talk back and they do not have a mind of their own. We can treat people as research objects (from what philosophy calls a ‘third-person’ perspective), but that research in and of itself will never arrive at valid truth claims regarding the human meeting of minds, or intersubjectivity. Between humans we need to admit the always already present subjective perspectives and therefore cannot get around interpretation, i.e. hermeneutics (see Habermas) which gives rise to an entirely different category of truth claims when it comes to intrapsychic or interpersonal phenomena. This anti-reductionist position postulates that in human affairs we need to recognize the other in an unpredictable and open dialogue (Gadamer) from a ‘first-and-second-person’ perspective.

In the world of psychotherapy, Buber’s famous phrase ‘I-Thou’ is well-known as capturing these ideas and attitudes. This begs the question of its opposite and what role ‘I-it’ relating may have in therapy. Here Stark comes to a surprising – for somebody who describes a linear historical development – and helpful, integrative position: she gives validity to all three possibilities and states that they all have their uses at different times with different clients.
This integrative attitude is neatly expressed by Ken Wilber’s phrase ‘transcend and include’ (Wilber’s four quadrants, by the way, are a very useful contribution to the distinction between ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-it’, introducing a whole new level of sophistication, which Stark’s model does not include).

The problem for Body Psychotherapy is that in addition to describing these shifts – across the whole field, including psychodynamic and humanistic traditions – from one-, to one-and-a-half to two-person psychology, she also sees a development in bodymind and relational terms: from a classical psychoanalytic emphasis on knowledge, insight and mental understanding, towards the importance of felt, embodied experience towards intersubjective relating. But this is conflating several distinct dimensions – and in all of them changes have indeed occurred simultaneously over the last century – but to superimpose them on one line of development is a category error, mixing apples and oranges.

The various ways in which different traditions actually take changes in all these dimensions on board, and whether they dismiss earlier positions or do indeed ‘transcend and include’ them, creates a very confusing, pluralistic field, that is not neatly captured by Stark’s outline. Different traditions combine the various dimensions in entirely different - and contradictory – ways. So the only way to capture this and gain clarity would be to create a multi-dimensional space of historical development, along several separate axes, each with their own continuum:

1. between ‘I-it’ and ‘I-Thou’ stances
2. between ‘exclusively mental’ and ‘holistic’ approaches
3. between ‘working alongside’ the client as an ally and ‘working opposite’ the client as a relational other (which is not the same as ‘I-it’ versus ‘I-Thou’, and not reducible to it – see Gomez, Lavinia)
4. between ‘challenging’ and ‘supportive’ stances
5. between ‘individualistic’ and ‘systemic’ perspectives
6. between ‘pure approaches’ and ‘integrative hybrids’

This may create some more clarity, but only up to a point. There are further axes we can think of, and the closer we look at them, most of them are not actually linear axes along a polarized continuum in the first place.

For Body Psychotherapy, the most pressing distinction is the recognition that - whatever the constellated bodymind phenomenology the therapist focuses on – it is always possible to either take an ‘I-it’ or an ‘I-Thou’ stance. It is perfectly possible to be intersubjectively engaged with the other’s mind via insight and knowledge. Equally, it is perfectly possible to take an objectifying stance towards the other’s body and experience. These two dimensions – the phenomenological one (from one-, to one-and-a-half to two-person psychology) and the bodymind one (from knowledge to experience to holistic relational experience) – need to be kept distinct, if we want to gain an overview over the variety of approaches actually being practiced within the field.

Some of these problems in Stark’s contribution can be usefully addressed by complementing it with an integrative model which has gained popularity over the last 20 years in the UK as well as globally. Petruska Clarkson’s model (1994) tries to establish a comprehensive spectrum of relational modalities between client and therapist, comparing these to kinship bonds, thus validating an integrative multiplicity of therapeutic relating. But it falls short of grasping the paradoxical essence of the dynamic whole which is the body-mind system of the therapeutic relationship (Soth ).

Thus, a holistic and phenomenological two-person psychology as body-mind process (possibly extending into many-persons psychology) still awaits formulation (Stark, xxxx), but a starting point is the integral-relational notion of the ‘Fractal Self’ I have suggested elsewhere (Soth xxxx), by extending the concept of parallel process to include bodymind (Reich’s functionalism) and inter-subjective dynamics and unconscious process (Soth, 2007).

Improving on Freud ...

or: What does Freud mean ‘by projection of a surface onto a surface’?

[this is still a draft ...]

About 35 years ago I stumbled across an expression in reading Freud, which intuitively made a deep impression on me: “the ego is a projection of a surface onto a surface”. I have not forgotten about it, and it has been engraved in my mind since then, although I have never been able to locate it since then (if you can help me find the citation, I would be very grateful – actually I have now found a reference in Boadella, which I need to pursue – see bottom of doc!!).

I remember having a sense that here Freud was onto some deep, precious recognition. But my mind could not get its head around it at all. In those days it constituted a defeat if my mind could not understand something. But on this occasion, I gracefully admitted defeat: this thing was just beyond me. I just knew that a powerful, educated, disciplined mind had here formulated a stroke of genius. I cannot even be sure that I correctly remember the actual phrase, in its word-for-word detail, so in writing about it I am aware that I am pushing the boat out.

It has taken me about 25 years or more to get anywhere close, but over the last 10 years I think I have begun to understand it. And not only to understand it, but - in my ever humble way – to even improve on it, or so I fancy.

Freud was a child of his times, and a mental and psychological giant, but it is also true to say that in those heady fin-de-siecle days and the decades that followed, he - and those around him - were taking baby steps in their thinking about the phenomena of the psyche. They were severely hampered by thinking within, as well as struggling against, the dominant zeitgeist of their time. So much of their thought – the distinctions they made, the categories they formulated, leading right into their conceptualisations and models – much of this has stood the test of time and shaped the 20^th century and its consciousness and thus human evolution, but it also led to all kinds of intellectual contortions and misleading complications, many of which are to some extent unnecessary.

Of course, they were trying to do justice to the complexity of the psyche, and so there is a level of reality where our models do need to match that intricate, quick-changing mercurial complexity. But the problem is not that the models are complicated – no, something much more vexing is going on: in trying to make sense of our perceptions of ourselves (and the human mind and psyche in general), our own internal conflicts and our ambivalent reactions towards the intensity of emotional and psychological experience – between the ever-present spectrum of pain and pleasure - enter our thought process and skew it. So it’s not surprising that our minds come up with ambivalent and confusing ideas – this is true for you and me, as well as great minds like Freud’s.

In pursuit of the noble adage "Know Thyself", and in directing our gaze towards our subjective experience, the conflictedness of that experience affects our capacity to see and to think. Therefore, as a consequence, our thoughts, ideas and models tend to reflect the conflicts that they are embedded in and arise from - rather than constituting any clear, let alone objective, perception or interpretation of the psychological facts.

In other words: our mental processes are parallel to our psychological reality. Fritz Perls was polemic about it in saying: all reasons are lies. But he was onto something: our thinking is not as clear and realistic and objective as it fancies itself. Our thought process is subtly influenced and subverted by the emotional agendas and avoidances which it fancies itself to be devoid of. Thinking is often born out of emotional defensiveness; or at the very least, it can acquire emotionally defensive functions. Our thoughts move in characterological grooves, on tracks which we take for granted and therefore don’t take into account and don’t factor in. Not one of our thoughts can be presumed to be free of such defensive functions – the defensiveness does not announce itself through the content of the thought. The thought itself – more likely than not – is valid and true, or at least has a truth content. The defensive function is visible only through the context and the emotional/psychological effect of the thought – the bodymind state that results from the thought; or the relational effects, both internal and external, that are precipitated by the thought.

The history of psychology and psychotherapy is full of models that are pervaded by - and are manifestations of - a fundamental emotional ambivalence: on the one hand, we want to, need to, are desperate to recognise and understand ourselves, right down into the depths of our psyche; to get some insight into those irrational forces beyond our awareness and control that drive our thoughts, feelings and behaviour - apparently like Greek gods, constantly and invisibly interfering in human destinies, but without human rhyme or reason. Such understanding can only flower when it is based on radical openness and acceptance: an agenda-free phenomenological enquiry into ‘what is’ – attending to ‘the body in the body’, ‘the feelings in the feelings’ – in the felicitous phrase of the Buddha’s sutra on mindfulness. Freud’s main focus was not ‘healing’ of the psyche, but a scientific version of ‘know thyself’ (a courageous enquiry not suited to the faint-hearted, weak-willed or woolly-minded which would then have anxiety-reducing and healing side-effects).

On the other hand, we're desperate to overcome those forces we are at the mercy of – to gain control over these irrational forces of the psyche and appropriate them and turn them to our ego’s advantage, and so edge closer to establishing a delusional stability and identity and maintaining an apparently secure, fixed and invulnerable self.

Our thinking and our models are therefore to a significant degree compelled by the impulse not to understand ourselves, deeply and truly, in a spirit of acceptance and surrender, but : to eradicate the pain, conquer the vulnerability, transcend the helplessness to overcome of vulnerability, our sense of feeling at the mercy of the irrational forces, emotional pain.

In short, our ego is conflicted: our conscious efforts are pervaded and guided and compelled and underpinned by a fundamental ambivalence in relation to psychological reality. The ego is compelled to find its roots and connect to them, to pursue the cracks down to their roots, to root out its limitations, heal the splits, cover up the cracks, and ultimately to transcend the prison of itself - at the same time as being compelled to perpetuate its existence into immortality. That ambivalence underpins and underlies all of our Western thinking, and therefore hampers our grasp not only of our internal world, but - of course - reality altogether.

So what was that statement by Freud that had left that lasting impression on me?

When talking about the relationship between the Ego and the Id, he said something to the effect of: the ego is a projection of a surface onto a surface.

Taking into account that we are here at the beginning of the 20th century, in an age of imperialism before the First World War, with the vacuum that Nietzsche’s death of God had created still haunting the Western mind, and at the height of positivism and materialism, with science about to take over as the new God, Freud is very much thinking in terms of physics – models of material reality that were taken as understood.

Making sense of psychological process by taking recourse to supposedly equivalent physical processes, on the one hand using physics as metaphor, but thereby treating them as much more analogous than they are. The metaphors become concepts which in turn become frames – Freud’s topographical model reflecting assumptions of archaeology and geology. Sometimes those analogies were made explicit – like Freud’s vision that some day all psychology might be reduced to neurology. With the photographic camera holding sway as one of the brave new advances of modernity, he’s taking recourse to a process of projection: the Id as the driving force of psychological process, ever energetic, it is like a light source projecting its energy onto the mind as a receptive and passive screen; with the animal-Id driving and radiating its instinctiveness; and consciousness as the apprehension of that energy and the mental manifestation and image and thought translation of it. 

So Freud implies that the surface of the Id is like the screen, onto which the film - moving images of the drives - are being projected. Remembering that Freud was deeply committed to neurology, and finding ways of rooting psychological process in the nervous system, he is trying to find a model for the mechanism by which basic unconscious physiological processes in the body are linked with and can manifest as psychological and mental and conscious processes and consciousness. He understands the body as a homeostatic system that goes through cycles of excitation, which arise in the Id, as instinctual processes. How do these unconscious, physiological processes become conscious? How does the human mind become aware of them?

Remembering also that at this point Freud is very much embedded in his topological model where the Id, the Ego and Superego are like geological layers - making therapy a bit like archaeology - it is easy to see why he thinks of the interface between the Id and the Ego as a surface: the forces within the Id are manifesting as arousal at that surface; this excitation is then available to be perceived by mental consciousness, and translated into images, thoughts and self-reflection. So whilst it is not difficult to see why Freud thinks of the Id as having a surface which the ego is watching, a bit like a film on a screen, what is more difficult to grasp is why he is speaking of the projection of that surface onto a surface. How does the second surface come in and what is it?

Here we come to an interesting point, where a whole paradigm clash manifests. On the one hand, Freud is deeply committed and embedded in the project of modernity, where mental observation is objective and thoughts are a direct objective reflection of what's out there. The Enlightenment, with its worshipping of reason, manifests in the belief (or we might say: the delusion), that the human mind has evolved to the point (with Western males at the pinnacle of that evolution, closest to a male God at the top of the pyramid), where they can see, think about, understand and ultimately control the movement of the universe. But whilst Freud cannot help being part of that compulsion and project, in everything he does he also undermines it. Along with Einstein and others, Freud is instrumental in puncturing the delusions of modernity and helping Western consciousness to its knees and to crumble (Freud's work effected a profound revolution in man's attitude towards, and comprehension of, his mental processes, constituting after Copernicus and Darwin, a third blow to man's self-esteem - See Stephen Jay Gould's “An Urchin in the Storm”, p. 214, for a development of Freud's "three great discontinuities”). Freud himself believed that his theories had struck but the latest blow against human vanity, the first being Copernican cosmology, which had displaced humankind from the centre of the astronomical universe, and the second, Darwinian evolutionary theory, which had removed it from the centre of the biological universe. By proposing that humans had evolved from animal species, Darwinism denied the biological uniqueness of humankind and asserted that human beings were but one of many species of animals. Just as Darwin destroyed the basic opposition between human and animal by placing human beings within a biological continuum, Freud similarly destroyed the traditional basic opposition between sanity and madness by locating normality on a continuum. (Anthropologists, as Levi-Straus then proposed, similarly replaced a traditional western opposition of civilized and primitive humanity with a conception of culture that places all social organisations upon or within continua).

The surface of the second surface he is talking about is the intuition that the mind is not an objective perceiver and reflector – not simply an accurate and reliable mirror - of what is ‘out there’ (or ‘in here’). Freud's key insight is that the supposedly rational mind is at the mercy of unconscious feelings and thoughts, and driven and directed by them all the more, the more it fancies itself above it. Already in his early theorising, Freud consequently does justice to this in his own thinking. He never fully succumbs to the promises and delusions of the Western mind. In himself or in others, he has a healthy, fundamental suspicion of every thought, including his own. In this regard, he is the father of post-modernity. He does not think of the mind as a single, perceiving point, like a mirror or an accurate radio receiver. No, he thinks of the mind as a surface: yes, as a screen, on which the unconscious conflicts are being played out; but as a screen which is affected by what it reflects, a screen that morphs under pressure of what it perceives and portrays.

He does not think of the mind as outside of the bodymind process, he does not succumb to an idea of the mind as the Archimedean lever which from its outside, dissociated, separated vantage point can leverage the whole of reality according to its whim. No, he thinks of the mind as a receptive surface, subject to the pressures of what it is perceiving, and therefore inexorably connected with it, and responsive as well as reactive to it.

On a deep level we can say that Freud has an intuition that transcends the subject/object split (this is not to deny the many aspects in which Freud is caught in perpetuating that very split). There is a long tradition of people trying to make up their minds as to whether Freud belongs in the first or second camp. The crux and the genius of Freud is that he, of course, simultaneously belongs into both camps, being deeply conflicted, but beginning to notice, attend to and formulate the conflict he experiences and recognises himself as caught in. The paradigm clash runs right through him, but his genius is that he is beginning to cotton onto it, recognise it, inhabit it reflectively.

On the one hand, he is the ultimate perpetrator of modernity; on the other hand he is the beginning of the end of it, its undoing and deconstruction. 

Freud's formulation of the relationship between the Id and the Ego, as a projection of a surface onto a surface, manifests this paradigm clash in a nutshell. He formulates, and his formulations are circumscribed by, a way of thinking in terms of projectors and screens that is very much trapped in the subject object/split; and in terms of the relationship between physiology, nervous system and the soma on the one hand and the mind, consciousness and psyche on the other, in the body/mind split. But what he's formulating at the same time is an intuition not exactly of their mutuality, but their intricate interconnectedness. He is speaking, thinking and formulating it from within the dissociated disembodied mind that is beginning to intuit its own limitations and turning towards the embodied roots of its own disembodiment.

In the language and formulations that have evolved in my mind over the last 15 years, having the benefit of complexity theory and 20 years of living with the idea of parallel process, I prefer to formulate Freud’s idea through the notion of the ‘fractal self’.

The idea of the fractal self combines integral thinking with parallel process. It draws on Wilber’s integral theory, especially as it applies to the body/mind and subject/object split, but goes beyond it in a significant way: by drawing on the idea of parallel process, we can make much more precise and meaningful statements about how the different levels and layers which integral theory describes in evolutionary terms, are actually related and linked in the complexity of the human bodymind. We can make much more useful statements both about the pathologies and contortions of the human bodymind, as well as about the paradoxical and often self-defeating process towards integration and wholeness. For a description and mapping of the overall spiritual individuation process, Wilber’s distinction of the various layers and states and lines may be sufficient, and integral theory does a good job of it (probably the best we have currently available, when we include its interested critics and detractors).

However, the more we get into the nitty-gritty of the individual human and how they are trapped in self-replicating contortions, the more we get down to the complexities of the individual subjective human psyche, as therapists do, the more we need an experience-near understanding of these vicissitudes. We then need to understand the detail of how the various layers of body and mind are linked and how patterns conspire to maintain the status quo within characterological fixations. How are old wounds and traumas embodied, carried from the past into the present into the future and – most importantly – just how do they replicate themselves? How come the mind is helpless, even when having understood the origins and manifestations of a characterological pattern, to actually change that pattern? Why is the mind helpless to change those patterns? Why is understanding usually not enough?

Many, if not most, modes and modalities of therapy are still built upon the mind as the supposed agent of change. Most talking therapies inherit the legacy of the 19th century, and that half of Freud's work which was caught in modernity. Many, if not most, modes and models of therapy are not suspicious enough of their own thinking, concepts and theories, both in general as well is in the nitty-gritty of a particular client-therapist relationship. We need to understand more the other half of Freud, who did recognise the mind as a parallel process, as the reflection of a surface onto a surface.

The more we can recognise, and more importantly, surrender to parallel process, the more the notion of enactment, being caught in patterns, whether we have any awareness or understanding of them or not, becomes significant. The notion of enactment, as parallel process like infinite dominoes replicating a pattern, regardless of the mind’s understanding or interference, is much closer to the reality of our vulnerability and susceptibility to these patterns.

Lifestreams: An Introduction to Biosynthesis
books.google.com/books?isbn=0710211457
David Boadella - 1987 - ‎Psychology
This enables us to comprehend Freud's statement that the ego is a projection of a surface onto a surface.5 Not only is the ego a function of the cortex, the outer ...



The tensions and contradictions between authentic and reparative modalities of therapeutic relating

I am currently writing a chapter for a book, which addresses some questions I frequently hear, regarding the relational modalities:

The crucial inspiration for authentic relating, however - pre-dating the explicit formulation of  intersubjectivity by several decades - came from Martin Buber’s dialogic philosophy (1947), which had a fundamental impact on Rogers, Perls, and the humanistic movement, captured in the phrase ‘I-Thou’ relating.
Already during the 1960’s and 1970’s humanistic writers had begun to question the psychoanalytic tendency to absolutize the transference as the be-all and end-all of the therapeutic relationship. Many of them had come through psychoanalysis and understood that the transference was helpful in understanding the vicissitudes of the therapeutic working alliance. But they also recognized that much of psychoanalysis had ossified into a one-sided and fixed relational stance which more often than not  was liable to undermine and destroy the working alliance, by a punitive attitude against ‘acting-out’ and the analyst’s habit of reducing everything that happens between therapist and client to transference.
The humanistic movement was inspired by an intuition – years later to be articulated by Petruska Clarkson (1994) - that the therapeutic space is and needs to be relationally complex, with the therapist capable of flexibility and fluidity between all the modalities of therapeutic relatedness, rather than dogmatically as fixed in their relational position as the client is in their characterological position.

In pursuit of the unfolding of the client’s full potential, humanistic therapists were willing to experiment (as analysts as Ferenczi, Reich, Sullivan and others had done) and found that both authentic and reparative modalities held therapeutic possibilities which psychoanalysis was categorically ruling out and excluding. There was some understanding that many psychoanalytic ‘rules’ instituted by Freud had grown out of his reaction against his traumatic experiences with the intensity of the erotic transference in his early practice, and that these principles and guidelines of practice needed revising, especially in the light of the new cultural context of sexual liberation, then 60 years on from Freud.

However, in its evolving anti-reaction against the objectifying, patriarchal and power-over paradigm of classical psychoanalysis, humanistic therapists often tended to swing from one extreme into the opposite. With the precious discovery of anti-hierarchical modes of relating often turning into an egalitarian ideology, rather than habitually enacting a fundamental relational inequality as psychoanalysis had done, humanistic therapists now started habitually avoiding any trace of inequality. Throughout the humanistic approaches, this resulted in a relational stance designed to systematically side-step and short-circuit the intensity of the transference – one reason why Body Psychotherapy has been criticized for neglecting the relational dimension of therapy.

Whilst often based on psychoanalysis merely re-stating the rigidity of its classical paradigm as well as prejudice, its critique of relational obliviousness in the humanistic field is substantially valid: by conflating reparative and authentic modes of relating into a confused blend, the subculture of humanistic psychotherapy has long managed to avoid an inconvenient feature of reparative relating: it is by definition inherently and necessarily unequal, and in its extreme is positively infantilizing. By wrapping the reparative stance within a philosophy of authentic, dialogical relating (which is by definition inherently and necessarily equal), the unpalatable aspects of reparative relating can be denied and rationalized. Repair of the client’s maturational deficiencies and provision of the developmentally needed responses – as valid and necessary as they are to the fullness of the therapeutic endeavour – inevitably involves the client experiencing – from within their subjective experience of the deficiency (i.e. from within the regressed state at the root of the deficiency) – a sense of need and inequality, even helplessness and feeling at the mercy of the other.

But even worse than that: contrary to the humanistic principles of I-Thou relating, a reparative stance inevitably involves a perception, not to say: a diagnosis of the wound and the deficiency. The reparative mode is inseparable from a sense of objectification – with a benign, motherly, nurturing attitude, but objectification nonetheless. The developmental deficiency – or more precisely: the client’s unawareness and defence against the wounding inherent in the deficiency - interferes with the client’s capacity for mutual intersubjective recognition: reparative relating cannot get around some kind of ‘medical model’ implications. There is a fundamental tension and opposition between reparative and authentic modalities of relating – a tension which can be navigated and worked with, but it should not be denied and collapsed. One of the shadow aspects of the humanistic tradition, therefore, are hidden and denied ‘medical model’ assumptions which pervade both theory and practice (Soth 2005, 2008).

Humanistic therapists and writers have developed a host of ways to fudge this issue: by re-formulating the repair not as an unequal interpersonal dynamic, but as the client’s self-healing process; by claiming – quite rightly – that the equality of authentic relating is reparative of the wounds inflicted by a history of unequal relating.
But none of these manoeuvres get around the conundrum: the experience of developmental repair implies the experience of the wounding, in a context of inequality; without the client actually feeling the deficiency which we are supposedly repairing, and therefore feeling unequal, we are colluding with an avoidance of the wound. This is the inescapable logic of the Kleinian opposition to any kind of gratification of the client’s needs and demands, any kind of fudging of the wound and the inherent helplessness, as well as frustration, anguish, envy and fury.