'Chit chat' he talks, tells me his news.
He starts with 'is there anything that you would like to explore'
and I reply with the same question. 'Is there something that you would like to explore?
Adding 'or I will just ramble' .
Meaning I will be
Tangential....and that wont do for you!
He - There is something..."
And he talks about the clients for whom therapy is really at an end but they still arrive each week to talk about their latest expedition to the supermarket.
Not a good sign.
Why is he doing this - he's the one doing chit-chat, not me.
He - "There is some reason that is keeping them there, yet there doesn't seem to be a subject - and it occurred to me that obviously that isn't quite your situation here because of the course - the mandatory therapy..."
OK, here we are again!
The door to the plane - he is trying to prise the door open!
Why doesn't he speak plainly, I feel pulled into guessing the implications of his words. I'm thinking that surely this is because he perceives how I feel about him, in his heart, in his very bones. And he can't, wont talk about it?
As much as I empathize, it is horrible being on the client end of this!
So no I don't talk about light and fluffy things, I was trying to talk about memory last week...then had to change tack to something less neurobiological!
Whatever.
Isn't this all another way to say that he wants me gone?
But I would think that, because catastrophe is so much more attractive to the mind!
Right then, being as I don't know, and it isn't my role to ask the questions I'm just going to stay on the surface. He's going to have to work a lot harder on putting his feelings into words if he wants me to actually know what he thinks. I wont play guessing games.
He - "Sometimes I think the subtext is in what isn't said, in other words if somebody is paying for sessions and they are talking about seeing their aunty and how full the shops were the other day, what are they avoiding? And they are still coming, and they are still coming. What are they avoiding? That's something that is worth asking directly I think - 'I notice that we are talking about...' and 'I get the sense that that really isn't why you are here' you know, there are all sorts of ways of addressing that"
I ask - "Does that usually work"
He - "yes <pause> yes..."
Me - "It gives them permission to talk perhaps"
He - "There is also something about the subtext, because the reason they are here <pause> may not be to do with anything you are talking about - It's back to that thing I've spoken about before, 'who am I to the client'. And what am I providing that they can't get anywhere else"?
He's said 'they are avoiding saying something'
I certainly am!
And I've said 'they need permission to talk'
And I certainly do!
I wish I could feel safe enough to tell him, but I really don't.
So I'm talking about an assignment, for my other course. I begin with the notion that Freud derailed his patient's entrapment in the inexplicable, by making it explicable with a powerfully shocking explanation that could never be tested, or ever talked about by the patient with anyone other than Freud!
Actually I see Freud as a great showman, rather like Charles Dickins! Freud's shocking narratives sold books, and filled lecture halls. And his words have made me laugh out loud so many times!
An example:
Our patient gradually learns to understand that she has banished clocks and watches from her room during the night because the clock is the symbol of the female genital. The clock, which we have learned to interpret as a symbol for other things also, receives this role of the genital organ through its relation to periodic occurrences at equal intervals. The special fear of our patient, however, was that the ticking of the clock would disturb her in her sleep. The ticking of the clock may be compared to the throbbing during sexual excitement. Frequently she had actually been awakened by this painful sensation...
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (p. 157). Kindle Edition.
Throbbing clocks - oh my! Good to know (I'm being ironic) that Freud's patient finally gave up her positive denial and mocking doubt, and accepted his interpretation:
In the working out of the interpretations I had to hint and suggest to the girl, and was met on her part either by positive denial or mocking doubt. This first reaction of denial, however, was followed by a time when she occupied herself of her own accord with the possibilities that had been suggested, noted the associations they called out, produced reminiscences, and established connections, until through her own efforts she had reached and accepted all interpretations.
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (p. 156). Kindle Edition.
Why was she in therapy?
A nineteen-year old, well-developed, gifted girl, an only child, who was superior to her parents in education and intellectual activity, had been wild and mischievous in her childhood, but has become very nervous during the last years without any apparent outward cause.
Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (p. 155). Kindle Edition.
She had become nervous for no apparent reason, but it was all fine once she accepted Freud's interpretations.
Which sets me off talking to him about the alternative, to create a space in which a client is able to explore their edge of awareness feelings. This was Gendlin's work, to enable a person to sense the resonance between words and their inner sense, their wordless thinking process.
And right now I'm challenging Kit's view of the therapeutic interaction.
I sure feel subversive.
And heretical.
And through his words I think I'm hearing that he doesn't understand edge of awareness, he imagines it to be 'lightbulb moments' those flashes of insight when a person suddenly gets why they think in the way they do, or why they did x,y or z.
But that isn't edge of awareness..
Anyway I agree with him - rather than explain. Because if I said 'no, edge of awareness is closer to the process Jung used when he wrote his Black books (later to become the Red Book)' we wouldn't have got anywhere good.
I agree with him, so he agrees with me.
And on we go talking at 'crossed purposes' and getting on really well.
Or perhaps he is hating every second?
I will never know.
I ask him about Wittgenstein's 'Language games'. "All language undoes itself" as a hint and commentary on our process. Latter - after a brief diversion around Logical Positivism and postmodern foolishness..
He says - "But there is something beautiful about language isn't there..."
We are speaking via Zoom.
He says..."I can't quite see but it looks as if there are red roses behind you... who was it...Scottish poet, I can see his face - died young - had lots of babies all over the place, wrote lots of poetry about women but didn't really respect them, clearly - Um, there's a day named after him!"
Me - "Oh Robbie Burns?!
He - "Yes! My love is like a red, red rose - which of course is nonsense in terms of logical positivism, but we all know what it means, it is still meaningful - it is conveying something about somebody's beauty"
Oh no...arrows.
Those words straight and true, fly direct into my loving heart. Red, red, roses are emblematic of rich, sensual love. But my red roses are poppies, the emblem of hallucinogenic - death like - painless sleep / mother of morphine. Arrows...needles. I gather my self, reconnect psyche, body, pneuma...and tell of Robbie Burns using a diamond tipped pen to engrave poems on pub windows. Granted, this may seem tangential; far from the numerous meanings enfolded in the red lips of the rose with its connection to the twenty-two paths between the sephirot, the totality of experience - the discursive paths traversed to unite the shattered worlds...
Far off, most secret, and inviolate Rose,
Enfold me in my hour of hours; where those
Who sought thee at the Holy Sepulchre,
Or in the wine-vat, dwell beyond the stir
And tumult of defeated dreams...
WB Yeats.
With Yeats in my mind we end, talking about with Francesco Petrarca, not Ficino or Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, and certainly not Yeats.
He says- "I'm wondering you know - because we've been all sorts of places today - I find this so interesting. On the course do you ever get the chance to have conversations like this?"
Neoplatonism?
No - it has not come up as a subject during my training - and yet its concepts underlie so much of what we are taught...!
Me - "No"
He - "When I was a student we had lots of coffee fueled conversations until 3 am which were very exciting when you are in your early twenties. It was great, and I loved it. and it's a great sadness to me that I've never ever been able to capture it since."
OK, well I've done my very best!
WOULD that we were, my beloved, white birds on the foam of the sea!
We tire of the flame of the meteor, before it can fade and flee;
And the flame of the blue star of twilight, hung low on the rim of the sky,
Has awakened in our hearts, my beloved, a sadness that may not die.
A weariness comes from those dreamers, dew-dabbled, the lily and rose;
Ah, dream not of them, my beloved, the flame of the meteor that goes,
Or the flame of the blue star that lingers hung low in the fall of the dew:
For I would we were changed to white birds on the wandering foam: I and you!
I am haunted by numberless islands, and many a Danaan shore,
Where Time would surely forget us, and Sorrow come near us no more;
Soon far from the rose and the lily, and fret of the flames would we be,
Were we only white birds, my beloved, buoyed out on the foam of the sea!
WB Yeats.
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