Jung At Heart

I consider myself to be fairly active politically, though nowhere near the activist that my husband is. Politics is important to me because it is one place where I see the opportunity to attach my values to action. But I go through periods when I just don't want to hear about for a while. I don't want to read political blogs or news. When I avoid C-Span like the plague . And I am in one of those times. I think as I struggle to become more aware of my own shadow issues -- and they do seem limitless -- I become less willing to see the world in the stark black and white terms that so much political discourse these days falls into. I point you to this post from the Last Psychiatrist as offering some thoughts that can help us bring to bear our skills in looking at the political scene.

Someone asked me recently about whether or not I see therapy as healing.I don't think of therapy as healing in the usual sense. To heal means to make whole or healthy, to recover or restore and comes from the root kailo meaning whole or uninjured. In order to think of what I do as healing, I would need to see the people I work with, and indeed myself, as broken, ill and I don't, not in the sense of illness. I don't think of the people I see or myself as having any kind of brain illness, as Roy of ShrinkRap apparently does--

"the long-standing practice of carving mental health treatment out of the rest of the medical system, while applying different payment mechanisms (higher co-pays, for example) which have resulted in fractured care systems and higher costs. Even Medicare continues to charge beneficiaries a 50% co-pay for outpatient mental health care rather than the 20% for all other organ system disease.

This "carve-out" system is the ultimate in insurance discrimination. This lack of parity between brain illness and body illness should have ended in the 1990s, during the Decade of the Brain."

I see therapy  as opening the door to new possibilities. I cannot undo my history, make myself as if my childhood or any part of my life had been ideal, but I can become more conscious of the ways that history and my interpretations of it have operated in my life and in that way allow me to choose from a wider array of possible behaviors as I go forward. I think we are all wounded to greater and lesser degrees. But healing, in the sense that we usually think of it, seems to me to not be operative in the dealing with these wounds. 

So, as my patients and I work together, we can see  how the shape of childhood led them to be in certain ways. And becoming conscious of this, they can choose to act from a different place, no longer living out of the place of that child, though she will always remain a part of any of us.  Healing? Not really. Freeing? Yes.

A British object relations theorist, Bion, wrote about approaching each session without memory or desire. In my work with my patients, I try to hold this in mind. I take it to mean that I come to the hour without specific goals in mind, without a particular agenda, and without reviewing in any detail the previous session.

I try instead to  allow each session to unfold on its own, raising as it does memory of previous sessions and pointing the way to future work. The shape of each hour is dictated by the patient, what she brings and where her gaze is. As I listen, I remember previous sessions and the threads of the fabric we are weaving. I keep in check my own desire for how things should turn out, for the direction to take, for goals to be set. I follow the lead of my patient. 

This results in a path which is quite non-linear as one week we might talk about work and the next about childhood and the next about yet another issue. But all of these issues are woven together in the fabric of the patient's life and they form as well the fabric of our work together. The particular weave will become apparent as we go along. A habit developed in childhood as a defense against an intrusive parent will show itself again in adult life in work habits or in the way relationship issues are handled.

This approach takes time, it is true. And that runs against the grain of many for a quick fix. Both the therapist and the patient have to be patient with the process.

Does this mean I think that long term therapy is for everyone? No, I don't. I think it works well for people who have the desire to look deeply within and who see therapy as personal education. Short-term therapy, meaning 6 months or less, works well for a lot of people and for well-defined problems.