I entered private practice in the early 80s after my children were born. At first, I did a lot of school consultation and consultation to day care centers and to Head Start. But after my own children came along, I decided I no longer wanted to work with young children.
In my mid-30’s I started to wonder what I really wanted to do when I grew up. I considered going to law school. Or becoming a nurse and then a nurse midwife. Or going to medical school. Or getting a degree in public policy. In the end I came back to my beginning — I knew I wanted to do psychotherapy with adults.
Graduate school and my first job had given me the bare minimum training to be able to sit in a room across from another person and listen. Which I started doing. And I began to read again about therapy. I would find a book that spoke to me and when I finished it, I would look at the bibliography and start reading those books. I read Freud and Jung and neo-Freudians and post-Jungians. My father had always told me I could learn anything I needed to know from books, and though he wasn’t right, that notion stood me in good stead as I read and read and read. I came to the material without prejudices so I read widely — everything from ego psychology to archetypal psychology. It was all fascinating to me. Of course some of what I read resonated more than others and I found myself drawn particularly to two areas — object relations and that branch of post-Jungian psychology that developed in England and influenced by object relations. I fell in love with Winnicott, Guntrip, Balint and Samuels, Redfearn, Stevens Sullivan. I plowed my way through several volumes of Langs’ seminars.
Reading is fine and important. But no amount of reading can make anyone a better therapist. So I also sought both clinical supervision and personal analysis. I wanted supervision from therapists I knew to be better than me, more skilled, better trained, more experienced. And as Jungian analysts began to settle in Maine in the 80’s, I was able to find them. Between 1985 and 1998 I worked with three different Jungian analysts in supervision — one was quite classical, another embraced Langs’ therapeutic frame, and the third gave me the blend of psychoanalytic approaches and Jung that appealed to me.
Supervision is an important part of becoming a therapist. But personal therapy is even more important in my view. I had been in therapy in college and again in my mid-thirties. But what I wanted now was Jungian analysis. In 1986, a week before I turned 40, I started analysis with one of the first analysts to move to Maine, I worked with her for 3 years. I then started seeing another analyst, a man I ended up working with for 24 years.
But why Jung, you ask? It is the focus on meaning that really works for me with Jung. Symptoms have meaning which for me is a liberating way to understand life and behavior. Far more useful for me than something rooted in pathology and a notion of illness.
Jungians frustrate me sometimes. Sometimes it becomes too airy and I used to get annoyed at how little in the Jungian literature there was on technique. But the other side frustrates me too — with too much on technique and rules. Finding my own balance point in between has been a big part of my growth and development as a therapist.
I long ago lost count of how many books I have read on analysis and depth psychology in the last 40 years. And I continue to read, recently Barbara Stevens Sullivan’s The Mystery of Analytical Work: Weavings from Jung and Bion, not an easy read but well worth the effort.
One of my supervisors told me we practice what we believe. So I came to be a developmental Jungian (that’s what Andrew Samuels calls that branch of post-Jungian practice that combines Jung and object relations) because it is what I believe, because it makes sense to me in some deep and fundamental way. If you could see me work, you would not likely see much difference between how I am in session with a patient and how Paul Weston of In Treatment is or how most modern psychodynamically oriented therapists are. The difference lies more in how we view what we see, a difference not as great as some think, than it is in what we do. So, I practice what I believe.
Here are a few of the books that I read along the way that I have returned to more than once:
Barbara Stevens Sullivan: Psychotherapy Grounded in the Feminine Principle
Aldo Carotenuto: The Difficult Art
Andrew Samuels: Jung and the Post Jungians
Michael Balint: The Basic Fault
Harry Guntrip: Schizoid Phenomena, Object Relations and the Self
Now to what any of this means to you. If you decide to work with me, it helps for you to know that I am not an overnight sensation, that I have spent many years learning about and reflecting on what I do as a therapist and that I have also done my own work in my personal therapy. The specifics of my theoretical orientation may be of interest to you but as we sit with one another, they are not really important for you all.
Knowing that I come from a depth orientation matters because we will not be focused so much on solutions but rather on meaning– what does it mean in the context of your life that this issue persists for you? or what is this dream trying to tell you about yourself and your life.
As Sheldon Kopp put it, “The continuing struggle [in psychotherapy] was once described in the following metaphor by a patient who had successfully completed a long course of psychotherapy: ‘I came to therapy hoping to receive butter for the bread of life. Instead, at the end, I emerged with a pail of sour milk, a churn, and instructions on how to use them.’ “
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