The map is not the territory

I love a book that pulls me back again and again, each time offering me something more to savor and light up something new in me. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run With The Wolves  is one of those books, one that I dip into several times a year and one that I often recommend to my women patients. Barbara Stevens Sullivan’s The Mystery of Analytical Work is another of those deep and wonderful books. 

It is not an easy book, weaving together as it does concepts from Jung and Bion, two less than easy writers to grasp. I actually have both a paper copy and Kindle edition and both are heavily underlined and highlighted with notes written in the margins. Amazon tells me I have 50 highlighted bits from it and I am certain as I continue to live with this book, there will be at least 50 more.

Map or Territory

One can integrate an aspect of one’s inner reality only by experiencing it. A cognitive awareness of its existence may function as a guidebook or a map; one needs to actually visit the territory to transform it by digesting it. 

Think about it — how much of therapy focuses on achieving insight, of seeing and knowing more about oneself? And how often all of that knowledge fails to translate into deep change. Long ago I recognized in myself that in a way the planning of a trip is more exciting than the trip itself is. When I went to Italy a number of years ago, I loved poring over guidebooks, reading about places we would see, looking at pictures, reading descriptions of hotels and restaurants. And of course, in my mind’s eye, the weather was always perfect, the trains on time, my kids in excellent humor. So the trip I was taking in my imagination could not help but be closer to perfect than the actual experience turned out to be, when we had to deal with rail strikes, teenaged kids being teenagers, outbursts of marital discord, weather less than perfect. The real Italy, the territory I actually visited and experienced was wonderful but it was not the same Italy I found in the guidebooks and my imagination. Not a perfect analogy for what Sullivan is saying but close enough, I think. 

The Goal of Therapy

Anyway, Sullivan offers:

“It is not knowledge of reality that is at stake … reality is not something which lends itself to being known…. Reality has to be ‘been’ …” (Bion). Reality, in other words, must be experienced; life must be lived. It is good to know oneself, but the goal of analysis is to live one’s life fully, to be oneself… Our hope is that in the crucible of the analytic relationship each person will become bigger and take up greater responsibility for herself.” (Stevens Sullivan p. 250)

The goal of analysis is to live one’s life fully, to be oneself. The goal of therapy isn’t about becoming happy or feeling good, though these can and do flow from therapy. No, the goal is to become more, more of oneself.