Learning from Life

Becoming a Psychoanalyst

Patrick Casement

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317724216
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

All of life can be a resource for our learning. In his fourth and most personal book, Patrick Casement attempts to understand what he has learned from life, sharing a wide range of those experiences that have helped shape the analyst he has become.

Patrick Casement shares various incidents in his life to demonstrate how these helped lay a foundation for his subsequent understanding of psychoanalysis. These examples from his life and work are powerful and at times very moving, but always filled with hope and compassion.

This unique book gives a fascinating insight into fundamental questions concerning the acquisition of analytic wisdom and how personal experiences shape the analyst's approach to clinical work. It will be of great interest to all psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.

Part 1

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Development

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Chapter 1

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Learning from life¹

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Introduction

For many analysts, the choice of a career in psychoanalysis can be found to lie deep-rooted in our own experience. It is therefore likely that our approach to clinical work will have been influenced, sometimes quite profoundly, by our own lives. So the theoretical orientation at which we eventually arrive, the approach to clinical work and the technique we come to prefer, may well have been selected subjectively rather than chosen as objectively as we might wish to believe.

Unfortunately it is rare for the connections between life experience and clinical orientation to be openly addressed, probably because most analysts choose to keep their personal details out of the public arena, and with good reason. Such self-disclosure is almost bound to contaminate the transference, interfering with the clinical work that lies at the centre of their professional endeavour.

I have often been asked how I came to be a psychoanalyst. This is a question I have not usually felt free to answer, at least not in any detail and not in print, because of how that might affect my work with patients. But now that I am no longer taking on new patients I am under no such constraint. I trust that any past patients who might read what follows in this book will be able to take what I reveal here without too much difficulty or disturbance. I hope their transferences to me will have been sufficiently worked through to be able to bear facing realities that do not lend themselves to any continued idealization.

In what follows there will be vignettes from my own life and experience, with comments on what I have since come to recognize in these examples. When appropriate, I shall say something of the ways in which these experiences have contributed to how I have since come to regard the clinical endeavour. Even though some of these vignettes may not seem to be particularly important, for me they have come to stand for something of much greater significance than was present in the events themselves at the time.

Turkish delight

When the Second World War had just ended, my family began to have new kinds of food that we children had not heard of before. One such special treat was the first box of Turkish delight to come into our home. It was a large box with many wonderful cubes of this special new sweet, all embedded in icing sugar. Being such a treat, we were each allowed ‘just one piece’ after lunch. That was the rule, watchfully supervised by an adult at the time the box was being passed round.

To my shame, which I laughingly recall even now, when no one was looking I made some useful discoveries about these pieces of Turkish delight. They were not all the same size. Therefore, if one of the bigger ones was cut in half, the giveaway face (where the cut had been) could easily be concealed by dabbing it in the sugar. It then looked just like all the other pieces. Or, to be more precise, it looked just like the other smaller pieces. I was then free to help myself to more than my daily ration without it being all that obvious. However, having got into the way of helping myself by stealth, and it was so easy, I continued doing this. As a result, all the pieces got smaller and smaller, but nobody seemed to notice.

Though I kept on getting away with my ‘crime’, it was not without guilt. Years later, when reading Winnicott on the antisocial tendency (1956), I came to understand this particular experience quite differently. I had been repeating my crime with the unconscious hope that I might be caught. But as my delinquency remained undiscovered, there had been little or no reason for me to give this up. I had needed someone to notice what was going on in order to help me to stop. In the absence of discovery, I had been left with the hollow victory of repeatedly getting away with what I was doing. My deeper hope, I now realize, had not been met by the parental action that was unconsciously being looked for. Instead of the relief of being helped to stop this ‘stealing’, I was left with a guilt that stayed with me for years.

This experience served me well in my clinical work. From my early work as a probation officer, through to my work as a psychoanalyst, I could recognize when there had been that unconscious hope that Winnicott wrote of when he was describing the ‘antisocial tendency’. I have since come to paraphrase Winnicott in writing:

[Winnicott] observed that when a child has been deprived of something essential to security and growth, and has been deprived of this for too long, the child may go in search of this symbolically, through stealing, when hopeful. Who other than Winnicott would have been able to recognize that thrust of unconscious hope, even in stealing?

(Casement 2002c: xxii)

It was Winnicott's genius that he could see this, and I have been struck by how frequently his observation has been true of those who have later become delinquents, whose unconscious hope had not been met.²

Now say ‘sorry’

From all accounts, in my family I was seen as a particularly difficult and tiresome child. So it is not surprising that I had often to be called to account for my bad behaviour. One time, when I was about ten, I had been sent to my room ‘to cool of’. I vividly remember the quite new awareness that came to me on that occasion. I had spontaneously come to realize, for the first time ever, that I had really hurt my father. Also, for the first time that I know of, I had felt real concern. This I think was a moment when I began to discover a capacity for concern, of which Winnicott (1963) also writes.

However, all did not continue well. I remember going downstairs with what felt like a precious gift. I was feeling sorry of my own accord, and I went to say ‘sorry’ to my father for hurting him, to say this and really to mean it. Of course my parents could not have known the transformation that had occurred within me while I was left alone in my room. Instead, as usually happened at such times, I was greeted by my mother saying to me, ‘Now, say “sorry” to your father.’³ I can remember feeling completely devastated. The gift I had found in my heart to say felt entirely ruined. I could not say the ‘sorry’ being demanded of me as it was not at all the same thing as the apology that I had in my mind. So, to comply with that parental demand (understandable though it was) would, it seemed, have been to betray the gift I had come to offer. I know that my gift was not given, at least not then.

In later life I came to see that the crisis for me at that moment had to do with finding a level of true self, which was of a quite different order to anything that went with compliance or with good behaviour that was not necessarily felt.

I think that my subsequent sense of this vital difference, between compliant behaviour and that which flows from the inner/true/ core self, originated from this moment in my life. It is also the essence of what we encounter in our clinical work, and this is so much more real to the patient than any surface adaptation or compliance would be. Some patients need us to be acutely aware of this, not only in their own lives but also within the analytic relationship.

Even though it felt devastating to me that the gift of my first true ‘sorry’ had not been communicated or recognized, that moment has continued to serve me well over the years. Some of my patients may indirectly have come to benefit from it also. I have since come to realize how natural it is that I have so often been helped by Winnicott's writing. I repeatedly felt a relief in finding someone who had been where I had been, who also offered an understanding that was experience-near and so often relevant to key experiences of my own.

Being believed in

Having been a difficult child at home, it was not surprising that I was also difficult when I went to a boarding school. Towards the end of my time there (aged 13) I was summoned, as so often before, to the headmaster's study. He was a most unusual man, combining a firm discipline with an unmistakable affection for the boys, and they loved him in return. But, despite my love and respect for this headmaster, I had remained incorrigible. So once again I was expecting more ‘telling of’ or more punishment for whatever my latest misdeeds had been. Instead, the headmaster gave me a short lecture. He said to me:

I have news for you. All the staff have now given up on you. Everything has been tried and nothing has worked. At least, everything has been tried except for one thing. No one has thought to put you in a position of responsibility because no one has seen you as capable of being responsible. So I am going to take a risk with you. I am going to give you the responsibility of being a school prefect. Please don't let me down.

I remember being totally amazed. No one had ever seen me as having even the least potential for being responsible. I had been seen as ‘difficult’ or ‘bad’, a reputation I had evidently deserved, and I had continued to live up to that view of me. But now, for the first time, someone was seeing me as capable of being different. I then determined I would do whatever I could to live up to the headmaster's trust in me.

Here was a profoundly new experience. Here was an acknowledgement of my potential to be different, and the affirmation that went with this had always been lacking until then. It was also very different from what I had experienced from others. So it is not surprising that I later came to be drawn towards Alexander's notion of corrective emotional experience⁴ That headmaster's trust in me had clearly been ‘corrective’. It had also been a key emotional experience. Maybe, I thought, this was what helped to bring about change in people.

For a while I began to believe that it was through caring for and believing in people, such as clients on probation and patients in psychotherapy, that they could begin to experience themselves differently and so begin to live their lives differently. However true that may be, it took me a long time before I came to realize that there was something very important missing in this view.

An experience of discontinuity and the deep unconscious

One particular experience stands out as having given me a striking awareness of the unconscious at work. From that time I have remained most impressed by this deep part of the mind, which can operate so immediately and yet so entirely beyond our ken.

When I was first beginning to be interested in psychoanalysis, I had gone to a concert given by Rostropovich, at which he was playing the Dvorak cello concerto. When I got to my seat I found I was sitting in the second row from the front and immediately opposite the soloist. There was almost no one else between the soloist and me, allowing me to feel as if the concerto was being played just for me.

I don't remember having heard this concerto before. Then, in this most intimate setting (being oblivious of anyone else), I felt lifted to a new level of existence. Not knowing the concerto, the last movement came as a total surprise. Just when it seemed to be coming to an end, the cello was joined by a solo violin and together the two instruments began to soar into yet a further realm of the music. It was a completely unique experience for me. I was also especially glad I had gone alone to this concert, as I felt I could not have borne the shock of having to talk afterwards. I needed to remain undisturbed in this newly revealed world that lay so far beyond words.

I really needed to go for a long walk by myself after that concert, to take in the experience and to savour it, and to come down to earth very slowly. Unfortunately, I had promised I would go on to a party. There I came down to earth with a bump, with Bob Dylan music being played so loudly that no one could communicate with anyone. It was a shocking anticlimax.

It was not until a few weeks later that I had occasion to realize some of what that break in continuity had meant to me. I had been watching the television by myself, a programme about childcare in what was then Yugoslavia. We were being shown how mothers in that country were encouraged to go out to work while their babies or young children were looked after in nurseries. It was said to be more efficient than having only one or two children being looked after by each mother. With this regime there could be quite a number of children looked after by a single nurse, and the mothers released to go out to work. We were then shown a scene in which a one-year-old child, who had become attached to the first-year nurse, was being handed over to a new nurse who would look after the child for the following year. The child was turning back to the nurse who was known to him, still trying to cling to her.

At this moment some background music was introduced. I heard only the first four notes and suddenly I found myself in tears and crying more profoundly than I could ever remember. This crying seemed to come from a place so deep inside myself that the whole of me was wracked with pain. I thought I was going mad. Then, very gradually, I began to notice the music again. It was a cello playing with an orchestra, and it was a slow movement that seemed familiar, but I could not place it. Then it dawned on me that it might be from the Dvorak cello concerto. I had just bought a record of this but I had not yet played it. So when I felt sufficiently recovered I put on the slow movement and there were the four notes that I had heard immediately before my crying, the first notes of the slow movement.

For some years I regarded this as an extraordinary example of the timelessness of the unconscious and the immediacy with which the unconscious can remember and make connections. Only four notes had connected me with the concert in which I had felt so uplifted; notes I had heard played only once before. I thought my crying had to do with the disruption of that experience being so suddenly broken into by such different music at the party.

Years later, when I was eventually in analysis, I began to see this sequence differently. My analyst had simply asked me: ‘What was the programme about?’ I had then told him that it had b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Development
• Part 2 Reflections
• Bibliography
• Index