Forms of Feeling

The Heart of Psychotherapy

Robert F. Hobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135854478
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

First published in 1985. This book is aimed at readers who wish to learn how to engage in psychotherapy: for beginners, for experienced practitioners, for disciplined research workers, as for the author, the word 'psychotherapy' has a very broad meaning. The author describes this as an 'autobiography': the development of ideas, attitudes, and meanings which have arisen and been transformed through joy, sorrow, chaos, and relative tranquillity in a journey of forty years through the world of academic psychiatry, of analytical psychotherapy, of scientific research, and of life in a therapeutic community. To a large extent this book is an expression of individual experience.

BOOK • I •

THE TRUE VOICE OF FEELING

‘All real living is meeting’

(Martin Buber, I and Thou)

‘WHAT COMES FROM THE HEART THAT ALONE GOES TO THE HEART’ (S.T. Coleridge, ‘Essays on the Principles of Method’ The Friend)

• 1 •
TWO MEETINGS

Thirty-three years ago, I met Sam. I was young and inexperienced. An expensive medical training and a year or two in general medicine and surgical practice had taught me a great deal about the brain, lungs, and kidneys, with a little about academic psychology and the diagnosis of mental illness. But it was Sam who began my education in psychotherapy.

I classified him, with a certain satisfaction, as a case of ‘behaviour disorder in an introverted adolescent’, but this gratification was short lived. As time went by, I found myself forced out of the secure haven of the formulated phrase and compelled to experience the fear and joy of a unique personal relationship.

My conversation with Sam, over a period of months, contained in embryo the central principles of a method of psychotherapy which is the subject of this book.

A PEARL OF GREAT PRICE

Sam was fourteen when he was referred for treatment because of disturbed behaviour at home and at school. Although previously he had been a dutiful and obedient son to his widowed mother, in the last year he had become aggressive and wayward. He wandered alone all night and flew into violent rages with his mother, from whom he stole money to buy cigarettes. At school, he had acquired a reputation for surly, uncooperative behaviour. He often played truant, would do no work, and had been caught passing round papers on which lewd stories were written in the coarsest possible language. Punishment and moral exhortation had no effect and psychiatric help was sought by his mother and the education authority after an episode of thieving at school.

An only child, Sam was seven when his father died and he was brought up by his hard-working, conscientious, liberal-minded mother, whose main concern was to give Sam ‘a really good start in life’. He had always been shy and rather solitary but there had been no serious problems before the apparently inexplicable onset of his behaviour disorder.

Sam sat rigidly in his chair and glowered at me – a picture of dumb insolence. Determined to play the part of a sympathetic adult, I set about showing an interest in his life. I tried to explore his attitudes to his teachers, schoolmates, and mother. I encouraged him to talk about what I supposed to be his interests – films, games, and girls. I even asked him if he had any dreams and, with the help of a textbook, tried some interpretations of unconscious fears. All he gave me was a surly frown and the very occasional favour of a short, grudging answer.

He was compelled to come and I was compelled to see him. So it went on week after week, until I felt that I could stand it no longer. I do not suppose I would have persisted if I had not seen hints of an unhappy, frightened, lonely boy behind the sulky, aggressive mask.

It was a glorious summer in 1947 – perfect for cricket. One day, just before seeing Sam, I had been listening to a radio commentary on the Test Match at Lords where England was playing South Africa. I forget the details now, but the position was exciting and I was full of it when Sam came in. For some minutes I spontaneously and unreservedly poured out my opinions and feelings about the state of the game – an irresponsible piece of behaviour. Then I asked him what he thought about the state of play and at that moment – this is the vital point – I really needed a response.

Sam smiled. For the first time. Then we began to talk together. Together. I felt some months later that there was a vital step, a turning-point, when I, as a person, valued what Sam gave. He felt that he had something good to give.

During the next few weeks there was a complete change in the atmosphere of our interviews. I forgot about divining Sam's complexes, about plumbing the depths of his guilt, or probing into his sexual fantasies. We talked cricket. Devotees do not talk about cricket. They do not ‘describe’. They ‘show’, they ‘present’, they ‘disclose’. I demon strated my classic hook and he expressed his bodily joy in fast bowling. It was very much a case of give and take. Now, I thoroughly enjoyed our sessions and Sam said that he looked forward to his visits.

Then, one day, he came in wearing a strange expression and sat down slowly without his usual ‘Hello’. He was not interested in the county championship results or the selection of the Test team. We sat in silence. It was a very different sort of silence from the tense closed-upness of the first few weeks. Neither of us seemed either to fight against, or to withdraw into it; we sat in it each alone and yet together.

‘I had a dream the other night’, he said

He had told me before about a few dreams, in a casual way, but now he spoke with a strange intensity, akin to awe.

‘I was by a dark pool. It was filthy and there were all sorts of horrible monsters in it. I was scared but I dived in and at the bottom was a great big oyster and in it a terrific pearl. I got it and swam up again.’

I felt myself caught up in mystery, in a sense of otherness. At the time, my few words seemed very lame, but I was right to reply in the present tense.

‘That's good. Brave, too. You've got it, though, and pearls are pretty valuable.’

We said nothing more about the dream, then, but this interview was followed by another important step. Sam began to express his feelings and thoughts, his hopes and fears, and I was able to use my book knowledge in formulating his problems. He wanted to leave school as soon as possible, against his mother's wishes. He hated himself for becoming violently angry when she treated him as a child, and yet, at times, he feared that she did not really love him and he was terrified by the thought of leaving her.

On several occasions he wept with grief and rage about the loss of his father, though when it happened, he had been a ‘good boy’ and ‘kept a stiff upper lip’. As might be expected, for some months he experienced me as a wonderful father but, as his confidence grew he became able to be critical and angry and I became nearer life-size. Hesitantly, he talked about masturbation and about sexual and violent fantasies which he felt to be dangerous and wicked (the monsters in the pool). He warily let me know about feelings that he called ‘silly and soppy’ – his romantic love for a girl, and his attempts to write poetry.

In discussing these ideas, wishes, and impulses, and finding that I still accepted and liked him, he lost much of his hate for himself. He came to see that, hidden in these ‘bad’ feelings, were positive values which intimated possibilities of rewarding achievements in his developing sexuality and independence. He aspired to leave the world of childhood and become an adult. It was possible for him to experiment in thought and action and test his fantasies against external reality.

He emerged from isolated loneliness.

Becoming more able to love himself he was able to discover what he felt to be a new ‘self’, and a new attitude to his home and school life. There were marked changes in his activities with a new orientation to his future, to his social milieu and, like many adolescents, he struggled to make sense of the cosmos.

Only once did Sam refer to the dream. It was many months later.

‘It's queer about that pearl. I suppose it's me in a sort of way.’

‘Mm,’ I responded, wondering about ‘me’ and ‘myself’ and what Wordsworth meant by:

‘The calm existence that is mine when I/Am worthy of myself!’ ¹

Then (as now) I found in Wordsworth and other poets so much that was absent from academic and dynamic psychology. Today, when I am asked by beginners in psychotherapy what they should read first, I often reply ‘The Bible and Shakespeare’.

Adolescence is the phase of development from a state of childhood dependence to one of adult autonomy. It is one stage in growth from infancy to old age: unfolding potentialities are realized in a process of becoming a unique person in relation to the demands and opportunities of the outer world of people and things. Sam's personal growth was inhibited by fear and conflict.

The adolescent is in a state of conflict. On the one hand he wishes to maintain the secure state of a protected child, and on the other he aspires to an independent life in an adult world. He is faced with a problem. For Sam, the problem was magnified by the extremely strong bond with his ‘good’ protective mother and the absence of a father who could serve as a model. It was further complicated by guilt. Partly because of pressure of a social stereotype (the ‘brave boy’) and partly owing to disturbing, but largely unrecognized, anger associated with the loss, Sam had not adequately mourned his father's death. Anger added to his unadmitted resentment of being imprisoned by his mother, whom he loved deeply. He was bewildered by his sudden outbursts of aggression, together with feelings of guilt which were inextricably mixed with, and augmented by, sexual stirrings at puberty. There were hints of sexual desires which were bound up with his devotion to his mother (who in some ways treated him like a husband) but we did not explore these disturbing fantasies in detail.

Sam hated himself and defiantly set out to prove how bad he was – one way of striving for independence. His minor delinquencies only served to increase his sense of guilt, and his view of himself was reinforced by teachers and other worthy citizens. He could not trust or like himself, nor trust others to respect and value him. Perhaps most important of all, he felt that he had nothing valuable to give. He became more and more lonely and alienated.

The above schematic and somewhat naive formulation omits many complexities. Indeed, the themes were never spelled out in detail with Sam. The important process was not ‘talking about’ the problems but an enactment of them with a testing out of solutions within a conversation of mutual trust. It was not so much an elucidation of the causes of the problems, but rather a matter of discovering conditions in which personal growth could occur.

The vital factor was the mutual creation and expansion of a common ‘feeling-language’. The meaning of ‘feeling’ (elaborated throughout this book) is intimated by the vital significance of cricket for Sam and for me – alone and together. In a moving cricket conversation, our immediate experience was shared and shaped in verbal and non-verbal symbols of a language which emerged between us. It was not merely a matter of talking about events. It was a dialogue, a meeting, a talking-with in mutual trust – a personal conversation. A simultaneous giving and receiving. A finding and being found.

We discovered cricket by luck – or by grace. But the topic was not the important thing. With another therapist the content might well have been different. A feeling-language is constantly created, modified, and endowed with value, within a unique developing relationship. It involves processes which we habitually separate as ‘thinking’, ‘emotion’, and ‘action’. Such watertight compartments are inappropriate to an experience which is apprehended as a ‘whole’; an experience that is created in the ‘space’ between persons.

It might be suggested that the cricket talk was merely a matter of establishing a preliminary ‘rapport’ – a word that trips easily from the tongue but covers a world of ignorance. In psychotherapy the what (the content) is of vastly less importance than the how (the manner of discovering, exploring in, and mutually developing a feeling-language). Learning how to engage in a personal conversation: that is the heart of psychotherapy.

I do not suggest that the content (the material) of a conversation is of no importance. That would be absurd. I am saying that in order to explore Sam's problems we had to learn to understand each other, to use many kinds of language, many universes of discourse which were different and yet related. The language of day-to-day practicalities is not that of cricket which, again, is not that of the dream and of its parallels in widespread myths and folktales.

I have emphasized the importance of mutuali...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Book I The True Voice of Feeling
• Book II The Minute Particulars
• Book III The Heart Of A Psychotherapist
• Notes
• A Note on Sources, References, and Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index