Critical Existential-Analytic Psychotherapy

Some Implications for Practices, Theories and Research

Del Loewenthal, Del Loewenthal

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000371093
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Psicoterapia

This book is an introduction to critical existential-analytic psychotherapy. It has been written as a response to what is considered to be a crisis point in what is currently taken as psychotherapeutic knowledge. A focus point is the relentless move in psychotherapy and psychotherapy trainings towards evidence-based practice. It is suggested that such developments can be usefully challenged if we are to consider:

• Can startingwith theory be a form of violence?

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• Should a primacy be given to practice?

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• Doesreliance on empirical research mean we startfrom the wrong place?

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From a critical existential-analytic psychotherapeutic perspective, the answer to all three of these questions is 'yes'. This perspective, therefore, is fundamentally different from what psychological therapists are increasingly purporting to do, and further challenges other current notions from diagnosis and treatment to dominant discourses in psychology.

The aim of this book is to consider some ways in which the psychological therapies might be able to move away from the crisis mainly caused by what is currently wrongly beingunderstoodin terms of 'evidence-based practice' as the nature of psychotherapeutic knowledge. Instead, it is proposed that primacy be given to: practice, considering theories having implications rather than applications, and privileging thoughtfulness with notions of research being seen more as cultural practices.

This book is based on a special issue of the European Journal of Psychotherapy& Counselling.

Looking like a foreigner: Foreignness, conformity and compliance in psychoanalysis

Onel Brooks

ABSTRACT

This paper suggests that to approach another person confident that we are in possession of ‘universally applicable’ concepts and ideas is to begin in the wrong place both with that person and our ideas. It is to begin as someone who is well armed, well trained and perhaps too focused on succeeding by finding what she is looking for. Looking carefully at the particular, looking like a foreigner who has never seen what is before her is contrasted with looking like someone who is concerned with conquest and domination. In particular, this paper takes a sceptical view of the claim or assumption that psychoanalysis is ‘universally applicable’ and that a training in psychoanalysis prepares a practitioner to engage thoughtfully and honestly with race and culture. It argues that although psychoanalysis tends to treat race and culture as if they are marginal and optional, in its theorising, its practice and history psychoanalysis betrays the fact that race, culture and the treatment of what is regarded as foreign are central and fundamental to it.

Introduction

Thirty years ago it was common practice to run psychoanalytic trainings, giving very little consideration to race, culture, class, history and the socio-political context in which we work. Has this changed? Now, after four or five years on a more orthodox psychoanalytic training, some of the trainees and those charged with teaching them may, yielding to a lurking disquiet, seek to appease a sense of something being amiss by tacking on a few seminars about race, and or tellingly ‘difference’ (tellingly because this seems to imply that the training is about sameness) and features of the socio-political context on to the end of what it presents as the really important matter, the transmission of a body of knowledge or thinking called psychoanalysis.

Assumptions and convictions about the universal applicability of psychoanalytic concepts, help to keep this practice plausible and in place. For even if psychoanalysis is not conceived and spoken about as the science of the mind, more orthodox versions of psychoanalysis tend to treat it as a neutral perspective, uncontaminated by race, culture and politics, and these latter matters as peripheral and optional to it. Psychoanalysis, on such an account, finally shows us how all human minds work, and as such is able to tell us all about race and racism too. This seems to privilege psychoanalysis, assuming that it is born standing up and standing back somewhere neutral and clear-sighted, and as such is uncontaminated by issues such as race, culture, history and the socio-political context. This uncontaminated immaculate conception version of what psychoanalysis is, is intimately related to the claim, assumption or conviction that in transmitting and practising psychoanalysis, we can create and inhabit spaces where such considerations are not really so important, because we are concerned with what is ‘deeper’ than socio-political and historical matters, and because psychoanalysis is ‘deeper’, those trained in it, being experts on the psyche or ‘internal world’, are automatically well placed to understand and deal sensitively with most issues, including those that are to do with race, culture and difference generally.

A few comments about what this paper is not may help to clarify what it sets out to be. It may be argued that it is surely a mistake to present contemporary courses in psychoanalysis and contemporary practitioners as having much to do with notions of being in possession of ‘the science of the mind’. Fifty or even thirty years ago, yes, but now? And, the argument against this paper might continue, psychoanalysis is not one but many: some schools definitely do not think of themselves in this way. Furthermore, we might know individual psychoanalytic practitioners who do not have this attitude to what they are doing. The claim that this current paper is making is not that this self-conception is often or ever articulated, but that in so far as psychoanalysis and any form of psychotherapy is thought of as the application of a body of knowledge to all people at all times in all places, and without careful attention to time, place and the particularities of the people involved, including class, race, culture, gender, it is trading on, exploiting, making thoughtful or thoughtless use of the cultural trope of the scientist or the expert (who is closely related to the scientist). Psychoanalysis, other forms of psychotherapy, literature, film, and life in general might teach us that what people say is one thing, but it is wise to also pay attention to what they do. It is important to keep it in mind that the acrimonious ‘controversial discussions’, touched on below, which took place in the 1940 were conducted in ‘scientific meetings’ and that from London to New York to San Francisco, New England and Toronto, psychoanalytic organisations still refer to their meetings as ‘scientific meetings’.

There is a vast literature of thoughtful engagement with psychoanalysis, drawing on philosophy, commenting on the schisms and power plays in psychoanalysis, and on its failures when it comes to gender, race, class. This paper would be impossibly longer if it tried to say something about thoughtful and political engagement with psychoanalysis both in Britain and the United States, including ‘the interpersonalists’, ‘the relational school’ and ‘turn’, R D Laing, the Philadelphia Association, anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry, Jaffa Kareem, Roland Littlewood and the work of the Women’s Therapy Centre in London (See Cushman, 2015; Lowe, 2013; Orbach, 2007; Stern & Hirsch, 2017) These individuals and organisations have had a profound influence on the author of this paper. However, the argument being made here is that after all this, this practicing, writing and speaking, it is still the case that there are courses in psychoanalysis which tack on a seminar or two about ‘race’ or ‘difference’ onto itself, as if what is essential to psychoanalysis has little or nothing to do with race, difference, and the political context in which we live and practice.

This paper, then, is more lament than a review of the literature. For, in spite of this body of literature, there is still an inveterate belief in psychoanalysis as something universal, like a science, something that in some ways floats freely from culture.

Inspiration or echoes for this paper might be found in Derrida and Duformentalle (2000), Kristeva (1991), Levinas (1969), and Levinas & Kearney (1984), as well as in the work of Adam Phillips, and Bracken and Thomas (2005). This paper agrees with Adam Phillips comment that we might be disinclined ‘to believe that because a person has done a recognized or legitimated official training they are then qualified to claim something more than that they have done the training (doing something properly is a way of not doing it differently)’ (Phillips, 1997, p. xiv). Courses are good at getting people to speak or even believe in a particular language game, in seeing things in the ways that the celebrated others see things, in keeping people seeing in the same way. On the other hand, psychoanalysis, when it is not a matter of political positioning -presenting itself as closer to medicine or ‘science’- when it is not insisting on its superiority to other ways of thinking, when it is not a champion of conformity, an implicit or explicit system for distinguishing between ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’, it might be a way of reminding us that in spite of our desire to present ourselves as consistent with ourselves, as consistent with the culturally dominant conception of what it is to be a good person, to cast ourselves as commensurate with the other people around us (or maybe only the important ones), psychoanalysis might be part of a reminder that and of how we are at odds with ourselves, with the people around us, an invitation to our foreigness (Phillips 1997: xv). The contrast here is between seeing psychoanalysis as doing and seeing in the same authorised way, in order to conform, pass the training, be recognised as belonging, as a bona fide citizen of the state referred to as ‘psychoanalysis’, and on the other hand, the claim that what is of most value in psychoanalysis is a welcome to, a celebration of foreigners, and encouraging us to look like foreigners.

What follows is an attempt to provoke us to think more about the practice of tacking on a seminar or two about race and culture or ‘difference’ onto the supposedly foundational and universally valid body of knowledge called ‘psychoanalysis’. The paper argues that notions of race and culture are often present but evaded, neglected and obscured in psychoanalysis, and that this sort of neglect, evasion and not seeing is tied up with notions about who and what belongs where, who is in charge of psychoanalysis and, therefore, the right way to think. Looking like a foreigner, then, is related to the ability to look at psychoanalysis like a foreigner, which is the very thing that success on most trainings must threaten, as trainings offers us a way of looking like one of us, an insider, as opposed to one of them, an outsider. According to this line of thinking, then, training in psychoanalysis, especially versions which tempt us to universalise and think of ourselves as ‘applying’ psychoanalysis, is excellent for helping to destroy our capacity to do what may be of most value in psychoanalysis: our ability to provide welcome to what is strange, foreign and potentially unsettling in ourselves and others, what we have never heard or thought of.

Conquests and compromises

‘I am not at all a man of science, not an observer, not an experimenter, not a thinker. I am by temperament nothing but a conquistador’ (Szasz, 2006, p. 33). This is what Freud, a man who had to flee from the Nazis, told his friend Wilhelm Fliess. It is possible perhaps to dismiss this, but Freud himself is one of our teachers when it comes to helping us to pay attention and think about what is in front of us, to be less dismissive. If Freud likens himself to the Spanish and Portuguese explorer-soldiers, professional warriors who conquered much of the world for Spain and Portugal during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, might we not wonder whether psychoanalysis might be regarded as a form of conquest, domination? We do not have to say that this is what psychoanalysis always is. This would be a generalisation rather than the acknowledgement of a possibility, tendency or temptation. Why would we want to generalise from one of Freud’s comments and pronounce something about all psychoanalysis at all times in all situations? As well as the notion of conquest, dominating and overpowering, this remark of Freud’s might remind us of race and culture, of how Europe has plundered, massacred, enslaved and dominated the foreign others it has encountered. This might lead us to wonder whether the way we treat the foreign others is related to how we treat the foreigners that we might glimpse or meet in ourselves.

Writing to Edward Glover in 1940 about the fierce ideological battle between Mrs Klein and Miss Freud, which later became ‘the controversial discussions’ James Strachey states that ‘if it comes to a showdown – I’m very strongly in favour of compromise at all cost’ (Rayner, 1994, p. 18). By 1940 it was known that the Nazi regime was murdering people it considered to be subhuman, due to ethnicity, race, sexuality, as well as other undesirable outsiders, such as its political opponents and those regarded as ‘mentally ill’. This paper is concerned with foreignness, with seeing someone or something as foreign, and with looking like a foreigner. It is difficult not to think about ‘compromise at all cost’ in this context. How can Strachey be so uncompromising about compromising? Is it an extreme position to be uncompromisingly compromising? Is compromising always a good thing, and do we not have to consider what compromising might cost us, or what we compromise by being so willing to compromise? I fear that in the face of the two extremes represented in his letter by Mrs Klein and Miss Freud, Strachey’s ‘compromise at all cost’ might be regarded as another extreme position: that in the face of dogma, he has taken a dogmatic position about compromising.

Strachey continues

These attitudes on both sides are of course purely religious and the very antithesis of science. They are also (on both sides) infused by, I believe, a desire to dominate the situation and in particular the future – which is why both sides lay so much stress on the training of candidates. Actually, of course, it’s megalomanic mirage to suppose that you can control the opinion of the people you analyse beyond a certain limited point. But in any case it ought naturally to be the aim of a training analysis to put the trainee into a position to arrive at his own decisions upon moot points – not to stuff him with your own private dogma. (Rayner, 1994, p. 18)

These comments and observations may lead us to other comments and observations, beginning with the remark that both religion and science might be said to be fond of claiming ‘universal application’ or applicability, and that this has been, at times at least, a first step in demanding that others comply, do as we do, believe as we believe. To say something like this is not to go along with Strachey’s attempt to contrast religion and science in this way: it is to say that religion and science are in some ways not so foreign to each other. Second, psychoanalysis is presented here as at least sometimes yielding to temptations to dominate and control the views of others, passing on shared and private dogma whilst claiming to be engaged in something ‘scientific’. Such comments and observations may lead us to wonder how we might approach psychoanalysis so that it is not a matter of passing on shared or private dogma, constructing and bequeathing a set of truths about all human beings in all times and all places, discrediting and excommunicating those who do not comply with our version of what psychoanalysis is.

To continue with Strachey’s letter, he writes, ‘Why should these wretched fascists and (bloody foreigners) communists invade our peaceful compromising land?’ (Rayner, 1994, p. 18). My worry is that the image of the ‘wretched fascists and (bloody foreigners) communists invading our peaceful’, idyllic, democratic and ‘compromising land’ is part of the problem. It is as if Britain did not have an empire, as if peaceful, idyllic, democratic, compromising and rather charming is not only one side of the story.

It is not just that at the time of Strachey’s writing these words there is a war on and the people he refers to have fled from fascists threats to their lives for being ‘bloody foreigners’ no matter how long they have lived in Germany. It is not just that this idyllic picture of our democratic compromising land does seem to be a little idealised, and what you see if you do not look like a foreigner. For instance, Rayner tells us that ‘Glover, one of the main protagonists in the quarrel’ -hardly a refugee from Nazi Germany- ‘was disliked for his high-handed and anti-democratic running of the Society’. Ernest Jones had created the Society in 1920 and then ran it ‘autocratically’ for twenty-seven years. This seems to be part of the ‘peaceful compromising land’ the ‘bloody foreigners’ threaten by their presence. ‘Compromise at any cost’ seems to have much to do with keeping things the way we are used to them, keeping them familiar. Rayner writes, ‘Why this was tolerated by the membership for so long is an interesting question’ (Rayner, 1994, p. 19). Indeed! Practitioners and trainees familiar with psychoanalysis easily ask themselves about compliance and conformity when it comes to institutions, organisations and families. We should not stop short of asking a similar question about psychoanalysis. Is there something about psychoanalytic trainings, authority and orthodoxy that inclines those who have undergone such trainings to fear rocking the boat and being seen as foreigners when it comes to psychoanalysis? Does this help us to understand why for twenty-seven years psychoanalysts put up with, went along with autocratic rule? There are often anxieties that change, doing things differently, including those who are usually excluded, will lead to chaos, anarchy, panic. Often it is easy to increase our anxieties about such matters and manipulate us. It is not clear that being trained in psychoanalysis significantly addresses such anxieties, provokes thoughtfulness, or makes us less vulnerable to manipulation and mystification about such matters.

And we need to state the obvious sometimes: there could be no psycho-analytic society without the people referred to in this letter as ‘wretched fascists and (bloody foreigners)’.

Modernism and universal application

To insist on seeing psychoanalysis as having ‘universal application’, as the science of the mind, may be seen as part of and thus a way of continuing the modernist project: the attitude and conviction that the West is naturally superior because it has made use of reason to sweep away superstition, custom and empty stupidity that many cultures and peoples are still caught up in (West, 1996, pp. 7–16). But can modernism be considered as neutral about race and culture? Clearly it knows too much about who is superior to whom and, therefore should control and dominate. Writing about modernism, Bracken and Thomas state, ‘Proponents of this idea maintained that all the problems of our lives on this planet would ultimately yield to scientific investigation and to the application of one sort of technology or another’ (Bracken & Thomas, 2005, p. 6). Modernism then looks to science and technology as the way to salvation for all our human ills. A modernist way of thinking about psychoanalysis is to see it as a technology that may save us. Those who are critical of modernist ways of approaching psychoanalysis are suspected of being willfully ignorant, stupid or perverse. That is, they are outside of and foreign to the place we occupy: we who are reasonable.

However, it is also possible to take another view of what psychoanalysis is and might be able to help us with, a view that is more questioning and takes less for granted, that is more curious and attentive to our hopes and aspirations for psychoanalysis. It might help us to ask about our attitudes and convictions when it comes to psychoanalysis, what our insisting might be about, what this fixation on science and technology might be doing to us, as well as preventing us from doing. Such a view of psychoanalysis may be part of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Looking like a foreigner: Foreignness, conformity and compliance in psychoanalysis
• 2 Language as Gesture in Merleau-Ponty: Some implications for method in therapeutic practice and research
• 3 The private life of meaning - some implications for psychotherapy and psychotherapeutic research
• 4 Finding my voice: Telling stories with heuristic self-search inquiry
• 5 ‘When working in a youth service, how do therapists experience humour with their clients?’
• 6 What gets in the way of working with clients who have been sexually abused? Heuristic inquiry
• 7 Maculate conceptions
• 8 The pictures you paint in the stories you tell, a response
• 9 Reflections on the tensions between openness and method in experientially oriented research and psychotherapy
• 10 On the very idea of post-existentialism
• Index