Allegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervision

Windows, Landscapes, and Questions for the Traveler

Mark A. Kunkel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319959276
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychotherapeutische Beratung

This book explores the practice of psychotherapy, teaching, and supervision via allegory, metaphor, and myth. Based upon the author's own extensive teaching and practice, Mark Kunkel takes the reader through a series of vignettes that are windows not only into reality, but also into the soul. The author's approach reflects his vocational commitment to an integration of conceptualization, affective involvement, and application. These allegories, parables, and myths serve to clarify and open important issues in teaching, psychotherapeutic, and clinical supervisory settings, and are intended to be allies in individual study and group discussion alike.

© The Author(s) 2018

Mark A. KunkelAllegories for Psychotherapy, Teaching, and Supervisionhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95927-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. An Abundance of Sweet

Mark A. Kunkel¹

(1)

Department of Psychology, University of West Georgia, Carrollton, GA, USA

Mark A. Kunkel

End Abstract

Window

As a child of the 1960s, I grew up with vivid memories of characters flickering across the grainy screen of our black and white console television. Among many other favorites was the luminous and deceptively sophisticated comedy of Lucille Ball in her lampooning of power and patriarchy and parody of the 1960s suburban housewifery. We all loved Lucy. And it turned out that Lucy was the sort of comedian who was also a teacher. In her evocation of laughter, she provoked thoughtfulness and self-reflection in the way that I hope to do through these writings. She framed her only apparently comedic routines as something that could be seen as a funny picture, or glimpsed as an interesting mirror, or gazed through more profoundly as a window opening on the wide expanse of that element of life itself. It is one such routine that I would like to frame as the allegorical window for this chapter.

Lucy and her best friend Ethel were somewhat resentful of having to depend on their husbands’ doling out of allowances and pin money. So they determined that they would secure employment of their own, to stake out self-reliance and vocational worth. As I remember from my youth, a memory revisited occasionally thanks to YouTube, this job of theirs was on the wrapping line of a chocolate factory (Fig. 1.1). We join them in this routine: seriously tragic and eminently comedic. They stand in front of a conveyor belt gowned, gloved, and hatted, and charged with the task of wrapping candies in wax paper. If memory serves they had failed previously in more sophisticated employment elsewhere in the factory, and thus it was that this was their last chance, here on the wrapping line. Lucy and Ethel are first hectored by a stern manager who lets them know that their job is to wrap each one of these freshly made candies in wax paper, to be boxed later by workers. If they let any candies go by unwrapped, however, they stand at the peril of termination and the dissipation of their last chance at autonomy and self-reliance. They understand the instructions.

Fig. 1.1

Lucy and Ethel in the chocolate factory (Image in the public domain)

The manager leaves and the conveyor belt begins. We see Lucy and her friend Ethel casually and comfortably performing their vocational task, chatting happily even as the belt increases its speed incrementally. Still, they manage to keep up with wrapping the parade of chocolates and reassure each other that finally they have found their sweet niche. And then the distant voice of the manager is heard from the next room, yelling “OK! Start the belt boys!” At this indication the parading candies accelerate and escalate beyond all apparent human ability to contain and wrap them. Lucy and Ethel, desperate to keep their job and their newfound independent, self-reliant dignity, escalate and accelerate their efforts accordingly. They attempt frantically to wrap each cascading piece of chocolate in its paper but, despairing in their ability to do so, they begin to remove some chocolates from the belt. First, they are frantically gobbled. Then, they are tucked surreptitiously past the censorship of the 1960s into the front of the factory uniforms, and ultimately under each hat. With bulging cheeks, wide eyes, and lumpy clothing, Lucy and Ethel meet again the eyes of this supervisor as she comes in again to verify that they have not let any of the chocolates go by unwrapped. They nod with bulging cheeks and vaguely chocolaty mouths in agreement and assert anew their ability to do their work. Then we see the manager exiting the room yet again, and we hear her yell, “OK! Full speed ahead!” at which point the camera fades onto our vocational sisters’ frantic despair of ever being able to do what the work requires.

There are many features of this story that lend themselves allegorically to my project of opening up unto the work of supervision and psychotherapy and teaching. I would like to address some of these in sequence, acknowledging at the outset that they are of course enfolded and wrapped up with one another. And there is something else at play here around my motives in choosing this allegory. It is certainly a story that has spoken and amplified vocational questions for me over the years, and it opens here at 61 differently than it might have at 6, or 16, or 46. I have spent my time at that belt, and I have wrapped and gobbled and dropped my fair share of chocolates. But I claim sanctuary and even a bit of exoneration in having persevered, I suppose.

The first allegorical lesson of this story is that our work is sweet. When I pause to consider the procession of students and patients and supervision companions that have lingered and moved before me, I am nothing short of amazed. In my 31 years, I have taught many thousands of students in undergraduate psychology. I have supervised several dozen dissertations and yet more Master’s theses to joyous completion. And I have accompanied many erstwhile beginning therapists in their work of turning fear into humility, and arrogance into confidence. I have been blessed, and that is precisely the word, to save some lives and revive some others, in the mystery of psychotherapy. And almost without exception, my dilemma has been a relationship to an overabundance of sweet.

I know, there have been denizens of that conveyor that have been only apparently sweet, that when I brought them to my hand and heart seemed cloying in their stickiness, or saccharine in their sweetness, or even maybe bitter in their inward essence. There have been student chocolates that even were the belt to be less insistent and speedy in its velocity, would have been almost too elusive or prickly or fragile to pick up, let alone to enfold. And there have been patients and supervision companions who might have seemed at the beginning full and precious in their rich depths, but who turned out to be crystallized or treacly or molten or even almost spoiled. But the great majority of those I have accompanied in therapy rooms and classrooms and supervision rooms have been thickly and wonderfully human. They have brought to my vocational gladness a deep need that has seemed ever more sweet and nourishing and wonderful and precious, here over the years. It is already something, I think, to stand in that vocational conveyor space and to appreciate it as this kind of dilemma, the kind that has to do with too much sweet. What a privilege it is.

Our students are not drops of excrement. Nor are our patients mere sticky, amorphous masses. And our supervision companions are not for the most part difficult, let alone noxious. So, I would like to take this occasion to speak unequivocally my gratitude to those who have passed sweetly into my little earnest workplace these last many, many, years. I am reminded here on this afternoon on this sticky Georgia sidewalk that I am grateful. I am blessed.

A second allegorical landscape opens onto the nature of vocation. It is not lost on me, and it was not lost on me even as a very youthful viewer of Lucy and Ethel’s aspiration, that frequently we encounter ourselves in careers that do not correspond to our vocational gladness. We may find ourselves asked to work in places of the vocational factory, or the institution, or the hospital, or the classroom, to which our gifts perhaps are not best suited. We might even find ourselves on such occasions imagining refuge on a different manufacturing line, or in some warehouse, or we may in despair call off the project of career altogether. But Lucy and Ethel’s lesson is among other things a reminder to stand with integrity in the workplace, even in the misogynistic, not at all nostalgic, ethos of the 1960s. Their willingness to extend themselves vocationally speaks volumes to self-reliance and striving. They remind me that we do our best work when we see ourselves perhaps as interdependent rather than dependent or counterdependent. I admire their humility in going to work at a chocolate factory at all. And their work and workplace certainly remind me of the thin prestige and status accorded to those of us in the vocations on which the focus of this book lingers. We teachers tend not to be the most richly remunerated of those working in society, and we supervisors tend to be perhaps less rewarded financially than are full-time therapists. And even we therapists who apparently are rewarded financially in a way that would seem excessive to those not deeply familiar with our work, also bear in our bones the cost of doing that work. I have stood with my fair share of youthful students who multiply 30 or 40 hours weekly times 120 dollars a session and assume that is their financial lot in life as a beginning, let alone midlife or lifelong psychotherapist. We who toil in those places realize rather soon that not only is this vocation not as lucrative as it might have seemed initially, but that it exacts a toll and an anteing-up every day that makes the financial payoff secondary. Perhaps there are days too when our career and workplace are not only noncorrespondent to our investment of time and resources but ultimately to our best gifts of head and heart and hand. The uniform, after all, weighs heavy at times.

Of course, the antidote to what would otherwise be embittering and cynical in our vocation is, among other things, gratitude. From that perspective as teachers, we see our bulging course rolls as swollen with honey, and we anticipate sweetness rather than burden. As we come to view our therapist room companions not as clients buying something from us, but as those who suffer (hence, patients) and with whom we might participate in a co-conspiracy of not cure, but healing, we hold a sweetness rather than a duty. To view those who want our help with clinical supervision as latently already in possession of what we sing gently awake is to stave off routinized obligation, and instead awaken and ready our senses to take on the sweetness of our work.

In my own vocation, when I find myself overly weary or overly despairing or burdened, it has been a sweet place of refuge to contemplate the chocolaty richness of my companions. I imagine maybe that Lucy and Ethel, along with the frantic gobbling of those chocolates, may have taken time to linger over and relish one or two in particular. I hope they enjoyed these delicious burdens, and I hope they savored them in addition to the gobbling. And I pause to wonder what it is that I am gobbling and devouring, that I might allow myself to enjoy, more.

And now this window opens onto a yet larger vocational expanse, the rolling fields of irony. It didn’t escape me, even as a youthful viewer, that Lucy and Ethel’s position, of being asked to do something doomed to impossibility, was already a sort of tragicomic portrayal. No one, I would guess, expected these two novices to be adequate to the task before them. Not even the apparently stern and vigilant supervisor, I imagine, could have performed what she was expecting of these two beginning chocolate wrappers. And over the years, I have taken some comfort that in addition to the ludicrous irony of our impossible profession, there is a beautiful, tragic, and even sacred aesthetic. To do our work well is to borrow the worthiness and worth of Sisyphus. The overwhelmed chocolate wrappers’ vocational enterprise, in which they participated in something impossible in a way that was both comedic and allegiant to beauty, truth, and even dignity, is very similar to ours.

No one imagines, I hope, that we can conduct the impossibility of psychotherapy as if it were a mechanical, convergent, and linear process that guarantees outcomes. No one imagines that the ephemeral project of education is a mechanical procession toward some pedagogical end, in which teaching assures learning. Over the years, I have come to awaken, and I daresay even cherish, how much I can be accountable for my teaching, as well as how very little control I have over students’ learning. In recent years, having invested my life’s blood in writing a free open educational resource, Introductory Psychology textbook, it was initially both disconcerting and disheartening to me that many students didn’t bother to read it. Perhaps Emerson was right in observing that what comes to us cheaply we esteem lightly. But then again, my job isn’t to effect learning. My job is to do the work of teaching as earnestly and wholly as I possibly can. I feel like a farmer sometimes. We sow our crops, and we toil in rain and sunshine, knowing fully well that what happens ultimately isn’t really up to us. It’s not the fault of the chocolates, or the wrappers, or the uniforms, or the factory, or even that stern taskmaster of a boss. It’s just the deal.

So to take up psychotherapy, knowing in some ways that our project is inherently doomed to failure, is to take up the project in a way in which we are attached deeply and truly to not engendering an outcome. Rather, we strive to be immersed wholeheartedly in a process that sometimes eventuates in some of those outcomes. To conduct supervision as if we are manufacturing good therapists is to be ridiculous. Instead, it seems worthwhile to celebrate the delicious destiny of our work toward something to which we are not only inadequate, but as an enterprise that eventuates only probabilistically and occasionally in various outcomes that we cannot guarantee, however fervent our involvement in it.

One day that factory will crumble or burn. One day someone will decide that chocolates aren’t after all the point, or that we shouldn’t be eating them at all. Someone will decree that teaching is irrelevant to a cultural primacy of knowledge as commodity and product, and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. An Abundance of Sweet
• 2. Beautiful Lies and Beautiful Truths
• 3. Breathing into the Self
• 4. “Contact” in Our Work
• 5. Cows, Milk, and Milking
• 6. Crickets and Seagulls
• 7. The Fourth Presence in the Fire
• 8. Gifts and Their Giving
• 9. Going In, and Coming Back
• 10. Good Medicine, Good Companions
• 11. Instructions to the Worker Bee
• 12. Juries, Evaluation, and the Game I’m Playing
• 13. Pillows of Faith
• 14. Pitfalls
• 15. Reactors
• 16. Sacred Shaping
• 17. Sirens and Masts
• 18. Still Honest?
• 19. The Stones in Our Chimneys
• 20. Three Musical Virtues
• 21. Tigers and What I Hold in My Hands
• 22. Wood and Blood
• 23. “Yay! You’re Almost There!”