TALES OF UN-KNOWING

THERAPEUTIC ENCOUNTERS FROM AN

EXISTENTIAL PERSPECTIVE

ERNESTO SPINELLI
 Other works by Ernesto Spinelli
published by PCCS Books:

Demystifying Therapy
ISBN 978 1898059 89 9

First published in 1997

Gerald Duckworth & Co Ltd

Republished in 2006.

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© Ernesto Spinelli 1997

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Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, this publication may
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Tales of Un-knowing: Therapeutic encounters from an existential perspective

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1898059 79 0

Cover picture Automat (1927) by Edward Hopper

 Contents

Dedication and Acknowledgements

Prologue

1.Growing Old Disgracefully

2.Vile Bodies

3.The Royal Road

4.The Tale of the Therapist who Discovered that He was the Client

5.Lou and Simone: Truth or Happiness?

6.A Life Divided

7.Lifting the Veil

8.Her Last Breath

All names, distinguishing characteristics and identifying details of the clients discussed in this book have been altered in order to ensure their anonymity.
 Dedication and Acknowledgements

For
Alex and Christiana,
and
Caroline and Louisa
may your life-tales continue to embrace
the wonderment and whimsy of your youth

Each series of therapeutic encounters discussed in this book has its basis in actual sessions that took
place between myself and various individuals as far back as 1985 and as recently as 1995. Every care
has been taken to represent our meetings as faithfully as possible while maintaining professional
guidelines regarding confidentiality that necessitate the disguising of certain features in order to
ensure the anonymity ofs my clients. In some cases, I have combined a number of relevant issues and
dilemmas presented by two or more of my clients into a single account in order to convey particular
related ideas of importance to the model under discussion. Whereas, in my first years as a therapist, I
used to take copious notes and transcribe long passages of dialogue, I have ceased doing so since
1989. As a result, while a number of the accounts in this text rely extensively upon these records, the
remaining narratives are reconstructions of events as I have remembered them. Even so, when I have
employed extracts of dialogue in these latter accounts, I have gone back to my early notes and
transcripts in order to mimic as accurately as possible the manner and style of my own contributions
to the discussions and to attempt to find a distinctive ‘voice’ for each of the clients.
I am, of course, deeply indebted to all of my clients, past and present, since it is through my
meetings with them that I continue to learn what it is to ‘be a therapist’. In a sense, I hope that these
assorted tales speak to them all in a manner that resonates with their own experiences of being with
me. For myself, I can only say that throughout the writing of this book, I have felt my clients’
presence and influence acting as guide and mediator.
I want to acknowledge also the impact of various students and colleagues upon the writing of this
book. I am lucky enough to spend a substantial part of my time in the company of trainees and
professionals with whom I can engage and spar in an open, respectful and humour-filled fashion.
While I am thankful to all of them, I particularly wish to express my appreciation to the students that
I have taught on the Advanced Diploma in Existential Psychotherapy that is offered at the School of
Psychotherapy and Counselling at Regent’s College, in London, and to Dr Hans W. Cohn, Dr Freddie
Strasser, Dr David Livingstone Smith, and Ms Emmy van Deurzen for the profound influence that
they have had upon my thinking and practice. While it is highly likely that each will find significant
areas of divergence from, and disagreement with, what I have written, I hope that my words will act
as constructive stimuli for them just as surely as theirs have done for me.
 Finally, for their faith in and encouragement of this project, my heartfelt gratitude goes out to
John Richard Parker, Robin Baird-Smith and, as ever, my wife, Maggi Cook.
 Prologue

Although the demand for therapy has grown at an unprecedented rate over
the last decade, what takes place between therapist and client once the door
to the consulting room has been shut continues to remain something of an
enigma. Oh, of course, most of us have learned by one means or another
what, in general, is likely to occur: the client will sit or lie down upon a
(hopefully comfortable) couch or armchair, the therapist will recline
somewhere nearby, and a distinctive kind of dialogical exercise, focused
upon the client’s travails and concerns, and lasting a set period of time
during each meeting, will be enacted. Nonetheless, such knowledge begs
more questions than it answers.
While part of the continuing mystery is almost certainly the
consequence of therapists’ widespread tendency to perpetuate a mystique
regarding their profession so that, at times, what takes place appears to
parallel the rites performed by priests and initiates of mystery cults of the
ancient world, there are, undoubtedly, more prosaic factors that must also
be taken into consideration. Not least among these is the recognition that
therapy is by no means a unified discipline or profession. It is, if anything,
overburdened by numerous competing and contradictory theoretical
models, of which therapists may be anything from ‘strict adherents’ to
‘eclectic magpies’. As a result, what can, and does, take place between any
one therapist and client currently defies any detailed, generalised
elucidation.
As I personally see it then, therapy, at its most fundamental level,
involves the act of revealing and reassessing the ‘life stories’ that clients tell
themselves in order to establish, or maintain, meaning in their lives. The
role of the therapist is not only that of an engaged listener but also of
‘attendant’ (the original meaning of therapist) in that he or she is also
involved in the explication and reconstruction of the client’s narrative via
various forms of clarificatory and challenging input. It is, therefore, the
very relationship that develops between therapist and client that is the
central constituent of the therapeutic enterprise.
However, while just about all of the major models of therapy
acknowledge the pivotal importance of the relationship, which of its various
components or qualities are emphasised or dismissed, highlighted or
glossed over is, once again, largely dependent upon the theoretical model
being advocated. In similar fashion, while some therapists stress the
interpretative or educative skills that they bring to their encounters with
clients, others minimise the significance of what a therapist does and,
instead, accentuate those qualities of being that are expressed by the
therapist’s presence.
All of these issues, and many more besides, continue to be discussed
and disputed in abstract fashion at specialist conferences, as part of training
programmes, and, most commonly, in journal articles or textbooks.
Nevertheless, without wishing to minimise their value to the professional
and interested lay person alike, what is often lost in such accounts is a sense
of the lived immediacy of the therapeutic encounter. I find it interesting that,
while so much of a therapist’s life deals with the ‘telling of tales’, and the
discerning of new meanings through them, narrative is so rarely utilised by
therapists in order to express any number of abstract ideas which infuse
their thinking or to contrast one therapeutically derived hypothesis with
another. To be sure, therapists do make use of case studies in order to
demonstrate the efficacy of their chosen approach or to ‘concretise’ in a
descriptive fashion some category of diagnostic disorder.
I don’t particularly like the term ‘case study’. While it suggests some
sort of objective, quasi-medical exposition of interventionist treatment, in
the world of therapy it is actually used as a more professionally acceptable
term to describe the act of partially retelling a client’s tale from the
standpoint of the therapist and of the theoretical model that he or she
advocates. Unlike many of my colleagues, I do not find it upsetting to
consider case studies as a contemporary form of ‘twice-told tales’; in fact, I
think it’s quite exciting—and very much in keeping with the spirit of the
original therapeutic narratives as recounted by Sigmund Freud to his
followers.
Freud’s case studies can be read on several levels.1 As well as serving
as ‘learning tools’ for his followers, they can also be seen to announce
developments and/or amendments in psychoanalytic theory. More than this,
however, the expositions are typically constructed in order to emphasise
their dramatic qualities. The power of Freud’s writing is such that the reader
is drawn into a world that is both mysterious and foreboding and where,
frequently, the resolution to the conundrum is, at best, tenuous and certainly
open to multiple layers of meaning. In similar fashion, it is also difficult to
distinguish ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’ in Freud’s studies. Is he, as a scientist,
recounting exactly what occurred to the best of his ability? Or is he taking
the sorts of liberties that would be allowed of a novelist or playwright
seeking to convey narrative truths rather than historical facts? It may be
that these accounts’ continuing ability to enchant and provoke us is
principally due to Freud’s brilliant creation of an original form of narrative
which somehow combines the interests of the impartial scientific
investigator with those of the dramatist whose attention rests upon the
‘suffering, fighting human subject … [who is] required … to convey the
human interest, the drama, of the crisis of selfhood …’.2
When assisting my students in the preparation of case studies as part of
their training requirements, I urge them to think of their reports from the
standpoint of story-telling. I remind them that case studies are highly
selective ‘fictions’ usually told from the perspective of one, highly biased,
participant in a shared experience whose ‘meaning’ is open-ended and
likely to change significantly over time. I suggest to them that they consider
carefully what exactly it may be that concerns and fascinates them about the
particular case they are describing and focus their attention upon the
exploration and elucidation of the relevant elements of their material rather
than pretend that they can convey ‘the whole story’ as it occurred.
If case studies are not ‘objective’ testaments of what has occurred
between a therapist and a client over a period of time, what is their point
and purpose? Again, I think that there exists no one certain answer. The
case study may be a unique means of presenting often abstract theoretical
analyses in a vivid and concrete fashion which can be more readily grasped
and understood. Or, it may be a sort of ‘morality tale’ through which are
revealed any number of ‘life dilemmas’ that many human beings are likely
to encounter. Or, it may be an attempt to highlight a specific instance of
revelatory insight on the part of the therapist whose impact alters his or her
way of understanding, or style of practice. Whichever of these options,
alone or combined, the therapist selects, and imposes, both a fictional
quality and a (usually unstated) sub-text, or hidden agenda, upon the
subsequent account.
Acknowledging this, it becomes necessary for me to divulge my own
motives in writing this book. As I stated at the beginning of this prologue,
much of what takes place during therapy remains a mystery. While some
degree of secrecy is undoubtedly necessary in order to maintain client
anonymity and confidentiality, and, while it is also the case that each
therapeutic encounter remains unique, nevertheless a good deal of
unnecessary mystification persists. As a challenge to this state of affairs, I
have attempted to focus upon eight therapeutic encounters drawn from my
practice as an existential therapist. Hopefully, these accounts, and my
commentaries upon each, will succeed in providing readers with some
reasonably adequate and realistic clarification of what it might be like to
engage in a therapeutic relationship, certainly with me, and, possibly, in a
more general sense as well.
It is also my belief that the eight accounts that I’ve selected serve to
illuminate a variety of dilemmas and anxieties that most of us are likely to
encounter and experience at differing points throughout our lives. If I am
correct in this assumption, then these therapeutic tales may also serve as
catalysts to challenge the reader’s personal stance and outlook and open
him or her to novel, and potentially beneficial, experiential possibilities. If
so, then at least some aspects of the existentialphenomenological model
may have a ‘lived’ impact upon the reader and thereby stimulate farther
inquiry.
Finally, as if the above were not sufficient sub-texts, I will seek to
clarify a number of the key ideas, and their applications and implications, of
the theoretical model which best defines and deeply influences my
therapeutic approach. In this way, I hope to highlight a number of the
unique features and characteristics of the existential-phenomenological
model, and will strive to distinguish these from various assumptions and
attitudes that are recognisable features of more well-known and influential
models of therapy. In doing so, I also hope to offer trainees and professional
therapists an alternative, concretely focused means with which to consider
certain pivotal contributions that the existential-phenomenological model
offers to therapeutic encounters. This last point brings me to the notion of
unknowing which, as a recurring theme throughout the book, now demands
some preliminary explanation.
 In recent years, existential-phenomenological therapy has steadily
attained an ever-increasing degree of professional and public interest both
within the US and UK and throughout the rest of the world.3 It is an
approach to therapy that many therapists and clients alike find intellectually
rewarding and experientially challenging. Nevertheless, it must be said that
its theoretical underpinnings remain complex and not immediately
accessible. In part, this may be due to the specifically philosophical
grounding which is characteristic of the model. That its principal
philosophical influences include Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche,
Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Maurice
Merleau-Ponty and that its current developments have been greatly
influenced by hermeneutics, narrative theory and post-structuralism should
make it plain that its ideas provide a significantly different means of
examining and dealing with the wide range of problems that provoke people
to seek the services of a therapist to those which infuse most other
contemporary therapeutic models.
Even so, in spite of its unusual heritage, the existential-
phenomenological model has proved to be highly effective in assisting
individuals to make constructive sense of their problematic lives and to deal
with the problems of living which they bring to therapy. Indeed, it is almost
certainly due to its philosophical foundations that it has been shown to
provide a unique means to examine and shed light upon central human
dilemmas such as meaning and purpose, choice, freedom, guilt, and the
anxieties of temporal existence.
Perhaps most fundamentally, and in a strikingly contemporary fashion,
existential-phenomenological theory has always insisted upon viewing
human beings from a relational rather than an isolated perspective. In this
way, it speaks of existence as a being-there, or being-in-the-world—in other
words, as a co-constituting self-world, or self-other relationship. In a
therapeutic context, this stance reconsiders the problems and dilemmas that
are presented in therapy as dialogical statements that express various
anxieties and insecurities of relational existence.
These afflictions may be focused upon seemingly ‘internal’ relations
(such as conflicts between my values and my behaviour, or my inability to
live up to or fulfil various demands and aspirations that I have set for
myself), or upon seemingly ‘external’ relations with other human beings
(such as conflicts with my spouse or partner, my friends or colleagues, or,
alternatively, those conflicts that arise when I seem unable to find a suitable
spouse or partner, friends, etc), or with the world in general (such as fears
and phobias about animals, space, health and the environment).
However, while we in the West have tended to consider such relational
issues from the standpoints of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, it is arguable that this
perspective is misleading in that the issues in themselves are neither solely
‘internal’ nor solely ‘external’. Rather they can more adequately be
understood as expressions of conflicts and insecurities that arise from
relational experience.
Existential-phenomenological theory presents us with a view of human
existence that places anxiety at its centre. It suggests that our experience of
living is never certain, never fully predictable, never secure. Instead, our
very embracing of life presents us with all manner of ‘challenges’:
challenges to the meanings we have built up and live by, challenges to the
aims and purposes with which we imbue our lives, challenges, indeed, to
the very continuation of our existence. Our response to any or all of these
challenges can range from the attempt to create a protected environment
that will repel any perceived threats to our sense of physical or psychic
security, to the undertaking to foster a chaotic lifestyle which,
paradoxically, fixes its meaning and purpose upon the unwavering belief
that ‘all is meaningless’. Whatever the response, however, what is
significant is that the response itself expresses the stance we take toward
our relations with the world. It is, in a sense, our unique ‘language’ through
which we engage in dialogue both with ourselves and others.
And yet, as much as it may be of our making, this ‘language’usually
remains largely unexamined by us. Indeed, it may be that we only become
aware of just how foreign it is to our understanding when we are presented
with various forms of psychic and behavioural disturbances that highlight
our experience of alienation from thought and deed, self and other.
With this idea in mind, the existential-phenomenological model can be
seen to be much more a clarificatory exploration of the client’s way of
being-in-the-world (and the contradictions, conflicts, and anxieties that this
evokes or avoids) than it is about symptom removal, ‘ego-strengthening’,
‘rational functioning’ and so forth. It seeks to provide a psychic meeting-
place which is sufficiently accepting and respectful of the client’s existence
as it is currently being lived so that it may be disclosed and investigated in
an open, non-defensive fashion. This enterprise of disclosure is likely to
provoke a confrontation with myriad values, beliefs, assumptions and
judgements that the client has maintained without properly acknowledging
or reflecting upon their existence and their impact upon his or her (often)
rigid and experientially limiting stances towards self and others.
My own preferred way of exploring these issues with my clients
centralises the concerns and dilemmas surrounding what I have termed the
self-construct.4 The self-construct expresses the beliefs, attitudes, values and
aspirations that define who we believe ourselves to be. Contained within
this construct, as well, are all those judgemental variables that exemplify, in
general, who we must or must not be, or who we are allowed or not allowed
to be. As should become apparent upon reading the accounts discussed in
this book, many of the principal areas of exploration and challenge within
the therapeutic encounters I have with my clients seek to examine and
clarify the self-construct in general and its judgemental elements in
particular not necessarily in order to change them, but to illuminate their
influence, and the possibilities and limitations that they impose, upon our
experience of relational existence.
The therapist who seeks to follow the existential-phenomenological
model makes it his or her aim to gain some adequate degree of entry into
the lived world of the client. However, this requires the therapist to be very
much a participant ‘in’ the relationship rather than the detached observer
who stands ‘outside’ the client’s psychic world and comments upon or
interprets it. In the therapeutic relationship, the therapist is ‘the other’ in the
client’s current experience. In this way, the therapist becomes both the
representative focus point towards which the client expresses his or her way
of being and the ‘exception to the rule’ whose way of being with the client
provides the client with the possibility of experiencing and allowing novel
ways of being.
But this challenge of the client in turn also challenges the therapist in
significant ways. Therapists’ own ways of being, and the underlying values,
beliefs and assumptions that maintain them, may be deeply shaken through
their encounters with clients. At a more specifically professional level, their
attempts to attend to their clients may provoke therapists to reconsider
many of their theory-laden assumptions as expressed through their practice.
Or they may be confronted with questions regarding their power and their
potential (or actual) misuse and abuse of it.
 In general, I have labelled these instances of mutual, and often
simultaneous, challenge as aspects of un-knowing. I employ a hyphenated
spelling in order to distinguish the term from its more common meaning as
that of which we remain unfamiliar, unaware, or uninformed. Instead, ‘un-
knowing’ refers to that attempt to remain as open as possible to whatever
presents itself to our relational experience. As such, it expresses the attempt
to treat the seemingly familiar, or that of which we are either aware or
informed, as novel, unfixed in meaning, accessible to previously
unexamined possibilities.
Within the specific context of therapy, the idea of ‘un-knowing’
suggests the therapist’s willingness to explore the world of the client in a
fashion that seeks not only to remain accessible to, and respectful of, the
client’s unique way of being-inthe-world, but also to be receptive to the
challenges to the therapist’s own biases and assumptions (be they personal
or professional, or both) that this exploration may well provoke. In taking a
step towards ‘un-knowing’, therapists present themselves to the challenge
of exploring the possibilities of relational encounters.
Hopefully, the following Tales of Un-knowing will illustrate a number
of the more pivotal descriptive features and practice-based implications that
encompass this term.
As a starting point (and as ending to this prologue), I offer a few apt
lines from Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho!:

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.5

As a statement of the attempt to un-know, and of the therapeutic enterprise

in general, I know nothing that rivals its sagacity and wisdom.

1. Freud’s principal case studies appear in volumes 2, 7, 10, 12, 17 and 18 of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (translated by James and
Alix Strachey) which is published by the Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London. They have also been collected together in volumes 3, 8 and 9 of the Pelican
Freud Library published by Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, England. A (very) limited list of books that interpret these case studies in different ways includes: Sulloway, F.J. (1979)
Freud, Biologist of the Mind. London: André Deutsch. Marcus, S. (1984) Freud and the Culture of Psychoanalysis. London: W.W. Norton. Bernheimer, C. & Kahane, C. (eds) (1985)
In Dora’s Case: Freud–Hysteria–Feminism.London: Virago. Decker, H. S. (1991) Freud, Dora and Vienna 1900. Oxford: Macmillan. Esterson, A. (1993) Seductive Mirage. Chicago:
Open Court Press.
2. Quote from John Wiltshire’s book review of An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks, which appeared in Volume 2.2 of The Australian Journal of Primary Health Interchange,
1996 p. 90.
3. Recent British writings on existential-phenomenological therapy include: Deurzen-Smith, E. van (1988) Existential Counselling in Practice. London: Sage. Spinelli, E. (1989) The
Interpreted World: An introduction to phenomenological psychology. London: Sage. Spinelli, E. (1994) Demystifying Therapy. London: Constable. Cohn, H.W. (1997) Existential
Thought and Therapeutic Practice: An introduction. London: Sage. Strasser, F. & Strasser A. (1997) Time-limited Existential Therapy: The wheel of existence. London: Wiley. The
Society for Existential Analysis publishes a twice-yearly Journal with regular contributions by existential therapists from all over the world. Journal and general queries should be
directed to: The Society for Existential Analysis, B.M. Existential, London, WC1N 3XX.
4. See, Spinelli, E. (in press, 2007) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books. Spinelli, E. (1996) The vagaries of the self. The Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis
7.2: 57–68.
5. Beckett, S. (1983) Worstward Ho!: 7. London: John Calder.
 1
Growing Old Disgracefully

As I recall it, there is a scene towards the end of François Truffaut’s 1971
feature film, Anne and Muriel (Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent),1 that in
its stark simplicity perfectly captures a moment of chilling awareness. In
this scene, the by now middle-aged hero of the story passes by a group of
schoolgirls and, in doing so, experiences the compulsion to gaze at the
reflection of his face in a car window. Shaken and saddened by what he
sees, he prods his skin, noting the obvious lines and blemishes which have
marked the passage of time. ‘What is the matter with me?’ he mumbles to
himself. ‘All of a sudden, I have grown old.’
Those of us who have waved our goodbyes to the prime of youth are
likely to share a shudder of recognition at the thoughts and emotions this
image evokes. As conscious beings, we are brought, often unwillingly, to
the realisation of our temporality; to the obvious, if indigestible, knowledge
that just as each of us was blessed with life through our conception and
birth, so too will each of us, one day, cease to exist as physical, human,
beings.
Existential authors and therapists, influenced by the writings of the
German philosopher, Martin Heidegger, have tended to refer to this
universal experience as death anxiety.2 While the term seems initially
straightforward enough for us to comprehend its intended meaning, it is
also slightly misleading. It is not death, per se, that provokes our fears and
concerns; rather, it is the recognition of the fragility of our existence. As
human beings, we know how precarious life is and, as well, we recognise
that, in spite of whatever precautions we might take to protect and nurture
it, our life’s journey will inevitably arrive at its endpoint. It may have been
more accurate to speak of temporal life anxiety. But, there it is: the former
term has been employed too often and for too long a time now for it to be
easily altered.
Whatever its idiomatic deficiencies, the notion of death anxiety seeks
to point us to our diffuse experience of the fundamental uncertainty of
being, such that every step we take, every act we initiate, expresses, at its
heart, our inevitable movement towards non-being through unknown and
unpredictable life circumstances.
How each of us deals with our death anxiety is likely to be as varied
and unique as our experience of being alive. We might, for instance, seek
out ways to avoid risk and uncertainty as much as possible and, thereby,
cocoon ourselves into a lifestyle bounded by regime and habit, as bereft of
novelty and surprise as humanly possible. Equally, we might throw
ourselves into a life which seems to require doubt and risk, whose very
uncertainty revels in its defiance of security and predictability. In between
such extremes exist myriad stances, each expressing a different way of
coping with ‘living towards death’.
We can see, then, that the term is descriptive rather than prescriptive in
that it seeks to express a core aspect of human existence rather than any
form of symptomatology which can be alleviated or cured. Nevertheless,
the means by which we cope with death anxiety can, all too regularly,
provoke disturbing dispositions toward life. We might, for example,
convince ourselves of our ‘specialness’ in that, unlike everyone else, our
existence as a human being will be extended throughout time, or perhaps
even beyond time and into eternity. Alternatively, we might come to believe
that some sort of saviour or ‘ultimate rescuer’ will appear to prevent the
final step into non-being either for ourselves alone or for humanity as a
whole. While not uncommon, each of these attitudes, as the American
psychotherapist, Irvin Yalom, has demonstrated so convincingly, imposes
unexpected and undesired limitations upon our life experience.3
Perhaps more subtly, another means by which we might seek to
diminish our experience of death anxiety is to suppose that the end of our
being will occur as a form of cosmic catastrophe that heralds the end of all
human existence. The fascination that so many of us maintain regarding the
idea of a predicted apocalypse (a notion that has grown noticeably acute as
we approach the end of this millennium and the beginning of the next) may
well be an example of this stance.
 In less dramatic, but equally potent fashion, I can recall several
conversations with young children who expressed the hope that everyone
would die when they did so that no further episodes of their favourite
television programmes would be broadcast past their deaths and, hence, the
upsetting knowledge of their not being able to watch them would be
allayed. While such statements may tell us something of the egocentricity in
children’s thinking, it would appear to me that they also express something
that is both relevant and specific to our times: through the recent advances
in electronic technology we are increasingly able to both capture and revisit
the past—both personal and general—with relative ease. It is, for instance,
a simple task for us, as it is for the children I mentioned above, to re-view
instances of our personal history or particular radio or television
programmes from our respective, fondly remembered, pasts via access to
video cameras and tapes, laser disks or, increasingly, digital technology. In
such ways, we have managed to quite literally replay our pasts (though,
sadly, not always our less critical memories of such instances) and, in this
fashion, to move the past more into our present. This ‘enclosure’, however,
has possibly served to aggravate our anxieties regarding our still unknown
futures. If we could somehow ensure that there would be no future beyond
our own, it might arouse pleasant responses for at least some among us.
This aspect of non-being, and its associated anxieties, has not been
sufficiently explored by existential writers. In a similar fashion, those
specific anxieties evoked when contemplating a continued existence beyond
that of our family, friends and social acquaintances remain open to much
more detailed examination. So, for instance, would many of us experience
the continuation of our own being bereft of the being of our most significant
‘others’ as not merely undesirable but, rather, far less bearable than the
cessation of our own lives? For some, I would suppose, such a state of
affairs would evoke anxieties which would be at least as intolerable, if not
more so, as those which focus upon our own individual impermanence.
Over the last half-century, it has become an increasingly recognisable
characteristic of Western society in particular to both promote and elevate
youthfulness. We are constantly bombarded by media messages designed to
reinforce our assumptions that the only worthwhile way to be is to be young
— or, if that is beyond us, to at least be youthful in appearance. The Who’s
once nihilistic-sounding refrain ‘Hope I die before I get old’4 has become
the chant of our age and vast fortunes are earned and spent on treatments
and lotions which promise us, male and female alike, if not eternal then at
least life-long youthful looks and vitality. Here, then, is yet another,
exceedingly common expression of our attempts to deal with death anxiety.
And, through it, it is once again made blatantly obvious that such a
term is not limited merely to concerns surrounding our eventual death, but,
more conspicuously, to our fears of being viewed as death’s representatives
in that our very ageing process signals to ourselves and others those all too
obvious reminders of life’s singular direction towards non-being. Indeed,
the message proclaims that even in the limited time-span allotted to us, the
evidence of its movement towards non-being cannot be fully obscured.
If such thoughts point us towards some sort of universally shared
human truth, then it would not be surprising to find instances of death
anxiety being expressed in therapeutic encounters with clients. Indeed, it
would be unusual not to find them! One vivid instance of this was made
unabashedly evident to me in a brief series of therapeutic sessions I had
with a client whom I have given the fictional name of Edwin Jones. The
straightforwardness of his complaint, I think, should illuminate the thematic
issue under discussion.
I first met Edwin Jones during a period in my professional life when I
was offering regular therapeutic consultations in several NHS medical
practices throughout south-east London. One of the doctors with whom I
regularly consulted approached me to ask whether I would be willing to see
one of her patients for a series of private sessions, for which I would be
paid directly by her patient himself. She explained that while she had
offered to put him on the list of patients assigned to see me during my
contracted times at the surgery, thereby allowing him to make use of my
services without worry as to their financial cost, he had refused this offer,
insisting that he preferred to see me privately so as not to have to wait two
or three weeks before I could see him.
Although the request was unusual, I agreed, and so, about a week later,
having provided him with details as to how to reach my private office and
having made a number of preliminary arrangements as to our working
contract, I was at the entrance to my door, awaiting Mr Jones’s arrival. For
reasons whose relevance should become obvious soon enough, I must
clarify that I see many of my private clients in an office within my home.
This office is located on the first floor and is reached, unsurprisingly, by
going up a set of stairs. Arriving on time, Mr Jones introduced himself. As
he energetically shook my hand, he thanked me profusely for having agreed
to see him. Then, immediately upon having been told where we were
heading, Mr Jones quite literally bounded ahead of me virtually galloping
up the sixteen steps and leaving me no option but to chase after him.
As I made my way into the office, mentally reminding myself, as ever,
that I needed to do more exercise, Mr Jones smiled at me and, full of pride,
announced himself to be ‘fit as a fiddle’. Following on, as if to add further
proof to this contention, he pulled at his T-shirt in order to reveal, as much
to himself as to me, an agreeably flat stomach which he proceeded to
hammer with his fist. ‘See?’ he said. ‘Not an ounce of fat on it, doc! Pretty
good, eh?’ As I began to nod my head in agreement, he continued: ‘Here!
You give it a try! I bet you’ll not feel nothing other than muscle and bone!’
This somewhat over-dramatic attempt to present himself as a healthy
individual became a pattern in each of Mr Jones’s subsequent sessions with
me, and, as he himself would concede, was a typical introduction to his
conversations with just about anyone else in his life.
In 1988, the year he came to see me, Edwin Jones was fifty-two years
old. Twice married, and the father of two young sons, he worked as a self-
employed carpenter and joiner who, he claimed, was renowned for the
speed and quality of his work, both of which served to keep him in high
demand with the various contractors who hired him in spite of, as he put it
‘their being tempted to take on younger lads who could be conned into
working longer hours at lower hourly rates’.
Once we’d both sat down—he on a settee, I on an armchair placed
directly across from him—Mr Jones immediately launched into an
explanation of the concerns in his life which had led him to seek out my
services.
Mr Jones had been on tranquillisers (primarily Valium) for some
eleven consecutive years until moving to his present GP surgery, when he
had been abruptly taken off them. This change in regime had occurred in
March 1987— approximately ten months earlier. During this intervening
period, he had been going ‘cold turkey’ with little difficulty until, in early
December 1987, he’d shown up at the Surgery in order to plead with his GP
to be put back on Valium (or its equivalent) immediately. Asked to explain
why, he revealed to his doctor that he had recently developed a variety of
physical and emotional symptoms that he could not bear to put up with any
longer. The most significant of these symptoms included a persistent
tightness and dull ache in his belly, repeated stomach tension and
convulsions, sudden sporadic fits of sweating, occasional spells of near and
actual fainting, numbness throughout his body, bursts of breathlessness, hair
loss, insomnia, and general unspecified anxiety. Not surprisingly, as well as
being exceedingly worrisome, these continuing symptoms had severely
affected Mr Jones’s ability to maintain his work with any regularity and had
already forced him to either decline or give up several job placements—a
circumstance that had further aggravated his anxiety not only with regard to
his current income, but, just as significantly, to the point where he had
begun to believe it would have major implications for his future work
prospects. In addition, such worries had placed a great strain on his home
life in that he had become both moody and easily, and explosively, irritable
with his wife and children.
Since Mr Jones’s current symptoms closely replicated those for which
he’d been placed on tranquillisers eleven years earlier, his GP had taken
immediate steps to have him seen by a specialist consultant. However, the
results of these tests had revealed no obvious physical disorders to explain
the present complex of complaints. Rather than comply immediately with
Mr Jones’s plea to be put back on Valium, his GP had therefore urged him,
in the first instance, to consider embarking upon a series of therapy
sessions. Ready to try anything, Mr Jones had willingly consented.
Hearing this tale for the first time, I was struck (as I suppose that
readers of my account might similarly be struck) by the dissonance between
the ‘hale and hearty’ Mr Jones who had gone to such lengths to demonstrate
his physical fitness and the Mr Jones who suffered from the variety of
ailments just recounted. This dissonance was by no means a one-off event.
Indeed, these opposing strands in Mr Jones’s life story soon enough
revealed themselves to be recurring themes throughout our meetings. For
instance, just as each of our sessions would inevitably begin with
expressions of his general fitness either similar to his active behaviour at
our introduction or by verbal statements designed to highlight his youthful
appearance (for example, it was not untypical for him to make comments on
his looks along the lines of ‘You’d think I was forty, if I was a day!’), these
would be immediately followed by an abrupt change in his general
demeanour whereupon, having completed his litany of health, his facial
expression (together with the whole of his body) would then suddenly sag,
and, slumping on to the settee, Mr Jones would begin, almost lifelessly, to
recount the latest in a series of debilitating symptoms and crushing
circumstances in his somewhat misery-laden life which he persisted in
ascribing to what he imagined must be a delayed reaction to his having been
taken off tranquillisers.
As this was our first session together, I explained to Mr Jones that
what I could attempt with him, as with all of my clients, was to get as
accurate a sense as possible of how he experienced himself in his day-to-
day life. Put simply, I wanted to get to know him as well as he would allow
me. His story, his ‘narrative’ if you will, would be the subject of our
discussions.
‘Where do you want me to begin, doc?’ Mr Jones asked affably.
‘Anywhere you want,’ I replied.
He mulled this over in silence for less than a minute and then, perhaps
unsurprisingly, immediately confessed that my request would be difficult
for him to comply with as all he could think about at the moment was his
current problem. Rather than urge him to refocus his attention elsewhere, I
encouraged him to tell me more about this, to let me in on his thoughts and
concerns.
Without hesitation, Mr Jones blurted out: ‘I hate the way I am at the
moment! All this worry and concern just don’t sit right with me. I’m usually
a happy-golucky type, you know? A kind of “cheeky chappie”. You know
what I mean? Always got a good word to say, or a joke to tell just to bring
on a smile.’ He paused. Tears began to form. He placed his left hand over
his brow in order to avert his eyes from my gaze. He sniffed loudly,
attempted to regain his composure. ‘It’s all just so intense at the moment,
you know?’ he wailed.
‘These worries about the way you are these days stop you from being
the person you usually are?’ I inquired.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘Okay. Let me say that again slightly differently and then you tell me
what you hear yourself saying to yourself as you listen to the words. “I’m
worried about the way I am these days. I’m not being my usual self.”
‘What’s wrong with me?’ Mr Jones answered instantly. ‘What am I so
bleeding anxious about? Nothing’s changed in my life. It’s gotta be some
after-effect of all them drugs, don’t it? Maybe my body can’t live without
them no more!’
‘Well, maybe not,’ I concurred. ‘But let’s both be clear about what
you’re saying. Think of the years when you were on them. Were there ever
any times when you were taking the drugs that you felt something like the
way you do now? Or is this completely new to you?’
My question appeared to jar him. On one hand, I’d not immediately
disagreed with him; however, I’d also challenged him to consider his own
stance and see whether his point of view held up to his own examination.
Basically, I’d enjoined him to query his own assertion, to test it out for
himself. In doing so, Mr Jones began to explore and recount previous
instances of intense anxiety that had occurred prior to the onset of his
current disturbances. Of these, three specific areas of concern emerged over
the next few sessions which we explored at some length.
The first of these focused upon his current marriage. Mr Jones had
divorced and remarried a much younger wife nine years earlier (in 1979).
While asserting that he remained convinced that his wife, Debbie,
continued to love him and wished to remain with him as his spouse for the
rest of their lives, he had harboured a fear, almost from the onset of their
married life, that the differences in their ages would almost certainly
provoke her to re-evaluate her commitment unless he found the means to
prevent such thoughts from emerging. From his masculine-centred
viewpoint, Mr Jones’s principal worry concentrated upon their sexual life.
So long as he could ensure that Debbie remained ‘sexually satisfied’ with
him, then, he reasoned, she would not begin to regret her decision to marry
him. Convinced that he had to continuously demonstrate his potency ‘in
order to keep Debbie’s eyes from straying’, Mr Jones had sought to ensure
that they engaged in satisfactory sexual relations at least four times per
week (‘and a little extra on weekends’). He had managed to maintain this
ardent sexual lifestyle over the years but, he admitted, at a cost. Over time,
this self-imposed pressure ‘to perform’ for his wife had ensured that his
own experience of their sexual relations often left him feeling very little
pleasure, if any at all. Indeed, he confessed, there had been occasions when
rather than provoke experiences of closeness and warmth toward his wife,
their sexual relations had left him feeling quite the opposite and he had
barely managed to contain the anger he felt towards her because of, as he
saw it, her seemingly insatiable sexual demands.
 ‘So you’re saying that it’s Debbie who wants to have sex with you so
frequently?’ I inquired.
‘Yeah, right.’
‘And she tells you this?’
‘Well, not in so many words … But I know she does. It stands to
reason, don’t it?’
‘You mean that if you don’t have sex quite so often, Debbie will
remind you, or, perhaps, she’ll find a way of expressing her
dissatisfaction?’
‘Well, no. Not really. She just reads her book, or goes to sleep or
something. But ... I know that she’s pissed off with me.’
‘So Debbie isn’t the one who starts things up?’
‘No! I do!’
‘Most of the time?’
‘All of the time!’ Mr Jones bragged.
‘Even when you’re not in the mood,’ I added.
‘Hell, I’m hardly ever in the mood these days!’
‘But Debbie is,’ I challenged, testing whether I’d ‘tuned in’ with
sufficient accuracy to Mr Jones’s assumptions regarding this aspect of his
relations with his wife.
‘Yeah,’ he admitted.
‘And you know she is, not because she tells you this directly but
because you notice that she’s pissed off with you when you don’t have sex
as often as you normally do.’
‘She’s only thirty-one years old! Come on … She must want sex all the
time!’
‘Even if it means that you don’t enjoy it and you might feel angry
towards her for wanting it so frequently?’
‘She don’t know that I don’t enjoy it!’ Mr Jones smirked.
‘She enjoys it too much to notice that you don’t enjoy it?’
‘Well … I don’t know about that, doc …’
‘You don’t know about what, Edwin?’
‘I don’t know how much she enjoys it. Or even if she does at all’
This last comment suggested to me that Mr Jones might have shifted in
his stance of certainty towards one that allowed me (and possibly him, too)
to express previously unacknowledged doubts. ‘You’re not sure?’ I
wondered.
‘Don’t know,’ he mumbled. ‘It’s not easy to tell with women, is it?’
‘Edwin, there’s an obvious question here, isn’t there?’
‘Ask her?’
‘Would that be a difficult thing to do?’
‘No. But I might get back an answer that I couldn’t live with.’
‘Yeah. I see that. And maybe the fear of getting that answer is enough
to stop you from asking it.’
‘If I ask it, she might start wondering why I’m asking. And then she
might just start wondering what she’s doing living with some bloke who’s
old enough to even think of asking it!’
Mr Jones’s second concern centred upon his relations with his two
sons: Philip, his twelve-year-old, and Jason who had just turned eight. Full
of fatherly pride and affection towards each of them, Mr Jones expressed to
me his desire to be seen by them as being more a friend with whom they
could ‘muck about’ than a parent ‘who tells them what’s what and acts as a
grown-up around them’. Sharing a common interest in sports, he had
encouraged them both to become highly involved in athletic activities of all
kinds—particularly football and rugby. Not wishing to be the kind of father
‘who just sits on the sidelines and cheers them on’, Mr Jones had
undertaken to become as actively committed as they were by serving as
coach to several teams that they belonged to, and, as well, by doing various
types of athletic exercises with them on weekday evenings and weekends.
Mr Jones recounted a particular incident which was of significance to
him and which, I think, highlighted the way in which he wished to be seen
by his sons. On the day of an important football match, Philip suddenly
came down with influenza and was unable to play. Seeing his son’s distress,
and wishing to allay it, Mr Jones decided that the only thing that could be
done was for him to take the place of his son as team member during the
match. Obviously proud of this strategy, Mr Jones appeared to quite
genuinely see nothing unusual in his action. Indeed, he recounted the story
somewhat boastfully (as yet another example of his youthfulness) and
claimed to have ‘blended in with his team’ quite unnoticeably.
However, soon after he had told me this, Mr Jones went on to reveal
that, over the last few months, he had felt himself to be increasingly tired
and achy following such activities. He wondered whether, in spite of his
general fitness, he could continue to keep up with his sons. Such a thought
made him miserable since he felt that if they should notice, they would
cease relating to him in the manner which he thought was right. Once again,
the only explanation for his tiredness that made sense to him was that it was
a delayed reaction to his having been taken off the tranquillisers.
The third, and by far most disturbing, incident specified by Mr Jones
was recounted during our sixth session together. Hesitantly, and with
obvious emotion, he began to speak of his father’s sudden death in late
October 1987. Mr Jones described his father in much the same way as he’d
portrayed himself— a man far younger in appearance and healthier than one
would expect of someone of his age, who had never been ill a day in his
life, who had remained extremely active, particularly in sports, and who had
retained an ‘interest in the ladies—even at his ripe age’. Given the above,
Mr Jones had been greatly shocked to see a sudden, and totally unexpected,
physical and mental decline in his father about a month prior to his death. In
Mr Jones’s eyes, his father had gone from being a healthy, youthful
septuagenarian to ‘a decrepit old man’ seemingly overnight. As painful as
his father’s death was to him, he also saw it as a relief to himself and, he
imagined, to his father as well, in so far as neither of them would have to
face up to these obvious signs of continuing deterioration while pretending
not to notice them during their encounters with one another.
Nevertheless, in spite of this relief, Mr Jones explained that he could
not be rid of the frightening image of his father that he had seen on that first
occasion following his having been alerted to his impending death. Worse,
this image had remained to haunt and terrify him, especially at nights when
he lay in the dark upon his bed. Unable to sleep, feeling the weight of the
duvet upon him, he imagined himself in his own casket buried beneath the
ground. Overcome by fear, sweating profusely, he now found it impossible
to go to sleep without a light on and covered only by a single sheet which
he could easily cast aside in case the morbid thoughts that infested him
became too awful for him to continue to contemplate.
Told in such casual fashion, depicted in this summarised form, the
disturbing events in Edwin Jones’s life threaten to allow us to remain
detached from him as a complex and unique individual. While it is evident
that, throughout our meetings, it was these instances of deep anxiety to
which we both frequently returned and discussed, nevertheless, it remains
crucial to view them within the wider context of his life. I state this not only
because the presentation of case material most typically emphasises the
delineation of symptoms and the therapist’s attempts—whether successful
or not—to alleviate or remove them, but, more pertinently, because the
central focus in my work with clients takes as its principal axiom the
exploration of their lived world of relations. Viewed in this way, clients’
disturbing symptoms can be seen to be examples of their more general
ongoing dialogue with the world. Hence, rather than being merely
‘problems’ designated for removal, they form an important introduction to
their ‘way of being-in-the-world’. What this assumption suggests is that a
therapist who approaches the therapeutic enterprise from this stance is not
principally a ‘symptom remover’, but, rather, an actively engaged explorer
whose terrain of investigation is the client’s particular and unique world of
relations.
While such an attitude is relatively easy to grasp in its abstract form, it
remains difficult—if not impossible—for the therapist to adhere to it. The
temptation to seek to ‘make the client better’ remains strong no matter how
long the therapist has been in practice and, for this reason, it seems to me
that it is the most fundamental step of ‘un-knowing’ with which the
therapist is continually presented.
Given the information about Mr Jones’s problems as summarised
earlier, it might seem desirable for me to have homed in on the presenting
issues in order that I might convince Mr Jones that he simply needed to
change not only particular aspects of his relations with his wife and sons,
but, just as significantly, his view of himself. One might, for instance, have
attempted to convince him of the inherent ‘irrationality’ in his stance
toward sexuality, active sports, and his fear of ageing so that, if these were
properly re-evaluated, a more rational approach might well allow a
significant reduction in his experience of anxiety. One might also ‘educate’
Mr Jones regarding the after-effects of tranquillisers so that his fears
surrounding these might be put to rest. Alternatively, it might also have
been beneficial to consider Mr Jones’s problems in the light of
‘unconscious’ conflicts such as those that, for example, might be focused
upon his most deep-seated fantasies regarding his father.
Any of these might be both valuable and helpful to Mr Jones and I
would not wish to suggest that it would be ‘wrong’ for therapists to pursue
them. But what I want to propose is an alternative, and at least equally
effective, course of action. In contrast to the above, I saw my principal role
as that of facilitating the means by which Mr Jones could more fully
explore and clarify the meanings he had given to his symptoms. In turn, he
could begin to consider, from the standpoint of his own directly lived
experience, what these meanings provided him with regard to the ‘life
story’ he had constructed for himself. With this aim in mind, rather than
seek to ‘change’ Mr Jones’s stance, I had to attempt to enter his particular
world so that I might understand how he construed himself in the light of
his relations with the people and objects in his lived reality not from the
standpoint of how I, as therapist, experienced them but as he did. I had to
accept him as he was being rather than seek to remodel him in a fashion
which, to me, might be an improvement upon his current stance. But how to
go about this?
In one sense, by not ‘going about it’ in some technique-oriented
fashion. Rather than seek to do things to, or for, him, I had to check my
desire to ‘lead’ him and, correspondingly, I had to avoid allowing the
various bits of theorybased knowledge which I’d accumulated over the
years to ‘lead’ me in such a way that my own interpretative narrative of Mr
Jones’s life might threaten to swamp his own. R. D. Laing used to remind
his readers and trainees that the original meaning of the word ‘therapy’
centred upon the idea of attendance.5 The therapist, as Laing saw it, was
there to attend to the client in that an attempt would be made to keep up
with the client’s reflections and actions rather than move beyond them by
suggesting alternatives, transforming their meaning, or disputing their right
to exist.
This attempt relies upon the therapist’s willingness and ability to
remain with what is presented and to seek to ‘open up’ its meaning to the
client in a descriptively focused manner rather than to transmute the client’s
statements in a manner which ‘makes sense’ within the confines of the
therapist’s preferred theoretical model. In the case of Mr Jones, if there was
any worth to my awareness and understanding of the theoretical concept of
‘death anxiety’, it would have to disclose itself through Mr Jones’s own
explication of his life story rather than be introduced by me as a way of
bringing him round to my own way of thinking.
In order to allow this, and also to permit the emergence of greater
clarity as to how Mr Jones went about making sense of his life, two crucial
stances towards him were necessary. First, I had to remain open to, and
curious enough about, him so that I could begin to ‘hear’ his current
dialogue with the world as he recounted it. Secondly, I had to have
sufficient patience and faith in Mr Jones’s ability to disclose his story
openly and truthfully not just to himself, but in my presence. In brief, I had
to earn the right to be a participant in this explication by allowing the
emergence of a respectful and non-judgemental ‘environment’ within which
he might experience a willingness and desire to clarify and confront his way
of being.
This most basic of all aspects of therapeutic ‘un-knowing’ enjoined me
to set aside my desire to intervene on Mr Jones’s behalf and, instead, to
seek to enter his world as he lived it in order that we could both arrive at the
‘sense’ contained within his anxieties. To employ some jargon, I asked
myself to be there both with and for Mr Jones, in that I sought to be both
willing and able to embrace his way of ‘being-in-the world’ not merely to
reflect it back to him but in order to disclose accurately its implicit
assumptions so that these could be more adequately examined.
My questions and comments centred upon the crucial question: ‘What
is it like to be Mr Jones?’ To have focused merely upon his disturbing
symptoms would have provided only partial, and biased, insight. Instead
they had to be seen in the context of the whole of Mr Jones’s life
experience. If his relations with his wife, his children, his recently deceased
father, and his own body could be seen as being problematic, it remained
just as significant to understand such difficulties in the light of the joys,
hopes and aspirations that these relations also provided for him. In similar
fashion, just as they provoked deep anxiety and uncertainty, his symptoms
also exemplified fundamental aspects of the meaning he had made of his
life. Rather than be rid fully of his anxieties, Mr Jones, like all of us, was
faced with the task of finding some means to entice a more benevolent co-
existence between his fears and desires.
The French existential philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, recounted the
story of his meeting with a young student who had come to him to seek his
advice as to how he should choose between two competing, yet equally
compelling, demands.6 On the one hand, the student told him, he had an
ailing mother with whom he wished to stay in order to care for her. On the
other, he wished to fight for his country by joining the French Resistance
against Nazi occupation. Neither choice was completely satisfactory in
itself since either decision would necessarily exclude the other. What then
was the right choice? Sartre’s parable makes plain the more general
question of human choice. No one choice can ever be fully satisfactory as it
presents us with the anxieties of all the remaining ‘non-choices’ that present
themselves before us. It is only in dreams and fairy-tales and hack novels
that choices are made which will allow us to ‘live happily ever after’. If our
lived experience confronts us with anything, it is that the issues of human
existence will never provide us with ‘perfect’, anxiety-free resolutions.
Indeed, to aspire to such merely provokes further, possibly unnecessary,
anxieties.
In the light of this, we can note that Mr Jones had become convinced
that the happiness and worth of his relations with his wife, his children, his
work and, not least, himself depended upon his maintenance of a highly
active, virile, youthful lifestyle. If he allowed himself—and others—to
recognise his ageing, then, he knew, he would be rejected in ways that were
deeply significant to him. He had therefore tried to effect a stance which
would deflect such thoughts, deny the evidence of his growing older. He
himself had admitted this much to himself and to me from the first instance
of our meeting and it was the further exploration of this stance that provided
us both with additional insight as to how firmly this belief had taken hold of
his life.
During our eleventh session together, Mr Jones returned to the account
he had given of his father’s illness and death.
‘Edwin,’ I said, ‘tell me more about how you felt about your father’s
sudden deterioration.’
‘I was sickened by it!’
‘How so?’
‘It was like he’d lied to me or something.’
‘He’d lied to you because he’d presented himself as being a much
younger and healthier man than he actually was?’
‘Yeah. He’d conned me!’
‘And when you realised this—’
‘I hated him for it! He’d been an example to me, you know? He’d
shown me that you could be in your seventies and all and still be young and
healthy.’
‘And that was a lie.’
‘Too bloody right, mate!’
 ‘You’d believed him up to that point, and now you saw it was a con.
And I guess that, realising this, you might have thought: “Well, how far
does this con extend? How much have I lived my own life on the basis of
this con?”’
Mr Jones’s reaction to my words made it evident that my challenge to
him had gone too far, too fast. He was not prepared to entertain such
considerations. I had not sufficiently attuned myself to his stance towards
life. In an important sense, I had neglected to consider his problems in the
light of what they provided for him.
When I speak to students or supervisees about their clients, I typically
ask them to consider a problem from the standpoint of what it might permit,
what stance or belief it might allow that, should the problem be removed,
could no longer be so easily sustained. Reminding myself of this, I realised
that so long as Mr Jones continued to believe that the problems he
experienced were the result of his body’s delayed reaction to his having
been taken off tranquillisers, then he might not have to face the far more
unsettling, and incurable, anxiety of his natural ageing. In this fashion,
while the intensity of disturbing experiences remained, their meaning was
much more acceptable to him if they continued to be seen solely as the
consequences of an external agent (ie. the tranquillisers). Indeed, this
meaning may well have been the only option that Mr Jones could entertain
without becoming even more seriously incapacitated.
If this was the case, then my questioning was a threat to his deeply-
held belief. I had to realign my challenges so that they did not contradict his
views. In doing so, if my understanding of his position was sufficiently
accurate, Mr Jones himself would eventually expose the gaps and
inconsistencies contained within his belief.
As is often the case in therapy (in spite of what we therapists might
suggest in our written accounts), significant developments of therapeutic
worth are likely to emerge in serendipitous fashion.
Throughout our discussions, Mr Jones had revealed that one of his
continuing pleasures in life was to watch films together with his family on
his newly purchased video-recorder. As our meetings were regularly
scheduled on late Friday afternoons, he would often end our sessions by
telling me which of the films he’d recently viewed were worth my attention
and which films he intended to rent that weekend. When our fourteenth
session came to a close, I therefore expected to be told that week’s list of
film titles. Instead, Mr Jones turned to me and queried:
‘Hey, doc, what kinds of films do you like, then?’
‘Oh … All kinds,’ I replied. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Ah … It’s just that I don’t know what to get out this week and I
thought that maybe you could suggest something decent, like.’
In one of those infrequent instants of sudden ‘illumination’ that befall
me, I knew that I had been given an opening with which to allow Mr Jones
to challenge his stance in a relatively safe fashion.
‘I saw a video not that long ago that’s about Joan Crawford which I
thought was okay,’ I said. ‘It’s called Mommie Dearest.7 Maybe you’d like
it.’
‘I’ll see if I can rent it,’ answered Mr Jones. ‘Then next week I’ll tell
you what I thought of it.’
My suggestion, in fact, had been somewhat ‘loaded’. Just before
offering it, I’d remembered a scene from the film that resonated with my
understanding of Mr Jones’s dilemma. In that scene, Ms Crawford’s
daughter, herself a struggling young actress, had been given a continuing
role in a television ‘soap’. Suddenly taken ill, unable to go on the
programme, she had despaired that she’d lost her chance to succeed in
Hollywood. At this point, Ms Crawford, wishing to help her daughter, took
it upon herself to show up at the show’s rehearsals whereupon she’d
announced that she would take up her daughter’s role for as long as her
illness persisted. Although she was by then over sixty years of age, Ms
Crawford was convinced not only that she could play the role of a woman
in her early twenties, but also that the television audience would not notice
anything unusual in the character’s change of appearance.
The parallel between this and Mr Jones’s own account of his replacing
his son for the football match was potentially as pertinent as it was obvious.
Perhaps considering the issue from the more distanced perspective of a
dramatic moment in a film might provide Mr Jones with the means to
challenge his stance. On the other hand, I might still have read him
incorrectly and the scene could well pass him by. Time would tell!
The following week, Mr Jones’s demeanour was that of a changed
man. At the start of our session, much more hesitantly than was normal for
him, he revealed that he’d watched the video with his family. Eventually,
the scene I’ve summarised above began. As he explained it, it was not the
scene itself, but, rather, the uproarious laughter of his children that had
triggered off the connection for Mr Jones. At first, he had failed to see any
humour in it and, confused by their reaction, he had asked his sons to
explain just what it was that they found so funny.
‘She thinks that no one will notice that she’s so old, dad!’ they’d
squealed with delight.
‘But she’s just trying to help her daughter,’ Mr Jones had insisted.
‘Well, yes … But she doesn’t have to go quite so far, does she?’
And there it was. Now feeling both stupid and bemused as he had been
a week earlier, Mr Jones began to laugh. I joined him.
Eventually, he mumbled: ‘And they still love me, you know? Debbie,
too.’
‘I don’t have to be as young as them to be as loved and valued as I
wish,’ I said, attempting to speak on his behalf.
‘And I don’t need to keep conning them all. Like me ol’ dad conned
me.’ He paused, sighed gravely, began to weep copious tears. ‘I didn’t stop
loving him, you know?’ Mr Jones managed to whisper while continuing to
cry. ‘He didn’t have to pretend with me, I’d have loved him all the same.’
‘And maybe your family has told you that they, too, will continue to
love you all the same even if you give up trying to con them.’
From that point onward, Mr Jones’s anxiety attacks diminished
markedly. He was able to sleep more soundly, work for extended periods of
time without feeling faint, numb, or shaky, and his hair stopped falling out
in large clumps. More importantly to him, his relationship with his wife
improved and they were able to return to far more satisfactory—if
numerically fewer—sexual relations. Similarly, he continued to play sports
with his children but cut down on his own physical activities and decided to
‘act more like their coach than their team-mate’. Perhaps most poignantly,
Mr Jones now found himself able to visit his father’s grave and mourn his
passing.
To be sure, not all of Mr Jones’s symptoms disappeared. He continued
to experience occasional crippling stomach pains and still suffered from
recurring bouts of breathlessness. His concern over these, however, was
greatly diminished and he no longer sought to be put back on tranquillisers.
Instead, he began to visit an acupuncturist and claimed that his
interventions both minimised the irritations associated with his remaining
symptoms and ‘boosted his energy levels’. He even provided me with the
acupuncturist’s business card ‘just in case I ever felt the urge to visit him’.
Although I ceased meeting him as my client after our eighteenth
session, I continued to see Mr Jones occasionally at the GP surgery. On
such occasions, he would pop into my office to say hello and to let me
know that he was ‘still on his feet’. While he would also continue to
encourage me to note the flatness of his stomach, his accompanying
statement altered subtly, yet significantly. Pretty good for a man my age,
eh?’ he would now say. And then, with a wink and lurid smile, he would
add: ‘Just growing old disgracefully, I am!’
At one point during his therapy, Mr Jones revealed that he held no
religious beliefs. And, yet, it seems to me that he did. His was a ‘religion of
the immortal body’. And, like a believer suddenly plagued with doubts
about the existence of a deity, Mr Jones had been desperately fighting off
the acknowledgement of any evidence that might suggest that his body, as
Arthur Koestler once so aptly put it, was one more ‘god that failed’.8
While our total number of sessions was unusually low (I tend to see
clients for an average period of two years), and my attempted entry into Mr
Jones’s way of being-in-the-world was therefore limited and relatively
superficial, nevertheless I have chosen to recount the story of our
engagement because it highlights in a clear and, hopefully, informative
manner some pertinent aspects of the notion of ‘death anxiety’ as
understood by the existential-phenomenological model.
At the same time, in spite of its brevity, I am aware that there exists a
good deal of relevant material that I have elected to leave out of my
discussion. Much of this edited information is highly pertinent to my more
general attempt to explicate significant theoretical aspects of my chosen
model. For instance, I have merely hinted at the importance of our
relationship and its interplay of ‘meeting and not meeting’ one another.
Similarly, I have not addressed those aspects of our discussions that focused
upon the immediacy of our encounter, nor upon issues regarding Mr Jones’s
self-structure, nor the influence of his remembered past experience, the
meanings and purposes implicit within his fundamental stance towards
‘others’, and so forth. Nor, perhaps most significantly, have I addressed the
issue of how Mr Jones’s struggle with ageing and the recognition of his own
temporality affected me not only as a professional seeking to attend to his
client, but, more relevantly, as yet another human being who faced those
same dilemmas from his own unique perspective and, who, through his
attempts to enter the world of another, caught glimpses of his own strategies
for protecting himself from the full brunt of life’s anxieties.
As I began to write out what at first appeared to be a rather simple
case, I was struck by the fact that I could probably discuss every single
important issue that I hope to convey and clarify throughout this book just
by examining the complex webs of meaning and dialogue that took place
during my sessions with Mr Jones. In holding this belief, I find myself
disclosing the conviction that every encounter contains within it both
unique and universal qualities that may point us to fundamental aspects of
the experience of being human. That, in the end, I chose not to pursue this
track has more to say about my assumptions regarding the tolerance of my
potential readers than it does about the limited material to be gleaned from
this particular encounter.
So, let us acknowledge the incomplete nature of this first study, and,
through it, remind ourselves that in the exploration of un-knowing we are
inevitably confronted with the incontrovertible evidence that there will
always remain far more that is unknown about anyone’s life experience—
our own included—the sum total of what we have been interested enough to
probe. As the refrain from some now barely remembered song used to go:
‘Whatever you think, it’s more than that.’ This seems to me to be an apt
memorandum for any therapist who might seek to ‘un-know’ and thereby
gain some partial, even precarious, foothold in the realm of a client’s being.
In doing so, it should not be surprising if one were to stumble upon those
undercurrents of non-being which also claim a place of privilege.
The dilemmas confronting Mr Jones serve as salutary reminders of the
anxiety of non-being that permeates all our experiences of living. Like
young children, we can bury our heads under metaphorical pillows and
convince ourselves that we have made this particular ‘monster under our
bed’ disappear— at least until the next dark night. However, as Mr Jones’s
story points out, pillows may stifle as well as protect and, in the long run,
are likely to themselves become ambassadors of that self-same ‘monster’
that we can never fully evade.
1. Anne and Muriel (original title: Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent), directed by François Truffaut, was first shown in cinemas in 1971.
2. For example, see May, R. (1967) Psychology and the Human Dilemma. New York: W.W. Norton; and Yalom, I. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
3. See Yalom, I. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Yalom, I. (1989) Love’s Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4. ‘My Generation’ was composed in 1965 by Pete Townshend and is copyright TRO-Devon Music, Inc. BMI.
5. Evans, R. I. (1976) Dialogue with R.D. Laing. New York: Praeger. Mullan, B. (1995) Mad to be Normal: Conversations with R.D. Laing. London: Free Associations Press.
6. Sartre, J-P. (1956) Being and Nothingness (trans. H. Barnes). London: Routledge (1991). For an interesting discussion of this dilemma, see Robert Hare’s paper in Bloch, S. &
Chodoff, P. (eds) (1991) Psychiatric Ethics (2nd ed). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
7. Mommie Dearest, directed by Frank Perry, was first shown in cinemas in 1981.
8. Koestler, A. (1950) The initiates. In R. Crossman (ed) The God That Failed. London: Hamish Hamilton.
 2
Vile Bodies

Friedrich Nietzsche, that most disturbing of German philosophers,

proclaimed: ‘All truths are bloody truths to me’.1
As is often the case with his finely honed aphorisms, we can glean
multiple layers of meaning from this. My reflections lead me to suppose
that its intended purpose is to make plain that our truths are not to be
derived from some distanced, ‘spiritually elevated’ source, but, rather, from
the flesh and bone—or blood—of our own lived experience. When I
consider the phrase more coarsely, however, it comes to me that ‘bloody’
truths are hard-won, painful and upsetting, troublemakers that, like the
fairy-tale child who shouts that the Emperor wears no clothes, expose the
pretences that our vanity conceals.
Therapy can be the agency by which ‘bloody truths’ are revealed. But
if this is so, then let both client and therapist beware.
When I engage in therapy with young people in their teenage years I
usually find the work tiring, frustrating, befuddling, so that my ability to
attend to them, my willingness to enter their world-views, is often taxed to
breaking point. I can do it—most of the time—but I prefer not to. This
inclination, when clarified, reveals two pertinent, if unflattering, concerns.
First, my encounters with the young are likely to provoke memories of my
own youth and while I cannot say that this time in my life was so suffused
with unhappiness and pain that it is agony for me to face it, however
indirectly, through the accounts of young clients, nevertheless it was painful
enough, confounding enough, for me to remain wary of re-embracing it
today. And second, in seeming contradiction to what I have just stated, there
is also jealousy. For, although I swear, in all sincerity, that I would never
wish to be a teenager again, I am aware that I say this because I see ‘being a
teenager’ from the standpoint of one who already has been so, and who, in
reflecting upon those shambolic life events, recalls the wild and
unpredictable highs and lows of sudden emotion, the late night/early
morning confusions and illuminations, the fumbling searches for love and
lust and identity and meaning that, in turn, evoke an odd kind of yearning
which is not about any desire to re-experience such mysteries once again,
but, rather, to experience them for the first time.
It is this very sense of un-knowing that makes the teenager, that
provides the necessary thrill and ecstasy experienced in facing these
melodramatic uncertainties so as to imbue them with sufficient worth to see
through to another day. And although the young and old(er) share the fact
that their lives are ever filled with questions, what they ask, and how they
deal with life’s ambiguities, distinguishes their un-knowing in such
significant fashion that each is highly likely to perceive the other’s queries
as irrelevant, pointless, a waste of time and effort.
I learned this lesson well during my first couple of years of paid
employment as Director of Advisory Services for an international college
based in London. A substantial part of my duties in this post centred upon
my providing therapeutic counselling and guidance to undergraduate
students from widely differing personal, cultural and economic
backgrounds. The work was highly rewarding and significantly instructive.
But, while I continue to value it for the formative impact it had upon my
professional development, my then occasional encounters with older
students who were well past their teenage years eventually convinced me
that what qualities and skills I might have as a therapist were likely to
emerge most satisfactorily when I was engaged with adults. Once I’d
acknowledged this, I jumped at the first opportunity to shift my post to that
of psychology lecturer and set up a private therapy practice focused upon
work with adult clients.
Hesitation, intolerance, jealousy and indifference. Not exactly helpful
aids to one who intends to attempt entry into another’s world with sufficient
openness to entice an attitude of un-knowing! Yet somehow, in spite of all
these qualms, I agreed to meet Amanda. And both of us, I hasten to
presume, gained from the experience.
The first time I heard from Amanda, she was mid-way through her
seventeenth year. She had telephoned me about a fortnight earlier and had
expressed a desperate need to see me. ‘Why me, of all people?’ I inquired.
The year was 1986 and I had not published anything about therapy that she
might have chanced upon, nor was it likely that she had heard of me via
other therapists. She was, as it turned out, the friend of one of my past
students who had urged her to contact me on the grounds that I was both
approachable and ‘not yet so old as to make her feel that she would be
consulting a parent substitute’.
Initially wary, for the reasons summarised above, I queried what it was
that concerned her so much that she felt the need to enter therapy. Did she
realise the time and expense and, above all, the commitment entailed in
such a step? While such questions would not be unusual for me to pose to
any prospective client, I confess that the way in which I posed them was
likely to have hinted at my qualms.
Amanda dealt with them directly. She explained that she already knew
something of therapy since, as a child of ten, she had participated in a form
of family therapy together with her younger brother and her mum and dad
over a fourteen-month period when her parents had been considering
divorce. So, she knew about the importance of time-keeping and had a good
sense of the financial costs involved. Of the latter, she admitted that, at
present, being a student, she could not imagine how she could pay me.
However, she explained, once she’d reached the age of eighteen, she would
be entitled to make use of a trust fund set up by her paternal grandparents
and, if I would allow her to put off payments until then, she would
recompense me in full for whatever number of hours had been accumulated.
In spite of the fact that she had given me an easy way out of my
dilemma in that I could have insisted that she wait to begin seeing me until
her financial situation had stabilised, this plausible solution did not sit well
with my aspirations to remain as open as possible to the taking on of clients
from a wide range of economic circumstances. Besides, I reasoned, six
months was not so great a period of time that its passing would have much
of an impact upon my reservations regarding working with teenage clients.
A glance at my diary confirmed what I already knew to be the case: there
were a number of available time slots within which we could meet. So be it,
I sighed mentally, and agreed to see Amanda for an initial session during
which, among more standard arrangements, we would design a contract that
would specify a mutually satisfactory financial arrangement.
But, I pressed, what was it that was so disturbing to my new client that
she’d felt the need to contact a therapist? I heard her intake of breath over
the phone, counted the several seconds that passed before she could bring
herself to reply: ‘I don’t like myself very much. I’m in love with a
wonderful guy and I’m being a real bitch with him. I’m just screwing him
about and I don’t know why.’
Oh. A familiar story whose ingredients make up the central concerns
of practically every teenager’s life and which most manage to resolve in
satisfactory fashion without the assistance of a therapist. Instantly regretting
my decision to meet Amanda, I mumbled something about how we could
discuss this further during our initial session. We set about arranging a time.
Given her expressed ‘urgent need’ to begin seeing me, I assumed that she
would want to set a date as soon as possible. I was told that it could not be
for at least a fortnight because she had to concentrate on a paper that was
due for one of her courses and which she had not yet even begun to think
about much less write. Of course; how naive of me to have assumed that
‘urgency’ would have the same meaning to one such as Amanda as it did to
me!
When we eventually did meet, I was confronted by a lissom, auburn-
haired young woman wearing fashionable casual clothing. Amanda
introduced herself, shook my hand, and then, without asking, selected a
place upon my settee to lounge upon. Her graceful ease in a situation that,
for many, would be initially rife with tension was both apparent and
somewhat puzzling to me. She glanced casually about the room, taking in
its objects and features, then, momentarily satisfied, settled her gaze upon
me.
‘This isn’t easy,’ she smiled, looking perfectly relaxed.
I was overwhelmed by my sudden desire to point out the apparent
contradiction between her stance and her statement, even though I’d not
played such distracting games with clients for a number of years. Aware of
my unwillingness to allow her to be present with me in the manner that she
chose, I refrained from blurting out my comment and, instead, smiled back.
‘We have fifty minutes together,’ I babbled. ‘What we can do during that
time is to explore your relations with yourself and others. How you live in
your world. There’s nothing special that you have to say or do. Just listen to
yourself and go with that.’
‘No censorship, right?’ Amanda grinned. ‘“Just say whatever it is that
comes to your mind.” That’s what Dr Heusen, the therapist I used to see
with my family, always said.’
 Ah, the wisdom of Dr Heusen! I thought sarcastically, already
engaging in silent debate with him. ‘That’s not quite what I intended to
suggest. Just hear your own statements to yourself. If you want to say them
to me, that’s fine. But you’re under no obligation.’ Having completed my
spiel, I looked at Amanda. She seemed lost, confused. Hardly surprising.
Somehow, that moment of recognition and regret succeeded in galvanising
me. I felt a sudden shift in my attitude. For the first time that day, I found
the means to acknowledge and welcome her presence.
As if by magic, she asked: ‘Shall I tell you what it’s like for me to be
here, then?’
‘Sure, go ahead,’ I said, relieved.
‘I feel like I’m playing games! There’s so much I want to tell you, but
I’m being coy about it!’
‘And what’s it like to want to tell me things and be coy about it at the
same time?’
‘Frustrating.’
‘Okay. Can you try to express that frustration?’
‘You want me to make faces?’ Amanda asked somewhat nervously.
I laughed. Then, with obvious relief, she did as well. ‘Not necessarily,’
I replied. ‘What if I said to you to check out if there are any statements you
make to yourself when you describe your experience as being frustrating?’
‘Oh … Well, as soon as I said that it was frustrating I told myself that I
was being stupid and that I was wasting your time.’
‘And not yours?’
‘What?’
‘You said that part of your message to yourself was “I’m wasting his
time”. I wondered why just ‘his’ and not yours as well.’
Amanda pondered this challenge. ‘I never thought of it like that,’ she
finally said. ‘That’s what I always say.’
‘Ah … So that message isn’t so unusual to you, then? You feel
frustrated when you imagine that you’re wasting other people’s time? But
you don’t include ‘you’ in the time-wasting frustration?’
‘You know … that seems true to me. Like, if I feel that I’m wasting
time with my boyfriend, Michael, I always just think of him and feel bad
because I’m wasting his time. I just never stop to think that I might feel like
I’m wasting my time as well!’
‘Okay, ’I urged her. ‘Can you give me an example of this?’
‘With Michael?’
‘Yeah.’
Amanda blushed, then giggled. ‘Well, when we’re making love.’ She
paused, blushed and giggled once more.
‘Making love with you is a waste of time for Michael? Is that what
you’re saying?’
‘No!’ Another giggle. ‘No, what I mean is, when we make love it takes
me longer to … uhm … orgasm. And it doesn’t take Michael any time at
all! So I feel that I’m wasting his time. By being so slow, I mean.’
‘And you feel frustrated?’
‘Sexually, you mean?’
‘Sexually. Mentally. Whatever.’
‘Yeah! Both. In all ways.’
‘And you never feel frustrated that he orgasms so quickly. Only that
you’re so much slower.’
‘Yeah! And you know what?’
‘What?’
‘That’s what I wanted to tell you in the first place.’
We smiled in unison. ‘Well, now you have,’ I added. ‘And in your own
time.’
‘That feels right,’ Amanda announced. ‘I feel satisfied.’
The wider implications of Amanda’s last statement were left hovering.
I knew that I could have pushed her further at this point, that I had the
means to do so, but felt uneasy about it. Our dialogue had struck me as
sharing metaphorical resonances with the kind of ‘lovemaking’ she desired
to engage in with Michael. I felt the presence of a ‘sexual charge’ that I did
not presently want to highlight further. If Amanda had grasped similar
undercurrents and wished to explore this aspect of our encounter beyond the
point we’d reached, I would be willing to do so, but I wanted the choice to
be hers. As I thought about this, the first words that came to mind were:
‘It’s too soon in our relationship.’ Talk about innuendo!
 The question of sexuality in the therapeutic setting remains a vexing
one. In recent years, the issue of therapists’ abuse of their clients—be it
psychological, financial, or, most commonly, sexual—has become of
significant concern to therapists and public alike. That some therapists
abuse their clients is without doubt. Just what proportion of practitioners do
so, however, remains difficult to quantify. Existing research on the subject
has tended to rely upon voluntary, anonymous questionnaires supplied to
‘therapy providers’. On the assumption (and it is a big assumption!) that
respondents to these questionnaires have been honest, it would seem that
somewhere between 5 and 11 per cent of practising therapists have sexually
abused at least one of their clients.2 In the overwhelming number of cases, it
is a middle-aged male therapist who perpetrates sexual abuse upon his far-
younger female client.3 While some therapists have suggested that sexual
relations between themselves and their clients might be therapeutically
beneficial, the accumulated evidence suggests the opposite conclusion.4 The
consequences of therapist–client sexual relations are likely to be so
devastating to the client that, increasingly, all therapy training institutes and
accrediting or licensing bodies stipulate in no uncertain terms that the
discovery of such relations will lead to the therapist being struck off the
professional register to which he or she belongs, either temporarily or
permanently and, in an increasing number of instances, a civil suit and/or
trial in a court of law may follow.
Nevertheless, without wishing to minimise the importance of these
studies, and the significant issues of therapists’ abuse of power that they
raise, it seems to me that they fail to address a far more prevalent issue: the
question of attraction between therapist and client. Unlike sexual abuse,
attraction—and, in particular, the therapist’s experience of attraction
towards his or her client, cannot be policed or controlled. It happens. To
some therapists, it happens more regularly than to others, but I will go out
on a limb and assert that I believe it to happen to all therapists at some time
or other in their professional lives. Somehow, it seems to me, it would be
inhuman for it not to occur.
Whereas some therapists seek out ways to deal with differing
expressions of attraction towards their clients by ‘talking it out of their
system’ with their supervisors, and others interpret it as an instance of
‘counter-transference’, my own belief, as I have elaborated elsewhere, is
that, usually, the best way to deal with it is to acknowledge its presence as
one factor among many in one’s experience of encountering a client.5 This
is by no means an invitation for therapists to act upon their attraction—
quite the opposite, in fact. I have suggested that in allowing it to be,
therapists may actually gain the necessary means to avoid the temptation to
act upon it. Indeed, it might even prove useful to their attempt to enter the
client’s world of relations.6
While I do not intend to belabour this point, I raise it here merely
because the question of my possible attraction towards Amanda posed itself
to me and was further discussed in my meetings with my then current
supervisor. That I found her looks and physical appearance to be attractive
was without doubt. But did I find her—the ‘totality of her being’—to be
attractive? No, not really. In fact, quite the opposite. Not only for those
‘teenage’ reasons I mentioned before, but also (and much more pertinently)
because already, so early on in our first meeting, her stance, her presence,
had resonated strongly with my memories of my first long-term lover and
partner. It had taken me some years to get over the debacle of that
relationship and I knew full well that it had not been finally resolved. I felt
certain that, if I continued to work with Amanda, I would be confronted
with these persistent and disturbing reminders. Was I prepared to put up
with them?
Significantly, while the issue that had presented itself had seemed,
initially, to centre upon my possible attraction towards Amanda, it became
far more meaningful now to address the matter from its opposing
standpoint. If there was attraction, there was also present the desire to
disengage and remain distant from her. On reflection, I had already
experienced being tugged by these opposing stances during our initial
session!
Earlier, I mentioned the term counter-transference. While my dilemma
might appear initially to be an obvious example of this hypothesised
phenomenon, in that my consciously experienced concerns about my
relationship with Amanda could be said to be ‘actually’ about my
relationship with my ex-lover (and ‘unconsciously’about my relationship
with one or both of my parents), I am loathe to accept this conclusion. Like
other critics of this perspective, I have argued that terms like counter-
transference (and its counterpart, transference) impose a limited and
defensive outlook upon the complex relationship between therapist and
client.7 Briefly, if we accept their reality, then we are faced with the
conclusion that all relations are imbued with transferential and counter-
transferential elements. But, if this is so, then it is illogical to pick out and
elevate only certain instances of this universal constituent in human
relations unless this serves a purpose other than that which those who
employ these terms would have us (and themselves) believe. What might
this be? As a number of therapists have suggested, the invocation of
transference and counter-transference provides therapists with the means to
disown much of the impact of their currently lived encounter by
‘swamping’ it via the assumption that what is ‘really’ being experienced is
some ‘transferred’ material from either the therapist’s or the client’s past.
As an alternative view, I have argued that the existential-
phenomenological model inverts this contention by suggesting that while
there may well be resonances between the current event and any number of
remembered past events in either the therapist’s or client’s lives, the
principal value in noting such resonances lies in their ability to make more
explicit those values, beliefs and emotions that present themselves in the
current encounter between therapist and client.8
Considered within the context of my encounter with Amanda, what
this view suggests is that the evoked memories of my failed romance
resonated with my perceptions of what was occurring between Amanda and
me. If I could be willing and able to ‘hold’ both as equal constituents of my
current experience, then, hopefully, I might gain more adequate access into
Amanda’s world-view as it expressed itself through the relationship that
existed between us. To have sought to rid myself of such resonances, or to
have allowed my memories to minimise or swamp the impact of our
encounter by invoking the hypothesis of counter-transference, however,
would have been a self-serving enterprise that would impose unnecessary
and potentially destructive limitations upon our relationship. I would be far
less open to her ‘being’ in that I would fail to hear her as adequately as I
could, either because I would block out those statements that might remind
me of my past or because I would hear them primarily from the meaning-
perspective of the past.
The great risk for therapists who attempt to practise therapy from an
existential-phenomenological standpoint is that, in their undertaking to
clarify or make more open the implicit assumptions, values, and anxieties
which infuse the meaning-world of their clients, they are, in turn, inevitably
exposed to any number of implicit constructs that make up and maintain
their own worldview. So, in deciding to continue to work with Amanda, I
was also aware that something of my own ‘world order’ was likely to be
shaken. That I could guess that it would probably link into values and
beliefs that were being maintained, at least in part, with those resonant
memories of my failed relationship was not enough to assuage the
awareness that I would be taking a leap into the unknown. If this risk
worried me, I reminded myself, it was worthwhile recalling that it was also
what therapists routinely ask of their clients!
Throughout our next four meetings, Amanda elaborated upon what she
took to be the principal details and travails of her life. Her parents had come
from widely differing social backgrounds. Her father had been the only
child of a well-to-do family based in Hertfordshire who had gone to a
public school and read history at Cambridge. Amanda’s mother had been
the fifth in a workingclass family of eight children living in a four-room
council flat in Leeds. They had met at the 1969 Isle of Wight Music Festival
and, like so many others, had engaged in wild, passionate, drug enhanced
lovemaking throughout the weekend, at the end of which they had casually
exchanged addresses, hardly expecting to see each other again. Three
months later, they were married and expecting their first child, Amanda,
whom, as they insisted upon reminding her, they had conceived during the
long wait for Bob Dylan’s appearance. Initially ostracised by both families,
Amanda’s parents had moved to London, whereupon, following a series of
menial jobs, her father managed to become involved in forming a ‘youth-
oriented’ travel firm that bussed its concert and festival hungry customers to
their desired sites and concert halls. The business became a great financial
success and, expanding its outlook and concerns, subsequently established
itself as a leading agency for independent travellers wishing to be taken to
remote and ‘undiscovered’ parts of the world. Amanda’s brother had been
born two years following her own birth and the family now lived in a large,
attractive house in Islington—one of Central London’s more desirable
boroughs.
Amanda described herself as ‘moody and introverted, in a kind of
“Late Victorian Romantic” sort of way’. She immersed herself in novels
and films, ‘practically lived at’ the Tate Gallery, and, like her father,
planned to read history when she went to university. She described her
parents as being ‘quite liberal’ in that they smoked cannabis, went on CND
marches and generally supported socialist causes. Amanda, on the other
hand, having lived much of her life under the influence of Mrs Thatcher’s
government, saw herself as being far more conservative in her social,
political and moral outlooks. While, for instance, her parents had
encouraged her to ‘express her sexuality’, and reassured her that they would
not mind if she brought boyfriends home, she felt ill-at-ease in discussing
such matters with them and could not contemplate the idea of having sex
with her partner while knowing that her parents were indoors ‘probably
walking around the house in the nude as they seem to enjoy doing’. Not that
she was a prude about sexuality, she clarified; rather, she saw making love
as a private and special activity, and not something for the whole family to
‘discuss and evaluate at dinner-time’.
Nevertheless, the topic to which Amanda persisted in returning during
our discussions was her sexual life. And, while she revealed some
hesitation, even embarrassment, at times in speaking about this, it was no
more than would be expressed by anyone who found himself or herself
relating intimate material to a relative stranger.
Amanda had begun having sexual relations with boyfriends at the age
of fifteen. Before that, she had not ‘really thought much about her body or
her sexuality’ and could not recall experiencing sexual arousal or engaging
in masturbation. Once she’d begun, however, sex became her central
concern in life. She’d read everything she could find upon the topic, from
historical and psychoanalytic treatises to ‘trashy fiction’ and regularly, if
secretly, ‘borrowed’ from her brother’s collection of pornographic
magazines and videos. She found all such material highly arousing and,
when alone, now masturbated frequently. She had met her current
boyfriend, Michael, at a party some five months earlier and had ‘instantly
fallen in love with him’. Although twenty-five, and significantly older than
her, Michael had had far less sexual experience than Amanda—a fact that
she had greatly enjoyed, revelling in her ability to both arouse and lead him
in experimenting with novel, sometimes near-acrobatic, sexual positions.
As she spoke more about her relationship with Michael, Amanda
found herself better able to express her own disappointments and
dissatisfactions regarding their sexual encounters. She wondered whether
they were incompatible as lovers in spite of their eminent suitability in all
other respects.
As our meetings progressed, however, Amanda began to voice the
view that the issue of the differences between her and Michael’s
lovemaking ‘style’ was quite superficial and that it served to obscure
something far more significant. Amanda felt that Michael glorified and
idolised her body far too much. So far, indeed, that she had begun to
wonder whether that was the main—if not the only—source of his interest
toward her.
This insight led Amanda to the examination of her own views toward
her body and here she revealed a number of contradictory attitudes.
Amanda disliked the shape and size of her body and felt ill-at-ease with it.
She felt that it did not ‘fit’ her in that she believed that her ‘true’ body-
shape was much fuller, fleshier, than the one that she was ‘stuck with’. At
the same time, she recognised that this ‘unnatural’ body was the type that
was highly attractive to most men— Michael included—and that if she
were to gain the body she desired, she would not be seen to be so obviously
desirable to them. Because the body she ‘inhabited’ was not really hers as
far as she was concerned, she felt able to treat it with some disdain. This she
expressed in terms of her ability to both ‘flaunt it about’ and ‘abuse’ it
through her ‘sexual experimentations’ both with men and by herself. In
addition, she insisted upon referring to it as ‘this’or ‘that’ body, rather than
apply any possessive pronouns. In this way, while she acknowledged her
relationship to it, she could also simultaneously maintain a stance of
disownership.
When she had first met Michael, Amanda had been initially attracted
to his aloofness towards her. He had seemed very much at ease with
himself, clear as to the direction that his life was taking, unconcerned as to
whether or not he had a partner. Michael’s independence, maturity, and
commitment to his own values and goals had stimulated her interest in him.
More, she had begun to invest some hope that she had at last found a man
who, while not immune to her physical appearance, was not so completely
swayed by it as had been her previous boyfriends. Even so, fearful that
Michael would remain uninterested in her, Amanda had eventually relied
upon ‘that’ body, and the ‘wild and unbridled sexuality’ she was able to
express through it, in order to provoke sufficient interest toward her for
Michael to ask her out and, subsequently, to become her boyfriend.
Amanda had employed the body she felt had been incorrectly given
her as the principal means to attract Michael, all the while hoping that
following this initial attraction he would eventually become attracted to the
person who expressed herself through that body. Except, things had begun
to go wrong.
As Amanda expressed it: ‘Because I wasn’t patient enough, or sure
enough in myself, my plan seems to have backfired! And now I think that
all he really cares about and loves is this body!’
‘And if “that” body were to change to something more like you wish it
to be …’ I sought to clarify.
‘I think he’d stop caring!’ Amanda asserted.
‘And yet when you first told me about you and Michael, I remember
you saying that you were both so compatible, such good friends. How does
this fit with what you’re saying now?’
‘I think that he’s taken on my interests and things because it’s part of
his worship of this body. Do you see? I’m not saying he’s lying or
pretending, not in any thought-out way at least. He’s just so in love with
what he sees that he’s willing to accept anything associated with it.’
Amanda paused, then, expressing her distress, added: ‘And he’s being
destroyed by it. He hasn’t got that selfassuredness he had when we first
met. He’s too keen to please me!’
‘As in your sexual relations.’
‘Yes! It’s like he has to please me sexually, make me come. He just
tries so hard. So if he orgasms before I do—which he does all the time,
anyway—he’ll do things with his hands and tongue until he imagines I’ve
been satisfied. He can just keep at it for hours! And I feel under such
pressure by it all that I can’t enjoy what he’s doing enough to orgasm.’
‘So … what happens then?’
Amanda began to cry in response to my question. I had intended it as a
preliminary prod towards her clarification about both her expressed sense of
frustration and her implied experience of guilt for having been the
perceived catalyst to his ‘destruction’. She, however, understood it to mean
‘So, what do you do sexually?’
‘That’s the bad part,’ she confessed, sniffling. ‘I start to think of other
men so that I can get aroused enough to forget about Michael and imagine
that I’m with someone else. It’s like I’m masturbating, not making love
with Michael. But at least it gets me to orgasm.’
‘At a price.’
 ‘It’s awful! I feel like I’m being unfaithful to him practically every
night! Which is what makes me wonder whether I really should stick things
out with Michael or maybe give it up and search for another boyfriend.’
‘Who might just see the “real” you rather than just—’
‘This bloody body! Yeah!’ Amanda completed.
A suspicion formed itself in my thoughts. ‘And might there be a
candidate somewhere?’ I asked.
Oh yes. There was a teacher. An older man who’d taken an interest in
her history projects and whom she was seeing for additional tuition in order
to have more of a chance of being offered a place at one of the more
desirable Cambridge colleges. This somewhat shadowy figure, whom
Amanda at first refused to even name on the (extremely unlikely) off-
chance that I might know him, became an increasingly prominent topic of
discussion during the next six sessions. The focus of her concerns was
whether or not she and Donald (for that was the tutor’s name) would
eventually become lovers and what effect this event would have upon her
and her relationship with Michael. Amanda was highly attracted to Donald
and admitted that she now mainly thought of him when making love with
Michael. She found that this activity aroused her significantly to the extent
that it led to her experiencing quicker and more intense orgasms. While she
had no complaints about this aspect of the matter, its consequences were
that Michael, on the assumption, she supposed, that they were becoming
increasingly compatible as lovers, had become even more sexually
demanding and appreciative of ‘that’ body. Unknown to Michael, however,
this very response was the worst possible as far as Amanda was concerned.
For, not only did it confirm for her that Michael loved not her but ‘that’
body, it also intensified her experience of guilt with regard to her ‘mental
unfaithfulness’. Indeed, Amanda expressed the view that as she was already
being unfaithful to Michael ‘in her mind’, this was far more significant than
any physical act that might occur with Donald.
Even so, unfaithful or not, there remained an unease in taking things
further with Donald. In discussing this with her, it became evident that
Amanda both wanted and did not want a physical relationship with him.
While remaining in this state of unexpressed desire, she could persist in
maintaining the belief that Donald was principally interested in her and not
in the body that Michael continued to worship. At the same time, Amanda
believed that Donald’s interest in, and appreciation of, her required its
physical expression. As much as she desired and fantasised over this
eventuality, she also dreaded it since, she saw, it threatened to turn Donald
into an older version of Michael.
As much as she agonised over these issues and concerns, Amanda was
honest enough to admit to herself and to me that she also, strangely, gloried
in them. She felt herself to be utterly alive through the experience and
enjoyed immensely the discoveries she made of herself, her sexuality, and
her ability to tease and dominate men. It was, she admitted, ‘like being an
addict’ for, while she punished and chastised herself for doing what she did
when she thought of her actions, the desire to repeat and maintain her
behaviour was too strong to give up. In addition, she admitted, she found
herself wallowing in the pleasure of conveying this to me. Just talking about
her ‘escapades’ during our sessions brought her intense satisfaction and
aroused her to such levels that, she confessed, she was provoked to engage
in extended night-time masturbatory activity whenever she had the
opportunity.
At the start of our nineteenth session together, Amanda appeared
clutching a brown manilla A4-size envelope. Sitting down, she placed it on
her lap and immediately began to recount the events of a day she had spent
together with Donald. Having noticed on the previous occasions that she
had been in Donald’s flat for her tuition classes that numerous framed
photographs of both nature and figure studies hung upon its walls, she had
inquired about these and had discovered that photography was his principal
hobby. Partially feigning interest in this, she had managed to convince
Donald to allow her to model for him. Initially hesitant, Donald had finally
agreed and they had had a session where eventually she had posed for some
nude studies. The shoot had gone well and Donald had even given her some
copies of the pictures—copies which she had brought for me to see. Would
I like to?
A number of clients with whom I had worked prior to my encounters
with Amanda had, at times, brought paintings or family and holiday snaps
for me to see. I had been happy to comply with such requests because they
provided an important means for us to examine various aspects of their
‘world-relations’ in an immediate and concrete manner. In this instance,
however, I experienced a sense of unease. While there may well have been
some sort of therapeutic value in our looking at Amanda’s photographs
there was also, for me at least, a strong voyeuristic element in the
enterprise. At the same time, I was aware of the illogicality of this
viewpoint. Amanda had already discussed and detailed with me all manner
of sexual incidents in her life whose explicit nature was both obvious and at
least as ‘mentally voyeuristic’ as anything that might appear on the photos.
I had not felt bothered or disturbed by such descriptions. Why was I now
balking at this particular proposal?
It occurred to me that one partial difference lay in the fact that in
listening to Amanda’s accounts of her sexual life, the ‘input’ I received
always contained Amanda’s interpretation of the events being recounted.
My first glance at the photographs, however, would be bereft of this vital
element so its therapeutic value might become more suspect. While this
very concern had not bothered me, or even occurred to me, in previous
instances of my clients’ uses of photos and drawings—although, in essence,
the issue was the same—this time, I felt that the material was simply too
charged. I am willing to admit that it was (and remains) my limitation as a
therapist (and a person) not to be able to treat nude photographs of my
clients in the same way as I might treat their pictures of holiday vistas and
family gatherings. Nevertheless, in being aware, I did not/ do not maintain
the illusion that I could approach an adequate stance of ‘unknowing’
towards them.
In addition, I suspected that Amanda’s desire to show me the photos
was not primarily intended to allow her to express novel aspects of her
relationship with Donald but, more likely, to test me as yet another man in
her life whose reactions to her body she wished to bring out into the open.
If these suspicions were valid, alternative means to expose and explore
Amanda’s intent were available to us.
Well aware that my reply might be read by her as being defensive (and
that she might be at least partially correct in this assessment!) I answered: ‘I
really don’t think that I want to see the photos. But what I’m curious about
is what you want me to see them for.’
‘They’re nice pictures,’ she answered glumly.
‘Anything else?’ I pressed.
‘Should there be?’
‘How do you think I would react to seeing nude photos of you?’
‘Of this body, you mean,’ she corrected.
 ‘Yes, you’re right,’ I conceded. ‘Of this body.’
‘You’d see what Donald and Michael were so in love with.’
‘And what would you see?’ I queried.
She smiled. ‘I’d see what you thought of it?’
‘And what do you suppose I’d think of it?’
‘That it was attractive.’
‘Okay. So, suppose I saw the photos and expressed my view as to that
body being attractive?’
Amanda paused, then looked away from me. ‘I’d be disappointed,’ she
admitted.
I was touched by what I took to be her admirable honesty. ‘You want
to show me pictures that will succeed in making you feel disappointed in
me,’ I reflected.
‘Yes,’ she barely whispered.
‘So what’s that about?’
‘I don’t want to be,’ Amanda explained. ‘But I think I will be.’
‘As with Michael?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Donald?’
‘Yes,’ she whimpered, and then began to cry unconsolably. Eventually,
she mumbled: ‘He’s no different. I destroyed what there was that was good
between us. Now, he’s just after this body as well!’
Clarifying her last point further, Amanda confessed that she and
Donald had become lovers following the photographic session. While she
had found the experience highly sexually exciting, she had subsequently
‘slumped into complete despair’ at the loss of the relationship they had
previously been able to maintain and which she now felt was no longer
possible.
‘And this is what you want to happen between us, as well?’ I pressed.
‘I don’t want it to. But I think it’ll happen.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well, you’re a man after all.’ She blushed.
‘And the fact that I’m a man …’
‘Means that you’ll be far more attracted to this body than to me!’ she
completed.
 ‘And what will that say to you?’
‘That this body is just too powerful. That it can corrupt anyone. Even
you. And that it’ll stop anyone from noticing me!’
I sighed. ‘Well,’ I muttered, ‘I guess that we have to put this to the test,
then. If you want to, I’m prepared to look at the pictures.’ My decision had
been spontaneous. I had no idea how I would react. It seemed as though all
of our work together now hung in the balance.
‘No!’ Amanda shouted. A moment later, she began to rip up the still
unopened envelope, tearing it, and its contents, to shreds. She began to cry
once more.
‘Thank you,’ I said, feeling both grateful and relieved.
She immediately looked up at me, somewhat surprised by what she’d
heard.
‘It seems to me that what you just did demonstrates that you’re not so
powerless over that body as you think you are,’ I suggested.
Her face registered a mixture of solace and vexation.
‘What are you thinking, Amanda?’
‘I suppose I’m thinking that if what you just said was right, then those
things that I blamed this body for weren’t really its fault. Maybe I just
wanted things to happen as they did.’
‘And if you did? What would that say to you?’
‘That I’m badder than I thought I was!’
‘I can see that conclusion. And it also seems to me that if you followed
through with that, it might further lead you to conclude that this body
wasn’t quite so alien as you imagined. Maybe it belongs more to you than
you’d like it to.’
‘It’s my body, you mean?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure I want it to be.’
‘Does that mean something different to you than “it isn’t mine”?’
‘Yeah. I suppose so,’ she admitted.
We had reached an important point in our therapy together. While I
could be wrong, and have no means of verifying my view, I remain
convinced that had we not confronted directly Amanda’s continuing
uncertainty as to whether I was someone who just might have cared more
for her than for her body, then further therapy with me would not have been
of significant value to her. Amanda’s decision to trust me in maintaining a
relationship with her that respected and focused upon her experience rather
than her looks, and to remain open to the implications of her shift in attitude
towards her relationship with her body, was a leap of faith on her part. The
remainder of the session expressed in silence our mutual sense of having
been quite genuinely and significantly moved by one another.
I must now attempt to express something of my own experience during
our encounters. As I mentioned earlier in this discussion, Amanda’s
relations to herself and to her boyfriend, Michael, had provoked strong
reminders for me of my own long-ago relationship with a girlfriend whom I
shall refer to as Jane. I had been struck by the similarity in appearance and
attitude between Amanda and Jane and, more pertinently, by the resonances
between the problems of Amanda and Michael and those of Jane and
myself.
Like Michael, I had ‘glorified’ Jane’s physical appearance and had
attempted to worship it as well as I could. While this act on my part had
been both accepted and valued by Jane throughout most of our life together,
it had been precisely this stance that she would subsequently insist had been
the principal cause of the breakdown in our relationship.
Jane asserted that I had ‘used her’ through her body, that I had never
truly known nor understood her as she was, only as the ‘attractive physical
creature’ whom I’d invented for my own purposes. Having seen into this
‘game’, she had turned to other, more respectful, men with whom, she
revealed, she’d experienced far more satisfactory relationships, not merely
sexually, but in all ways, because she’d felt valued and accepted as a human
being.
I, on the other hand, had rebelled at this view of our relationship. I
argued that while she was right in asserting that I’d found her to be highly
attractive, this attraction was not simply limited to her body. Had I not been
a caring, attentive, ‘liberated’ man who had treated her as an equal in all
manner of ways? What had I done wrong? What more could she have asked
of me? And, in any case, when it came down to it, all of her talk of my
attitude toward her body and her resentment of this only seemed to have
arisen when she had met the man with whom she now hinted she might
begin an affair. Who was she kidding?
 Our argument led us to the edge of violence. We screamed at each
other, cried, sulked, made desperate love, but we could not regain the will to
persevere with our relationship. Little by little, we separated from one
another, Jane moving to another city, I staying where I was in a house and
room that served to remind me day and night of what I took to be my failure
and her treachery.
In spite of the passage of time, regardless of insights and new
experiences, much less the blessing of far better, far more honest,
relationships in my life, I had never fully forgiven Jane. Indeed, I had
learned to live with the assumption that I never would. Not surprisingly,
while I had not seen nor heard from her for over a decade, her presence had
persisted over the years to the point where I could still pass away long
stretches of time analysing and dissecting our failed romance, still
experience the flush of lingering emotions that unsettled and distracted me.
In doing so, I had managed to maintain the view of myself as ‘suffering
victim’, and, in turn, I had constructed an account of Jane’s ‘pathology’ that
rested upon several now conveniently remembered instances drawn from
various points in our relationship.
Jane had never felt at ease with the idea of ‘being faithful’ (in all
senses of that word) to just one other person. She had attempted to explain
this to me by employing terms that evoked notions of ‘freedom’, ‘life in the
moment’, and ‘confronting oneself ’. All of which I had the tendency to
dismiss as aspects of the ‘existentialist clap-trap’ that so intrigued her but
which had, thus far, failed to enchant me. More to the point, I persisted,
revealing my then current psychoanalytically derived allegiances, surely
what pleased and excited her was all the self-centred attention she received
and which reflected un-met needs from her infancy. Jane insisted that I was
wrong, that it had nothing to do either with infantile needs or with sexual
gratification, but with her desire to remain open to her experiences of life.
Our differing views failed to allow a ‘meeting’ between us and, in all
instances until the last, Jane eventually came round to ‘choosing’ me. I had
‘won’, I told myself. Then why had I so blatantly failed to win on the
occasion that had mattered most? This question had remained to bother me
over all the years that had passed since Jane had left. And now, in my
therapy with Amanda, it had cropped up again.
For whatever reason, my attempt to attend to Amanda succeeded in
provoking me to re-address this conundrum from another, novel,
perspective. For the first time, I refused to take the easy route of
pathologising Jane’s behaviour and actually began to approach it from the
stance that she had sought to have me consider. In attempting this, I began
to challenge my own previously deeply held (or sedimented) position. I
began to see that my worship of Jane had focused principally upon her body
not merely because I construed it to be attractive but because, through it, I
had been able to convince myself of my own attractiveness and desirability.
In losing Jane, my self-construct could not be maintained. Yet, in a
desperate attempt to prevent it from crumbling, I began to seek to seduce
any and every woman who appeared in my vicinity regardless of who she
might be or how long I had known her. That my experiences had tended to
be unfulfilling, at times even nauseating, had mattered less to me than the
fact that I had had them and that I could weigh them up against the
persistent doubts I retained regarding my own and others’ perceptions of
my desirability. Admitting this, I somewhat hesitantly began to conclude
that Jane’s assertion that I had never known nor wanted her held more truth
than I’d previously wanted to accept.
In similar fashion, I began to reconsider Jane’s dilemma in a new light.
Perhaps, like Amanda, Jane had wanted to be seen—and to see herself—as
more than just an attractive body. While she might have appreciated the
worship bestowed upon it, was it not likely that alongside such appreciation
there might also be elements of discontent, possibly even disgust, at being
so limited in her existential possibilities? And, if she experienced such
restrictions in her relations with those around her, would she not yearn to
test other, novel, possibilities in the hope that someday, somehow, someone
might finally accept her and thus allow her the means to self-acceptance?
This stance not only corresponded with the one being currently
expressed by Amanda, it also highlighted her predicament: Amanda’s
divided stance toward her body expressed her recognition that whatever
tenuous sense of self-worth she was able to maintain both depended upon,
and was limited by, her body-construct. She believed that she required ‘that’
body in order that others would value her. Yet, she also knew that what
others valued was not ‘her’ as she believed herself to be. In response to this
awareness, Amanda had sought to disown her body, referring to it as ‘that’
body, despising it as false, imbuing it with the power to destroy her
relationships with men. At the same time, she retained an unshakeable faith
in the existence of her ‘true’ body, which remained unable to substantiate
itself since to do so, she believed, would deny her the appreciation that she
craved and could only obtain, however unsatisfactorily, through the false
body so admired by the world.
As I argued with regard to the hypothesis of counter-transference, it
would have been, at best, limiting for me to have understood Amanda’s
attempt to ‘seduce’ me as being merely an example of her ‘transference’
towards me. I did not represent an ‘other’ in her world, I was an ‘other’—
an ‘other’ who appeared to accept and value her yet who might well have
been like all the others in her world in that it was ‘that’ body that I was truly
interested in. What could she do except put me to the test? That I ‘passed’ it
allowed her to acknowledge not only that an ‘other’ could value her, but,
just as significantly, that she could begin to value who she was—even if
who she was was a being whose body was ‘that’ body.
This crucial insight emerged out of our shared willingness to take the
risk of encountering one another and to face up to what existed between us.
In this, the step we both took was one of un-knowing.
For me, my attempt to attend to Amanda and seek entry into her
worldview provoked a personal challenge in that, in order to more
adequately experience Amanda’s way of being with regard to her various
relations with men, her body, and, ultimately, her self-construct, I was
confronted with the necessity of desedimenting my fixed stance towards my
memories and beliefs about my failed relationship with Jane and the causes
or explanations underlying that event. This, I could only begin to achieve if
I was willing to ‘let go’ of my previously fixed perspective on the matter
and seek to provide equal value to Jane’s perspective. This very willingness
and attempt provided the means whereby a new, if painful, truth was
allowed to emerge.
For Amanda, the challenge of our encounter permitted her to view me
as both a representative of all the ‘others’ (including all the other men) in
her world, and an alternative possibility with regard to her beliefs about
others’ views of her. Amanda inhabited a world that seemed bounded by the
shape and contours, and desirability, of bodies. Her parents and brother
constantly reminded her of this, as did her boyfriends, as did she, herself.
She had learned that what the world appreciates and values is a body of a
certain shape that can be put to satisfactory sexual use. Indeed, she had
learned the lesson so well that it had become her own fixed stance, her own
arbiter of her self-worth.
 And yet, she also rebelled against this stance. Her lived experience
provided her with contradictory messages: on the one hand, it told her that
it was not enough to be judged and appreciated simply as a body. On the
other, it demonstrated to her over and over again that that was precisely the
one way that others did judge and appreciate her. In sedimenting her beliefs
about others, Amanda was able to construct a self who could disown her
body, who maintained a relationship toward it that was akin to slave or
addict. If there was pain in her beliefs being proved correct time after time
by others, at least that pain provided the proof that allowed her to maintain
her constructs.
The fundamental challenge that our meeting provided for Amanda was
that it offered a counter-example to her fixed beliefs not only about others,
but also about the self that she maintained. In accepting that I did not value
her just for ‘that’ body, she was able to begin to re-own that self-same body
and change her relationship to it.
But whatever Amanda and I gained or discovered as separate persons
could not have come about in the way that it did other than through the
relationship we had, which, via its differing challenges to each of us,
allowed an opening, an un-knowing, in one another’s sedimented values
and beliefs. Through that relationship, each of us saw novel possibilities,
new perspectives, being pointed out. And, in reaching for them, significant
facets of our relations with others in our lives, and with our sense of self,
ceased being unquestionable and impermeable to change.
Some readers might wonder at this point whether it would have been
more honest of me, and of more (or quicker) benefit to Amanda, if I had
disclosed to her my working through of the issues between Jane and me and
their resonance with her concerns. While I have argued in favour of a
particular form of therapist disclosure elsewhere,9 in this instance I cannot
see what value any explication of my failed relationship with Jane would
have had. On the other hand, I can imagine several negative possibilities:
that I had seen such resonances should not lead us to assume that Amanda,
too, would see them. She might well have construed any number of
alternative meanings in my account. For, while we each learn from one
another, what we learn may be (and often is) quite dissimilar.
My subsequent sessions with Amanda proved to be both easier and far
less personally challenging. Her tentative discovery that her body might not
be so alien and that she could find the means to ‘own’ it proved to be a
crucial step in her therapy.
To be sure, this acceptance provoked new problems for Amanda. Over
the next several months, many changes occurred in her life which I can only
summarise here. Not long after taking her first faltering steps toward
developing a new relationship with her body, Amanda decided to end both
her relationship with Michael and her affair with Donald. For a period of
time, she embarked upon a series of casual sexual relationships. Indeed,
during this period her obsession with sex intensified to extreme proportions.
She found herself fantasising about sex almost continuously to the point
where virtually every stranger—male and female—whom she met or saw
on the street became an object of lust for her and a spur, however
momentary, for her masturbatory rituals. During this time, as well, Amanda
revealed that in some instances I, too, became her sexual focuspoint.
While these revelations, taken out of their context, might strike one as
being worrying, they served a significant purpose for Amanda. For, in
opening to the possibility of her being attracted to any number of people,
regardless of age, gender, and body-shape, she was also able to maintain an
openness to the prospect that she, too, could be attractive regardless of the
way she appeared. She expressed this insight in a most physical manner by
quite literally experimenting with her body-shape, adding and losing
weight, immersing herself in a life of strenuous exercise or utmost
indolence. Eventually, this experimentation began to settle down and, with
its settling, Amanda came to terms with a body-image that approached a
balance between that which she desired and that which she judged others
would find sufficiently desirable.
Eventually, about a third of the way into our second year of weekly
meetings, Amanda announced that she had decided to stop therapy for the
time being. She and a close girl-friend had agreed to discontinue their
studies for a year in order that they could embark upon a temporary career
as tour managers for her father’s company. In this way, she would be able to
travel all over the world at virtually no cost.
At first, the enterprise seemed somewhat pointless and superficial to
me. But then, she was nineteen. The world beckoned. She was young and I
was not. I wished her well.
‘I’ll send you lots of postcards,’ she promised.
 I never received any.

1. Nietzsche, F. (1961) Thus Spoke Zarathustra, (R.J. Hollingdale, trans). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Walter Kaufmann’s Discovering the Mind: Volume two, 1980, New York: McGraw-Hill, contains a fascinating overview of Nietzsche’s ideas as contrasted to those of Martin
Heidegger and Martin Buber.
2. Llewelyn, S. (1992) ‘The sexual abuse of clients by therapists’, paper delivered to the British Psychological Society Annual Conference.
3. Szymanska K. and Palmer, S. (1993) Therapist–client sexual contact. Counselling Psychology Review 8, 4: 22–33.
4. Ibid.
5. See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.
6. Ibid.
7. Shlien, J. M. (1984) A counter-theory of transference. In R. Levant and J.M. Shlien (eds) Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach. New York: Praeger.
Reprinted in J.M. Shlien (2003) To Lead an Honorable Life: Invitations to think about Client-Centered Therapy and the Person-Centered Approach (pp. 93–119). Ross-on-Wye:
PCCS Books.. Smith, D.L. (1991) Hidden Conversations: An introduction to communicative psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
8. See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.
9. Spinelli, E. (1995) On disclosure. Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 6.1: 2–19.
 3
The Royal Road

A couple of years before his death, one of my own relatives, Jim, began to
inhabit two quite distinct time ‘zones’. While, most frequently, he
experienced himself being alive in the then current year of 1993, every once
in a while, he would, somehow, slip back in time to a period fifty years
earlier.
Jim was approaching his eightieth birthday when these ‘slips in time’
began. At the time, he was living with his wife in a comfortable council flat
in the London suburbs, where, as a retired couple, they managed to
maintain a reasonably decent lifestyle. One day, he was found wandering in
a daze up and down a street some distance from his home. When asked by
passers-by if he needed assistance, he managed to mumble out that he had
lost his way and wanted to get back to his home. Unfortunately, Jim insisted
that his home was in Ireland. How had he got here? He had no idea. As he
had, by now, become disturbed and befuddled, the police were called in and
he was driven to the local station. Eventually, having compiled the relevant
information, the police called up his wife who appeared some twenty
minutes later together with his GP.
Once he had been escorted back, under near-violent protestation, to his
council flat, it quickly emerged that Jim appeared to be existing
simultaneously in two time ‘zones’. For, while he was clearly able to
recognise his immediate environment and, when questioned, was willing to
admit that this was his current home, at the same time, he continued to
insist that he lived in Ireland and that he wanted to get back home to his
wife who must surely be wondering what had happened to him.
In response to the GP’s reassurances that his wife was right there in the
room with him, Jim became increasingly agitated and claimed that they
were all mad, that his wife was a young woman. Then, gazing more
carefully at the anxious woman in front of him, he declared her to be his
mother and would not change his mind over this despite his wife’s
increasingly vehement protests that she was his spouse and that he hadn’t
lived in Ireland for at least fifty years.
What made the scenario significantly odder was that when Jim’s GP
sought to convince him that his mother had died some twenty years earlier,
he accepted this information matter-of-factly, stating: ‘Of course she has.
We all went to her funeral, it was a wonderful sunny day …’ Yet, when his
wife made the same statement, Jim insisted that she must be crazy since
there she was in front of him, playing some sort of cruel game, and why
could she not admit that she was still alive and come back home with him to
Ireland where they both belonged? Eventually, tiring of having to repeat
himself several times and discerning that he was getting nowhere, Jim
became physically violent and verbally abusive, cursing everyone present
while attempting to wrest himself free from their hold and demanding that
he be let go to return to his wife and home.
As a last resort, Jim was sedated and a decision was made for him to
stay overnight at the local hospital. The following morning, he seemed once
again able to recognise his wife in her current incarnation and was returned
home. However, from that point onward, every few weeks or so, for no
apparent reason, Jim would ‘slip back’ into this unusual mental state where
he experienced himself as simultaneously inhabiting two quite separate time
‘zones’ wherein his wife became his mother once more and his home was in
Ireland, not London. During such instances, while his relations with others
remained in ‘current time’, in the presence of his wife, he seemed to be
propelled back into his distant past.
I am no specialist in genetic or biochemical disorders of the brain, so I
cannot say with all the apparent certainty shown by his GP, that Jim was
suffering from a form of dementia. However, I find it hard to grasp the
notion of a purely physical disorder of this type possessing the specificity of
focus that is triggered off only in a highly selective number of catalytic
circumstances such as the presence of one’s spouse.
My own infrequent conversations with Jim during these occasions led
me to suspect that his fixed return to this same past time in his life was not
haphazard. Rather, by his own account, this period had been a particularly
tumultuous one for him since it had been a time when his relationship with
his mother had been severely strained due a number of concerns centred
upon matters of inheritance that would never be resolved to his satisfaction.
Just as significantly, I believe, during his ‘turns’, Jim regained a physical
and mental strength and dexterity that had been seemingly lost to him for a
good many years. He may have been bellicose, argumentative, even a
danger to himself and others, but he also became infused with a spirit of
youth so alive and untamed that no one around him could dismiss or deny
it. On such occasions, as well, he would speak of his relationship with his
wife (current to him, yet fifty years in the past). He confided candidly, even
lecherously, about their life together, their love and attraction towards one
another, their adventures during the war. If the times had been disturbing,
they had also been full of excitement and laughter.
As I considered all this, I began to contrast Jim’s experience in each
time zone. One, made up of an everyday life full of drudgery, medication,
and the solitude that emerges when a couple can no longer find anything of
worth to share with one another, was in the present. The other was fifty
years earlier when those significant others in his life who had died
physically (like his mother) or spiritually (like his wife) were once again
fully alive for him, just as he was fully alive for them. In this world of
simultaneous past and present, personal meaning, loving contact and the
pleasure of being alive were regained, if not completely, at least in part.
And, in regaining them, Jim could allay the emptiness and solitude in his
current life, he could deny that the woman he married, once so alive and
passionate, was now a near-dead burden, more akin to his mother than to
the person he continued to invoke and attempted to return to in their
original home. Perhaps, through the simultaneity of time, Jim managed to
become once again the person he knew he had been, and could be.
While, in its extremity, this brief account may seem both disturbing
and unusual, I suggest that it might also highlight a feature of lived time that
is perhaps far more common to us all than we would normally suppose. For,
just as several of the therapeutic tales discussed in this book present
instances of experiential dissociation which, I have suggested, can be linked
to deeply fixed, or sedimented, values, beliefs, and stances that identify the
self-construct, so, too, is the self-construct maintained and validated by the
remembered past.
I have elaborated upon this point elsewhere, but, in brief, what I am
suggesting is that the past, as we remember it, has little to do with causal or
determining factors that have in some way made, or influenced, us as we
are today. Rather, the remembered past provides us with the means to
maintain, or validate, who we are today and to give focus and direction to
who we might wish to become at some future point in time.1
A great many theoretical models advocated by therapists assume that
the past is a causal determinant of current states of both order and disorder
in their clients’ lives. As such, their focus of therapy, at least initially, lies in
a backward-movement that tries to uncover the causal origins of current
client distress with the aim of making such origins clearer. So prevalent are
such notions of the past that it must be further acknowledged that many
clients themselves hold to these assumptions and perceive the task of the
therapist as being that of uncovering the issues and influences of their past
upon their current lives so that the conflicts and concerns that have arisen
from, or which have been aggravated by, the past can be at least partially
resolved.
The origins of this view within therapy can be traced back directly to
the ideas of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and the first
modern therapist. However, it is evident upon reading Freud that his own
view of causality acknowledged (however implicitly) its complexity. While
Freud maintained the belief that the causal origins of his patients’ disorders
lay in very early infantile experiences, it is important to note that not one of
his own case study examples provides readers with a completely resolved
explication of the initial or ‘originating cause’ to the current dysfunction.
Rather, Freud’s own work can be read to suggest that the ‘causality’ we
impose upon our lives expresses what we believe to have been a necessary
factor in our ‘becoming as we are’. In line with this conclusion, a
particularly pertinent paper by Freud entitled ‘Constructions in analysis’2
has been discussed by Irvin Yalom who provides the following summary:
An analyst who is not successful in helping the patient to recollect the past should, Freud
suggests, nonetheless give the patient a construction of the past as the analyst sees it. Freud
believed that this construction would offer the same therapeutic benefit as would actual
recollection of past material.3

What Freud would seem to be suggesting is that whether the constructed

past event is or is not historically ‘real’ or accurate matters far less than the
process of construction. For, through construction, the client is able to forge
meaningful links with a hypothetical past. This is a revolutionary stance for
Freud to have taken. In doing so, he opened the way for us to understand
our notions of the past as being essentially ‘interpretative’ rather than
historically fixed or ‘real’. The past, seen in this light, becomes a ‘plastic’or
flexible concept open to reevaluation and re-creation dependent upon the
current attitude and behaviour of the individual who experiences it.
Just as the remembered past is flexible in its meaning and significance,
so, too, is it the case that the remembered past is always a selective process.
Clearly, the remembered past makes up a minute percentage of all the
events that our brain has perceived over the course of our lives. Further, it is
also evident that what we attend to within any memory is itself a highly
limited selection of all the data contained within that remembered event. We
are left with the conclusion that the past—even at the level of its
‘remembered content’—is itself a selective interpretation of the total past
content that makes up that memory.
The remembered past reflects the current views we hold about
ourselves. That is to say, our interpretations of the past serve to validate our
current understanding of ourselves. We ‘manipulate’ the past, shape and
reshape it, so that it ‘fits’ who we believe ourselves to be (or who we
believe we must/must not, or can/cannot be). Considered in this way, it is
apparent that the remembered past is so tied to the present that it is more
accurate to speak of ‘the-currently-lived-past’ than of the past itself.
As if this were not complicated enough, further consideration allows
us to recognise that as well as the relationship between the interpreted past
and the interpreted present, there is also the important matter of the role of
the imagined or desired future to take into account. For, just as one’s current
self-construct is validated via the interpreted past, so, too, does one’s self-
construct contain within it assumptions, goals, purposes and wishes that are
directed toward one’s future. If the interpreted present ‘tells a story’ whose
content is the interpreted past, then it is also the case that the story contains
elements of intent or purpose which are focused on the future. As such, it is
far more adequate to see the past as the-past-as-currently-lived-and-future-
directed than to conceive of the past as a fixed and unchanging event-laden
moment in time.
But what of instances when the past remains impervious to recall?
What if, as is not unusual, a client perceives the problem to be that a
forgotten past event must somehow hold the key to his or her current
conflicts? How is such an event to be understood in the light of what has
been argued?
 For Freud and his followers, and for a great many others since, the
most sensible answer to this question lies in the assumption of a distinct
mental system which has come to be labelled as the unconscious. The
unconscious, it is argued, is a separate mental system to that which we call
consciousness, or ‘conscious thought’. While for some psychoanalysts, it is
a vast repository of infantile material (such as wishes, fantasies, primitive
drives, and disturbing experiences) that have been cut off, or repressed,
from consciousness,4 for others, the unconscious is an alternative system for
communication and informationprocessing whose exploration allows the
‘decoding’ of conscious thoughts and communications.5 While these
alternative views reveal important theoretical divergences, what is
fundamental to both is the assumption that the unconscious is a separate
mental system to that of consciousness.
As an idea, the notion of the unconscious maintains vast appeal not
only for therapists, but also for a great many artists, philosophers,
theologians and cognitive scientists—not to speak of ‘ordinary laypersons’.
It suggests a different form of mental activity whose influence upon our
conscious thought and behaviour cannot, by its very nature, ever be fully
understood or measured.
Although existential-phenomenology would not dispute the
complexity of mental activity, it remains sceptical as to the necessity of
invoking a separate and distinct mental system to explain our experience—
not least because the problem of consciousness remains irresolvable enough
without complicating matters by invoking a second system. Again, while
we admit that what we are aware of at any one moment is but an
infinitesimal fraction of those stimuli which bombard our senses and which
our brain processes, it is open to debate as to whether the assumption of
unconscious processing is necessary.
If, for instance, we were to suggest that awareness is a sub-set of
conscious processing, then it could be argued that we were conscious of all
such stimuli while remaining aware of only the tiniest proportion of them.
This solution might seem somewhat pedantic at first, since it seems to
suggest the mere exchanging of one word for another. I think that this
conclusion would be false. For, in taking the step I have suggested, we
would allow ourselves one important possibility: that those stimuli of which
we are currently unaware remain potentially open to our awareness via a
reflective refocusing upon our conscious experience so that what had
previously remained unreflected upon, can now be the focus of our
awareness.
This option cannot be adopted by those who insist upon the existence
of a separate unconscious system since, to do so, would make that system
redundant. The idea of an unconscious as a separate mental system requires
us to assume that that which is unconscious can only become conscious via
some form of interpretation or decoding. The hypothesis that distinguishes
awareness as a sub-set of consciousness requires no additional interpretative
or decoding features other than those which already exist as part of our (still
largely mysterious) conscious processing.
By now, even the most interested reader might well be asking: what
has all this to do with therapy? A great deal, I believe.
Much of the mystique of therapy lies in the assumption of the
therapist’s skill and ability in deciphering or interpreting obscure or
‘shadowy’ phenomena whose roots are said to lie in unknown and (at least
partially) unknowable regions of the mind. While this somewhat romantic
notion of therapy may be highly attractive to many therapists and clients
alike, it can also be revealed to contain several serious problems—not least
being the bedevilling issue of the imbalance of power in the therapeutic
relationship.6 One crucial step of unknowing seems to me to be that of
demystification. While most therapists remain wary of the ‘therapeutic
powers’ that they may have at their disposal, what is less frequently
considered is the possibility that the hypotheses and theories which they
advocate may, in themselves, be significant factors in the maintenance of
their power. The idea of a causal past, and of an insidiously influential
unconscious that only therapists have sufficient training and knowledge to
decode or interpret, are, I believe, clear examples of what I am suggesting.
Ah, but, they (or you) might say, what alternative is there? Take away
the causal past, remove the unconscious, and what is there left to therapy
other than a somewhat limited and superficial exploration of the psyche? I
hope that the accounts in this text offer sufficient contrary evidence to this
suggestion. However, I now want to tackle the issue head on by considering
an alternative approach to the hypothesis of the unconscious.
I have suggested above that the belief that who we are is the causal
result of fixed past events can be challenged. Instead, I have argued that the
remembered past is the means by which the currently sedimented self-
construct is both validated and maintained. I now want to propose that the
insistence upon an unconscious serves an equivalent purpose.
The attempt to ‘make the unconscious conscious’ via therapy can be
seen to be a way of saying: ‘I want to find out what has caused me to
become as I am.’ Equally, this same attempt implies that, if this were to be
achieved, ‘then I will no longer have to be stuck in my current repertoire of
fixed thoughts and behaviours—I can be changed.’ At the same time, it
must be recognised that the client’s desire to make conscious that which
was previously unconscious is a divided desire. As much as I might wish to
change, I might, equally, be terrified of just such an event—not least
because I have no idea of ‘who I will be’ once I’ve become someone new.
And more: perhaps, once I’ve changed, I will experience all manner of
discomfort, even revulsion, as to ‘who I have been’ and what that has
allowed me to do, or not do, both to and for myself and others.
By invoking ideas of a fixed and causally determining past, and of an
unconscious, I can make the struggle for change that much more difficult
and, as well, I can maintain my divided stance toward change while
allowing myself to believe that I am not actually divided in my goal. In this
way, my struggles with my past and my beliefs in an unconscious that must
be interpreted or decoded allow me to express a current discomfort and
deep unease with the limitations and contradictions forced upon me while at
the same time not only maintaining and validating that same self-construct,
but also defending it from the impact of any novel awareness that could
present itself.
This viewpoint, to which I subscribe, centralises the concerns and
dilemmas surrounding the self-construct as the principal area of exploration
and challenge within the therapeutic encounter. It postulates that clients’
problems are not truly about the psychically and/or behaviourally
determining influences of either remembered or inaccessible (or
unconscious) past experiences, but, rather, that they are expressions of
issues and conflicts that arise from the fixed, or sedimented, values and
beliefs that maintain and identify their relationally derived current self-
construct.
These conflicts are likely to be experienced in two general ways. In the
first, I might experience my self-construct as being overly limiting and
restrictive, a hindrance to my ‘potential’ or ‘ideal’ sense of self that,
nevertheless, seems impervious to any attempts to change. Alternatively, I
might experience a loss of control over, or a ‘possession’ of, my self-
construct by some unknown or alien agent that ‘makes me think or act in
ways that are “not me”’. Both perspectives impose a divided or dissociated
stance to my experience of being. While these dissociations can be
explained in terms of past causal determinants and unconscious influences
and impulses, I would suggest that it is more adequate to consider them as
expressions of conflict between who I believe myself to be (my current self-
construct) and my experiences of being.
The more fixed, or sedimented, is my self-construct, the more limited
will be my ability to embrace, or ‘own’, those experiences of being that do
not ‘fit’, or contradict, or seek to extend my current self-construct.
Similarly, the more fixed, or sedimented, is my self-construct, the more I
will be forced to ‘explain’ those experiences of being that do not ‘fit’, or
contradict, or seek to extend my experience of being by invoking ‘agencies
of disownership or dissociation’. Beliefs in a determining past, or in an
unconscious, can be seen to be powerful means of both maintaining the
sedimented self-construct and of ‘explaining’ dissociative experiences.
The focus upon the client’s self-construct and its implications of
sedimentation and dissociation removes the necessity to assume that the
past is a fixed, causal determinant of our present and that a separate mental
system (‘the unconscious’) both exists and serves to obscure or prevent
conscious access to significant psychical past events, while still greatly
influencing our conscious lives in a hidden or coded fashion. Just as
significantly, this step towards demystification is also an important aspect
of un-knowing since it allows a form of descriptively focused (yet still
challenging) exploration of the client’s way of being that, nevertheless,
reduces or removes a good deal of the therapist’s theoretically derived
interpretative power.
When Freud first presented his revolutionary ideas, he chose the issue
of dreams and their psychoanalytic interpretation to demonstrate the basis
and significance of his thought. Indeed, he wrote that dreams were ‘the
royal road to the unconscious’.7 Like others who have questioned this
conclusion, I want to attempt to take up Freud’s challenge by presenting a
brief extract from a lengthy series of meetings with my client, Michael, that
focuses upon a remembered dream so that it may be considered in the light
of a number of fixed perspectives, and their experiential implications,
contained in his selfconstruct.
 I had been meeting Michael on a weekly basis for fourteen weeks
when he first mentioned the dream. Prior to this, he had presented himself
as a likable, easy-going, struggling musician and I had found myself liking
him, falling easily into his gruff, yet lilting, sing-song Mancunian accent.
Throughout most of our sessions, he had explored his experience of his
failed attempts at securing a recording contract, the difficulties he was
having with the other members of his group, the boredom of rehearsals, the
excitement of live performances. That he wanted to make a name for
himself in the world of pop music was without doubt. Though he was well
aware that, in spite of his good looks and fashionable clothing, being
already twenty-seven years old, his chances of gaining the fame and wealth
he desired were growing increasingly remote, this did not seem to concern
him to the point where he might have begun to consider alternative
ambitions. Michael saw himself very much as an outsider and rebel,
although to be sure, beyond the partaking of the occasional illegally
acquired drug, even he found it difficult to back up this claim.
Michael’s first words to me had been to announce that he was gay. Did
it bother me that he was, he wanted to know. I replied that it didn’t. Still, I
wondered to myself, it was interesting that of all the possible things he
could have chosen as his first self-revealing statement, it had been about his
sexual orientation.
Michael’s initial presenting problem focused upon his relationship
with his mother, towards whom he felt deeply indebted. He explained that
when he was two years old, his parents separated. His mother had fallen in
love with another man and wanted to marry him. Initially, this man had
been unwilling to take on the responsibility of becoming Michael’s
stepfather and had attempted to convince his mother that she should leave
Michael behind and start life anew with him. Michael’s mother would not
be tempted to contemplate this option. She had insisted that either the man
take on the two of them together or else she would forget all about him and
live alone with Michael. Eventually, the man relented and agreed to become
Michael’s stepfather. While he and Michael eventually developed a good,
even loving, relationship, Michael never forgot the fact that his mother had
been willing to sacrifice her own happiness in order to keep him with her.
Now, however, Michael had, in turn, fallen in love with Doug who lived in
London and who was pressuring him to move down from Manchester
(where he still lived with his, now-widowed, mother) and move in with him
on a permanent basis.
Michael insisted that there was no possibility that he could bring his
mother down with him, not only because both he and Doug felt that her
presence, at least at this juncture in their relationship, would prove to be
problematic, but also because his mother enjoyed the life and social
contacts that she had built up in Manchester and was not prepared to leave
these behind. Michael felt deeply divided by his opposing desires. As much
as he wanted to make a go of his newly found relationship, he could not
contemplate the ‘betrayal’of his mother that, as far as he was concerned, the
act would bring about. As he became progressively torn between his
desires, he found himself experiencing ever-increasing tensions and
irritations that were principally directed toward his mother. While we had
attempted to explore these more fully, he had found himself unwilling to do
so, preferring, instead, to concentrate upon other significant, yet far less
anxiety-provoking, areas of concern in his current life.
In any case, here he was shuffling uneasily in his seat, unable to settle
into a comfortable position. This was unusual since, in our previous
sessions, he had quickly fallen into a relaxed and easy-going slouch. As I
sat across from him in silence, watching his near-pantomime act, he
eventually became aware of my presence. Suddenly quite self-conscious, he
laughed. ‘I suppose I’ve got things on my mind,’ Michael mumbled. ‘If I
get too comfortable, I might have to talk about them.’ He laughed once
again.
‘You’ve succeeded in arousing my curiosity,’ I smiled back.
He sighed. ‘I think I’ll have to tell you the dream, then.’
‘Is that a problem?’
‘No, but you’ll read things into it.’
‘Michael, all I can promise is that I won’t try to take your dream away
from you. If it starts to look to you that I’m telling you what it’s “really”
about—’
‘Oh, you don’t have to do that!’ Michael interrupted. ‘I know what it’s
about already!’
‘Michael,’ I repeated, ‘I’m willing to hear the dream.’
‘Yeah, okay,’ Michael nodded. ‘So …’ he began. ‘I dreamt I was back
in the house that I grew up in as a kid. I lived there with my mother and
stepfather from the age of two to about fourteen when we moved to our
current home. Anyway, I wasn’t fourteen or anything in my dream. I mean,
I was the age I am now. So, there I was in my old room in my house, and it
was exactly as how I remember it was when I left it. It had all the things on
the walls that I’d stuck there—you know, pictures of pop stars and football
teams, a huge map of the world, model aeroplanes … Anyway, there I was
and it felt absolutely sensible for me to be there. I mean, it wasn’t as if in
the dream I’d been away, or was looking at all this stuff as if it were from
my past or something. I mean, it was my past, but it was in the present in
my dream. It was like I’d never been away. I was just in my own room. And
then, I started to do what I did a lot of when I was fourteen. I had this whole
hidden stash of porno rags hidden away in this room. In a place only I knew
about. And I went to get them, and there they were! I could see them all so
clearly, like I was actually looking at them.
‘Anyway, before you ask, they were hetero mags—Mayfair and Razzle
and titles like that. So, there I was, flipping through the pages, and I started
to get really turned on, you know? So I started doing the job and I was
really getting off on it, seeing all these female bodies, you know? And I was
getting really, really excited—even though, while all this was going on and
it was the present and all that, even then I kind of knew that I don’t get off
on stuff like that any more. Anyway, as I was doing the business, just at the
point of coming, in fact, I heard this godawful noise from down the stairs. I
thought that somebody had heard me grunting away and was going to come
charging into my room. So I, like, quickly zipped up and stashed the mags
back to their hiding place and went out the door to see what was going on.
And it was the most amazing sight!
‘I could see my mother wrestling with someone at the bottom of the
stairs. It was so absurd, I started to laugh! But, as soon as she heard me, she
gave me this look she always gives me when she thinks I should have
realised already that she needs some help with whatever it is that she’s
doing, and started yelling. ‘Michael! Michael!’ she shouted. ‘Get down
here, quick! I caught this burglar trying to walk off with our belongings and
he’s going to get what’s coming to him!’ So I rushed down the stairs and
just started pounding the shit out of this bloke! I couldn’t see his face ‘cos it
was all covered up in this hat and scarf and I couldn’t get him to make any
sound. Which really drove me crazy, you know? I really wanted to hear him
scream! Anyway, the next thing I know, my mum’s somehow managed to
get out this huge knife—you know? One of those knives that look like
something out of a cartoon they’re so big—and she starts waving it in front
of this bloke, really threatening like, screaming at him where she’s going to
shove it and what she’s going to cut off if he doesn’t stop struggling. And
she’s swearing away like a trooper (which is another odd thing because my
mother, in real life, is really polite and all that, and I don’t think that I’ve
ever heard her swear once in her life). But in this dream, God, she’s really
spitting’em out!
‘And then, all of a sudden, she passes the knife to me and says: “All
right, Michael, now we’ve got him pinned here and I want you to do it.” I
said: “What are you talking about, mum?” But I knew what she wanted me
to do, and while I wasn’t going to, I was also really buzzing from the whole
idea of it! I think that part of it was that she was letting me do it, like I was
finally a “big boy” in her eyes and she could trust me to get the job done.
Anyway, I took the knife and, although I said to myself that all I was going
to do was to scare this bloke shitless and maybe earn a few brownie points
with mum, before I could stop myself, I really started cutting him up. So he
finally starts screaming, and there’s blood gushing out everywhere, and my
mum’s cackling away like some harpie or something and I just sank the
knife into this bloke’s lungs, just where I thought his heart would be.
‘And suddenly, he screams and falls back and I see his face for the first
time and it’s my dad! And as soon as I see this, I see that mum has this
really weird look on her face and she suddenly says: “Oh my god, Michael,
what have you done? You’ve gone and killed your own father!” And I look
down and she’s right; it is my dad—my real dad, not my stepfather. And
then I look up at her, and it’s like she had nothing to do with it all. She’s
giving me this really disgusted look like she’s some innocent in the whole
thing who’s just wandered in to find this mess. And I get so angry that she
could pretend to be like this, that she could be trying to set me off like that,
and I’m just so pissed off that I start waving the knife in her face, really
angry like, and I’m saying: “You cunt! You cunt! You take that back!”’
‘And I wake up saying this and feeling really sick and sexually
aroused all at the same time.’
‘And that’s what you remember of your dream?’ I asked after a few
seconds of silence.
‘Yup. Pretty gory, right?’ Michael chuckled.
 ‘Is that how you find it? Gory?’
‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘Okay. Well, before we look at your feelings about it,’ I said, ‘let me
see if I’ve got the main elements of the dream as you recounted it. I’ll give
it back to you, but I’ll try and keep the statements I make in the present
tense:
‘I’m back in my room of the house I lived in throughout my childhood
and early adolescence with my mother and stepfather. I am alone, and while
I find it odd to be back here, the room also seems very familiar to me. So
familiar, in fact, that the first thing I decide to do is to go to the place where
I’ve hidden my collection of heterosexual porno magazines and begin to
masturbate. I enjoy the experience, although I have a sense that this is not
the right sort of stimulus that I normally become aroused by. Just at the
point of coming, I hear some shouts from down the stairs. I put back my
magazines, rearrange my clothes and go see what’s going on.
‘I see my mother in a struggle with a man. She tells me that he’s a
burglar and asks for my help in bringing him down. She also shows me a
large knife which she threatens to use on the man and which she
subsequently offers to me. I take this offering as a statement of her faith in
me that I am “man enough” to do what is expected—which is to kill the
man. Even if I am a bit scared by the act and the responsibility entailed by
it, I am also excited by it. The excitement allows me to fulfil the act, but as
I do so, I realise that the man I’ve just killed is my father. I suddenly feel
exceedingly angry towards my mother who has attempted to distance
herself from the events and who seems to me to be expressing her disgust at
what I’ve done. I threaten her by waving the knife and by shouting: “You
cunt! You cunt! Take that back.”
‘Is that the substance of the dream?’
‘Yeah. That’s pretty much it,’ Michael agreed.
‘Okay. Well, just before you told it to me, you said that you already
knew what it’s all about.’
‘Yeah, it’s kind of obvious, isn’t it?’
‘Is it? How is it obvious to you?’
‘Oh, you know! It’s about my relations with my parents. It’s classic
Oedipal complex stuff.’
 I agreed with Michael that it could be used as an example by someone
wanting to explain Freud’s idea of the Oedipal complex. However, what
was far more significant was whether this explanation made sense to him in
a lived, or directly felt, fashion.
‘I’m not sure,’ Michael answered. ‘I suppose I’d have to say that I
don’t know.’
‘Okay,’ I continued. ‘Then put it this way: when you look at your
relations with your mother and father do you experience the sort of tensions
and conflicts that fit with your understanding of the Oedipal complex?’
‘No, not really,’ Michael admitted. ‘But that’s because I might be
repressing those feelings.’
‘Yes, you might be,’ I agreed. ‘But whether you are or not, are you
saying that at the immediately felt, conscious, level those things which you
associate with the Oedipal complex don’t help you to connect to the
dream?’
‘That’s right.’
‘All right. So let’s just work with what you do experience. For
instance: what was it like to tell me the dream and then to hear me repeat it
back to you in summary form?’
Michael considered this query, then answered: ‘It was odd. It felt really
strange. I felt a little embarrassed about telling it to you and even more
embarrassed when you repeated it. But I also felt kind of detached from it,
like it wasn’t really my dream.’
‘In the same way that it both was and wasn’t you getting turned on by
the heterosexual porno magazine?’ I challenged.
‘Yeah. I mean, I know I was turned on by the pictures. In the same way
that I know that I can get turned on by watching hetero-erotic scenes in
films and on television, or even just by attractive women or pictures of
women. But it’s also similar in that when I do get aroused from that, it
doesn’t feel like I’m really involved in it. It’s not me, somehow.’
‘So who is it?’
‘Well, of course I know it’s me. But it’s more me as I think other
people want me to be. As I tried to be when …’
‘When I was fourteen?’ I completed for him.
‘Yeah! When I was fourteen. Except that that was when I really started
to question whether I was really like who I thought I should be. Sexually, I
mean.’
‘Okay. So there’s something similar of that in the dream, isn’t there?
You both are and aren’t the person in your dream. What you do alone in the
dream is both something that you do and yet something you don’t do.
There’s that double aspect.’
‘Yeah! There is. And even with my mother, later. She both is and isn’t
like my mother,’ Michael added.
‘And your father?’
‘Well, he’s my father, but he’s also a thief.’
‘And he’s both your father and yet not your father since it was your
stepfather who mainly raised you.’
‘That’s true,’ Michael agreed. ‘I can’t say I ever knew my real father.’
‘Well, in your dream what you say about him is that he’s a burglar.
How does that sound to you?’
‘I can’t really see it. I mean, if anyone’s a burglar, it’s my stepdad. He
stole my affection, my love, from my real father.’
‘Did he?’
‘Yeah. I hardly ever think about my real dad at all. Which is also why
the dream’s so weird.’
‘So you hardly ever think of him, and in the dream he’s a burglar and
he’s someone you kill and whom you mother wants you to kill,’ I
summarised. Then, an obvious question occurred to me. ‘What do you think
he was stealing?’
‘I don’t know! The family treasures, I suppose!’ Michael laughed.
‘And what are the family treasures?’
‘What? Oh, you mean what does my mother have that’s worth
stealing? Fuck all, actually.’
‘And yet here is your burglar father clearly intent upon stealing
something. And, equally, your mother is so angered by his attempt that
she’s prepared to threaten him with a knife and subsequently pushes you
into killing him.’
‘Weird,’ Michael laughed once again.
‘Do you think that your presence may be a factor in this?’ I prodded.
‘You say that your mother has nothing worth stealing. So, if we accept this,
then we have to ask ourselves what is there in the house that suddenly
makes it worthwhile for your father to attempt to burglarise it?’
‘Well, if you put it that way, then it’s me! I’m there. That’s something
different.’
‘Okay. So play with that a bit. What is there about you that your father
might wish to steal?’
‘I said it earlier, I suppose. My affection. Maybe he thought he
deserved it.’
‘And do you think he deserves it?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘He deserves it but he isn’t about to get it?’
‘My mother would have a fit!’ Michael replied instantly. Then,
realising what he’d just said, added: ‘Shit! Just like in the dream!’
‘So you have something that both of your parents want. Your mother
believes it belongs to her and this seems to be partly right in a detached sort
of way as far as you’re concerned. But your father also believes that it’s his
to have even if the only way he can get it is to steal it.’
‘And my mother gets me to kill him!’ Michael continued, now
increasingly intrigued by what our exploration was revealing.
‘If I kill him …’ I began.
‘Then she gets all of the treasure … me!’ Michael completed.
‘And you agree with this.’
‘I don’t know. I’m not so sure. Sometimes, I feel with my mother I
have to be reassuring her all of the time about my feelings and affections for
her. She needs to hear how much I love her and all that. And I do, so I don’t
mind telling her, but it feels stifling a lot of the time. It’s like what she’s
demanding is so overwhelming—’ Michael stopped in mid-sentence. ‘And
that’s in the dream, too!’ he stated in surprise. ‘What she asks me to do is so
overwhelming.’
‘And you comply. You even get a buzz from it.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not completely at ease either. And, anyway, when I
realise what she’s pushed me into doing, I … I …’
‘I what?’ I urged him.
‘I want to kill her …’ Michael hesitated.
‘I want to kill her,’ I repeated. ‘Because?’
 ‘For turning me into a murderer.’
‘How has your mother turned you into a murderer?’ I challenged.
‘She hasn’t!’
‘Look at the dream again,’ I urged. ‘In order to be trustworthy in her
eyes, you must murder the man who threatens to take away what she
believes to be hers.’
‘Just like what’s happening in real life,’ Michael mumbled.
‘Not quite,’ I replied. ‘The threat in your current life is that you believe
that you might be denying your mother what is hers. As you haven’t told
her of your dilemma, we can’t say for sure what she’d think.’
‘You don’t know my mother!’ Michael laughed.
‘True. But what I do know is that you fear that in doing what you
consider to be the right thing, you may well be destroying the possibility of
a highly desirable long-term relationship with a man you love.’
‘And whatever choice I make, will destroy one or the other.’
‘So,’ I said, ‘if we change the word “destroy” to “murder”, we’re back
to your feeling in the dream that you could kill your mother. What might
that act offer you?’
Michael considered the question for a couple of minutes, then shook
his head several times and laughed to himself. ‘It’d resolve the moral
dilemma I’m in,’ he announced.
‘How so?’
‘Well, if I could kill her, then I could solve the problem as to how to
get to live with Doug.’
‘And would you have to physically kill her to resolve your dilemma?’
Michael snapped his fingers and smiled. ‘Oh, I see! I wouldn’t need to
literally kill her, just kill what love exists between us.’
‘And if you stick with that, would you say that that’s what happens
toward the end of your dream, as well?’
‘I don’t see it,’ Michael replied.
‘Well, as I recall, you stated that in your dream, once you’ve killed the
burglar who turned out to be your father, your mother seems to distance
herself from the event and you feel that she’s disgusted with you.’
‘Yes!’ Michael shouted. ‘And you know what? It makes me realise that
each time I’ve had a relationship with someone and it falls apart, she acts as
though she really wanted it to succeed, and she’s so upset for me and all.
But, really, she’s pushed things to the breaking point. Oh, in really subtle
ways, she’s let me know that she doesn’t want me to have a lasting
relationship. But she’ll put it down to me. She’ll say things like: “You
didn’t work hard enough at it,” or “I don’t know if you really want a long-
term relationship”.
‘And when she says things like that?’
‘It drives me crazy!’
‘Because?’
‘Because it’s not true. Because it’s a lie. That’s what gets me angry.’
‘What gets me angry is when my mother says something about me
that’s a lie,’ I reflected back to Michael.
‘Or tries to make my life a lie. Tries to make me live a lie.’
‘Ah … such as?’
‘My sexuality for one thing. I’m forced to play down the fact that I’m
gay with her. Oh, she knows about it, and she’ll tell me she accepts it and
that, but … Like, we always just talk of ‘my relationships’. I never mention
them by name since that would make it obvious that I’m gay. So, I play it
down for her sake. It’s no big deal.’
‘You say that,’ I challenged, ‘and yet I find your words a little
confusing because I can remember that the first thing you told me when me
met was that you’re gay and that this identification mattered a good deal to
you.’
‘Did I?’ Michael queried.
‘So I recall.’
‘Well, obviously, it was important to me that you knew.’
‘Yes. And from what you’ve said, I would guess that you took a real
risk in being so open with me about it. I could have rejected you.’
‘Yeah, I thought about that.’
‘I’m wondering if there’s something in the dream that resonates with
that sense of anger and disturbance that you feel when you find that you
have to play down your being gay?’
Michael pondered the possibilities. ‘I suppose … There’s the struggle
with the burglar who turns out to be my father. There’s a kind of gay
experience there for me in that it’s something that’s both taboo and exciting.
I get a buzz by being someone who breaks taboos. I won’t pretend
otherwise.’
‘And the dream you recounted seems to agree with this. You break the
taboo of murder (which turns out to be patricide) and you get a buzz from
it. But it also says more. As well as a buzz, you feel some degree of remorse
and, perhaps more importantly, you’re not in control of the action that
provokes the buzz.’
‘Yeah, that’s true. Maybe, part of the buzz I felt in the dream was
because it wasn’t my decision. I was doing what my mother wanted me to
do and I was doing it well. I was pleasing her. That seemed to be much
more important than the act itself. It was that I was pleasing her.’
‘Okay,’ I pressed. ‘Stay with that. Here I am, doing what my mother
wants me to do, and doing it well. I’m feeling good because she’s pleased
on two counts: that I’m doing what she wants and that I’m doing it well.
But when I notice just what it is that I’ve been doing, and who I’ve done it
to, all that sense of pleasure disappears and, instead, I feel a tremendous
amount of rage towards the same person whose dominance had just
moments ago allowed me to experience pleasure. Does that seem an
accurate summary?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Fine. Now tell me: how far does it remain right when you generalise it
out to other significant aspects of your relations with your mother?’
‘Well, actually, it still seems pretty right to me. The way my mother is
feeling about me, and what I’m doing, plays a big role in how I feel about
myself.’
‘And how does this link up with what you were saying earlier about
your pleasure in being a kind of “taboo buster”?’
‘It doesn’t really. I mean, I do get pleasure from both of them, but they
don’t co-exist. Or, at least, they’re not allowed to. Which is another thing
that’s so odd about the dream. My mother isn’t one for taboo busting at all.
She lives by codes and morals that she thinks are valued and respected by
society. She wants to fit in. And she’s happiest towards me when I do things
that make it look like I’m fitting in. So, in the dream, when my mother
wants me to kill my father, even if she did really want that, she’d never
want me to do it because it’d be so unacceptable to her society.’
 ‘So, if I understand what you’re saying, that means that you have to
sort of split your experience of pleasure. The pleasure that you receive from
your relations with your mother rests on the premise that you behave in
ways that are socially desirable. The pleasure you get from your ‘taboo
busting’ is based upon those things you say and do and think that your
mother would find in some way unacceptable. Perhaps even disgusting?’
‘Yeah,’ Michael grinned. ‘That’s how it is, man.’
‘So, how do you maintain the two? They seem to be at opposite ends
of the spectrum to me.’
‘They are!’ Michael agreed. Then he added: ‘And I think that what
we’ve been doing has put words to the tension I’m feeling all the time. I
really feel like I’m being torn in half by two opposite demands.’
‘There’s what I want because it allows good relations with my mother,
and what I want which allows good relations with myself,’ I summarised.
‘Yeah! And in my dream, I can see that it’s full of images that show
this tension. Like, when I’m in my room by myself having a wank, I’m
doing it as something that’s for my pleasure—’
‘And it’s another form of taboo-busting?’
‘Yeah, it is. Well, I mean, as a kid of fourteen, I knew that I shouldn’t
be doing it.’
‘And now?’
‘Now? Now, it’s nothing at all. Everybody does it!’ Michael laughed.
‘So you’re saying that in the dream your wanking had no rule-busting
elements in it at all?’ I pressed.
Michael blushed. ‘I suppose,’ he admitted, ‘the fact that I was wanking
to a hetero rag might be a kind of rule-busting. I mean, some parts of gay
society are as narrow-minded as hetero society is. There’s some who think
that if a gay man gets turned on by women then there’s something wrong
with his gayness, you know? Like he’s not committed enough or something.
It’s seen as a kind of betrayal.’
‘Okay. And from your mother’s point of view? Is there also some
obvious rule-busting going on?’
‘She doesn’t think that wanking is very socially acceptable,’ Michael
replied. ‘But, actually, I think that the way she would see it would be that if
there was no way for me to be stopped from wanking, then it would be far
more preferable that I wanked as a heterosexual than as a homosexual.’
 We were both struck simultaneously by the absurdity contained in the
statement and laughed about it. ‘So, we’re back to your mother’s lack of
approval of your identification as a gay man?’ I asked eventually.
‘It’s not that she doesn’t approve!’ Michael insisted. ‘I think it’s more
like she doesn’t really believe in it. As far as she’s concerned it’s only
something I’m doing because I need to “be different”.’
‘And what do you think about that viewpoint?’
‘Obviously, I think it’s crap.’
‘Even if there is a correspondence between it and what you explained
earlier is your own tendency to want to present yourself as being different?’
‘It’s just coincidence at that level. Being gay is being different, but
that’s only because this society makes it so.’
‘And your mother is a representative of that society.’
‘Yeah. She is.’
‘And you’d like her to accept your sexuality as it is.’
‘Of course. That’s obvious.’
‘Just as it also seems obvious that your sexuality can’t be pinpointed
quite so straightforwardly. You identify with being gay yet also recognise
that your definition of “being gay” doesn’t necessarily fit with all other gay
men’s definitions.’
‘Yeah. I’m gay in my own sense of the word.’
‘Okay. Well, I’m just thinking about the dream again and I think
there’s still a gap there that might be worth looking at. You’ve made your
mother’s attitude towards your gayness pretty clear, but what about your
father’s?’
‘My stepfather’s, you mean?’
‘That would be worth knowing about, too, but I meant your biological
father’s. The one who appears in your dream.’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since he left us, have I? And I was
too young then.’
‘Sure. But you can imagine. You can’t know, but if you were to guess
…’
Michael thought about this, then, somewhat hesitantly, he said:
‘Actually, this is really weird, because I suppose that I’ve always sort of
imagined that my father would be willing to accept me as a gay man.’
 ‘And what makes you think that?’
‘I don’t know. I have nothing at all to base it on. But, in a strange way,
I think I’ve always kind of linked my gayness with my father.’
‘You mean that you think that he was gay, as well?’
‘No … No, I don’t think he was. No, what I mean is that—I don’t
know if I can explain this—that in a way I kind of became gay because of
him.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Michael laughed. ‘No, I’d be surprised if you claimed you did!’ he
hooted. ‘I don’t know how to make it clearer. I suppose, in some way, I’ve
always had this sense at the back of my head that part of my initial
experimenting with being gay has a link to my father, and his leaving. I
can’t imagine why I connect the two, but I do. Maybe I just want to have
something to thank him for. That I’ve discovered something worthwhile
about myself through his leaving.’
‘Otherwise his leaving would have been senseless?’
‘Yeah. And just too goddamn painful. I couldn’t understand what he
was doing, and my mother couldn’t—or wouldn’t—explain it to me other
than to say that I wasn’t going to see him any more. I thought he was sort of
dead, you know? That’s what I told myself and people who asked when I
was younger. It was the only way I could explain things to myself.’
‘And it sounds to me that this aspect of your relationship is in the
dream as well. This time, your father really is dead—’
‘Even if I have to do it myself,’ Michael added.
‘As you did before,’ I challenged.
‘What?’ Michael responded in surprise.
‘You said yourself, a moment ago, in order to explain or make sense of
his leaving, you had to make him dead. Isn’t that similar to what happens in
the dream?’
‘In the dream, my mother forces me to kill him.’
‘Yes. And doesn’t that correspond with what you just said? Because of
whatever went on between your father and your mother, you had to
construct this account of your father’s death.’
‘Umm … Actually, my mother never rejected that story, never told me
to change it. I think she kind of liked the idea of me telling everyone that
she was a widow.’ Michael paused, then considered further what I’d said.
After some time, he added: ‘Oh … I see the connection with the dream. She
made me turn her into a real widow in the dream. She wanted me to kill him
just as I’d done as a child.’
‘So if you go back to the question of what your father might have been
trying to steal …’
‘He was trying to steal me so that I wouldn’t lie, I couldn’t keep it up
any longer. And my mother would be left to have to face the truth.’
‘And instead?’
‘Instead, I caved in. I did exactly what she wanted me to do.’
‘And does this link up once again with your living relations with your
mother?’
It did. And, further, our exploration of his dream provided Michael
with a means to begin to investigate a wide range of issues surrounding his
relations not only with his parents, but also with various friends and lovers,
and with himself. Perhaps most pertinently for Michael, the dream, and our
subsequent discussions about it, allowed him to make significant
connections between the divided loyalties he felt toward his mother and his
lover, and his own lived experience of himself as a divided being.
In brief, Michael’s initial presenting concerns expressed, in a
somewhat distanced fashion, his own attempts to make sense of who he was
and how he had come to be. While he was at ease to a large extent with his
sexual orientation, and had no desire to change it, nevertheless he sought to
explain its genesis to himself. In his attempts to do so, he fashioned a
meaning from his remembrances of his early life that linked his
homosexuality to both his mother and his absent father. That his mother had
been willing to sacrifice her own happiness in order to ‘do right by him’
was a source of both joy and vexation, for Michael could not be secure in
the thought that she would have offered to make the same sacrifice if she
had known how he would ‘turn out’. While he harboured suspicions, he
also continued to maintain the hope that he would someday prove to be
such a ‘good son’ to his mother that these suspicions would no longer have
any basis.
Considered in this light, Michael’s inability to choose between his
mother and his lover contained much more meaning for him than he might
have originally supposed. In similar fashion, the seemingly absurd situation
in his dream also highlighted Michael’s desire to please his mother as well
as his concern that this very action would only succeed in revealing a
disgust that he feared she maintained toward him.
If Michael felt both ‘stuck’ and ‘divided’ in his current experience,
these same tensions dominated his sense of his immediate future and his
more longterm goals and directions. In this case, too, Michael’s attempt had
been to place the ‘cause’ in his remembered past. However, through the
dream, he began a process of re-evaluation that eventually provided him
with a means to make decisions that focused more upon his future
aspirations than they did upon maintaining the seeming ‘power’ of the past.
Over the several years of our work together, the dream became a
recurring motif to our explorations. It seemed to contain in its compacted
set of images and events much that could be seen to have a more general
thematic meaning within Michael’s world-view.
I began this account by recounting the incident of my relative’s
synchronous inhabiting of two distinct time ‘zones’. While such instances
can seem to be highly unusual and disturbing when they occur in our
waking life, it is apparent that, in dreams, an individual (the dreamer) is not
likely to find similar circumstances to be terribly peculiar. Michael’s dream
makes this obvious: he is back in the house and the room from his
childhood, and, in some ways, responds to this as that child.
Simultaneously, however, Michael is also his current age and, on occasion,
even reminds himself of this within the dream.
At first, the oddity of Michael’s dream, and its somewhat
melodramatic elements, would suggest that our only means to interpret it
would be via some psychoanalytically derived perspective that would
assume that the dream is overladen with symbols and distortions that
require deciphering or decoding in order for its meaning to be revealed.
However, as can be seen, no such interpretative process was necessary in
order for Michael and me to explore it with significant effect.
My approach to the analysis of dreams is principally derived from the
techniques developed by the Swiss psychiatrist and analyst, Medard Boss,
founder of a highly influential ‘school’ of existential therapy known as
daseinsanalysis. Originally a psychoanalyst and Jungian analytical
psychologist, Boss became increasingly critical of both these approaches
for what he saw to be their unnecessary emphasis upon ‘the interpretation
of the unconscious’. Greatly influenced by the writings of the philosopher
Martin Heidegger, with whom he engaged in lengthy correspondence and
face-to-face dialogues, Boss became convinced that dreams expressed a
form of lived reality that demanded to be approached from the standpoint of
what was being presented to the dreamer rather than by ‘looking behind or
beneath’ their given statements in order to discern hidden, or unconscious,
meanings. As such, the exploration of a dream became, for Boss, a
descriptively focused examination of the dreamer’s relationship to the
various elements of the dream, as well as to the dream in its totality.8
While this method might seem unusual at first, and, perhaps, suggest
that its employment will only lead to somewhat superficial insights and
analyses, I hope that my example of Michael’s dream, which seeks to
remain at the descriptive levels of investigation advocated by Boss, will
have been convincing enough to at least demonstrate the wealth of
informative material that can be gleaned from a dream without resorting to
analytic interpretations.
More pertinently, I hope that my example provides some concrete
clarification of my earlier questioning of the related hypotheses regarding
the past as a causal determinant of our present, and the necessity to posit a
separate unconscious mental system. Instead, I suggested, we could
reconsider the phenomena associated with these hypotheses from the
standpoint of the selfconstruct, its sedimentations, and its related
experiential dissociations.
Michael’s dream highlighted these features in several ways. I suppose
that, like all of us, Michael had sought to find a rationale, a logical basis, to
who he was and how he had come to be. In particular, he had also so
identified himself with his sexual orientation that he needed to find its
‘cause’ and origins. Rather than revealing these, our exploration allowed
him to examine the various pieces to the puzzle he had made of his identity
and to consider these in the light of how they were expressed in his dream.
This exercise proved to be highly valuable to Michael. It allowed him
to recognise that, over time, he had built up an identity that was confusing
to himself and others. Although he had constructed a self that appeared to
‘fit’, his experience, as reflected in his dream, was that there actually
existed a great many ‘gaps’ and contradictions which, nevertheless,
maintained his selfstructure. In exposing these, Michael not only found a
greater degree of ‘ownership’ in the experiences of being that he had, he
also became far more concerned with who he was and what he wanted from
his life rather than how or why he had come to be as he was.
Most significantly for Michael, he ceased attempting to explain his
sexual orientation from the standpoint of some reactive mechanism that had
evolved through his relations with his parents. Instead, questioning this
assumption, he began to reconsider it until he arrived at the conclusion that
it was the orientation which suited him for all manner of reasons and that it
required no causal explanations. In shifting this perspective, he, in turn,
allowed new possibilities to emerge regarding future prospects and
directions in his life.
Freud was right: dreams are royal roads. In their simultaneous
embrace of past, present and future, and of the person who extracts meaning
from, and is in turn made meaningful by, their conjunctions, they epitomise
the interconnectedness of reflected time and constructed being.

1. See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

2. Freud, S. (1937) Constructions in analysis, Standard Edition of the Collected Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, 23: 141–207. London: Hogarth Press.
3. See Yalom, I. (1980) Existential Psychotherapy, p. 347. New York: Basic Books.
4. Fenichel, O. (1982) The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gay, P. (1988) Freud: A life for our time. London: J.M. Dent & Sons.
5. See Smith, D.L. (1991) Hidden Conversations: An introduction to communicative psychoanalysis. London: Routledge.
6. See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.
7. Freud, S. (1900) The interpretation of dreams in The Standard Edition of the Collected Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, volumes 4 and 5. London: Hogarth. The complete
quote presents the interpretation of dreams as ‘the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind’ (Standard Edition, volume 5: 608).
8. Boss, M. (1958) The Analysis of Dreams. New York: Philosophical Library.
 4
The Tale of the Therapist who
Discovered He was the Client

Sometimes, half in jest, I tell my students that there exists a cosmic clause
in the psychotherapy rule book which stipulates that at key points in our
practice, ‘we will get the clients that we deserve.’ This statement is usually
met with various degrees of laughter and then we move on to more serious
topics. However … I am not so sure that my dubious insight does not
deserve some degree of consideration if only insofar as, being constructors
of our meaning-world, we imbue certain aspects of our clients’ issues with a
relevance to perspectives in our own lives which have emerged to intrigue
or trouble us. And to reveal to us one more facet of un-knowing.
I had been working at a pace that had succeeded in tiring and
exasperating me when I first agreed to see Russell. I was at one of those
points in my life when I had begun to lose a sense of purpose and value in
what I was doing. Nothing in particular was going wrong, but, nevertheless,
life seemed somewhat constricted, bounded and defined by my academic
and professional pursuits to such a degree that I had allowed all other
interests and activities to wane to a now noticeable degree. Most tellingly, I
had begun to realise how little of my thoughts and actions did not have my
work as their focus. My evenings and (supposedly) free times were being
spent increasingly in front of my computer, writing papers, journal articles,
administrative reports—the necessary output of an academic and
professional.
That I was writing a great deal was not, in itself, a novelty. I have,
since my teens, gained pleasure and stimulation from writing and have
pursued this interest in the form of poems, short stories, and novels which,
while largely unsuitable for publication, have nevertheless allowed me an
important—perhaps even necessary—means to explore and give expression
to those personal interests and passions that have marked my relations with
self and others. However, in this instance, not only had my writing time
managed to extend itself significantly beyond its usual boundaries, far more
importantly, I was principally engaged in a particular type of
administratively-focused writing whose limitations regarding style and
content were such that I was beginning to find it—and myself—both arid
and tiresome. In sum, increasingly devoid of meaning and worth.
The impact of this state of affairs upon my life in general was
devastating. I found myself less and less able to engage with others so that,
for example, my conversations with friends and acquaintances had become
brief and stilted, more akin to irritating disturbances than to pleasurable and
sought-after encounters. As a result of this, my most cherished relations
were being substantially curtailed and left unattended while I isolated
myself within the confines of my study. My wife, with whom I’d managed
to maintain the residues of what had once been a far wider-ranging set of
less restrictive encounters, in an effort to assist me, had adopted the role of
go-between with friends and, while grateful that she had so willingly taken
on this thankless task, I had begun to feel as if I was experiencing much of
my life in a second-hand, somewhat telegraphic, manner.
That I could see all this taking place, that I regretted it deeply, still did
not instil in me sufficient strength and determination to seek to alter my
circumstances. ‘Once the next corner is turned …’ I promised myself, ‘once
this bit of work has been seen to, then I’ll take the necessary steps to regain
what has been lost.’ But, of course, each corner turned merely revealed
another that had been previously unforeseen. I had become all too similar to
an obsessive player of a computer game proceeding from one level of
difficulty to the next in such mindless, machinelike perseverance that
whatever meaning and purpose the game once might have held had been
reduced to nothing other than that of reaching its end-point.
Caught up in this rut, increasingly unable to imagine a realistic way
out, convinced that this was the inescapable direction in which my choice of
life-work had driven me, I found myself speaking to Russell over the
telephone. His listless voice seemed to me to echo mine. He was at the end
of his tether, he explained. His family life was suffering for reasons which
in his opinion made him a victim of circumstance and duty. All right, I
stopped him, I had one opening in my schedule that I could offer. He
accepted; if he was grateful, his words gave no hint of this. Instead, finished
with me, Russell put down the receiver. As the open line hummed in my
ear, I had a fantasy of Russell scurrying off, cursing to himself that this was
yet another damned trial in his life. I knew exactly how he felt.
When he first appeared, exactly on time, my initial impression of
Russell was somewhat lacklustre. He was quite short, substantially
overweight and, apart from a few wispy strands of ginger hair that he had
combed sideways in order to provide the momentary illusion that they
covered his head, noticeably bald. Having introduced himself, he showed
no inclination to initiate discussion but, rather, sat opposite me, arms
folded, legs crossed, head slumped. He sweated profusely, possibly out of
tension, but just as likely from the heat of the midsummer evening, and
wiped furiously at his brow with a well-worn handkerchief which he tugged
out of and then pushed back into his left-hand trouser pocket with
clockwork regularity. I noted that while I usually find myself experiencing a
substantial degree of inquisitiveness and concern towards new clients,
particularly during their first session, in this instance I felt little other than
that type of boredom which instils in me an air of detachment and which
makes me grateful that I disdain the use of a wrist-watch in favour of an
electronic pocket clock/alarm as, otherwise, in circumstances such as these,
I would be tempted to glance at it every few minutes.
And there we sat, he playing with his soaked hanky, me aware of street
noises and questionable observations, when suddenly, with no preparatory
warning, Russell spoke. ‘I suppose I had better fill you in on my
circumstances,’ he said, avoiding my gaze and, once again, swiping his
hanky over his forehead. He cleared his throat. ‘I am concerned about my
continuing employment. And this has had some degree of effect upon my
state of mind. To add to it, my wife has decided that I have become so
obsessed by this development that she has ordained that I deal with the
matter. She claims that I am beginning to fail to function in my everyday
relations with her and the children. Well … I’m not so certain. However, it
appears that my work has been seen to be suffering somewhat as well of
late. Not quite up to its previous standards, I’ve been told. I have had to
have several meetings with my immediate higher-up at the company. As
you can imagine, this has added to my concerns so that I now find it
difficult to concentrate upon my duties. As my higher-up is quite taken by
the avowed merits of counselling, and as this view is shared by my good
wife, I agreed to attempt a series of sessions. My wife obtained a list of
counsellors in the area and you appeared to be the most convenient. So …
here I am. I place myself in your, I am sure, capable hands.’
‘And what would you hope that my “capable hands” might be able to
achieve?’ I asked somewhat aloofly.
‘I have not the slightest idea,’ Russell answered matter-of-factly.
‘You seem to be a very trusting sort of man,’ I suggested.
‘How so?’
‘Well, by your own account, you’re here because not you but your
higher-up and your wife have deemed it to be a good idea and you tell me
that you’re ready to place yourself in the hands of a convenient someone
whom your wife has found for you.’
‘That is correct,’ Russell nodded. If he had noted any irony in my
words, he gave no indication of reacting to it.
‘I suppose I was struck by your willingness to go along with it all—
and to not appear to want to have any say in the matter,’ I continued.
‘I have no qualifications by which to assess the value of my wife’s
initiative,’ said Russell.
‘Yet it is you who is here and not your wife.’
‘My wife is not experiencing any difficulties that I know of.’ He
paused, wiped at his forehead once again, then added: ‘Other than myself, I
suppose.’
There was something in the tone of his tacked-on remark that touched
me. Abruptly, I discovered some residue of willingness to encounter Russell
as a human being rather than as a generator of problems. ‘So …’ I said,
‘perhaps you can fill me in on these difficulties you’re having at work.’
Russell explained that his immediate work-related difficulties lay in
his current inability to remain engaged with the sequence of tasks that his
role as a CD-ROM programmer and technician required. He specified that,
recently, he had found himself to be easily distracted by sudden, painful
intrusive thoughts of which he could not let go and, as a consequence, he
would find himself either forgetting what he was about to do or typing in
erroneous program commands. This, in turn, would force him to begin the
sequence over again several times thereby losing much-needed time and
thereafter experiencing the anxiety of perceiving himself as an agent of
delay in his company’s overall program production.
 This had been a highly unusual development as he had prided himself
on his technical and programming know-how and now felt that the respect
he had earned from his colleagues was under threat. Yet no matter how
forcefully he berated himself and sought to concentrate on the matter at
hand, he could not succeed in shrugging off the undesirable thoughts and,
instead, managed only to exacerbate the situation.
These ‘undesirable thoughts’ centred around Russell’s growing fear
that his aged mother, who had been continuously ill of late, was about to
die. As a consequence, he had become so excessively agitated that he had
had to take several days off work. After keeping his feelings bottled up
during the first two days, he eventually broke down and confided in his
wife that he was greatly concerned about his mother and that he couldn’t
bear to think of her degenerating in the way that had been suggested to him
by her doctor. Russell’s wife, Elaine, rallied round the other members of the
family for a discussion, but it proved to be of no lasting avail. In spite of the
fact that they had all sought to reassure him that the doctor’s prognosis was
by no means certain and that, even if things came to the worst, they would
all share in both the care and medical expenses that might be required,
Russell found himself unable to truly listen to and believe in them. Instead,
he felt that the whole burden of the situation rested solely and squarely
upon his shoulders.
Recounting this to me, he expressed his conviction that while his
family was quick to talk, not one of them had shown any significant
inclination to act. Unlike them, he argued, in spite of his own pressing work
commitments, he had been to visit his mother regularly (in fact, almost on a
daily basis), something which the others had not seemingly thought worth
their bother. While acknowledging that, as a consequence, he had let his
other family relations and job assignments decline noticeably, Russell
insisted that he felt honour-bound to defer all other bonds and that if the
family did not respect or understand his need to care for his mother, then
that was their problem, not his. It angered him that no one, not even Elaine,
seemed to understand his concern or was willing to back him up on the
decision he’d taken.
Russell’s life until this point had been extremely ordered and precise.
When I asked him to detail this more concretely, his first response was to
speak in terms of physical space. He described his home study and his
company office as being chock-a-block full up with books, journals, design
texts and programming manuals, all of which were sorted out precisely so
that he knew exactly where to turn in order to find what he wanted as soon
as it was required. When I sought further elaboration, he painted a mental
picture of his rooms filled to the brim with objects so that there was literally
no space to move in either of them. Then, partly in embarrassment, partly in
pride, he explained that he had had to design a path in each one so that he,
or anyone wishing to speak to him, could manoeuvre their way through in
order to get to his desk. Russell also added that he kept his rooms locked so
that no one else could enter them unless he allowed them to. Once again, he
followed up his statement with a grin that suggested both selfcritical
bemusement and fierce defiance.
As an apt expression of this dual stance, he explained that while his
attitude had provoked difficulties for the cleaning firm employed by his
company, he had, nonetheless, insisted that his office be regarded as being
out-of-bounds, even if it meant that it would be left uncleaned. ‘I can be a
cantankerous so-and-so when I wish to be,’ he admitted, ‘but when I know
I’m in the right, nothing and no one can move me.’
‘I suppose that as well as that,’ I replied, ‘your disposition might also
serve to reassure you that you’re a valued member of your team.’
‘How’s that?’ Russell asked, revealing some surprise at my comment.
‘Well, I suppose that if your office didn’t value your contributions then
it wouldn’t be quite so willing to appease your whims.’
While he did not appreciate my referring to his stance as a ‘whim’,
Russell nodded his head in agreement.
‘I would think that from the position of office management, there is a
great deal of implicit trust being placed in you,’ I added. ‘If, as you say, no
one but you can obtain access to your work-place or the materials and files
located therein, the fact that your wishes are respected suggests to me that
your role in the company is seen as being significant.’
‘Or convenient,’ Russell appended.
‘And might this have any resonance with how you perceive your
family’s relationship to you?’ I asked. ‘For instance, I’m wondering if when
they tell you that your interventions regarding your mother are valuable—
possibly even irreplaceable—what you hear is that they’re convenient to
them?’
 ‘I’m the one who visits her as often as possible! I’m the one who has
had to make the important decisions! Actions speak louder than words!’
Russell thundered, expressing apparent anger for the first time during our
meeting.
‘Yes, I agree. But, again, without stretching the parallel too much, just
as you’ve made it as difficult as possible for anyone other than yourself to
have access to the materials in your office by constructing a space which
only you can negotiate with little difficulty, might it not be also the case that
you’ve constructed similar obstacles with regard to your family’s access to
your mother and her needs?’
Russell did not appreciate my challenge one little bit. ‘But what would
be my purpose?’ he hissed.
‘Why not consider that question yourself?’
‘Because it is an absurd question!’
‘All right, let’s say it’s absurd. But you will admit that the situation is
such that even if someone in your office were to phone you up and say that
they were aware of the difficult circumstances in your life at present and
that they wanted to help by doing some of the work that you’ve had
assigned to you, it would be difficult for them to achieve this.’
‘It would be more trouble than it was worth!’
‘Because?’
‘Because I’d have to explain so much with regard to directions and
such that I might as well do it myself!’
‘Right. Okay … now take that very statement “I’d have to explain so
much that I might as well do it myself ”, and apply it to your family
situation. Does it fit at all?’
‘Yes, of course it does! But that’s only because I was the only one to
take the initiative to set up appointments with specialists, to arrange home
help, to do all the necessary things!’
‘Yes, Russell, you did that, and I’m not trying to minimise the
importance or value of what you did. However, what I am suggesting is that
you may have also done it in such a way that now, even if they wanted to,
no one else could do it without a great deal more difficulty than if you were
to continue to do it. In fact, they couldn’t really do it without your
assistance. Just like what you said with regard to the office scenario we
discussed a moment ago.’
 Something in my words must have struck a chord for Russell. For the
first time, I felt that he was deliberating what I’d said. When he spoke up
again, it was neither defensively nor antagonistically; indeed, he seemed to
be speaking more to himself than to me. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘That’s true
enough. I know much more and can get to the relevant details much more
quickly and easily than anyone else.’
‘You’ve made yourself special,’ I said. ‘And maybe the others see that.
And value you for that. Maybe, as you say, they also find it convenient that
you did. But whatever the case—’
‘They can’t replace me,’ Russell interjected.
At the start of our second session, once Russell had relayed the latest
information, which basically added up to the fact that neither his own nor
his mother’s circumstances had improved to any noticeable extent, the
opportunity arose for me to ask him what his feelings were about coming to
see me. He answered promptly that, much as he would like to, he
unfortunately continued to fail to see much point in the procedure other
than that of providing me with an income. Nevertheless, he smiled, if others
persisted in thinking it important that he pursue the enterprise, then he was
willing to respect their viewpoint for a little while longer.
‘And what are you experiencing as you tell me this?’ I queried.
‘I can’t say. Nothing substantial. I suppose I remain unsure,
unconvinced of the point in relaying personal and family matters to a
complete stranger.’
Making no attempt to dissuade him of this viewpoint, nor offering
promises that matters would eventually improve, I instead asked him to
attempt to remain in that experience of doubt and note what emerged.
Russell’s response was to produce a sneer which, as soon as he saw me
noting it, turned into a somewhat insincere-looking smile. ‘I can’t think of a
thing,’ he said glumly. ‘Sorry.’
‘What are you sorry about, Russell?’ I inquired.
‘You asked me to do something, and I couldn’t accomplish it. Sorry.’
‘It’s no big deal. I was just offering something that might allow you to
focus on your experience. That you couldn’t come up with anything seems
to be as valid as anything else.’
Russell thought about this. ‘Well, actually, if you want to know, I
wasn’t really experiencing nothing. I was experiencing anger, as a matter of
fact.’
‘You were experiencing anger towards me?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so.’
‘And what was the basis of that anger?’
‘I hate people telling me what to do.’
‘Ah … And yet, I find this odd because you seem to do a lot of things
on the basis of other people telling you what to do. Like coming here, for
instance. Does this mean that you’re angry a great deal of the time?’
‘No!’ Russell loudly disagreed.
I paused, waited for him to gather his thoughts, once again avoided
contradicting his viewpoint.
‘I’m not angry most of the time,’ he stated following about half a
minute of silence. ‘It’s just that people seem to have all these ideas about
what’s right and wrong for me to do and act as if they know me better than I
do myself. I don’t mind their suggestions, not at all. But many times, I wish
they would leave me in peace to sort these matters out for myself.’
‘I see. What is it, do you think, that makes people so unable to leave
you to make your own decisions?’
‘I don’t know. They simply don’t think.’
‘But, there’s something more implied to this. What is it, do you
suppose, that makes you the focus of their attention? After all, they don’t go
about telling everyone what to do. Just you.’
‘Perhaps I’m weak, and can’t make decisions,’ Russell offered half-
heartedly.
‘Does that ring true for you?’
‘No!’
‘So …’
‘Perhaps it’s because of the opposite,’ Russell added cautiously.
‘I don’t understand,’ I said.
‘Perhaps it’s because people see me as being quite strong, actually, and
they don’t like to see that.’
‘What? They’re afraid of strong people like you?’
‘Possibly … Possibly more bothered than afraid.’
‘Bothered in what ways?’ I pressed.
‘It challenges their power, I suppose.’
 ‘Oh … You mean that they do it to put you in your place?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Russell, are you saying that it’s your belief that your relationship to
others is one that’s based upon some sort of competition whereby others
attempt to—’
‘Make me more like them!’ Russell completed.
‘Ah … I see. So, if that’s what they’re up to, then what do you do?’
‘I try to stand my ground.’
‘And how do you do this?’
‘I find ways to ensure that they cannot have access to me.’
‘Like using your space to create barriers and obstacles?’
‘Yes, I suppose so.’
We began to explore this idea more fully over the next few sessions.
What was evident, if initially implicit, in what Russell had told me, was that
I, too, he assumed, as a representative of the ‘others’ in his world, held the
same agenda towards him. The consideration of this option proved
particularly useful as it allowed Russell to express his general views
regarding others within the specific and immediate context of our sessions.
Once again, my aim was not to dispute his position but, rather, to try to
clarify it as accurately as possible so that I might gain some adequate
degree of entry into his currently experienced ‘being world’. My purpose in
this attempt was not merely, or even primarily, to ‘empathise’ with Russell,
but rather to truly challenge him—not from the perspective of an outsider
who would have only confirmed his views regarding others in general, and
this ‘other’ in particular, but as one who was sufficiently akin to him to
expose all manner of subtle, implicit assumptions and biases that, however
unnoticed, were contained within the explicit views, beliefs, values and
stances that made up his currently lived experience.
It is an assumption of the existential-phenomenological model that this
‘internal’ challenge to a client’s world-view is far greater both in impact
and significance than any attempt on the part of a therapist to ‘prove’ the
error in a client’s viewpoint, or to seek to provide the means for ‘change’
via alternative options, techniques or rationales. From the standpoint of the
existentialphenomenological model, the therapist’s primary function is not
that of provoking attitudinal or behavioural change in the client, but of
clarifying the client’s lived experience of being-in-the-world. That such
clarification may provide the means for clients to change their attitudes and
behaviour is beyond doubt. That it may also allow clients to accept (or
‘own’) for perhaps the first time in their lives the attitudes and behaviours
they have adopted in either an unaware or a dissociated manner is likewise
certainly the case. While these latter instances may not be regarded by some
as proper evidence of ‘change’ in clients, they should not be underestimated
—however difficult they may be to ‘measure’ quantitatively.
The points just discussed reveal yet another meaning within the notion
of un-knowing. To attempt to un-know requires of the therapist the
willingness to accept the client’s way of being as valid and entitled to
respect. That this may often require therapists to accept client values and
beliefs that are alien or contrary to their own is a necessary condition of this
enterprise. If nothing else, in striving to enter the world of the client via the
acceptance of these self-same values and beliefs, what the therapist is likely
to experience will be similar in significant ways to that which the client is
being urged to accomplish—the clarification of one’s self-construct.
This is not to suggest that existential-phenomenological therapists can
claim that they, unlike everyone else, can erase their own attitudes and
predispositions, nor that they can ever hope to fully experience or
comprehend their clients’ worldviews exactly as their clients live them. To
do so would imply that such therapists were somehow magically capable of
no longer holding, or ‘reflecting’, any values or beliefs other than those of
their clients. Rather, acknowledging that they will always retain their own
percepts and biases, and that these will be present in their attempts to listen
to their clients, existential-phenomenological therapists seek to suspend the
judgements, evaluations, and desires to change the client’s way of being
that accompany, or which they associate with, their client’s statements
about their way of being so that the latter may be heard and challenged
more adequately.
My own view is that this aim stands a greater likelihood of success if
therapists remain genuinely curious about alternative ways of being so that
they remain as open as possible to the ‘being possibilities’ presented to
them—regardless of how unusual, alien, disturbing or challenging these
may be to their own.
Such qualities, which I have described as the therapist’s willingness to
be for the client (i.e. to respect the client’s way of being as valid and
meaningful) and to be with the client (i.e. to attempt entry into the client’s
way of being in order to clarify its underlying values, beliefs, and so forth),
are not techniques or skills that the therapist can learn and apply.1 Rather,
they are, more properly, expressions of a particular type of human
encounter. The therapist’s willingness to engage in this way with his or her
client provides the latter with the experience of an ‘other’ (i.e. the therapist)
who both represents all others in the client’s world and also challenges the
client’s assumptions about others. But, just as importantly, this same
willingness on the part of the therapist offers the client a ‘model’ with
which to ‘be with and be for’ his or her own way of being-in-the-world.
In Russell’s case, the attempt to provide and foster this type of
encounter appeared to have a significant effect upon his stance and attitude
towards himself, towards me, and towards our meetings with one another.
Following on from the sessions previously summarised, Russell seemed far
more happy and willing to attend and participate in our weekly meetings
than he had been before. Indeed, he even requested that we begin to see
each other twice-weekly—a request that I had to reject because of other
commitments. That Russell was saddened, even angered, by my response
was evident; even so, that he chose to voice his feelings and assumptions
regarding my decision said a great deal about his commitment to an
alternative way of responding to the travails of the world and, as well, about
the value he had placed upon our relationship.
While Russell’s life seemed to be altering noticeably in ways that he
valued, my own battle with despondence continued unabated. The one
bright element that seemed to provide me with the will to continue my work
was the promise of my annual month’s holidays in September. I had
mentioned this break to all my clients long before, but now, as the days
approached, I noted that Russell (who had also been informed) began to
allude to future sessions in such a way as to suggest that he had forgotten
about our arrangement. When I reminded him that we had two more
sessions left before the holiday, he responded with agitated surprise,
claiming that I had not warned him and that we were at such a crucial point
in our sessions that their continuance was necessary. I commiserated with
his anxiety, but insisted that I was not prepared to alter my plans. When I
attempted to explain my rationale for the break, he professed to understand,
but left the meeting in a huff.
Russell did not show up for his subsequent session. I have no iron-clad
policy as to what to do on such occasions. Most often, like many other
therapists, I do nothing and simply assume that my client will return the
following week. With Russell, though, I had such a strong sense of his hurt
that I wrote him a brief note expressing my hope that nothing untoward had
occurred and that I looked forward to meeting him for a final session before
the break.
The effects of this communication were mixed. While Russell did
appear for the following session, explaining that he had had an urgent
business matter to deal with and was grateful for the note I’d sent him, his
manner seemed more detached and distant, much like that of the Russell I’d
encountered during our early sessions. The meeting dragged on for its
allotted length and then, as soon as he was aware of its completion, Russell
rose, formally shook my hand, and wished me the best with regard to my
holidays. We set a time and date for our first session following the break
and said our goodbyes.
Much to my consternation, however, I could not get Russell out of my
thoughts. Throughout that month, I constantly returned to thinking about
him, considering his concerns, seeking to make sense of his way of being-
in-theworld. As I did so, I remained fully aware that this was virtually
unprecedented in my experience of working with clients.
My students find it surprising when I tell them that in spite of the
intensity of focus in my attempt to be with and for my clients during our
encounters, as soon as each meeting ends, it is as if all memory of that
session ceases for me. I emphasise ‘as if ’ because I know that, with some
effort, I can recapture the session with sufficient accuracy. But there is
rarely any point to my doing so other than if, for some reason, something
that has been said or that took place strikes me as significant in a more
general or abstract fashion, in which case I jot down a few lines to act as a
trigger for subsequent theoretical speculation.
Even so, as soon as I again meet my clients, I find myself suddenly
flooded with the memories of incidents in their lives as previously
recounted to me, as well as of our previous meetings together. This
reimmersion into our shared past can be so detailed that at times clients are
amazed by my ability to recall names and dates, chronological sequences,
and extracts of our past dialogues with seemingly unerring facility. This
ability is difficult for me to express without making it sound uncanny. Yet I
do not believe it to be so and have talked with several other therapists who
have experienced something highly akin to this. Perhaps it is an aspect of
what Frances Yates has termed ‘the art of memory’ that most long-time
therapists employ.2 In any case, what is relevant here is that I have learned
to rely upon this ability when in sessions and have begun to suspect that it
hinges, at least as far as therapy is concerned, upon my willingness to ‘let
go’ of each session when it reaches its conclusion.
As such, my inability to be free of Russell was somewhat
disconcerting. So much so, in fact, that I eventually forced myself to
confront it by setting aside some time on a daily basis, in order that I might
sit in my office, and ‘conjure up’ Russell’s ‘presence’ in order to explore
and examine this conundrum. This turned out to be a useful and
illuminating exercise for a number of reasons.
First, my attempts succeeded in reawakening my memories of our
sessions together and I recalled that Russell had once stated that his
experience of being with others was that he ‘cut off ’ from those who were
not immediately present. For Russell it was as if those who were not
currently there disappeared from his thoughts until such time as their
contact with him ‘made them real’ once again. Russell was clear about his
position: ‘Friends and family members get in touch with me, I don’t get in
touch with them,’ he had stated in blunt fashion. The similarities between
our experiences struck me forcefully to the point where I began to clarify
my own implicit stance toward my clients in that they, too, are examples of
people who ‘get in touch with me’ and not the other way around.
Except that this wasn’t so with Russell; I had got in touch with him
when he’d failed to appear for his next-to-last meeting. Rather than
challenge his stance towards others so that it might be clarified, I had,
however inadvertently, proven its ‘truth’. And what might that mean to
him?
As confounding as this insight was, it was superseded by my
subsequent realisation that Russell’s views accurately expressed my own
current ones towards my own friends. I had become so detached from my
social world, so immersed in the private world of thought and writing, that I
had clearly neglected to maintain regular contacts with my circle of
companions. Indeed, over the previous months, I had relied upon them to
get in touch with me. Confronting this viewpoint saddened and outraged
me. Even so, realising what I had done, wishing to change matters as
quickly as possible, I was also struck by a sudden degree of anxiety. I had
forgotten how to do it, I told myself. True, I could still manage with my
clients, that much I knew, but that was work, not friendship. Had I, in my
misguided subservience to professional duties and development, lost my
ability to make and retain friendships?
Haltingly, I began to confide my concerns to my wife who, while
reassuring me that my worst fears were not realistic, nevertheless implored
me to push myself to initiate contacts, to regain an active role in this part of
my life that clearly meant so much to me. Thankfully, I took her advice,
discovered that my friends, far from being resentful, were prepared to
welcome me back into their worlds, and, with their assistance and patience,
I began to regain a balance between my private and professional lives.
Even so, my concerns about Russell persisted. This time, I began to
wonder whether Russell, too, had come to believe, as I had, that he was no
longer able to take such a ‘leap of faith’ with regard to his family and
friends.
As I considered this last point, a niggling refrain began to repeat itself
until I could avoid it no longer. ‘Consider his mother’, it said. And
eventually, I began to. At first, all I could come up with was the view that
Russell had done his duty towards his mother. He had also sought to cut off
everyone else from this in order that he could maintain his belief that he
was irreplaceable, the only person who could ‘do it right’—just as in his
work. But, however clear-cut, this account seemed to be incomplete.
Something that I could not pin-point continued to bother me.
Toying with alternative possibilities, I began to wonder what might
emerge if Russell’s stance towards his mother had been more than mere
duty? The metaphorical light-bulb hovering above my head suddenly
clicked on. What if, I wondered, Russell’s concern and desire to be with his
mother had been the one means of maintaining an openness towards others
remaining to him? If so, then little wonder that he had fought so hard to
retain that contact. And had I not, along with all the other members of his
family, misinterpreted his aim by viewing it solely as an example of his
need to believe himself irreplaceable?
Without denying the significance of this former interpretation, I now
began to view it as but one side of the coin. Might not his attempt also have
expressed his yearning to value another—and, in turn, to be valued—not
because of what he did but, rather, for the unique quality of relationship that
he could offer simply by being there?
 On further reflection, I considered that he had begun to extend this
attempt to engage in a far more defenceless form of human encounter in his
relationship with me, as well. And yet, something had failed. I was not yet
‘real enough’ for him to feel at ease with the fact that we would not be
seeing one another for a month. What was it that he’d said about others not
being ‘real enough’? ‘Friends and family members get in touch with me, I
don’t get in touch with them.’ Just as I had proved the ‘truth’ of this view,
had I also, in contacting him when I did, proved that I was not ‘real enough’
as well? Perhaps, had I stood firm, I might have allowed him the
opportunity to challenge his own sedimented position by opening the route
towards his contacting me. True, we were not friends, but our relationship
contained some significant resemblances, to be sure, as any established
therapeutic relationship will.
And what had been my purpose in contacting him in the first place?
What had it allowed me? Oh, not much. Just the means to realise that I, too,
had been living in a fashion all too similar to Russell’s in that my friends got
in touch with me, I didn’t get in touch with them. And, in breaking this rule
in a therapeutic relationship that bore some similarities to friendship, had I
not found the desire to take that ‘leap of faith’ to initiate contact with my
friends?
As if all this were not enough, my continuing attempts to spend more
of my time in the company of my friends also provided me with an
additional intuition regarding Russell’s way of being. During an afternoon
passed with a close friend and fellow therapist, Barbara Guthrie, she
casually mentioned an idea derived from existential theory that had struck
her with some force. Ludwig Binswanger, an early exponent of existential
thought as applied to psychiatry, had argued that the exploration of a
person’s relationship to his or her physical space and environment provided
significant clues as to their fundamental stance, or dialogue, towards their
being-in-the-world.3 Barbara had become fascinated by this insight and had
begun to consider its wider implications with regard to the way that
architects’ constructs of buildings, rooms and space might have a
significant, if rarely considered, impact upon the shaping of our Western
cultural psyche.
Inspired by these reawakened ideas and their resonances with what
Russell had told me about his own relationship with his study and office, I
began to consider his ongoing dialogue with the world from the standpoint
of his relationship to physical space.
By his own admission, Russell had constructed a closed, restrictive
physical world which virtually prevented entry by others unless it was of
his own choosing. In achieving this, he had succeeded in cocooning himself
from the demands— and delights—of others. And yet, over the time of our
sessions, as he’d begun to voice his concerns and fears regarding his
relations with others, and, as well, as he’d begun to disclose himself in the
presence of another, his relationship to his physical environment had also
undergone alteration.
While I had failed to attend to this development to any suitable extent
during our sessions together, I now realised that Russell himself had been
alerting me to its significance for him. He had remarked that he had been
looking about his offices more carefully, more judgementally, than he had
ever done before. His home office chair, for instance, no longer seemed
comfortable to him and, similarly, he had begun to dislike the colours of his
work office and had wondered whether he could stand the upheaval of
having it redecorated.
Perhaps more significantly, as a way of preparation for his attempts to
regain his ability to work with the diligence and perseverance that he had
previously been able to muster, Russell had started to go through the
voluminous stacks of papers, magazines, journals and books that had
covered practically all of his floor-space and had resolved to rid himself of
any that were now outdated or extraneous to his concerns. In doing so, he
had made his space far more accessible to others than it had ever been
before. And, while this filled him with some degree of dread, much more
significantly it had surprised him how easily, and pleasantly, he could live
with his new situation.
On the negative side, however, this change had provoked some
unexpected concerns. Most tellingly, he had discovered that with the
modification had come a loss of clarity. He was no longer certain as to
where things were, or even if he had elected to keep or throw them away.
Much to his chagrin, he began to experience the relative novelty of losing
things. Even then, however, the experience had not been entirely
detrimental. Russell had found himself talking more frequently, and openly,
with others and had even, admittedly somewhat tentatively, begun to ask for
their assistance or advice.
 Linking these events to the clues I’d gathered about Russell’s self-
construct, it became apparent that this process of ‘opening up’ his physical
space resonated significantly with his own movement towards being more
open in the presence of another (i.e. me). In similar fashion, while this latter
experience was greeted by Russell as being important, valid, possibly even
beneficial, nevertheless it too had led to experiences of confusion and
bewilderment. His movement, it now seemed to me, was one that had
progressed from an attempt to create and inhabit a world that he could quite
literally, shut out, and thereby control, towards a position where he had
abdicated some of this power to others. And, yet, this ‘abdication’ had also
provided him with the means to regain human contact and relationship—
even if the ‘price’ of this had been greater degrees of uncertainty and risk in
his world relations.
Once again, I was taken aback by the correspondence of Russell’s
situation to my own. I, too, had gone about shutting out as many people as
possible from the influence and direction of my life. That I had achieved
this to a great extent only to discover a sense of deep loss and emptiness
provided me with a powerful insight as to Russell’s conundrum. Just as
Russell’s space was ‘full up’ so as to constrict the impact of others, so too
was his self-construct (his sense of his own being) ‘filled’ in such a fashion
as to prevent its being invaded or challenged by novel possibilities that
would have emerged through more open relationships.
But the consequences of both these strategies were evident: quite
paradoxically, they perpetuated an empty, seemingly unchanging (and,
hence, lifeless) environment and way of being, which while self-protective
and guarded, to be sure, were fundamentally isolated from the world.
While existential-phenomenological theory postulates (quite correctly,
I believe) that each one of us construes a unique reality which cannot, in
any complete sense, be accessed (or lived) by anyone else in exactly the
same way, nevertheless it would be a substantial error to conclude that this
model also implies, or champions, an isolated position towards existence.
Quite the opposite, in fact; existential-phenomenological theory assumes
that all reflections upon our lived experience reveal that existence is
relationally derived. While our reflections upon our existence remain
unique, the very source of our ability to reflect upon the world in a
distinctly human manner springs from our relational encounters with the
world.
 This dual position suggests a basic tension or ‘existential dilemma’ in
human living that each of us seeks to resolve: the search for, and attempt to
construct, a way of being that somehow will balance our unique reflections
upon our lived experience with the perceived demands and desires of being-
with-others. In this sense, the fundamental project of living, for all of us,
becomes the struggle to achieve relational balance between our experience
of our own self-construct, our experience of others as we have construed
them to be, and our experience of that ‘between-ness’ that emerges through
our every encounter with the world.
Like others who have spoken of this project, I remain of the opinion
that equilibrium cannot be achieved. At best, our lives are composed of
constant attempts which will eventually fail. And yet, each failure can also
be seen to be a victory of sorts in that it provides the potential for us to
derive a more adequate stance towards our being-relations on the basis of
that which has been found to be both desirable and wanting in our
experience of previous attempts at balanced relations.
Nevertheless, each failure can also leave us disheartened, anxious
about our willingness and ability to attempt the project yet again—even if,
in some way, we remain aware that there is no alternative to this project.
For even the most extreme denial of it—the attempt to isolate oneself from
all relations—reveals itself to be one more form of relation, however
restricted and constrained. But one does not need to go to such lengths to
realise that, typically, we settle for much less than we desire or of which we
might be capable. We might advocate the view that says: ‘Enough! This is
what I’ve learned, this is where I’ve reached, this is where I stand. Don’t
show me any other possibilities!’ Alternatively, we might move on too
quickly from one tentative form of encounter to the next without
sufficiently considering the worth and weaknesses of each, what may be
gained and lost, provided or withheld. This tension between our attempts to
settle for something less than what is possible and to explore ever further
fuels all of us. That we each contrive unique strategies should not blind us
to our common pursuit.
In considering Russell’s experience of being from this perspective, I
could see that his attempt to construct an environment impermeable to
others was one response to this ‘existential given’. Yet, as a response, it
excluded too much. As full as it was, his space was empty.
 I think that it would be misleading to view Russell’s relationship to his
physical space as being symbolic of his more general stance. Rather, I
would argue that it was his stance, as viewed from a particular focal point
of his experience of being-in-theworld. In similar fashion, one could see this
same stance from the focal point of the limited range of his relations with
his wife and family, friends and colleagues, to the sense of self he had
bolstered—in short, in every facet of his lived experience. In this sense,
then, it would not matter which aspect of his experience was ‘worked on’ in
therapy or elsewhere, since each in its particularity also reflected the whole.
In similar fashion, any significant alteration in Russell’s relational
experience as viewed from one particular focal point would have its impact
upon all others since they all were ‘fragments’ or diverse perspectives on
the same matter.
That Russell had sought to close up his space, and his own experience
of being, from the invasion of others I had seen with some degree of clarity.
But I had also erred in conceiving his strategy to be too simple, too
straightforward. What was being left out was something that Russell had
alluded to in our early conversations concerning his ‘closed space’. He had
told me that in spite of his desire to avoid the presence of others he had
designed a path in each of his rooms so that anyone wishing to speak to him
could manoeuvre their way through. In other words, he had allowed a space
for others, no matter how difficult and restrictive, to exist in his world. And,
in similar fashion, just as that space provided the means for others to come
to him, it also allowed him to move towards others.
Viewed from this different focal point, Russell’s relationship with his
mother provided a corresponding ‘pathway’ for all the other relations in
Russell’s world. How could his family and friends have failed to see this?
More tellingly, how had I failed to see it? I was amazed that I could have
been so unaware, so naive, so much more the apprentice than the avowed
expert that I had come to believe I was.
Well, I told myself, now that you have seen, you will be able to ‘be
with and for’ Russell far more adequately.
This was not to be so, however. A few days before the end of my
break, I received a note from Russell. He had decided not to continue with
therapy. He explained that he had never really wanted to be in therapy and
was now strong enough to express this. Nevertheless, he remained grateful
for the time we had spent together and felt certain that our meetings must
have played some small role in the positive changes in his life. He would,
he concluded, always remember me with fondness.
Berating my deficiencies, my stupidities, I was nonetheless heartened
by his final comment. That he would remember me suggested that perhaps,
in spite of everything, I had been sufficiently ‘real’ to Russell. On
reflection, that he had taken the step of contacting me, rather than wait for
me to contact him, also seemed to indicate that he had found the means to
take his own ‘leap of faith’.
In spite of the fact that our meetings had come to an abrupt end, I
decided to spend the hour that I had reserved for our meeting in
contemplation of my encounter with Russell. As I did so, much to my
growing discomfort, I began to conclude that while Russell’s ‘complaint’
had stimulated me to examine and act upon my own issues and concerns,
these self-same considerations had prevented me from providing the ‘space’
that might allow the same for him. Who had been the therapist and who had
been the client?
Although several years have gone by since I last heard from him, I
remain indebted to Russell. Not only for having served as catalyst to a
necessary reevaluation of the ‘being-relations’ in my life, but, just as
importantly, for reminding me that all faltering steps in the direction of un-
knowing lead us also towards humility.

1. See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.

2. Yates, F.A. (1966) The Art of Memory. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
3. Binswanger, L. (1963) Being-in-the-World: Selected papers of Ludwig Binswanger. New York: Basic Books.
 5
Lou and Simone:
Truth or Happiness?

While most of us would consider the idea of a life bereft of significant and
intimate relations with a long-term partner to be undesirable, possibly even
unbearable, such relationships can also be one of the main sources of our
concerns and anguish. It is hardly surprising, then, that ‘marriage, or
relationship, therapy’ is increasingly sought after and offered. As the term
suggests, this form of therapy differs from individual or ‘one-to-one’
therapy in a significant, if obvious, manner in that both members of the
couple are seen together, for at least the majority of sessions, throughout the
whole of the therapeutic encounter.
Unlike practitioners representing many other models in therapy, those
who attempt to follow an existential-phenomenological approach have
written very little about their work with couples. This seems somewhat
startling to me not only because quite a few existential-phenomenological
therapists offer couple therapy, but also since it is apparent that this
approach provides a unique and novel perspective. Although I have neither
the training nor the patience to engage in therapeutic encounters with
groups, I have found the experience of working with a couple to be both
stimulating and illustrative of the importance given by existential-
phenomenological theory to the idea of being-with-others. Nevertheless, I
remain aware that until someone writes a detailed analysis on engaging in
therapy with couples from an existential-phenomenological standpoint, my
own attempts remain both tentative and idiosyncratic.
Working with a couple is not the same as working simultaneously with
two individuals. While there are clearly two people with separate (often
contradictory and competing) wants and viewpoints present before the
therapist, that which the couple, in its very being, has created—an ongoing
relationship that exists between the two individuals—must be acknowledged
and considered in its own right. Indeed, it is this very relationship that, for
me, at least, forms the principal focus of my engagements with couples.
As such, there is already an important, if not usually acknowledged,
complexity imposed upon this type of therapeutic encounter. For, while
individual therapy can only focus, via an indirect extension, upon the
client’s other relational encounters with ‘the world’, in the case of couple
therapy, this is clearly not so, since the individuals’ relationship with one
another, as expressed in the immediacy of the therapeutic encounter, is very
much directly evident in the couple they have co-created.
In this way, the therapist’s focus rests not only with each individual, A
and B, as separate ‘beings-in-the-world’, but also, and far more
prominently, with that expression of relational being that has been co-
constructed by the couple (that is to say, which exists between A and B). If
the therapist does not acknowledge this, he or she falls into the trap not only
of not meeting with the existing couple, but also, just as likely, of focusing
attention upon one individual to the detriment of both.
This is an easy trap to fall into since, in most instances, couples who
come to therapy have assumed that what difficulties have emerged within
their relationship have their origins in, or are ‘caused by’, the perceived
faults or problems contained within one of the individuals. Indeed, it is not
unusual for the individual members of a couple who might otherwise claim
to disagree with one another on practically every other issue, to agree,
however implicitly, that the source of their current difficulties lies in the
attitudes and behaviour of one member. Often, by simply pointing out this
agreed assumption to them, the therapist may increase the possibility of the
couple’s willingness to address their concerns from a less combative stance.
In similar fashion, I have found it vital to note and clarify with the
couple what each member’s construct of the perceived problems is and
what role each has construed for himself or herself, and for the other
partner, with regard to its genesis and influence upon the current conflict. In
doing so, the way is opened for the three of us to focus upon the existing
conflicts from the relational perspective of the co-constituted couple. And,
in turn, this outlook may succeed in revealing important aspects of the ‘split
consciousness’ that their relationship expresses.
 Just as I have sought to show in the previous case discussions that my
work with individuals reveals conflicts of sedimentation and dissociation
arising from the individual’s reflections upon his or her relational self and
world constructs, my therapy with couples examines similar factors that
reveal the couple’s sedimented and dissociated constructs regarding its own
being and its stance towards the world. For such reasons, I prefer to employ
the term couple-construct as a shorthand means of referring to the ‘co-
created relational unit’ that the word ‘couple’ implies. Realising that such
jargon can be as irritating as it may be helpful, I will employ it only when it
is necessary to the discussion.
In an attempt to find a way of exploring these issues most effectively, I
have, over time, devised a particular sequence that I apply throughout all of
my therapeutic engagements with couples. This follows a routine pattern
made up of a series of five sessions. During each series, I meet both
members of the couple together for the first two sessions, then meet each
member individually for the next two sessions, and then meet with both
members together once again for the fifth session. This sequence of
meetings is then repeated in the same fashion until such time as our
therapeutic encounters are brought to a close.
At first, this approach might seem odd to readers. For if, as I have
suggested above, my principal concern lies with the exploration of the
meaning and values embedded in the couple-construct, why then should I
wish to see each member separately? The answer to this reasonable
objection becomes, I hope, understandable, when it is clarified that these
one-to-one sessions seek to focus upon that individual’s experiential
exploration of the couple-construct that he or she has co-created. In doing
so, I avoid the tendency for these individual sessions to become dominated
by the present individual’s focus upon him or herself or upon his or her
partner, as separate individuals, and, rather, I urge each individual to
consider the issues each brings to our discussions from the standpoint of the
couple-construct.
In this way, as well as enabling each individual to expose, clarify and
consider his or her experience of ‘being with the other partner’, what can
also be clarified will be any number of previously unspecified assumptions,
values and beliefs regarding the couple-construct both as it is perceived to
exist, and as it might be desired, by each member. I have found it
worthwhile to this aim to provide each individual with the opportunity to
engage in such explorations, during each series of five sessions, without the
presence of the other partner—with the proviso that whatever clarifications
emerge during this session will be at least attempted to be conveyed to the
other partner either before or during their next session together.
The co-created ‘problematic couple-construct’ can be seen to express
various thematic issues or concerns that in some way are perceived to be a
threat to its continuance by one or both partners. In many cases, such issues
are likely to have existed from the beginning of the co-created couple-
construct, although they may not have been obvious or reflected upon. As
such, current conflicts that are brought to therapy can be seen to express
fundamental sedimented values, beliefs and outlooks that define the existing
couple-construct. It is, therefore, vital to realise that if these assumptions
are challenged effectively, then the continuance of the couple-construct as it
currently exists is threatened in a significant fashion.
Readers may have by now ascertained a commonality between my
work with individuals and couples in that the conflicts and issues that have
arisen for the couple are viewed not as symptomatic novel disturbances but,
rather, as integral defining characteristic ‘structures’ of the existing couple-
construct. In this way, if some sort of beneficially perceived change is to
occur, it can only do so via the co-creation of a new couple-construct.
If each member of the couple is willing and able to attempt this task,
then the possibility emerges for the resolution or alleviation of the currently
perceived problems. But this may not always be possible, or desirable, for
either or both members of the couple to attempt— in which case, the
couple-construct will either continue to exist with (or in spite of) its
problems, or, as is the more likely outcome, the relationship between the
two individuals will fall apart.
When presented with a couple in conflict, I take the view that our first
task together will be that of clarifying the underlying assumptions, biases,
values and beliefs of the currently existing couple-construct. Via such
descriptive clarification, the couple’s inter-relational sedimentations and
dissociations can be high lighted. At the same time, this attempt is also
likely to expose any number of intra-relational sedimentations and
dissociations maintained by one or both individual members of the couple
with regard to the currently existing couple-construct. Put in another way,
descriptive clarification can reveal not only poorly perceived defining
aspects of the existing couple-construct, but also those poorly perceived
defining aspects that each member of the couple maintains with regard to
his or her own self-construct or to the ‘other-construct’ of his or her partner.
In summary, the couple that begins therapy experiences conflict. This
conflict is perceived by each individual who co-constitutes the couple from
that individual’s own perspective. This viewpoint is typically retained with
little direct communication between the individuals, even though there is
also the common assumption that the views, attitudes, beliefs and values of
the couple are shared (in theory, at least) by both individuals. Such conflicts
are commonly expressed by one or both of the individuals who co-create
the existing couple in the following ways:

1. One individual expresses the view that the other (via his or her
behaviour, or perceived alteration in stance, values, attitudes and/or
beliefs) threatens the stability of the couple by engaging in, or
threatening to engage in, what is perceived to be a dangerous,
undesirable or unacceptable activity.
2. One individual expresses the view that he or she has changed, or is
changing, with regard to previously maintained stances, values,
attitudes and/or beliefs and that such changes threaten the continuance
of the existing relationship.
3. Both individuals express dissatisfaction with some aspect or aspects
of the currently existing relationship and may either wish to change it
but don’t know how or are concerned that any such changes, if
accomplished, may themselves threaten the continuance of the
relationship.

If an individual comes to therapy because he or she experiences some sort

of dis-ease which is often interpreted via a form of ‘medicalese’ language
invoking an illness that threatens to bring about a psychic ‘death’, so, too,
does the couple who comes to therapy experience its co-created couple-
construct in terms of sickness or illness that, if left unchecked, will lead to
the ‘death’ of the couple.
Working with couples extends the work that a therapist engages in
with an individual into a far more complex examination of the
sedimentations and dissociations which maintain, indeed define, the couple-
construct. If Freud’s analogy of the therapeutic encounter with an individual
was that of playing a game of chess, then working with couples is like
three-dimensional chess. Throughout the therapeutic sessions, the therapist
must attend not only to the individual in the couple who is currently
speaking but also to the other individual who remains silent, and to the
couple that emerges from their interaction. This view approaches in an
explicit fashion that which remains usually implicit in individual work since
each individual in the couple addresses issues from a relational self/other
standpoint. In this sense, while the therapist in individual work is always
the sole present living embodiment of ‘others’ in the client’s self-other
relations, in the case of working with a couple, the therapist is the ‘other’
not only for each individual but also for the co-constructed couple.
No wonder then that therapeutic work with couples can be (and
typically is) much more taxing and tiring for the therapist since he or she
must attend to and be in relationship with not one but three relationally-
derived sedimented and dissociated constructs!
The couple whom I welcomed into my office for the first time had
arrived together, holding hands. They introduced themselves to me as Lou
and Simone and then announced that their marriage was in ‘deep shit’.
Simone presented herself as an effusive and socially engaging person.
Short and slight in build, dressed in bright-coloured, loose-fitting casual
clothing, her long auburn hair pulled into a pony-tail, and subtly, if
effectively, made-up, she seemed to me to embody all those attributes that
advertising agencies search for in models who will promote ‘home and
family’ products. She revealed that she had been the one to decide that she
and Lou needed to see a therapist, had struggled to convince Lou of the
value of this, and felt proud both of herself for having succeeded in
convincing him and of Lou for having agreed to come along in spite of his
continuing reservations. Now, she stated, admitting that her words were
only partly in jest, it was up to me to demonstrate that all her efforts had
been worthwhile.
The first thing that Lou said to me in an attempt to describe himself
was that he was thirty-seven years old—which made him five years older
than Simone. Then, immediately upon hearing himself speak these words,
he added that he was also five inches taller than her. Conservatively dressed
in a dark, fashionable three-piece suit, he explained that he worked as a
senior lecturer in economics at a London university, enjoyed his post, and
was well-liked and appreciated by his colleagues. As well as being tall, he
was extremely thin and fit—the latter due to the daily games of handball
that he played at the university sports centre. And that was that; as far as
Lou was concerned, he’d said all that he needed to say about himself.
Following a longish pause, during which time Simone prodded him to add
something more, he conceded that he had ‘mixed feelings’ about coming to
therapy but that, as it seemed to mean so much to Simone, he was prepared
to maintain an open mind and participate as well as he could.
Lou and Simone had been a couple for just over eight years. Until
recently, each had believed that they had together constructed a reasonably
happy and fulfilling relationship. When this point was expressed more
clearly, they both affirmed that as a couple they had managed to create a
relationship based upon mutual agreement. They had tried, and succeeded,
in seeing eye to eye with one another throughout all of their years together.
Until now. Now, they were presented with an issue that threatened to tear
them apart because they disagreed. Their discord was experienced in
differing ways. Simone expressed it in terms of her ‘being depressed’ to the
extent that she had been to see her GP and had begun a course of anti-
depressants. Lou, on the other hand, stated that he felt angry—angry that he
now had to deal with a ‘sick’ wife on top of all his other ‘mid-life’
concerns.
Once again, although their perspectives diverged in significant ways,
they insisted that in their discussions prior to their decision to see me, they
had arrived at a point of mutual agreement: as each saw it, the source of
their problem lay in ‘knowledge’. So long as each of them had allowed their
relationship to remain unconsidered, unreflected upon, they had been
happy. It was only once they had begun to analyse what they each wanted
from their marriage that, they claimed, the trouble had started.
As they spoke, once again united in their mutual decrying of the
‘knowledge’ that had somehow infiltrated their previously happy marriage,
I was reminded of an old ‘mind game’ that I and my friends used to pose to
one another during the late 1960s: ‘If you knew that a comet was rapidly
descending towards the Earth, that it would hit it in three days time and that
there was no possibility whatsoever of the planet and all its living beings
being saved from instant death, would you choose to retain this awareness
and live out the remaining three days in the full knowledge that your life
was about to end or would you choose to have all such knowledge erased
from your thoughts so that you would continue to live your life as usual and
in a state of complete unawareness as to what was about to occur?’
 This somewhat silly question had the avowed function of clarifying
whether one chose truth or happiness as the mainstay of one’s life. And yet,
as frivolous as the question may be, it seems to me that it touches upon a
core human concern. There may not be any life-destroying comet in our
lives at present, but there is, just as significantly, the unavoidable fact of our
choice in the manner by which each of us elects to deal with the daily
uncertainties of living.
The existential-phenomenological idea of choice has often been
misunderstood to mean that human beings are free to decide, determine, or
‘choose’ whatever happens to them. So, for instance, as I write this, there is
an exceptionally strong wind blowing outside and if, because of this, a tree
should fall, crash through my window, and destroy my computer so that
everything that I have written so far is suddenly and tragically wiped clean,
then, this argument suggests, I somehow ‘chose’ this to happen. In this
sense, choice can be seen to be equated with ‘cause’.
Apart from being an absurd assumption to maintain, it is also
misrepresentative of the existential-phenomenological view of choice. Our
‘choice’ is not at the ‘cause’ level. Rather, our choices are situated within
the structural conditions, or ‘givens’, that the world ‘throws at us’. As much
as we might wish to, we cannot control the events, or, more broadly
speaking, the ‘stimuli’ that impinge themselves upon us, moment by
moment, throughout our lives. Rather, what choice is available to us lies
either at the level of how we deal with, or ‘interpret’ these events, or at the
level wherein we face directly that which has presented itself before us
rather than attempt to avoid, deny, or replace this ‘given’ with a more
palatable, if unavailable, alternative.
On reflection, I think that this latter definition of choice clarifies a
common dilemma in our lives. Many people, not least those people who
come to therapy, convince themselves that there are alternative options to
choose where none exist. In doing so, they live an ‘as if ’ kind of life based
upon false choices. So, for instance, if I return to my earlier example of the
tree destroying my computer, it would be a false choice if I were to
convince myself to ‘choose that this event did not happen’. In maintaining
this stance, I would be adopting an ‘as if ’ position upon which all of my
subsequent choices would depend. But such choices would be empty since
they rested upon my avoidance of choosing that which alone was available
to me—the acknowledgement that my computer has been destroyed and
that I am now faced with the choice of what I can and cannot do with this
circumstance.
I might be (momentarily) happier in my ‘as if ’ choice standpoint, but
we can all foresee the problems ahead if this stance is maintained. In
choosing that which is presented to me, however, I might well lose that
temporary happiness, but at least I will be able to act in a way that
acknowledges ‘what the world has thrown at me’ and move on from there.
On reflection, both depression and anger can be seen to be ‘as if ’
choice responses in that each seems to be a temporary way out of the
unbearable or unjust ‘stimuli’ of the world. The first ‘as if ’ choice seems to
be saying: ‘I can’t bear to face the way things are, so I’ll just “shut down”
or “shut off ” all thoughts and emotions and, in that way, the way things or
others are (or the way I am) will shut down or be shut off as well’. The
second option shakes its fist at what the world has thrown and shouts that
‘It’s not right, or possible, or just,’ while imagining what the world should
have offered. Both options can be seen to rest upon the view that the way
things are is ‘wrong’ and that an alternative ‘as if ’ option remains possible.
Might it be, I wondered, returning my attention to my clients, that Lou
and Simone, in their separate ways, had co-created an ‘as if ’-based
marriage? And, if so, were the problems that they were currently
encountering direct outcomes of this? Perhaps, I supposed, the unruly
appearance of ‘knowledge’ into their once ‘happy’ lives could be seen to be
their way of expressing their growing realisation that their relationship
throughout the years had rested upon their mutual avoidance of the lived
choices available to them and the maintenance of a couple-construct that
expressed their shared ‘as if ’ stance towards their experience of being-with
one another.
When I invited them to speak more about their agreed concern over
their current problems, Lou explained that he saw their present home life as
a source of tension and discontent. He revealed that, latterly, he’d found an
increasing number of ‘reasons’, some made up, all superficial, for him to
remain as late as possible in his office so that he wouldn’t have to spend
time with his wife. While chagrined and embarrassed to reveal this, he
spoke the words with a degree of defiance, as if to say: ‘See? This is how
bad things have become between us.’ Simone elected not to respond
directly to Lou’s revelation; instead, speaking softly, she stated that she saw
their continuing disagreement as being deeply destructive to their marriage,
and she added that if she were to be faced with the choice of persisting in
what she was doing or giving in to Lou’s demands, she would choose what
she was doing—regardless of the consequences.
Having made their initial statements, both agreed that it would be
useful for me to be filled in on the background to their as yet unrevealed
problem. Taking turns to speak, their words flowing seamlessly from one
speaker to the other, they recounted the story of their relationship.
Simone had been married previously. Her first husband had been a
university lecturer who had regularly drunk himself into an alcoholic stupor.
When he’d begun to attack her physically, injuring her to the point where
her bruises began to be publicly noticeable, Simone decided that she had
had enough and left him to live in a local sanctuary for abused women. It
was while she was in the process of reconstructing her life that she began to
meet with Lou, who, as a fellow lecturer in the same department as her ex-
husband, had been privy to some of the existing tensions between the
couple and had felt sufficiently concerned about them both to maintain a
regular, if separate, contact with each of them.
With the passing of time, and the decision on the part of Simone’s ex-
husband to take up employment at another university and to agree to a
divorce, her friendship with Lou became a romantic affair leading to the
new couple’s decision to first live together in Lou’s flat and, subsequently,
to marry.
Although their marriage proved to be a happy and fulfilling one for
both partners, not long prior to their coming to see me Simone had begun to
feel herself to be increasingly inadequate because she did not have an
academic degree—unlike Lou, who had several. Simone explained that she
felt this shortcoming most when they entertained Lou’s colleagues or when
he attended conferences to which she also went at his request.
This perceived defect was not new to Simone. Her first husband had
made fun of, and disparaged, her for not having a degree and had referred to
her status as that of a ‘pleasuring animal’ whose purpose in life was to meet
his every physical need. While Simone acknowledged that Lou did not ever
denigrate her, nor view her with anything approaching a similar fashion,
nevertheless, she worried that he might well begin to do so at some point in
the future.
 Such concerns were aggravated for two additional reasons. Owing to a
defect in her reproductive system, Simone had had a hysterectomy at a
relatively early age and was unable to conceive—something which Lou
insisted did not matter to him as he was, in principle, against having
children. Nevertheless, her inability to bear children continued to prey upon
Simone’s thoughts so that, in spite of his protests, she could not fully
believe him. Secondly, Simone also felt both responsible and guilty for the
failure of her first marriage on the grounds that it had been she who had
introduced her husband to the abuse of alcohol and drugs and who had
initiated him into various forms of ‘tantric’ sex which, she believed, had led
to his becoming addicted to physical pleasures that he could not handle and
which, she claimed, had altered his personality to the extent that he’d
become a violent and self-centred individual. While she had been far more
restrained in introducing Lou to various forms of sexual and physical
pleasure, nevertheless she feared that Lou might eventually suffer the same
fate as her first husband and that the subsequent blame and guilt would be
hers alone.
Although he was already a ‘rising star’ in academia when he first met
Simone, Lou had lived in spartan quarters and did not possess many
belongings other than those which he considered to be the basic
requirements of survival in British society. While he had had several affairs
with women, none of them had amounted to anything of long duration—nor
had he expected, or wished, them to. Lou had seen himself very much as ‘a
loner’ whose main preoccupation lay in his research work. While sociable
and liked by his colleagues, he had made few real friends. He enjoyed the
solitary life he had built up for himself and found pleasure mainly in
activities which he could pursue on his own. While he did not spurn the
company of others, he did not require it and felt that he had arrived at a
suitable equilibrium which, he imagined, would sustain him throughout his
life.
When he first began to have more intimate relations with Simone, Lou
had not expected these to develop into a ‘deep’or long-lasting relationship.
When it became obvious to him that, in fact, this very event had, indeed,
occurred, he experienced surprise and disorientation. Uncertain as to
whether it was what he truly wanted, nevertheless he accepted that Simone
had become an important part of his life and that what he felt towards her
was both novel and desirable. While the thought of marriage provoked
concern and seemed alien to his ways, he recognised its import to Simone
and, initially, had consented to it only to please her. From Lou’s standpoint,
their agreement to live together was a sufficient testament of his (if not
their) willingness to acknowledge and accept the responsibilities and
commitment to one another that a ‘good marriage’ demanded.
Noting Simone’s surprised facial reaction to this last statement, I asked
her if she could tell Lou and me what, in her own words, she had just heard
Lou say.
‘He’s saying that he feels compromised. That he feels that this
marriage isn’t his choice,’ she grumbled, then immediately added: ‘And that
really pisses me off !’
‘No, Simone, that’s not what I just said,’ Lou interrupted.
‘Let Simone finish,’ I urged him.
‘It is what you said,’ Simone threw back.
‘Well, it’s what you heard in his words,’ I qualified. ‘But, please,
continue with what you wanted to express.’
Simone sighed deeply, as if to compose herself. ‘I suppose I was
surprised by Lou’s assessment of our getting together. I didn’t feel that I
was pushing him into anything. I don’t want to push anything on anyone.
Ever. And I don’t want anyone to push things on me, either—which is what
I think Lou is trying to do in a very subtle way. If Lou feels that I pushed
him into something and he regrets it, then I’m sorry. It wasn’t what I wanted
either.’
‘So,’ I summarised, ‘neither of you wants to push or be pushed. You’re
both in agreement over that. And, similarly, both of you agree that you
experience the other to be pushing you.’
Lou jumped in. ‘I just want to say that I didn’t mean to suggest that I
felt that Simone was pushing me. What I said before about our relationship
and marriage wasn’t intended as a judgement or criticism of Simone. Hell,
if I hadn’t seen any point to our getting married, no one would have been
able to convince me to do it! I was just talking about how I remember
feeling at the time. That doesn’t mean that it’s how I feel about things today.
If I didn’t see any point in our staying married, if I didn’t value a lot of what
our marriage has provided, I wouldn’t be here today. I didn’t make my
decisions on the basis of being pushed. I made my decisions because I felt
that that was what Simone wanted and I thought that it was a sign of my
caring for her that I would try to go along with what she wanted. That’s not
the same as being pushed into something.’
‘But, Lou,’ Simone replied, ‘that’s what you always say!’
‘What do I always say, Simone?’ Lou shot back irritably.
‘ “I want what Simone wants” ’.
‘So what’s wrong with that? What’s so terrible about me trying to go
along with your wishes?’
‘If I believed you, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with it,’ Simone
said, then turned to me and grinned.
‘What stops you from believing Lou’s statement, Simone?’ I asked.
‘Because it’s not true! Look at what got us into this mess in the first
place! What I want is to start a degree. It’s what I really want. But Lou
doesn’t want me to start a degree, so he’s got the hump about it because he’s
not been able to convince me to change my mind. How does that square
with Lou supposedly wanting what I want, hey?’
‘What do you think Lou wants instead?’ I pressed.
‘He wants things to stay just as they are! He doesn’t want me to start a
degree, that’s for sure!’
Lou shook his head several times, then expressed his exasperation.
‘Look,’ he explained, ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to have a degree. That’s
not it at all.’ Noting that Simone’s response to this declaration was to hoot
in disagreement, he began to address me instead. ‘All I’ve been saying to
her is that she has this unrealistic set of expectations about having a degree.
She’s just blowing it up to unreal proportions as though it’s going to
suddenly mean something.’
‘So,’ I replied, ‘to you, Lou, the idea of Simone getting a degree is
pointless. Meaningless. Simone doesn’t see it that way. For her it’s
something meaningful and important. So there seems to be a conflict. But
what I find difficult to understand is that if it really is so meaningless to
you, how come it has become such a ‘hot’ topic? For something so
meaningless, it seems to have acquired a good deal of meaning. So, perhaps
it would be of help if Simone expresses just what there is that is so
meaningful about her starting a degree and then you can present your views
as to why it’s so meaningless.’
Both Lou and Simone sighed simultaneously in response to my
suggestion. For the first time since their arrival, I saw them reacting in
unison as a couple, exchanging knowing, exclusive, glances between one
another, smiling in that almost conspiratorial fashion that itself expressed
the fact of their ‘being a couple’. That moment of lived connection seemed
important to me and I considered pointing it out to them. But I also
recognised that it might be intrusive to do so at this early stage in our
engagement with one another. In the end, I said nothing.
When he ascertained that Simone wasn’t about to take up my
suggestion, Lou sighed once more. ‘I suppose you’re right,’ he assented. ‘It
can’t be so meaningless and yet provoke such disagreement between us. I
just don’t see that it’s going to be worth all the hassle and shake-up in our
lives. If Simone starts a degree then it’s a commitment that we’re both
taking on in terms of time, and money and ...’ He paused, reconsidered his
words, began again. ‘It means that we would have to give up any idea of
moving anywhere for four years. So, I suppose it would be a sacrifice on
my part, too. Not just Simone’s. And I’m not convinced enough that it’s a
sacrifice worth making. That’s my view, anyway.’
‘Simone?’ I prodded.
‘Can I reply to what Lou just said?’ she asked me.
‘Sure,’ I agreed. ‘But how about if before that you just express your
view as to what starting a degree means to you? It really would help me to
get a sense of its importance to you.’
Simone nodded her head in compliance, then began: ‘I’ve tried to
explain this all to Lou quite a few times already, but … anyway … I know
that Lou can’t seem to accept this, and thinks that it’s really stupid of me to
feel the way I do about it, but I feel a great deal of anxiety when I’m in
Lou’s circle of people because I don’t have a degree. I just feel like I don’t
belong there, and that they feel I don’t belong there but are going along with
it for Lou’s sake. I just really feel inferior to them, and I want to show them
—and me—that I’m not. I know it sounds stupid. I know that. But stupid
things can mean just as much to people as significant things do. In fact, I
think that no matter how stupid, if it’s significant, it’s not stupid. You
know? After all, who can say what’s really stupid or significant? It’s what
we make of it that counts. So, I really want to get a degree. That’s the
bottom line. And I can’t seem to get Lou to see it my way.’
‘And what do you think prevents Lou from seeing it your way,
Simone?’
 ‘Because Lou thinks that he always knows best. In spite of him saying
that he wants what I want, what he really believes is that he knows what I
want.’
‘And Lou thinks that he knows what you want better than you do,
because?’
‘Because he’s intelligent! He’s educated! He has degrees!’
‘Ah ... So, let me see if I’ve heard you correctly. “As long as I don’t
have a degree, then Lou will continue to be the one who knows what I want
better than I do. But if I have a degree, then I’ll be better placed to be the
one who knows what I want.” Is that what you’re suggesting?’
Simone considered this interpretation. ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I think it is.
It’s not really just about a bloody degree. It’s about what the degree will
allow me.’
‘Lou? Did you hear what Simone just expressed?’
‘Yeah, I heard. And I don’t think it’s fair or sensible.’
‘Okay. We’ll get to your views in a moment. But for now, I just want
to be sure that, whatever you think of how fair or sensible Simone’s views
are, you’ve heard her accurately.’
‘Yeah, I have.’
‘Fine. So, if you have, then do you think that you could try just for a
moment to set your personal views aside and see the issue as Simone sees
it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Okay, so if you’re Simone and you see things as she does, what’s it
like to hear them being judged as “not fair and sensible”?’
‘If I hear them from Simone’s standpoint,’ Lou answered, ‘I suppose I
can’t really understand why they’re being judged that way. They seem to be
fair and sensible to me.’
‘Okay. Simone? Has Lou captured your reaction to his judgement
accurately?’
‘Yes. It drives me crazy when I hear him say things like that.’
‘Right. So, Simone, let’s attempt the same thing with you. Put yourself
in Lou’s place. You’re Lou and you’ve just heard Simone’s reasons for
wanting to get a degree, and you’ve replied that you don’t think that they’re
fair and sensible. And Simone has responded to this by telling you that it
drives her crazy when she hears you say things like that. What’s your
reaction to that?’
‘It just makes me even more convinced that she doesn’t really know
what she wants and that I know better. She doesn’t really want a degree, she
wants more independence. Or at least she thinks she does. This is a
recurring theme. And each time, she realises that she’s wrong.’
‘Lou? Has Simone got it right?’
Lou smiled. ‘Yeah. I couldn’t have put it better myself,’ he joked,
provoking all three of us to laugh.
Our first session was coming to an end. I summarised the issues and
disagreements that had been presented and then pointed out to both Lou and
Simone that while these were significantly divergent points of view and I
was not attempting to minimise their import to each of them, and to them
both as a couple, nevertheless it was also important to note that as well as
disagreeing with one another, each was capable of seeing the issue as the
other saw it with substantial accuracy. I urged them to pursue this attempt to
enter one another’s world-views in order to further explore any other
possible issues underlying their concerns. Both Lou and Simone
immediately agreed that they would make an effort to do so.
At the start of our second session together, Lou and Simone seemed
much more willing to present themselves as a couple. They came into my
consulting room and sat down beside one another so that their bodies had
very little space separating them. They smiled in unison when I asked them
if there was anything they wished to say, then looked at one another in order
to decide between themselves who should be the first to speak.
‘It’s been an interesting week,’ began Simone. ‘Lots of turmoil, but
also lots of good times.’ She paused, turned to glance at Lou as if to
ascertain his agreement with her assessment. In response, Lou nodded, and
she continued. ‘We talked a lot about what went on here last week. And we
realised that this issue about my degree follows a pattern that I suppose we
both knew about but hadn’t really made explicit before. I suppose I’ve tried
to assert my equality in our marriage from the very start. In different ways, I
mean. I’ve felt very much in debt to Lou for having helped me so much
when my first marriage broke up. He really saved me from cracking up and
showed me that I wasn’t a worthless individual—which is what I thought I
was when the marriage failed. I really appreciated that. I still do. But, as
well as that appreciation, I suppose I also felt that I owed him something.
And because I owed him, I wasn’t able to feel that I was an equal partner.
When we talked about this, I saw that my wanting a degree wasn’t just
about my feeling able to be at ease with Lou’s crowd, but, more
importantly, it was also about my being able to feel that I was Lou’s equal
in our relationship. I wanted to show him that he’d made the right choice in
marrying me, that I wasn’t going to be a burden to him and that I had things
to offer that he could appreciate.’
‘I’m interested that you’re speaking of your desire to study for a
degree by using the past tense. Does this mean that you’ve changed your
mind?’ I queried.
‘No!’ Simone answered. ‘I still want to start it! In fact, if anything, it’s
become even more important to me that I begin it as soon as possible.’
‘Which is why there were “downs” in the week as well!’ Lou
interjected.
‘So, the degree remains an issue,’ I clarified.
‘Yeah,’ Lou continued. ‘Only, as Simone just said, it’s not really about
the degree.’
‘It’s not really about the degree,’ I repeated. ‘So what is it “really”
about?’
Lou turned to Simone. ‘Can I try to answer that?’ he asked her. Simone
nodded. ‘Right. Like Simone just said, we realised that there’s a recurring
theme here. For instance, in the past, Simone’s come to me with decisions
that she’s made about us. Like, that we should get married, or where we
should live. And each time, she’s made those decisions by herself and
presented them to me as if they were of major significance. That we had to
do it because it was essential to the stability of our relationship. And each
time, in the past, I believed her. I got into her mind-set and went along with
whatever it was that was suddenly so important that everything depended
upon it. And, each time, at some point or other, once I’d got used to the
idea, she’d just change her mind. So, suddenly, maybe it hadn’t been such a
good idea that we get married, for instance. And then I’d be left in a state of
absolute confusion. I’d suddenly be wanting the very thing that I hadn’t
even wanted, or at least hadn’t thought about whether I wanted it or not
until Simone had presented it as being so goddamn important. And I’d end
up feeling lousy. And stupid.’
 ‘So, let’s see if I heard you correctly,’ I said. ‘You see Simone’s idea of
wanting to study towards a degree as being another example of this pattern.
Simone is convinced that she has to do this, and she’s tried to convince you
and at some point you’ll be convinced by her and once you are, she’ll
change her mind, take the opposite view, and then you’ll end up feeling
lousy and stupid. Is that what you said?’
‘Yeah. I’m sure that that’s how it’s going to develop,’ Lou agreed.
‘Simone? Are you able to “tune into” Lou’s way of responding to the
issue?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Simone replied. ‘But he’s exaggerating. I’m not
always like he’s said I am!’
‘Okay. Let’s say that that’s so. That you’re not always like that. But I
hear you acknowledging that you have been like that some of the time. Is
that right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fine. Is there any way that Lou could know the difference?’
‘Probably not,’ Simone laughed. ‘But he could believe me. He could
assume that it was what I wanted.’
‘And isn’t that what Lou’s said he’s done? I heard him say that it’s
precisely because he makes that assumption that he ends up feeling lousy
and stupid.’
‘I don’t see why he has to end up feeling that way!’ Simone grumbled.
‘Okay,’ I continued. ‘But if he does. If that’s all he can end up
feeling?’
‘Then that’s his issue, isn’t it?’
Lou laughed. ‘See?’ he said to me. ‘Either way, it’s my fault! I’m the
one who screws it up according to Simone! And I’m sick and tired of this!’
This last exclamation was followed by a long pause. The couple had
seemingly reached an impasse and appeared to express this once again via
their bodies’ relationship in that each spontaneously moved away from the
other so as to increase the space between them. Eventually, Simone began
to speak about a specific concrete conflict that they had had over the past
week. Lou and Simone had decided that it would be a good idea for them to
go on a short holiday break in the near future and had begun to make
arrangements for a weekend in four weeks’ time. Simone had spent several
days organising the trip, finding a suitable hotel and so forth, but just as she
was on the verge of confirming their plans with a travel agent, Lou had
announced that they would have to call off the trip because he had just
received an invitation to speak at a conference that was of some importance
to his work. Although he had initially insisted that the invitation had been
unexpected, he eventually admitted that he had been aware of this
possibility for several months but had not said anything to Simone about it.
As a consequence, Simone had felt aggrieved both by his change of mind
and by the fact that he had not considered it important to inform her of his
probable trip to Germany.
At first, their dispute remained what Simone referred to as a ‘silent
argument’ that continued for most of the weekend. Eventually, however,
Simone wrote Lou a note stating that she accepted his decision and that if
he would bring her along, she would try to see it as a ‘kind of holiday’ for
them to share.
Lou’s reply to this was that he felt that Simone was attempting to turn
him into ‘the guilty party’, that she was virtually inviting herself along to
what would be a very busy gathering where he could not guarantee that he
would be able to attend to her needs. He would end up feeling compromised
by the opposing demands of his wife and the other conference delegates
and, all in all, he did not think that her coming along would be a good idea.
Simone, in turn, expressed the view that she had done her best to come
up with a solution that respected his work commitments and had been
rewarded by being informed that she was not welcome.
As a result, the couple had ended up having a major row during which
Simone had stated that she was thinking seriously about leaving Lou.
Lou had responded to this last statement by declaring it to be a poorly
disguised, and unwarranted, threat on Simone’s part which he did not take
kindly to at all. Instead, he argued, he’d expected and felt that he had
deserved an apology for her initial ‘tantrum’ regarding their change of plans
and had been surprised and saddened when her note had not provided this.
Simone, he insisted, should have been ‘grown up’ enough to accept the fact
that she could not always have things her own way and she should have
recognised that such changes in plan were part and parcel of his academic
duties and responsibilities. What’s more, she should have seen and accepted
the necessity of his taking up the offer for the sake of his academic
advancement and the mutual benefits that this would bring. Lou also felt
that Simone’s threat to end the marriage had been infantile and did not
deserve to be treated seriously—not least because it had not been the first
time that she’d made such a threat without subsequently acting upon it.
Simone would not accept that her statement was either infantile or
threatening. She had been deeply disappointed by Lou’s sudden decision to
change their plans and had felt that their marriage was once again taking a
back seat to Lou’s academic interests. Further, her declaration that she had
been considering bringing their marriage to an end had not been intended as
a threat but, rather, had been her attempt to speak honestly to Lou of her
personal experience. Lou’s response, she felt, was uncalled for and made
her think even more seriously of whether their marriage was worth
maintaining.
Now angered by what he continued to take as her provocation, Lou
taunted Simone even further by stating that she knew full well that she
couldn’t survive financially on her own.
Surprising herself, Simone did not become overwhelmed by the
uncontrollable anger that she had expected. Instead, she considered Lou’s
point with care and then went on to reveal to him that during a recent period
when Lou had been away for nearly a fortnight on a research trip, she had
felt very happy and at ease with herself and had realised that she was not
particularly looking forward to his return.
To their great mutual astonishment, Simone’s words provoked tears for
both of them. Giving way to their emotions, they had fallen into one
another’s arms, each asking forgiveness for the hell they had just put one
another through. In the end, they had gone to bed and made passionate,
unrestrained love which left them both blissfully exhausted and convinced
that there was a great deal of worth to be salvaged from their relationship.
Since then, they agreed, they had been ‘like young lovers’.
‘And now?’ I asked. What was each experiencing in this moment?
They both laughed, blushed, and finally blurted out that they wanted to save
the marriage.
Following a brief, reflective silence, Simone began to express her view
that the important things in Lou’s life were presented by him to her only
once he had discussed them thoroughly with a number of colleagues from
his department. She believed he didn’t really think that she had very much
to contribute to these decisions and, as a result, her fears about the failure of
her first marriage were prone to resurface.
Lou protested that her perceptions were false. ‘Of course I talk to
others about these things,’ he explained. ‘But that’s only because they know
the ins and outs of these matters.’
‘And the only ins and outs that I know are in bed, right?’ Simone
threw back, smiling yet also revealing a flash of genuine anger.
Upset by this response, Lou revealed his own underlying resentment.
‘Look,’ he hissed, addressing himself to me, ‘I’m fairly easygoing. I’m not
interested in digging up the dirt—especially since when we do all we find is
more dirt. I don’t see the point in all this and can’t understand why Simone
has to be subjecting us both to all this shit. Simone just gets fixed on
something and won’t let it go. She’s like a rottweiller; once she gets her
jaws clamped on to something, she just can’t let it go, regardless of the
damage that’s done.’
Simone laughed. ‘I just can’t see myself as a rottweiller,’ she giggled.
‘I had no idea that you see me as being so determined and tenacious,’ she
said to Lou.
‘Well, you are,’ he answered. Then, seeking to reduce the tension
further, he added: ‘Still, you’re the most attractive rottweiller I’ve ever
come across.’
‘And you’re not such bad looking little poodle, either,’ Simone
sniggered.
Lou’s reaction was to smile. Still, I caught a moment of hesitation in
that act and wondered in silence how funny he—or I, come to that—would
find it to be referred to as a poodle. I caught myself out: why had I not
wondered the same about Lou’s depiction of Simone as a rottweiller?
Perhaps, however inadvertently, I had begun to side with Lou’s point of
view.
While I struggled with this conundrum, the couple returned to their
dilemma regarding Simone’s intentions to begin a degree programme. In
spite of all their discussions and points of convergence, she remained
insistent that she had every desire to begin.
‘The thing is,’ she explained, ‘that no matter what I’ve said in the past,
or how many times I’ve changed my mind in the past, it still feels good to
me that I could eventually have a degree.’
 ‘Tell us more about that feeling of it being ‘good’,’ I urged her.
Simone reflected upon this for some time and finally answered. ‘I
suppose I don’t really feel all that good about myself most of the time,’ she
confessed. ‘I feel that I’m not living up to my potential, that I have a lot to
give and offer to both Lou and myself. I have a good mind. But it’s not
structured, it’s not as ‘fine tuned’ as Lou’s is. And I suppose I sort of envy
that in him. I like the way he can think and express himself clearly. I think
that I can, too. But I need some training. And university is where you go for
that sort of training. Is that so difficult to understand? Or is it that Lou just
thinks that I’ll never be able to approach his lofty heights?’
‘Lou?’ I asked.
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you able to offer Simone any sort of response to her questions?’
‘Well, yeah, I can see what she’s saying. But I think that she’s got an
overblown opinion of what an undergraduate degree is able to provide. I
don’t think that her mind is so unstructured or so much in need of training.
She’s good enough already, as far as I’m concerned. More than that.
Simone’s undervaluing her abilities. She’s a lot better than she thinks she
is.’
‘Simone?’
‘Well, my first reaction is that I’m touched by what Lou’s just said. I
don’t think that he’s ever expressed these views before. Not to me, anyway.
And, like I just said, I’m touched. But if he can see that, if he really believes
what he’s just said, then I don’t understand why he’s making such a fuss
about the whole thing. If he really does believe in me as he says, then surely
he can accept that I need to prove it to myself. I just don’t have the sort of
faith in myself that he has in me. I need to prove it to myself.’
‘Lou?’ I said, ‘Are you able to see Simone’s point of view?’
‘Yeah, I can. And I suppose I believe what she’s saying is true. But for
how long? I mean, like I said, Simone has a tendency to change her mind all
too easily. There’s a lot at stake here. If we decide to do things her way,
then both of us will need to make sacrifices. I’ve been thinking of a new
direction for my career. That’s part of the reason why I want to be at that
conference, by the way. There’s going to be people there that I can sound
out. But if Simone’s dead set on starting her degree, then I don’t see how
that’s going to be compatible with any changes in my life. The truth is, I’m
becoming increasingly bored by the post that I’ve got. I want to do a lot
more research rather than spend most of my time teaching. I know that I
can’t do that where I am because the university here isn’t set up for
providing extensive research facilities. But if I take up another post that’s
mainly research oriented, I’m almost certain to have to accept a cut in
salary. I don’t know by how much. That’s something I’d need to discuss
with any institute that might be interested in taking me on. But, whatever
the cut will be, it’ll have some implications for our lifestyle. Frankly, I was
hoping that Simone would be willing to consider taking up some sort of
work to make up for the shortfall. We’ve been living off my salary for
years, and that’s been fine. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge that, and
I’m not saying that Simone hasn’t contributed sufficiently. Being a
housewife is work, too. I accept that. And I appreciate it that her work has
been focused around keeping the flat going, sorting out the bills, doing the
shopping ... all those things. So, I suppose something has been cleared up
today. We both have changes that we want to make in our lives. And we
can’t both initiate those changes at the same time. So, the question is really
“Who gets to go first?”. I think that I should. Simone thinks differently. I
suppose that’s what we’ll have to decide.’
In response to Lou’s conclusion, Simone spontaneously hugged him.
In tears, she managed to say: ‘I feel like I’ve finally been treated and
listened to as an adult. Not some spiteful, wilful little brat. I really
appreciate what you’ve just said, Lou. I can understand what you’re saying.
I think we can work something out now. Together.’
Lou blushed, clearly overcome by his own and Simone’s emotions. I
expected him to find something humorous to say in order to defuse the
situation. But, somewhat to my surprise, he did not do so this time.
As had been arranged during our first meeting, Simone came alone to
the third session. I confess that, on the basis of how the previous session
had concluded, I had expected her to announce that they had gone some
way towards resolving the issues that had arisen between them. Instead,
much to my chagrin, within a minute or so of her sitting down, she began to
cry uncontrollably. Her tears were clearly not an expression of joy.
Eventually, she managed to blurt out that notwithstanding the
closeness and understanding they had felt towards one another at the end of
the previous session, matters had degenerated significantly over the week to
the extent that she now felt completely alone and more uncertain than ever.
Their marriage, she claimed, was at best at a crossroads, at worst, in its
death throes.
Difficult though I imagined my request would be, nevertheless I asked
Simone if she could attempt to present the issues from a standpoint that
expressed not only her point of view but also that of Lou.
Saying that she would try her best, Simone explained that she and Lou
had spent the two days following our last session together discussing the
various matters that had arisen. Both of them, she asserted, had continued to
feel close to one another and had expressed this both verbally and
physically. Their sex life prior to initiating our sessions had suffered
significantly and they had wanted to ‘make up for lost time’. While the sex
had been enjoyable for the two of them, Simone had wondered aloud, in the
spirit of mutual openness, as to whether Lou felt sufficiently fulfilled by
her. While he had answered (immediately) that he did, she did not quite
believe him and had pressed him on the matter. Eventually, exasperated by
her persistent ‘cross-questioning’ of him, Lou had begun to query what she
was getting at, and, in anger, had given vent to his own anxieties.
Eventually, he had expressed his own concerns that if she were to begin a
degree she might meet any number of attractive men among her fellow
students and that this might lead to her having affairs behind his back.
Simone had felt deeply hurt by what she perceived to be his lack of
trust in her and had answered back that she might well be worried about the
same thing occurring between Lou and any number of his students and
colleagues since she had noticed at the academic gatherings she had
attended that a fair number of women had been ‘well and truly besotted’
with him. Lou had attempted to shrug off such accusations and had insisted
that she had nothing to worry about. Nonetheless, she had continued to
worry and, from that point onward, the closeness they had regained quickly
began to evaporate.
The last couple of days had passed without them speaking to one
another. However, just hours before coming to see me, Simone had finally
confronted Lou and informed him that, whatever they would decide
regarding their future, she had resolved to readjust their division of labour
regarding the maintenance of their home. If she went to university this
change would need to be enacted anyway, she asserted. But, even if she did
not, then she would at least want to begin some part-time classes and this
would mean that Lou would have to contribute more to the housework and
meal arrangements.
Lou had become furious at this, shouting that he was not about to be
dictated to by her, that he had more than enough to think about and do with
regard to his work commitments and that she had better ‘come down to
earth’ and recognise that it was his income that allowed them to survive as
well as they were and that she should not forget this. As a result of this
confrontation, they had begun yet another row that she had walked out on in
order to keep her appointment with me.
When Simone had finished her account, I asked her how she might
make sense of Lou’s various responses. At first, Simone found this difficult
to attempt, much less accomplish. However, when I explained that I had
asked her not in order to excuse or explain away Lou’s behaviour but
simply in order that we might both see it more clearly from his perspective,
she found herself better able to approach the matter.
Almost immediately, she explained that some five years earlier, she
and Lou had decided that it would be good for them to have an ‘open
marriage’ that would allow them both to have sexual relations with others
should they so wish. Having agreed to this, Simone subsequently
discovered, much to her surprise, that she had little interest in pursuing
extramarital affairs. Lou, however, had come home from a conference to
announce that he had slept with one of the delegates. Hearing this,
overwhelmed with jealousy, Simone physically attacked him. After
numerous angry accusations and counter-accusations, they agreed that they
had made a serious error of judgement and that from that point onward they
would vow to remain faithful to one another.
For reasons that she could not explain, this long-ago incident had
resurfaced to plague her thoughts over the past few days. For equally
unaccountable reasons, she explained, Simone was certain that Lou had
recalled this event as well and that it was this ‘unfinished business’ that
seemed to be tearing them apart.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Try to be Lou for a moment. Let’s say that I’m you and
I’ve just told you exactly what you just said to me. What comes up for
you?’
Simone considered this question for about a minute, then, taking on the
role of her husband, said: ‘I suppose I see this as another example of
Simone changing her mind about things. She doesn’t really know what she
wants. It’s back to the question of the degree. How can I be sure that she’s
not just going to change her mind about this one too?’
‘Okay. Anything else?’
‘Well, I suppose part of the problem is that, in the past, I’ve always
accepted Simone’s position, even if she does change her mind. Why can’t I
accept things this time as well?’
‘Why can’t you?’
‘I’m just sick and tired of these games she plays. I have important
decisions to make that will affect us both and I think it’s time for me to get
what I want for once.’
‘Fine. Now, consider what you’ve just said from your own—Simone’s
—point of view. How do you react to Lou’s arguments?’
‘Well, I think they make some sense. But it’s not true. It’s not always
me who decides things and changes her mind. I do do that. I admit that
much. But Lou isn’t this passive accepting person that he makes himself out
to be. If he accepts, it’s because it suits him.’
‘Like with the open marriage?’
‘Yes! He didn’t waste any time getting himself a willing accomplice,
did he?’
‘And what does that suggest to you?’
‘That he might have given the idea some thought before.’
‘And if he had?’
‘Then he must have been extremely pleased that I suggested it.’
‘That assumes that he had also decided that it was a desirable idea.’
‘Hey!’ Simone shouted in anger. ‘He fucked someone else, I didn’t!’
‘And if you had fucked someone else?’ I challenged her, ‘Would it
have remained a desirable idea?’
‘For him or for me?’
‘For you both as a couple.’
‘Probably not.’
‘So it might have been a desirable idea for either of you as individuals,
but it clearly wasn’t a good idea for you both as a couple.’
Simone nodded. ‘I see what you mean. You know, I think that a lot of
our issues boil down to this tension between us as individuals and us as a
couple.’
‘And knowing this, or, rather, seeing it this way, does it shed any light
upon your current circumstances?’
‘Well, the first thing that comes to mind is that I have a lot of issues
surrounding me as an individual.’
‘You mentioned something like that at the last session,’ I reminded her.
‘You talked about not feeling good about yourself most of the time, I think.’
‘Yes. I don’t. I’m my own worst critic.’
‘More of a critic than Lou is?
‘Oh, far worse!’
‘How so?’
‘Like I said. I want Lou to accept my potential. I want me to do so,
too!’
‘Because if he doesn’t?’
‘He might leave me. Or I might leave him.’
‘And isn’t it paradoxical that it’s this very desire that seems to be
provoking that very possibility?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, put it this way: What’s it like for you to be talking to me right
now? How are you experiencing yourself being with me right now? Are
you being ‘good enough’ or not?’
‘I’m feeling just a little bit dim right now,’ Simone joked. ‘But, no, I
don’t feel like I’m not being ‘good enough’. I feel at ease with myself. I‘m
liking me right now.’
‘Okay. Now what is it about being here with me right now that allows
you to not be quite so critical of yourself ? That lets you “like yourself ”, as
you say?’
‘I don’t feel like I’m being talked down to. I feel engaged. I feel that
you’re engaging with me and not just because I’m paying you to.’
‘Okay. Now think of earlier today with Lou. When you told him of
your decision about rearranging your housekeeping duties.’
‘Oh! Well, when I told him—No, in fact, even before I told him, I was
sure that I was going to be made to look infantile and stupid.’
‘Not “good”?’
 ‘Yes, exactly! I was already telling myself that I was bad for even just
bringing up the topic.’
‘And how were you “bad” for bringing up the topic?’
‘I was telling myself that Lou has so many other responsibilities
already. That I was being unfair and demanding for asking him to take on
more.’
‘Which is pretty close to what he said himself, isn’t it?’
‘Yes! He proved me right.’
‘And proving you right proved to you that you weren’t “good”?’
‘I suppose so. Are you saying that I got angry with him because I was
really angry with myself ?’
‘Are you saying that?’ I wondered.
‘Sort of. I suppose I was looking for Lou to prove me wrong. I wanted
him to be different towards me than I was being to myself. I wanted him to
treat what I was saying with seriousness.’
‘And if he had?’
‘I might very well have talked myself out of my demands!’
‘So, let’s see if I got this right: you’re hoping for Lou to be the sort of
person towards you that you can’t be towards yourself. You’re hoping to
find the proof from him that you’re a ‘good person’. And you’re looking for
that from him because it’s something that you can’t usually generate on
your own.’ I waited for Simone to express her agreement with my
interpretation, then continued. ‘But, see, there’s another element here: you
said a few minutes ago that being here with me you were able to view
yourself as a ‘good person’. So, it’s not impossible for you to experience
this. The question is: what needs to occur, or not occur, in order that you
adopt one of these perspectives over the other?’
‘I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it.’
‘Okay. But let me ask you this: if we were to put the same question to
Lou, what do you think he’d reply?’
‘I suppose he’d say that I’m just too hard on myself and that, as a
result, I take it out on him. He’d say that he’s told me endlessly how much
he respects and values me but that I just don’t listen. That I don’t really
believe or trust him.’
‘And would he be right?’
 ‘Not completely. No, I do a lot of the time.’
‘And when you do, how are you with regard to yourself ?’
‘I feel good about me ... Oh! I think I’ve seen something!’ Simone
exclaimed.
My session with Lou was quite different to my meeting with Simone.
From the start, Lou remained unwilling to present and consider issues from
a standpoint that permitted both his and Simone’s views (as he perceived
them) to emerge. Instead, his stance was far more casual than it had been
during our sessions in the presence of his wife. His approach attempted to
promote a ‘buddybuddy’ relationship between us whose primary function
seemed to be that of having his views both validated and shared by me.
When I confronted him after several such attempts and queried what it
might be that was so important to him that I approve of his stance and
reveal it to be my own, he became both upset and angered, claiming that I
had taken Simone’s side and was now out to get him.
Instead of disputing this point of view, I pursued it further in the hope
that it might unveil further aspects of the couple’s ‘way of being’.
‘Let’s say that you’re right,’ I began, ‘and that I’ve taken Simone’s
side. How do you suppose that happened?’
‘Because she’s such a tease!’ Lou asserted. ‘Oh, I don’t mean sexually,
though she can be that, too. But, in this case, Simone can become so
convinced that she’s right, or that she knows what she wants, that she can
convince anyone else in the same way. I’ve seen it happen too many times
now not to be pretty damn sure I’m right.’
‘And it’s happened with you any number of times, as well,’ I
supposed.
‘Yeah. I fell for it.’
‘You say that in the past tense.’
‘That’s because I’m not going to let it happen again.’
‘Because if you do?’
‘I’ve told you: I’ll feel lousy. And I’ll regret it in some way or other
because when Simone gets around to changing her mind, and she will, then
there’s going to be some sort of price to pay. And it’ll be me who has to pay
it. Enough! Things have got to change.’
‘And if “things don’t change”?’ I pressed.
 ‘What?’
‘What if we could look into the future and what we see is that no
matter how hard you try, or Simone tries, to change one another’s way of
being with each other, it can’t be done. The relationship that you’ve both
created is stuck where it is and nothing, no amount of therapy or insight or
behavioural change, nothing is going to change that. Then what?’
‘That’s hard to say.’
‘Yeah. And what comes to mind?’ I insisted.
‘Actually, funnily enough, it’s not the obvious. I think that even if I
didn’t like it, I could find some way of putting up with it. As long as
Simone also recognised her part in it. But what’s interesting is that when
you spelled it out like that, what I felt was a moment of real relief. It’s
almost as though I just wanted to say: “Whew!”’
‘So, if you experienced relief with that scenario, what’s the
implication?’
‘That I don’t want it to change? But that’s crazy!’
‘Well, don’t judge your conclusion so immediately. Just stay with it.
Consider it from another angle: what would happen to your relationship if
Simone were to change with regard to those ways that she seems unable to
change?’
‘Oooh, I’d be scared shitless!’ Lou hooted.
‘Because?’
‘Because she’d be so much more powerful than she already is!’
‘And how is she powerful in the way she is in your marriage together?’
‘She gets her way.’
‘And you don’t.’
‘Yeah, I do. But only once she’s uncertain as to what she wants. Then I
get to sneak in my own position and, usually, she agrees.’
‘So, if Simone were to change ...’
‘Then I’d never win!’
‘So, it’s important for you that the relationship between the two of you
stays as it is.’
Lou smiled, taken by the implications that had just been made explicit.
‘Yeah! I never saw it quite like that before. I’d thought I’d convinced
myself that it would be a good thing for Simone to change, and that I
wanted her to change, but, really, I suppose I don’t.’
‘Which raises an interesting question: if what you say is so, then how
come you’ve changed the way you deal with Simone with regard to her
wanting a degree? How come you don’t follow your own pattern which,
from what you’ve said, would have segued into Simone’s pattern and so
forth, as in all the other previous instances?’
‘I suppose I thought I wanted a change. I became tired of the way
things are between us.’
‘And what is there about this time that made you tired of the way
things are between you?’
‘Well, I think that this time Simone seemed so certain about what she
wanted. I couldn’t be so certain that she would change her mind. I know
I’ve said different and that I tried to convince Simone of that. But I was also
attempting to convince myself.’
‘And if this time did turn out to be different, and Simone got her way
and started a degree?’
‘Then I’d be convinced that I couldn’t “read” her any more. She’d be a
“new” Simone. And I‘m not certain I want to deal with a “new” Simone
right now. Or ever.’
Having arrived at this insight, Lou’s stance reverted to the abrasive one
he’d adopted at the start of our session. Seeking to gain my agreement, he
complained about how Simone minimised his contributions to the
maintenance of their household. He was the breadwinner, he proclaimed,
and should have this acknowledged and respected. He’d been a good
husband—more than good, in fact—he’d put up with all of her whims, he
trusted her, he was prepared to live with her for the rest of their lives.
Wasn’t his commitment to that enough for her?
Like so many other times, with so many other clients whom I’ve
encountered in my practice, Lou revealed himself capable of maintaining
and advocating a stance which negated all that he had gleaned from his
earlier clarifications. While I could only speculate as to what this might
reveal if viewed from the standpoint of sedimentations and dissociations of
the self-construct, it seemed sufficient for the moment that I remain at the
level of pointing out the inconsistencies of his current position with his
earlier one and consider them from the standpoint of the conflicting stances
that existed in the couple’s relationship. If, by the end of the session, my
attempts proved to be of any clarificatory worth, I’m afraid that it escaped
me.
Lou and Simone arrived separately for their fifth session. They
explained this on the grounds that Lou had had a departmental meeting and
Simone had been to visit a friend. Even so, I noted that while each partner
greeted me, neither sought to offer any words of welcome or recognition to
the other.
As soon as we’d all sat down, Lou began to speak. He explained that
he was surprised that he had done so much talking during our sessions since
he had assumed, before they’d begun, that Simone would be the one to
dominate the discussions. He was pleased with himself for having been
such an active participant and felt that he’d learned something of
importance from this.
Then, pausing only momentarily, he announced that he had done a
great deal of thinking since the last session and that (with Simone’s
knowledge and consent) he had been away from home for the last two days
in order to contemplate matters further. In sum, he had decided that he was
well on his way toward achieving the academic success and respectability
that he felt he deserved and that he really needed to focus on this side of his
life much more than he had been doing. He wanted to concentrate on the
future rather than the past.
Then, turning somewhat dramatically to face Simone, he addressed her
for the first time that day. ‘Simone,’ he said, ‘do you want to be part of my
future or just part of my past?’
‘What about our future, our past,’ Simone threw back straight away at
him.
‘That’s what I meant,’ Lou stammered.
‘Oh, “mine” means “ours”, does it?’ Simone persisted.
‘Just answer the fucking question!’ Lou shouted. ‘Let’s not play at
semantics! You know what I mean!’
Holding back her own violent emotions, Simone agreed that their
future was more important than their past to her as well. They had been too
‘grownup’ for years, far too serious. What she thought they needed was
more fun in their lives.
 ‘I agree,’ Lou said, showing more concern towards Simone. ‘And this,
for instance,’ he added, indicating that by “this” he meant our therapy
sessions, ‘is definitely not my idea of how to go about having fun.’ Lou
paused, looked about himself to see how Simone and I had reacted to his
statement. Then, shrugging, he adopted a more conciliatory attitude. ‘Still,’
he said, ‘here we are.’
‘So,’ I interjected, ‘if you‘re both saying that you want to focus on
your future in an attempt to make it more “fun”, what do you think is
necessary?’
Once again, Lou jumped in. ‘I think that what I’ve seen is that Simone
is just going to have to face reality with regard to what she thinks is
important. It takes two to tango. We’ve got to address what’s real here
rather than what we might prefer or might fantasise about. The situation is
this: our whole lifestyle is dependent upon my work and advancement.
That’s how it is—regardless of how Simone or I might wish it to be
different. And, if that’s so, then my success and development in academic
life takes precedence over everything. Perhaps if we’d had children, the
situation would be different. But we don’t. And we’ve got to face what’s
there rather than what we’d like to be there. I’m willing to make a go of
things. That’s what I can offer right now. If I get settled in, find something
more stimulating and financially rewarding, then at that point, I’m willing
to reconsider the situation and allow Simone’s needs to have more of a
priority. Assuming she still wants to start a degree at that point, or if she’s
come up with something else that she really wants, I’m willing to do my
best to meet her needs. But she’s got to take a back seat for the moment.
Not just for my sake, but for our sake.’
Simone’s facial grimace suggested her shock in hearing Lou speak so
forthrightly. ‘I’m trying to believe you,’ she began eventually. ‘But I can’t.
Not completely, anyway. I don’t trust you. I think you’re going through the
motions so that we don’t go forwards but stay where we are. Or, even, go
backwards to that time when I was so clearly distraught and you were the
one who took over. I was grateful to you for that then. I don’t know if I
should feel grateful or furious with you now. I feel like you’re not giving
me much choice in the matter.
‘You’re right, I’m not!’ Lou interrupted her. ‘But the choice isn’t about
you or me. It’s about us. Believe me, if I was thinking just about me right
now—’
 ‘You wouldn’t be here,’ Simone interjected.
‘That’s right.’
The two of them remained silent for quite some time after that. It felt
to me in those moments that they had both seen that their relationship as it
had existed had come to an end-point. There was nothing left for them to
say. Their subsequent actions would reveal whether they would choose to
begin a new relationship or go their separate ways.
Although we spent a few minutes at the conclusion of that session
deciding arrangements for a new series of five sessions, I cannot say that I
was entirely surprised to receive a phone call from Lou three days later
informing me that they would not be attending meetings any longer and that
I should bill him for their missed sessions. I told Lou that I would be
willing to see them again at a later date if they should want to see me again,
and while he thanked me for this on his and Simone’s behalf, it seemed to
me that he spoke more out of politeness than appreciation.
And that was that as far as my therapy with Lou and Simone was
concerned.
On reflection, I could say that through their work with me, they had
both seen that the couple-construct they had co-created had depended upon,
indeed, had been significantly defined by, a pattern of sedimented
perspectives that each partner had maintained both towards themselves as
individuals and as a couple.
Simone’s sedimented self-construct appeared to rest upon her
supposition that she was ‘a bad person’. While her various attempted
‘rebellions’ could be seen to be endeavours to become ‘good’, her
retractions, or ‘changes of mind’, just at the point of her seeming success in
changing her situation served to convince her not only that she had been
‘bad’ all along, but that her very desire to change was an aspect of her
‘being a bad person’. For Simone to ‘be good’, however momentarily,
depended upon her experience of being with others in such a way that she
did not feel ‘talked down to’ and that their engagement with her was open
and respectful. But this she could only find in her relation with Lou when
she backtracked on her decisions and accepted that he knew better than she
did what was right and desirable for her to want and to be. And yet, in
accepting this conclusion, she also succeeded in proving, paradoxically, that
‘being bad’ was all that she could be since to attempt to ascertain for herself
what was required in order for her to be ‘good’ was in itself ‘bad’. For
Simone, Lou was the one who determined whether she was ‘bad’ or ‘good’.
And, far worse, regardless of his decision, her experience was always that
of ‘being bad’.
Lou’s sedimented self-construct, on the other hand, required him to
always know with absolute conviction that he was ‘a good person’, and
that, as ‘a good person’, he had an unerring sense of what was right for him,
for Simone, and for their marriage. This view subsequently supposed that
he must always know what was required of others in order for them to ‘be
good’. In his relationship with Simone, he proved that he was ‘good’ both
by at first going along with what she decided (thereby, proving how ‘good’
he was towards her) and, subsequently, by proving to her that such
decisions had, in fact, demonstrated that she was ‘bad’, and that she could
only be ‘good’ if she accepted that only he could know ‘what was good for
her’ and for them as a couple. In this way, Lou maintained his stance that he
was ‘good’ under all circumstances. True enough, allowing Simone to be
‘bad’ provoked feelings of ‘stupidity and lousiness’ for Lou, but even these
served to demonstrate both how ‘good’ he could be towards Simone and
how ‘bad’ she was in not believing sufficiently in his ability to know what
was ‘good’ for her and for the marriage. Indeed, such feelings arose only
when ‘bad’ Simone provoked his sense of doubt that he was always right
with regard to what was ‘good’ for her, and them. Even so, paradoxically,
the stronger the feelings of being ‘stupid and lousy’, the stronger was the
subsequent conviction that he had been ‘good and right’ all along.
The couple-construct that Simone and Lou had co-created not only
maintained these sedimented self-constructs, but also, more significantly,
was itself defined and sedimented through them. The conflicts that arose in
their relationship served to ‘prove’ that Lou was always ‘good’ and that
Simone was always ‘bad’. From this sedimented perspective, the couple-
construct functioned smoothly so long as Lou’s ‘goodness’ was accepted
and in control. Whenever Simone challenged this state of affairs by seeking
to change from being ‘bad’ to being ‘good’, however, problems developed
and could only be resolved once she returned to the view that she was
‘wrong and bad’ and that Lou, as ever, was both ‘right and good’.
So long as both Lou and Simone had relied upon their individual
sedimented ‘as if ’stances towards their self/other relations so that each
engaged with the stimuli of the world from an ‘as if I can only be bad’ or
‘as if I can only be good’ stance, the co-created couple-construct, too,
adopted a similar ‘as if ’ sedimented stance in that it functioned ‘as if ’each
member of the couple agreed with the other as to who was to be defined as
either ‘always good and right’ or ‘always bad and wrong’.
Something, however, had occurred to destabilise this sedimentation.
What that might have been was never made clear in the few sessions we
had together. Nevertheless, at some point, either or both individuals had
started to challenge, however hesitantly, his or her sedimented self-
construct with regard to being ‘good’ or being ‘bad’. Such challenges, in
turn, began to destabilise, in a more obvious fashion, the couple-construct
that had been co-created. It was evident that what the couple had initiated
by itself was exacerbated during our therapeutic encounters in that both Lou
and Simone had started to question the sedimentations that maintained both
their own self-constructs and the couple-construct. In doing so, they, as
individuals and as a couple, had begun to confront their ‘as if ’ standpoints
and to acknowledge the actual situated possibilities available to them. Such
steps, if continued, would have desedimented the couple-construct and
permitted the co-creation of a more experientially adequate alternative.
That my descriptive challenges had helped to provide the means by
which they could achieve this possibility was obvious. However, I had
failed to attune myself sufficiently to the couple’s way of being and, in not
doing so, I had not taken sufficient heed of what both Lou and Simone had
tried to tell me, and each other. Namely, that as much as each desired a
change in such constructs, what mattered as much, indeed more, was to
preserve the existing coupleconstruct.
Lou, for instance, had expressed this most clearly when he admitted
that ‘I’d thought I’d convinced myself that it would be a good thing for
Simone to change, and that I wanted her to change, but, really, I suppose I
don’t.’ In similar fashion, I suppose, he might well have arrived at the same
conclusion regarding his own lack of desire to change.
Unfortunately, they had each un-known too much, yet not quite
enough, for them to either pursue their possibilities or deny them. The
couple-construct could neither change nor remain the same. As such, it
ceased to exist.
As for me, I had made the mistake of assuming that we had reached a
suitable point of un-knowing ‘as if ’ there still did not remain a great deal
yet to know in order for the exercise to be of benefit to my clients.
As I realised this, I was reminded once more of the old story about the
comet and the choice we had to make regarding truth or happiness. As I
thought about it, it occurred to me that there existed a third option that had
remained unconsidered: we could have replied that we chose both truth and
happiness ‘as if ’, within the givens of that particular scenario, this non-
choice were possible. On reflection, considering the great number of
heartaches and problems that so many of us who posed that original
question ended up having to face, this third alternative seemed to me to be
the ‘as if ’choice that we convinced ourselves was there to make. A
common enough strategy, it seems. I don’t know what became of Simone.
However, some months following the last session, I was surprised to
receive a telephone call from Lou. Sounding somewhat agitated, he
requested that I begin to see him for personal therapy.
That, however, as they say, is an altogether different tale.
 6
A Life Divided

I had been seeing Jennifer for around six months before I became aware
that, on occasion, there was something decidedly unsettling about her
demeanour.
From the very start of our sessions together, she had presented herself
to me as a studiously guarded, even sullen, individual racked with a
multitude of anxieties and concerns that she found extremely painful to
express. However, as I began to reflect more upon my sense of unease, I
noticed that, every once in a while, Jennifer would appear dressed in a style
that was unusual for her, and that, on such occasions, her voice sounded
gruff and cracked much like that of a long-time heavy tobacco smoker
(even though Jennifer had made it a point to tell me that she had never
smoked anything other than the very occasional cigarette). As well as her
voice, the tone and style of her language would alter so that she not only
spoke at greater length and with uncharacteristic ease, but also was able to
express significant events in her life in a direct, almost carefree, and quite
‘earthy’ language laced with a stream of carefully chosen, if unoriginal,
four-letter epithets that did not match her more usual shy, selfeffacing
manner. Just as noticeably, her attitude towards me (and towards herself)
would be far more friendly, warm and laden with elements of humour.
Indeed, as I write about her, these alterations now seem to be so
obvious and significant that it occurs to me to ask how it could have taken
me so long to notice them. Regardless of how unsuitable an explanation it
may be, my honest answer is that I simply missed these factors until such
time as they became apparent to me. I would like to believe that had I
begun to explore these with her at an earlier point in her therapy, Jennifer
might well have retreated from this challenge and found sufficient reason to
cease seeing me altogether. As face-saving an ‘explanation’ as this may be,
I am sorry to report that I cannot vouch for its accuracy.
So, putting aside all the possible ‘perhapses’ that there may be, let me
offer a brief summary of what I was aware of as being meaningful instances
in Jennifer’s life circumstances.
In her early twenties, having been diagnosed by her GP as suffering
from anorexia nervosa, Jennifer found herself, with her parents’ consent,
hospitalised in a private clinic. There, she was treated with a combination of
force-feeding procedures and ‘character strengthening’ techniques that had
been developed by a psychiatrist whose specialist expertise lay in eating
disorders. Some ten years later, from her own clearly prejudiced
perspective, Jennifer asserted that this ‘treatment’ had consisted of long
periods of sedation, quasi-hypnotic ‘suggestions’ regarding the pleasure and
satisfaction to be experienced in eating and drinking regularly, and routine
morning and evening ‘therapy’ during which the psychiatrist sought to instil
in her high levels of guilt for the pain and concern that her selfish actions
were provoking in her parents, family and friends.
Jennifer stated with some vehemence that she had thought the man to
be a quack and had had little respect for him and his avowedly successful
techniques. Nevertheless, she had realised that she would remain under his
control so long as she failed to appear to improve as he had wanted her to.
In a similar, if more pertinent fashion, she also decided in private that, in
spite of the pain that she’d felt her parents had put her through, their
concerns were evident and she did not want to further hurt them. For such
reasons, she willed herself to want to be cured and managed to improve her
health to such an extent that she was subsequently declared sufficiently fit
to leave the clinic.
At first, overjoyed by her cure, her parents’ relations with Jennifer
were experienced by her as being ‘wonderful’—better than they had ever
been before. Jennifer was truly happy, she asserted, for the first time since
her childhood. However, as time passed and relations settled into day-to-
day routine, she began to experience the return of tensions and anxieties
between herself and her parents that were reminiscent of their previous,
difficult, encounters. This time, however, Jennifer slowly initiated a
secretive ‘binge and vomit’ cycle that, while assuaging her stress
temporarily, nevertheless convinced her that she had become bulimic.
 Now thirty-six years old when she began to see me, Jennifer felt that
she wanted to deal with her bulimia and, with my assistance, rid herself of
it. She explained that she had tried to fulfil this aim on her own but had
failed utterly. Convinced that she was ‘some sort of addict’, she did not feel
that she had the ‘inner strength’ to deal with matters by herself.
What did she imagine that she was missing that I might be able to
provide? Her answer to my query was straightforward and direct: she
required a structure, a weekly routine, within which she could give
expression to her distress and gain the necessary strength to combat her
‘addictive tendencies’ while in the presence of a caring and attentive ‘parent
substitute’.
And, indeed, Jennifer’s circumstances did begin to alter relatively
early on into our sessions. While her bulimic behaviour did not, by any
means, cease entirely, nevertheless it was quickly reduced so that she
moved from a ‘high’ binge and vomit count of eighteen to twenty instances
per day to a ‘low’ of between three and five. While this was a dramatic
decrease, nonetheless her need to enact this behaviour remained sufficiently
problematic for her to provoke debilitating bouts of guilt and anxiety.
I should state here that my relationship with Jennifer was not one that
sought to focus exclusively upon the issue of her bulimia, nor did I seek to
reward or encourage her successes. This should not imply that I was
uninterested in her struggle. Rather, while I noted and sought to reflect back
to her her own sense of pleasure and relief with regard to her increased
sense of accomplishment (as measured by Jennifer herself), principally I
sought to retain a stance which remained clear that my interest in, and
willingness to be with and for, her was not predicated or conditional upon
her ‘progress towards health’. In similar fashion, my attitude sought to
reassure her that she was free to allow herself to be with me in whatever
fashion she wished.
This quality of encounter is to me an important, not to say crucial,
disposition for therapists to seek to maintain towards their clients. For,
through it, emerges the possibility for them both to develop an open,
trusting relationship that, as well as being often unique and unlike any other
previously experienced by the client, also allows a much safer environment
within which the client can begin to delve less defensively into deep-seated,
implicit and previously unchallengeable (or sedimented) values and
attitudes that sustain the current self-construct.
 In line with this, with reference to so-called ‘addictive’ behaviours
(whether they be linked to drug or alcohol abuse, or to repeated ‘impulsive’
activities that appear to be uncontrollable), I remain convinced that these
contain an underlying purposeful meaning or significance in that they serve
to protect the client’s self-construct from a variety of debilitating anxieties
that arise from his or her self/other world-relations. If my belief is correct,
then these meanings are more likely to be clarified and expressed when
there is little fear that their exposure will not be followed by any demands
—be they subtle or obvious—on the part of the therapist for the client to
give up the behaviour.
This attitude may strike readers as being somewhat strange. If a client
asserts that he or she desires to break some ‘addictive’ life pattern, why
should the therapist not seek to focus upon and assist him or her in the
fulfilment of this aim? Again, I base my stance upon what I have observed
in myself and others in non-therapeutic instances: while we may state
(sometimes with great vehemence) that we wish to cease or alter some
recurring activity in our lives, most often such utterances reveal a divided
stance in that they express only part of the statement. If we were more
honest, we would acknowledge that in these circumstances an equal, if
opposite, desire also exists and that it is the very conflict between these
opposing attitudes that serves to keep us very much where we are.
While this view shares some similarities with the intra-psychic,
conflictbased tripartite model of the mind posited by Freud and his
followers, I do not believe that the source of the disturbance lies in unruly
‘unconscious’ processes.1 Rather, as I have already suggested in the earlier
account that I have entitled ‘The Royal Road’, the conflict is, to borrow
Sartre’s term, at a level of unreflected consciousness.2 Which is to say that,
while the opposing elements of one’s position are available to reflection, or
open to one’s awareness, they remain at an implicit rather than explicit level
so that they appear to be concealed from conscious thought and action.
So long as they remain implicit, we can deceive ourselves that they do
not exist and, in turn, maintain the behaviour which seemingly merely
bothers or disturbs us. To acknowledge conflicting desires, on the other
hand, forces us to confront our attitudes and values more adequately. But
while, in an abstract sense, this might strike us as being a highly desirable
goal, at the level of experience this willingness to make more explicit our
complex stance towards the world and our self-construct is, as my client,
Michael, discovered for himself, likely to be deeply disturbing and
destabilising of our sedimented beliefs and values towards both the being
we have construed and that being’s relation to, and understanding of, the
demands of the world.
What psychoanalysis calls ‘unconscious’ (or directly inaccessible)
wishes, motives or fantasies, can be understood more beneficially as
disowned or dissociated awareness—awareness that is directly accessible
but only in a seemingly detached or distanced fashion from the thoughts,
motives and wishes that ‘fit’ our current self-construct.3 Stated simply, this
suggests that a great many of the mental struggles and anxieties in our lives
can be viewed as expressions of conflict between on the one hand, those
beliefs, values, behaviours and desires that are identified with the ‘self ’
who must or should be and, on the other, the opposing beliefs, values,
behaviours and desires that cannot or must not be. The more fixed or
sedimented are the former, the more vehemently are the latter experienced
in a disowned, or dissociated, fashion when they arise. If we come to be
convinced that we are safe in, or acceptable to, the world only when we are
who we ought to be, then when we find ourselves ‘being who we cannot, or
must not, be’ then that being ‘cannot be who I say I am’.
It seems to me that if therapy can offer anything of significance to the
client, it is the possibility of a dialogical encounter that will promote honest,
if difficult, disclosure of that which is both explicit and implicit, accepted
and disowned, in the client’s beliefs and values regarding his or her possible
ways of being-in-the-world so that these may be confronted as they are,
rather than as the client might wish them to be or as the client might wish
the therapist (as representative of the world) to see them and, by extension,
to see his or her relationally construed self.
Those clients who have classified themselves as being ‘addicts’of
some sort or other are initially surprised (possibly even dismayed!) by my
unreadiness to seek to convince them of ‘the error of their ways’ and to
‘reward them for being good’ since this attitude is likely to be atypical of
their dealings with the world to whose whims and demands and supposedly
superior knowledge they have often come to believe they are subservient.
Contrary to common opinion, I would suggest that I might be of far
more substantial worth to my clients if, rather than attempt to alter their
current way of being via argument, coercion, or reward, I attempt to ‘stay
with’ them ‘as they are’ and, instead, explore with them what their
experience of ‘being as they are’ is like so that the implicit sedimentations
and dissociations that maintain that ‘way of being’ may be made more
explicit. Clarificatory challenges such as: ‘Who does your addiction allow
you to be that you would not otherwise be able or allowed to be?’, ‘What
does your addiction allow you to do that you would not otherwise be able or
allowed to do?’, ‘What do you think might be lost to you if you were to
cease being an addict?’, ‘How do you think your relations with yourself and
others will change if you stop being an addict?’and ‘When you say “I am an
addict” what are the statements or judgements that immediately follow this
statement?’ have often stimulated significant explorations with regard to the
lived meaning-world that the client has construed, and how his or her
‘addiction’ functions as a necessary functional constituent of that meaning-
world.
In any case, this same stance was adopted by me in my therapeutic
encounters with Jennifer. Little by little, she began to voice previously
unstated concerns and anxieties regarding what she believed to be the
world’s perception of her. Jennifer spoke of her fear that she was ‘never
quite good enough’ as far as her parents and the world was concerned.
What this meant was that every act she committed, every statement she
made, was, she believed, followed up by statements or responses that
suggested to her that she ‘could have done better’. As I sought to clarify
this view, it quickly emerged that even if others’ statements suggested
praise or acceptance, Jennifer herself always read into these an implicit
critique of her way of being.
‘So what you’re saying then, if I heard that right, is that even when
others don’t state out loud that you were wrong in some way, you’re able to
read that message?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ she affirmed.
‘And how are you able to do this?’
‘Do what?’
‘Know what others are really saying to you.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You just can.’
‘Yes.’ Jennifer paused, then added: ‘Do you think I’m lying?’
‘No, but do you think I’m lying to you?’ I challenged her.
‘About what?’ she asked in reply.
 ‘That I believe you when you say that you know what others—me
included—are really saying to you.’
‘I suppose so. I mean, as soon as I hear someone say something, I can
sort of hear what I think they’re really saying to me.’
As I began to say, ‘Okay. So what do you think I’m really saying?’,
Jennifer added simultaneously, ‘I’ve had years of practice!’ We both
paused, neither of us having properly heard the other’s statement. Before I
could ask her to repeat her words, Jennifer mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ and then
lowered her head, avoiding my gaze.
Intrigued by her demeanour, I answered: ‘That’s okay, I’m sorry, too.’
Then I added: ‘But, look, let’s stay with what went on just now. Both of us
started to say something at the same time and the result was that I didn’t
hear what you said, and you didn’t hear what I said. Then, you apologised,
and I apologised back. Now tell me: when you heard me say, ‘That’s okay,
I’m sorry, too,’ did you pick up a critical message from me directed towards
you?’
Jennifer paused to consider her reply. If my understanding of her way
of being was sufficiently adequate, I’d just thrown her a formidable
challenge. Finally, blushing profusely, she replied. ‘Yes, I did,’ she
confessed. ‘But I heard it before, as well. That’s why I said that I was sorry.
I didn’t want you to be angry with me.’
‘Yes, I see that,’I answered as gently as I could. ‘And I guess that what
I pick out as being important in this is that you gave yourself a critical
message— something along the lines of ‘I’m not being a good enough
client for Ernesto because I’ve interrupted him’. Which is the same message
you supposed you were receiving from me—in spite of what I might have
seemed to be saying to the contrary.’
‘Yes … Except it was worse than that.’
‘How so?’
‘It was: “I’m not being a perfect client.”’
‘Ah! So, it’s not good enough for you to be ‘good enough’! You’ve got
to be perfect in your dealings with me?’
‘I want to be.’
‘Sure. But I’m not clear that it’s just that you want to be. I think it’s
more along the lines of “I must be.” Am I right?’
‘Perhaps. I don’t really see the difference.’
 ‘Well, let me tell you what I see as being the difference and you tell me
whether it fits or not for you. When I want to be something, I might try to
achieve it, but if I don’t, well, I can say that at least I tried. I can forgive
myself for not having made it. I did the best I could and I can pretty much
live with that. Now, on the other hand, if I must be something, then I really
have no choice in the matter. I either fulfil my aim or I fail. But if I fail in
something that is a must, it’s not so easy for me to let it go. I can’t forgive
myself and maybe I even have to punish myself for having failed. Do you
see the difference? In the first, there’s the possibility of self-acceptance
even if the aim or intention wasn’t fulfilled; in the latter, there is no such
possibility and instead all there is is a sense of worthlessness, self-directed
anger, and the demand for punishment. So … which is it for you? Is it that
you want to be perfect or that you must be?’
‘I must be. Definitely,’ Jennifer asserted.
‘All of the time?’ I queried.
‘Probably. Certainly most of the time by a wide margin.’
‘So most of the time you don’t accept who you are and what you do.
And, equally, most of the time you maintain a punitive attitude towards
your being and doing.’
‘That just about sums it up.’
‘Okay. So just a few minutes ago, with me, that was one of those
majority times, was it?’
‘Oh yes. Absolutely.’
‘Fine, so tell me what the message was that you gave yourself .’
‘Oh. It’s as I said before. I just told myself that I was jumping in too
quickly as usual and that this made you angry with me and why didn’t I
know enough to wait until it was my turn …’
‘Okay. Now bear with me and can you please say what you just said
again only this time in the present tense, as if you were just telling it to
yourself right now.’
Jennifer complied. ‘I’m jumping in too fast as usual and he’s angry
with me and why don’t I wait until he’s finished before I say something,’
she said.
‘And as you hear yourself say that, are you saying anything more?’
‘That I’m awful! Despicable! How could I be so stupid and arrogant?’
 ‘And is this typical of what you say to yourself when you feel you’ve
been or done something wrong with others?’
‘Yes,’ Jennifer agreed.
‘Okay. Now, before you were telling me that you could pick out what
others were really saying to you. Is what you’ve just said something that
you pick out as being a fairly common message that others give you?’
‘Yes,’ she agreed once again.
‘Except this time we established that the message came from you, not
me.’
‘Yes, true. But it also came from you.’
‘Did it?’
Before she could bring herself to answer me, Jennifer shut her eyes. I
noted her face twisted in a grimace, her fists bunched tightly so that her
fingernails dug into her palms, her body tightened in tension. She appeared
to be in physical battle with herself. Finally, still unable to look at me and
struggling to speak, she managed to whisper: ‘Are you telling me that you
didn’t feel any anger whatsoever towards me for interrupting you?’
‘Well, actually,’ I answered carefully, ‘I did feel anger. But not towards
you. As soon as I blurted out what I did, I was critical of myself for not
having realised that you had more to say.’
‘You’re being truthful about this? You’re not just trying to make me
feel good?’ Jennifer demanded to know.
‘Jennifer, at the risk of making you go all self-punitive again, I’m
being truthful. Believe me!’
‘I do,’ she smiled, suddenly relaxing.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘So, you see, we’re not so completely different.
Like you, I berate myself for not always getting it right. But, perhaps where
we differ is that I can also forgive myself. A little, anyway.’
Jennifer laughed. ‘That’s why you’re a therapist and I’m a client.’
‘And in being your therapist, I’d like you to tell me, what’s so terrible
about you that you have to be so punitive towards who you are and what
you do? How come you have to be so perfect that it’s unforgivable for you
to be otherwise?’
In that particular session, Jennifer was unable to answer my query.
However, over the next series of five meetings, she returned to this question
and sought to examine it as carefully and honestly as she could. In doing so,
she began to reveal both to me and to herself that this highly self-critical
train of thought was typical of her relations with others. Others, as she
explained, provoked her to adopt a punitive and self-loathing attitude
focused upon her inability to be perfect. Such a stance, it emerged, was far
less common when she was alone, although, even then, when on occasion
she would imagine the presence of others, the punitive thoughts would arise
as strongly as when others were actually present.
That she could speak about this to me (a representative of the ‘others’
in her world) brought her significant relief and opened her to the possibility
of being able to express her ‘inner dialogue’ externally with another whom
she trusted—if not completely, at least far more than any other in her world.
This view of the therapist as being both a representative of all others in the
client’s world and at the same time the exception to the rule regarding the
client’s percept of others, seems to me to be one of the most significant
offerings that therapists can make to their clients. But, as we can see from
the extract of dialogue presented above, in order to even hope to achieve
this, therapists need to be willing to monitor closely what is taking place
between them and their clients so that the immediacy of the situation can be
utilised to explore the issues as they currently present themselves to the
client.
Such monitoring might, as the extract hopefully also reveals, require
the therapist to disclose his or her experience of being with the client.
However, it is important to note that as well as being of potentially great
value, therapist disclosures are also clearly risky—not least because they
may digress from the client’s current concerns, or reveal the therapist as
having misunderstood the client, or suggest to the client that the therapist’s
own life-anxieties now require assuaging and, thereby, further burden or
punish the client for having exposed them.
It seems to me that the common therapeutic taboo against therapists’
disclosures, while typically solely explained from the standpoint of its
possibly harmful effects upon the client, may, just as significantly, have
much to tell us about therapists’ own fears about being imperfect.
Increasingly, the growth of a variety of movements seeking the
professionalsiation of psychotherapy and counselling has had the effect of
seemingly demanding therapists to demonstrate their expertise in a skills-
based fashion, so that the anxiety surrounding ‘doing it wrong’ has become
a prominent issue for trainees and practitioners alike. Such anxieties lead
therapists to positions which, like Jennifer’s, emphasise ‘must’ over ‘want’
and, in doing so, serve only to further dehumanise and encase the
therapeutic encounter into a series of stilted, overly cautious actions and
verbalisations.
While perhaps not being unique in questioning this attitude, the
existential-phenomenological model certainly remains a primary exponent
of the view that it is far more significant and valuable for therapists to seek
to remain openly willing to risk the exposure of their imperfections rather
than emphasise their ‘technological know-how’. That a therapist of
whatever persuasion may seek or wish to be as good as possible is surely a
laudable aim, but to impose what rational-emotive behaviour therapists
refer to as a musturbatory attitude upon their encounters surely can be seen
to work against the very enterprise of therapy.4
This aspect of un-knowing, in the sense that the therapist
acknowledges that he or she can never be truly in a non-risk encounter with
clients, seems to me to express a central general assumption within
existential-phenomenological theory. All encounters expose us to some
degree of risk—risk that we might be wrong, that we might do or say the
wrong things, that others may not respond to us as we expect, or that,
indeed, others may dismay, delude, deceive or betray us and themselves—
just as we might do so to ourselves and others. This lack of certitude, of
risk-free relations, places all of our encounters with others and with our
self-construed beliefs and values in an uncertain realm. To avoid such
anxieties, we may seek to inhabit a world which is bereft as far as possible
from any dealings with others. Or, perhaps more commonly, we may seek to
impose severe restrictions upon what, how and when we engage with others
so that the risks are statistically minimised. The price paid for taking such
an option is, I think, evident to us all: life becomes somewhat ‘life-less’,
unfulfilling, limited in its scope and expression. It becomes, as someone
once stated, ‘something that you put up with until you’re allowed to die’.
More to the point, if therapists themselves adopt and advocate such
defensive stances, is it not likely that clients, in turn, will find it far more
difficult to risk the opposite mode of being during therapy? Indeed, given
such contradictory messages, would it not seem likely that clients would
find the encounter all too similar to, and as threatening as, those which they
might experience elsewhere?
 ‘Addictive’ clients reveal their stance to be one of deep uncertainty
and ambivalence towards what they perceive to be the demands of the
world with regard to how and who they are permitted to be, or more
specifically, who they must be. Placed in this light, their addictive
behaviour, as problematic and dangerous as it may be, nevertheless serves a
significant function: it expresses an act of rebellion, a form of aggressive
reaction towards the world for not allowing them to be as they are. This
view seems to me to be rarely considered in the literature of addiction, yet it
is by no means uncommon for clients themselves to make statements of this
kind once they have taken sufficient risk (and the therapist has earned
sufficient respect) for them to voice it within the therapeutic encounter.
While clients are clearly able to assess that what they do is dangerous
to their existence, it is this other, often unreflected and opposite, stance that
serves to maintain the behaviour. For, as well as being life-threatening, it is
also, often, paradoxically, the only self-affirming behaviour that they can
muster in response to the perceived punitive and unloving stance of the
world.
While this idea may be at first difficult for most ‘non-addictive’
individuals to understand and accept, it may become easier to do so if we
consider it in the light of other instances of ‘impulsive’ behaviour which we
recognise as being undesirable yet seemingly cannot (or will not) cease to
enact in spite of their illogicality. This divided stance may well be
recognised as a common thematic reaction that permits in one stroke both a
sense of rebellious reaction to and a sense of relief from perceived world-
demands.
Such was Jennifer’s stance as she eventually voiced it directly to me.
While she desperately wanted to cease her bulimic activity, she also came to
recognise that, as painful and destructive as it was, it allowed her one of the
few instances of pleasurable relief from what she took to be her parents’
and the world’s demands upon her to be as they wanted her to be. Over
time, for example, she noted that her need to engage in bingeing and
vomiting diminished significantly when she spent extended periods of time
by herself. It was primarily as a result of the recent or current presence of
others that the bulimic response became strongest for her. Indeed, an
important part of the ‘thrill of pleasure’ that she found from the act emerged
precisely when she could enact her behaviour while others were around her
but did not know what she was doing. It was a secretive means, as Jennifer
herself eventually stated to me, ‘to get them off my back and to show them
that even when they thought they’d won, they hadn’t really. They think I’m
giving into them, but in fact I’m getting away with it right in front of their
eyes!’
Nevertheless, it also became clear that even when successfully
isolating herself from others, Jennifer continued to engage in acts of
bingeing and vomiting, however significantly reduced was their frequency.
On examination, this led her to acknowledge that the ‘punitive agent’ which
she placed on others was also part of her own private dialogue with ‘the
Jennifer who had to be’. This admission had great significance for Jennifer
since it allowed her, perhaps for the first time in many years, to address her
own divided stance towards her self-construct and to see that even if she
was correct in asserting that others were the source of deep ontological
anxiety (to employ R.D. Laing’s term),5 this anxiety did not solely emanate
from others but was also present as part of the self-to-self dialogue that she
engaged in. In seeing this, Jennifer began to explore her own punitive
attitude and language towards her self-construct and, just as significantly,
initiated a process of self-challenge.
However, as if to demonstrate that one’s life is always more complex
than therapeutic tales would have us believe, it was also at about this same
period that the inconsistencies in her general demeanour with me began to
become increasingly obvious to the extent that I eventually noticed them.
And, having finally done so, I decided that all I could do was to address my
growing confusion as directly as I could. As such, at the first opportunity
available, I pointed out to her that she seemed somehow different to the
Jennifer with whom I had become accustomed to engaging in dialogue.
‘That’s because it’s not really Jennifer whom you’re talking to!’ she
giggled.
‘Who am I talking to then?’ I asked, revealing my surprise.
‘Well …’ she said hesitantly, ‘in a way, you’re still talking to Jennifer,
but when I’m like this, I prefer to think of myself as Susie.’
My shock must have been as obvious to Susie as it was to me. My
persistent reminder to my students to ‘always be open to the unexpected’
reverberating all too loudly, I mumbled: ‘Ah … So, I guess it’s better for
me to address you as Susie then. Would you prefer that?’
‘It sounds strange,’ answered Susie.
 ‘How’s that?’
‘Well,’ Susie confessed, ‘You’re the first person that I told about me
being here at times. It’s been a secret up till now.’
Somehow, in spite of my astonishment, I found that I was both moved
by Susie’s faith in me and optimistic about this new twist in my relationship
with Jennifer. ‘I’m touched and grateful that you felt yourself to be trusting
enough towards me to let me in on your secret,’ I said. ‘I want you to know
that I’ll do my best to honour it. And, I guess, even if it does feel a bit
strange to have the secret out in the open between us, it might also make it
easier if we just accept it and work with it.’
‘Yes … I think you’re right,’ Susie agreed.
‘So … Susie. I don’t know if I can word this well but, what I find
myself wondering right now is what is it about you that’s different enough
so that you’re Susie and not Jennifer?’
Susie sniggered. ‘You’re right: you didn’t word it well! I suppose you
must be goddamned confused by my popping up.’
‘A bit,’ I admitted.
‘Good!’ she chuckled once again. ‘Still, never let it be said that I didn’t
try to be helpful. So, in answer to your question, I think I’m a little bit more
intelligent than Jennifer is. And I know how to get on better with people.’
‘And how do you do that? Get on better with people, I mean.’
‘Oh, they don’t put the shit up me as much as they do Jennifer. And I
don’t have to be so goddamn careful not to upset or bother them!’
‘What’s Jennifer so worried about in bothering or upsetting people?’
‘She thinks they’ll hurt her. Destroy her.’As she said this, Susie made a
dismissive gesture.
‘Can you tell me more about this idea that Jennifer has about people
destroying her?’
‘Well, like you explained to her: she sees others as being the ones who
punish her for not being like they want her to be. She gives them all this
power to dictate her life and it scares her because when she’s being like
they want her to be, she doesn’t feel that she’s being herself. Silly moo!’
‘And when she’s not being herself, who is she being?’
‘Not me, in case that’s what you’re wondering!’ Susie whooped. ‘Not
in those circumstances. No, when she’s like that, it’s like she’s no one. She’s
not really alive when she’s like that. Well, not literally of course. She’s alive
and all that, but it’s not her.’
‘And is she still alive when she’s not being her but you’re being you?’
‘Of course she is! She’s more alive than usual, in fact!’
‘So, oddly enough, when she’s not being Jennifer and you’re being
you, Susie, Jennifer is actually being more Jennifer than she usually is?’
‘That sounds bloody convoluted!’ Susie hooted. ‘But, yes, in a strange
way, that’s it. When I’m in charge, Jennifer is, too. She’s here. It’s not like
I’m ‘possessing’ her or anything like that!’
‘It’s more like when you’re in charge you’re able to give emphasis to a
way of being that usually can’t express itself so clearly when Jennifer’s in
charge and around people? Is it like that?’ I sought to clarify.
‘Yes! Except she can’t ever be like this with other people. So I have to
be here for her.’
‘And Jennifer is aware that this is happening? She’s aware that you
exist and that you’re sometimes in charge?’
‘Yes and no. Like, next time, when you tell her that you’ve been
talking to me, she won’t be surprised. Not entirely. She knows I exist, but
she imagines that I only exist in her thoughts. So I suppose she might be
surprised when you tell her. She might think that you read her thoughts or
something.’
‘And do you want me to tell Jennifer that I’ve been talking to you?’
‘I don’t know. You’re the expert!’
‘As are you!’
‘Touché!’ Susie laughed.
Still somewhat confused, I took the opportunity to clarify what had
been stated and ensure that I’d understood it correctly. ‘Jennifer knows that
you exist, but thinks that you only exist in her thoughts. And when you
‘take over’ you do so because you can deal with people far better than
Jennifer can. Is that right?’ I waited for Susie to express her agreement and
then continued: ‘All right, now this is where I’m still unclear: if you can be
there when she’s feeling scared to be with others, how come you don’t ‘take
over’ more often? What holds you back?’
‘Jennifer does!’ Susie answered.
‘I don’t understand.’
 ‘Look, it’s pretty bloody simple, actually. What you said is right, but
not completely right. When I take over, it’s not just so I can deal with
others. It’s just as much that I can do and say things to myself that Jennifer
wouldn’t dare allow herself to do or say. You got it now? If I could, I’d take
over a hell of a lot more often than I do. But she’s scared of me. So she
holds me back.’
‘What makes Jennifer so scared you? Doesn’t she trust you?’
‘Of course she does! But, you see, if I take over too often, then I might
be in charge most of the time and then Jennifer would hardly ever get the
chance.’
‘Is this what you want?’
‘No! Fuck that! I only want to do what’s best for Jennifer. I love her
and want to protect her.’
‘Okay … I think I’m beginning to understand. So, let me try and
express what you just said in another way. Could it be that as well as what
you’re saying, another reason that Jennifer doesn’t allow you to take charge
as often as you could might be because Jennifer feels that she’d lose
something important if this were to happen?’
‘Lose? Lose what?’
‘You tell me. You know Jennifer better than anyone else.’
‘Um … I’ll have to think about that. I’ll leave you now. I’ll be back,
though.’ As she said her goodbyes, I witnessed for the first time the
‘transformation’ from Susie to Jennifer. It was an amazing sight to behold.
The changes reflected in her posture, her facial expressions, her breathing
were subtle, yet evident. Within seconds, I was back in the presence of
Jennifer. As soon as she saw me, she flushed, then turned her eyes away
from mine.
That action suggested to me that Jennifer knew that I knew her secret.
Still, I recalled Susie’s warning and tried to act accordingly. ‘Jennifer,’ I
said, measuring my words with care, ‘before we say anything else, I want
you to know that I’m not going to push you to explain what just happened.
If you don’t want to say anything, or refer back to it ever again, I promise
I’ll respect that.’
Still avoiding looking at me, Jennifer began to cry. I made no attempt
to disturb her. Eventually, she wiped her eyes and said: ‘You’re the first
person to know about Susie.’
 ‘That’s what Susie told me as well,’ I replied.
‘She told you that?’ Jennifer smiled. ‘Then she must like and trust you
as well. She told you?’
‘Yes. It was one of the first things that she told me.’ I paused, then
continued. ‘Susie also told me that she thinks that you imagine that she only
exists in your thoughts. But it doesn’t sound like she’s right.’
Jennifer smiled once again. ‘I used to think that. But, over time, since
not long after I began to see you, I knew that that couldn’t be so. That’s why
I let her come to see you sometimes.’
‘So, Susie’s not quite so in charge as she thinks?’
‘No. But don’t tell her that!’ Jennifer pleaded.
‘I won’t,’ I promised. ‘But does this mean that you always know
what’s going on when she “takes over”?’
‘No, not completely,’ Jennifer explained. ‘It’s as though I have a very
vague experience and memory of it. It’s more like I’ve got some telepathic
contact with Susie. I mean, what I sense is something that doesn’t really
belong to me. It’s like I have a little bit of access to Susie’s thoughts. But,
usually, it’s not so clear.’
‘And would you like to know more about Susie’s thoughts than you
do?’
‘I’m not sure. I … I’m not sure.’
From the way in which she sighed and fidgeted in her seat, I felt quite
certain that Jennifer had thought of something which she was finding
difficult to express. ‘Is there something you want to tell me about?’ I urged.
Jennifer blushed, sighed deeply once again. ‘Well, if you must know,
what I mainly usually remember or “read” in my picking up Susie’s
thoughts is from when she’s with Adam.’
Adam was Jennifer’s then current boyfriend. They had been together
for some three years and Jennifer had expressed the view that while she
didn’t trust him to the extent to which she thought that partners should trust
one another, nevertheless she had been more honest and relaxed with him
than with anyone else in her life. Even so, she did not trust him enough to
tell him of her bulimia, much less of Susie. Like all others in Jennifer’s life,
whatever trust and affection she held for Adam, this was overwhelmed by
her fear that he would ‘overpower’ her, seek to turn her into this ‘person
that she was not’. That he, too, like all others from her parents onward,
would not—could not—accept her as she was but only accept her if she was
as he imagined and wanted her to be.
A vague suspicion began to dawn on me. If this was the relationship
they had, and if, as Jennifer had told me several times, she eventually saw
their future together as a married couple, then what purpose did Susie fulfil
in it? I could guess, but it was more important that Jennifer herself tell me.
‘And Susie?’ I prodded.
‘What about Susie?’
‘You said that you get a sense of Susie’s thoughts particularly around
Adam. Can you tell me what those are?’
‘She likes him.’
‘And how do you feel about that?’
‘I suppose I’m relieved.’
Again, I was struck by a suspicion as to what was being implied.
‘Jennifer, when is Susie most likely to be around Adam?’ I asked.
Jennifer blushed vividly and with obvious embarrassment. ‘You
guessed!’ she shouted with uncharacteristic abandon.
‘I’m not sure if I did. Do you want me to tell you what I’m thinking?’
‘Yes.’
‘I think that Susie’s there when you and Adam make love.’
‘She makes love with Adam,’ Jennifer corrected.
‘And does this upset you?’
‘No! I’m relieved.’
‘You’re relieved.’
‘Well, she at least enjoys it!’
‘And you don’t enjoy making love with Adam?’
‘I’ve never made love with Adam in my life!’
‘Well,’ I laughed, ‘that bit of information would take Adam by
surprise!’
Jennifer’s response to my impromptu quip was, thankfully, to laugh as
well. We spent several minutes enjoying the fantasy of Adam’s reaction to
this turn of events. However, the laughter could not disguise the important
information that had just been revealed. Up until this moment of dialogue,
Jennifer had only alluded in passing, and with singular reserve, to this
aspect of their relationship, or, indeed, to her sexual interests and
experiences as a whole. As had become evident from our earliest
discussions, her sexuality was a taboo topic in both discussion and
experience. She had declared herself to be ‘entirely asexual’ and vowed that
it was an issue that never crossed her mind—other than how to avoid it in
her relations with Adam who, she acknowledged, did not share this point of
view.
Now, at last, it was clear that Susie’s presence rescued Jennifer in this
particular instance of her relations with others as well. For, Jennifer
declared, Susie was ‘full of sexual appetites’ and it was she, not Jennifer,
who was ‘an active and willing participant’ in sexual encounters with Adam
as well as the previous men in ‘both their lives’. Even so, Jennifer admitted
that, once Susie ‘had finished and departed’, she (Jennifer) was sometimes
left with a vague sense of pleasure. In the past, she had attributed this to her
relief that Susie had managed ‘to get the sex out of the way’, but,
increasingly, Jennifer had begun to question this explanation and, as a
result, had been left with a vague, if disturbing, sense of unease and
disquiet. Indeed, she now wondered whether Susie’s influence upon her was
such that she, Jennifer, was ‘being sullied by lustful feelings’.
Having told me all this, Jennifer averted her eyes once again and, more
in shame than embarrassment, mumbled: ‘And there you have it: not only
are you dealing with a schizophrenic, you’ve also got a perverted woman on
your hands. I wouldn’t blame you if you were to tell me that this was too
much for you to want to keep seeing me!’
‘And if I were to tell you just that?’ I asked.
‘I’d be sad. But I’d be grateful that you were at least being truthful
with me.’
‘And if I told you otherwise?’
‘I’m not sure I’d believe you.’
‘So you’d believe me in one instance, but not the other,’ I clarified.
‘I suppose I would.’
‘You’re more prepared to take a statement that will hurt or sadden you
as truth than you are to accept one that might be something that you want?’
I persisted.
‘Yes,’ Jennifer assented. ‘I’ve learned not to hope to get what I want.’
‘It seems to me that you’ve learned more than that!’ I answered. ‘Your
response to the possibility of getting what you want is to not believe it.’
 ‘Yes, but I’m usually right in not believing it.’
‘That may be so,’ I agreed. ‘But what if, this time, you were prepared
to give me the benefit of the doubt in either case?’
Jennifer paused, took her time in considering my question, then finally
looked up at me. ‘You’d be crazy!’ she half-laughed.
‘Possibly … But that doesn’t answer my question.’
Jennifer smiled. ‘I don’t think you know what you’re getting yourself
into.’
‘I know I don’t …’ I answered. ‘But I’m willing to give it a go
nonetheless.’
‘Good.’
The next few months of sessions with Jennifer and Susie were fairly
evenly shared by them. Much to my surprise, it was easy from the start of
each session for me to quickly ascertain who was in the office with me. The
time together that we shared was used principally to allow Jennifer and
Susie to construct a fuller ‘history’ to their shared life. Because we had
agreed that whatever information was conveyed should be completely
available to all three of us, we initially set up a system whereby every
session was to be audio-taped for either Jennifer or Susie to take away with
her so that the other would have it available to listen to prior to the next
meeting. This procedure continued for around thirty sessions until, one
afternoon, Jennifer announced to me that we would no longer need the tape
recorder since she and Susie had discovered that they were both now able to
recall all sessions without recourse to the taped material.
This development struck me as being highly significant and I inquired
whether this meant that now the two of them were in much closer contact
with one another’s thoughts and experiences. Jennifer confirmed this and
explained that for the past few weeks they had actually been able to engage
in a form of conversation with one another whenever ‘the fancy took them’.
In addition, she told me that they had had a novel experience in that each
had found the ability to remain ‘in the background’ while the other was ‘in
charge’ and could almost experience the other’s encounters with the world
at a near-simultaneous level.
Even so, there remained differences in the stance and attitudes that
such shared experiences evoked. While one might appreciate or enjoy the
events unfolding, or which she initiated or participated in, the other might
find the same to be worrisome, embarrassing, unpleasant or boring or,
alternatively, invest them with another meaning or significant insight that
was subsequently discussed with her ‘companion’ (for this was the term
that Jennifer and Susie began to employ for one another).
Such divergences in experience were most notable when, for instance,
Jennifer passed her evening in solitude listening to classical music. Susie
found all this highly boring (she hated being alone, and enjoyed more
modern pop music) and could only bear it by reminding herself that
Jennifer had a right to do what she pleased with her time. In similar fashion,
Jennifer found Susie’s constant social whirl to be alien, tiring (and
tiresome) and, particularly when it led to sexual activities with Adam, both
frightening and somewhat repugnant. Nevertheless, she, too, attempted to
be more tolerant of her companion’s wishes and, slowly, began to express
the view that there was something not entirely unpleasant and unenjoyable
about such behaviour.
These statements and attempts to ‘enter into and respect’ one another’s
lived experience had their psychic consequences as well. Little by little,
sometimes in quite laborious and emotionally draining fashion, Jennifer and
Susie began to piece together their past and currently lived worlds and, as
well, in doing so, initiated a process of ‘merging’ so that each adopted
facets and characteristics of the other to the extent that after about another
sixteen months of therapy it became increasingly difficult for me to clearly
distinguish one from the other.
The effects of this change in demeanour were expressed in the bulimic
problems that Jennifer had originally come to discuss with me. Over our
discussions, it emerged that both Jennifer and Susie suffered from ‘partial
bulimia’ in that while it was Jennifer who binged, it was Susie who
vomited. As can be imagined, I was intrigued by this revelation and sought
some further clarification. It was explained to me that while Jennifer ate in
order to quite literally ‘fill up her life’, Susie vomited so that she would be
able to maintain her figure and remain attractive to both herself and her
partners.
Once again, this behaviour contained added significance to each of
them. For Jennifer, the experience of ‘being full’ allowed her some sense of
stability, of quite literal weight, in order to buttress herself against the
perceived influences and demands of others. Susie, on the other hand,
vomited in order that others would approach her in a positive fashion and
might be more likely to treat her with respect and deference.
While these strategies appeared to function in opposition to one
another, it was evident that they shared a similar aim. For both Jennifer and
Susie, their relations with others provoked uncertainty and anxiety. Others
were dangerous to them, albeit in differing ways. Nevertheless both Jennifer
and Susie saw others as being powerful enough to dictate a good deal of
their interpersonal stance and dialogue with the world. Their dealing with
others provoked a sense of threat to their being from which each had to
protect herself.
In this sense, among others, their relation with me, as representative
yet in significant ways also exceptional other, was an important means for
them to address and explore these anxieties. Even so, it soon also became
apparent that Adam, too, had played a considerable role in their partial
rapprochement with the world and with one another. Adam was significant
because he, uniquely in their experience, appealed to each of them—if for
divergent reasons. To Jennifer, Adam was an interesting man who did not
‘push his body on her’ and who was clearly able to engage with her
intellectually and socially. At the same time, Susie found Adam to be a
caring and attentive lover who, importantly, allowed her to take the
initiatives in their lovemaking but was also clearly not ‘a wimp’ (a term
which she had applied to all of Jennifer’s previous male acquaintances).
I stress the importance of Adam’s influence upon Jennifer and Susie
because often it is assumed that the therapist has played the most significant
role in the progress of therapy (whether deemed successful or a failure).
While not denying that Jennifer’s and Susie’s relationship with me was both
unique and influential, what I am pointing to is the fact that in many
instances the most significant developments that may be seen to occur as a
result of therapy, or while in the therapeutic relationship, are likely to occur
outside the therapist–client meetings. In this instance, for example, both
Jennifer’s and Susie’s mutual interest in Adam (if for different rationales)
served as a subsidiary springboard in Jennifer’s decision to begin therapy
with me and, just as significantly, in Susie’s agreement to this decision.
Readers may, by this point, be asking themselves why I persist in
referring to Jennifer and Susie as if they were two separate persons rather
than speak of them as one being—however divided. I have done so for what
I believe to be sound and relevant reasons. First, if, as I have argued
throughout all of the discussions in this text, I see my primary function as
therapist as that of seeking to enter the lived-world of my clients as
accurately as possible, it seems to me that I can only respect this particular
world-view, and maintain my purpose, by acknowledging that, in this
instance, the means by which this division was expressed and lived was via
the presence of two initially distinct ‘personalities’. Second, I want to make
plain to my readers that I sought to avoid making a judgement as to which
personality was the real one. I still to this day have no real sense as to ‘who
came first’ in Jennifer and Susie’s chronological development. While
Jennifer was the first to approach me, I cannot state with any certainty that
Susie had somehow ‘split’ from Jennifer. Could it not have been vice-
versa? Or, indeed, could it not also be the case that both Jennifer and Susie
were themselves ‘split constructs’ of a previously construed self ?
Such questions raise, I think, another significant point that readers may
be curious to know: how and why did this split—or any other further splits
—take place? Why have I not given an historical account of Jennifer and
Susie’s life? I am well aware that the literature of multiple personality
disorder (MPD) stresses early childhood trauma (typically involving serious
physical and/or sexual violence) as the necessary genesis of this form of
dissociation.6 Nevertheless, as Ian Hacking warns in his masterful and
unreservedly recommended recent text, Rewriting the Soul: Multiple
personality and the sciences of memory, such theories reveal numerous and
significant assumptions and biases that demand further clarification on the
part of researchers.7
In heeding Dr Hacking’s advice, I am loathe to assert that my
encounters with Jennifer and Susie necessarily provide an example of
working with multiple, or dissociated, personality disorder. While Jennifer
and Susie certainly shared some features with those individuals who have
been so labelled, they also deviated from a number of common variables,
not least in that there seemed to be only two ‘dissociated personalities’—a
highly uncommon event in contemporary research.8
In any case, I must say that I find the question as to whether this is or
is not a genuine case of multiple or dissociated personality disorder to be
somewhat uninteresting and irrelevant. What little I have written on this
still controversial disorder has attempted to focus not upon dissociations of
personality but, rather, on dissociations between one’s reflected experience
and one’s beliefs surrounding the current self-construct.9 I think that this
refocusing of attention is worthwhile insofar as it places extreme instances
of dissociation within a continuum that includes many instances of ‘normal’
or ‘everyday’ experiential dissociations rather than presenting them as
unusual, and still largely inexplicable, occurrences.
Whatever, the dual themes of early trauma and sexual abuse were,
indeed, expressed to me in the accounts that, initially, Susie and,
subsequently, Jennifer both revealed during their sessions. Susie explained
that during their first three years, they lived with their natural parents both
of whom severely and repeatedly injured and sexually abused them and
made them the ‘playthings’ of a group of adults with whom they associated.
These activities were subsequently reported (possibly by a neighbour) to
local social services who acted by taking them away into care and
eventually finding adoptive parents.
While there is no reason to suppose that these events did not actually
happen, it must be stressed that neither is there any immediate basis for
assuming that they did. What is important, therapeutically speaking, it
seems to me, is not whether the events recounted had an historical basis but,
rather, that this was the account by which Jennifer and Susie constructed
their past and which, in turn, served to validate their current experience.
This narrative allowed them to make sense of themselves, their relation to
one another, and their relations to others. It is this factor that seems to me to
be of crucial significance for therapists to explore with their clients not least
because, in most instances, therapists simply will not be able to ascertain
the historical ‘truth’ of a client’s recounted past. As such, it seems best for
therapists to treat the accounts given as ‘narrative truths’ and grant them the
respect that they deserve—not because they are necessarily historically
factual but because they are the meaningful lived truths by which clients
have construed their way of being-in-the-world.
This stance seems to me to be yet another aspect of the therapist’s
attempt to remain un-knowing, and, while undoubtedly difficult to maintain,
can be just as unquestionably highly beneficial to, and liberating for, the
client. While it leaves substantial gaps in our understanding of ‘how and
why we came to be’, it also opens up myriad possibilities as to ‘who we can
become’.
As an example of this prospect, readers may be interested to learn that
although, once our meetings came to an end, I never saw either Jennifer or
Susie again, about two years following our last session, I received a
telephone call from a vaguely familiar-sounding woman who referred to
herself as Sylvia. Deciphering the confusion contained in my somewhat
hesitant ‘Yes?’, she announced that she had just called to say that Jennifer
and Susie had asked her to convey their greetings and thanks to me and to
wish me well. My chat with Sylvia was both hesitant and brief. We were
like two strangers who, in meeting, realise that they share a common
acquaintance whose significance to each of them stands no chance of being
adequately communicated to the other.
Nevertheless, as odd as it may sound, this first, and thus far last,
contact with Sylvia was richly satisfying.

1. Nagera, H. et al. (1970) Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on Metapsychology, Conflicts, Anxiety and Other Subjects. The Hampstead Clinic Psychoanalytic Library, volume 4.
London: George Allen & Unwin.
2. See Sartre, J.P. (1956) Being and Nothingness. (trans. H. Barnes). London: Routledge (1991)
3. Spinelli, E. (1993) The unconscious: an idea whose time has gone? Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 4, 19–47.
See Spinelli, E. (2006) Demystifying Therapy. Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books.
4. Ellis, A. & Whitely, J.M. (1979) Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Rational-Emotive Therapy. Pacific Grove, California: Brooks/Cole.
5. Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self. London: Tavistock Publications.
6. Lowenstein, R.J. (1990) The clinical psychology of males with multiple personality disorder: A report of twenty-one cases. Dissociation 3: 135–143.
Lowenstein, R.J. (1991) Psychogenic amnesia and psychogenic fugue: A comprehensive review. Review of Psychiatry, 10: 189–222.
7. Hacking, I (1995) Rewriting the Soul: Multiple personality and the sciences of memory. Chichester: Princeton University Press.
Braude, S.E. (1991) First Person Plural: Multiple personality and the philosophy of mind. London: Routledge.
8. The earliest reported cases of dissociated personalities typically dealt with two ‘personalities’. (See, for instance, F.W. Myers’ Human Personality and the Survival of Bodily Death
(2 vols) which was originally published in 1903.) Since then, modern accounts of MPD present numerous dissociated personalities and, as far as I am aware, rarely, if ever, deal with
only two.
9. See Spinelli, E. (1996) The vagaries of the self. The Journal of the Society for Existential Analysis, 7 (2), 57–68.
 7
Lifting the Veil

‘The first sign that I had of seeing beyond “the blur” was at a marriage
reception that I attended about five months ago. There was a young mother
there with her five-week-old daughter, holding her, playing with her. I was
unable to take my eyes off the baby. She was just so cute and alive,
wriggling and squealing merrily in her mother’s arms. It made me feel just
so happy. And then, all of a sudden, I was able to see beyond “the blur”.
‘How it happened was that as I was staring at the baby, she just
suddenly started ageing in front of my eyes. I mean, she just began to look
older and older, going through year upon year of development in a matter of
seconds. I was nearly struck dumb by it all. I wondered whether anyone else
was seeing this happening but I didn’t ask because somehow I already knew
that I was the only one really able to see it. So I just watched her getting
older and older until she seemed to stop changing. I knew that she was fifty.
This fifty-year-old woman sitting there on her mother’s knee and staring
back at me. We really communicated with each other. It’s like we were the
only ones who were truly in the room. And she smiled at me. This half-
innocent, half-desperate smile that seemed to sum it all up.
‘She knew me. She was able to look into me and see me as I was, in
the same way that I could do the same to her … The words aren’t right. I‘m
not explaining it properly. It wasn’t really “me” or “her”. It wasn’t about
identity. It was who this really is. And who she really was. Who we all
really are.
‘It’s beginning to sound crazy. I just can’t tell you what it was like. I
was scared, really scared, but I also had this odd sense of calm about me. It
was like knowing for certain something which you’ve only allowed
yourself to suspect and then brushed aside. I suppose I was scared because I
knew that I could never brush this aside. Not ever. You can’t go back to not
knowing something that you’ve known with such absolute clarity. Even if
everybody else doesn’t seem to be able or willing to understand.
‘The first few weeks when I was trying to explain this to people and
they couldn’t—or wouldn’t—make sense of what I was talking about, I was
becoming truly angered and irritated with them. I was almost violent with
rage that they couldn’t see what was so obvious. But then, finally, partly
because I’d got nowhere other than to be sectioned by my family and my
GP, I began to see that, really, if I’d been in the situation that they were in,
I’d be reacting in the exact same way as they were. Until that baby showed
me the way, I’d managed to avoid “the blur” and live as though it wasn’t
really there and that what hints I’d had of it were just due to momentary
“mental aberrations”—as I heard someone put it the other day on the radio.
I suppose I’d have reacted in the same way if I hadn’t experienced what I
did.
‘Anyway, the little baby was just the start of it all. When I stopped
concentrating on her, I started to turn around and look at all the people
sitting at the table beside me. And—how do I explain this?—although I
could still see them as they appeared, I could now also see them as they
really were. I mean, I could see beyond their masks. Or inside them. I don’t
know how else to put it. I saw what they actually were. Not people, as such.
Not even “things”, bodies, you know what I mean. They were more like
vibrating energy. Like light and shade. They had no substance, really. They
were more like “vibrations”. And, what’s more, I could “read” what they
were really thinking, as opposed to what they were saying or not saying.
‘I mean, for example: there was one man there opposite me who was
just sitting there smiling at this other person’s small-talk, but really what he
was doing was saying to himself: “How much longer do I have to put up
with this? How long before I can get up and leave and go back home?” And
somebody else was there looking as if she was really interested in what her
husband was telling these other people about their holiday in Morocco or
somewhere, but what she was really doing was imagining herself being in
bed with this other man sitting across from her and I could see the images
she was constructing about them having it off and such, you know? And
there was this other woman talking away except what she was really
thinking was about her still being single and that it wasn’t fair, that she had
so much to give to somebody who’d appreciate her and love her and why
couldn’t she find somebody like that instead of just spending her life
coming to these other people’s weddings.
‘And it was like that all around me. It was as though I’d managed to
tune into two different wavelengths, you know? At one wavelength it was
what seemed to be happening, while at the other was the truth, what was
really happening. I was being bombarded by all of these thoughts and
images. And I couldn’t shut them out. It was awful. Frightening. I felt sick
to my stomach. Not just by the falseness and lies in people’s lives, but,
really, more by the truth. It was just too awful to sit with. For some reason,
all of a sudden, it was as if a veil had been lifted. This veil we call “reality”,
and I could see behind it to what was actually there and it was
overwhelming in its intensity and awfulness. I didn’t want it to be
happening. I couldn’t understand why it should be happening at all—and to
me! Why me, for God’s sake? Why should I suddenly have to see things
like that? What had I done to deserve it?
‘But, even as I thought this, I was aware that it wasn’t actually “me”
who knew all this. There wasn’t really a “me” there in the first place. It was
like there were just these thoughts that could be accessed, but they weren’t
really “mine” or “theirs”. They were just thoughts kind of floating in the air.
Or vibrating in space. And then, little by little, all these thoughts converged
into one “big thought”, one thought that kind of overwhelmed everything
else and just kind of stood out from everything. And the thought just was:
“It’s all meaningless.”
‘And that’s what truly freaked me out. Because I couldn’t get rid of the
thought and because it was true: it is all so bloody meaningless! I couldn’t
turn my back on it. I couldn’t shut it off. I was kind of thrown into this
meaninglessness and I was really, really terrified by it. I was nearly
hysterical with fright, to tell you the truth. I don’t think that you can
imagine what it’s like to see things so clearly, and to know that you’re the
only one who does see things so clearly. I was alone in this meaningless
void, with no one to understand or share it with me—and there wasn’t even
really a “me” there in the first place.
‘Since then, as you know, things seemed to get worse. When I tried to
explain these things to my wife and family, I could see that they weren’t
able to understand or make sense of what I was attempting to express. I
guess that they began to think that I was going mad. At first, they tried to
tell me that I was just overwrought with the pressures of work and that I
needed a good long holiday, just to rest and enjoy myself. They started
planning a trip for me and I went along with it for a while. I mean, I tried to
convince myself that this was what I really needed and wanted. Take some
time off in the countryside, go fishing, maybe get back to riding, golf …
You know. It was supposed to be a dream come true. Something we’d
planned for ages but had never quite got around to doing. So, we started off,
everybody trying to make merry and pretend that nothing had happened. I
lasted a couple of days trying to keep up pretences. I just couldn’t do it any
longer. When you’ve seen beyond the fake, when “the blur” is no longer
there, it’s just impossible to pretend there’s any point in all those things you
once thought were meaningful and worthwhile.
‘I just looked at myself and everyone around me and what we were
doing, and how meaningless it was and how it just leads to nothing.
Nothing at all. And I was sickened by it all over again. I couldn’t
understand why I had been the one to have seen through it. What had I done
to deserve this? So, I flipped out all over again. Only this time, it was much
worse. I guess I started to rant and rave, not because I really meant to, but
because no one would—or could—understand or accept what I was trying
to tell them. They thought that I had just gone off the deep end, I suppose.
Not that I blame them. But I was just so frustrated, you know? I was
revolted by their attempts to calm me down and tell me it was all going to
be all right. It just wasn’t going to be bloody all right! Nothing could ever
be the same again. Nothing.
‘I ran off. I didn’t know where I was going or what I was about to do. I
just wanted to be a bloody long way away from all these people who
couldn’t help me one damn bit. I knew that I was scaring them, and I didn’t
want to. But, you see, they were scaring me even more. They were trying to
get me to pretend that I didn’t experience what I was experiencing. They
were driving me even crazier than they thought I was. I just wanted to be
left alone.
‘I think that that was when I first began to hear the voice inside me. It
sounded strange. Not strange in that it had an odd tone or said weird things.
It sounded like me, but I knew that I wasn’t the one thinking out its words.
It didn’t belong to me. It just kind of used me. Used my brain and thinking
patterns and inner voice. But it wasn’t me. It was quite calming, actually. It
told me that things were all right, really. That no one was going to
understand because they were still caught up inside “the blur”. It didn’t say
who it was or anything like that, but it sounded to me like it was the voice
of something beyond human; something wise. It didn’t give me its name or
anything, it didn’t say, “This is God speaking” or “This is the devil”.
Nothing like that. It was just this voice that understood me and accepted the
reality of what I was going through and just tried to help.
‘And because it believed in me, I felt able to believe in it. In what it
said and what it wanted me to do. It just kind of took over, I suppose. I
mean, it didn’t push its way into taking over. I let it. It calmed me and I
could talk to it and it would answer back that I was right or to pretend or try
to be like I used to be. It confirmed what I had thought and tried to express
to the others and to myself. That everything had changed and nothing could
be the same as it once was.’
The forty-four-year-old man providing me with this account of the
recent harrowing events in his life was named Giles. Giles had asked to
come to see me twice weekly on the advice of his GP and his family. I had
not been his first choice. He had already visited three other potential
therapists, each of whom he had rejected on the grounds that they had either
tried to focus upon past causes to explain his disturbance or had sought to
provide him with behavioural tasks in order to allay further ‘breakdowns’.
In short, Giles had felt that they had not really listened to him, nor had they
truly understood what he had attempted to express. Giles had insisted that
nothing in his past life could serve as an explanatory springboard for what
had happened to him and that to learn to live as if these disturbing events in
his life had not taken place was a lie to which he did not wish to be a party.
Unsure as to what it was that he did want from me, I remained, at first,
somewhat wary. To be honest, the fact that Giles had been diagnosed as
paranoid schizophrenic, had spent some weeks in a hospital ward wherein
he had been heavily sedated, and was still under the supervision of a
psychiatrist concerned me. I had no desire to set myself up—or to be set up
—as an alternative ‘healer’ for Giles. While I have worked with individuals
who have been diagnosed as suffering from a number of serious mental
disturbances, and while I have numerous reservations about the ways in
which such disturbances are typically treated from a clinical standpoint, I
remain somewhat wary of beginning private therapy with people who have
been so labelled. This position is not due to any sense that the problems
under consideration are necessarily unsuitable to the therapeutic encounter
that I seek to foster with my clients. The issue, I believe, is far more
complex.
While they are undoubtedly disturbing to both client and therapist, the
diagnostic symptoms associated with the various disorders of thought,
emotion and behaviour that are categorised in clinical frameworks such as
the current widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders (DSM-IV) do not seem to me to be the principal agencies of that
partially-shared felt sense of disabling trauma. Existential-
phenomenological psychiatrists and psychologists, since the descriptively
oriented, pathfinding work of Karl Jaspers, have sought to structure their
texts according to the perspectives of self-awareness, style of self-report and
perceptual processes rather than by diagnostic grouping.1 These attempts
go beyond the more widely held assumption that an individual’s responses
are in some way ‘abnormal’, and, instead, seek to expose and explore the
meanings being expressed through these responses. The potential ‘success’
in this endeavour is dependent upon the therapist’s ability to discern that
which is understandable in the initially ‘un-under-standable’.2
While there are important disagreements between
existentialphenomenological therapists as to how far the attempt to ‘make
the client’s ununderstandable position understandable to the therapist’ can
be achieved, nevertheless, they are all in agreement that the attempt to
unfold both what the client is experiencing reflectively at any given
moment, and how that currently lived experience is imbued with meaning
relative to the whole of the client’s reflected life-experience, is of
inestimable value to client and therapist alike. This undertaking allows a
clarification of the preoccupations and evaluations that are attributed by the
client to his or her experience, as well as the wider meanings that these have
to the client’s sense of his or her overall life-experience. In addition,
through these clarifications, the therapist is in a position to assist the client
by accurately reflecting back that experience and challenging it insofar as
the challenge reflects the implicit beliefs, values, judgements,
contradictions and assumptions that are embedded within the meanings
given to, and the relational stances derived from, these experiences.
Once the therapist has sufficiently demonstrated a willingness to
embrace the client’s way of being, it becomes possible for him or her to
develop deductive speculative hypotheses that reconceptualise the client’s
experience within a wider theoretical framework. In other words, what is
being acknowledged here is that the existential-phenomenological therapist
is dedicated to being not only a practitioner of merit but also a theoretician
concerned with the explication of an evolving model of human experience
derived from his or her therapeutic and more general life encounters—a
dual stance that, I hope, this book has managed to convey.
Bearing in mind this latter point, when working with those individuals
whose current way of being has been classified as severely disordered or
dysfunctional my experience has led me to suppose that seriously disturbed
persons are likely to respond to their disordered experience by adopting two
main attitudes or dispositions.
On the one hand, their standpoint expresses an ‘I want out’ orientation
to their experience. Their way of being is felt to be so frightening and
disorienting that they don’t want any part of it. Once again, it is not the
events per se that provoke this attitude, since these same events could be
experienced as being ecstatic, or deeply meaningful in a mystical or
religious sense, and might even allow a resolution to life problems rather
than provoke new ones. Rather, the issue lies with the meaning implications
to their relationally derived sense of existence, essence and identity. This
view is deeply indebted to the still revolutionary work of R.D. Laing3 and
the studies that he undertook together with his colleagues Aaron Esterson,4
and David Cooper.5
On the other hand, seriously disturbed individuals are also likely to
imbue their dysfunctional experience with a pronounced and potentially
unshakeable sense of new-found existential certainty. While, before the
onset of the disturbance, they might well have had serious doubts and
concerns about the meaning in, and purpose to, their existence, essence and
identity, once in the grip of the mental upheaval, such uncertainties cease to
be. Although they may not want, nor feel secure in or at ease with, these
‘certainties’, nonetheless, just as strongly (if not more so), they may insist
upon maintaining them to the extent that they will resist any attempt to
explore or clarify their lived meaning-world, because as disturbing as it
may be, this novel experience of having been provided with the certainty of
meaning is so greatly valued that it must be protected at all costs.
How seriously disturbed individuals respond to their new-found
‘certainties’ is a crucial factor in my decision to work therapeutically with
them. If I can discern that they continue to acknowledge their previous
uncertainties and, through this, will be willing and able to question the very
basis of their newfound certainty (which is to say that while not denying
their current experience of certainty, nevertheless they remain open to its
questioning, to the possibility of its being challenged), then I am inclined to
begin therapy with them. If, on the other hand, their certainty is fixed,
unshakeable, unopen to clarification, testing, and questioning, then I believe
that it is highly unlikely that the therapy that I am able to offer is either
suitable or desirable.
This has nothing to do with any inherent restrictions in the
existentialphenomenological model, nor in the supposed severity of their
symptoms. But it does, however, have everything to do with the
commitment to time, attention and energy that I am able to provide. Under
other circumstances, in an environment that exemplified the original
meaning of ‘asylum’ in that it provided a safe haven for relational
expression and exploration, my stance would be altered. But I cannot
provide this, just as I, as an individual, cannot offer anything other than a
temporary ‘space’ and presence to any of my clients. It would be both
foolish and irresponsible for me to pretend otherwise.
So, in my first meeting with Giles, listening to him recount his deeply
upsetting experiences, and the meanings he extracted from them, I found
myself wondering whether, in the end, I would have to inform him that I
would not be prepared to continue seeing him for the twice-weekly sessions
that he had requested and, instead, seek to assist him in finding a more
amenable therapeutic setting. Once again, it was not the disturbing
experiences in themselves that would determine my position, but, rather,
Giles’ existential relationship to them.
It seemed to me that Giles’ narrative exemplified that very dual
orientation I have summarised above. His statements suggested that he was
deeply distressed by his sudden experience of ‘seeing beyond the blur’.
This experience was perceived by him as being threatening in various ways.
First, it threatened his sense of his own existence in that he could no longer
be certain as to what he was since he had lost any sense of meaning
regarding this. Second, it threatened his sense of his essence in that he
couldn’t be certain that he existed and could only allude to ideas of
‘thoughts floating in the air or vibrating in space’. And third, it threatened
his sense of identity in that he no longer knew who he was and could only
express the felt reality that ‘this is not really me’.
 In addition, all of these threats were equally applicable to the others in
his world—with the one significant difference that, unlike Giles, all others
had remained blissfully unaware that their existence, essence and identities
were a sham.
But, somewhat paradoxically, Giles also seemed to be suggesting that
he had now become certain of his convictions, regardless of how unnerving
they may have been. In seeing beyond ‘the blur’, he had been exposed to
‘reality’ so that, now, ‘everything had changed and nothing could be the
same as it once was’. Giles had found his ‘truth’ and, having found it, may
not have been at all interested in clarifying and challenging it.
In this sense, Giles’ experience was analogous to that of an individual
who has gained a deep and abiding religious faith. This faith may be of the
sort that includes and allows the experience of doubt as a valid aspect of the
experience of belief. On the other hand, it may be the sort of faith that must
deny or erase all sense of doubt since this is perceived as a threat to the
maintenance of the devout belief. It is this difference that distinguishes the
believer who is open to alternative possibilities and is willing to allow his or
her faith to be challenged by them from the fanatical, or fundamentalist,
follower of a belief system who cannot abide blasphemies toward ‘the one,
true faith’. Giles’ newly discovered ‘meaning’ rested upon the belief that
‘everything was meaningless’. But was he open to alternative ‘meanings’?
Or were they simply unallowable?
As I attempted to stay with Giles’ description of his lived experience,
and yet keep in mind my concerns regarding the viability of our continuing
encounter, I was reminded of the plight of one of my favourite authors, the
American writer of speculative fiction, Philip K. Dick. Eight years before
his death, Dick had had an experience which would obsess him for the
remainder of his days. He labelled this event ‘the pink light experience’
since that was the colour that had bombarded his senses on the day that he
became ‘possessed’ by an alien discarnate entity whose presence, he
claimed, remained to reside within him for several years.6
This entity provided him with a great deal of information that would
prove to be both wise and foolish. For example, Dick’s entity convinced
him that he was being observed by the FBI and that the only way that he
could save himself from being imprisoned by them was to provide them
with detailed letters exposing the anti-American activities of various friends
and colleagues. Dick was certain enough in the existence of this discarnate
entity to follow its urgings and write these letters. However, he had also
remained open enough to the possibility that he could be misguided in his
beliefs by taking these letters and ‘posting’ them in his outdoor rubbish bin.
This way, he argued, if the FBI agents were truly there, they would see him
carry out this odd activity and go to investigate, whereupon they would
discover the letters. If, on the other hand, he was wrong, and his beliefs
were delusional, then no harm would have been done to his associates.7
It was this willingness to ‘test the reality of his convictions’ that led
me to suppose that, no matter what the label of disorder that might be
applied to him, nor the severity of his symptoms, Dick’s willingness to
explore and challenge his beliefs surrounding his experiences, even in the
midst of having them, would have made him suitable as a client. The
question was: how suitable was Giles?
Giles worked as an accountant and was excellent at his job. His
principal interests lay in mathematical theory and he had had several papers
published in learned journals, even though he had no formal training in
mathematics beyond that of a first degree. Giles also informed me that
while he was deeply interested in the major theoretical concerns related to
mathematics, nevertheless he refused to read up on anything that anyone
else had written in the subject areas because he believed that to do so would
disturb his own way of thinking. This stance had caused him no end of
difficulties since, knowing of his interests, friends and colleagues would
give him mathematical textbooks as gifts, or he would receive articles from
other mathematicians who had read and been impressed by his writings. In
such circumstances, Giles explained, he was forced to enact several ‘rituals
of cleansing’ that would allow him to maintain the ‘purity’ in his thinking.
The one exception to this highly rigid rule was the work of Albert
Einstein. Here, in complete contradiction to his avoidance of others’
expositions, Giles, by his own admission, immersed himself in every facet
and feature of Einstein’s mathematical equations, philosophical statements
and private life. So great was his interest in and identification with Einstein,
that Giles claimed to have arrived at Einstein’s equations on general and
specific relativity in his own way and insisted, only partly in jest, that he
deserved to be recognised as being as much a genius as Einstein had been.
Giles worked independently, and alone, passing a good part of his
weekdays sitting at his computer. His clients were very pleased with his
efforts, not least because of his uncanny memory in recalling various sub-
clauses and conditions wherein suitable claims for tax adjustments could be
made on their behalf. As such, he was in great demand and could ask for,
and received, an exceptionally good income.
Giles’current disturbed condition had not seriously impaired his work;
although, he admitted, his accountancy had lost whatever meaning (‘in an
infinite sense’) for him that it had once had. Nevertheless, he had stuck with
it, knowing that he must persevere with it, if not for his own sake, then at
least for that of his family and clients who, in not having seen beyond ‘the
blur’ still continued to store great value and meaning in their ‘materially
oriented’ lives.
Giles’ wife, June, remained his ‘closest, dearest friend’ and he
expressed his distress that he had, somehow, upset her by his behaviour. He
professed to love her ‘to the nth degree, and beyond’ and was convinced
that it had been, in part, his ability to experience such vast levels of love
that had influenced his movement beyond ‘the blur’. Giles and June had
two children—Will and Claire—whom he also loved and wished to live for
and whom he ‘trusted implicitly’. But June remained far and away the most
important person in Giles’ life. Rather that his children died than June, he
declared.
Even so, Giles was disturbed that neither June nor his children seemed
to understand or share in his insights. But then, he supposed, they had never
understood the things that concerned or mattered to him—such as his
interests in accountancy and mathematics. ‘Well, at least they’re honest
about it,’ he joked.
Sex was something else that Giles enjoyed a great deal. For him, sex
was ‘living mathematics’ in that it was full of permutations and
combinations that enthralled him. He had never been unfaithful to June, nor
had he wanted to be, although he had, at times, ‘theorised’ about sexual
activities with other women, or together with them and June, and had
masturbated over these ‘theorems’. This activity had provoked some degree
of anxiety but nothing that he saw as being substantial or as provocation to
his current disturbances—although, Giles admitted, while hospitalised he
had met a woman who seemed to understand what he was going on about,
who had also seen beyond ‘the blur’ (or so she had supposed; he could not
be quite so certain) and towards whom he had felt a strong sexual attraction.
 On reflection, however, he had decided that he was not so attracted to
her as a body, but as a being who could allow him to work out his ‘more
advanced theoretical speculations’. Still, while there had certainly been the
opportunity, he had not taken it. ‘Sometimes,’ Giles confided, ‘the scientist
needs to step back and consider the social consequences of his ideas and
refrain from enacting them for the social good.’
As our initial meeting drew toward its ending, I remained uncertain as
to whether I should offer to continue to see Giles as a client. In the end, I
decided that I could live with my doubts for a while longer and so I
proposed to him that we set out a contract whereby we would meet initially
for a series of ten sessions and then decide whether our agreement should
be extended to a more openended sequence of encounters. Giles found this
arrangement to be satisfactory and we settled upon a regular time and date
for our meetings.
Over the following couple of weeks, I gained a clearer perspective
regarding Giles’ views of himself and his relations with others.
Interestingly, many of his statements to me focused upon aspects of his
thoughts and behaviour which he himself equated with, or which he felt
expressed, his unusual, problematic and distinctive way of being.
Giles defined himself as a ‘structured daydreamer’. He enjoyed
passing long stretches of each day ‘in solitary splendour’, engaging in
internal dialogues that focused upon the mathematical exploration of ‘the
reality that exists beyond the blur’. This activity had become increasingly
important to him to the extent that he had begun to cut down his
accountancy work by not taking on new clients and by making himself less
available to his existing ones.
When I queried this decision, he explained that not only did their
interruptions disturb his thinking, but also, if he was not properly prepared
to ‘talk accountancy’, he would find himself expressing his irritation to his
callers and then go on to say things relevant to his theorising that did not
seem to make any sense to them. While he could recognise that his clients’
subsequent questions and expressed concerns regarding his health and well-
being were genuine, nevertheless he had begun to feel increasingly guarded
towards revealing his felt experience to others and had come to harbour a
suspicion that they wanted to be convinced by him that he was in some way
ill or ‘different’ so that they could sever their professional relationship and
engage the services of another accountant.
 In response to this growing concern, Giles had begun to rearrange his
daily routine so that he worked in the evenings and early morning. This
strategy, he felt, freed him in two significant ways: first, it ensured that he
was less likely to be disturbed, and, second, because he would not be fitting
in with his clients’ worktimes, they would have far less opportunity to talk
to him and, as a consequence, build up questionable impressions about his
state of health.
I wondered how his wife and family had responded to Giles’ change of
habit. My query seemed to agitate him. Bristling in response, Giles
launched into a long, and at times incoherent, explanation that suggested
that, unlike others in his life, those immediately close to him understood the
importance of his actions and had not complained.
‘Are you detecting a note of complaint from me?’ I asked.
‘I am not,’ he answered briskly.
There was an emphasis in his use of the word ‘I’ that intrigued me. ‘Is
there anyone else who detects it?’ I wondered.
Giles giggled and bounced up and down in his seat. ‘It’s not within my
province to say,’ he replied, smiling impishly.
I challenged him.‘During our first meeting, you spoke of a wise voice
that calmed you and told you things. Is it this voice that has detected a note
of complaint from me?’
Giles giggled once more, then clapped his hands enthusiastically
several times. ‘Bravo!’ he exclaimed.
‘And is the voice speaking to you now?’
‘No. For now, it has chosen to remain silent. But I engage it in
conversation whenever it is willing,’ he answered, quite suddenly sober and
restrained.
‘And it helps you in your theorising? ’I continued.
‘Very much so.’
‘But you remain cautious in revealing its existence to others.’
‘Wouldn’t you, under similar circumstances?’ Giles said scornfully.
‘If I thought it was in some way dangerous to do so,’ I answered. ‘Is
that what you think?’, I added.
‘It’s not easy for people to accept that I can gain information about
them by means that they cannot discern.’
 ‘And by “people”, do you include your wife and children?’
Giles nodded in agreement.
‘So you have to keep the existence of “the voice” hidden from them?’
‘I have to protect it.’
‘Protect it. I don’t understand.’
‘No, you wouldn’t.’
‘But I’m willing to try.’
Giles glared at me in silence for what seemed like an endless time. As
he did so, I noticed that his eyelashes had begun to flutter violently and that
his lips were pursed as if he were kissing the air. The sound they made
resembled that of a cat lapping up liquid from its bowl. Finally, bringing all
such activities to a sudden end, he sighed deeply. ‘What I can tell you is that
there is a plot to prevent us from seeing beyond “the blur”. The plot appears
to be worldwide. So everyone is a potential enemy. If it were more
generally known that I was in communication with what I have referred to
as “the voice”, both it and I would be in danger.’
‘And the danger would be?’
Giles sighed again. ‘Reality is so precious,’ he whispered.
My subsequent attempts to get him to clarify his statements having led
nowhere, I thanked Giles for trusting me enough to reveal what he had. He
accepted this and appeared to be genuinely moved by my words. ‘But what
I don’t understand, though,’ I continued, ‘is how it is that you can trust me
with this knowledge, but not your wife and family. What makes you
distrustful of them?’
In response, Giles began to cry. ‘I want to!’ he finally wailed. ‘But I’ve
been told not to!’
‘On what grounds?’
‘I don’t know! My questions are met with silence.’
‘Yet you feel you must obey all the same.’
‘I have to believe.’
‘What would happen if you didn’t?’
‘Don’t you see? The voice would leave me then.’
‘And if it did?’
‘I’d be on my own again, lost and frightened by what I’ve seen! I’d go
mad! It’s too much to bear!’
 ‘So, the voice makes it more bearable for you to deal with what you’ve
seen beyond “the blur”?’
‘Yes. It helps me to make sense of it. To find the mathematics to
explain it.’
‘And if you find the mathematics?’
‘The proof will be there! Everyone who has a mind to will know the
truth!’
‘And once they know?’
‘They’ll understand why I am as I am.’
‘They won’t view you as disturbed?’
‘Yes!’
‘As your wife and family view you at present?’
‘Only because they don’t understand!’ Giles wailed in agitation.
‘And, in order for them to understand eventually, you must continue to
behave in ways that they interpret as signs of your disturbance.’
Giles was taken aback by this last challenging comment. The paradox
contained in his stance had not occurred to him. He promised me that he
would meditate on this before our next session.
When he did reappear three days later, Giles was eager to talk.
However, he insisted that I must agree to allow him to do so without
interruption. I responded (realising that, in doing so, I was already
interrupting him) by telling him that I would try to honour his request as far
as possible, but that if I did not understand something that seemed
important to him, I felt duty-bound to clarify this with him.
‘But I don’t really care whether you understand or not!’ Giles insisted.
‘So you prefer me to be like your family and view you as disturbed.’
Giles scowled at me. ‘Your comments and questions disturb me!’ he
shouted.
I had a sudden intuition. ‘Giles,’ I said, ‘You told me once that you
couldn’t read other mathematicians’ writings because if you did these
would disturb your own thinking. And you also said that if this happened,
you had to carry out some rituals to “purify” yourself again. Are you saying
that my comments have the same effect?’
‘Yes! Yes! Yes!’Giles bellowed in a sing-song fashion. ‘If you want me
to confide in you, you must know your place. Otherwise you’re just a
detriment to my thinking.’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘I won’t interrupt you for the rest of the session, unless
you tell me that it’s all right for me to do so.’
The remainder of our meeting passed by with me making little sense of
Giles’ words. He uttered long series of algebraic equations and formulae
that could have been total gibberish for all that I remembered of the
mathematics I had been taught in university physics and chemistry.
I found myself speculating that Giles’ stance suggested his mistrust of
me (and, more generally, possibly of all others in his world). His sense of
disturbance by those challenges that sought to clarify seemed to express
both his desire to confide in me (and others) and a simultaneous fear of the
imagined consequences that the enactment of this desire would provoke.
There was something “magical” in his thinking—a magic that, as he had
told me himself, was designed to protect. But to protect what? And was all
this frenzied recounting of mathematical formulae a form of magical
incantation?
What I did manage to note and retain was Giles’ constant hearkening
back to Einstein. If he had already been recognised and lauded as much as
Einstein had been, Giles was convinced that his discovery of what lies
‘beyond the blur’ would have been treated as a major scientific
breakthrough rather than handled as it had been. Why didn’t people try to
accept the worth of his ideas, he wanted to know. And, eerily echoing my
own thoughts, Giles wondered: what are they trying to protect?
His obsession with Einstein became increasingly apparent over the
following week. His hair, already long yet carefully groomed when he had
first come to see me, now seemed much more dishevelled, wilder in
appearance. In addition, Giles had begun to grow a somewhat ungainly
moustache, and his ‘accountant’s uniform’ of three-piece suit and tie had
been replaced by far more casual baggy brown corduroys, an even baggier
sweater, and track shoes. The identification seemed obvious. But to what
purpose?
Giles had revealed that he believed there to be a hidden agenda to
suppress the truth about reality from more general awareness. Had he
decided that only a ‘new’ Einstein would have the authority to destroy this
conspiracy without threatening ‘the voice of truth?’ And, if this had been
his decision, was his dramatic change in appearance yet another form of
‘magical ritual’ designed to turn him into the quite literally ‘living
embodiment’ of Einstein?
For reasons that I could not discern, Giles’ demeanour towards me was
markedly different this time. He began to speak openly of his dialogues
with ‘the voice’. He explained to me that ‘the voice’spoke to him in an ‘if
… then’ fashion, as if every statement was a theorem. Giles proposed that
this specific means of communication served as a kind of auditory
blackboard upon which he could compose his ideas. It was his means of
working through his speculations, ‘the voice’ acting as stimulus to his
thoughts by presenting an untested theorem which he then attempted to
disprove.
As he revealed this to me, I noticed a giddiness in Giles that seemed
new. I commented upon it. ‘You seem more lighthearted to me today,
Giles,’ I said. ‘Do you agree with my observation?’
‘No,’ he answered firmly. Then added: ‘If anything, I’m quite
disgusted with myself.’
‘How so?’
Before answering me, Giles muttered something to himself that I was
unable to hear, then, as was his habit when considering a reply, fluttered his
eyes several times in rapid succession. ‘I’ve decided that I am becoming as
fanatical as the priests I railed against as a young man,’ he finally stated in
wrathful fashion. ‘They were so fucking self-assured, so absolutely certain
of the truth of their views, so unwilling to hear alternatives.’
‘And how are you different?’ I sought to clarify.
‘Because I know that what I experienced is true. Because I wasn’t
looking for it, or trying to prove a point, I was just living out an ordinary
life.’
‘I’m surprised to hear you speak of your life, even before your
experience, as being “ordinary”,’ I answered. ‘My impression was that you
had seen yourself to be an ‘unordinary being’ all along.’
‘You mean that perhaps I was hoping for something amazing to happen
to me so that I could be convinced that my life really had been special all
along?’
‘Were you?’
‘I don’t know. It’s possible …’
 Aha! I thought. Here was some indication that Giles was prepared to
entertain doubts in his self-understanding. I had no idea how far this attitude
would extend, whether he had the trust and courage to be prepared to
consider his ‘post-blur reality’ in the same fashion. But the possibility
existed.
If he could explore his ‘magic’, I was equally prepared to attempt mine
in that I would seek to assume his way of being as far as was possible for
me and, in that attempt, I might begin to make ‘understandable’ that which
currently appeared to be ‘un-understandable’. But, in order to allow this to
have the remotest chance of occurring, I needed to be prepared to take steps
in the opposite direction: I needed to be willing to enter the terrain of un-
knowing.
Such an attitude required me to entertain the possibility that Giles’
viewpoint was both understandable and meaningful. That it was ‘true’
insofar as it expressed his lived truth. And that this truth was believed in by
him and, because it was, it had its structure, its basis in his experience, and
its consequences which demanded their expression. I would endeavour to
explore his way of being as openly and as non-judgementally as I could so
that I might reflect back my descriptive observations and clarificatory
challenges in a manner that revealed an underlying respect toward his
beliefs and values and indicated that I understood them accurately.
However, unknown to me, another, more powerful, form of ‘magic’
had already begun to influence events to such an extent that whatever I
might have had to offer was already redundant.
A few minutes following our initial exchange, Giles admitted that,
perhaps, I had been correct earlier in assessing him as ‘giddy’. With some
embarrassment, he confessed that since we’d last met, he’d been convinced
by his wife to keep the appointment she had made with his psychiatrist.
And more, once there, he had been urged to cease coming to see me since
our meetings were perceived to be aggravating, rather than diminishing his
disturbance. He was implored by both the psychiatrist and his wife to begin
a treatment of anti-psychotic drugs since, according to his doctor, his
disturbances were of the kind that had been shown to respond positively to
medication. He had agreed, if only to ‘prove’ to his wife how much he
loved her and how he hated to be a source of concern to her.
 My irritation with his psychiatrist was obvious to Giles, yet he
remained firm in his conviction that his decision was the right one. He
expressed his regret that we would have to stop meeting and offered to pay
for the remainder of his sessions. And, with that, we said our goodbyes to
one another.
Over the following weeks, I found myself spending the time during
which Giles and I would have met rereading two books that had impressed
me with their lucid speculations on the question of reality: Ernest Becker’s
The Denial of Death,8 and John F. Schumaker’s Wings of Illusion.9
Becker’s passionate argument presents us with the possibility that if
we were to fully apprehend our human condition we would be driven to
states of disorder that are best described as ‘insane’. According to Becker,
our unique status among all other living beings is the result of an
evolutionary development that has allowed our species to become self-
aware. But such awareness, Becker insists, extracts a heavy price in that,
with this ability, has come the knowledge of our life’s inevitable movement
toward death. It is this unbearable awareness that forces upon us the
necessity to create false beliefs and lies about reality.
And if, for some reason, we should come to see behind the veil of our
distorted beliefs, if we were to face nature’s reality head-on, the only
normal emotional response would be one of abject terror.
What are we to make of a creation in which the routine activity is for organisms to be tearing
others apart with teeth of all types—biting, grinding flesh, plant stalks, bones between molars,
pushing the pulp greedily down the gullet with delight … and then excreting with foul stench
and gases the residue. Everyone reaching out to incorporate others who are edible to him …
not to mention the daily dismemberment and slaughter in ‘natural’ disasters … The soberest
conclusion … is that the planet is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer.10

Considering reality in this light, Becker concludes that what we label as

mental disorders are not the misinterpretation of reality but, rather, the
failure to misinterpret reality. ‘[T]here is no one more logical than the
lunatic.’11
While remaining critical of some of his more polemical tendencies, the
clinical psychologist, John F. Schumaker, expresses his broad agreement
with Becker’s conclusions. His summation, derived from a wide range of
highly apt examples taken not only from current psychological and medical
research, but also from philosophy, poetry and literature, argues the view
that ‘human kind cannot bear very much reality’.12
 In Thornton Wilder’s The Eighth Day, for instance, the main character,
another who has difficulty in defending himself from ‘too much reality’ is
provided with ‘a chilling description of the terrifying nothingness of life’:13
You are having the dream of universal nothingness. You walk down, down, into valleys of
nothing, of chalk. You stare into pits where all is cold. You wake up cold. You think you will
never be warm again. And there is nothing—and this nothing laughs, like teeth striking
together. You open the door of a cupboard, of a room, and there is nothing there but this
laughing. The floor is not a floor. The walls are not walls. You wake up and you cannot stop
trembling. Life has no sense. Life is an idiot laughing.14

Schumaker himself concludes:

From a global perspective, we can see that we are able to live with—or without— almost
anything. We can adjust to and accommodate almost any physical, social, or cultural
conditions. In that sense, we are almost indefinitely malleable. The only exception is that we
do not seem to be able to live without some belief in something, someone, or some force that
simplifies and/or supersedes the reality of the human situation. Less than one percent of
people, regardless of culture, have no paranormal beliefs at all. The same in variance cannot
be seen in any other form of human behavior.15

This view parallels that of Eugene Kennedy who has argued that the human
being is ‘a believing phenomenon who must believe in order to live at all.’16
Without beliefs, Kennedy suggests, ‘we fall victim to personality
disintegration and a preponderance of negative repercussions to our
psychological well-being.’17
When these conclusions are considered in the light of the specific
issues raised by mental disorders they present us with the challenging
conclusion that mental health and ‘normal’ functioning are both reliant
upon some degree of psychic disturbance. The psychoanalyst Otto Rank,
for instance, developed an approach to mental health that was ‘reliant on a
rejection of reality … that true normality is a matter of achieving an ideal
illusion. In other words, sanity depends on achieving and maintaining a
workable form of insanity in the form of illusion.’18 Rank’s argument, stated
as succinctly as possible, suggests that the ‘essence of normality is the
refusal of reality.’19
Finally, Schumaker, along with Becker, Rank and many others, posits
that those whom we label as mentally disturbed are not so because their
mental disorders distinguish them in a fundamental fashion from those
whose mental lives are balanced and ordered. Instead, he argues, the
distinction lies at the level of the inherent ‘clumsiness’ in their adopted
beliefs insofar as these provide a means to distort reality that is far less
effective than ‘normal cultural pathology’.20 In this sense, those symptoms
that the ‘mentally healthy’ define and describe as examples of mental
disturbance represent unsuccessful deviations from what might be labelled
as ‘normal pathology’.
As I considered all these issues from the perspective of my initial
attempts to understand Giles’ disturbance, it occurred to me that his
‘madness’ lay in his sudden loss of ability to transform chaos into some sort
of acceptable, or shareable, order. Instead, the ‘meaning’ that he had
discerned lay in his having seen through ‘the blur’, and, in doing so,
discovering ‘meaninglessness’. As Giles himself had told me, his initial
reaction to this discovery was one of fear: ‘it was overwhelming in its
intensity and awfulness’. In response to this, having to deal with what he’d
been made aware of, Giles sought to protect himself, to make himself
healthier, by ‘erasing’ himself. This wasn’t happening to him, he argued; he
wasn’t anything, in fact.
Yet even he, confused and alarmed as he was, couldn’t fail to see that
this strategy was insufficient. If he was nothing, he could not make sense of
the thoughts and feelings that were his; he could not cease being self-aware.
And so, a second strategy emerged: ‘the voice’ began to make its presence
felt. It soothed him, believed in him, guided him. Now Giles’ beliefs were a
little less ‘clumsy’. In some ways, he returned to ‘being normal’. And yet,
he couldn’t rid himself of the knowledge that he had, that ‘the voice’
continued to remind him of, about what lay beyond ‘the blur’. Indeed, ‘the
voice’ had only made itself available to his awareness because of what he’d
experienced.
If Giles had made an error, it was not necessarily in his harbouring
‘mad’ thoughts—rather, his mistake lay in thinking that these thoughts were
so important that they should be revealed to the world. His first attempts
were too extreme, too raw. But if they could be presented via mathematical
theorems, then they might well be accepted. Indeed, he might well be
accepted.
I thought again of Philip K. Dick and was reminded of further
similarities. Like Giles, Dick had made an attempt to transmute his
experiences into a set of theorems—though in Dick’s case they were
philosophical rather than mathematical. Dick spent a good deal of his
waking life writing what he referred to as his ‘Exegesis’. What has been
published of its several million words contains much of worth as well as a
great deal that seems impenetrable to even the most dedicated ‘seeker of
truth’.21 The Exegesis provided Dick with some lasting sense of
achievement; it filled him with a kind of sceptical certainty that brought
some relief to him during his final years of life.
Giles, too, had appeared to be striving toward a similar sort of balance.
Although it was suffering to some extent, his job was still something that he
recognised had to be maintained, if only as an expression of his abiding
love for his wife and family. He had almost managed to persuade them that
he was getting back to normal. But he became too deeply enmeshed in
trying to prove his experience-derived theorems. He had decided that the
world would only listen to and respect him when his experiences were
‘proven’ in the form of mathematical equations.
Giles wanted to convince the world that he was like Einstein—a genius
in the guise of an Everyman. But Einstein, too, would have remained a
nobody, would have been treated as a crank, if he had just begun to shout
‘E=mc2’. He needed to provide his thesis with the undeniable logic of
mathematics. Perhaps this was what was on Giles’ mind as he immersed
himself in a similar enterprise. And, as well, perhaps, Giles had become
convinced that his initial error lay in announcing his discovery before he
had had the right, and the mathematical authority, to convey it to the world
in a fashion that would allow it to be received with alacrity rather than be
met with the scorn and rejection and concerns as to his state of mind with
which he had had to deal.
Giles was torn between opposing ‘voices’—those within that soothed
and believed in him, that aided and spurred him on, and those from without
that labelled him ‘paranoid schizophrenic’. And so, too, there had also been
my voice, which he may well have perceived as belonging in part to both
camps and, hence, not entirely trustworthy.
Here was another parallel with Philip K. Dick. For Dick also had both
sets of voices for a while, until the ‘inner’ one left him, and many of the
‘outer’ voices gave up on him, found him to be too mad to deal with any
longer. And, in consequence, bereft and empty, he had attempted suicide.22
Yet, Dick had survived, went on to write what many consider to be his most
brilliant novels 23—all of which sought to explore and convey his ‘pink light
experience’ and the meaning he had gained from it.
 Could the same be expected of Giles? I hoped so; but, here, at last, was
a possible crucial difference in the lives of these two men. Dick, at least,
had already found some degree of respect and notoriety before he had had
his illuminating experience. Giles was still unknown. He had no steadfast
followers who, however disturbed, might remain prepared to at least
consider his beliefs with some degree of respect.
The disordered experience of the ‘ordinary’ being is anything but
splendid and ecstatic. It is a pain-filled and terrifying ordeal. Unlike those
who search for such experiences in order to ‘see more clearly’, most
mentally disturbed people would do anything to be able to avoid, or erase,
the knowledge they have gained. For the great majority there is no sense of
achievement or fulfilment in their ‘madness’. Quite the opposite, in fact.
While the diagnostic symptoms of the visionary and the poet may be
indistinguishable from those of the ‘insane’, a gulf exists between their
subjective experiences. For while the former can approach such novel ways
of being from a standpoint that assumes a ‘sound’, if flexible, ‘core of
being’, a fundamentally secure sense of ‘self ’ that can respond to the
unusual stimuli being presented to it, the latter typically have, at best, a far
more tenuous and unstable self-construct that is likely to be stretched to a
point of dissolution when challenged.
As I thought about him, I wondered whether Giles was likely to have
been a member of this second group of beings. How strong had been his
sense of existence, essence and identity prior to the events that had so
severely distressed each of these existential components? I had no real basis
for deriving any adequate conclusion, as I had only barely managed to gain
some preliminary sense of his way of being. And yet, I speculated, what if
his identification with Einstein wasn’t at the relatively superficial level at
which each of us ‘identifies’ with another, but rather at that level whereby
Giles was becoming Einstein in that he was attempting to find his shape and
construct through him. If Einstein was a mask that he could wear, then at
least the mask had substance, was something through which his experience
of being could be embodied, made real.
Perhaps the drugs he was being given would help Giles to regain some
of that ease and security that had been his before he’d lifted the veil.
Sometimes, drugs can provide this relief. On the other hand, they are almost
as likely to make things worse …
 Finishing my tale, I turn to gaze out of my window. I blink. The world
seems suddenly to evaporate with regard to its blurred reality. Perhaps Giles
had truly seen beyond ‘the blur’. I think of him, and conjure up an image of
Giles scribbling away in his notebooks, developing that theorem that will
emerge some day to astound us all. I smile at the thought. And then I blink
again. And I am back, tolerably safe and secure, within this blurred reality.

1. Fewtrell, D. & O’Connor, K. (1995) Clinical Phenomenology and Cognitive Psychology. London: Routledge. (Quote taken from page 13.)
2. Jaspers, K. (ed) (1963) General Psychopathology (J. Hoenig & W. Hamilton, trans). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
3. See Laing, R.D. (1960) The Divided Self. London: Tavistock Publications.
Laing, R.D. (1970) The Politics of Experience and the Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Laing, R.D. (1971) Self and Others. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
4. Laing, R.D. & Esterson, A. (1964) Sanity, Madness and the Family. London: Tavistock.
5. Laing, R.D. & Cooper, D. (1971) Reason and Violence. London: Tavistock.
6. Rickman, G. (1985) Philip K. Dick: The last testament. Long Beach, California: Fragments West/The Valentine Press. Sutin, L. (1989) Divine Invasions: A life of Philip K. Dick.
New York: Harmony Books.
7. This account was first given by Greg Rickman in a talk delivered at the Philip K. Dick Celebration organised by Epping Forest College, Loughton, Essex on 19/20 October, 1991.
8. Becker, E. (1973) The Denial of Death. New York: Free Press.
9. Schumaker, J.F. (1990) Wings of Illusion. Cambridge: Polity Press.
10. See Becker, ibid. p. 283.
11. Ibid. p. 201.
12. Eliot, T.S. (1969) The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. The line quoted is from Four Quartets (‘Burnt Norton’) p. 172.
13. See Becker, ibid. p. 283.
14. Wilder, T. (1967) The Eighth Day. New York: Harper & Row, p. 134.
15. See Schumaker, J.F (1990) Wings of Illusion. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 7.
16. Kennedy, E. (1977) Believing. New York: Garden City, p. 29.
17. See Schumaker J.F. (1990) Wings of Illusion. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 7.
18. Ibid., p. 31.
19. Rank, O. (1945) Will Therapy. New York: Knopf, p. 195.
20. See Schumaker, J.F. (1990) Wings of Illusion. Cambridge: Polity Press, p. 110.
21. Dick, P.K. (1991) In Pursuit of VALIS: Selections from the exegesis, (L. Sutin, ed). Novato, California: Underwood-Miller.
22. See Sutin, L. (1989) Divine Invasions: A life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Harmony Books.
23. Interested readers may find the following Philip K. Dick novels to be of particular merit: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974); A Scanner Darkly (1977); VALIS (1981); The
Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).
 8
Her Last Breath

Many of us go through life as though we were immortal. We make plans for

meetings and assignations, holidays and private celebrations, weeks,
months, even years into the future. Already, for instance, I, along with
countless others, have begun to make tentative decisions with friends as to
how and where we shall welcome in the new millennium.
And then, events occur that remind us of how fragile life truly is, and
how unpredictable is our future. We might hear or read of a disaster wherein
hundreds or thousands of ordinary lives are suddenly extinguished. Or we
might pick up the daily paper to read that someone we knew, or knew of,
has died in an unexpected accident. Or the telephone might ring in the early
morning hours, filling us with an immediate dread that someone close to us
has died. In such moments, we are likely to confront the unavoidable
insecurities of our own lives and then, shuddering at the thought, make
vows to reassess our life’s direction or priorities, or, just as likely, seek to
find the means to suppress such forbidding reflections.
And, sometimes as well, we might find ourselves caught up in our own
life’s unforeseen dramas. About two years ago, for instance, as a result of
an overly active attempt to spring-clean my conservatory, I inhaled such a
great deal of dirt and dust that, some hours later, I found it to be
increasingly difficult to breathe. Rushed off to hospital, I was fitted with a
respirator in order to assist my breathing. However, some hours later, it was
found that I had not responded sufficiently well to this, and, subsequently,
my breathing had to be maintained through the oxygen provided by a
ventilator. Lying there, watching various bits of electronic machinery
monitor my blood pressure, my heart rate, and the oxygen generation in my
blood, I found myself considering the possibility of my dying more
seriously than I had ever done before. Thankfully, I responded well to the
treatment; less than twenty-four hours later, I was recovering comfortably in
my own bed.
For a few weeks after that event, still recuperating, unsure as to
whether I’d have a relapse, I found myself reacting with overwhelming
emotions to the simplest of life’s pleasures. Just to sit drinking cups of tea,
or watching television beside my wife, or making love with her, or being
greeted by one of our cats, or stopping to have a chat with a neighbour or
the newsagent, seemed intensely magical and meaningful experiences to
savour.
And then more time passed, and the emotive memories of the
experience declined in their intensity, and that undeniable sense of being
grateful and indebted to life dissipated to the extent that I could return, quite
happily, to reconsidering this gift from a far more mundane standpoint.
Until the next instance of terrifying enlightenment.
While I cannot honestly state that I am grateful for my experiences of
being ill, I do value them. Not least because, as far as my work as a
therapist is concerned, they allow me some degree of experiential insight
into the fears and concerns of those among my clients who must find the
means of living with their own, or their loved ones’, afflictions.
Although we tend to speak of illness in terms of its symptoms and
effects upon our body, on reflection, our experience of ‘being ill’ is not
restricted to the delineation of the somatic constituents of the illness, but,
more accurately, it expresses a relationship between these constituents and
the person who judges their effects upon his or her possibilities of being.
While such judgements often lead to conclusions of restriction or limitation
in one’s existential possibilities, at times the effects of illness, however
serious or terminal, can be experienced, as the example from my own life
has suggested, as deeply liberating to the extent that one feels ‘more alive’
than before the onset of the disease.
Existential-phenomenological theory avoids imposing a distinction, or
separateness, between psyche and soma, mind and body. In similar fashion,
it shirks from treating somatic illness and our experience of being ill from
an ‘isolationist’ perspective. It argues not only that the investigation of an
individual’s illness can reveal important aspects of the various relations that
the individual who is ill maintains towards his or her body, his or her
selfconstruct, and his or her way of being with others, but that such an
inquiry can also disclose a society’s fixed, or sedimented, relational stances
both toward the individual who is ill, and to that society’s sedimented
beliefs about itself with regard to what it perceives as illness and how it
responds to, or treats, those who are ill.
The philosopher, Gabriel Marcel, has suggested that the body exists in
a ‘borderline zone’ between being and ‘having’. I cannot say that my body
is me, nor can I say that it is not me—‘I both am and have a body’.1 In
related fashion, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, one of the foremost exponents of
phenomenological philosophy and psychology, writes of our awareness of
our existence as being an ‘incarnational consciousness’, in that our body is
the means by which we enact our thoughts, aspirations and desires
regarding our existence. For Merleau-Ponty, the body is not a ‘thing’ among
other ‘things’ with which consciousness is somehow associated, but rather
it is the configuration through which our existential projects are realised in
that the ideal becomes action through the body.2
Our bodies express our unique dialogue with the world; they reflect
our way of projecting towards the world and our responses to the world’s
projecting of itself towards us. However, it is also apparent that our
experience of this unique dialogue with the world contains numerous
relational fears and anxieties regarding our beliefs and assumptions about
who and how we are allowed/not allowed to be (or must/must not be) as far
as the world is concerned. And these anxieties, in turn, can be, and often
are, expressed in our divided or restricted relations with our bodies.
So, when our bodies become ‘ill’ or ‘diseased’, the resulting felt
anxieties are not solely focused upon our concerns for our physical well-
being, they also express our anxieties as to our failings as human beings.
Just as, in similar fashion, others’ responses to us as sick or decaying beings
provokes their anxieties about their own weaknesses and limitations as
human beings in relation with others.
The experience of ‘being ill’challenges our sedimented beliefs about
who we are, about who the world requires us to be, and about the world’s
response to our being.
I cannot imagine a clearer therapeutic example of the accuracy of this
conclusion than my brief encounter with Elizabeth. As I began to write
about it, initially adopting the past tense as with all the other ‘tales’ in this
book, I began to feel uneasy with this strategy. And so, instead, I’ve chosen
to relate this final account in the present tense, as near to its impressionistic
lived reality as I can muster. I hope that this attempt on my part to convey
the poignancy of our meeting, and its lasting presence in my life, will
succeed at least to some degree.
Elizabeth has decided to come to therapy because she is dying of lung
cancer. The illness had been diagnosed a couple of weeks earlier as being
incurable. Somewhat impassively, she informs me that she has been told
that she has only anywhere between three and twelve months left to live.
Her GP, who conveyed this news to her, also recommended that ‘she might
want to talk things over with a therapist or counsellor’. For no obvious
reasons that she can imagine, fully aware that ‘no amount of talking is
going to allow a miracle to happen’, she has, nevertheless, agreed to follow
this suggestion. Via a series of bureaucratic manoeuvres and coincidences,
she has found me.
Elizabeth is thirty-two years old—supposedly, in the prime of her life.
She had been an excellent and hard-working student, obtaining a degree in
environmental studies. As a new graduate, she had applied for, and been
awarded, an Enterprise Grant with which she has set up a small business
that provides a ‘plant hire and care’ service for various companies and
corporations in London’s Docklands. The business has thrived and provides
Elizabeth with a great deal of personal and professional satisfaction, in that
not only does it allow her to be her own boss, it also offers her the
opportunity to express and develop her affinity towards the growth and
nurturing of plants.
As she speaks of this, her drawn, somewhat gaunt, rigidly angular
facial appearance blooms into sudden and obvious life. It is not surprising
for me to hear her express her relations with her plants as being ‘loving’
and ‘nearmaternal’.
Although Elizabeth has been in a romantic relationship with her
partner, Dave, for seven years, she tells me that it still feels wonderfully
new and satisfying. ‘It’s as if we’re still honeymooners,’ she confesses,
blushing to reveal such intimacies to a near-stranger. ‘After all this time, we
still can’t keep our hands off each other,’ she adds.
She and Dave had agreed to put off having children until they had
saved enough money for Elizabeth to retire and refocus her attention upon
the several offspring they had once planned. As she reveals their simple
hopes and plans to me, cursed with the knowledge that they stand no chance
of being fulfilled, Elizabeth’s facial features regain their rigidity, as though,
having become the business woman once again, she has deemed emotions
to be too unstable a currency.
As our first meeting proceeds, Elizabeth divulges to me that her initial
reaction to the news of her illness had been one of shock and anger. She
couldn’t believe that something like this could happen to her. The medical
diagnosis couldn’t have been correct. There must have been some mix-up
somewhere. By her own admission still not quite believing, she insists that I
be aware that she has always cared for her body, has not abused it with
cigarettes and has been abstemious with alcohol. Up until the moment of
her doctor’s revelation, she had been a perfect specimen of health. She
exercises at a club three times per week, swims for twenty minutes almost
every day, sleeps well, makes sure that she and Dave go out regularly for
long walks in the countryside. Even their holidays are active, spent cycling
around the Continent, year by year seeing more of Europe. Another broken
promise now.
‘I don’t deserve this!’ Elizabeth suddenly cries. ‘There are so many
people in the world who’ve wasted their lives, or who’ve hurt others and
themselves through their sick lifestyles and sick relationships. They deserve
this much more than I do! What have I done that I need to be punished in
this way?’
Elizabeth explains that she had had strong religious beliefs in her
youth, and had been a practising Roman Catholic. As she grew older,
however, she began to experience and express doubts and concerns about
various aspects of her religion, particularly the Church’s stance on birth-
control and on female priests. Nevertheless, until recent events, she had
remained a believer in a deity and felt that her spiritual interests and
orientations continued to be expressed through her regard for, and
appreciation of, life, her pleasure and fascination with plants, her love of
nature—all of which, she felt, allowed her a direct contact with her God,
rather than the indirect one she had had when practising within an organised
religion.
The diagnosis has provoked two equally powerful, yet contradictory,
responses regarding her faith. On the one hand, Elizabeth now claims that
she has become an atheist as she cannot see how a just and merciful God
could allow this to happen to her. ‘If there is a God, then he must be
uninterested and uncaring,’ she argues. ‘I don’t want anything to do with
him. I won’t even believe in him. Why should I?’ On the other hand, she
also wonders whether her illness is a punishment for leaving the Church, for
having had the arrogance to suppose that she could expect a unique and
self-centred relationship with God. A few days ago, she spoke to a priest
who hinted as to his agreement with her latter conclusion, and this has
sustained the persistent thought that she is, in spite of her views, being
condemned to an early death because of her vanity.
‘But was this so terrible?’ she asks. ‘Surely, God could punish people
who have done far more terrible things than I have?’
As if she does not have enough to contend with, and in spite of the
harmonious picture she had painted earlier of her and Dave’s relationship,
Elizabeth’s illness has provoked a significant crisis between them. When
she told Dave of the news, Elizabeth explains, he reacted badly to it. At
least as badly as she had when the prognosis had first been conveyed to her;
possibly even worse. Indeed, Dave was so distraught by the disclosure that
he threatened to kill himself when she died. Guilt-racked by this possibility
and unable to bear the burden of responsibility for Dave’s undeserved and
premature death as well as her own, Elizabeth pleaded with him to promise
her that he would retract this vow, if not for his own sake then at least as a
final gift to her.
That she has managed to convince him to change his mind has brought
her some degree of relief; however, she has also been deeply shaken by
Dave’s inability to help and care for her when she most needs his attention.
As Elizabeth begins to explore and express more of the powerful
emotions that have surfaced together with her account, she suddenly wails
that she is bitter and hurt that so much of her remaining energy and strength
have had to be directed towards her attempts to nurse Dave back to health
when, by rights, it is she who requires all of his affection and devotion.
Nevertheless, almost immediately upon voicing this, Elizabeth shrugs her
shoulders and announces that in spite of this powerful sense of betrayal, she
is also feeling empty and detached from ‘all this gnashing of teeth’ to the
extent that she sees herself as ‘going through the motions’. What does it
matter to her whether or not Dave kills himself ? She will be dead by then,
anyway. She will just be rotting flesh and bones. Beyond emotions, beyond
pain and remorse.
 And, somehow, this conclusion, too, provokes a renewed anguish.
Elizabeth despairs that she has so little time, that she had all these plans that
she now knows will never be fulfilled. She cries for the children and
grandchildren she will not have, for the friends who will grow old without
her, for not being able to be alive to celebrate the start of the new
millennium, for the books she has not read, the films she will not see, the
places she will not visit. She cries over her parents. ‘Parents shouldn’t have
to be present at their children’s funeral!’ she laments.
Most of all, Elizabeth asserts that she has lost all meaning. ‘What is the
point of it all? Why can’t I just die right away, today, if I’m going to die so
soon?’ She has contemplated taking her own life, but fears she is a coward.
And yet, so what? Once again: what will it matter?
Finally, she turns her attention to her current situation. She stares at me
somewhat icily, as if she has just now become aware of my presence. What
is she doing, coming to see me? What does she think she is accomplishing?
What can I possibly have to offer her that is the least bit worthwhile? I
cannot make miracles happen. I cannot cure her. It all seems so pointless.
In reply, I make no attempt to provide her with answers, nor to
dissuade her from her views. I offer no alternatives to the experience that is
hers in this moment. I refrain from providing her with any hint of hope that
I can perform curative wonders. Instead, I offer what I can: that I will seek
to attend to her experience as she recounts it, that I will strive to remain
open enough so that I may gain some foothold into her world-view, even
though I recognise how painful this is, not only for her, but for me as well.
I notice my face reflected in her eyes and I wonder, Why? Why this
woman? As I ask this, I register that I respond immediately with the
statement: There is no ‘why’ here that can be answered. It is this woman
because it is this woman.
And as I hear this message, I become aware of how it cocoons me
from Elizabeth, how it takes me away from her world that has lost all
meaning and places me in my safer, private realm where meaning, however
irksome and incomplete, still exists. Fine, I say, but consider what it might
be like to not even have that sliver of security, for that is where Elizabeth is.
I attempt to unknow, to experience the sudden loss of meaning, to be in that
way of being that struggles to regain what is no longer, to confront the
moment when one realises that all that remains as certain is the fact that one
will die. And I ask myself again: what would it be like to be Elizabeth in
this situation?
With this question in mind, I gain some insight as to what I might be
entitled to request of Elizabeth. And so, I ask her what she has been doing
between the time she nursed Dave out of his despair and her journey to my
office at her GP’s surgery.
The query surprises Elizabeth. On reflection, she remarks that not
much has altered in her day-to-day living. She continues to do the things
she has always done. She goes to work, exercises, tends to her garden,
spends time with friends, makes love with Dave. On the surface, she
concludes, nothing has changed.
‘Am I in denial?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘Am I acting as though it will just go
away? That I’ll wake up and find that this has been just another nightmare?’
‘Are you?’ I ask back.
Elizabeth considers this proposition seriously. She shakes her head.
‘No,’ she answers. ‘No, the thought that I’m dying is always there. I don’t
pretend otherwise. I just don’t know what else to do.’
‘What else is there for you to do?’ I challenge her.
‘I don’t know. Dave asked me how come I don’t just start indulging
myself. What will it matter? I could start to smoke, to take drugs, to over-
eat. All those things that I’ve denied myself because of not wanting to do
harm to my body. I don’t even have to keep on taking the pill every
evening. I could travel, just give up my job, collect as much cash as I can
and just travel until I drop dead.’
‘Yes, you could do all of these things,’ I reflect. ‘But you don’t.’
Elizabeth laughs for the first time since we’ve met. ‘You know, in spite
of the fact that my body has betrayed me in such a total fashion, I still don’t
feel able to betray it. I don’t want to harm it. It’s silly, I know.’
‘How is it silly?’
Elizabeth gazes at me, intrigued and exasperated by my prodding. She
blinks several times in quick succession, agrees to humour me. ‘When I
die,’ she states, ‘I want others to say that I took care of myself. Isn’t that
absurd?’
‘And if you didn’t?’ I say. ‘If you stopped taking care of your body
and the others recognised this. Then what?’
‘I couldn’t stand it. I’d be betraying my own principles.’
 ‘And to live up to your principles, even at the point of your dying, is of
vital importance to you.’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose it is.’
‘Even if, as you said earlier, it’s all meaningless.’
My comment shakes her. Explaining this, she tells me that it has
startled her that in spite of what she tells herself about there not being any
meaning, she continues to act as if there is, that this seemingly ‘meaningless
meaning’ remains important to her, continues to guide her, determines what
remains of her life’s possibilities.
Listening carefully to her words, I wonder whether this could be a
statement of strength. Certainly, it might be interpreted as such; many
would judge it in this fashion. But I remain cautious in jumping to this
conclusion. I don’t know whether Elizabeth experiences this principle as
something which she has chosen or which has imposed itself upon her. The
difference between ‘I can’ and ‘I must’ seems crucial here since while the
former permits openness towards one’s experience and forgiveness for the
imperfect consequences that emerge, the latter imposes a stance that rejects
all options save the one deemed ‘correct’ or ‘permissible’ and punishes
anything less than perfection.
Where does Elizabeth sit with this? Does she even contemplate these
matters? I am sitting across from her, listening and not listening. What I
mainly hear are my own views which, swayed as they are by those whose
wisdom has influenced my life, lead me to contemplate whether Elizabeth
would be willing to consider the degree of freedom and choice that remains
to her even now, at the precipice she has reached.
My idle speculations suddenly cease with the realisation that Elizabeth
has been speaking and I have not heard a word that she’s said. In moments
like this, as my own personal means of refocusing my attention back toward
my client, I find myself reciting what I jokingly refer to as my mantra,
which I have borrowed from a book by R.D. Laing: ‘If I could turn you on,
if I could drive you out of your wretched mind, if I could tell you I would
let you know.’3
The words remind me that I have nothing to tell Elizabeth. That she
has everything to tell herself. And me. I remind myself that I have no magic
available with which to make her better. I offer Elizabeth a silent apology
for my inattentiveness. I want to listen to her now. Will my desire be
sufficient to allow her to listen to herself ? Time will tell. Perhaps.
As Elizabeth’s therapy continues over the next four weeks, a number
of important thematic concerns and issues emerge and are explored. The
first of these focuses upon Elizabeth’s relationship to her body.
Elizabeth has lived under the self-imposed dictum that as long as she
does the right things to her body, her body, in turn, will ‘do right by her’.
This sedimented assumption has been challenged to its core with the onset
of her illness and the subsequent prognosis of her imminent death. Her
initial response to this extreme refutation of her belief is her experience of
betrayal. ‘This event just should not have happened!’ she insists. And yet, it
has.
While she cannot fully deny this ‘impossible outcome’, nevertheless,
Elizabeth goes on to experience a partial dissociation from her body. ‘The
“sick” part of this body is not me!’ she proclaims. Instead, her words add up
to the view that ‘it’ has become ill not by her doing but by that of others—
her parents, genes, the environment, early childhood illnesses, all manner of
internal or external ‘alien invaders’. And if those ‘invaded’ bits of body
could be fully separated from her, then the sedimented belief she wishes to
uphold will be proved true after all.
Elizabeth reveals that her relationship to her body is conditional. She
will ‘own’ it, respect and value it so long as it fulfils its part of the bargain.
Which is to say: so long as it will be ‘good’. But still, I point out, this
attitude is not quite true. For has not Elizabeth stated that, in spite of
everything, she wants to continue to maintain her fixed relationship towards
even that ‘bad’ part of her body if only so that others will say that she took
care of herself ?
As this last statement is one that Elizabeth made explicitly during our
first session, I, in turn, am entitled to reflect it back to her as an initial focal
point to our attempts to clarify and make more explicit what she has implied
about her stance towards her relations with others, or with the world in
general.
Elizabeth learned at an early age that in order for her to obtain love
and respect from others, she had to be ‘good’. This being ‘good’ is expected
of her at all times—just as she expects others to be ‘good’ towards her so
long as she is ‘good’ towards them. As she voices this second sedimented
assumption, Elizabeth realises that it is the direct extension of her previous
and equivalent assertion that if she is ‘good’ to her body, then her body is
expected to be ‘good’ to her.
Is there an equivalent to the dissociated stance that she has also
adopted? On reflection, Elizabeth wishes that she could be loved and
respected by the world regardless of whether she is good or not. Is she not
deserving of others’ love under all circumstances?
At first, our attempts to arrive at an answer to this question approach it
in a roundabout fashion. When I ask her to tell me more of her experience
of others, Elizabeth responds that others are the rule-makers. Others are the
ones who judge her. Others are the ones whose expectations she tries and
fails to fulfil.
‘And if there were no others?’ I challenge her.
Elizabeth’s response is immediate. ‘I would breathe easier,’ she
asserts.
As she says this, both of us are struck immediately by the implied
allusion to her illness. We stare at one another. I want to ask her the obvious
question yet hesitate to do so. I wonder whether this is cowardice or
recognition that we do not know each other well enough yet for me to pose
such a raw challenge so early in our relationship. Perhaps it is both. In any
case, Elizabeth saves me from my dilemma.
Smiling grimly, she commands: ‘Go ahead. Ask me.’
I comply. ‘And the lung cancer is an expression of this inability to
breathe easier?’
‘Yes.’
‘Elizabeth, are you saying that you believe that there’s some sort of
link between your lung cancer and your stifled ability to breathe freely in
the presence of others?’
‘Yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. I must be mad!’ she half jokes.
‘But what if it were true?’ I continue. ‘What would this say to you?’
‘That I’ve been judged as not being good enough. That this is my
punishment.’
As soon as she says this, Elizabeth begins to sob uncontrollably. ‘It’s
not fair!’ she whimpers. ‘I’ve tried my best! But I’m just not good enough
to them!’
 ‘Who is it that you’re not “good enough” to?’
‘Dave. My parents. My sister. The whole fucking world!’ Elizabeth
moans. ‘I’m never good enough for them!’
And yet, once again, even as she says this, Elizabeth herself questions
the basis for her assertion. ‘No,’ she concedes at last. ‘No, it’s not just
punishment. It’s also an expression of what happens when these others
impose such stifling demands upon me. It’s their fault, too!’
‘How?’ I inquire.
In reply, Elizabeth reveals more about her relations with Dave, with
her parents, with all those ‘significant others’ in her life. While she is
prepared to acknowledge and value their love and affection for her,
nevertheless, she feels that these contain implicit demands or conditions
that she must fulfil in order that their affections remain available to her.
With regard to Dave, for instance, Elizabeth expresses the view that
while he insists that he loves her, it is truly what she does for him that he
loves. She must be his muse, his ardent lover, his attentive caregiver, his
sounding board. And while she is happy and willing to be all these, she has
come to realise that she feels she has no choice in the matter, that he is not
merely requesting but, rather, demanding that she continue to furnish him
with her lavish attention—in spite of her own needs at this juncture in her
life. Even his talk of suicide, she confesses, is perceived by her not so much
as a statement of his unwillingness to consider a life for himself without
her, but rather as a response to the realisation that her death will leave him
bereft of what she provides for him.
In similar fashion, Elizabeth sees herself as her parents’ ‘good little
girl’. Yes, of course, they love her, but, she suggests, what this love
translates as being is more about their sense of parental self-worth. As long
as their ‘good little girl’ is alive, they can invoke the evidence for
themselves and their friends and acquaintances that they have been
successful parents, that their approach to parenting has ‘produced the
goods’. ‘I’m just a good product of their parental efforts,’ Elizabeth
exclaims.
But, I remind her, she has mentioned the existence of a sister. Surely, if
she is correct, then her parents would be able to continue to maintain this
view through their continuing relations with her.
 Elizabeth shakes her head in disagreement. ‘No, Linda’s different. She
isn’t as ‘good’ as me. My parents have had their difficulties with her. She’s
wilder, more of a free spirit than I’ve been. Linda goes her own way and if
my parents can’t agree, then that’s their concern as far as she sees it. She’s
far more independent of them than I am.’
‘And is there a touch of envy towards your sister on your part because
she can be this free spirit?’
‘Perhaps a little,’ Elizabeth admits. ‘But I wouldn’t want her life. No,
Linda’s too different to me. I can’t really compare us.’
‘So, if we go back to what you were saying about your relations to
Dave and to your parents, and the conditions that you perceive there, would
you say that this isn’t so with regard to Linda?’
‘Not at all!’ says Elizabeth. ‘It’s the same with Linda. But she’s more
able to get away with being the way she is, living her life as she wants,
because I’m alive.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘My parents don’t have to focus so much on Linda because they can
focus their attentions on me. With me, they can relax more about Linda. We
spend a lot of our time together discussing her, the latest crazy thing that
she’s up to. They can laugh about her with me.’
‘Ah ... I think I see. What you’re saying is that so long as you continue
to be the ‘good little girl’ in their life, then Linda can go on being their
‘wilder’, ‘not quite so good’ daughter and yet still be able to retain their
love and affection.’
‘Yes, that’s it. So she needs me to be the way I am, as well. Otherwise,
my parents would start insisting that she be good.’
‘So Linda can be imperfect and yet still receive their love, while you
must be perfect to receive the same.’
‘Yes.’
‘So what’s different about you and Linda that she can be imperfect and
be loved all the same, while you, on the other hand, must be perfect in order
to be loved?’
‘I don’t know,’ Elizabeth smiles (perhaps a little less certain of her
conviction than before?). ‘She’s just lucky, I suppose.’
‘Lucky,’ I repeat. ‘As long as you’re alive—’
 ‘Linda can get away with it! I’m the means to her freedom!’ Elizabeth
interrupts.
And so, via one example after the other, Elizabeth reveals just how
deeply sedimented is her belief that the world’s own interests are served by
her way of being. More than this, her examples serve to validate her belief.
And, by implication, her death will have direct consequences upon the
world as a whole in that it will no longer be able to maintain its own beliefs
and relational stances once she is gone.
But is there no exception to this fixed rule? Does it permeate
throughout all of Elizabeth’s relations? At first, this appears to be the case.
However, over time, and continuing clarification, Elizabeth comes to realise
that one exception to this fixed stance does exist. There is one world-
relation that is truly accepting of her. And this relation is revealed when she
begins to speak of her engagement with the natural world in the form of
plants.
Although she has always known this, somehow, Elizabeth discerns
with some surprise that she has never before acknowledged this
dissimilarity quite so clearly or explicitly.
‘It’s different with plants,’ she explains movingly. With plants, I feel
that I’m being truly accepted as I am. I don’t have to be perfect. And they
don’t have to be perfect with me. I tend to them, nurture them, try to
provide the best and healthiest environment for them to grow and thrive.
But if I fail, or if they reject what I’ve given them, then it’s all right. Oh, I’ll
feel sad, I’ll even cry if one of them becomes sickly, or dies. But I won’t
take it as a sign of failure on my part—or theirs. I am what I am. They are
what they are. It’s so much more accepting. And loving.’
‘Without conditions,’ I say.
‘Yes. Without conditions,’ Elizabeth agrees. ‘When I’m with plants,
when I’m around them, I just seem to feel so much more in touch with life.
I’m in a space where death is acceptable. Another part of life.’
‘You breathe more freely,’ I challenge.
‘Yes! That’s it! I breathe more freely!’
Having found an exception to Elizabeth’s sedimented belief, we can
now attempt to explore and clarify the distinctions between her relations
with plants and all of her contrasting relations with others. How is it, I
wonder, that she has endowed all others—except for plants—with such
power over her life? Over her whole way of being?
Via this focused inquiry, Elizabeth arrives at the insight that all others,
apart from her plants, determine the kind of dialogue that she has with the
world— which is to say, that she restricts the possibilities of both who and
how she can be with others in ways that conform to, and confirm, her fixed
beliefs about who and how others want her to be.
In this way, Elizabeth abdicates power to others not because others are
necessarily inherently more powerful than she, but because, in doing so, her
self-construct (i.e. who she believes she must/must not, can/cannot be) is
itself maintained and validated through these same beliefs.
This position reveals a ‘closed circle’ in her stance. Elizabeth’s fixed
beliefs rest upon several closely related sedimented assumptions that can be
summarised as follows:

1. She is who/how she is in the world because that is who/how others

want her to be.
2. Others are the way they are towards her because of who/how she is
in her relations with them.
3. She experiences restrictions in her way of being-in-the-world
because others require these restricted relations (i.e. being ‘good’) in
order for them to be as she wishes them to be towards her (i.e. ‘loving
and accepting of her’).
4. She experiences restrictions in her way of being-in-the-world
because these restricted relations (i.e. being ‘good’) are the means by
which others can maintain their own beliefs about themselves (i.e. ‘I
am a good parent/partner/ sister’) and remain as they are with regard to
their own relations with the others in their life (e.g. ‘So long as
Elizabeth is a good daughter, Linda can be “not so good” and still
receive our love and acceptance’).
5. Others are experienced by her as demanding a restricted way of
being of her (i.e. ‘We will be loving and accepting towards you on
condition of your being “good” ’) in order that her fixed beliefs about
her restricted way of being (i.e. ‘I must be “good” if I expect others to
love and accept me’) can be both maintained and validated.
What is apparent is that a change in the self/other relations within any one
of these conditions will significantly alter (or invalidate) all of the
remaining relational conditions. So, for instance, if Elizabeth ceased
assuming that others required her to be ‘good’ in order that she receive their
love, then she would no longer need to maintain restricted relations towards
herself (i.e. ‘I must be good’) and others (i.e. ‘I have to be good in order for
me to receive your love and acceptance’).
That others’ willingness to offer their love and acceptance might still
remain conditional, is, of course, a (likely) possibility, but, if it is so, then
Elizabeth is at least still freed from the restrictive belief that she, and she
alone, is the source of this stance.
For any such change to occur, however, what is required is a
desedimenting of any one of the various fixed beliefs contained within each
set of relational conditions. This cannot be achieved by my ‘educating’
Elizabeth to accept that her beliefs are ‘wrong’ or ‘irrational’, since this
strategy will only maintain Elizabeth’s position that here is yet another who
wants her to be ‘good’ (‘right’) and will not accept her if she is ‘bad’
(‘wrong’ or ‘irrational’). Paradoxically, this very attempt will only serve to
strengthen Elizabeth’s sedimented belief that all others require her relations
toward them to be self-restricting.
Nor will my offering her my personal perspective on the matter be of
significant value, since, at best, this will only be accepted at an intellectual
level and not at a ‘lived or felt’ level. What’s more, such an offering may
also confirm Elizabeth’s view that (like her sister, Linda) I do not have any
awareness of the burdens that she must accept, and, in turn, this is likely to
create a barrier in our dialogue insofar as Elizabeth will not experience
herself as having been sufficiently heard by me, and may begin to be
convinced that I, or she, or both of us, are in an inadequate, or unhelpful,
relationship.
At the same time, in maintaining this openness toward her way of
being, the ‘psychic environment’ that is fostered may provide Elizabeth
with the safety and the courage to explore, clarify, and question her
assumptions, not by herself, but in the presence of another who has
adequately understood her way of being and who accepts both it and her as
it/she is.
 In keeping with this attempt, my initial challenges bring back into
focus Elizabeth’s relation towards her body, since it is here that some
degree of doubt as to her fixed stance had been voiced in our earlier
discussions.
I remind her that, initially, she had presented the view that she would
respect and value her body so long as it was ‘good’ (i.e. ‘healthy’). And yet,
through clarification, she had concluded that this attitude was not entirely
accurate since, in spite of its being ‘bad’ (or ‘sick’), at least in part, she
would like to continue to be caring towards it.
But, if this is her desire, then what she is expressing is the view that
her body deserves to be loved and respected regardless of whether it is
deemed ‘good’or ‘bad’. Can she accept this unconditionally loving and
respectful relationship?
I am not too surprised when, in response, Elizabeth concurs that while
she might well desire this, she finds it hard to imagine that she would be
able to find the means to achieve it.
And yet, I insist, she has already told me that just such a relationship
does already exist in her lived relations with plants. So it is not that the aim
is impossible, it is that there exists for her an obstacle within her relations
with her body, with others, and with her sense of her own being (i.e. her
selfconstruct), that is not present in her relationship with plants.
So, we begin to explore Elizabeth’s relations toward her lived
experience via her self-construct.
Initially, these are seen to parallel Elizabeth’s relations with her body
in so far as just as it is a sedimented belief that she can only ‘own’ her body
when it is ‘good’, so too is it Elizabeth’s sedimented belief that she (i.e. her
self-construct) must be ‘good’.
‘And if Elizabeth is not ‘good’? Then what?’ I ask.
‘Then Elizabeth must be punished,’ Elizabeth replies.
‘And how is she punished?’
‘She’s told that she isn’t loved any more. Or that she’s making things
painful for everyone.’
‘And everyone includes Elizabeth?’
‘Yes, but what she mainly thinks of is everyone other than Elizabeth.’
‘Ah … So the pain that everyone other than Elizabeth experiences
when Elizabeth is ‘bad’ is more important than the pain that she herself
experiences?’
‘No, not more important. The others’ pain just needs to be attended to
first.’
‘Because?’
‘Because if it’s not, then ... then she’ll be punished even more.’
‘All right. So, tell me what ‘being punished even more’ means.’
‘It means that even if the pain goes away for everyone else, she’ll
continue feeling it.’
I think about what Elizabeth has just said and attempt to clarify the
implicit assumption that I perceive it to contain. ‘Let me try and rephrase
what you’ve just said,’ I reply. “Even if the world stops seeing me as ‘bad’,
and returns to seeing me as ‘good’, I’ll continue to see myself as ‘bad’.” Is
that it?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth admits, and then begins to cry.
‘Elizabeth,’ I ask, ‘what have you done that is so terrible?’
I am aware, as I pose the question, that it is the same as the one she
once asked of me. And yet there is a significant difference implied. In her
query, Elizabeth sought to gain understanding from the world (as
represented by me). In my probe, I, as representative of the world, am
requesting her to disclose the ‘explanation’ she provides from the
standpoint of her own self-construct.
By way of reply, and in spite of what she has said before, Elizabeth
now reveals that she has rarely felt ‘good’, that she has never really deemed
her own being to have been ‘good enough’. All of her actions are attempts
to dispute this belief, yet, even so, the assumption is never quite challenged
successfully. She could always do better, be a better person, she complains.
As an example of this, Elizabeth points to her inability to accept praise
from others. Those who compliment her, she asserts, simply haven’t seen
enough, don’t really know her.
And if they could really know her?
Then they would see that even if she behaves as a ‘good girl’, she still
thinks and fantasises ‘bad’ thoughts.
Like what?
Like wishing that she didn’t always have to be caring of her body, or
of other people. She has fantasised sexual relationships other than the one
she has with Dave. She has wished that she would discover that she had
been adopted and that her real parents were more accepting of her. She has
dreamed dreams wherein it is her sister, Linda, and not her, who is dying of
lung cancer. She has imagined other lifestyles, other ways of being, for
herself.
And when she imagines such things?
She tries to dismiss them. She damns herself, vows to be a better
person.
And to be a better person is to be a perfect person?
Yes. But she is not. And so she must be punished. And the punishment
is a public revelation that she is not as good as she pretends to be.
As she reveals this, I am reminded that she has claimed her illness to
be a form of punishment. It occurs to me to ask how many people know of
her illness.
Besides herself, only Dave and her doctor. She could not bear a more
public awareness.
Because her pretence would be exposed?
Yes.
‘And yet,’ I challenge her, ‘someone other than the people that you’ve
mentioned knows of your illness as well.’
‘Who?’ she asks, suspiciously.
‘Me,’ I say.
In placing myself so directly in her world, I have opened the
possibility for our mutual exploration of Elizabeth’s relation towards me.
As with any other therapist, I am both the immediate representative of
‘others’ in my clients’ self/other relations and also a living challenge to my
clients’ sedimented ways of being with the others in their lives. And,
concurrently, my presence can serve as a direct challenge to my clients’
sedimented self-constructs. In my attempts to remain open to Elizabeth’s
experience of being with me, and to endeavour to explore it descriptively,
we begin to be able to focus upon the various thoughts and feelings that she
reflects upon in the immediacy of our encounter with one another.
Elizabeth’s initial expectation of our meetings was that I would
provide her with ‘the correct way to be’ with regard to her illness. I would
guide her through her pain, anger and sorrow and in some way teach her to
move above or beyond such stances. I would seek to make her ‘good’ once
more, and thereby, paradoxically, succeed in confirming her fixed belief
that she was ‘bad’.
Instead, my presence offers her no alternative views with which she
can discern implicit demands and statements as to how to be, what is ‘bad’
about her, what she must do and be to please me. This is experienced by her
as a significant challenge—perhaps the most significant that I can offer her
—since, through it, her sedimented beliefs about how others demand her to
be, and how she demands herself to be, are questioned, doubted, not in an
abstract or merely intellectual fashion, but as a lived and immediate
response to her current experience.
As this willingness to meet her in a manner that embraces her way of
being is maintained, Elizabeth initially begins to connect her novel
experience of ‘being with another’ to that of her being with plants.
Eventually, she expresses the view that our meetings with each other are
also times when she can quite literally breathe more freely. She tells me that
she feels respected and loved even if she is imperfect, even if she is dying a
meaningless death.
And I, in turn, disclose to her that my experience of being with her
shares some similarities in that in spite of the fact that I know that I cannot
remove her illness, I, too, find our encounters to be both valid and valuable.
This disclosure moves Elizabeth deeply. It startles her to accept what I
say without immediately dismissing my words and searching for whatever
it might be that she imagines I might want of her. And, in this hesitant
acceptance of my presence as she experiences it, she allows the possibility
that she can accept her own being, as it presents itself to her, without
immediately placing the label of ‘bad’ upon it.
In this way, I become important to her not because I merely represent
others in an idealised sense, but because I am another with whom she is in
dialogue (even if it is a unique dialogue). I am the means whereby, through
‘the other that I am to her’, Elizabeth finds the courage to explore the
possibilities and sedimentations of her self-construct and starts to challenge
them in my presence.
As our meetings progress, Elizabeth begins to report her attempts to
reveal her new-found way of being with others. She speaks of the changes
that she experiences in her relations with her family and with Dave. And
while there is a great deal of sadness there, for by now all of them are aware
of her declining health and imminent death, she has also begun to perceive
a sense of spontaneity in these encounters that provides her with a feeling of
acceptance from these important ‘others’ in her life that she has yearned for,
yet never before dared consider or accept as a possibility.
Still, it is when she is with her plants that Elizabeth continues to
experience her greatest freedom and ‘aliveness’.
There is no denying that she remains angry and forlorn that she is
dying, yet the fact that she can express this to herself and her intimates
without experiencing the self-judgement that she is ‘bad’ fills her with joy.
She now knows what it is like to breathe freely with others.
During our last meeting together, Elizabeth’s health has degenerated to
such an extent that she appears aged and tired, her every movement a
painful struggle. Her time is limited, she confesses, but at least she has been
given this gift of time, even if the gift has extracted a heavy price from her.
Managing to evoke a smile, Elizabeth tells me that she has given up
her job, but not in order to ‘go wild’. Instead, relishing the breathing space
she has gained, she continues to discover the possibilities of being with
others in ways that are mutually accepting. And when she is not with them,
she is with her plants, tending to them, nurturing them, just as she, in turn,
is nurtured by them.
In death, it is to her plants that she will return, she announces. While
the law of the land prevents her from being buried in her own garden, where
her flesh and bones will be able to provide her final nourishment to them, at
least her ashes can be scattered there. A final communion of sorts will be
possible.
In tears, we embrace one another. And as we do, Elizabeth whispers to
me that she now believes that her last breath will be the freest of all.
Therapists speak glibly of their role as that of ‘changing’ or ‘healing’
their clients’ life circumstances. But, faced with the most significant
dilemmas in our clients’ lives, we are confronted with how limited our
interventions truly are. Clients, like all of us, do not exist in isolation. They
are ‘beings-in-the-world’, subject to the constraints and vicissitudes not
only of their own making, but of all our making. As such, from the wider
perspective of the world, how significant can any personal change derived
from a therapeutic encounter be?
 And yet ... As I write these final sentences, knowing that she died only
weeks after our last meeting, Elizabeth is alive for me now. I think of her
attempt to breathe more freely. I remember my own experience of
breathlessness. Something connects. Some meaning emerges.
Breathe deeply: ‘If I could turn you on, if I could drive you out of your
wretched mind, if I could tell you I would let you know.’

1. Marcel, G. (1935) Être et Avoir. Paris: Aubier Montagine.

2. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception (C. Smith, trans). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
3. See Laing, R.D. (1970) The Politics of Experience and The Bird of Paradise. Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 156.
 Table of Contents
Title
Copyright
Contents
Dedication and Acknowledgements
Prologue
1. Growing Old Disgracefully
2. Vile Bodies
3. The Royal Road
4. The Tale of the Therapist who Discovered that He was the Client
5. Lou and Simone: Truth or Happiness?
6. A Life Divided
7. Lifting the Veil
8. Her Last Breath