Inside Out and Outside In by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

Holding What It Is to Be Human While Not Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater

We think that relational and intersubjective theories capture some of the complexities of what it is to be human. They exhort us to tolerate the uncertainty, ambiguity, and paradox that is inevitable in working with others whose humanity is also deeply complex.

But often beginning students see clinical theory and practice as either/or. That is, we sometimes hear our students saying, “That is a one-person psychology and I don’t want to learn it!” or “I only work in a two-person psychology model!” This dichotimizing overly simplifies all of clinical work. In fact, all relational practitioners have been trained traditionally. They are knowledgeable about drives, defenses, and structures of the mind, about object relations, self psychology, attachment, neurobiology, and trauma, but they highlight the context of the therapeutic encounter as the stage wherein these play out. We think that to work as two minds, one needs a sense of one mind first. Often the beginner who starts by learning relational theory may feel free, for example, to share any spontaneous thoughts, feelings, and reactions with her clients. Ehrenberg (1992) writes, “The issue is not simply one of being ‘authentic.’ There are ways of being authentic that can burden our patients unnecessarily and we can derail, rather than advance the process” (p. 84).

Thus we think there is a danger to undisciplined spontaneity, to disclosing without a great deal of thought and restraint, to making transparent power relationships under any and every circumstance. Often our clients want and need us to have knowledge or power, for cultural reasons, for psychological reasons. Often our clients need us to listen and not to associate with our own reveries and musings. Often our clients need distance from our minds for reasons having to do with the dangers of too much closeness or fears of losing their own minds. Without learning to practice with some restraint, without learning to listen, without learning first to start where a client is, there is the danger of excessive self disclosure, or of relativism, a kind of “anything goes,” or of seeing the client and therapist as equals when in fact—in the context of the therapeutic relationship—they are not.

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