The Cultural Complex: Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society by Samuel L. Kimbles & Thomas Singer

Author:Samuel L. Kimbles & Thomas Singer
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Social Sciences
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2004-07-31T04:00:00+00:00

and psychotherapy founder when it comes to reviewing and codifying the literal and metaphoric aspects of the erotics of the clinical encounter (see Samuels 1996; 2001:101–121).

Power and the therapy relationship

From a historical perspective, perhaps the most worrying and destructive way in which Western psychotherapy has become foreign to us in the West is its overall reluctance to engage with power dynamics in its actual practices. Obviously, I am not saying that all therapists ignore the presence of power dynamics and power issues in therapy and I think that, in a halting way, moves are being made, mostly within integrative psychotherapy, to grapple with power relations in therapy. In transcultural psychotherapy, meaning therapy of any kind in which there is explicit recognition of and response to the psychological dynamics of the cultural backgrounds of the participants and the mixture of these, such a concern is necessarily widespread and fundamental due to the uneven spread of power between communities and the way in which ethnic and national strife become animated in the transference—countertransference relationship (see Kareem and Littlewood 1992). But in therapy work done between similars, instead of a frank concentration on power, we often find the issue given an instant interpretative (and psychopathological) spin so that it is claimed to be a question of an omnipotent breast or the Law of the Father or the Terrible Mother, not to do with the process of psychotherapy itself. Sometimes, the power dynamics within the therapy session are overlooked in favour of a consideration of whether or not the client is or feels empowered—which is not really the same thing.

Many practitioners do not realize that therapy institutes a relationship that involves power as a primary and ubiquitous feature. Experiences in transcultural therapy suggest that we can make creative use of what often seems in the beginning to be an ugly and unjust scenario. Many people have been wounded precisely because of abuses of power, ranging from refugees to those brought up in standard issue middle-class British families. Recovery from such wounds will be impeded if the transference—countertransference power dynamic is insufficiently explored. Power issues in therapy often follow the lines of an inferior/ superior dance in which the starting pose is that the therapist is up (idealized) and the client is down. Perhaps this is the cultural complex that can explain why so many clients either try to please the therapist or, conversely, spend their time fighting the therapist's system. In my experience, it is essential to challenge the manner in which many power issues take on this inferior/superior tone so quickly. The vertical axis encourages a kind of spurious morality and denies that there is also a horizontal axis of interpersonal power which calls out for some kind of struggle on the part of the client (see Samuels 1989:194–215).

The question of power is not only a matter for a particular therapy situation; it is a central feature of the cultural complexes that make psychotherapy practice what it is. For, as an institution in culture, psychotherapy has cultural power.

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