Epiphanies by Ann Jauregui

Author:Ann Jauregui
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beyond Words
Published: 2007-07-01T00:00:00+00:00

and I thought

I am so many!

What is my name?

MARY OLIVER

from “Sunrise”

In the world of psychotherapy there have been two main, and sometimes antagonistic, camps of theorists.

There have been those practitioners, usually psychodynamic in their orientation, who have treated individual patients with the assumption that something is wrong with them, or with the way they are going about things, which has its origins in their personal histories. This is still what a lot of people imagine when they think about psychotherapy and its Freudian origins. Often enough, a person will make a protective gesture somewhere around his or her head as if to say, “Don’t look in here, it’s a mess!”

Then there have been family therapists who think the lens of the camera must be opened wider; they see individuals or families in therapy with the idea that the problem is not located in the personality of an individual but in the interactions of the “system” as a whole: the family, the community, the hierarchical culture. These systems theorists, working in the newer and less well known tradition of cybernetics or information theory, want to know what else is going on.

“Open the lens wider,” they say. “What else is here? Who else?” And so context or ecology, a word that had not been used in psychology before, is everything. “Stamp out nouns!” Gregory Bateson said, after watching dolphin families. It’s all in the verbs. A person is part of a living process; everything is in the action and interaction.

For example, Virginia Satir, Bateson, and others at the Mental Research Institute of Palo Alto noticed that they could help a schizophrenic child in the hospital and send him home, only to find him returning in the same fix a few hours or a few days later. Maybe something in the family was wrong. They conjectured that the child’s mother’s communication pattern might be convoluted in a crazy-making way. A formula for a crazy-making admonition to the child might be: “Don’t do that or else” + “Don’t not do that or else” + “We’re not going to talk about any of this.” The child, in ghastly collaboration with the “schizophrenogenic” mother (and, some thought to add, the absent father), comprised a sick system, and the child was carrying the symptoms on behalf of the whole family.

In these readings of both psychodynamic and cybernetic theory, theories that resided in distinctly different journals and training institutions, something was wrong and needed to be fixed. The keeper of the symptoms—the person or the larger family system—had generated the presenting problem over time and was now in the habit of it, or “needed” it to maintain a certain equilibrium. It was this unholy homeostasis that the therapist was meant to disrupt, like rebreaking a bone that has mended badly.

But as physical scientists were saying they were not so sure they knew what the world was, the separate camps of psychotherapists began to say they were not so sure they knew what a person was either.

Otto Kernberg talked about the “self.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.