Our initial task as client and therapist – our work during the first few sessions – resembles cartography. I begin, like a map-maker, drawing a square or a rectangle, then sketching the outlines of landmarks visible from afar – the mountains, the sea, the rivers. In limning a life, the prominent features are obvious – where you were born, and when, where you grew up, what you do for a living, who your parents were and what they do, your siblings, if you have any, and your relationships with them, your partner, if you have one, and your relationship with him. I get the big stuff down, then step back, and try to make sense of it all – take “the lay of the land.” Later, I’ll add shading and nuance, and fill in the details – tiny inlets and hillocks, copses and rills.
I conjure a map from blank parchment. It returns the favor – conjuring a New World from my collected observations, and serving as a trusty guide. The expanse charted in shorthand on the map permits me to “rack focus” (as they say in film-making) – alter my gaze to take a fresh perspective, observe an unaccustomed vista. The map, as it develops, assumes a shape of its own. Disparate regions are drawn together by common threads – the length of a river’s course, a shared coastline or mountain range. My attention drifts to objects on the edges of boundaries, features I might have missed. The elusive “big picture” – awareness, the ultimate goal in psychotherapy – begins to coalesce.
The first step in the process comes as a question from the therapist. The phrasing of that “first question” gets debated when therapists gather. I trained with a colleague who invariably asked the same thing at each first session: “So what brings you here today?” That feels twisty and indirect to me. I usually start with “So how are you?” or, depending on my mood, or yours, “So how’s it going?” Sometimes there’s serious upset taking place in the here and now, that needs attending to right away. Before I sketch the background – the mountains and the sea and the rivers – I need to know if there’s a battle occurring on that stony plain, a castle under siege, a forest caught fire.
This is an historical map. I am mapping a quest – an epic voyage. You are the hero. Ours will be the sort of map with crossed swords to mark battlefields and mythic beasts to guard those unexplored zones at the edges of awareness.
The first question doesn’t matter much, because your unconscious feelings function like a compass. Wherever you start, you’ll find yourself where you need to be.
I have a good sense of direction, too. If I sense we’re drifting off-course, I’ll lean my elbow on the tiller.
Your compass is guided by emotion, drawn to it as to a magnetic pole. If I detect an increase in feeling, I might grow cautious, slow our pace and sniff the breeze, comb the sky for a cynosure – fear, anger, sadness, hurt. Emotions guide our way.
Albert Einstein was puzzled by the mystery of his own fame. He was forever pondering with friends and associates why he – a physicist whose work was a mystery to most non-scientists – should have become the recipient of full-blown Hollywood-style celebrity. For whatever reason, Einstein chose not to discuss this issue with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, either when they met in person in 1927, or in their later correspondence. As one of Einstein’s biographers, Denis Brian, put it:
Why? Because that’s what most people assume they want, until they stop and think, and maybe come up with an answer that’s a little more meaningful.
Money, in psychotherapy terms, is a surrogate for security in love. A patient once told me if he won the lottery he would build a brick house that needed no maintenance and would stand for five hundred years, then he’d create a fund to guarantee that the taxes and every other possible expense would be paid for in perpetuity. He’d have a place, a safe place, forever, that no one could ever take away. He could finally feel safe and breathe free.
As a child, you can gauge your parents’ investment in you – their love – by whether they are paying attention. You learn to do everything you can to keep their eyes on you as much as possible – like a kid at the playground, calling to his mother, making sure she watches each and every trick he performs on the jungle gym. Attention is like food for a young child.
There’s evolutionary history behind our desire to be rich and famous. It traces back to the fact that humans, with their gigantic brains, take a long time to reach maturity. An orangutan reaches adolescence at about age four. He’s in contact with his mother’s skin almost without break for much of that time, then soon becomes independent. A human doesn’t reach adolescence until thirteen. He requires more than a decade of childcare – too many years to rely solely on the care of parents. The human child senses instinctively that his life might depend upon summoning care and attention from others.
The problem with chasing wealth and fame is that it’s a child’s mission, not an adult’s. At some point you must step out of childhood – that long, helpless period of your life – and move onto the independence of maturity. Instead of needing reassurance that you are loved, you can achieve independence by learning to love yourself. That big step into adulthood is an affirmation that you deserve love, and deserve to receive it from those you call friends or partners.
It’s interesting that one of the most famous photos of Albert Einstein features him sticking his tongue out. You’ve probably seen it a million times on postcards or posters on dorm room walls. It seems to speak volumes about Einstein’s naturalness and lack of pretension – his being in touch with his child. Perhaps that’s true. It was photos like that – and his crazy hairdo – that helped make Einstein an icon of approachable, lovable brilliance.
The original, un-cropped version of the photo gives a slightly different impression from the familiar cropped version. The original includes the people around Einstein, who are trying to hurry a sick man home through a crowd of reporters. Perhaps, when he stuck out his tongue, Einstein the adult was simply annoyed and exasperated at a mob harassing an aging, unwell physicist whose work none of them could even understand.
The first researchers to observe chimpanzees in the wild were left with an idyllic impression of our close ape cousins. They appeared to be a peaceful tribe of vegetarians, who cuddled and groomed and cared for one another in extended family units, sharing fruit and showering their young with affection.
Chimpanzees are gentle, loving and family-oriented within their own territorial mating group. But with chimps from outside that circle, they can turn vicious.
An album of photos was made public in 2008 containing photographs taken by members of the SS who worked at Auschwitz. These pictures are not what you would expect. Dating from 1944, they show laughing, singing, smiling people reveling at Solahütte, an SS recreation home located just outside the death camp.
There’s even a shot of an SS officer lighting the Auschwitz Christmas tree only a few miles from the place where millions were being starved, beaten and gassed.
Freud watched Hitler march into Austria during the Anschluss in 1938, as the powerful Roman Catholic church stood by offering no resistance whatsoever. As Peter Gay describes it:
Another way to ostracize a group is to link them to disease. When Glenn Beck calls Progressivism a “cancer” in America, he implies that Progressives, those people like myself who believe in Progressive causes, are the embodiment of that cancer. He is borrowing a page from Adolf Hitler’s playbook. One of the Fuehrer’s favorite tropes was to compare Jews to tuberculosis bacilli infecting the German nation.
Still another way to justify dehumanizing a group of people is to isolate them because they have a different ethnic background, or physical appearance. This country began as a slave colony, based on the firm notion that people with dark skin could be beaten, abused, tortured, murdered, and bought and sold as chattel because they weren’t really “human” at all – they were more like animals. This is another example of in-group/out-group psychology at work.
The Tea Party movement lends itself to in-group/out-group psychology because it is a homogenous population – an excellent candidate for an in-group. According to a CNN poll, active supporters of the Tea Party, those who have attended a rally or donated money, are much more likely to be wealthy, male, have graduated from college and reside in rural areas that are already GOP and conservative strongholds. According to a Quinnipiac University poll, 88% of the Tea Partiers are white. They are also almost entirely Republican. It’s a fair guess that most of them are Christian, too, and probably fundamentalist.
This might explain their obsession with attempting to prove that Barack Obama, the President of the United States, was somehow not born here or is somehow not American.
The latest example of in-group/out-group psychology at work has appeared in the form of threats of violence by radical Right-wingers against Democratic politicians who supported the healthcare bill and voted it into law last week. Black and gay politicians have had nasty names shouted at them. One Democratic congressman was called “baby killer” by his Republican colleague on the floor of the US House of Representatives. There have been death threats and acts of vandalism.
But the Republicans still need to learn a basic lesson in citizenship.
My patient sounded bewildered.
You’ve probably heard of “Pavlov’s dogs.”
My patient was developing an observing ego. He kept having “deja vu” moments. He’d been down this path before, and he knew it.
Here’s further evidence that Sigmund Freud didn’t invent the concept of psychotherapy out of thin air:
The plot should be familiar to most of us:
That does it. The session with the French guy cracks Scrooge’s resistance, and new awareness arrives fast and hard. He wakes up a new man. With consciousness comes the desire for change. Now that Scrooge can see himself – the roots of his patterns of behavior, the distortions in his current cognition, and the pressing insistence of his mortality – he longs to express his authentic self, his best self – to become the man he truly is.
Two famous pilgrimages:
The People's Therapist 