In 1817, in a letter to his brother, the poet John Keats wrote about how people of achievement had a quality he called “negative capability.” They were capable, he said, “of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Negative capability is an acknowledgement of complexity, a mature respect of life’s shades of grey, an understanding that despite what the strident headline, indignant tweet or demanding placard says, the situation is probably not quite so simple.
“We can never know in the beginning, in giving ourselves to a person, to a work, to a marriage or to a cause, exactly what kind of love we are involved with. When we demand a certain specific kind of reciprocation before the revelation has flowered completely we find ourselves disappointed and bereaved and in that grief may miss the particular form of love that is actually possible but that did not meet our initial and too specific expectations. Feeling bereft we take our identity as one who is disappointed in love, our almost proud disappointment preventing us from seeing the lack of reciprocation from the person or the situation as simply a difficult invitation into a deeper and as yet unrecognizable form of affection.” A digression: Do you feel lucky today? Richard Wiseman, a magician turned popular psychologist, conducted some research on luck. He advertised for people who considered themselves very lucky, or very unlucky and received many replies. The lucky people seemingly had led charmed, successful, happy lives. They were always in the right place at the right time, and good things inevitably just happened to fall in their lap. The unlucky people? The opposite. An extraordinary catalogue of calamities, disastrous romances, failed businesses, missed connections, lost harvests. Wiseman conducted a series of tests on these people. One was to count the number of photos in a newspaper. The unlucky people took a few minutes to complete the task. The lucky people took just seconds. Why? Because on page 2, half the page was devoted to a notice that said, in large letters: “Stop counting: There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.” The “unlucky” people, blinded by the certainty of the task, never saw it. According to Wiseman, people make their own luck. The house of uncertainty holds no fear for lucky people. Which side are you on? Our brains have two hemispheres: the intuitive, holistic, creative, transcendent “right brain,” and the more logical, rigid, pedantic, detail-focused “left brain.” Iain McGilchrist calls the former the “Master” and the latter the “Emissary.” The problem, he says, is that the Emissary is supposed to be in service to the Master, but somehow he has taken over the controls. As a result, he has profoundly changed us—and our world. All power, says McGilchrist, now rests with the Emissary “who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master...is led away in chains.” (A simplistic binary split of the brain into left and right perhaps shows a lack of negative capability—it ignores all the shades of grey matter. But we'll stick with it.) Instead of working together, our bird-brained inner accountant turned on our wise and thoughtful inner poet and, in a desperate ontological battle, the latter was slain. The poet, needless to say, embraced negative capability; she lived it. The accountant however, clipboard, ruler and calculator in hand, can tolerate only certainty. He has created a fragmented, western world of technology, mechanisation and bureaucracy, a world of alienation, where love is hard to find, and beauty gets bulldozed, a world of spreadsheets instead of sonnets, a world where everything is measured, itemized, indexed, where the little picture matters and the big picture doesn’t. Einstein had a sign hanging in his office which read: “Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.” Doubt in the consulting room The Emissary’s hand can be seen in every detail of our lives—in tax returns, Ofsted reports, market research. In doomed attempts to deconstruct jokes or works of art. And, as I wrote earlier this week, in the field of mental health. The Emissary wants to shoehorn your troubles into a neat, clearly-labelled pigeonhole. He wants to eradicate your symptoms with a drug and, if you insist, a bit of talking in the form of some short-term cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT). A little adjustment to your levels, a bit of soldering under the bonnet, and you should be good to go—back to your spreadsheets. If it were that simple, we would not be human. On the first page of the introduction in her book The Impossibility of Knowing, psychotherapist Jackie Gerrard writes: “I am sure that I, like many of my colleagues, started my training eager to learn and to know, and I have subsequently spent the years post qualification learning that I do not ‘know,’ cannot ‘know,’ and, indeed, should not ‘know’ . . . by saying I do not ‘know,’ I am continually endeavouring to hold a state of mind that can tolerate remaining open, bearing uncertainty, and avoiding, wherever possible, omnipotence and omniscience.” Not “knowing” is not the same as indecision or ignorance. In Tales of Un-knowing, existential therapist Ernesto Spinelli says therapists should aspire to be un-knowing—as opposed to “unknowing”—they should “attempt to remain as open as possible to whatever presents itself in our relational experience.” The Emissary therapist reaches for theories, models, personality tests and questionnaires about your mental state so that he can enter your score on a spreadsheet. He reaches for the manual to find a clinical diagnosis such as “generalized anxiety disorder” or “oppositional defiance disorder” and some techniques to make it go away. American existential therapist Irving Yalom marvels that anyone can take diagnoses seriously, adding: “Even the most liberal system of psychiatric nomenclature does violence to the being of another. If we relate to people believing that we can categorize them, we will neither identify nor nurture the parts, the vital parts, of the other that transcends category.” The Master therapist, by contrast, see you—all the vital parts, all of you. All her senses are alive to you and your experience of distress. This level of presence and empathy was memorably expressed by British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, who wrote that every therapeutic session should be approached “without memory and without desire.” Even the therapist’s wish for their client to be, say, less depressed is, according to Bion, an imposition that will cloud that therapist’s mind. He believed that in every session there had to be a genuine open-mindedness and freedom. All too often therapist and client conspire to flee from uncertainty. The therapist who claims to be “sorted” might be cut off from their own vulnerability and woundedness, and perhaps not be the best guide to accompany a client as they traverse a landscape of despair. Integrative psychotherapist Diana Voller writes: “The tension of the experience of being in uncertainty brings the person of the therapist well and truly back into the therapy.” The therapist, too, needs “the scariness and excitement of being willing to be in the unknown, allowing oneself to be temporarily overwhelmed, feel stupid for a while...gaining new perspectives and growing.” (I am grateful to Voller for a presentation she made on negative capability years ago in London—thank you.) Increasing your negative capability So perhaps we would be better people if we could cultivate a little more negative capability in our lives. There'd be more good things like luck, love, empathy. Negative capability transforms a profane world into one of poetry. For Keats, ways to cultivate more negative capability were: “books, fruit, French wine, fine weather and a little music out of doors played by someone I do not know.” Voller suggests that films, TV, art, literature and the theatre are all “rich everyday resources for choosing to be temporarily unsettled and ready to be ultimately changed by other ways of seeing things.” Here are 9 tips for a greater capacity for uncertainty: 1. Have therapy There’s no better way to experience the discomfort of uncertainty, to encounter those frontiers of yourself that you have for long retreated from, than to be a client. The consulting room is a safe place to explore your distress, your history, your way of being in the world, all your secrets and shadows. Processing such dark matter affords some control over it rather than the reverse. 2. Keep a journal Another great way of exploring, of cultivating a better relationship with our self—or rather, disparate selves. Start the conversation. 3. Improvise Now and again, put away the instruction manual, or the sheet music, or the cookbook, and just do it. 4. Meet new people Hurl yourself into unfamiliar social situations. Interact with a wide range of people. Richard Wiseman wrote of how some of his “lucky” participants often sought out ways to force them to meet different people. One noticed that whenever he went to a party, he tended to talk to the same type of people. To disrupt this routine, he now thinks of a colour before a social event and then speaks to people wearing that colour of clothing. 5. Get lost Take a different route to work, take your watch off, travel without a map, go somewhere new on holiday, camp in the wilderness, explore a very different country, travel alone. Develop a sense of what psychoanalyst Nina Coltart called xenophilia. Lose yourself in nature. Gaze at trees, clouds, thunderstorms. Waste time. 6. Spend time with children Learn from their streams of consciousness and ability to play, and to be spontaneous and joyful and un-selfconscious. They haven’t yet learned, as we have, to filter, to not see. Negative capability is the antidote to old age. Viewpoints, like arteries or neural pathways, can become clogged, fewer, narrower, less fluid. 7. Have new experiences Sign up for that retreat, workshop, meetup.com event. Do things that you’ve always wanted to do but haven’t because they scare you a little. Try different genres of art and music and film and food. 8. Be with your body Dance. Play. Sing. Act. Exercise. Move. Do yoga. Touch and be touched. Our psychology affects our body—the reverse can also be true: putting your body into unfamiliar, freeing positions can also free your mind. 9. Stop making lists! Ultimately, negative capability is a stance, a state of mind, an awareness. A willingness to give up the life you planned in order to have the life that is waiting for you, as American mythologist Joseph Campbell so succinctly put it. It’s not easy. There are times when we need to be on autopilot, or seek refuge from the world under a giant metaphorical duvet. But we are only fully alive in those fleeting moments when we are brave enough to throw away all the old rules and maps and guidebooks and lists and embrace living in a state of uncertainty, eyes wide open to the world, engaging our fluid self with a fluid environment in original, creative and spontaneous ways. I’m pretty sure there some truth in that. But of course, I can’t be certain. So a buffoonish ultra-conservative known mostly for his hair has decided that he wants to run the country. Boris Johnson? No, not yet, though that day will undoubtedly come. It’s the other one, the billionaire property tycoon Donald Trump, who on Tuesday declared that he’s going to run for President. Don’t laugh. It could happen. The White House may well yet be rebranded The Gold House. Despite TV shows like The West Wing, Veep or House of Cards, so often the truth of American politics seems far stranger, more comical, and more sinister than fiction. We know Trump’s politics: the law of the jungle. In his get-rich, self-help, self-homage book Think Big, he writes: “The world is a vicious and brutal place. We think we’re civilised. In truth, it’s a cruel world and people are ruthless. They act nice to your face, but underneath they’re out to kill you.” Poverty is regarded as a moral failure—if you were foolish enough not to have been born with a wealthy property developer as a parent, as Trump was, well, that’s your problem; you are one of life’s “losers” (a favourite Trump word). Trump’s would be a government by the rich for the rich. What of the man himself? To be near him—as I was last summer when I interviewed him in Trump Tower for a magazine article—is to sit in a wind tunnel of self-promotion; a nonstop volley of bluster, salesmanship and foghorn declarations of greatness. A favourite tactic is to cite “unnamed sources” who affirm his brilliance; another is simply to offer self-serving statements of grandiosity that just aren’t true. Surely he doth protest too much. We might conclude that, like so many narcissists, he must be compensating for some chronic, deep-rooted insecurity. Or is it all just an act, the perpetuation of a rather cartoonish public image, a kind of parody of tycoonery that he plays up to and makes fun of even, all in the interests of notoriety and maximizing the bottom line? Narcissists don’t often voluntarily seek counselling as that would imply they were less than perfect. In many ways, Trump is the exact opposite of a typical client, who might be unsure, lacking in confidence, anxious, emotional, low in energy, afraid, highly sensitive, guilty, socially awkward, and so on. So can we learn anything from Trump? Might looking at someone on the far, opposite, extreme end of a spectrum from where we are perhaps move us towards some kind of healthier position in the middle; some kind of balance? I’m not saying we should be like Trump—far from it—but sometimes we could all use just a little bit of what he has. And sometimes lessons come from unexpected quarters (the Dalai Lama said our enemies are our best teachers). Here are 3 things to take from Trump: • Consider a different narrative. A few years ago, a young up-and-coming American golf pro called Natalie Gulbis told an interviewer that she’d been dumped by Ben Roethlisberger, the Super Bowl quarterback. A little while later, she met Trump, who scolded her. “I never want to read that again,” he said. “From now on, I want to read that you dumped him. You don't get dumped.” It may not be exactly true, but just thinking about things in a different way can be empowering and break us free from our relentlessly punitive internal dialogue, which plays in our heads constantly like a broken record. A CBT therapist might encourage you to challenge your “negative automatic thoughts” (“he dumped me—I’m worthless”). Trump, unerringly a believer in “positive thinking,” replaces them with the opposite extreme, relentlessly positive automatic thoughts (“I dumped him—he’s worthless”). These are just as distorted; in his book The Art of the Deal, he calls this “truthful hyperbole . . . an innocent form of exaggeration.” Whatever you tell yourself about your life, your relationships, you, how about playing with some different interpretations and then settling on something in the middle? These are called alternative balanced thoughts (“it didn’t work out but we’re both moving on”). • Don’t let anyone intimidate you. Trump can walk into a meeting, appear on TV, make a presentation to thousands of people and not be in the slightest bit nervous. Few of us have such ice-cold blood running through our veins, nor would we want to, but being able to feel like you have every right to be on this earth, to think what you think, do what you do and be who are, without apology, is something we can all achieve—regardless of who you are, what you’ve done, or how you feel about yourself. In fact, someone can only take that away from us if we let them (as Eleanor Roosevelt said: “No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent”). “Don’t let people push you around,” advises Trump in Think Big. • Act now, think later. If you think about a good idea for long enough, it’s possible to turn it into a bad idea. Worrying about all the things that could go wrong before you’ve even taken the first step, all the barriers you might encounter along the way, can be paralysing. It’s a much bigger barrier than the actual barriers themselves, which may turn out to not be there, or not that bad, or useful, changing your direction in an interesting way and teaching you something. Clients will sometimes speak of their big plans “next year” or “after my mother dies” or “when the kids are grown up.” We tell ourselves that when the planets are all aligned, then I’ll take that courageous step. But our “conditions” ensure it never happens. We make ever-more detailed plans as a defence against acting on them. How about just doing it, starting today? That’s what Trump does. He gets things done. “Do not wait around for the ‘right time’ or until you are perfect,” he writes in Think Big. “It will never happen. Start right away. You will learn more from doing than you would learn from anything else.” If you still don’t do it, maybe you might allow for the possibility that actually you don’t really want to and, with relief, give it up. You don’t have to be anything like Donald Trump (really, it’s better that you’re not). You don’t have to “think big.” But telling better stories about yourself, taking your rightful place in the world and among your fellow humans, and acting rather than endlessly cogitating, will all help you become somebody much more important than Trump: you. The most famous, most iconic tortured artist—the original—is Vincent van Gogh. Today, he would probably be diagnosed as bipolar, or possibly schizophrenic. He had psychotic episodes, he was sectioned, and he allegedly cut off part of his ear (though some believe Gauguin was the slasher). Van Gogh spent his final year in an asylum. He committed suicide. His paintings seem to telegraph his inner turmoil. The stars on the canvas burn too brightly. Each brushstroke appears laden with madness. Does a true artist have to be a tortured genius? Must there be some psychological crossed wiring, some gaping brain lesions, or a too-hot neurotransmission system to allow such acute sensitivities to the outer world and the inner world of the imagination? Or is the torture the effect of heightened creativity rather than the cause—does it all take its toll? Do creators see and feel too much? Is art a gift—or a curse, consigning the artist to drown in angst and absinthe in a lonely garret? Is art only good if its creator suffered? On her Brain Pickings site, Maria Popova writes on the relationship between creativity and mental illness, quoting extensively from the book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius by Nancy Andreasen, which casts a forensic eye over such evidence as Van Gogh’s letters or Sylvia Plath’s journals or Leo Tolstoy’s diary of depression or Virginia Woolf’s suicide note. In a study of the Iowa Writers Workshop, Andreasen found the majority of the writers “described significant histories of mood disorder that met diagnostic criteria for either bipolar illness or unipolar depression.” She concluded that psychological distress is indeed allied to creative genius (but to be successful it must be overcome). And that creative people are in fact different, superior beings. She writes: “Although many writers had had periods of significant depression, mania, or hypomania, they were consistently appealing, entertaining, and interesting people. They had led interesting lives, and they enjoyed telling me about them as much as I enjoyed hearing about them.” I don't agree on either count. Creativity is not some kind of special neurosis bestowed on the chosen few. It is instead like love—a good, healthy and universal part of being human. Anyone can access that incandescent, transcendant energy that can fuel our waking moments—and lots of our sleeping moments, too. You don’t need to be a genius—nor class A drugs—to see with kaleidoscope eyes. “No matter what your age or your life path, whether making art is your career or your hobby or your dream, it is not too late or too egotistical or too selfish or too silly to work on your creativity,” writes Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way, which argues that accessing creativity is akin to a spiritual awakening—anyone can plug into some kind of cosmic or divine grid of “spiritual electricity.” For Betty Edwards, author of Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, becoming creative is simply learning how to see. “You may feel that you are seeing things just fine and that it’s the drawing that is hard. But the opposite is true ... By learning to draw you will learn to see differently and, as the artist Rodin lyrically states, to become a confidant of the natural world, to awaken your eye to the lovely language of forms.” There are plenty of sane, ordinary, even rather boring people who are also highly creative artists, writers and poets. (Conversely there are also plenty of people who suffer who don’t create anything.) Years ago, one example of a seemingly untortured artist, the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, told a packed auditorium that every person in the room probably had the imagination to write a serviceable novel. The only difference, Vonnegut said, is motivation: very, very few actually do it. (Probably just as well—the world hardly needs more mediocre novels.) So why do those that create do what they do? Why does anyone spend months or years labouring over many thousands of words that almost certainly will never have an audience? Where does the motivation come from? It is here that a little bit of madness can give us a push. It’s possible that being a little unhinged or conflicted, with a slightly cracked heart, can provide a call to create, to search for meaning, to try to make sense of it all. Freud regarded art as another “royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind,” like dreams. Creative pursuits can be enormously therapeutic for dissatisfied, distressed or damaged souls. It is an outlet, a form of expression for those without a voice. And there have also been studies linking creativity with bipolar-type people, the intense exhilaration of manic highs perhaps providing not only the raw materials to build a palace in the sky but also the energy to put it all together. Untortured artists: creativity as play But while it may help you put pen or paintbrush to paper, mental ill-health is not a prerequisite. Because creativity, at heart, is play. The late great British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott said creativity and play are essential parts of being fully human, and should be nurtured and encouraged in people of all ages, starting in childhood (something Ofsted and uncreative, unplayful education ministers all too often forget, if they ever knew it in the first place). Wrote Winnicott: “It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.” A lot of the great artists probably didn’t set out to become great artists. They weren’t tortured souls, creating their art out of despair. They just liked messing around with words, images, melodies, ideas, and the biproduct of that process, eventually, was a valuable creation. It doesn’t matter if your creativity produces anything that others deem to be “good.” Art—like psychotherapy, or indeed living—is about being engaged in the process rather than fixated on the outcome. If you stare at the blank canvas burdened with aspirations of greatness, with all the grand masters down the ages peering over your shoulder, not to mention your critical parents and others who sit in judgment over you, you’re coming at it from the wrong direction. You’re imposing top-down commands instead of seeing what emerges organically from the bottom-up. You will be paralysed. The canvas will remain blank. And so will you. And you don't have to create “art." There are many ways of being creative, of playing. But if you don’t, won’t or can’t play, if access to your “child” self has been cut off, you will turn into a drone, a worker bee, an automaton—serious, lacking in passion, colourless. The “Person Who Cannot Play,’’ writes Thomas Harris in I’m OK—You’re OK, is “duty-dominated, always working late at the office, all business, impatient with family members who want to plan a skiing trip or a picnic in the woods.” Decades later, you might well recall that picnic in the woods as you lie on your deathbed. The memory might raise a Mona Lisa smile. You won’t be wishing you spent more hours in the office. However you do it, it's important to play. Accessing your playful, spontaneous, impulsive “child” self is fundamental in creating your life or your art. But it’s not the whole story. You do need a bit of “parent” mixed into the palette too. There is such a thing as technique. Ideally, there is an integration of the whole self. Tracey Emin, for instance, perhaps suffers from too much “child”; the lifeless pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat from too much “parent.” The integration evolves over time. Years ago, there was a Mondrian exhibition in New York that showed his work in chronological order. He started out painting pretty, pastoral, post-Impressionist scenes. Gradually the curves straightened, the colours became bolder, the form more abstract. Eventually, Mondrian matured into the painter he is known to be today, the creator of those startling, rigid black grids and blocks of primary colours. Walking through the galleries, there was an inexorable sense of his gradual development, a sharpening of something, a distillation towards some kind of essence. It was as though Mondrian himself had no control over this progression. “The position of the artist is humble,” he wrote. “He is essentially a channel.” If we’re only willing, we can all be a channel. If we can forget about whether or not we have the right kind of van Gogh-like madness in sufficient quantities, and forget about our grandiose fantasies of being special, gifted, and achieving greatness and fame, and forget—for a few precious moments—all our everyday demands, duties and responsibilities, then we can simply plug in and allow the good energy to flow through us, and set us free. After the formalities, the details, the terms and conditions of therapy, the first thing a therapist might say to a new client is: “So, what brings you here?” There are three different kinds of client, according to Steve De Sheza: • Visitors are highly ambivalent about the whole exercise—very often they are there grudgingly, at the behest of a partner, boss, educational establishment, medical professional or court of law. • Complainers love to catalogue all their problems, how much they suffer and are mistreated by others, but they refuse to see any role that they might play in either the cause or the cure. They are greatly attached to their troubles and have no intention of actually doing anything to relinquish them (they will defend them, wrote Freud, like a lioness defends her young). • Customers—the best clients—are present, open, engaged and highly motivated. They want things to change. They’ve had it with the status quo, with feeling bad all the time, with aspects of their life that have become worn out or problematic. They’re tired of being stuck. They have faith that better days lie ahead. “Customers” have a sense of some kind of direction or goal for their therapy. A partial list: --to feel less anxious, depressed, afraid, panicked, unsafe or stuck; --to improve relationships; --to express and manage emotions in a better way; --to change specific unhelpful repetitive behaviours, habits or patterns; --to come to terms with some kind of loss; --to process difficult events or trauma of the past; --to explore and “find” oneself; --to be supported in coping with a great, transformative challenge such as leaving home, bereavement, redundancy, divorce, illness and disease; --to make sense of the story so far; --to live life more fully; --to find some meaning, purpose or spirituality; --to prepare for death. Can therapy meet these goals? Sometimes, to some extent, for some people. But change is not always so easily steered. Unhindered, it happens naturally: we’re born, we grow, we blossom into a gorgeous ripening. We can't help but grow—it's what we do. We are fluid, like a river, as Heraclitus argued two and a half thousand years ago. Nothing will ever again be quite the same as it is right now. But sometimes our growth can be stunted, stuck or skewed. We don’t get the optimum psychological light, water, nutrients and nurturing that we need. Life’s troubles, stormy weather and other obstacles get placed in our way. We get shackled; as Rousseau wrote we are “everywhere in chains.” What prospects for growth, for change, in these circumstances? Carl Jung wrote: “We cannot change anything unless we accept it. Condemnation does not liberate; it oppresses.” This paradoxical theory of change, echoed by Carl Rogers, Arnold Beisser and others, says: We can only become more like the person we want to be by first fully cherishing the person we are. I believe this acceptance arises from two factors: self-knowledge, and, for want of a better word, love. We are troubled by our symptoms, defences, age-old problematic patterns, unconscious desires or other less pleasing, disowned or denied parts of ourselves. But when we have a thorough grasp of these things and where they came from, coupled with an acceptance of them by both Self and Other, they cease to bind us so tightly and in some cases simply melt away. We come to realize that we do not need our crutches any longer, that the world will embrace us without them, that it is safe to lay them down. By contrast, when we don’t understand them, don’t have compassion for them, cannot accept them, we are subjecting ourselves to oppressive condemnation. We try to command our stifling troubles away but discover that they only cling to us ever tighter. We have limited success with our diets, our New Year’s resolutions. Our CBT assignments may offer respite from our symptoms, but the relief seems superficial and short-lived. We quickly develop negative thoughts about our doomed attempts to “think positive.” For lasting change to occur, both ingredients are necessary: an integration of knowledge and love, head and heart, the intrapsychic and the interpersonal, “Logos” and “Eros,” yin and yang. • Knowledge can emerge through reflection and self-help, but is more effectively gleaned in therapy, via collaborative exploration, enquiry, interpretation and analysis. Our unconscious processes, evident in the “transference”—our habitual emotional responses that get activated in the consulting room—are made conscious. The experience of therapy can deepen emotional and physical knowledge, as well as the purely cognitive kind. We come to understand and make meaning out of how we have learned to be in the world—we did what we had to do to survive our childhoods or later challenges. We shine some light on the shadows. We gain insight, and some control. We become more integrated. The river flows freely again. • Love is clearly a highly-charged word. It's a hopelessly simplistic shorthand for a kind of human energy that comes in many flavors. In this context I mean it as a quality of the therapeutic bond between client and therapist, nurtured by Rogers’ “core conditions” of empathy, congruence and “unconditional positive regard,” and greenhoused in a non-judgmental, safe, boundaried space. According to Jackie Gerrard: “Unless and until there can be felt moments of love for the patient by the therapist, the patient is not able to develop fully.” But love is not just some positive affirmation that the therapist directs towards the client; what is beneficial is to be able to love as well as feel love; to experience a certain sort of intimacy, to explore vulnerability in the presence of another, a sense of what Karen Maroda goes so far as to call “mutual seduction” and “emotional surrender.” This kind of love is what keeps you both in the room when things get bumpy. It allows the client to trust that it’s OK to reveal the more unpalatable, unspeakable parts of their experience. Love allows you to admit to hate, for instance, and work with it, which can be highly therapeutic. In a letter to Jung, Freud wrote: “Psychoanalysis is in essence a cure through love." The love gets internalised; self-rebuke and condemnation are replaced by self-compassion and acceptance. The dodo bird Outcome research shows that there is little difference in effectiveness of one kind of therapy over another—the so-called “dodo bird verdict.” However, research also shows huge variation between individual therapists within the same orientation. So what makes the best therapists so special? Different authors and researchers have emphasized the importance of different common factors. Miller et al argue, for example, that “supershrinks”—the best of the best therapists—demonstrate “deliberate practice”: they think, act and reflect with the client’s goals and tasks always in mind. For O’Brien and Houston, therapists “need to have the ability to engage the client in a co-operative participation with regard to the goals and tasks of therapy, to provide an opportunity for the client to express emotion and to create a healing therapeutic bond.” Perhaps it is simply the capacity for client and therapist to form a relationship which transports them to a place of knowledge and some kind of love that is most helpful in facilitating change. All a therapist has to offer is their subjectivity—the flawed, imperfect sum total of their personality, training, years of therapy, life experience and history. There are, of course, some things that can’t be changed. I don’t believe the idea that you can have anything if you just want it enough and work hard enough to achieve it—this is often a piece of self-aggrandisement offered by privileged people who have been the lucky recipients of a fortunate environment. I don’t believe in “conversion therapy”—I want to live in a world where people are free from oppression, the subtle kind and the not-so-subtle kind, for their natural, human, unimpeachable sexual orientation. I don’t believe people have much opportunity to bring about change in the levels of inequality, social immobility, and government and corporate power that weigh on them—the so-called “complainers,” it turns out, have much to complain about. Life is more of a Greek tragedy, less of a Richard Curtis movie. Circumstances conspire against us; we don't get anywhere near to reaching our potential. I agree with David Smail that psychotherapy’s tendency to suggest all a client’s problems exist within the client—to “blame the victim”—is disrespectful, unethical and oppressive. Smail takes the argument to an extreme, as if we have no personal agency at all. “There is no such thing as an autonomous individual,” he writes. But even from that vantage point, he sees a modest role for therapy—to provide clarity, encouragement and solidarity. Ultimately, change is not an event but an ongoing process. Therapy is perhaps less about achieving a specific, tightly-defined goal, and more part of an ongoing attempt to foster greater self-knowledge, and an enhanced capacity for love. Armed with these, the client (not to mention the therapist) is in a good position to heed the call of the “serenity prayer”: We walk out of the consulting room and back into real life with heightened reserves of courage to tackle what can be tackled, of serenity to accept what can’t be tackled, and of wisdom to know the difference between the two. January 1. We emerge from 2014, unsteady and slightly hung over, blinking at the harsh light of a new year. A clean slate. A line in the sand. A fresh start. This time round, surely, things will be different. We resolve to be fitter, happier, more productive in 2015. We will give up bad things: unhelpful food, people, duties, habits. We will instead do the things we always wanted to do. We will finally live the unique, courageous, beautiful life that we deserve. Why doesn’t it ever quite happen—why are those new year resolutions forgotten by February? Are we not rational, logical, conscious beings, able to make choices—masters of our own destiny? Are we not brave? We might make some mistakes along the way, but aren’t we in general trying to do the right thing, staying true to ourselves and our values, heading toward some kind of elevated, enlightened summit? We are inherently sensible and good . . . aren’t we? Perhaps not entirely. We’re not always sure what we really want—our true desires are often ambiguous, ambivalent, illogical or hidden from view. Our conscious, stated wishes can be completely at odds with our unconscious ones—Lacan said that faced with the possibility of a wish actually coming true, we often run the other way (Freud called this “the wish for an unsatisfied wish”). Sometimes, to our surprise, our behaviour doesn’t quite tally with our cherished principles and beliefs. The German philosopher Heidegger said we discover our intentions through our actions rather than the other way round, and neuroscientific studies have since confirmed that. You watch in disbelief as your hand goes up to volunteer for something you hadn’t even considered. You hear yourself agreeing with someone who flies in the face of opinions you held dear. You fall for someone who supposedly isn’t suitable, isn’t your “type.” Poets, priests and politicians—not to mention psychotherapists—preach wholesome, “family values,” with sincerity, while compartmentalising away their own chaotic, operatic private lives. Our motives, instincts and behaviours are not always pure. Humans are all perfectly capable, in a certain light, of being craven, weak, cruel—or criminal. We have an immense propensity for good . . . and for bad. Consider these famous psychology experiments: • In Festinger and Carlsmith’s 1959 research project, participants were made to carry out a really boring task, then they were asked to describe the task to a new recruit in glowing, positive terms. The ones that were paid a modest amount for lieing in this way later reported that they had changed their mind: they decided the task had actually been quite interesting. We go to extraordinary lengths to manage our “cognitive dissonance” and preserve the fiction that we are rational, logical, consistent and “good.” “I don’t smoke,” a friend once told me as she lit up yet another cigarette. • Our capacity for conforming to others was tested by Asch in 1951. In the experiment, a participant was brought into a room with eight fellow participants who were really stooges. The group was then shown three lines of differing lengths, and a reference line. All they had to do was state which line—A, B or C—was the same length as the reference line. The stooges all gave the same answer, which was clearly wrong. Half of the participants succumbed to peer pressure and gave the same wrong answer as the stooges on more than half of the trials. Only a quarter ignored the stooges and gave the right answer every time. • A newspaper report of the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese in New York claimed that 38 people had heard and seen the attack, which lasted an hour, but did nothing. Darley and Latane (1968) observed this “bystander apathy” in an experiment in which participants were unlikely to help someone apparently having a seizure if other people were present—the larger the group, the less likely the participant was to act. • In Zimbardo’s notorious, controversial 1971 Stanford Prison experiment, a mock jail was created: Some of the participants were randomly assigned to role play being prisoners, the others were to be guards. Freed from their own identities, the young participants took to their new roles; the “prison” quickly became all-too real. The “guards,” mostly idealistic, peace-loving young men, found themselves enjoying humiliating, abusing and even physically assaulting the prisoners. The experiment was stopped after 6 days. • Most chilling of all is the 1963 Milgram experiment in obedience. Each participant was told by the researcher that they would be posing questions to an unseen person behind a screen, and delivering a small electric shock each time a question was answered incorrectly. The researcher asked the participant to increase the voltage each time an incorrect answer was given. How far did the participants go? Nearly two-thirds went all the way—to the maximum voltage, past the point where the actor behind the screen had stopped screaming. Why do we do what we do? So our supposed rational, logical mind doesn’t quite seem to be in charge to the extent we imagined. It might think it’s steering the ship, but there appear to be other hands on the wheel, too, and some of them, at times, feel beyond our control. We don’t have absolute free will. But nor is everything pre-destined. Buddhists believe instead in a middle way: things happen as a result of multiple causes, conditions and connections. As Frankl and others have said, we have choice, but within constraints. We are neither free nor not free. What drives those choices? Where do we want the ship to go? There are no simple answers to this question. Theorists tend to follow one of four broad beliefs: • We are biological creatures. We are motivated by survival. Freud said we had natural instincts for sex and aggression; for love and death. Many years later, Dawkins wrote that we’re at the mercy of our “selfish genes.” The behaviourists believed that, like rats in a maze, we simply respond optimally to external stimuli. • We are individual psychological creatures. Maslow said we each have an innate tendency towards psychological growth, which happens via what has been called a “hierarchy of needs.” Once the basic physiological demands have been met (food, water, sleep, safety), we can find love, esteem and, finally, “self-actualisation,” which might be searching for knowledge, understanding, meaning or spirituality in life; a kind of transcendence. This was taken up by Rogers with his idea of “individuation”; by May, Fromm and other humanists. Some critics say this focus on self and individual autonomy gave rise to a selfish, navel-gazing “me-generation” of people only concerned with their own personal growth. • We are relational creatures. Bowlby was the first to say that we’re motivated by our powerful need to form social bonds: the way we formed attachments with early caregivers—or didn’t—influences all our subsequent human actions and interactions. Unlike some mammals, we are born half formed. We quickly learn to adapt to our environment. For better or worse, whatever we learned as children about how best to be in the world tends to manifest in lifelong repetitive patterns. The unconscious wish to gain parental approval persists long after the parents have gone. • We are societal creatures. We each exist within complex cultures that in subtle and not-so-subtle ways dictate the rules of the game. We are presented with a double bind: we are told to be true to our self, to find our own way, yet we are also under the influence of society’s laws, customs, rituals and beliefs. For Smail, this usually involves some kind of oppression from distal forces, especially political, economic and corporate power. The truth is, all of the above are at play. We are motivated by self and others, nature and nurture, the conscious and the unconscious, left brain and right brain. Drozek writes that motivation “emerges from body, mind, and environment including conscious and unconscious affects, intentions, proclivities, values, and ideals that are physiologically, emotionally, relationally, and culturally mediated. But it is exactly because motivation involves all these sources of experience, uniquely configured and textured in every life and every psyche, that we cannot easily make generalizations that would apply to all of humanity.” It’s hard enough to make generalizations that apply just to us, never mind all of humanity. The late British psychologist Mair broached the idea that we are each a “community of selves”; previously I’ve written that we are like a rubbish football team, filled with players who all wear the same kit and are subject to the same rules, but who all have different motivations and don’t always get along. So we can be at war with ourselves. We can get stuck. Human motivation is such a complex cocktail. No wonder cognitive behavioural therapy so often fails. And no wonder our new year’s resolutions are doomed. New year’s resolutions gone bad Here are three scenarios: • You resolve to lose weight. But your animal, survival-oriented self wants you to keep eating. Your teenage rebellious self says to hell with losing weight (not to mention social conformity). And your hurt, emotionally-starved self finds comfort and nourishment in food. (Who is it that wants to lose weight, anyway—is that your rational, logical self speaking? Or your social self that thinks you’ll be more lovable if you’re thinner? Or your societal, comforming self that is bombarded by cultural images and messages that offer only one very tightly-prescribed—and very skinny—conception of beauty?) • You resolve to relax more, not work so hard, and have more fun. But a primitive part of you is always anxiously on guard, hypervigilant to danger. Perhaps your child self learned from your parents that you will only be loved if you achieve great success. Your social, relational self says you “should” work hard, because that’s what your colleagues seem to be doing. And your societal self, too, tells you to get a sensible job, settle down, keep calm and carry on—that’s what everyone expects of you. • You decide you’re tired of being alone. You go through the motions of online dating. But the rejected self that was once unloved by a parent, or deeply hurt by a lover, secretly sabotages every approach to prevent the possibility of any further pain. The requirements for a future partner become absurdly numerous so as to ensure that they will never be met. In all these scenarios, we end up with a kind of internal mutiny on our hands. So perhaps new year’s resolutions are best avoided. They only set us up for inevitable failure and disappointment. Perhaps, instead of wishing for change, we might resolve in the coming year to try to be grateful for all that we have. To be more accepting of all our various imperfect selves. And those of the people around us, too. You can understand, accept and have compassion for things being exactly as they are. Or your can be filled with frustration, resentment and disappointment. What we sometimes fail to grasp is the paradox that the former mindset is much more likely than the latter to result in positive changes. When we consider the shortcomings of our lives, it's better to be empathic than emphatic. Love is a much better motivator than hate. Happy new year. |
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AuthorJohn Barton is a counsellor, psychotherapist, blogger and writer with a private practice in Marylebone, Central London. To contact, click here. |