John Neumin DCTP, Member CAPT

The Subversive Nature of Psychotherapy (Abridged)

Our theories will go awry, will all throw dust into our eyes, unless we dare to confront not only the world but the soul as well, and begin to be amazed at our lack of amazement in being alive, at our taking life for granted.

Confronting the soul is an intellectual exposure that tears open the mind to incalculable questions, the answers to which are not easily earned. Modern man, therefore, believes that his security lies in refraining from raising such issues. Ultimate questions have become the object of his favourite unawareness.

- Abraham Heschel
(Between God and Man, 1951, pg 191)

Why are most people instinctively afraid of therapy? Why do people who have little idea of what therapy is, get so uncomfortable about therapy? Why do clients and therapists who have been involved in therapy for years and directly know its value, not only ‘resist’ it, but often negate or attack it? Why do the partners and families of people in therapy often make great efforts to sabotage it? Why does much of our culture as a whole deny, fear, attack, and denigrate what is meant to be helpful and generative?

In contrast with non-depth therapies, psychodynamic therapy changes clients from ‘the bottom up’. Counselling tries to teach, educate or find solutions to our problems, medication to alter our physiological / neurological reactions to them, and the goal of behavioural therapies is to help us develop new habits so we can avoid problems or better cope with them. Psychotherapy begins with the radical premise that the real issues we are struggling with are hidden far below the manifest problems we consciously experience.

When we begin therapy, our explicit concerns and the symptoms of our suffering are only a part of the work. In psychotherapy we try to listen to our implicit world view, our underlying values and assumptions, and the core experiences that make up the ground from which our concerns and issues grow. What we hope to do when we practice psychodynamic therapy is affect these foundational structures by providing a medium in which a ‘confrontation with the soul’ is enabled. If we do our work well, if we engage our needs and motivations to change and grow, then it necessarily follows that the structures that were built on previously shaky foundations begin to topple, or must be dismantled. As clients, when faced with this loss or destruction (though it may be initiated and driven by our own need from growth), our natural tendency is to try to prevent this and to hold on to what we have so painstakingly built. And so it follows that depth therapy is intrinsically linked to resistance.

Freud was very aware and quite proud of the subversive nature of therapy on both personal and societal levels. At the very beginning of his Introductory Lectures he had this to say about a new client starting an analysis and the layperson’s attempt to understand the analytic process:

"And here I can at once give you an instance of how in this field a number of things take place in a different way - often, indeed, in an opposite way- from what they do elsewhere in medical practice. . . But when we take a neurotic patient into psychoanalytic treatment we point out the difficulties of the method to him, its long duration, the efforts and sacrifices it calls for; and as regards its success, we tell him we cannot promise it with certainty, that it depends on his own conduct, his understanding, his adaptability and his perseverance. . . I will show you how the whole trend of your previous education and all your habits of thought are inevitably bound to make you into opponents of psychoanalysis, and how much you would have to overcome in yourselves in order to get the better of this instinctive opposition."

( Freud, Introductory lectures Lecture 1 page 1, bolding mine)

So it begins. We come to therapy despite our fear, despite any apprehension we might have, any warnings we might have heard. Suffering, desperate, sometimes with little hope and occasionally with a healthy curiosity, we bring ourselves into therapy hoping to make our lives better. But it is our very self that is the most immediate and direct focus of psychotherapy’s subversive action. We may not know how we will change or where our therapies will lead, but we almost always have an intuition that we will be asked to change in far more radical ways than we are aware.

This subversion of our sense of self can sometimes be so unpredictable, so global and so deep as to sometimes feel terrifying. Conservatives become more radical, radicals more conservative, fearful people tune into their courage, ‘brave’ people tune into their fear. Materialists sheds their possessions and find freedom; others shed their ‘freedom’ and find commitment, responsibility and meaning. Things we pride ourselves on are revealed as defences and softened, and traits we reject are acknowledged, developed and become central. The ‘self’ is necessarily and inevitably subverted over and over again. For most, if not all, therapy means deep changes in who we are, not once, but continuously.

Of course, these personal changes go hand in hand with how we relate to the people around us. As we change, our relationships must as well. If our relationships change, then to some extent, the people we relate to must also change. Here is where it becomes problematic. Most of us really don’t want to change, especially if someone else is felt to be driving that change, and so this inevitably creates stress in our relationships. In a way, we have the very empowering and privileged position of having, in some sense, chosen to make changes in our lives. Our partners and families however, find themselves reacting to changes that are requested, suggested or demanded by ‘someone else’, and so inevitably they resist many of our changes, and often they openly oppose our therapy.

Some things that my clients have reported to me that their partners have said about their therapy: “You were fine before you started therapy.” “I don’t know what you are doing there.” “What a waste of money.” “We can’t afford it.” “Aren’t you finished yet?” “What do you talk about?” “Why can’t you talk to me instead?” “Can I come to your sessions?” These statements and questions are not simply concerns stemming from an unfamiliarity with the therapy process. Our therapies are, indirectly, threatening to subvert the people we are most closely and intimately involved with.

So much of what we bring to therapy is focused on our struggles in intimate relationships. At times, as we slowly start to change and these relationships are powerfully stressed, this cumulative web of connections powerfully influences us not to change. Sometimes therapy can/must pull a whole family along. When we change, we are pushing up against the web of relationships in which we are embedded and find resistance. We are sometimes forced to cut some ties, strengthen others, pull some in and fight to change many more. We actively and consciously try to alter the basic nature of how we relate. Though this is rarely part of our plan, something like this must happen. We must subvert the systems that we have taken part in if we are to have any hope of bettering our lives.

In some ways we learn this subversion directly from the theraputic process. We are asked to be aware of how we relate to our therapist and tell them how they feel about it. We do not confine our conversation to the parameters dictated by social norms or niceties. We open up deeper and deeper layers of how we feel, what we want, and what we need. We say the things we have always been afraid to say, we share our secrets, we struggle to be true to who we really are, regardless of what other people or society might say about whether or not it is ‘acceptable’. Eventually, as we struggle to experience ourselves in this new way, we find it hard to keep it confined to a therapy session. And so the subversion spreads.

But we do not come to therapy simply to change ourselves and how we experience our lives, or how we relate to our friends and family. Though we can at times experience profound inner growth with little obvious outer change, usually our psychological changes involve more tangible changes as well. Marriages end as we learn more about what we want or don’t want, or develop our capacity to love, or they begin for the same reasons. Careers are changed, friendships re-evaluated, and sometimes lives are turned upside down. It’s true that life changes everyone and everything, but for those of us in therapy, the changes are often accelerated -- at times it may seem to someone outside of the process that there are no foundations at all. When Freud recommended that new clients not make any dramatic changes in their life for the first couple of years of their analysis, he was not only warning against the defensive possibility of premature change, but also acknowledging the powerful potential of therapy to spur us to make outer changes.

Therapy can change our politics, our goals, and our values. By focusing on deeper and deeper structures of meaning we are led to overturn or overthrow the very bedrock of our lives. Our understandings and experiences of -- Love and Hate. Life and Death. Meaning and Meaninglessness. Choice and Limitation. Connection and Isolation. Good and Evil. God and Absence. -- are all challenged. The fundamental stances we have towards all of these issues are woven into every experience we have, and exploring them is central to every depth therapy.

James Bugental, an analytically trained and existentially oriented psychotherapist, has this to say about therapy’s subversion of our deepest understandings of life:

"Our resistance is not just cultural conditioning. It is our dim sensing that once we take up residence in our own centres, we may never find the familiar world familiar again. It may be our intuition that assuming the throne of subjective autonomy means bearing the unrelenting burden of choice, carrying the inexonerable load of guilt for having failed our potential, and living always before a vista of uncertainty, ambiguity and incompleteness.

So confronted, who would not flee from the prospect? It is scarcely an offer that can’t be refused - as literally millions refuse it daily."

- Bugental (Art of the Psychotherapist, 1991)

Therapy’s subversion is often this radical. We assert that our life is meaningful, and thus all life is meaningful. We treat ourselves as beings who act in meaningful ways, and whose connection to meaning is complex, rich and deep. This perspective is very different than what we find it popular culture where dreams are understood as random firings of a brain trying to clear itself of garbage, depression is reduced to a problem of brain chemistry, one’s life goals are thought to be obvious, and right living is prescribed in simple homilies and prescriptions.

There are phases in most of our therapies that are particularly intense. Times when we may embody the Kabbalist saying, “He who saves one life saves the world.” If we take our therapy seriously, if we take life seriously, then we must grapple with the idea that the subversion that is unleashed in our therapy can ‘change the world’. Our changes ripple out from us in unexpected ways, and effect more than we can predict or imagine.

Perhaps the most subversive aspect of all of therapy is its profound rootedness in love. Ironically, it is this underpinning of therapy that is by definition benevolent, this normally desirable quality, that many find the most difficult to discuss. Not only is the nature of a loving therapeutic stance very difficult to systematize or simplify, but it could fall into sentimentality, or arrogance. Saying that therapy is in any way loving, is a sign of hubris, or is naive, or unsophisticated. This fear seems to pervade most analytically informed dialogue. Yet the loving nature of therapy and the subversion of love are both undeniable. Fortunately, writers like Freud, Suttie, Betelhiem and many other groundbreaking figures in the field, have occasionally broken the silence (what Suttie called “The Taboo on Tenderness”) and encouraged us to be open and honest about what we see, feel and understand as the ultimate foundation of therapy.

Jonathan Lear, in a wonderful and revolutionary rereading of Freud's concepts of Eros and Thanatos has this to say about it:

"Psychoanalysis, Freud once said, is a cure through love. On the manifest level, Freud meant that psychoanalytic therapy requires the analysand’s emotional engagement with the analyst and the analyst’s empathic understanding of his patient. But the latent content of this remark, which Freud only gradually discovered, and then through a glass darkly, is that psychoanalysis in its essence promotes individuation and is itself a manifestation of love. (Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature, 1990)

Let us count the ways of love. Love is active. It flows through humans, but it is larger than human life. It is through love that humans, and the rest of living nature, acquire form, but humans do not acquire form by being passively affected by love. What it is for love to run through a person is that we ourselves become a locus of activity. That is what it is for love to permeate our nature. A person’s activity may be an expression of love, but there is no outside perspective from which this activity is revealed as a mere illusion of agency. There is no neutral perspective from which love disappears."

Therapists do not have to be saints to give us a time and a place to grow. They do not have to be perfect or even extremely good at loving to catalyze our maturation as loving people. As collaborators in a process that is wider and deeper than both participants, they only have to engage in the struggle to ‘nurture a potential, ‘facilitate a process’, ‘honour a truth’, or in Freud's terms, ‘develop an instinct’, that lives in and through us all."

Copyright 2008 John Neumin

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