Mobiles and modalities: whose is the shiniest?
I’m not used to playing
the part of psychotherapeutic agony uncle, but I recently received the
following letter. With my steaming mug
of liquorice herbal tea at my side I read:
“Dear Alterego
I wonder if you could
help me. I’m training to be a TA
psychotherapist, and thought I was making good progress. At first I learnt to observe my clients and
help them to identify recurring themes and patterns linked to the past in order
to enhance their self awareness and insight.
Albeit with some painful soul-searching I came to the Stark realisation
that I was only being a 1-person therapist!
For the past year I’ve been focusing on becoming a better, 1½ -person
therapist, decentering from my own
experience and empathically immersing myself in that of my client, thus
providing them with a ‘corrective’ experience – one they didn’t have as a
child. I must say that my work, along
with my self confidence as a therapist, has improved enormously.
All was going well until
I heard about the 2-person therapist! It
came as a bit of a shock, and again left me feeling somewhat deficient, second
best – just like when I bought my iphone4 some time back, only to superseded by
the 4s model, and more recently the iphone5!
Both my iphone 4 and my 1½ -person therapist-self seem suddenly and
sadly old hat, lacking ‘relational depth’, and inferior! It seems that to be ‘with-it’, state of the
art, relational I need to learn to become a 2-person practitioner (and get an iphone 5!). I’m told that this will involve me focusing
not just on my client but on myself and our here-and-now intersubjective
engagement with each other, involving mutuality and reciprocity. It does sound very like the experience they
say you get with the iphone5, a more interactive, sensitive and contactful touch
screen experience! I’ve heard that
you’re only a relational TA therapist
if you’re the 2-person version. Does
this mean that I’m not relational? I thought I was!
Yours disconsolately,
Brin Reece”
I took a big swig of my liquorice
and mint herbal tea and replied with the following.
“Dear Brin Reece, (was
that his real name I wondered – it almost sounded like an anagram!)
I can understand how you
feel. I have an iphone 4s and to be
honest (and 2-person?) regard mere mortals, and the diminished portals of their
iphone4, with an attuned yet patronizing sympathy. On the other hand I look up enviously to the proud owners of the latest iphone5 with a
mixture of envy, desire and pointless self flagellation. My friends say I should focus on embracing my
iphone 4s, and by doing so accept myself, since there’s always something out
there in bright new packaging, promising a better, superior and more complete
experience, only to be superseded by something apparently shinier, but not
really new.
Oh and I almost forgot about
the other matter of the 2-person psychotherapist! I’m sorry to have to break the news to you,
but the 2-person version has already
been superseded – by the Tudor’s ‘2-person +’ and Cornell’s ‘2-person separate’
versions – I won’t even go into what they mean now because I don’t want to
confuse you or depress you further (have I?).
But take heart, like with mobile phones there’s a plethora of
psychotherapeutic ‘providers’ of the 2-person-version, even just within TA,
many of whom don’t even bother with ideas of the unconscious or
transference.
Within the
psychotherapeutic sub-culture psychoanalysis, somewhat like Apple and Google,
has generally been viewed as a superior model - the real McCoy – but then
they’ve got the granddaddies of them all, Sigmund and Carl (the Steve Jobs and
Larry Page of psychoanalysis) as opposed to our mere second generation models of
the founding fathers Carl, Fritz, and
Eric. However, the psychoanalytic tribe
were way behind the humanistics in reframing the therapeutic relationship as an
encounter between two people as ‘subjects’ ie each with their own subjective,
personal realities, scripts, transferences or whatever.
To say you’re only doing
‘relational TA’ if you’re using the 2-person version doesn’t mean that you’re
not relational if you’re not 2-person – if you see what I mean. I don’t use the ‘relational TA’ label for
myself Brin, despite my adherence to ‘The Principles’ (who doesn’t these days?)
because for me it carries the implication (ulterior transaction?) that other
types of TA practice are not
relational – and thus lesser in some way - plus I simply don’t like labels on
the grounds that they tend to feed unhelpful competitiveness, defensiveness and
splitting.
We transactional
analysts love lists of things, and numbers – or even better, numbers in circles
– but it doesn’t mean that 2person+ is better
than 1, or 1.5 or 2-person versions, even if it does very much create that
impression! They are simply different
modes of engagement for different clients at different stages of the
therapeutic process. Who really wants to limit themselves to a
big clumsy dull old handset with a small screen? Who really
wants to be 1-person when there’s 2-person+ available? Who really wants to be practicing ‘non-relational TA’! Not me Brin.”
Yours relationally,
Alterego
I went off to make
myself another liquorice and mint herbal wondering how he (and you dear
reader!) had received what I had to say, thinking maybe I’d give him a ring on
my brand new iphone5! I did ring him but
the line was dead. It was only then that it hit me!
Brin’s name was an anagram. Brin Reece - Eric
Berne! He was trying to communicate to
me – thus the mobile phones metaphor.
Was he was struggling with the emergence of 2-person relational
transactional analysis (the iphone5) – reversing the traumatic move he’d made
away from the unconscious in breaking from/being rejected by the psychoanalytic
establishment? Did he bridle at what
maybe seemed to him as the casting of traditional, classical TA (1-person?) as
outmoded (the iphone4). I hoped that my
letter had reassured him.
That night I had a dream, one that I took as yet another message from
Brin/Eric; I was at the national TA conference banquet dinner and everybody,
all the schools including ‘relational TA’, were there. The dessert
was a magnificent Apple Charlotte suitably accompanied by a
delicious deluxe ice cream, which we
were all enjoying, together! I’ll leave
you to work out the associations – at both the unconscious and organizational
levels (I’ve italicized to make it easier).
I hope and trust that Brin/Eric is resting in peace with it all after
all?
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