In the first of her contributions as our regular new My Practice columnist, Simone Lee remembers her counselling training, and later years of teaching skills to trainees. She emphasises how, although psychological theories and models have an undoubtedly important place in training and practise, ultimately, the fundamental element of therapy is ‘…to meet our clients where they are in their experience… allowing curiosity about that unique being with whom we speak, whose experience can never truly be understood, but only wondered at.’
Simone’s words brought to mind these lines from Jung who, along with Freud, is considered to be a founder of the psychotherapeutic movement: ‘Learn your theories as well as you can, but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.’1 Jung’s words, published in 1928, echo down the century, as does Freud’s seminal text, The Ego and the Id, published five years earlier
Just over 100 years after its publication, Jay Beichman considers the relevance of Freud’s theories today in Freud: the enduring legacy, reminding us of their limitations – in part borne out of the very different political, cultural and social era in which his ideas were formed – but also of the extent to which they have gained common currency in contemporary thinking, such that many people might be unaware of their origins.
Following on from this, Paul Terry (see page 14) provides a practical illustration of how the psychoanalytic concepts of countertransference, projective identification and the destructive superego can be applied in clinical practice in Disentangling entanglements. Not in the stereotype of the cool, silent, objective, quasi-scientific, bespectacled analyst sitting behind a prone patient on the couch, but in an embodied, relational way that enables the reflective practitioner to apply theoretical concepts to help make them to make sense of their own experience in the room with a client.
Herein lies a key contention on which Freud and Jung fundamentally diverged. While Freud determinedly, and ultimately it could be argued with futility, fought for psychoanalysis to be seen as having a scientific basis, Jung maintained that what he referred to as ‘practical medicine’, ‘…is and always has been an art’.1
Accordingly, Jung concludes: ‘True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories… Not theories, but your own creative individuality alone must decide.’1 This is, of course, hard for novice trainee counsellors to get their heads around. The inevitable anxiety that both counsellor and client will feel in the therapeutic encounter, with all the inherent uncertainty, mystery, complexity and confusion it brings, can naturally evoke a need in the therapist to reach for theories and techniques to help them to tolerate what it is to bear and stay with the unknown.
This, I imagine, must create a challenge for those organisations and individuals that have been part of the unenviable process of mapping the competences, practice requirements, length and level of training and experience to come up with the Scope of Practice and Education (SCoPEd) framework. Necessary, perhaps, but also arguably impossible to some degree. For ultimately, when it comes to touching the ‘miracle of the living soul’, how and where we’ve trained, the extent of our clinical and lived experience, and how competences have been assessed, while meaningful, can only ever be ‘the map’ and ‘not the territory’.2
John Daniel, Editor privatepractice.editorial@bacp.co.uk
