INTEGRATIVE TRIANGLE - Freud, Reich and JungOverview- Freud, Reich and Jung as internal objects - how do they (and their r’ships) work within us - an holistic perspective on dis-integration - the triangle Freud, Reich and Jung - examples from supervision: Freud, Reich and Jung in three practitioners - applying the triangle - integration - some key principles In this talk I am interested in how our therapeutic ancestors live within us, how they contribute to our sense of integration or dis-integration as persons and as therapists. How do they inspire, influence or obstruct the project of psychotherapy integration ? What actually am I talking about when I say: I try to integrate Freud, Reich and Jung in my work ? I have never met them, I have no direct knowledge of them as people, I have read their writing (and I am fortunate enough to be able to read the original rather than the translation by others, which especially in Freud’s case makes a considerable difference). What we think we do and what we say we do as therapists can be a long way away from what we actually do. It is inevitable that the same caveat applies to Freud’s, Jung’s, Reich’s writing. So I know what they wrote and thought about what they did as therapists. But what claim can I lay to ‘integrating Freud, Reich and Jung in my work’? The only way I can talk about them and about ‘integrating’ them is through acknowledging that they are fantasies, and that they are internal objects. When I talk about Freud, Reich, Jung I am talking about MY fantasies, about them as MY internal objects. Freud, Reich, Jung as fantasies, as internal objects:
Donald Meltzer, the Oxford psychoanalyst, is known for saying something to the effect of: “my clients/patients are not in therapy with me, they are in therapy with my internal objects”, and for himself he is specifically thinking of Daddy Sigmund (Freud) and Mummy Melanie (Klein). According to Meltzer, your client’s unconscious does not feel contained by you, by what you think and intend or do as a therapist, they feel contained by how contained you feel by your internal objects. Your theoretical understanding, your technical skill, your professional competence matter but little on that level of containment (which - certainly in Meltzer’s view - is what really matters, rather than, for example, ‘client motivation’, therapeutic orientation, feedback and reality testing or other ‘common factors’; when we invoke the usually amorphous notion of the ‘quality of the therapeutic relationship’, isn’t it possible that we are pointing towards what Meltzer is talking about ?). What does that mean: feeling contained by my ‘internal objects’? It means your sense of internal integration and your ideas about what constitutes an integrative process are manifest in and shaped by your blueprint of integration: the relationship of your internal parents, more generally: the landscape of your internal objects. In simple terms it means: how do your internal mother and father get on ? How loving, creative, passionate, integrated is their relationship ? How split, conflicted, bickering, dis-integrated is their relationship ? In modern analytic thought the image of the parental couple is an important, if not the important yardstick for the degree of integration in the patient’s personality (see david mann “The Erotic Relationship”). Jung’s thinking is very close to this, to him the hieros gamos, the internal marriage, was of utmost importance in the individuation process. Reich did not formulate internal integration in terms of Mummy and Daddy, but in terms of body and mind, that to him was the yardstick of integration. Freud was too pessimistic to really have a blueprint, let alone yardstick for integration. The thing about the internal parental couple is: just as with your real parents, you are landed with them. You can’t command them to get on with each other, much as you would like to knock their heads together and get them to have the perfect relationship, so that you as the child end up getting proper love and attention. What Jung said about complexes in general, applies just as much to the ‘internal parental couple: we don’t have them, they have us. That means, integration is not something we primarily DO, but something we find or don’t find ourselves in. Integration or dis-integration is something we discover, recognise, suffer. It’s not something we can will into being. This balance between doing or achieving integration on the one hand, and suffering or surrendering to it on the other is crucial. There is what in archetypal terms we might call an Apollonian route to integration (through insight, will, discipline, pulling the fragments together) and there is an Dionysian route to integration (through surrendering to the fragmentation that always already is): here integration is a spontaneous process out of necessary dis-integration. So far psychotherapy integration has rather been dominated by the Apollonian style. In the terms of this conference, so far we’ve seen more of the Trojan war of integration than of the Odyssey. The Odyssey is the post-heroic journey of dis-integration and initiation. There is a tendency towards a forced ‘false’ kind of integration to avoid dis-integration (in line with our cultural addiction to Apollonian light and quiet unity). That always ends in monopolising take-over bids which wreck the very plurality required for integration where we want to do justice to each perspective on its own terms rather than subsuming other people’s ideas under my paradigm. In order to do justice to Apollonian AND Dionysian styles of integration, this talk needs to emphasise and is rooted in the value of dis-integration. I’m trying to do the pretty impossible job of singing the praises of Dionysian dis-integration whilst firmly maintaining an holistic perspective. No more or less impossible than psychotherapy itself. An holistic notion of dis-integration ...with each clientthe different theories offer various perspectives on the state of dis-integration which the client/patient brings to therapy and which brings the client to therapy in simple terms: body, emotion, mind and spirit seem to function as unrelated (dissociated) or conflicting (repressed) fragments, leading to the subjective experience of being at war with oneself, not loving oneself, being driven, repetitive patterns out of control; Wilber’s ‘European Split’ to the field as a wholeFollowers of Freud, Reich and Jung know relatively little of each other. psychotherapy as a field is similarly fragmented, conflicted, dis-integrated, and is therefore as much a symptom and a reflection of modern Western dis-integration as it is an attempted response to it. The field of psychotherapy reflects the psyche of its clients and practitioners - it’s a collective parallel process. In terms of their personal relationships, the historical development of their teaching into schools, in terms of the insularity of these schools, and in terms of the parental landsacpe they form in each of us, they make a pretty dis-integrated triangle. Without awareness of that triangle between Freud, Reich & Jung, as dis-integrated as it is, we cannot develop an holistic perspective. Without an holistic perspective we cannot develop integrative practice.My suggestion is that an holistic perspective on psychotherapy requires the integration of at least these three of our therapeutic ancestors Freud, Reich & Jung: each with their respective strengths and weaknesses. But if we take their teaching as giving us a model of how to achieve integration, we’re in exclusive heroic mode. So I would like to appreciate the contribution of these three geniuses not as heroes of integration, but as experts of dis-integration. We can see and use each of our forefathers as showing us the recipe for overcoming dis-integration. Or we can see them as sensitisers to dis-integration. Each of our forefathers offers a particular, precious and incisive, but also partial and incomplete perspective on the dis-integration of modern Western human beings. That gives each of them a unique capacity to deepen our sensitivity to certain aspects of dis-integration, and also certain shadow aspects which can exacerbate our own obliviousness to other aspects. Freud had a particular sensitivity to the denied conflictedness of the mind, Reich to the denied body, and Jung to the denied potential wholeness. In oversimplified terms we can say that each becomes a champion (self-elected) of one of the dissociated, conflicted fragments. Freud, Reich, Jung as fantasies, even if historically accurately perceived as the people they were, are nevertheless fantasies championing archetypal aspects of our psyche and our own sense of dis-integration / wholeness. FREUD:... becomes the champion of (a particular condition of) the mind: the vicissitudes of the mind when operating within repression, within European body/mind split Strengths (we derive from this)
Weaknesses
REICH: ... becomes the champion of the self-regulating, energetic wisdom of the ‘animal’ body as the redeemer of European body/mind split Strengths (we derive from this)
... literal, narcissistic, isolated medical Weaknesses
JUNG:becomes the champion of spirit / soul transcending the split Strengths (we derive from this)
omnipotent introverted individualist(?) Weaknesses
Examples from practice:
Frank (Jungian):
Martin (psychodynamic-integrative): extreme example:
Pauline (body/breathing):
You can see from these examples that it is possible to practice each approach in such a way that it also feeds and re-inforces dis-integration, and re-enacts and perpetuates internal conflict Application of triangle:in the triangle Freud, Reich, Jung, the shadow of each need the other two to compensate, and the shared blind spots of each two need the third for integration“In my fantasy of them as therapists to each other, I have pictured Jung saving Reich from his unsuccessful struggles with the world, and I have seen Reich breaking through the sophisticates walls of distrust that protected Jung from more intimate contact with men.” Integration:unless an integrative approach includes attention to the body and the mind and the soul and spirit (on their own terms), it will be difficult to attend to the intricate nature and quality of the client’s experience of dis-integration, and the relationship of those fragments with each other in the client’s inner world and manifested in the relationship
What is ‘holism’?holism as a notion was first used in the 1920’s nowadays it covers a multitude of sins, it’s a fashion term increasingly signifying nothing. Wilber defined it usefully in Sex, Spirituality, Ecology: matter - life - mind physio, bio, noo; Koestler holon = whole AND part; within each level heterarchy, between levels = hierarchy, heaps not wholes systems, chaos and complexity theory have made holism more concrete and tangible; giving it more shape and conceptual clarity self-regulation, self-organisation, emergent process versus established structure new structure a system can show the tendency for its constituent parts and fragments to organise themselves into an integrated whole which is larger than the sum of its parts this self-organising tendency can often be seen most clearly as coming into operation at the edge of chaos and dis-integration when a radically new, more complex and differentiated structure emerges in a quantum leap, just when the established structure is going to pieces this is the other half of entropy (the universe running itself down - this is the universe building itself up) holons within holons - Wilber joke this is inherently a relational theory (how is it organised = what are the relationships between parts ? how integrated - dis-integrated is a relational question parallel process: how does dis-integration on one level get repeated, reflected on the deeper, higher, more embracing level ?I want to develop a differentiated sense and concept of the the intricacy and fullness of dis-integration. There’s the labour of gathering the fragments, and there’s the non-labour of surrendering to them. There’s the heroic overcoming of fragmentation and the victim’s denial of the hope/possibility for integration. a conception which does justice to each of the fragments/parts on its own terms There is no integration without full and detailed embracing of dis-integration. |
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