Michael Soth - Articles & Papers: Extracts
No 'Relating Cure' without Embodiment
Michael Soth - Articles & Papers: Extracts |
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No 'Relating Cure' without Embodiment |
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| Soth, M. (2007) No ‘Relating Cure’ without Embodiment, unpublished | |
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In previous articles I suggested that there are two dualisms which our field has been struggling with (and against) over the last hundred years: the doctor-patient dualism (='medical model') and the body-mind dualism.
And I proposed that extricating ourselves from dualism is usually a process of oscillating from one extreme to the other, until we can fully engage the dialogue between the inherent polarities and eventually hold the contradiction between them in a paradoxical embrace. We then recognise that the mutually exclusive opposites are also mutually constitutive: as well as being antagonistic they also co-create and depend on each other.
In terms of the doctor-patient dualism, the field has swung from being embedded in Freud's 'medical model' assumptions to the humanistic 'anti-medical model', leaving us confused as to what we really mean when we say: "it's the relationship that matters". In the last issue I was proposing that we may be able to embrace both therapy as treatment and therapy as relationship as valid and necessary ingredients in therapeutic 'relating'.
In this article I want to focus on the notion of 'embodiment', and suggest that a similar paradoxical position is required to transcend and work with body-mind dualism.
Now we all know that much wiser heads have been broken on the philosophy of the body-mind conundrum - Schopenhauer has called it the 'world knot'.
Ken Wilber, summarising the research and writing on the subject, says: "the influential philosophers addressing the mind-body problem are more convinced than ever of its unyielding nature. There is simply no agreed-upon solution to this world-knot." (Wilber 2000, p. 175)
The origins of our field are steeped in body-mind dualism, or - as the tradition of Body Psychotherapy is used to calling it: the body-mind split (or what Wilber, more accurately, calls the 'European Split' - "which is a peculiar lesion in the modern and post-modern consciousness"). These origins go back to the late 19 th century when the three disciplines of psychoanalysis, neuroscience and genetics were born roughly at the same time. Consequently, all three have inherited and carried the zeitgeist of that time, and to some extent have been defined by it .
I have struggled to capture the basic assumptions, the inherent paradigm of that zeitgeist , each time I am asked to explain - ideally "in terms that a five-year old can understand" [in the words of Denzel Washington as the lawyer in the film 'Philadelphia'] - what counselling can learn from neuroscience.
Some socio-historical and philosophical compromises were required, but as a result of my struggles I can herewith present to you my 'Thomas the Tank Engine'-version of neuroscience: according to this vastly over-simplified version (please, endulge me!), the late 19 th century was in the grip of a dominant fantasy reminiscent of the figure all British parents know as 'the Fat Controller'. The world was imagined as mechanism directed by the quasi-divine representative of an order which the 'good' engines obey, and the 'bad' engines disturb. As all well-trained counsellors will recognise, this arrangement translates fairly neatly into Freud's Super-Ego (=Fat Controller), Ego (the good, dutiful, reality-adjusted, obedient engines), and Id (the selfish, greedy and impulsive engines). In this universe, order is maintained from above, all disturbance is a function of willful irrationality and all change for the better is top-down, goal-directed, linear, rational.
I am suggesting that the late 19 th century perceived reality through the lenses of this world view and found corroboration of its assumptions everywhere . Initially neuroscience believed that the brain was the seat of the mind, instructing and directing the body in the same way the Fat Controller directed his island of Sodor. The implied Cartesian dualism was based on the equation mind = consciousness = rationality over and against 'dumb matter' = body = unconsciousness. Later, throughout the 20th century,through detailed understanding of the electrical conductivity of nerve cells, the Brain as the command centre of the Fat Controller was to morph into a Computer, but the assumption regarding top-down maintenance of order remained. The Fat Controller kept upgrading his technology, but his central command position remained unquestioned and unassailable until the late 20 th century. Until the 1960's, for instance, it was largely taken for granted - by both psychoanalysis and behaviourism - that any 'mental' problems had to be understood and dealt with by strenghtening a variety of external and internal Fat Controllers, i.e. insight, verbalisation, effort, will and discipline along with gratification delay and other gifts of "Civilization and its Discontents" (Freud 1930).
The anti-authoritarianism, postmodernism, feminism etc. of the last 40 years, along with chaos, systems and complexity theories in science, however, have succeeded in undermining the Fat Controller's credibility and top-dog position. Over the last two decades, both neuroscience and genetics had to purge themselves of certain "central dogmas" (Fox-Keller 2000) which were originally seen as definitional of the discipline itself [To back up these claims at least minimally, I will illustrate the following section with a series of quotes by eminent geneticists themselves, all from Fox-Keller, E. 2000 "The Century of the Gene" - an abundance of similar statements could be found for neuroscience].
As a plethora of publications are now available introducing neuroscience to psychological practitioners (Gerhardt, Corrigall/Wilkinson, Wilkinson), I will just indicate some headlines, and focus on summarising some of the clinically relevant implications regarding the new conception of the relationship between body and mind.
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Mirror neurons provide an elegant explanantion for how one person's internal state can appear in another's experience.
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Reich provided us with the foundations of a holistic psychotherapy theory that pre-dates neuroscience and does not rely on it, but actually gets confirmed by it. As I will indicate below, Body Psychotherapy's championing of the body has come at a price, and it required certain one-sided assumptions and polarisations which we are slowly working through (refs). But what it does establish is a non-dualistic framework for depth-psychological relating in which our perceptions of, our engagement with and our responses to the client's problems, wounds and negative patterns are all understood as bodymind processes and relationships.
By cherry-picking a few significant examples, I wanted to give a sense of how enriching the radical de-construction of the body-mind dualism has been in neuroscience, and that there are ubiquitous and pervasive implications for our own profession.
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Having emerged under the aegis of the Fat Controller, the various approaches within our field [with some notable exceptions] are each rife with body-mind dualism in terms of theories, practices and assumptions deriving from that inheritance. Some approaches which claim they are holistic, maintain an holistic model for the client , but do not extend this to the therapeutic position itself, let alone the therapeutic relationship as a system. Whatever core model we follow, its inherent dualism is bound to ensure that aspects of our model will obstruct our work as much as facilitating it.
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However, in taking the new bodymind paradigm on board and trying to apply it, our profession is likely to encounter a major conundrum.
We can have an intuitive sense that something like a body-mind split is structured into our culturally given experience and informs our client's (and our own) psychological struggles. We may understand mentally-theoretically that we have traditionally approached these struggles through a dualistic stance which is bound to exacerbate and perpetuate these struggles. And we may be able to borrow certain metaphors and recognitions from other, non-dualistic disciplines.
But we will not be able to simply switch our therapeutic position and begin to work from a 'new' non-dualistic stance just because we 'believe' in it. Moreover, as I suggested in my last article, in extricating oneself from being unknowingly embedded in a dualism, more often than not one goes through a process of oscillating between the dualistic extremes.
Just such a switch into the opposite extreme can be seen to have occurred in the 80-year old tradition of Body Psychotherapy: in trying to escape Freud's pessimism, rooted in the irreconcilable opposition between instinct and ego (or later: life and death instinct), Reich formulated a holistic meta-psychology [which he called 'functionalism' - in today's language 'holism' by any other name] based on both mind and body arising as complementary and antagonistic opposites from a common energetic unity. We can see this as a precursor for the increasingly fashionable notion of the essential 'oneness of body and mind' which - we may agree - has more than just a ring of truth about it. However, when we look at how this 'truth' has been used, we are entitled to become suspicious: under the guise of this 'holistic' truth, we often find comprehensive denial and non-engagement with the 'reality' of the body-mind split.
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This has important implications for our definition of the term 'embodiment'. There are two main problems with how it is commonly used and understood. The first is a confusion between embodiment as a physical reality versus a subjective experience. The second is between (what I would call) an idealised notion of embodiment versus a paradoxical one. Let's consider them one at a time.
I have seen it argued that Body Psychotherapy is making a big deal out of 'embodiment', that actually we are all 'embodied' because we all have bodies . Therefore - the argument goes - therapists of all schools cannot help but work and have always worked with their bodies.
In my view, that is a gross misunderstanding of how the notion of 'embodiment' has evolved and has been used: the meaning of the term acquires significance only in the context of an agreed intuitive understanding of the chronic dis-embodiment at the root of our cultural malaise. We cannot talk about how to 'use' the body in therapy without some recognition of the 'use', mis-use and ab-use of the body under 'normal' circumstances.
I would suggest that - rather than a simple fact of life - the value and power of the term derives from the idea that 'embodiment' is not just a given, but that one's experience can rest in (or emerge out of) embodiment or not , and that this can make an enormous difference to the quality of one's life.
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As I suggested before, the hallmark of a transcended dualism is that one can inhabit the paradox at the heart of it. This requires more than switching from a notion of 'body-mind split' into an opposite notion of 'body-mind unity'. In fact, it is the simultaneous 'truth' of both these opposite notions which we are appreciating when we are holding them in a paradoxical embrace. Although as Westerners we may take a more laborious and circuitous route towards it, we can find that recognition of paradox echoed elsewhere, for example Shunryu Suzuki ('Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind'): "Our body and mind are not two, and not one. If you think that your body and mind are two, that is wrong. If you think that your body and mind are one, that is also wrong. Our body and mind are both two and one."
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The client's potential for recovery, the wound itself and the defence against the wound are all rooted in the bodymind (across all the levels and systems that constitute its wholeness) - they are bodymind processes. I try to understand all our work, all modern psychology as body/mind process within the context of the European Split. I see no hope in attempts at body-mind integration without first recognising and being able to experience - without flinching - the reality of the split. As I have tried to show, for me working with body-mind dualism is not simply a question of counterbalancing, switching or oscillating, but entering the conflict.
This paradoxical embrace of body-mind split versus bodymind unity can be held alongside the equivalent paradox of therapy as treatment versus therapy as relationship . In my view, our capacity to hold both in the midst of the emotional turmoil of the therapeutic relationship, and to re-formulate all our models and techniques from that position, would help take our profession a good step from the 19th into the 21st century.