Contemplating Practice
Sanja Oakley and Albyn Hall
review
Anthony Stadlen’s
Society for Existential Analysis Forum
answering questions on how he practises psychotherapy
Friday 31 May 2002
[Hermeneutic Circular (Newsletter of the Society for Existential Analysis), October 2002: 18-23.]
Response from Sanja Oakley
During his seminar on Series and Nexus in the Family
[Laing: ‘Series and Nexus in the Family’. Inner Cir...]
a week before the Friday Forum, I somehow managed to provoke Anthony Stadlen into a vigorous defence of how he neither challenges nor gets into the client’s world. He once surprised me by explaining Heidegger’s contention that ‘empathy is for the degenerate’ – now he was challenging me with a rejection of the necessity of ‘challenging’. On reflection, I decided Anthony Stadlen had more words at his disposal than most of us to describe what he does and why he does it, hence his reluctance to use vulgar words like ‘challenging’.
As I am walking to the Tavistock on a sunny evening, I decide to expose other participants to the same challenge and ask Anthony to explain once again how he engages the client in a process of therapy – I’m planning to heckle him! Instead, he ‘gets’ me: on my way into the building he asks me to write a review of the discussion. As I try to wriggle out of the job (offering to find a replacement ‘reporter’), he tells me he doesn’t usually ask ‘anybody’ and that the person he considers for the task has to be very intelligent. Flattered, for the rest of the evening I am too busy taking notes to enquire about the conspicuous absence of ‘challenging’ in Anthony’s being-with-clients.
I will now try and relate the discussion as it unfolded, illuminating how Anthony works when he sits with his clients.
Steve Ticktin, who chairs the event, tries to open by gently suggesting that Anthony might want to tell us about his practice. Somehow this raises Anthony's blood pressure (my very modernist description/explanation of what occurred) and he responds: “For some unknown reason you invited me here to tell you how I practise. So, what would you like to know?” Steve – still unruffled – concludes that Anthony wants us to ask him questions. The atmosphere in the room suddenly feels very buzzy as 40 of us (I imagine) try to ‘be very, very good’ and ask the perfect question – fast! Sarah Young comes to rescue first when she enquires about Anthony’s position regarding self-disclosure.
On Self-Disclosure
Anthony starts by looking at the concept in its wider sense and says: “A therapist discloses herself with every breath she takes from the moment she enters the room. Everything discloses the person. It is not usually necessary to disclose the intimate details about a therapist’s life, but it might be useful. It is difficult to make strict rules about that.”
Sarah Young delves deeper and enquires whether there might be times when Anthony would self-disclose intimate details. Anthony reiterates his flexible position and replies that it all depends on what the situation feels like; people sometimes ask personal questions and then the task is to try and judge just what the truth of the situation between the client and you at that particular moment is (Anthony is big on ‘truth’ – as we shall see later): “If it is crucial for the client to know whether I have children, why is this important? Is it so that they can trust that I can understand them? If they don’t believe that I can understand them, I need to explore that. I’d say that I couldn’t have experienced everything everybody who comes to me has experienced, and aren’t they familiar with the concept of imagination?” Here Anthony gets a giggle from the audience. His sense of humour is arresting – I can imagine him using this gift as a therapist in order to painlessly challenge the client. I am also starting to realise that I need to find another word for ‘challenging’, otherwise I’ll make Anthony’s blood boil again! The controversial word is becoming difficult to avoid – in his next line Anthony is on his way – via Heidegger – to challenge the concept of empathy. He calls it a ‘dodgy’ concept. Scheler, too, before Heidegger, contested empathy; for Heidegger only the degenerate and alienated deploy empathy.
On Why Anthony Tries to Avoid Practising Empathy
Suddenly unsure about the level of his audience’s erudition, Anthony stops to ask his audience: “Are you familiar with this [Heidegger on empathy]?” The room fills with knowing smiles. We might not know about Heidegger’s position on empathy, but we know that if we say we don’t know, we will encourage Anthony and then we might not be able to stop him again. The truth is, we want to know more. We make ourselves look so unknowing, he feels he needs to start from the beginning and indeed he does start with the existential notion “you are familiar with...we are always already with the person.” Therefore, Anthony says, you don’t have to infer anger – it’s a direct experience: “Sometimes you need to check your impressions with the person and correct the experience. Empathy presupposes two separate boxes, one inferring from the other what it’s like to be inside that box. Being-with and seeing who you are doesn’t mean I know what you’ve had for breakfast, but I could see what sort of person you are the moment I set eyes on you, to some extent; I may be mistaken about that, and may change my perception. But most of the time, it is the first impressions that stay.”
The level of arousal in the room has by now reached a high pitch as every-one is stimulated by the above ideas – things we always already knew but didn’t dare articulate. (I finally look up a replacement for ‘challenge’ in my Thesaurus and, amongst other words, I find inquiry, exploration, discovery and dialogue. To Anthony’s defence it also lists interrogation, inquisition, cross-examination and even post-mortem.) A brave participant questions Anthony’s last statement by pointing out that his impressions of people change all the time. There is a hiddenness about people, Anthony explains: “We change our impressions about people as more aspects of a person come into view. The person is not a mysterious something behind what we see, which we have to infer by empathy.” Hans Cohn pleads with us not to start thinking we can put ourselves inside the person, as some therapists think they should do. This is exactly what ‘projective identification’ means, he explains, but we can’t inhabit somebody else...
By tuning into the discussion, we manage to over-excite our speaker and he proceeds to tell us about the etymology and the history of the word ‘empathy’. It is Greek for feeling in, much used in aesthetics and invented by Lipps, a philosopher, contemporary of Freud. The dictionary defines it as ‘trying to understand a work of art by projecting yourself into it’. “How narcissistic,” Anthony snarls, “I try not to practise empathy.”
You’d think that having made his point so passionately, Anthony could now leave the subject altogether. But no...by this juncture he is at war with empathy and, being a quality historian, Anthony brings us more evidence to prove his point. Anthony tells us that on 16 June, he and Peter Swales will spend 12 hours showing how Freud misses the horns on Michelangelo’s Moses (and a lot else) by reading his own feeling into the sculpture. Apparently, Freud is so keen to empathise that he loses the point and subsequently generations of analysts and art students do the same. At this moment Simone Lee throws me a sorry glance. Always already with, she must have somehow resonated with my concern that I was going to miss this point; brought up as a communist, my bible knowledge is patchy and makes it difficult for me to to be open to the context (Freud’s problem in this instance exactly [except that he grew up with the Bible. A. S.]). Realising he’s moved away from a discussion of his practice, Anthony juxtaposes his own practice with his last comment on Freud: “This is what I try to do in my practice - open up to people’s context.”
Laura Barnett wants to find out how Anthony explains her feeling battered and bruised after a session when the client isn’t feeling like that at all. Then a few months later the client reports a similar feeling. Is she carrying an emotion they haven’t yet had? (She also uses the opportunity to grass on the supervisor who tells her she is merging with her clients.) Anthony is keen to demystify the experience: “This happens with friends and families. It is not something that only happens in therapy... We pick up peculiar things... There is telepathy, but picking up mood is not telepathy... We pick up mood from body, from breathing, etc. These experiences are conceptualised in all sorts of peculiar ways, e.g. ‘counter-transference’, but it’s really very simple.”
On Therapists Being Unlike Dentists
When another participant wonders how Anthony would deal with the client who is asking “How are we doing?”, I realise Anthony is still answering the original question, about self-disclosure. He realises this too and says, “Ginnie, I’m still trying to answer your question and Simon, I’ll address yours while I answer Sanja’s.” To respond to this latest point, Anthony reveals he likes to compare the service we provide with dentistry, gardening and the work of the car mechanic. He is not alone: Emmy van Deurzen’s current favourite comparison of therapists with other service providers is with cleaning ladies. I find her analogy depressing: the demand for cleaning persons far outstrips supply. I wish this were true of therapists.
But what does Anthony do with his metaphor? In answer to the client’s question “How are we doing?” he replies “That’s a reasonable question to your dentist. But this is rather different. I understood you were working on something ... so why ask me? What do you think about this?”
On Having an Aim
Alex Smith wants to know if Anthony, as a therapist, has an aim. It transpires that for him purpose is about a search for some sort of truth – the client who is ‘serious’ about therapy will be committed to that search. Anthony shows his anger at the popular debunking of ‘truth’ and positions himself firmly outside. His other aim concerns ethics – the search for the right way to live. He is careful to point out that it is not about telling clients about the truth, committed as he is to his own life-long search. He is weary of becoming grandiose and stresses the importance of being clear that his way is not the client’s way. He has been practising more than thirty years; the way he practises now is not quite the same as when he started out, or even ten years ago. Asked how he has changed, he said that, when he started out he used to try and seduce people with his brilliant interpretations.
On Usefulness of Theory in Making of a Therapist
According to Anthony, we all totally misunderstand the role of theory in practice. The current structure of training courses (theory in the morning, practice in the afternoon) is totally schizoid. Theory is not something you get out of books, and then ‘apply’ to what you’re doing. Theory means contemplating practice, contemplating what you are doing. When Anthony started out, he was much more ‘theory-bound’. If ‘existential’ suggests an absence of theoretical construct, then “you really need to put all the theory into the melting pot”. Anthony dealt with this problem by doing his own research. He took Freud seriously when the latter said “If you want to understand what psychoanalysts do, read the cases”. Anthony read Freud, Jung, Boss, Laing and Esterson. Freud said he practised science – scientific account must be testable. “If Freud said that somebody was helped by psychoanalysis, I want to know if this is true or not,” Anthony states. Anthony engaged in research to find out whether these ‘hypothetical constructs’ (the theory) could be proven. His conclusion was negative – evidence provided by the cases is shaky. For Anthony, the discipline of standing on his own two feet, not assuming that there is any theory behind it all, meant that he had to contemplate what actually did go on with people. That was his theory, he said: contemplating what actually happened. “Whether you’ll really be any better at the job for all the stuff you’ve stuffed your head full of from the books, or whether you’d be better just using your common sense, is a very moot question. I suspect you’d be better off with the latter,” he concludes.
On Phenomenology in Psychoanalysis
Anthony tells us about the amount of phenomenology he finds in Freud, Jung “and even Klein”. When Freud talks about people who came to see him, he is talking about real phenomena. But then he tries to fit these phenomena into his metapsychology. Anthony says he tries to throw these conceptualisations out, much like Freud (whose practice didn’t depend on his theories). Anthony makes sure we don’t ignore too much of that which psychoanalysis teaches us: for example, the phenomenon of a client behaving as if the therapist were their parent does happen. Clients’ behaviour will also be influenced by their perception of their therapist’s behaviour (and this may be what psychoanalysts call projection). Here Anthony can’t resist an opportunity to educate us: “In Zollikon Seminars, Heidegger disputes the possibility of projection – if you could really project something onto another, you’d get rid of it!” But he says Heidegger is being a bit ‘smart Alec’ here, because Freud obviously didn’t mean that you could.
On Asking (and Answering) Questions
Steve Ticktin must have realised that Anthony was still answering the original question when he asked: “How is the person to know that their perception of you is true if you don’t self-disclose?”
Anthony doesn’t think self-disclosure is an answer in this case: “One could still be lying. If someone has a wrong perception of me, I ask them to consider the evidence behind their assertion.” He continues: “Students think this pedantic and not phenomenological. They consider the things I ask to be prosaic and the truth to be out of place in counselling. I deal with sheer facts. Supervisees are often vague about what clients have told them. When I ask them why they hadn’t asked for more, they wonder if it’s their place to be asking,” he concludes.
I sense Anthony’s sympathetic nervous system changing to a higher gear (Anthony is easily provoked by stupidity). To illustrate his point, he patiently returns to his comparison of therapy and other trades. “Look,” he says, “if you were a gasman, or a piano teacher, and a client asked you a civil question, would you not give them a civil answer? Similarly, if a person asks for help and you don’t understand their question, you have a responsibility to ask them what they mean. We ought to understand a lot more than what therapists settle for,” Anthony says. I am being presented with an extremely thought out way of working; tried and tested by years of experience – his own and other people’s. “If I take my car to the garage,” Anthony continues, “and say to the mechanic ‘it’s out of sorts’ and the mechanic nods and gives me a bill for £1000...well, that‘s nonsense. The mechanic will ask detailed questions to find out what I’m complaining about and then he’ll try and help. If I tell my piano teacher that I’m stuck, she will probe to find out what it is that I can’t get on with.”
“Trainees often tell me,” Anthony continues, “that the client was in an abusive marriage, or was abused by her father. I want to know what actually happened. Almost always the student will not have asked what happened. They accept the value judgement without getting a description.” At this point Anthony is in full swing (he is also, coincidentally, providing us with a description of what he does when he doesn’t challenge). He moves from Freud to Boss and back again, fully referencing each quote (all user-friendly and extremely challenging). “A question,” he continues, “is opening up, a statement – ex-cathedra. So why privilege a statement over a question? There is a fetishistic taboo concerning the psychoanalytic ‘why?’, which supposedly leads people to think about causes. But why does it have to do that? It all depends how you ask. On the other hand, if you say ‘why not?’, it is supposed to open things up. This is based on what Boss wrote. But ‘why not?’ could become equally paralysing, and ‘why?’ could open things up.”
Philip Chandler is granted the privilege of asking the penultimate question. As it turns out, he would have been better off without this opportunity. In reference to Anthony’s stress of the importance of exploring client’s context (including their social context), Philip asks why other existential therapists don’t subscribe to this thinking. Anthony wouldn’t be Anthony if he were to answer the question without first making a number of erudite digressions. He is also masterful at involving his audience, so he asks Philip if he knows Zollikon Seminars. Philip doesn’t let this question embarrass him (mainly because he knows most of us are glad it was him who got asked), looks Anthony in the eyes and says, “No, I haven’t read the book.” Anthony first urges Philip to get hold of a copy (he really is sweet) and then explains how it contains a description of Heidegger advocating an enquiry into the relationship of a young schizophrenic with his friend (i.e. exploring the social context, at the same time as R. D. Laing’s and Esterson’s efforts.) Anthony never manages to answer Philip’s question because at this point, as you might expect, Stephen Ticktin enquires about David Cooper and then we run out of time.
In the 90 minutes we spend with Anthony Stadlen we are presented with a way of working that makes much sense to me. Its solidity gives his approach the reliability it needs if it’s going to be useful to us beginners. At the same time his position on therapy clearly advocates the need to remain flexible in order to adapt to all circumstances. We are very lucky to have Anthony among us.
Sanja Oakley
Response from Albyn Leah Hall
‘Quest for Truth’
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