From the Prologue

From the Prologue - The Process of Psychotherapy: A journey of discovery

Dear Bobbie

It is good to hear that you are still ‘on the road’. As I look back on our work together, I am tempted to pick out only the therapeutic ‘high spots’. This is the Achilles’ heel of all therapists; the tendency to assume that we do anything of any great value, far less that we know anything of any lasting worth. Having spent the ‘golden hour’ with the patient, as you say, the therapist then toddles off to dream pleasant dreams, leaving the patient to continue wrestling with her demons. I would be lying if I said that I never took you home with me in my thoughts. My discipline is such, however, that I found little difficulty in letting you ‘float back’ to the consulting room, thereby returning me to my slumbers. Perhaps some of that discipline has rubbed off on you and you too have learned how to use the emotional ‘left luggage’.

Which reminds me of that apocryphal tale of the two monks who encountered an attractive young woman by the banks of a river. The older of the two monks offered to carry her across and, having deposited her safely on the other side, bid her farewell and continued on his way. After journeying some miles in silence, the older monk stopped to ask his partner what was on his mind. The young monk was incensed. Had he forgotten that their order was sworn to celibacy? What was he thinking of carrying such an attractive woman across the river? The old monk paused: ‘Oh, her,’ he replied. ‘Yes, I left her miles back down the road, but I see that you are still carrying her!’

On re-reading your letters and reports, I suspect that learning how to leave your footsteps behind you was one of the invisible tasks you have accomplished. True, like me, you often turn your head and retraced those footprints, frequently acutely aware of what it felt like to be in those shoes at that time. But then you returned your attention to here and now and, perhaps more importantly, to the road ahead. How you did that is the simple yet remarkably complex story of this book; one that may hold out hope to lay readers who can relate directly to your experiences, and to therapists and would-be therapists who also need infusions of hope. How you achieved the ability to ‘live your life’ will be the medium for this book.

I intend no disrespect when I say that you have a gift for describing the ordinary nature of everyday life. Keeping going, climbing, striving, building, creating, discovering and noticing—these are the ingredients of living. Arriving should be the last thing on our minds, for by then it will all be over- quite literally. Life is a protracted process of becoming. That kind of a living must surely be the core of the ‘good life’, which so many seek but so few appear to find. Therapy is usually about discovering how a difficult life can, somehow, be made a better life. It is reasonable therefore that learning how to live life should occupy the heartland of the therapeutic endeavour.

Wasn’t it Benjamin Franklin who said something to the effect that a long life may not be good enough, but a good life was always long enough? I am sure that he would have endorsed Swift’s blessing: ‘May you live all the days of your life’. I am left thinking that if my words encouraged you to do anything it was nothing more profound than that. But then again there may be nothing more profound than that!

Kierkegaard observed that life ‘can only be understood backwards’. Much therapy operates on this premise. However, there is a danger that we neglect the second half of Kierkegaard’s dictum that, although it may be understood backwards, life ‘must be lived forwards’. I recall once saying in an interview that all I did as a therapist was to help people to live their lives forward. I don’t think the interviewer was impressed. It sounds a lot less exciting than exorcizing demons or otherwise mending broken minds.

I have long felt that I do not belong to any ‘school’ of therapy, and this will be reinforced greatly here in this book, where my ‘pick and mix’ approach to therapy could be called eclectic by the generous of spirit. However, many psychotherapists might be unhappy that I should even care to describe what I did with you as therapy. Still, I believe that ‘psychotherapy’, when it does achieve some healing of the mind, must involve a reinventing of oneself. If the patient remains the same, then nothing of any note has happened. I have never been in therapy in the proper sense, but have, I believe, spent much of my adult life inventing and reinventing myself Given that experience, I appreciate how the process of personal change, at whatever level and depth, is a task that only you can realize: a task in which the therapist is a mere onlooker or confidante. Successful therapy results, in my view, in the recognition that one’s golden achievement in life is the constant remaking of yourself, so that, at last, you know how to live. Once you own that knowledge, then you can begin to make sense of the past. Perhaps you even begin to grasp Emerson’s logic when he said that ‘most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in our own sunshine’.

Given that words are such an important part of your life and have played such a key part in our therapeutic dialogue, it is only fitting that the record of your therapy should conclude with these reflections: I always received them in the spirit of a ‘therapeutic gift’, and I continue to receive them in that spirit. When the only therapy that I might be allowed to practice has become the one-way street of emotional correction that I have, all too often, read about, I shall turn to gardening, or some other enlightening pursuit - for clearly I shall need such enlightenment. Albert Einstein once said that he reminded himself a hundred times a day that his inner and outer life depended on the labours of other people, living and dead. Einstein knew that he needed to exert himself in order to give in anything like the measure he had received, and was still receiving. Wise words indeed. These words could be crafted into a plaque to adorn any therapist’s office. I shall return, no doubt over and over again, to the gifts that I have received from the many patients with whom I have been privileged to be associated. It will be interesting to see what I can make of the gifts I have received from you.

I sense that much of what lies before you involves courage. It may well be appropriate that you are uncertain of the path, far less the destination. We dare to be wise about the everyday business of living. Those who postpone the hour of living are akin to the traveller waiting for the river to run out before they risk the crossing. There are so many variants of the therapeutic message — from my grandmother’s ‘there is no time like the present’ to the modern Nike’s ‘Just do it!’ All these encouragements require is the courage to enact them, but the message remains an enduringly wise one.

Before I close, I thought that I should say something about my professional part in this whole process. A professor is, as the saying goes. ‘someone who talks in someone else’s sleep’. But I would add that the professor is (often) someone whose job is to tell students how to solve the problems of life, which he (usually) has tried to avoid by becoming a professor. And so it might well be with therapists, although many will take issue with this judgement. They might go as far as to say ‘speak for yourself’, which of course I do. Like you I have little idea where this will lead me, but I can feel, as my Irish forefathers would say, the road rising up to meet my every step. I have little understanding of who I am, and even less of what lies before me. Such ignorance is what makes life interesting, if not meaningful. My bags are packed and the journey promises to be likewise.

Yours

Phil