Theoria

Photographer: Talkingdrum. Postprocessing: Lmant

The past five days have been quite difficult. The deadline for my DMP essay is fast approaching and on Friday night I  realised I had to get on with writing it. From being a tutor involved in assessing others all of a sudden I was like my own students, worrying about word counts, referencing styles - subjects have different rules, in the arts we use Harvard whereas psychology uses MLA. 

But the real nightmare was finding the right angle. The essay is for a module called "Theoretical Approaches to DMP" and it involves constructing a critical  argument which illuminates two approaches to the practice. For the past six months I have been reading, have taken assiduous notes during lectures, written up my observations during practical sessions. I felt quite confident I could write this essay easily until I really got down to it. And then it dawned on me. Two thousand and five hundred words only! and I am supposed to discuss Freudian and Jungian approaches.  I nearly died. I had far too much to write and could not squeeze it all in just two thousand and five hundred words, inclusive of citations!

I buried myself with books at the weekend and did not go out at all. When I wrote my dissertation, years ago, the work was mostly done in the library. Now studying can be done online, in fact Google Scholar is one of the best tools, not to mention online journals and collections like JSTOR. It is easy to find the latest monograph if you do an online search.

Back to the essay. I truly agonised over it. Freud and Jung.  Libido and individuation. A structured psyche.  Collective unconscious and archetypes.  Relational psychoanalysis. And then there is Lacan  and the unconscious 'which is structured like a language' (Saussure in the background). What do I do with Lacan?

 I went round in circles, I wrote, then I began to  remove layers. From time to time I stopped writing and  played with Photoshop or answered emails, just to give myself a break.  The point of my essay was to examine the transference/countertransference relationship between client and therapist. In DMP this is approached non-verbally. But there are some important differences in how this is played out depending on whether the therapy is informed by a Jungian or a Freudian (or psychoanalytic /psychodynamic) approach. The two are irreconcilable. If you follow Jung, during the transference/countertransference  you try to reconnect with the collective unconscious activating the archetype-centred process of individuation. You aim for a transformation. If you are Freudian oriented, the process will be a dynamic that allows a recovery of past conflictual experiences of the patient , rendering them conscious, thus it will enable a resolution of the patient's  inner conflicts. 

I had to put Lacan on hold, I could not involve his psychoanalysis in this discussion, much as I wanted to, two thousand and five hundred words are simply not enough to do justice to all three - in any case Lacan was a self -professed Freudian, so in his formulation  the transference/countertransference would follow a psychodynamic model.  

I dealt with the question satisfactorily. My critique was directed at those who mix Freud with Jungian methods. Such eclecticism is unhelpful, unless you believe that the theory can be divorced from the practice. I dont. I believe that theory and practice are a continuum and not just in DMP.  Susan Melrose takes this concept further by invoking the very etymology of theory,  theoria, which in ancient Greece was a performance of wisdom. The theor was an itinerant performer.  I like this image. Thus the therapist is a theor, or should aspire to be one, just like the artist, any artist. There is never only a practice,  but a theorised practise, in all its variegated forms.

(All photos modelled by Alex B)