Walking into work yesterday ahead of teaching on a two day block with the Masters students I felt a deep sense of gratitude. The University campus was just coming alive; looking through the windows of various teaching spaces, people crouched over their laptops or engrossed in books sipping a coffee. Imagining the day to come, I felt energised and appreciative of my teaching position and the opportunity to stay engaged with an academic study of psychotherapeutic theory and philosophy. Undoubtedly, part of my experience in that moment was my connection to a University I have been with for over 30 years now: my alma mater.
I’ve written before about the process of making the decision to re-train at the University I studied (as an undergraduate through to PhD) and was still working at as a researcher in my former domain of exercise physiology. Perhaps the unreadiness to ‘leave home’ was part of the decision; but I also thrived in such a structured learning environment. Furthermore, I didn’t know much about the training of counsellors and psychotherapists at this point. I was following the experiences of a close friend who had completed the foundation course: it seemed just the ticket as I was (ironically) trying to leave academia and the body behind* and was getting curious in the workings of the mind. While I might have fallen into a university training as a matter of circumstance and convenience, the gratitude and privilege I feel now as a lecturer is an ongoing resonance with the experiences of training within a University setting. As something of a psyche-naut, my conceptual mind appreciated making contact with the therapeutic landscape in the form of theory and philosophy. I say this of clinical work too: that if thinking is the strongest intelligence (in reference to Jungian typology) don’t despair that feeling and sensing functions are essential to the healing work. Firstly, we need clarity of thinking when formulating client distress; and significantly, in my experience conceptual mind has acted like a hook on which I can hang experiences. Other learning styles might accomplish this the other way around. It bears repeating we are all different and will find our way to the “both / and” of concept and percept as inseparable bedfellows, the double edged sword.
The advantages of doing a counselling and psychotherapy training in the University setting include that crisp clarity of academic rigour. We are exposed not only to the theories, but also how to critically engage with a range of ideas and thinkers: not so as much designed to enforce integration but rather to ensure we don’t swallow ideas whole. Moreover, the Open University report concerns from employers and educators about graduates’ mastery of ‘critical thinking’ and the transferability of higher-order thinking skills to the workplace. According to Cambridge University Press’ life competency framework, critical thinking is the understanding and analysing of ideas and arguments. Depending on whether the source of writing on critical thinking is from philosophy or education, there is disagreement as to whether it is a skill and can therefore the extent to which it can be trained. However, as a competency, its main components can be described as identifying and classifying information, recognising patterns and relationships, and interpreting and drawing inferences from arguments and data. Certainly, the ability to evaluate and synthesise are essential: to be able to break down the information (theories) we are exposed to, judge its quality (including a reflection on the source of the information), and then combining different ideas to create a new, unified argument or understanding. In a counselling and psychotherapy training, we might also bring forth praxis: a kind of marriage of knowledge and action through reflection. How might we bring together two theories, and not only describe them, or compare and contrast them, but also evaluate them through the lens of experience? Readers might be calling to mind the central thesis throughout this text: how dialectics invites us to bring into play some sort of contradictory process between opposing sides. A proposition (thesis) which inevitably generates an opposite (antithesis) which creates a tension toward synthesis. This synthesis leads to a thesis for a new dialectical cycle.
Training at an institution that holds a cross-modality approach flexes these muscles constantly. As was indeed the case for me, trainees are tasked with listening to a broad range of theory from two traditions with different origin stories concerning ontology and epistemology: and as I have alluded to earlier, how does a phenomenologist (who is working with the principle of knowing) relate to the theories of transference and countertransference that hinge on unconscious processes? In a recent discussion with a psychoanalytic colleague, I described how my exposure to other ideas allowed a “not this, not this, not this, not this” type process, drawing a frame to something of a negative space that allowed what was there to arise more clearly. We must struggle with these ideas to know where we stand and ensure consistency in methodology. Training at University has allowed me to go deeper into a phenomenological practice because I have deeply considered the “equal and opposite” ground reaction force of psychoanalysis. Without such exposure I would not know what I know, and the importance of that knowing. I believe it is also what has allowed me to develop my own passions. Quite hard to put into words, it is as if the exploration of the equal and opposite toward psychoanalysis (and particularly the depths of unconscious processes through exposure to Jung, Bion for example) have had me “mine, mind” and bring me full circle into a phenomenology that can also include the vast mind of the transpersonal approach. This was undoubtedly facilitated by having an assignment structure that permitted us to follow our own smoke; the research dissertation is the epitome of this permission; and a process offered by University training.
Whilst I cannot have a training experience different to the one I have had, I do on occasion ponder “what if” I had trained in a more experiential setting; especially as I have taken my trajectory into phenomenology and felt inspired by writers who many have had a movement or dance background (Ruella Frank, Judith Blackstone, Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, to name but a few). We might think of the academic setting as the masculine, the experiential as the feminine. Certainly, as a lecturer within the former setting, I am committed to ensuring we balance the theory and practice aspects of our courses: that the theory encountered in the morning is in dynamic interaction with the experiential workshops each afternoon. There is always room to keep improving this with assignments that evaluate trainee competence not just in the written work. I look to other training institutions that use vivas or videoing of client work to bring alive the whole moving-feeling-sensing-perceiving package of living process.
I also continue to reflect upon how we might support trainee’s understanding of what it truly is to be an existential-phenomenological practitioner of an effective psychotherapy. These past two days I have repeatedly spoken to the counter-intuitive notion of turning our attention inward (in here) in order to meet the client (over there): that we can only know other through knowing the relational as it is playing out in self. And so when some trainees grapple with fish bowl working in experiential workshops, I spend time explaining the importance of an embodied working: not because percept doesn’t need concept (as I allude to above), but because we tend to lag behind in this capacity. Early on in training, there is the inevitable performance nerves. I suggest to the trainees they might reflect upon how to include them in the working. Nothing needs to be got rid of; our tradition is about wholeness after all, and this includes meeting all our experiencing, not denying any of it. Anxiety is awash in the field; and to call it “performance nerves” slaps a label on something that is alive and important; a noun that could be a verb. Moreover, I challenge trainees in the latter stages of their counselling course when they state “we are too good friends to work in fish bowls now”. We might wonder about this protest and what it aims to push against; and yet what it allows is a discussion as to what is the work: What is intimacy? Can we ever “know” an Other; let alone know them too well? What is there when there is no-thing to talk about anymore? Does it allow other (deeper, more sensitive) expressions of self to emerge?
Experiential working, whether it be the fish bowl practice where two people in dialogue are witnessed by the rest of the group or experiential weekends that give an opportunity to explore exercises and experiments as individuals and in group process, enable many mirrors to our being. My own experiences have helped me explore some of those enduring relational themes we all hold and continue to enact. If each being is a mirror, we come to experience who holds a reflection we might trust or not; and how we too might distort someone else’s being. As a facilitator of such groups, my own experiences as a participant have helped me hone the capacity to both support and challenge as well as invite curiosity between the other dialectic of personal and interpersonal; to be vulnerable and courageous as we are witnessed and as we test out our projections, introjections, and retroflections.
These are some emerging thoughts as I turn toward the final section of my book. It’s feeling good to finally palpate a finishing line to this project 🙂
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*Only to land more deeply in them both!
As often the case, featured image thanks to www.freepik.com