What is psychotherapy?
Hello and welcome. I have no idea who you are and what got you here. Maybe you are looking for therapy, stumbled across my website and wanted to check out what I have to say in my blog. If this is you, I hope I don’t scare you away. Or you could be meandering aimlessly on the web with nothing better to do. Another distinct possibility is that no one reads this at all. I could be talking to the aether with only the empty sky to hear me. No matter what the case may be, it doesn’t really matter. My aim of this blog is to consolidate my thoughts and feelings about psychotherapy. In this sense I am writing for me. I am at the tail end of a 7-year training and have started private practice. I am using this blog to write a series of essays of what psychotherapy means to me and if someone gets something from it, that is a welcome bonus. The act of writing is a creative and contemplative process that solidifies thoughts making them more tangible and real. It also has the habit of enticing something new out from within that otherwise may not have found expression. Writing draws ideas and creations out of us that could be a surprise even to the writer. In a sense, the writer could be a puppet whose strings are pulled from a deeper unknown elsewhere.
In this essay I will be touching on the question: what is psychotherapy? Asking this will elicit an answer entirely dependent of what psychotherapist you ask. The endeavour of psychotherapy necessitates the therapist to have an idea of what it is to be human in this world. This is a subjective matter. The therapist will invariably be informed by their training, world view and personal histories. It is fair to say, the therapist may have unconscious assumptions about the nature of lived experience and unwittingly bring this into their definition of what therapy is. This is inevitable and I am no exception. What is more, the same therapist may give entirely different answers on any given day depending on their internal fluctuations. The answer may also evolve over time to become less definitive and more nuanced. Furthermore, the therapist may adapt their definition of psychotherapy to suits the needs and expectations of the client.
My view is that psychotherapy is a mysterious venture because its works through mechanisms that are not entirely conscious. Psychotherapy therapy requires an appreciation of a deep formless place within us that defies location and definition. If we try to pin this process down, then something of its essence is lost. The freedom to roam is stupefied by what we feel ‘should’ be happening. I will therefore annoyingly refrain from giving a clear answer to the question at hand. Everything I write will be pointers, nudges and hints towards something greater that lies behind the literality our usual everyday lives. And it is my belief that what I am trying to intimate is crucial for successful therapeutic practice.
One thing we can be sure of is that psychotherapy involves two people sitting a room together - two people fulfilling particular roles. One person’s role is that of the client who comes to therapy for the amelioration of a difficulty or problem in their lives. The other persons role is that of the psychotherapist. Our roles in life have archetypal resonances. A parent’s role is that of the archetypal mother or father. A soldier’s archetypal role is that of the warrior. A comedian’s role is the archetypal trickster or jester. A leader’s role is archetypally the king. Our world is full of these archetypal roles. The psychotherapist’s archetypal role is that of the healer. Throughout history we have had healers and the way these healers work is in accordance with the belief systems, ontologies and paradigms of their age. In pre-history and traditional cultures, we call these healers shamans. They worked with unseen energies in a vibrant alive animistic world. In our current time healers have tended to do away with these so called ‘primitive’ superstitions. Now, psychoanalysts use the frameworks of the unconscious, transference and projective identifications. On the other hand, psychiatrists adhere to the doctrines of medical science. Their world is one of chemical imbalances, diagnoses and treatment options. More recently, healers work with historical trauma and somatic experiencing. There is truth to all these approaches. However, problems arise when healers take these tribal affinities as ‘the truth’. Clients could then be forced into an ill-fitting box that is not of their making. Psychotherapy is then something that is done to us through the imposition of a particular belief system. This is not the way to go. But paradoxically we all need frameworks or a system to work in – otherwise, we are wondering aimlessly in the dark. The trick is not to take these modes of operating as a literal truth and to have light touch.
So, people come to therapy to see a healer. But what exactly is healing? If we look at the etymology of the word heal it may give us some clues. Heal originates from the old English Haelan which means ‘to make whole or restore to soundness’ and is related to the word’s health and, interestingly, holy[1]. So, psychotherapy is about facilitating health and wholeness, and this is a ‘holy’ activity. The implication of seeing psychotherapy as a journey towards wholeness is that there are parts of us that are slit off that need to be recovered and integrated into our being. These parts split off as a defensive mechanism to protect ourselves from their potentially terrifying intensity. Or it could be that parts of us were simply unaccepted in our formative years causing us to reject or deny them. A ‘false self’ then develops to meet the wants, needs and desires of others[2]. We then become unconscious of these splits in our being which, although we are unaware of their existence, drive our behaviour behind the scenes so to speak, causing us to behave and act in limiting and detrimental ways. I will be writing more about this later, for now I want to emphasise the split or schism, and we shall shortly see how this relates to our enquiry.
Another useful etymological exploration is to look at the word psychotherapy itself. Psychotherapy is the amalgamation of the Greek words psyche and thera. Psyche has three meanings: soul, breath and butterfly. And thera means to attend to or to take care of. Therefore, it follows that, in one sense, psychotherapy means to attend to or take care of the soul[3].
Some people may be uncomfortable of the notion of soul. We are a product of a culture which is dominated by a materialistic, reductionist and scientific outlook. Many may see belief in soul as childish and naïve. It is true that if we were to dissect a human, we would not find a soul, we would just find biological organic matter. Despite this, according to recent surveys about half of the UK population believe in a soul[4]. This implies the jury is still out and the hardcore rationalists have not succeeded in converting us to their view. Maybe there is some truth to soul after all, although one could never prove it.
In the context of psychotherapy, what exactly do we mean by soul? The therapist who originally brought soul into psychotherapy is Carl Jung[5]. He recognised psyche as a spiritual reality whilst simultaneously attempting to maintain empirical and scientific credibility. He subsequently rejected any definition of soul that smacked of the anything resembling mysticism. The result of this is that he described soul in a myriad of different and sometimes contradicting ways. The definition that most resonates with me is to see soul as ‘a kind of life force’. This chimes with the other meaning of psyche which is breath. Across many philosophical and religious traditions, the breath is universally regarded as a principle of life. Without breath we cannot live. Breath is therefore seen as symbolically synonymous with the vital energy that rhythmically flows through us, animating us into life. In the Indian yogic traditions this is called Prana and in the Chinese traditions it is called Qi and both words literally mean breath in their respective cultures. Viewing soul as the breath of life gains further traction when we consider the word animate which comes from the Latin word anima which also means soul. All this points to soul being the vital energetic essence that animates us to be alive sentient beings.
So, in effect, the task of psychotherapy is to tend to our energetic life force. In an ideal situation, when our lives have meaning and we feel we are living the life we want, this energy flows unhindered. We are in tune and harmonic balance with our own essence. We wake in the morning content and satisfied with the way things are going. It feels good to be in our skin. There is a confidence in our own being giving us faith in our resilience to meet life’s challenges with openness and sensitivity. All is good.
Needless to say, the above scenario is not how most of us exist. And even if it did it would probably only be temporary situation. In all of us, without exception, our life force leaks out of conscious awareness. Our conditioning creates blockages or knots that inhibit the flow of our being. Our life force can be sucked into the vortices of anxiety, depression, shame and other negative feeling states. It could be our energy is embroiled with thoughts of self-loathing, or we could simply feel empty disconnected and discontent. The list is endless. All these negative feelings states are distortions or splits in our life force. Our energetic bandwidth can be enmeshed and used up, leaving little room for anything else. Returning to the idea of healing, it is the job of psychotherapy to integrate these split off energies or distortions into the flow of our being. This doesn’t mean surgically removing them but rather it is a process of alchemical transformation. This can be a painful experience as we feel those sensitive wounded parts of us bubble up to the surface of awareness. But there is a beauty in this unfolding as we, through our pain and tears, give birth to a new way of being.
I have no trace of doubt that we all have this potential for transformation and healing because we all have soul or life force. Much like the first law of thermodynamics this energy cannot be created or destroyed. It is just there and is what is. We cannot get rid of it even if we tried. We are all equally imbued with this life force. It courses through the veins of our being. The only difference is how that energy is expressed or caught up in our own particular ways of existing and unique shape we adopt in the world. And like all energy, it cannot be destroyed but can be transformed. The solidity of the ice in our hearts can be melted into the spring water of life. Psychotherapy is about providing the right conditions and environment for this process to naturally unfurl on its own accord. Like a blossoming flower it cannot be forced but it can be nurtured or tended to.
Returning to psyche as breath, it strikes me that breath is neither inside nor outside of us. The act of breathing is a rhythmical symbiotic exchange between inner and outer. Similarly, we cannot locate psyche or life force as being entirely within us. We are in a continual inter-being between ourselves and our outer environment, be that the animate or inanimate. Those around us affect us and we affect them. We are connected to others whether we like it or not. We are also affected by the ‘inanimate’ such as our houses or works art. A work of art could bring us to a sense of awe or wonder, and an untidy house can make us irritable. When considering this psychotherapy isn’t only about the individual client. It is about their relationships, their work, the culture at large and the world they inhabit. This is reflective of the fact we all live in interconnective and interpenetrative energetic ecosystem. For example, when a client presents with a set of difficulties described as ‘depression’ the question needs to be asked – how did this arise systemically and what systems are in place the perpetuates the problem? In this way we do not locate the problem entirely in the individual but rather there is the appreciation that an individual is but one part within a larger systemic network of influence that is spread across time and space. In this way psyche is both within us and external to us without being entirely located in either. In other words, our soul exists within a larger world soul.
The last meaning of the word psyche is butterfly. This reminds us that one way the soul communicates with us is through the symbolic. From ancient times the butterfly has signified not only the mystery of physical metamorphoses but also the loveliest transmutations of the soul. It is the poetic image of soul’s renewal into beauty. This beauty is latently present in all the stages of the butterfly’s life cycle from the egg to the caterpillar to the chrysalis. It could not be any other way. Similarly, we all have beauty in the core of our being, no matter what stage of life we are in. James Hillman tells us that ‘the soul is born in beauty, feeds on beauty and requires beauty for its life’[6]. It is the task of the psychotherapist to recognise, nurture and tend to that innate beauty. This beauty is not merely confined to a surface level aesthetic sensibility. That kind of beauty is an allergy of a deeper more fundamental truth. The beauty I am speaking about is an intrinsic quality of the world and who we are beyond our conditioning in our core. Its expression comes not only symbolically through poetry, art and music but also through love. When we see the beauty in the heart of things we cannot help but experience love. Beauty and love are entwined in an infinite, ineffable embrace – Psyche and Eros[7]. This is the gift of psychotherapy - to be seen, loved and recognised for who we fundamentally are. We are all beautiful.
[1] See https://www.etymonline.com/word/heal
[2] Donald Winnicott coined the term ‘false self’ in his work on child and personality development.
[3] I owe this insight to Guy Dargert from his wonderful book - The Snake in the Clinic: Psychotherapy’s role in Medicine and Healing (2016).
[4] See https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2018/05/29/attitudes-toward-spirituality-and-religion/#:~:text=The%20survey%20also%20asked%20about,as%20spiritual%20but%20not%20religious.
[5] See https://jungiancenter.org/jung-on-soul-tending/#:~:text=The%20dictionary%20offers%20seven%20definitions,“soul”%20as%20Seele%20does.
[6] James Hillman: The thought of the heart and the soul of the world (1992), p29
[7] The Greek myth of Psyche and Eros (the god of love) tells of Psyche’s trials and tribulations in a quest through the underworld which eventually ends in the unification of soul/beauty and love. Psyche’s journey to the underworld is an apt allegory for the psychotherapeutic endeavour.
