On the strong recommendation of Cesar Espineda, I registered for the 2012 National Meeting of APsaA, held January 10-15, at the Waldorf Astoria in New York City.
I may have been the only cleric in the large international gathering of psychoanalysts. Among the categories of registrants were psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, and “others.” I registered in the latter category. I was very well received, as Cesar promised I would be. One analyst working for a large treatment center told me that they often found themselves thwarted in their patient work until they could bring in the patient's cleric or religious authority to provide reassurance and support to the patient.
There is considerable overlap in the work of the psychoanalyst, or any psychotherapist, and the work of clergy and religious authorities. This is contingent on the level of training of the cleric or religious authority. And the more clinical training and experience a religious authority has, the more overlap there is. Most all religious authorities function as counselors at some level of expertise, but only the most experienced function with the discipline approaching that of a trained psychoanalyst.
]]> Freud said once that all he did was make connections - mostly connections of course with the unconscious. The psychoanalyst is the consummate maker of connections. Of course, like clergy they also teach. But unlike most clergy, they are highly disciplined in separating their teaching from their analytical work with patients.What most struck me at the APsaA meeting was seeing that analysts are doing exactly what we are doing when we are at our best, but doing it without any identifiable religious allegiance. Where we as religious authorities straddle two worlds, religion and psychotherapy, they attend professionally only to one. But the wisdom and healing they seek and promote is congruent with the wisdom and healing we also work to promote.
I found it quite humbling as well as inspiring to sit in seminars where psychoanalysts of many decades of experience shared their patient work with groups of colleagues, friends and strangers, leaving themselves open to professional critique. The astonishing humility of an analyst of several decades experience laying his or her patient work before a group of peers, and to be reminded of the distorting effects countertransference in relation to their patients, was an eye-opener to me. I left the conference with highest respect for many of the analysts I saw in action. That sort of professional humility we see too little of in our own community.
The break-out groups at our own Plenary meetings should be given a clearer, more explicit injunction, that the small group assignment is not only to share clinical work, but in doing so specifically to prepare to engage one's own countertransferences. While that injunction has been implicit all along, I believe we should make it more explicit, especially after my experience at the APsaA meeting.
Countertransference is the viper in all counseling and psychotherapy. It is the perpetual lure toward imposing on the patient/parishioner/client one's own values and prejudices as opposed to providing a maieutic context in which the other might experience, grow and prosper. No one is exempt from this snare.
The great psychiatrist, Wilfred Bion, proposed that the therapist begin work with a patient "without memory or desire." These words are a monument to the highest respect a professional can give to a client. They signal the intention to impose nothing external on the client, but simply to relate to and explicate what one sees. Such a posture requires extraordinary courage from the therapist, the kind of courage that therapists are not always ready to muster. It also makes the therapeutic encounter an uncertain one, both in terms of direction and results. Which leads me to recall another Bion saying, that the therapeutic encounter consists of the meeting of two frightened animals, one hopefully less so than the other.
Many religious authorities have considerable resistance to playing a therapeutic role in the lives of persons under their purview. They are too busy teaching and passing on religious content - the catechism, the Torah, or whatever. Such teaching is of course part of the religious leader's mandate. (Indeed, psychoanalysts also teach psychoanalysis.) But the limitations of such a job description, and the relative emptiness of such a job description in relation to suffering people often never occurs to clergy.
We in CPSP are committed to authentic therapeutic work in addition to whatever teaching we engage in. The psychoanalytic community as exemplified in the APsaA offers itself as a significant ally as well as a valuable resource.
Donald Capps, emeritus professor of pastoral counseling at Princeton, in his seminal work in 2008, Jesus as Village Psychiatrist, makes the case for Jesus as a healer in the Freudian vein. Capps' work is obligatory for all religious professionals. In Capps reading, Jesus was a religious authority who functioned with the skills of a psychoanalyst, and brought about cures startlingly similar to Freud’s.
Anton Boisen, the founder of the clinical pastoral movement, in the midst of his psychiatric hospitalization in 1920, recognized the need for a psychoanalytically informed ear through which he might be able to sort out his tormented life. Ironically, the psychiatrists to whom he was assigned were contemptuous of Sigmund Freud and his theories. Boisen was thwarted in his own attempts to get transferred to a hospital where Freudian therapists were on staff. Boisen sought someone to listen to him as he attempted to probe his own tormented history and inner life. He seems never to have found such a therapist. What he accomplished, he accomplished on his own, through a kind of self-analysis, and it was seemingly a partial resolution only. That Boisen remained devoted all his life to the replica of his punitive mother, the withholding and sexually repressed Alice Batchelder, indicates the failure of his therapy, or his lack thereof. However, even in his damaged condition, Boisen knew what suffering people need, and he knew what therapists needed to do to assist them. "It's not what the counselor says to the boy," Boisen famously and inimitably said. "It's what the boy says to the counselor." It's not what the therapist says to the patient, but what the patient says to the therapist. It's not what the minister says to the parishioner, but what the parishioner says to the minister.
The psychoanalytic community is committed to "the talking cure." They are contemporary specialists in the meaning of talk, and the meaning that can be discovered through talk. We who are pastoral counselors and pastoral psychotherapists need the psychoanalytic community as allies and resource persons. They are very much our colleagues.
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Raymond J. Lawrence, D.Min.
CPSP General Secretary
lawrence@cpsp.org
