Friday, July 17, 2009

Letting the Ideas Flow Naturally

By Kevin Murphy, M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist,
Dublin, Ireland.


A client stopped in mid-sentence recently to apologise for hopping and jumping from one topic to the next. I replied that there was nothing wrong with doing that, the best way of speaking in therapy is by allowing the free association of ideas to carry on unhindered.
The client had worried that the ideas had not been following a logical track towards an overwhelmingly sensible point. It seemed haphazard, offbeat, random whereas instead they had wanted their speaking to be logical, sensible and of practical value.
Two things were of interest in this situation. Firstly, this client had come to therapy because their life had become unworkable as a result of a compulsion that would not go away. It had no obvious cause and no obvious solution.
The second thing was this client had begun the session by reporting that since beginning therapy this compulsion had not been as much in evidence in their life.
Where is all this going?
The fact is that we love logic and sense and science and things to follow an order. The reality for most of us, however, is that our inner lives and often our outer lives don’t follow any such pattern, no matter how much we’d like them too. Impulsivity, contradiction, illogical forces, imaginary considerations and gut feelings that defy verbalisation are just as much a part of what we do and who we are, as are their rational cousins.
We are nuanced, if that’s the right word, between a logical, observable world and an almost illogical, invisible one. The business of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, at least in one of its aspects, is to form a bridge between these two registers. And often the work of building that bridge comprises simply acknowledging that these two diametrically opposed registers exist in the first instance and also that they are intrinsically linked.
Once we have that, we can then move on to the notion that the two registers are asymmetrical in terms of their scale and influence over our lives. By this I mean that there is not an equal dividing line between them. Rather the separation is pretty much 90-10 in terms of the invisible side of things.
As you may have gathered, I am talking about the unconscious mind, the hidden, invisible part of our mental life that we never see directly and that we can only know when it ‘erupts’ in our slips of the tongue, in our dreams, in our jokes and so on. In short, a form of personal truth slips out usually when we are looking the other way.
The unconscious was Freud’s discovery, and it was a point in history after which all subsequent understanding about the human psyche was never the same again. In terms of impact it has been compared to the discovery of 15th century Polish mathematician Nicolaus Copernicus who discovered that the Sun was the centre of our universe rather than the Earth, as had previously been believed. In both cases, a much larger force was now discovered as being the driving force behind a fundamental part of our existence while the role of the original centre of activity was relegated to a more dependant role.
I mention this preamble on the unconscious because in so much of our lives we encounter examples of human experience that are not explainable by logic or science or medicine. In fact, the medical profession has its own term, Medically Unexplained Symptoms (MUS), to cater for this very thing.
Anyone who heard Paddy Doyle, author of The God Squad, speak on Liveline on RTE 1 this week, will have got a glimpse of this. He is a sufferer of from chronic dystonia, a neurological movement disorder characterised by involuntary muscle contractions which force certain parts of the body into abnormal, sometimes painful, movements or postures. If it is not caused by hereditary factors or brain injury – both absent in Paddy Doyle’s case - there is no clear medical understanding as to how it occurs.
Paddy Doyle himself quoted a psychiatrist he went to who said that the profound bodily movements he has displayed since around 10 years of age may be a replication of the bodily movements of his father dying from hanging, a scene he witnessed as a very young boy. The implication being that the trauma of the experience was written into the very contours of, and continues to re-enact itself repeatedly in, his body.
My client above faltered momentarily because of a belief that speaking in therapy should follow a sound logical path. There is a logic to the unconscious but it is not the same logic as we know in the observable, rational world. Psychoanalytic psychotherapy uses free association, the free, unfettered flow of ideas, as a tool with which to catch occasional glimpses of the vast and cavernous part of our inner lives that prefers to remain hidden. So in this context, veering off the path of the sensible and the logical is to be welcomed.

No comments: