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This paper was read at the 1990 Institute of Psychotherapy and Counselling (Westminster Pastoral Foundation) Conference on Psychotherapy - A Dangerous Profession. It challenges our profession since the danger explored by Peggy Jones is not, as expected, to do with our patients, but to do with how we tend to end up as therapists or analysts - somehow removed ‘from the larger arena of life’, depotentiated and cut off from collectivity.
The author is propelled into thinking about this by her dismissive reaction to some American ‘self-help’ books she had been given. She admits to learning from the books, which leads her to explore and contrast the two approaches. The psycho-dynamic model, focusing on oneness and twoness, re-enacts the mother/baby dyad with an inward and downward orientation. For a time, at least, it necessarily deconstructs, depotentiates. By contrast, the ‘self-help’ model, with emphasis on self-discipline and responsibility, has an outward, upward orientation. It postulates a potent adult affirming the exercise of narcissism with the capacity to challenge. The author is concerned lest those of us with psychodynamic orientation do not find a way back. We continue to claim our wounds, perhaps to disarm critics and their envy - though she asks if envy is ever disarmed. While our wounds are an invaluable source of information to which we repeatedly refer in our work, we should not neglect our state of ‘well-ness’. For, after all, this was what we wanted when we first embarked on therapy.
With this in mind and with a backdrop of the events of Eastern Europe in 1989, Jones then subtly and movingly weaves in different authors and poets who have something to say about truth, the freedom to speak the truth, and the risks taken in expressing it. A contrast emerges. There is Irina Ratushinskaya scratching poetry on a bar of soap in prison, Václav Havel claiming passionately that what is truthful and authentic survives and does so in a political dimension. And ther