Posts Tagged ‘Wilfred Bion’
The Alchemy of Healing
“The psychoanalyst listens, the shaman speaks.”
Thus wrote Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist. Levi-Strauss, like Carl Jung, was intrigued by pairs of opposites.
I have been reflecting on this particular pair of opposites, listening and speaking, in the context of psychotherapy. I have come to think of listening and speaking as representing the yin and the yang of the healing process.
The Yin and the Yang of Healing
From a Taoist perspective, yin energy is associated symbolically with the feminine, yang with the masculine. These energies are not, however, linked with gender. We all embody the potential for both yin and yang poles of energy.
Yin energy in therapy is manifested through phenomena including listening, empathy and nurturance, as well as through a metaphoric “holding space” for the other.
Yang energy may be expressed through speaking, interpretation, emphatic engagement or confrontation.
Both patient and therapist must develop a full range of these capacities. The process of healing is catalyzed by a creative dance between these polar energies. Both therapist and patient need to cultivate their respective abilities to speak freely and to listen fully. Each must be able to listen to herself as well as to the other.
The Role of Early Life Trauma
The reason why listening and speaking are healing can be understood against the backdrop of early life trauma. The traumatized child goes unheard. Neither parent has the wherewithal or the willingness to listen to the child. As a consequence, the child comes to feel alone, uncared for, disconnected and afraid. Moreover, such a child is liable to grow up as an adult who is wary of closeness to others. Such an individual is prone to seek social isolation.
Wilfred Bion, a British psychoanalyst, in his paper “Attacks on Linking,” put forth the premise that such a child is deprived of a primary experience of emotional bonding or “linkage,” with either parent. This absence breeds in the child an experience of sadness, a sense of futility and ultimately of rage. The child’s rage has the potential to generalize into an unconscious hatred of all “linkages”: between the child and another human being, between thought and feeling, between the child and himself, and ultimately between the child and reality. Such broken or unconsummated linkages are the substrate for unspeakable suffering.
The Alchemy of Healing
Through reciprocal speaking and listening within the therapeutic relationship, emotionally meaningful linkages are formed. The patient’s capacity to achieve emotional connection with the self and with the other is enhanced. Dissociation between thoughts and feelings, between feelings and images, is transformed into integration.
Through integration of split off parts of the self, healing occurs. Through relatedness with self and others, the full potential of the patient blossoms and flourishes.
These transformational processes are always reciprocal, between patient and therapist. Witnessing and participating in this alchemy of healing is deeply moving. Such participation is the central calling of my life.
A Buddhist Perspective on Healing: Wisdom and Compassion
My immersion in Tibetan Buddhism has influenced my perspective on the healing process. The central tenets of Tibetan Buddhism are wisdom and compassion.
Wisdom in Healing
From a conventional point of view, phenomena are incontrovertibly how they appear. At this level, healing in psychotherapy includes the kinds of work that I have described in previous blogs and radio shows. It is essential to bring dissociated feelings and memories into conscious awareness. Doing so in the context of a caring psychotherapy relationship allows the “working through,” the integration and the release of these emotions. Mourning is central to this process: mourning for both what was wounding and for what was lacking in the patient’s early life.
Another key component of the healing process is working on the patient’s “shadow” side. Trauma propagates through identification with the aggressor. It is a painful, but vital, step to recognize one’s own propensity to hurt others.
From an ultimate point of view, all phenomena are inherently “empty.” I am not qualified to discuss the Buddha’s teachings. So, for our purposes, let me just say that healing is facilitated by the cultivation of the awareness that all of our perceptions, all of our experiences, are like a mirage, like an illusion. We all construct our own “psychic reality.”
This realization is very powerful. It gives us the freedom to construe the past from multiple vantage points. We can achieve release from an identity as a perennial victim of circumstances. We can develop the capacity for what Carolyn Myss has called “symbolic sight.” We can learn to “learn from our experience” (Wilfred Bion). We can develop the potential to do things differently, to experience transformation.
Viewing life as an open field, rather than as a constellation of solid figures, liberates us from fixity, from the unconscious compulsion to repeat the past.
Compassion In Healing
Compassion for others is the antidote for narcissism. Narcissism is the root of all suffering. When we fixate on an “I,” we experience ourselves as fundamentally disconnected, constricted, anxious and depressed. When we cultivate our compassion for others, we feel alive, related and infused with life energy.
Wisdom and compassion are inseparable, like the two wings of a bird. In conjunction with one another, they liberate us from suffering, allowing our spirits to take flight. The darkness of our delusions is dispelled. The radiance of our innate nature shines forth unimpeded. We are free.