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R.D. Laing: What Was Therapeutic About That?1 C.F. CLARK [...continued from Page 3] It doesn't get anywhere with those people who find it very difficult to live in the world of the interpersonal and the intrapersonal and see how stupid it all is, how ugly it all is, how it expressively confused all this [is]... and yet, are disregarded as crazy and mad, for realizing that... and are either locked up or run away. [audience applause] FOURTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: Speaking about conspiracy, I would like to ask the members of the panel, how this young woman came to be interviewed in front of hundreds, or thousand of us today, without knowing that this was the case? CHRISTY: I knew it was the case. DR. LAING: She knew it was the case. She [just] didn't know that the camera had started running. She knew. Absolutely. CHRISTY: Yeah, I knew that you guys were watching me. I didn't know when they started the camera. FOURTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: I got it. Thank you. FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: It seems to me, that what seems to be happening is that a vacuum has been created. It reminds me of a professor friend of mine that said: "I feel, I feel, I don't know what I feel, but oh, how I feel." What I am wondering is: that vacuum allows people in the medical professions to bring zombies to us and we have to work with them and the vacuum doesn't really give to me, at least, a feeling of understanding. And when you refuse to understand, it sounds sort of "nirvana-ish." Although I am not against that, I think that some kind of clearer explanation, clearer understanding should be given so we know what we are doing. When you avoid those things, you are breaking down the whole therapeutic process, it would seem to me. Enlightenment does not come just by remaining silent although that is a nice feeling. DR. LAING: [rising voice, approaching an impatient angry tone] This young lady sitting beside me is supposed to be an absolute paranoid schizophrenic, on medication. She is sitting here just now, perfectly compes mentus, perfectly clear, facing this most intimidating situation from the stage, not exhibiting any symptoms of schizophrenic disorder. If you knew of any medication that could do that in twenty minutes, from there to here, would you say you wouldn't give that to a patient? You would have to spend the rest of your life being a biochemist to understand what the chemical effects of that sort of thing are supposed to be in the central nervous system. [Intensely] So you don't know anything about this sort of process! Have the humility to admit that and keep your place, instead of the arrogance that you seem to have, to think that because that you don't know something that there is something the matter with those people that do! [loud audience applause] FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: I didn't say that I don't, I have a mind that could understand, I am sure that you do. I don't think that we should call each other names and say “arrogance.” I think that there is more arrogance in silence sometimes than there is expressing wisdom, if somebody has it. If there is wisdom, give it to us, but don't let us feel as though there is some kind of mystical communion going on when there isn't. This audience member is demonstrating the basic impediment of many aspiring “students” of any tradition or discipline: the absence of beginner's mind, a non-critical openness to what-is. Instead the member is impatient and angry, labeling patients as “zombies,” projecting his own arrogance onto the silence of the instructor, and rejecting the very teaching that is being present and that is being presented. He is assuming that wisdom is a kind of commodity that can be given to him rather than arriving from his effort and direct experience. Transpersonal literature and the apprentice model of psychotherapy training acknowledge the necessity of learning by direct experience. Dr. Laing seems quite angered at the comments that are discrediting him and the transpersonal realities in this encounter, at the statement that ‘there isn’t a mystical communion going on’. DR. LAING: There is! There is! That is the point! There certainly is, but... see you say, "when there is some sort of mystical communion going on when there isn't”. FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: Well again its, [mocking Dr. Laing] "I feel, I feel, I feel, I feel, I don't know what I feel, I feel." DR. LAING: [mocking him back] "I feel, I feel, I feel!" -- who’s talking about I feel? FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: “I don’t know what I feel, but, oh, how I feel it!” DR. LAING: Well -- I do know! And you don't know! And I'm saying that it is not verbal, and it can't be put into words. Because you can't understand it, obviously, you say... [mocking again] "Ha, ha, ha, some sort of mystical communion going on." FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: But there are people that have claimed to have seen the devil, there are people who have claimed all kinds of things. DR. LAING: Give someone else a chance at the microphone! FIFTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: If it bothers you than I can quit. DR. LAING: [loudly] It bothers me! [audience applause] [Another audience member deflects focus to the on-stage panel in a discussion about using medication with seriously mentally ill clients. The psychiatrist who has seen Christy a few months before reports that she exhibited "loose associations, prominent delusions, was visibly hallucinating, and was disoriented." He attributes her current stability to having a stable place to live now. Christy disagrees and motions she wants to talk.] CHRISTY: The reason I'm doing better is that I quit putting mental energy into the conspiracy, and creating it to a certain point. But this guy says that there is one! [audience laughter] I think that is because… [aside to Dr. Laing]: You know how to share minds? DR. LAING: [nods affirmatively] CHRISTY: He knows how to tap into other people's minds, on a subtle level, not by just asking questions. �use everybody reads minds, you guys read minds, I tell you everybody does. If you observe and look around, you notice it… And, one more thing… I don’t go around like a paranoid schizophrenic all the time, I know how to keep my cool! And I think this guy would be a great psychotherapist because he does that, he knows how to tap into where other people’s minds are at… She is alluding to the deep connection she felt with Dr. Laing, the authenticity and accuracy of the contact they had, the sense of his being fully with her, being able to ‘tap into’ her mind, go past the ordinary normal boundaries. ‘Transpersonal’ means, in one sense, beyond the person. We have all had clients, especially those with loose boundaries, who can ‘pick up on’ where we are at that day. And it is not an uncommon experience, in a transpersonal moment, to note that a therapist’s intrapsychic experience includes intuitions or precognitions about a client’s commentary. If one is indeed ‘interpersonally meditating’, one is practicing mindfulness when in a therapeutic interview. Such a practice loosens some of the restriction that the therapist’s ego has on his or her own perceptive capacities and ordinary ego boundaries. This is not mystical or magical: it is part of the impact of mindfulness, that’s all. [After the exchange, another audience member talks to Christy:] SIXTH AUDIENCE MEMBER: [later identified as Dr. Salvadore Minuchin] I loved it. I thought that it was wonderful, and I think that you should learn something from Ronald because I don't think that you did. You see, what we have experienced here is a communion of love. What I was observing... I fell in love with this young person. She was able to release it from Ronald and so did he from her, that kind of experience. It was experienced at the level not of the words, but there was an element of joining that was expressed in their hands, in their legs. They were moving exactly in the same place and I loved it. I think that it is important that you should know that. I am talking to the physician that talks about drugs because the drug that existed there is very, very powerful. [loud audience applause] — · — In my first professional psychotherapeutic job in 1975, I was a counselor in a residential treatment program for clients with character disorders, mood disorders, and chemical dependency problems. A visiting Hindu guru urged me to "love your clients" as a treatment method. It seemed kindly advice but it dodged what I consider to be more to the point: there are specific methods of activity and inactivity that can and do reach clients with increasing degrees of effectiveness. These methods are a function of the client and the therapist, the theories and research, the place and the times. Clients respond in definitive observable ways when those methods are successful. I do think that Joseph Needleman has it right (Needleman, 1996, p. 80): The possible love relationship between human beings must now include, and even be principally constituted by, the help that one human being can give another toward the aim of inner self-development. To love one’s neighbor is to regard him/her as a being containing the spark of divinity… who is, at the same time, in need of help in order to actualize his or her possibility. Summary Thus we have on record a conversation between R. D. Laing and Christy at their first meeting. I contend that it offers a direct picture of a number of transpersonal psychotherapy concepts and interventions, including answers to the vexing question, 'what was therapeutic about it?' It begins with a psychotherapist who has been practicing meditation and studying the esoteric elements in Christianity. These efforts build capacity in the practitioner who constitutes now a Real Companion for a client’s psycho-spiritual struggle. With this company one has a time of repair for the usual experience of ‘I’m all alone out here, railing at God’. It is a genuine kind of alliance that is the subject of Christian parables and Sufi teaching stories and Jewish rabbi tales and psychotherapy interviews. This alliance diminishes the experience of separateness from the Transcendent and from significant others who are struggling towards It as well. The two companions here embark on a discussion weaving back and forth between standard, psychodynamic topics and esoteric, transpersonal commentary. In the beginning, the therapist adopts the client’s organizing metaphors which are spontaneously of an esoteric, spiritual nature. He makes some attempts to help her reformulate her relationship with her spiritual life, one which is characterized by some confusion, and a bitter disappointment that God is not accomplishing more good in the world. He encourages her to press on, to 'still put on a coat and tie under the circumstances,' rather than to give in to her despair, which she shares by alluding to 'others' who may try to commit suicide. At this point she realizes that "other people are listening to this" in real time, and brings up her fears of "a conspiracy." He helps her clarify her confusion about this and supports her contentions that psychomystical events (‘minds interact’) do occur, rather than discrediting this idea as paranoid. It is interesting to note that as long as Dr. Laing is engaging and mirroring her, and they elaborate on the transpersonal world, that ‘all goes well’. As soon as he confronts her about her failing to ‘put on a coat and tie’, she alludes to suicidal despair and a conspiracy. I have done it myself and it is not therapeutic: the ill-timed confrontation that is more than a fragile client can tolerate. A clinical supervisor might speculate that she splits off from her resentment about the confrontation and unconsciously projects that resentment out onto the world, alluding to it as ‘out to get her’. They then go back into a discussion of transpersonal ideas and agree on the notion that people do distort what they see in the world. (Note how that can be seen as a meta-comment on what Christy has just done here in their meeting.) Dr. Laing then takes her fears one step further but reverses them. He says it is a conspiracy by the Universal Mind to do good. She says that that Mind ‘isn’t capable of doing anything!’ They touch on a fundamental element of transpersonal theory, differentiating between 'wakefulness' and 'sleep.' But Laing is talking not about humans, he refers here to the Universal Mind, and the client cannot take this in. Thus Laing shifts into esoteric Christian metaphors, supporting both her spiritual search and her psychodynamic needs to be autonomous from her (probably constrictive) parents. She has described herself as unfaithful to God, doctors, and her parents, and then she ends the session in a remarkable show of ego strength and faithfulness by going on-stage with Dr. Laing to answer to a huge and somewhat hostile professional crowd. She is, in the here and now, being faithful to a significant other, and this experience will help her repeat it in the future, and assist her to alter that negative self-image. It can thus be observed that the encounter has been therapeutic for the client. Neither this recorded session nor this assessment will end the long-standing debate between those practitioners valuing evidenced based interventions corroborated by experimental studies and those valuing interventions that are less quantifiable, involving intuition, empathy, authenticity, and mindfulness. It is hoped nonetheless that the two camps can move a bit closer together in this consideration of technique (that can be taught and tested) and of interpersonal meditation (that increases intuition and perception). One might propose, in fact, that what appear to be ‘two separate camps’, just like in a Sufi teaching story, are merely two sides of the psychotherapist’s own whole self. After all: the part of us that ‘parachutes into the nether regions’ with our clients and is in love with the mystery of it All – is intimately interconnected with and needs the scientific part of us that wonders, ‘what was therapeutic about that?’ — — References Almaas, A. 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