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I Questions
 "Do
you know Vicky Hamilton?" Jack Lee Rosenberg
(1932-) asked me back in August 1997, at the end of
a five day seminar culminating my three years
further education training in 'Integrative Body
Psychotherapy' (IBP). "No, I'm afraid not", I
replied. Rosenberg clarifies: "She is my long-term
supervisor in Los Angeles, and former therapist.
I've known her now for nearly twenty years. She
came over from London, where she was sort of an
assistant to Winnicott (1896-1971) at the Tavistock
Clinic." Jack knew, since our first meeting in
summer 1993 in Switzerland, that I was a former
student of the Scottish psychiatrist and
psychoanalyst R.D.Laing (1927-1989) and trained
with him in existential analysis and psychotherapy
from 1976-1981 in London. Despite my no for an
answer, I began searching for a connecting link for
freedom and peace of mind.
Who
can contain a river once it overflows? Who knows
the undercurrents below a river's bed? Can we let
it happen, as it happens anyway, as in the meaning
of the Chinese expression "wu wei"? Can I trust my
Self and let "soul-making" take its course and take
it from there on in? Can I connect what shows
itself to be the case in bringing forth a vision of
the soul into words (psyche-logos)? When we take
care of our senses, the words take care of
themselves.
This
reminds me of what the late Ted Hughes (Poet
Laureate: 1930-1998) once said in a 1996
interview
Every
work of art stems from a wound in the soul of
the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune
system comes into operation and the self-healing
process takes place, mental and physical. Art is
a psychological component of the autoimmune
system that gives expression to the healing
process. That is why great works of art make us
feel good. There are artists who concentrate on
expressing the damage, the blood, the mangled
bones, and the explosion of pain, in order to
rouse and shock the reader. And there are those
who hardly mention the circumstances of the
wound, they are concerned with the
cure.1
Laing's,
Rosenberg's and my practice of psychotherapy is an
art of healing.
II
First answer
My
curiosity was now genuinely aroused. I went to my
library, and looked in several recent biographies
on R.D.Laing consulting their indexes for
'Hamilton'. John Clay's biography 'R.D.Laing-A
Divided Self' was the only one, which featured her,
to my relief. We read about her in the chapter
titled 'India 1971-72': "By the end of March 1971,
Laing was ready to leave (London) and he flew to
Colombo, accompanied by Jutta, although he had
planned initially to go on his own. Given the
chance, Jutta had opted to go with him, worried
that in his present mood he might not come back...A
friend and former analysand of Laing's, Vicky
Hamilton joined them there."2
They all lived for a while near Kandy.
This
find made me happy. I picked up the phone and
dialled Jutta Laing's phone number in London. She
confirmed Clay's statement and gave me some more
insider information.
Vicky
Hamilton (born between 1938-1940, according to
Jutta Laing and Leon Redler) spent time in Kingsley
Hall, the experimental therapeutic community opened
by R.D.Laing and his Philadelphia Association
colleagues in 1965 (till 1970) at Bromley, East End
London. She was a friend with James Greene (son of
Hugh Greene, Graham's brother), who was at that
time in psychoanalysis with, and introduced her to
Laing. In due course she too entered analysis with
Laing. Once Hamilton began to mix in this social
circle, she threw her flat doors open and invited
her new friends for parties. After separating from
Greene, she paired up with Peter Mezan, a friend of
Laing's and a bit the 'Ernest Jones' of the
Laingian-circle, at the that time, who not only
accompanied Laing on his notorious 1972 USA Lecture
tour, but wrote a commendable Esquire article
"After Freud and Jung, Now Comes R.D.Laing", and a
gripping book-chapter: 'R.D.Laing-Portrait of a
Twentieth-Century Sceptic '(1976). It was to be
Mezan, who in 1981, "came out to California for
ten days to help me organise the manuscript into
its final form. His insistence on coherence and
precision revived both the book and the
author", Hamilton notes in the acknowledgements
of her first book, 'Narcissus and Oedipus-The
Children of Psychoanalysis.3
By
the late 1970's we find her married with Nicholas
Tufnell, who, coming from old English landed
gentry, moved with Hamilton from London to Los
Angeles, where she opened a psychotherapeutic
practice. Being new and coming from out of town,
she attracted clients such as Rosenberg, who by
that time was a very 'in' Gestalt-Therapist, among
other things, and could not very well go to someone
from 'in town'.
I
now became aware of how Hamilton's relationship
link with Laing formed a 'bridge' to Rosenberg. My
further training with Rosenberg complemented my
basic apprenticeship with Laing. Like an
anticipation of a spiral circling back to the point
from where it is drawn, fate was bringing us
together, to validate one another from the
inside/insight to the outside. I began to hear the
echo of music played long ago, connecting the heart
of human compassion and the sharing of feelings in
the sacrament of the present moment. It was the
melody of that agent of healing by active
intervention - a bright candle in the darkness of
abstraction the Hungarian doctor of medicine,
Sandor Ferenczi (1873-1933) - which I was hearing
once again.
III
Unfoldings
What
follows is a brief sketch for a psychoanalytic
ancestor lineage for Laing, Hamilton and Rosenberg,
before amplification of how the independent minds
in British psychoanalysis, of whom Laing was a
part, influenced, in an indirect and experiential
way, Rosenberg and his colleagues while forming the
art of Integrative Body Psychotherapy (IBP).
Laing
was in psychoanalytic training (1956-1960) with
Charles Rycroft (1914-1998), who was analysed by
Sylvia Payne (1880-1976), who received her analysis
from Hans Sachs (1881-1947) who, in the first
place, was analysed by Sigmund Freud (1853-1939).
Laing was in supervision with D.W.Winnicott
(1896-1971) and Marion Milner (1900-1993).
Winnicott was first by James Strachey(1885-1967)
and later by Joan Rivière (1883-1961) in
analysis. Both of them received their initiation
directly from Freud. Rivière was later in
analysis for a while with Ernest Jones (1879-1958)
and Ferenczi. Milner was first in analysis with
Payne and then W.Cliffort M.Scott (1903-1995) and
in supervision with Melanie Klein (1882-1960) and
Rivière.
Klein
was, of course, in analysis with Frenczi and later
in Berlin with Karl Abraham (1877-1925), both of
whom received their analysis from Freud. Abraham
also trained Charles Odier (1888-1954), who had
Lacan (1901-1981) in training. Lacan received his
first analysis from Rudolf Loewenstein (
1898-1976), when he was in Paris (coming from
Lodz/Poland). Loewenstein was a one-time lover of
Princess Marie Bonaparte (1982-1962) the founder of
psychoanalysis in France, and had worked under
Sachs in Berlin.
Hamilton
was in analysis with Laing, and in apprenticeship
with John Bowlby (1907-1990), when she trained as a
psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. The
clinical seminars given by Winnicott during the
last two years of his life (1969-1970) 'remain
an unforgettable experience'.4
Bowlby gained his PhD. under Cyril Burt (1883-1971)
at UCL, and in 1946 was appointed Head of the
Children’s Clinic at the Tavistock. He was in
analysis for seven years with
Rivière.
Rosenberg
trained as doctor of dental surgery, and has a
Ph.D. in clinical psychology. As a student
counsellor he participated in encounter groups at
the Esalen Institute, where he subsequently trained
with Robert Hall MD, founder of the Lomai School of
Somatic Psychotherapy, and Fritz Perls (1893-1970)
in Gestalt-therapy. He trained as a Reichian
Therapist with Phil Cucurudo. He also took
workshops with Alexander Lowen (*1910), who had
trained with Reich. Being in Big Sur, he also
learned "Structural Integration","Breathing and
Moving Yoga" and other facets of the humanistic
psychology movement.5
Jack Lee Rosenberg needed to bring the insights of
Victoria Hamilton, "who did so much for me, but did
not say very much during a session (just like
Winnicott)", to his body. Without a body experience
there could not and would be no integration of
insight.6
vFritz
Perls was briefly in analysis with Karen Horney
(1885-1952) and later with Clara Happel, a student
of Horney's. It was Horney who told Perls to seek
out Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957) 'For he would be
the only analyst who could get through to
him'.7
Honouring this tip, Perls entered analysis with
Reich, 'who was the first man I could
trust'. Horney trained with Abraham in Berlin.
Together with Hans Sachs (who had studied Law, and
was "a secret committee ring carrier" and was, with
Otto Rank (1884-1939), the only one without a
medical degree) she designed a psychoanalytic
training program. She was on good terms with Georg
Groddeck (1866-1934) her mentor and informal
therapist, who for his part, was a close mate of
and the physician of Ferenczi. Wilhelm Reich wanted
to be treated by Freud, who refused to see Viennese
students - which Reich was. So Reich went first to
Isidor Sadger (1876-1942) an early co-struggler
with Freud, and later to Paul Federn (1871-1950)
for analysis. He had a flat in Berggasse, where he
also saw patients, as close to where the action
was. Freud did refer patients to this very bright
and talented 22-year-old medical student in 1920.
Sandor Ferenczi appreciated Reich's work and
theoretical reflections in 'Characteranalyses' very
much.8
IV
Second answer
Now
lets go back from Vienna to London, as memory
always gets there in the end.
For
it was in 1920, that Hugh Crichton-Miller, MD.
(1877-1959), founded the Institute of Medical
Psychology, in Tavistock Square, London, (whence
its name) known world wide as "The Tavistock
Clinic" whose first medical director he was till
1933. This very innovative outpatient clinic was
run by a group of dedicated doctors, psychologists
and social workers, who were inspired by the "New
Psychology", originating in Vienna (Freud) and
Zurich (Bleuler, Jung). H.V.Dicks in his "50 Years
of the Tavistock Clinic", writes:
This
distinctive 'mix' was in the fourfold aim of
understanding and treatment, the
furthering of research into causation in
the hope of finding rational means of
prevention in mental hygiene, and on
teaching the emerging concepts and skills
to future specialists as well as to all those,
medical and non-medical, concerned with mental
health and human relations.9
In
1947, Dr. John D.Sutherland (1905-1991), from
Edinburgh, was appointed to become the third
medical director of the Tavistock Clinic, a
position he held until 1968. While active in
Edinburgh University, teaching psychology,
Sutherland went into analysis with Dr.Ronald
Fairbairn (1989-1964), Scotland's first
psychoanalyst. Together with Klein and Winnicott,
Fairbairn was one of the founders of the
"object-relations" approach to psychoanalysis,
which bases personality and character development
on the experience of the infant in her or his early
relationships -- both in quality- and quantity-
patterns - within the family. Fairbairn's
contributions to Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
were original, both in practice and theory, without
his having undergone the normal psychoanalytic
training routine. In 1946, he published his seminal
essay, "Object-relationships and dynamic
structure". Glasgow University's first professor of
Psychiatry, T.F.Rodger (1907-1978), a friend of
Fairbairn's, had appointed two young and bright
MD's, MacNiven and Thomas Freeman, who had trained
at the Tavistock Institute 1950-1952, and was an
enthusiastic researcher into 'schizophrenia'. As
Professor of Psychiatry, Rodger was also medical
director of the Gartnavel Royal Mental
Hospital.
R.D.Laing
studied medicine at Glasgow University from
1945-1951. At the Gartnavel Hospital, Laing trained
as a psychiatrist and joined the 'Schizophrenia
research unit', headed by Freeman. Together with
John L. Cameron and Andrew MacGhie, Laing wrote up
his first experiment in interpersonal relations
research ("Patient and Nurse"1955.)
While
practising in this mental hospital, he began
collecting cases and writing them up. These
writings became the basis for his two books (first
conceived as one) The Divided Self (1960)
and The Self and Others (1961). Freeman,
Cameron and MacGhie published their own book
Chronic Schizophrenia (1958) with a foreword
by Anna Freud (1895-1982).
It
was John Sutherland who, having asked Rodger to
suggest a few names of bright and talented
psychiatrists, decided to invite Laing, who was one
of those fortunate enough be mentioned, to come
down from Glasgow to London, to train on a grant as
a psychoanalyst and, at the same time join the
staff at the Tavistock Clinic, as a registrar,
which Laing did from 1956-1960. Until he left the
Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in 1964,
Laing was active in the family communications
research field. Dicks features Ronald Laing
…who
also obtained a Foundation Found grant on
completing his senior registrarship and his
psychoanalytic training with us...Laing's work
in pathological family process not only
consisted of vivid observation of schizophrenic
families, but also laid the foundations of a new
method of recording interactions. which resulted
in a book by Philipson, Lee and himself -
Interpersonal Perception.10
It
was here at the Tavistock, that Laing also met John
Bowlby, who later became an important influence in
the formative training years of Victoria Hamilton,
aiming to become a Child Psychotherapist, (as such
registered with the UKCP in 1999). Even when
studying for a doctorate at the Psychoanalysis
Unit, University College London, in 1985, Hamilton
enjoyed "many informal discussions with Dr. John
Bowlby until his death in 1990; he provided
encouragement, interest, and support throughout the
study. He was particularly taken with the idea of
psychoanalytic cultures, the title he favoured for
the book."11
She however titled this piece of empirical
research, The Analyst's Preconscious.
Let's
hear what Laing had said about Bowlby:
Bowlby
told me that a sane society depended on the
sanity of its members which was very much likely
to be affected by a wholesome early life and a
wholesome relationship with the mothering, or
care taking person...Bowlby I think saw me as a
very bright young man and one that he had great
hopes for but was always a bit anxious about the
wild side of me, or another side of me that he
didn't understand. By the wild side I mean an
intellectual wild side, which to him was
phenomenology and this existentialism...
But at the same time, over a period of years in
repeated seminars and in terms of research
designs that I proposed - the interpersonal
perception design and the outcome study in
Napsbury and Shenly - I influenced Bowlby a lot.
' Intervention in Social Situations' was another
influence on him.12
Bowlby
is one of the founders of the "attachment
theory", which elaborates and explains the way
in which we, as infants, establish ties with our
mother or primary care givers and explores the
consequences of this tie being disrupted or lost.
One can also loose ones motherland, through the
necessity of fleeing persecution or destruction, as
we all are aware of, in the history of those
painful years between 1931-1945, when fascism and
criminal mass destruction reigned through
government in Europe. One of the many who had to
flee Hungary was Michael Balint (1896-1970) who,
together with his wife Enid, left Budapest in 1939.
In his suitcase he brought his friend's and
teacher's last manuscript to Manchester and later
to London. It was Sandor Ferenczi's The Clinical
Journal from 1932.
Balint
trained first with Hans Sachs in Berlin (1920-24).
Once back in Budapest continued his psychoanalytic
education with Ferenczi. Balint is one of the
pioneers of psychosomatic medicine. In 1947 he
began work at the Tavistock, as a member in the
"Family discussion bureau". In 1950 he started what
became know as 'Balint-group', a forum for general
practitioners in which they could discuss cases
from their practice paying special attention to
psychological interaction with their patients. As
Ferenczi's literary executor, Balint became very
influential. He had his own strong voice going in
his book: The Basic Fault. Therapeutic Aspects
of Regression (1968). Laing, of course,
knew him and his work, concerning "the basic fault"
- which created, in Laing's words, "ontological
insecurity".
V
Interlude
Joan
Rivière mentions Freud's simplicity, which
was a familiar characteristic to those who knew
him. Real psychoanalysis is an uninterrupted
sequence of concrete experience. Rivière
mentions how in her analysis, Freud one day made an
interpretation, and she responded to it with an
objection. Freud is reported to have said:
"It is unconscious". Rivière was
overwhelmed by the realisation that she knew
nothing about it. She experienced Freud as someone
who did establish an instantaneous direct relation
to his interpersonal perception. Was he not
practising a sort of relaxing "soul therapy"? Freud
encouraged Ferenczi to relax in sympathy with his
patients, and to discover the sagacity of the body,
as the soul's vessel. As therapists, we perceive
with the whole of our own embodiment and the whole
of our (own) past, what the patient brings to us,
as what is the case and what is not the case in
what is the matter with her or him. This Ferenczi
called a "relaxed active therapy stance". Rycroft
once remarked that perhaps Winnicott's most
important contribution to psychoanalysis was his
concept of "a transitional reality…which
mediates between the private world of dreams and
the public, shared world of the
environment."13
Another
point of note, in the gathering together of the
strands of this time, is that Melanie Reizes grew
round and healthy before marrying Arthur Klein
(1878-1938) in 1903 in Rosenberg. Today this place
is called Ruzomberak in Slovakia.14
The newly married couple travelled to Zurich, where
Arthur had studied chemical engineering, and then
on to Constanz on the same named lake, not far from
where I live now in St.Gallen. Returning home they
settled in Rosenberg, a principal town, with about
8000 inhabitants, in the Hungarian province of
Liptau.
On
March 5th, 1952, Bowlby and his research assistant
James Robertson, a social worker who had worked
with Anna Freud at the Hampstead Nurseries during
the war, showed their film, A Two-Year-Old Goes
to Hospital, at the Tavistock Institute. In the
film they illustrate how, "during an eight-day
stay, the child undergoes a typical sequence of
responses varying from distressful protest through
despair to brief episodes of detachment...Anna
Freud approved the observational approach and
endorsed the view that the distress was due to the
absence of Mother, but the Kleinians
disagreed."15
I was born that very same day. Is not our capacity
for symbol-making our basis for creativity?
Also
in 1952, Fairbairn wrote his piece, "Theoretical
and experimental aspects of psychoanalysis",
wherein he claims that psychoanalysis is a valid
experimental method, by using his fresh concepts of
relations with internal objects and their
projection in the transference on the analyst or
therapist. The interaction between the two persons
engaged in this endeavour can then be dealt with
entirely in terms of "Here and Now" phenomena. From
1950 on Fairbairn went to a regular discussion
gathering at the Davidson Clinic in Edinburgh,
established (1939) and run by Dr. Winifred
Rushforth (1885-1983), a Jungian Analyst, who had
Vera von der Heydt (1899-1996) on her staff, and
who, in 1973 was to be my first Jungian Analyst.
Laing also had some sporadic contact with
Rushforth.16
Rycroft
has written a book on Reich for the Modern Masters
series, to which Laing contributed the chapter
Why is Reich Never Mentioned? in: On
W.Reich & Orgonomy and reviewed The
Function of Orgasm, The Sexual Revolution,
Character Analysis, Selected Writings (in
1968), and concludes: "Reich has left us a vivid
record of part of his adventure. We would be wise
to study it with care. I for one have been
instructed."17
Jack
Gaines interviewed Rosenberg for his memoir on
"Fritz Perls-Here and Now". Jack said, "I
was thirty then, an established professional and
well thought of, and I couldn't get up and kiss
girls and dance around. Fritz was doing it, and
that kind of gave me permission to do it. I started
to try it. Man, it was like I had permission to be
alive because he was alive."18
When
Bob Mullan asked Laing about Fritz Perls, this is
what he said:
As
far as Perls was concerned, he looked us up in
Kingsley Hall and came along one evening. and he
was in tears while there. I didn't meet him in
detail and, when I was over in Esalen for the
first time, Perls was around and again we never
clicked at a personal level. He was a character
that I didn't take to. By this time he was
playing the role of some sort of liberated
secular rabbi who had a great propensity for
pawing and making physical contact with any
woman in sight...
The
elements that have gone into the practice of
Gestalt were things that were a codification of
awareness that I took for granted, you might
say, in my awareness. The 'empty chair'
technique, for example, and I suppose the
overlap between Gestalt and Moreno's
psychodrama. I mean, that just seemed like a
thimble compared to what I felt was the real
thing that went on in mental hospitals and the
PA houses. Twenty-four-hour living. Perls' main
clients seemed to be psychotherapists
themselves.19
In
October 1971, Leon Redler (1936-), a colleague of
Laing's, interviewed Vicky Hamilton for her account
of Kinsley Hall, the PA Network, and herself. The
interview is in two parts, and, written up, runs to
33 pages. It is presently archived in the R.D.Laing
Special Collection, Glasgow University Library. The
first lecture of Laing's that Hamilton attended, in
the winter 1966, was about orient-ation, about
looking to the Orient. It was all completely new to
her. She wrote
It’s
very strange because the first time I'd come
across Ronnie's name was in this bookshop,
Dillon’s University Bookshop. And I picked
it up because I saw this name Laing, which is a
Scottish name and actually was the name of our
village shop...but I just turned over the pages
of this book Sanity, Madness and the
Family (1964) and the word 'schizophrenic'
jumped out and that finished that book for me.
And so, but later on when James introduced me to
Laing.20
Living,
writing, painting in Glasgow, Hamilton, then 21
years old, came across a book called "A Life of
One's Own" by Joanna Field, pseudonym of Marion
Milner, who wrote about writing down whatever comes
to mind in a Journal. She later came down to
London, studied Philosophy at UCL and worked part
time as an art-therapist in a mental
hospital.
Redler:
Did you see Kingsley Hall as a place where you
yourself might have occasion to go at any point,
to live?
Hamilton:
I did think of going there twice and I think it
was important to me really, because I always
felt there was somewhere to go if things go too
difficult or too unmanageable. If things could
not be contained in my analysis, I think I felt
I could go there...an enabling sort of
environment...and the first person I really knew
there was Noel (Cobb). I began to visit there
quite regularly...everything was so free, I mean
a whole lot of stuff, which appealed because I
was so hung-up myself at the time. I think
probably now I might have a rather different
prospective on it all. I think now I've become
more doubtful about the value of getting
involved in acting out, I mean take screaming
for example. I just feel that that might be
quite a relief, but I don't feel it would really
get one through whatever one was really
screaming about.
I
was most on the fringes of Kingsley Hall and
felt frightened of it in the way I have
described, and it was very much mediated through
my feelings about Ronnie and my analysis with
him. But I think that after the summer of 1967
'The Dialectics of Liberation Congress' time,
was the time of great change for me, because
during those two weeks, that was the first
social context in which I felt really
happy...Ronnie would see how I was out of
analysis, how I conducted myself in the outside
world...I mean Ronnie was the most central
figure in Kingsley Hall, and everybody projected
onto him...
Ronnie
was the only person that was elected to be free
and able to say anything which occurred to him.
He generally was the most interesting person
there, because he was the only person who was
being himself in any way...Because part of the
projection was whether he would approve or
disapprove, people could just feel completely
destroyed if he attacked them or criticized
them... and its all a complete waste of time, in
as much as that was the guiding rule of my
behaviour. Ronnie never criticized me or did
anything in public the faintest bit like that. I
could at least go and talk what I felt about and
it could be analysed and the transference could
be analysed.(Ibid)
She got
herself together, came into her own, got her voice
going in a most refreshing way. She separated from
Ronnie, and never ever mentions, in her two books
that she was in Psychoanalysis with him.
Jack
Rosenberg told me that Vicky Hamilton never
mentioned her experience with Laing, and he didn't
know of her two books, published during the 19
years he was in analysis and supervision with her,
until I told him so.
VI
Approaches and Concepts
IBP
was founded and developed by Rosenberg together
with Diana Asay, a Jungian Analyst, and Marjorie
Rand, Ph.D.and first presented as a therapeutic
form in their book: Body, Self and Soul -
Sustaining Integration. (1985) IBP's approach
is a holistic one, taking body, self and soul as
inseparable aspects of our being human. It focuses
on the somatic, emotional, social, and spiritual
energetic experience, and the way these are
expressed in relationships through words and
embodiment. The basic concepts used in this
therapeutic style are: Body-awareness, Core or True
Self, Breath, Grounding, Containment, Boundaries,
Fragmentation and Reframing-composition, Issue of
Sexuality, Current Situation, Here and Now,
Transference and Counter transference in the
therapeutic relationship. The concepts of Secret
Themes, Character Style, (other) Agency and Self
Agency were developed later with Beverly Morse
Ph.D. Release of tension and transpersonal aspects
round off the "core bug". The aim is to create a
greater and smoother sense of wholeness both within
oneself, with others and existentially with the
cosmic powers that be.
Victoria
Hamilton mostly orients herself in the use of the
concepts from attachment theory and
object-relations theory. Interpersonal
interactions, the child's ability to experience
him/herself as an effective and affective agent in
the world, are using objects to create direct
links/connection from inner world (dreams,
phantasies, imaginations) to the reality of the
shared outside world. Pathological behaviour and
experience is only intelligible in its social
context. She makes use of G.Bateson’s
cybernetic explanations, using central concepts
such as: feedback, patterning, redundancy, and
predictability in communication specific to the
context of the transference relationship in an
analytic setting. Following Balint and Winnicott
she uses the concept of primary object-love and
primary affectional bonds, good enough environment
with interactional synchronicity and mutuality,
transitional schemas, agency, the analyst's
preconscious and her/his interpretive practices.
Hers is a pluralistic approach, as distinct from
relativism. She differentiates and compares
therapist's sentences of faith while practicing and
their publicly declared ideological orientation.
The holding and containing therapeutic environment,
the therapist's models of Change, and the
'Reparative Process', are some more core concepts
she uses.
Throughout
her published work, she has mentioned R.D.Laing
four times, always in relation to Winnicott,
Balint, Klein, Milner and others.
Laing’s
major concepts are as follows: Interpersonal
experience, process and praxis, intelligibility,
ontological insecurity (engulfment, implosion,
petrification and depersonalisation), the embodied
and unembodied self, the false-self-system,
authenticity and inauthenticity, alienation and
mystification, self-consciousness, modes of
interpersonal experience (phantasy, communication,
pretence and elusion, the counterpoint), forms of
interpersonal action (complementary identity,
confirmation and disconfirmation, collusion, false
and untenable positions, attributions and
injunctions), primary data and family scenario
(operations, rules and metarules, mapping), dual
unity and ego-boundary, the tie and the cut-off,
embryologems, psychologems, mythologems, recession
and regression, procession and progression,
transgression, mystical experience and
liberation..
It
has often been asked, what would make a 'Laingian
therapy'? Confronting what is there, in behaviour
and experience, to test the shared reality. Laing
has never been satisfied with using a single term
to connote his own therapeutic style. As we know he
was, like Hamilton and Rosenberg, very eclectic,
making use of existential, psychoanalytic, gestalt,
bio-and autorhythmia, hatha-yoga, Zen, and other
healing arts. He practiced being in company in an
undivided attention, clarification, reframing,
co-presence, cultivated intuition, spontaneity and
sensibility. Laing never presented a model, like
Rosenberg has managed to do. In a way we get
something back to Europe from an ancestral spirit,
who made the effort to connect free-floating sides
and varieties of the same which are not alike, and
simplified, tuned in those different plays and base
melodies, in to a chorus form.
In
summarising his work for the Oxford companion to
the Mind, Laing wrote succinctly:
There
is so much that goes on between us which we can
never know. The necessity of this ignorance, and
the impossibility of any satisfactory criteria
of decidability when it comes to the validation
of particular attributions of a personal and
interpersonal order, have led those who wish to
cultivate the art of the soluble to abandon this
area of uncertainty and enigmas. However, this
domain does not evaporate because the objective
look does not see it. The great divide between
fact and feelings is a product of our own
schizoid construction. In reality, the reason of
the heart and the physiology of the brain
coexist and must be interdependent. We cannot
construe this reality, however. We cannot
explain it, much less can we understand
it.21
Nevertheless,
what we can do is to live and let us be lived,
cultivate a method of reflexivity, to see how I
'see', to depict my way of seeing, feeling,
thinking, dreaming and to live my answer through my
soul's embodiment. After all is said and done, make
your Self a vessel, to float in the river of life,
towards the ocean of eternal being.
VII
Signification
My
attempt here is to disclose and/or to reveal a way
of looking at 'psyche's phenomena', which enables
what each contributor brings to the gathering, to
be seen in connection. Basically, I want to know:
how did I get here? Where did I come from? What am
I still here for? Where do I go from here? What
help are these mutative interpretations of
experience? For is it not our professional longing
to reach a key position on the threshold of a
mature adult life, to muse on the checkpoint of
possibilities, aiming to be in on the act of
becoming conscious of being in resonance, with
what, for another word, we call God or Goddess?
This moment releases energy and libidinal
gratification. That’s why, our sweet
psychoanalytic ancestor in Hungary, Sandor
Ferenczi, has encouraged us to practice active
intervention, for as patients we are in need of
immediate emotional experiences, in the actual
presence in a shared reality with the therapist,
appropriate and sufficient to the present
situation. Ferenczi called this being active
in-junction, to hold onto the twofold sense of
touching and being touched by trauma - and
accessing our resources.22
The
therapist witnessing this emotional tremor creates
a liveable and healing symbol of kindness and
wisdom, which activates a fresh ordering, or to use
another word, integration.
The
archetype of 'the healer' aids unity in the soul.
For me it was a revelation to read in Ferenczi's
clinical journal about the concept of fragmentation
and re-union, something that is practiced with a
tender thoroughness by Jack Lee Rosenberg, Beverly
Kitaen Morse and Marjorie Rand. Without sympathy,
no healing. That's our path. Living our health and
no longer aim or beg for health to be administered
to us.
Further
themes to explore in this field of soul making are:
"Healer heal thyself & Shaman
initiation/calling illness and its transformation,"
and "Morphic fields and Morphogenetic Resonance in
the Unfolding of a Deep Psychotherapeutic Tradition
or Culture," (with special reference to the work of
Rupert Sheldrake (1942-).
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Notes
1
Ted Hughes in Sagar K. 2000, p.xi
2
John Clay 1996, p.156
3
Victoria Hamilton, 1993, p.vi
4
Victoria Hamilton, 1993, p.vii
5
Jack Lee Rosenberg, 1993, p.183-186
6
Personal communication.
7
Fritz Perls in Clarkson and Mackewn 1995,
p.26-27; Karen Horney in Rubins JL 1980, p.12
8
Wilhelm Reich in Sharaf M 1994, p.103
9
Tavistock Clinic in Dicks HV 1970, p.1
10
Ibid, p.243
11
Hamilton V 1995, p.viii
12
Laing in Mullan B 1995, p.156-158
13
Rycroft in Jacobs M 1995, p.136
14
Rosenberg Austria in Grosskurth P 1987,
p.40
15
Grosskurth 1987, p.403
16
Rushforth in Mullan B. 1995, p.64; Laing, A.
1997, p.178; Vera von der Heydt 1976, p.xiii
17
Wilhelm Reich in Laing 1968, p.6
18
Jack Rosenberg in Gaines J 1979, p.173
19
Laing in Mullan B 1995, p.212-13, 348
20
Collection Dept.Univ.of Glasgow, R.D.Laing
Collection, Call Nr.L192/1 +192/2
21
Laing in Gregory RL 1987, p.418
22
Ferenczi 1988, p.98-99
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I like
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