Centre for Training in Psychotherapy -- Orientation 2008

Dear friends, there are a few occasions each year when the whole school--students, graduates and faculty are invited to gather together--Graduation, What is Psychotherapy day and Orientation. The focus of tonight's gathering, as the name indicates, is to welcome our new students and share with them something of the spirit and orientation of our school.

Orientation evokes the idea of our place in space and the purposeful direction of our journey. Charles Taylor in his classic The Sources of the Self defines the human self as the one who orients him or herself in relation to questions about the good.

Now the C.T.P. twenty years on has an orientation that is the result--our glory and our burden--of innumerable choices of the faculty towards a good. Our purpose has been to create an essential and best possible training for psychodynamic therapists.

We stated at the beginning that we ourselves are a group of life-long learners. We continue to work with clients of our own and all of us are reading and thinking, talking and arguing about the human condition and the work of therapy. So you new students are the latest to be invited into a collegiality with a group of life-long learners.

I will mention two signature characteristics of your learning at C.T.P. One is the emphasis we place on group therapy. The other is that we study directly the texts of selected important therapists and theoreticians.

I will highlight one particular intentionality that lies behind these two choices.

Human beings love to generalize and they love a system of generalized knowledge. Naturally enough! Because we can’t begin to make our way in the world without learning from others the words for things (general ideas) and the way everybody knows how things hang together and make sense. We can’t survive or mature humanly without categories and without an initial shared view of the world.

History shows us however that this necessity can lead us astray into the assumption that with a few general ideas or words (a definition) we have grasped the essence of something. Secondly we can be led astray into a love of a conceptual/language system for its own beautiful sake.

Besides, faced with the overwhelming riches and complexity of what has gone before in human culture, the stoutest individual learner can easily quail and be tempted to beg for a quick simplified summary of the Truth.

The therapy group is able to be a wonderful corrective to all these perils. Firstly it changes the paradigm of knowledge itself.

Our forefathers put a lock on what knowledge is by looking at astronomical objects and generalizing about their motions. (Now there’s a generalization for you!). This meant for them that they were finding out the intentions of God or the gods. Its result in history was that knowledge came to be understood as the possession of a set of true propositions.

What the experience of the group does is subversively restore a different view of human knowledge as coming from the encounter of two human beings--something every mother knows.

We offer our narrative to the other with the use of general words and we hear the other's words. But we are constantly reminded that the particular and unique person who speaks is always more than her words or your words express.

So in a group we are each held to the particular, to the unique person, and we are constantly reminded to stay open, to leave room for the new, the unexpected, the unknowable. Every word we use stays open for expansion and never closes off as if adequate to what is named or referred to.

We are not cast down into skepticism here. We have the confidence we gained as children that we are truly connecting, uniting with this other person, for we are present to them as they are in their fullness and we hold our words lightly and open.

Besides the group therapy, your first two years at C.T.P. introduce you to classic texts by selected major therapists and theoreticians.

The perils I mentioned earlier--over confident generalization, the seduction of system for its own sake, the frightened wish for a simple summary of what’s true--all of them press upon us here in a more powerful way. And we are dealing with writers who are passionately trying to achieve systematic thinking about the human condition and its suffering.

The learner finds they often disagree or at least are worlds apart in their language and way of thinking.

Furthermore we can only read a little of each. Are we trying to drive you crazy? No.

The disagreements remind us to avoid closed conviction, to hold conviction open to amendment or completion. Besides, disagreements that seemed irreconcilable in 1914 ( Freud-Jung), 1940 (Anna Freud-Melanie Klein), 1970 (Freudians-Self Psychology), after decades of controversy and some ecumenical writing of the kind that a Stephen Mitchell did, seem to yield a great deal, if not totally, to complementarity.

Opponents in controversy tend to oversimplify and even caricature the opposing view, so it is important for us to go to the classic texts directly.

Now as I said we read only a little of each. This keeps us humble, for we must read a great deal more than is possible in two years, to have a developed and nuanced sense of any one author. So you are reminded that you are beginning a life-long journey of learning.

But the overriding reason for our use of originary or classic texts brings us back to what I said about group therapy. For in the classic texts we see not only the passion for synthesis and systematic knowledge, we see theoreticians in live contact with their therapeutic work, their encounters with their clients, out of which their theory flows.

As in the group where we are constantly reminded that the persons and the encounters have an existential fullness that cannot be contained in words. So as we read Freud on Dora we remind ourselves that the existential fullness of these two persons and their encounters far transcends the words and interpretations that Freud struggles to write for us. We find ourselves arguing with him as if we were there and then fall silent because we were not.

Even the theoreticians who were not therapists, Heidegger and William James, are trying with all their might to hold themselves to what is phenomenologically present and is immediate to experience. And both know our words fail us.

So welcome, old friends, to this reminder of why we chose group therapy and the study of many classic texts. And welcome, new students, to the beginning of a unique and exciting life-long journey of heart and mind.

Philip McKenna

September 3^rd 2008

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I am posting this Orientation address which I gave to the Centre for Training in Psychotherapy because it shows, in the context of psychotherapy, certain principles of knowledge and language use that become quite critical for our journey (via) in theology.

1. All our knowledge begins as encounter with a living person. She is our universe, our "all." You might argue that this is an illusion, and many psychoanalysts have chosen to use this term while insisting that it is a necessary illusion in the infant to ward off any awareness of its utter helplessness. To focus on the imperfection and illusory nature of infant experience risks missing the fertile truth potential in originary experience. Thus it is generally held that animism is the earliest form of religion. All things have souls or everything is alive. Everything is "full of gods" as Thales the presocratic said. Later, astronomy is the science of what God or gods are doing in or through the heavenly bodies: for successful agriculture we need to know. And in monotheism a loving, personal Creator "holds" all things and all persons in being and draws them through time to union with God's self. Now all these human elaborations of meaning will naturally evoke a wordless echo of our original encounter, gaining analogical force and richness from this evocation.

Monotheism, as here described, can at once be seen as an elaboration of the originary experience and a "purification" of animism and early cosmic theology. Negative theology moves in the same direction, gradually removing (via remotionis) reliance on anthropomorphisms. This context reminds us to privilege, at the human end of the via negativa, a posture of journeying that is itself encounter and a movement towards a final encounter. Theology is not first of all a set of propositions. Because of human limitation we cannot stay constantly in the prayer mode of encounter and presence: At appropriate times the work with words and concepts, propositions and reasoning, Scripture and Tradition, claims our full attention. Our larger prior intention includes this within our Way.

2. I referred to holding concepts "open" in our thinking. I came across this idea while reading Humberto Eco's dialogue with Cardinal Martini (Belief or Non-belief: a Confrontation, Arcade Pub. 2000). Think of the concept of "the heavens." We are aware of galaxies and light years, so we can see clearly how our ancestors, pointing to the same "heavens" as we do, would have been wise to have kept some room for completion or correction of their concept. I can easily imagine we know as little about the human brain as our ancestors knew about the heavens... Moreover, we must hold our concepts open, not only across history but interpersonally as well. The concept of a concept is itself an abstraction. Each person using the concept of the human brain will arguably have a discernibly different "core" to their instantiation of the concept--not to mention the virtually limitless sets of different associations surrounding each person's use.

What we have said applies also to propositions and whole texts, with the added complication that texts float loose from their author into the future, suffering cultural and grammatological vicissitudes as well. The text, like the concept, is an abstraction.

Given that our paradigm of knowledge is encounter, we are not dismayed by these limitations.We are already predisposed to know the inadequacies of human thought and language. That any thing and any human transcends our knowledge makes us ready for the incomprehensibility and the ineffability of the divine.