Therapy as immersion in the real

In this text, I would like to share some thoughts regarding the non-content aspect of psychotherapeutic practice, what is associated with its background and what, in my opinion, reflects the uniqueness of this approach compared to other types of human communication.

First, I would like to describe the obvious things in order to then move on to the less obvious and even completely contradictory. The first step to be taken in this direction will reflect the relationship between the object and subject of psychotherapy. In the everyday view, which largely reflects the views of the traditional medical model, the client is an object for therapeutic influence. It needs to be improved by correcting inadequate personality characteristics. Accordingly, therapy turns out to be a method of getting rid of mental suffering, which aims to achieve so-called health, that is, comprehensive mental, physical and social well-being. The insidiousness of such a task was discovered by Buddha Shakyamuni, who chose the recognition of suffering rather than the promise of Nirvana as the basis for spiritual practice. In other words, if the goal of therapy is to get rid of something by, in modern terms, reacting, then this is reminiscent of a child trying to hide by covering his eyes with his palm.

Psychotherapeutic discourse, like any other activity, is characterized by its own language and the therapeutic position can be detected on the basis of the verbal markers with which it is designated. For example, words that expand the concept of “impact” - improvement, correction, bringing to happiness - are not found within the framework of therapeutic discourse, since they operate on the territory of reality, and the therapeutic setting separates the space of the symbolic from everyday life. This is why the therapist does not give advice, because advice and recommendations intrude beyond the symbolic. In therapeutic relationships, you can hear words close in meaning to the concept of “exploration” - interest, excitement, desire. That is, just those that we rarely operate in everyday life.

In the next step towards describing psychotherapeutic discourse, we recognize that the client is not an object of influence, but finds himself in the status of a subject. But what exactly does he become the subject of? And where then is the knowledge about the client's good if we leave the idea that the therapist has this knowledge at the previous step? After all, we remember that the idea of ​​improvement, and therefore the concept of the end point of development, does not work. The client comes to therapy because he has reached the limit of some ideas about himself and, upon coming to the session, discovers that the therapist does not have this knowledge either. Don't such thoughts lead us into a dead end and discredit psychotherapy, affirming it in the status of a useless and meaningless activity?

Let's try to understand this issue. The client is primarily a subject of his unconscious. This assumption requires decoding. In general, a visit to a psychotherapist turns out to be the first legalization of the unconscious, the recognition that there is something that goes beyond conscious control. The client says that he has tried a lot of things, but it does not help, or has studied the topic, but the knowledge does not change behavior or attitude. However, in the future this legalization does not develop; moreover, it is precisely this that is subjected to intensive denial during therapy. In general, this resistance can be characterized as follows: the client is trying to control the unconscious, and not use it as an attempt to expand his ideas about himself. In other words, he treats his unconscious as an object, over which, again, it is necessary to carry out some manipulations.

In this sense, the most difficult clients are those who are therapists themselves. Therapy from the client's perspective has nothing to do with therapy from the therapist's perspective, because they belong to different registers of the psyche. To illustrate this idea, let us first turn to the status of the unconscious. With Heidegger's light hand, being was separated from existence. This act contains the philosophical basis for duality. The existing in it appears as a certain intelligible object, as something about which one can think or in relation to which one can take a position. Being, in turn, turns out to be a condition for such knowledge and its possibility. Existence follows from being and, in a simplified view, is its reduction. Metaphorically speaking, if being is an image from the depths of a magic lantern, then being is its optical system and source of light.

The conscious, in turn, relates to the unconscious, as existence relates to being. We can comprehend being only as changes in existing things. The paradox of this cognition lies in the fact that the agent of reflection is located in the conscious, while mental defenses are aimed at keeping the conscious in stability, not allowing anything into it that would differ from its current structure. Therefore, the unconscious is forced to manifest itself bypassing the conscious, bypassing its security and censorship system. This is how a symptom appears, as a form of contraband and a message that must be read before they begin to fight it, including with the help of psychotherapy focused on alleviating the condition. Exploration-oriented psychotherapy maintains the presence of the unconscious in the frame, and thereby reduces the harm from the symptom, which is an invasion of the unconscious, sometimes destructive to ordinary life.

How does this happen? The unconscious strives to be heard. The client closes his ears in every possible way and, at the moment when his efforts fail, comes to the psychotherapist to become an ally in his fight against this hubbub. But instead, I am met with a proposal not to get rid of the sound, but to adjust the equalizer so that the sound becomes more articulate. Despite the research resources of this message, it seems extremely aggressive. After all, it goes against common sense and the client’s life plan. Therapy, in a sense, is not only useless, but also generally unnatural, since it turns the organization of the client’s mental life on its head. Where he is usually used to tightening the screws, following logic and maintaining control, he is offered the exact opposite - to fantasize, be impressed and disagree. The therapeutic situation is the reverse side of ordinary life.

In the conventional view (the medical model of psychotherapy, focused on getting rid of suffering), the therapist fights the symptom, forcing the latter to retreat and clear the way to the supposed well-being. I will try to take the therapist out of the image of a noble knight who overcomes the resistance of the monsters of the unconscious. In fact, everything is exactly the opposite - the therapist serves the symptom as a message from the unconscious, the therapist does the work of the symptom and “fights” rather with the client’s conscious, which is trying to remain unaffected and unimpressed.

Therapy offers the client a very serious challenge. The unconscious cannot be discovered while in the conscious. This feature of the unconscious is very well described by the psychic register, which Lacan calls the Real. The Real, in contrast to reality, as a certain picture of the world, has no possibility of being understood at all; this is what eludes understanding, what constitutes the foundation for any conceptual knowledge - the lack of completeness. The unconscious is chaos and pulsation of drives. These drives cannot be understood as some object separate from the personality. They can only be described in terms of the effect they produce in the conscious. In other words, in order to get to know the unconscious, you first need to surrender to its drives, and then, in retrospect, register the changes that have taken place.

It’s easier to write about this than to try to implement it. Because plunging into the unconscious means giving up everything that anchors us to reality. For some, fortunately limited, session time, the client will have to give up not only his usual ideas about himself, but even familiar feelings and sensations. In a sense, therapy is a sacrifice and a demo version of suicide. This is the price to pay for change. And on the one hand, this is something that the client has to do alone, because no one is able to do it for him. On the other hand - and this idea is very supportive - the same story happens to the therapist.

Here we take another step - the subject of the unconscious can reveal itself only in dialogue. The therapist and client do not move together, but in opposite directions. If the client tries to understand and thereby excludes the possibility of understanding, since it lies beyond the limits of the tool that he uses for this, then the therapist tries not to understand as far as possible and thereby brings understanding, which appears as a result of presence in chaos, as a residue of this effort. This is a difficult paradox to formulate. But in order not to understand, the therapist must also be impressed by his own unconscious, which responds to the client's unconscious.

The client comes to the therapist, as a subject who supposedly knows what the client does not know, for the truth that he needs most, because the question seems to come from outside his identity. Something beyond the boundaries of my knowledge of myself calls to the one who seeks it for reunification and reassurance. And on the one hand, the therapist does not have the knowledge for which they come to him. It is not in the form of something ready-made that can be talked about and, if possible, understood. But the therapist has a method by which this knowledge can be obtained - by being overwhelmed by the experience, by discovering oneself where words do not yet exist. There is a very large distance between these two states; they do not interact with each other directly. Therapy is a way to bridge the gap between the known and the ineffable and to establish an exchange between these opposing registers of mental life. The knowledge sought does not belong to the therapist, but to the client's unconscious. This truth appears in the therapeutic relationship like a photograph under a red lamp. The therapist turns out to be the place where the client's knowledge about himself is directed and from which it can be seen.

So, let's summarize some results. The unconscious is inexpressible, but the attempt to symbolize it turns into development, as a synonym for deepening. Either we look into the unconscious in therapeutic sessions, through effort and mental work, or it manifests itself through a symptom, without effort, but with destructive consequences. Therapy is a space for contact with the unconscious and this is its main and main task. Despite its inherent resource for change, the method it proposes for this is unnatural and unpleasant. In psychotherapy, unfortunately, there is no romantic happy ending - it does not lead to final integration, but supports a movement that has no completion. It does not smooth out the contradiction, but, on the contrary, maintains its pulsation. On the other hand, thinking, as a human phenomenon, is also unnatural, that is, redundant and unnecessary. Therefore, psychotherapy paradoxically turns out to be an optional but essential practice, since it supports the effort to assert oneself. And this statement is not aimed at achieving some final and complete knowledge about oneself, but in a completely opposite direction - towards irony regarding the possibility of achieving this. Paradoxical assertion of oneself in impermanence and readiness for change.