As an existential phenomenologist, I am partly indebted to Heidegger’s philosophy, which has been very influential in the world of counselling. His 1927 book Being and Time addresses ontology, the study of being, arguing that we (human subjects) are inseparable from the objective world. We are beings-in-the-world or (his word) Dasein. If I were born in another time or another place, I would be a different person, so the time-and-place I ‘find myself in’ is an integral part of my being.
Counsellors and psychotherapists are no more immune to this than the rest of us; also of a time and place, inseparable from the circumstances in which they arose and in which they exist today. The philosophers and early psychotherapists who are typically given credit for bringing the field of psychotherapy into existence are mostly white men. They had the time and privilege to sit at their tables and think (as Sara Ahmed writes so well); questions of what is behind the table, underneath the table, where the table came from, who doesn’t get to sit at the table, and who’s looking after the kids (amongst other labour which is often out of view) are not often addressed. Counselling also exists in its present form in a certain context; it ‘finds itself’ in a specific time and place. How that context is described is dependent on the individual, as it’s arguably a complex and relational context. My ‘Luke eyes’ see that context refracted through my own lenses, true to me, perhaps only to me.
Heidegger himself was a contextual being of course, to put it mildly. To put it more directly, he was a member of the Nazi party between 1933 and 1945. Not just a Nazi of course, also a philosopher, a teacher, a partner of to different women (including Jewish women, one of which was Hannah Arendt), a father, and so on. The debate about separating the art from the artist is naturally complicated, and perhaps Heidegger would argue that such a separation is impossible; we are beings-in-the-world before all else. Freud and Jung too, ‘fathers’ of psychotherapy, were also ‘of their time’, with conflicted views about the subconscious. Both used racist analogies at times and seemed to veer from fearing the ‘darkness’ of the subconscious to embracing it. There’s a remarkable example of this in Jung’s travels from Kenya to the Sudan. At first he joins in with some African men dancing (swinging his rhinoceros whip above his head) but then becomes overwhelmed, seemingly frightened that the group were turning into a ‘wild horde’, while he himself starts acting ‘wildly’ by suddenly chasing them away with his whip and swearing in Swiss German (Im indebted to Nick Totton for this description).
How to approach this difficult history and context? Can I throw baby Heidegger out with his fascist bathwater? To quote Tom Waits: “the only ropes that tie me here… and tangled up around the pier”. I don’t know what the answer is. I sit uncomfortably in the centre, holding both the joy and the horror that one person can bring the world. It’s not a resolution to sit here knowing both, it’s an uneven and tilting balance between them. I imagine myself literally sitting on a fence, wondering if this is ‘neutrality’; wondering what it is like to jump down into one field; what is given up in doing so (sight of the ‘other’ field); what perspective is gained from seeing ‘both’; if this is simply cowardice; then rejecting the image of the fence because it’s too binary. Is it possible to reject Heidegger and Freud and Jung (and others) and be a therapist? Humanistic therapy emerged from the context built by these men, while also reacting against that context to do something new, less interpretive and more client-centred. But ‘we’ Humanistic therapists could not have emerged without that ground from which to emerge.
I cannot reject the ground I stand on, even if I wish it were different. Although I try to grow something different from the soil, the ground nonetheless remains. Similarly, in the therapy room I can still love a client if they have done things I find objectionable. I find value in allowing space for objectionable things to be discussed. For example, David Bedrick points out that when people with a sexual attraction to children enter therapy, they often focus on how much they are ashamed and regret their attraction to children. But without addressing the other part of them that does not regret it, ‘part’ of themselves will always remain siphoned off, without the possibility of true reckoning and integration. Counsellors and psychotherapists will not be neutral on these subjects. We may find them morally suspect, they may resonate with our own story in a way that makes them difficult to sit alongside, or we may not feel we’re personally qualified to see certain clients. But/and perhaps healing and growth cannot take place when some aspects of our clients are not invited into the conversation.
There is an idea that counsellors are supposed to remain neutral, a ‘blank slate’. Certainly the aim is to be focused on our clients, not get blindsided by our own prejudices and assumptions, and not to spend sessions talking about our own problems. To do that of course I need to be aware of my prejudices and assumptions, which involves exploring the air I/we breathe. ‘Remaining neutral’ when it comes to race for example, would involve being aware of any racial prejudice in myself and my community (both geographically and within the counselling community), rather than imagining myself ‘colour blind’. I need to be aware of any inbuilt power imbalances within the counselling space, and where relevant invite them in too. Perhaps it would be relevant for me to bring up ideas of gender and race when the client’s race and gender differ from my own, especially being that I am a white man (and being paid as an ‘expert’), with the power that often contains. Therapy is relational first and foremost, inseparable from the context of me-and-the-client-in-the-world, hence the ‘perhaps’. Thankfully the therapeutic process is not formulaic.
The awareness of my own prejudices and assumptions makes it easier to see patterns. People in therapy may, out of awareness, ask me as the counsellor to join in their familiar (familial) dance. Without an awareness of how I relate with others, it would be easy for me to accept that invitation, and before you know it the client gets the same response they get from others (sympathy, rejection etc). Same response, nothing changes. It is often more helpful for the counsellor to ‘remain neutral’ in a sense; to see the invitation pushed across the table, and to point it out rather than blindly accepting it.
However much I could try to leave my assumptions and prejudices ‘at the door’, I am not sure it’s possible. Even if it was, I don’t know that I would want to. Awareness is important so I can better tune into the client’s world, without too many distractions from my own. But counselling is relational, and in order to relate to someone I need to draw on my experiences of love, loss, joy, pain and suffering. If I have experienced a recent bereavement, and one of my clients has too, I will be aware of the possibility of my feeling particularly connected to that part of their story. Perhaps it is right for me to be wary of getting too tangled in my own grief. And, perhaps connecting deeply to the client is the most human thing to do in that moment. As a therapist, pushing away any personal feelings of bereavement to remain ‘professional’ might feel like keeping the client at arm’s length, and like keeping the feelings of grief at arm’s length. What message does that give the client? As a client, I don’t want my therapist to be robotic and distant. Equally of course I don’t want my therapist to feel ungrounded and start sobbing uncontrollably.
More and more I find there’s a wider context on my mind of climate change/collapse. Ive started noticing where ‘nature’ starts creeping into therapy – through metaphor or literally. I mentioned on Instagram that I’ve been reading Wild Therapy by Nick Totton recently, who points out the hierarchical splitting that happens when we refer to ‘nature’, as if we humans are separate from it. He refers to ‘The List’, a series of oppositions that informs our thinking in the West. Male/female, light/dark, sky/earth, culture/nature, thought/feeling, civilised/wild, mind/body, conscious/unconscious and so on. In each pair, as you can probably guess from reading them, the first concept is generally privileged over the latter. Female, dark, earth, nature, feeling, the body, wildness and the unconscious all become associated with each other and thought of as ‘lower’ than their oppositions. To see The List and untangle it is one way of becoming aware of my prejudices and assumptions, to allow all aspects of a client into the therapy room. This ‘untangling’ is partly more of a tangling: adding ‘both/and’, nuance and doubt to the tyranny of The List. If I follow this path, the destruction of other-than-human beings through climate change/collapse is mirrored in the psychological, and vice versa. This makes it hard to remain neutral on the subject in the therapy room.
In some ways I’m unsure if it’s possible or desirable to remain neutral as a therapist. Therapy is most effective when the relationship between the therapist and the person in therapy is good (where there is an alliance and empathy), seen from both perspectives. For therapists to encourage an effective relationship we need to be solid, yet flexible. I often think of trees. The more we are aware of ourselves and the context in which we live and emerged from, the clearer our eyesight will be, and the more effective our interventions can be. To me, neutrality suggests something less tangible and blank. It may just be semantic, perhaps neutrality is an appropriate word for describing a suitable therapeutic approach, as long as it doesn’t get tangled up with indifference. I imagine myself not sitting on the fence, but wondering who built this fence, what or who it’s keeping in or out; and inviting clients to wonder with me, perhaps carefully to take the thing apart. As a client I want my therapist to have a position, edges, some grit; to be alongside me; neither consumed nor unaffected by me; to be themselves so that I can be fully me.