Monday, December 27, 2010
Thursday, December 16, 2010
the numinous field of the transcendent funtion
| |
Relational Sandplay Therapy
Author:
"The first book on sandplay to focus on the clinical relationship, Relational Sandplay Therapy provides both beginners and experienced sandplay therapists with a new perspective on the healing power of sandplay/sandtray. This perspective is relational, intersubjective, and deeply explores the interwovenness of mutual unconscious processes and how they may be harnessed in the service of healing. In a truly creative synthesis, Linda Cunningham, Ph.D. brings to the forefront the importance of the therapeutic relationship in sandplay, and also explains in detail how to work within the relationship. Focusing on the importance of the therapist's subjective experience, she describes four archetypally based fields of human experiencing: Original Oneness/Merger, Twoness/Rupture, Differentiated Oneness/Transitional Space, and the Numinous Field of the Transcendent Function. The first two fields shed light on preverbal trauma revealed in more difficult or stuck sandplay therapies and how to understand it symbolically through the therapist's subjective experience. Through vivid clinical examples, Cunningham illustrates how silent understanding and containing may be the other--and at times the only--source of the symbol."
Author:
"The first book on sandplay to focus on the clinical relationship, Relational Sandplay Therapy provides both beginners and experienced sandplay therapists with a new perspective on the healing power of sandplay/sandtray. This perspective is relational, intersubjective, and deeply explores the interwovenness of mutual unconscious processes and how they may be harnessed in the service of healing. In a truly creative synthesis, Linda Cunningham, Ph.D. brings to the forefront the importance of the therapeutic relationship in sandplay, and also explains in detail how to work within the relationship. Focusing on the importance of the therapist's subjective experience, she describes four archetypally based fields of human experiencing: Original Oneness/Merger, Twoness/Rupture, Differentiated Oneness/Transitional Space, and the Numinous Field of the Transcendent Function. The first two fields shed light on preverbal trauma revealed in more difficult or stuck sandplay therapies and how to understand it symbolically through the therapist's subjective experience. Through vivid clinical examples, Cunningham illustrates how silent understanding and containing may be the other--and at times the only--source of the symbol."
Cunningham's fields relate to development in personality- these are self states as well as positions. The first has autistic-contiguous qualities; there is a mama baby oneness here, felt in the body. The second; twoness/rupture is paranoid schizoid. The third is differentiated oneness and relates to Klein's depressive position. I think of psychotic, borderline and neurotic levels of functioning... oral, anal, oedipal. There is so much to say about these positions. Read the book!
Most interesting to me here is the numinous field of the transcendent function. Jung's thinking on this was that when the unconscious and conscious meet a third space is created. The mandala is a symbol of this meeting place where the tension between two opposites are brought into a complementary relationship. I think of this as the rare golden and light filled moment in the work where therapist and client have a very cosmic simultaneous aha moment- both feel timeless- the lighting is good and everything is slowed down, in synch and very beautiful.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
underpinnings of gestalt therapy
The I-Thou is the foundation of the clinical relationship in Gestalt therapy. The term comes from Martin Buber’s book I and Thou. Buber was an intersubjective existentialist and his idea was that when we meet another from a place of authenticity and consciousness, this meeting is a holy relationship, bringing one into relationship with God, who is the eternal Thou. So, a Gestalt therapist works with this notion and holds the concept of self along with the understanding that self is inseparable from environment. There is an attention to all that is me, all that is not me and the unity. Attention to present moment is also important to Gestalt therapy. Perls’ basic premise was that life happens in the present – not in the past or the future – and that when we are dwelling on the past or fantasizing about the future we are not living fully. Through living in the present we are able to take responsibility for our responses and actions. To be fully present in the here and now offers us more excitement, energy, and courage to live life directly. Gestalt's paradoxical theory of change contends that we change only by deepening awareness and acceptance of how we organize our experience. The therapist does not seek to remove or interpret behaviors, but to bring them into awareness, with the goal of supporting new organization and self-regulation by the individual.
Contact takes place at the contact boundary, where the organism and the environment meet. We usually think of a boundary as separation, but in Gesalt, union is implied here as well. So, we can think of one person as the sand and one person as the ocean and the contact boundary as the shoreline or meeting of the two. An interruption or distortion of contact is called a boundary disturbance. These are ways in which we break contact and this can be a defense if it is unconscious or part of normal functioning if is conscious. Most of the clinical work in Gestalt therapy centers on these interruptions, as they occur in the moment at the contact boundary. In Gestalt therapy every symptom or defense is viewed as an attempt to solve a problem through creative adjustment. The only goal is awareness. Using this method, I usually ask my clients to check in and see what they notice in their bodies, to get a sense of how they are. I like to remind them to come back to this noticing if they get too far off in story telling or intellectualizing. Awareness in the present moment becomes an anchor for the work. Jim Doak, a local gestalt therapist that I did personal work with said, "Improving perceptual contact, working to allow greater sensation in the body and defining with sensitivity one's wants and preferences are all building blocks for a more creative life. Out of knowing what is, internally and externally, our lives begin to unfold in a way which more truly reflects our uniqueness, changingness and in the end results in our contribution to the world"
Contact takes place at the contact boundary, where the organism and the environment meet. We usually think of a boundary as separation, but in Gesalt, union is implied here as well. So, we can think of one person as the sand and one person as the ocean and the contact boundary as the shoreline or meeting of the two. An interruption or distortion of contact is called a boundary disturbance. These are ways in which we break contact and this can be a defense if it is unconscious or part of normal functioning if is conscious. Most of the clinical work in Gestalt therapy centers on these interruptions, as they occur in the moment at the contact boundary. In Gestalt therapy every symptom or defense is viewed as an attempt to solve a problem through creative adjustment. The only goal is awareness. Using this method, I usually ask my clients to check in and see what they notice in their bodies, to get a sense of how they are. I like to remind them to come back to this noticing if they get too far off in story telling or intellectualizing. Awareness in the present moment becomes an anchor for the work. Jim Doak, a local gestalt therapist that I did personal work with said, "Improving perceptual contact, working to allow greater sensation in the body and defining with sensitivity one's wants and preferences are all building blocks for a more creative life. Out of knowing what is, internally and externally, our lives begin to unfold in a way which more truly reflects our uniqueness, changingness and in the end results in our contribution to the world"
Sunday, December 12, 2010
freud's drive theory
okay, here's my take on this...
Freud's drive theory involves two drives: sexuality and aggression. His sense was that pathology comes not from the original id based, pleasure seeking motivated by these drives, or the subsequent anxiety and guilt about them, but the unconscious defense against them. The libido is sexual energy, a power and movement located in the body. His psychosexual stages look at how we experience pleasure and aggression in our early life. The oral stage is a time when we experience the pleasure of our mother's breast and take all of the nourishment we need in through our mouths. During weaning, we experience the pain and anguish of needing to give this up, of being castrated (denied unbarred access to our gratification.) This happens again during the anal stage, as we are made to inhibit our desire to eliminate when ever we want; the demands of others become more important than our pleasure gratification. During the Oedipal stage, we direct all of our libidinal desires toward the parent of the opposite sex. Realizing that we can't have this person, that they won't be entirely ours, is another devastating disappointment. This is about growing up, tolerating the disappointments and frustrations of the world's demands on us. Okay, I'll use a sippy cup, go in the big potty and mommy or daddy won't be here to meet my every need forever.
These are all castrations; thwarted desire, being told no. Neurosis is an attempt to alter this unbearable reality. We inhibit our desire because it is too painful to grieve this loss. In the myth, the goddess Psyche is eternally wedded to Eros; Freud saw pathology of the soul as it's divorce from erotic love . Symptomatic acts and dreams illuminate repressed hidden desires that cannot be tolerated in our conscious mind. As we bring the light of our awareness to this disowned energy, we can reclaim it, make choices about what we do with it. Sublimation is to pull this energy up into a higher place. Much of the work I do with clients involves reclaiming repressed or lost aspects of their aliveness and Freud's thinking is a another frame for me to hang this work on.
Freud's drive theory involves two drives: sexuality and aggression. His sense was that pathology comes not from the original id based, pleasure seeking motivated by these drives, or the subsequent anxiety and guilt about them, but the unconscious defense against them. The libido is sexual energy, a power and movement located in the body. His psychosexual stages look at how we experience pleasure and aggression in our early life. The oral stage is a time when we experience the pleasure of our mother's breast and take all of the nourishment we need in through our mouths. During weaning, we experience the pain and anguish of needing to give this up, of being castrated (denied unbarred access to our gratification.) This happens again during the anal stage, as we are made to inhibit our desire to eliminate when ever we want; the demands of others become more important than our pleasure gratification. During the Oedipal stage, we direct all of our libidinal desires toward the parent of the opposite sex. Realizing that we can't have this person, that they won't be entirely ours, is another devastating disappointment. This is about growing up, tolerating the disappointments and frustrations of the world's demands on us. Okay, I'll use a sippy cup, go in the big potty and mommy or daddy won't be here to meet my every need forever.
These are all castrations; thwarted desire, being told no. Neurosis is an attempt to alter this unbearable reality. We inhibit our desire because it is too painful to grieve this loss. In the myth, the goddess Psyche is eternally wedded to Eros; Freud saw pathology of the soul as it's divorce from erotic love . Symptomatic acts and dreams illuminate repressed hidden desires that cannot be tolerated in our conscious mind. As we bring the light of our awareness to this disowned energy, we can reclaim it, make choices about what we do with it. Sublimation is to pull this energy up into a higher place. Much of the work I do with clients involves reclaiming repressed or lost aspects of their aliveness and Freud's thinking is a another frame for me to hang this work on.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
el venado no ve nada...
My friend hosted a tamale making party last night and we played loteria. This game is full of archetypal images and there are zen riddles on the back of each card...
LA SIRENA: Con los cantos de sirena no te vayas a marear.
The Mermaid: Don't get dizzy with the songs of the mermaid.
EL SOL: La cobija de los pobres.
The Sun : The blanket of the poor.
Thursday, December 9, 2010
unknowable and unsayable
In what Lacan calls "the real", there are experiences that we have no context for/we can't understand. Whatever exists in the real is terrifying, we have no words for it, but our bodies hold the experience. Trauma creates a language all it's own because it creates an excess that is unbearable. This gap in knowing gets repeated in playing, speaking, or acting out in order to elaborate on the unsayable experiences. These effects manifest in the body; the language around events or the unsayable, is embedded in speech.
Bion describes something very similar to this in a strange way using mathematical representations, but I take something very similar away from it... that we have beta elements- unprocessed anxiety, pain, dread that is beyond our capacity to even think about or understand (alpha function) and that as an analyst, you can be helpful to clients by tolerating these beta experiences that emerge in session. The capacity to hold feelings, reverie, somatic stuff without knowing about it, facilitates it's birth into a thinkable form. In this way, we can act as an alpha function. Sometimes experiences show up in the therapist's body, reverie, dreams, before it ever comes into the therapy on a conscious level.
I've been thinking about Martin Luther King saying that we are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality"...
Bion describes something very similar to this in a strange way using mathematical representations, but I take something very similar away from it... that we have beta elements- unprocessed anxiety, pain, dread that is beyond our capacity to even think about or understand (alpha function) and that as an analyst, you can be helpful to clients by tolerating these beta experiences that emerge in session. The capacity to hold feelings, reverie, somatic stuff without knowing about it, facilitates it's birth into a thinkable form. In this way, we can act as an alpha function. Sometimes experiences show up in the therapist's body, reverie, dreams, before it ever comes into the therapy on a conscious level.
I've been thinking about Martin Luther King saying that we are "caught in an inescapable network of mutuality"...
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
going on being
Winnicott’s ideas about the mind body split and environment really influence the kind of therapy I value. His thinking was that a good enough environment means having caregivers that are able to adapt to your developing psyche soma; there is support and a gradual pulling back of support, an active adaptation. A “bad” environment can’t adapt, you have to be taken out of your development if this active adaptation isn’t happening. The child prematurely develops intellectual capacity that takes them out of their body and this chronic impingement breaks the mind body connection, they have to become their own little parent.
In therapy, the good enough therapist creates a holding environment that supports the reintegration of this psyche soma split. The therapist is able to contain and hold unnameable experience. The unconscious has always held the mind body connection. Early affect is bodily sensation; this cannot be put into words, so we can’t communicate it verbally. He also explains that in childhood transitional space, we are bringing potential to actuality, fantasy to reality. As we play out unconscious ideas and fantasies our “going on being” blossoms. If there are impingements on this transitional space, a false self is created; all of life becomes one big impingement. In therapy, we can repeat this; the client is trying to create an experience of transitional space to reconnect them with their own striving. We want them to have a flow where their knowing can emerge and they can discover their potentialities. As therapists, we have to give them the space to pick up the ball, encourage their “going on being”. If we impinge on this we recreate early experiences and fail to help them move back into their authentic self. The therapist’s capacity to tolerate not knowing can prevent a lot of this. As a therapist, I want to allow my clients to unfold, to give them room to reconnect mind and body.
I am thinking about how this work fits with Gestalt, focusing and Tolle's power of now. Present moment awareness brings us back from an ego identified place into the fullness of our aliveness. I have been experiencing my own going on being as I walk through the beauty and color of the tree canopied and leaf layered streets in midtown.
In therapy, the good enough therapist creates a holding environment that supports the reintegration of this psyche soma split. The therapist is able to contain and hold unnameable experience. The unconscious has always held the mind body connection. Early affect is bodily sensation; this cannot be put into words, so we can’t communicate it verbally. He also explains that in childhood transitional space, we are bringing potential to actuality, fantasy to reality. As we play out unconscious ideas and fantasies our “going on being” blossoms. If there are impingements on this transitional space, a false self is created; all of life becomes one big impingement. In therapy, we can repeat this; the client is trying to create an experience of transitional space to reconnect them with their own striving. We want them to have a flow where their knowing can emerge and they can discover their potentialities. As therapists, we have to give them the space to pick up the ball, encourage their “going on being”. If we impinge on this we recreate early experiences and fail to help them move back into their authentic self. The therapist’s capacity to tolerate not knowing can prevent a lot of this. As a therapist, I want to allow my clients to unfold, to give them room to reconnect mind and body.
I am thinking about how this work fits with Gestalt, focusing and Tolle's power of now. Present moment awareness brings us back from an ego identified place into the fullness of our aliveness. I have been experiencing my own going on being as I walk through the beauty and color of the tree canopied and leaf layered streets in midtown.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
holla if you feel like you've been down the same road
It looks like Eminem is going to receive a Grammy for his latest album Recovery and while he isn't on any of my play lists, I understand what everyone loves about him. His invincible spirit, rebellious charm coupled with an ability to be vulnerable and transparent shake people up. I really think main stream folks wanna wake up, be raw and get down to brass tacks- this just isn't modeled in popular culture. Rap is so therapeutic and his not afraid video is full of larger symbolic meaning. I guess I just think it is important to process your relationship with your mom, suicidal tendencies and what it's like to grow up in a broke ass neighborhood (if you did) and doing this with creativity and bounce is a good thing.
Monday, December 6, 2010
identifying our complexes
A complex is a personal manifestation of archetypal energy. My feeling about this is that as we bring our personal unconscious to awareness, the healing happens on a collective level as well. I have been meditating on the characteristics of a complex; usually an intense, repeated experience in relationships- constellated around a central theme, it has a life of it's own, seeks expression in ways you ordinarily wouldn't find acceptable, there is an absence of empathy and the complex is powerfully inductive or self fulfilling. I am thinking about how early trauma may evoke particular complexes/ organize personality structure and interested in their archetypal origin. My love for therapy, tarot cards and astrology has something to do with this fascination around mythology, archetype and the collective unconscious.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
the talking cure
I am freaking out about David Cronenberg's "A Dangerous Method," coming out next year. The movie is based on Christopher Hampton's stage play "The Talking Cure," which explores Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung's relationship. It looks like there will also be some steamy sub plots about Sabina Spielrein, one of the first female analysts. Can't wait! This will definitely be a therapist field trip.
I have learned so much about my own history and evolution through the conversation between these two men- this morning, I stayed in bed until noon with my coffee and Jung's the archetypes and the collective unconscious. I am beginning to see my own integrative and creative cycles through archetypal energy more clearly. Right now is definitely a period of fiery initiation for me as I work towards my 3000 hours for MFT Liscensure.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
