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.
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Whoa - deep stuff, Angie!! I love it!
ReplyDeleteThough I lean more toward a Milan-Bionian bent, I'm intrigued at how you've put together the Winnicotian notion of preverbal "childhood transitional space" in a way that seems to lend itself to Turner's/Eliade's notion of "Liminality". As a firm proponent and practitioner of what Preston (2007) and others coin ‘contemplative psychology’ I’ve often wondered whether therapeuts experience Liminality in psychotherapeutic encounters?
I’m most intrigued by your words:
"If there are impingements on this transitional space, a false self is created; ... In therapy, we can repeat this; the client is trying to create an experience of transitional space to reconnect them ...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..."
I initially trained in psychodynamic psychotherapy, as an attempt to see what is beyond words. I always understood that transference attempted to rationalise the ontology and epistemology of affect. Do feelings, which are experienced, originate in response to here and now material, the current interaction, supposedly therapeutic, or are they relics of past associations? Further, do they originate from the client’s experience or from the counsellors'? And what of the times when such feelings appear connected, but unacceptable, projective identification, or connected and acceptable empathy?
Counselling praxis for me has always worked at the interface of an inside and an outside. Within this dynamic, it explores, or encourages into consciousness, the “internal” world of our therapeuts. Like contemplation, therapy works in both the inter-personal and intra-personal realms. For Benjamin (1986), therapy works in the intersubjective space.
Since counselling places a high value on respect, genuineness and autonomy, “what is yours” and “what is mine” are continually challenged. My clinical supervisor and I both agree that therapeutic agency can be expressed as walking a veritable tightrope. Beyond words, in its deep, underlying symbolic structures, the therapist can be seen as a liminal figure, “practicing at the limits of representation” (Burman, 1996) --- like a “boundary object” (Gordo & Lopez, 1996) or inhabitant of the fifth province (O’Reilly, Byrne & MacCarthy, 1999). Clements (2004, 45) seems to support this same notion thusly:
Liminal experience is the foundation of successful inquiry. When liminal becomes spiritual, and one experiences the source of one’s Trans-egoic experience to be a willing, even enthusiastic, partner, something more is happening.
I view these transitional places, and what happens between ‘states’, as special windows of opportunity for growth. They can be viewed either in the microcosm of one’s own moments, or in the macrocosm of an individual’s entire life, or both. Theorists have tried to understand and appreciate these ‘spaces’ through concepts like that of “Liminality” as it pertains to transitional (transpersonal) experiences [‘Liminality’ is a period of transition, during which usual boundaries of thought, self-understanding and behaviour shift, opening the way to something new’, says Thomson (2007)].
If Liminality is viewed as ‘transitional [sacred] space’, I’ve also wondered to what extent counselling experiences create the necessary Liminality to catalyse significant psycho-spiritual transformations. Or, does counselling, rather, attract those brave souls who are already liminal and, in a sense, prepare them for any inevitable encounters with the numinous in constructing a truer sense of Self?
Are you open to discussing further your understandings of "transitional spaces" as they relate to Identity & spirituality (true self/false self) i.e. your "authentic self"?
yes! thank you raewyn, for the discussion. there is a lot here- the clinical relationship and intersubjectivity (I love Benjamin!) and then the idea of liminality and transformation.
ReplyDeleteI am going to think on this... more later