Disillusionment, Empathy, and Change

I’ve written in this space before about Donald Winnicott and his description of the ways in which illusionment and disillusionment function in the analytic process and development writ large.  The first broken illusion is, of course (as the object-relation sect would have it), the infant’s loss of belief in their own omnipotence as the mother ceases to be able to meet every single demand of the infant, either through a growing sense of the need for some independent function on the part of the infant, the mere exhaustion and toll it takes on the mother to meet each of those needs without hesitation or reservation, or more likely as it were some combination of the two.  The child then reconstitutes its sense of potency in accordance with whatever limitations exist upon it, creating a new illusion which will be deconstructed at some other later developmental phase, and this pattern will subsequently carry on throughout the lifespan.  This disillusionment is a central function in the inevitable cycles of grief and change and will come to function in some manner in all subsequent experiences of change as our being re-worlds itself in response to experiences and stimuli that cannot be folded into or accommodated by the belief systems that already exist.  Disillusionment is an inevitable feature in the process of change.

Winnicott’s primary focus is on the disillusionment of the infant and by inference we can do a lot to expand this idea to that of the client in therapy.  But what of the role of the therapist in all of this.  It would be easy to say that the purpose of therapy is to somehow recognize when the client’s impressions do not correspond to a consensual interpretation of reality and therefore the pathology we are meant to treat, via a process of disillusioning the client’s “false” claims on reality, is to help the client develop an impression which more accurately corresponds to other’s perception of their external environment.  Though engaging in vastly dissimilar projects, I have been working through a little Descartes as of late, and certainly the whole point of his Meditations is to engage in an act of self-disillusionment, which—for Descartes—eventually leads to the famous proposition that the only thing he could for certain believe to exist is the activity of the mind itself.

However, taking this on principle leads us to a position of pure skepticism, where there can be no consensual reality of which to speak, and therefore nothing towards which to direct our patients.  In Descartes’ extremist position, none of the properties of the world actually exist.  I am of course using this as a somewhat extreme position to illuminate my point.  Descartes’ practice might serve as the basis for some interesting thought experiments in therapy, but it lacks the relationality, intimacy, and depth that many of our clients come to us seeking.  In fact, to return to the original point, there are likely many of those who come to us to reinforce their illusions.  To wit, one of the basic framing devices used by some analysts is to understand the analytic process as one which the client enters into to reinforce their neurosis, and that the analyst’s job in the process of an analysis is to fail the client by failing to satisfy this demand. 

So perhaps a process of cognitive disillusionment is not quite what we are thinking about when we discuss the process of disillusionment in psychotherapy.  In fact, for those who don’t consider the work to be purely cognitive, the idea that lived experience is reducible to the experience of thinking is an inherently flawed position.  I think here of Eugene Gendlin’s (I’m paraphrasing) “The mind cannot think that which the body hasn’t already experiences”.  In this way I am far more sympathetic to Aristotle’s idea that touch is fundamental to the experience of living creatures, especially if we extend the notion of touch to include the ways in which our various nerves tendril themselves into some kind of concert with embodied affective processes.

Perhaps the best way towards exploring this concept of disillusionment is to more fully explore what it is we are doing as psychotherapists in the context of this cycle of illusionment and disillusionment.  I think clients are at times somewhat skeptical about the degree to which it is important for a therapist to get to really know them in the process of doing therapy, particularly long-term therapy where the therapist is not relying on a manualized or overly determined set of techniques and interventions to “cure” across a paradigmatic set of problems.  Part of that “getting to know you” might, I suppose, be better articulated as “I am getting to know myself as you”.  These early sessions are important in the context of development of a kind of countertransferential response to the client that is essential to the empathic process.  We need to be able to enter the world of the client and to get swept up, in much the same manner, as they are in their ongoing experience of being.

Once this has happened, then we have something to offer the client.  In granting ourselves the permission to be influenced and impacted by the client, we are given over to the experience of seemingly trying to “solve” their “problem” more directly.  I cannot tell you how many times sitting in session I have found myself nodding along to something being shared by a client that, were I not under the hypnotic influence of the therapeutic process, I would otherwise know to be fundamentally without merit.  But it is only in coming back from the client’s “untruth” into my own “truth” that I can then offer the client something to disrupt some rigid pattern of thinking that is clearly binding them up in the context of our relationship and presumably is causing them problems in other contexts as well.  And moreover, by my being at first influenced by their narrative and only then allowing myself to actually work it out for myself can I begin to give them something back that they might conceivably be able to use.  That it is through this process of a kind of reciprocal empathy that there exists any possibility of creating movement for our clients.  Were I to begin by simply telling them they were wrong and trying to describe why, I might be able to influence them in some regard, but something in this process would be lacking.  By allowing myself to be drawn away from myself, in order to go away and then come back to some insight rooted in my own theoretical disposition, this generates a felt experience between client and therapist that makes therapy into something more than the sharing of respective positions and thoughts about the world, but rather an affective enterprise which situates the making of meaning within felt experience.