I am eating a coffee cake muffin. I am eating a coffee cake muffin and thinking about what to write, knowing that I haven’t written anything for this space in a while, as I’ve been developing lectures for a class I am teaching and reading poetry and navigating a period of (joyful and opportune) transition within my family. I think a lot about my website when I am not actively writing for my website. The point of the writing is two-fold. First is to help build traffic and hopefully more clients and consumers of what I have to provide in this space. The other is to help clarify the ways in which I think about the work of therapy. Of psychotherapy. I try to be careful about adding the “psycho-“ to psychotherapist ever since I had a NP during an annual physical ask me what I did for work, and I responded “therapist”, and then he said “what kind of therapist”, and I said “psychotherapist”, and then he said “oh…what kind of psychotherapy do you practice? CBT?” in a kind of interested sort of way, and I said “no more psychoanalytic”, and then he said “oh” in a less interested kind of way and changed the subject. That was a fun exchange.
I wondered as I was writing this if I should have started “I am thinking about what to write” and then mentioned the muffin. I think this is the kind of thing analysts, that is psychoanalysts, notice when they are doing interpretation. I have been reading more about interpretation of the transference lately, which has nothing to do with the class I have been teaching. I had committed to myself, quite recently, that I would pause reading psychoanalytic material while I focused on the class and otherwise read poetry or short fiction or things of that sort. Then I remembered my supervisor observing the fact that I read into countertransference well, but not transference, and that I ought to be willing to put more on my clients about what is showing up in the room. So, Strachey, and Gray, and Schafer, and other ego psychologists and the like got added to the reading list. But still poetry as well.
The course I have been teaching is one on brief therapy, which is not something I would say I currently practice, though the nature of time and how we wish to dissect it in any form of therap…psychotherapy is an interesting thing to consider. For instance, though I tend to work with people on the order of months or (even more often) years, there are many instances in which the needs of one session, or of a relatively short string of sessions, come to inhabit a different set of needs than what the rest of the work with that client has demanded. So sometimes you do crisis work because you are a crisis clinician and that is the work you do and so you expect to only see someone once and for a timeframe on the order of a number of minutes because those are the expectations of the sort of work that you do. But sometimes you do crisis work because the world is unpredictable and clients come to rely on you for things you never could have anticipated. Therapy is not all eating muffins you know.
It’s hard to think about the idea of analyzing only the transference, as asserting that there is a difference between transference and countertransference in the practice of therapy (psychotherapy!) is somewhat debatable on its surface. In a more existential-psychoanalytic framework, there is really only the relationship. We exist in a phenomenal world in which all things are linked, including our perceptions of all those linked things, and so the idea that there is a “me” and a “you” that could somehow be separable is just something some part of our mind does to organize some aspect of the world, but doesn’t actually get at what the experience of capital-B Being is actually like. As such, existentially speaking, part of our responsibility in doing therapy is to bring clients into a more phenomenal experience of what being-in-the-world is, which means using the relationship as the interwoven and undifferentiated self-other continuum that the experience of being-with actually is. Which means interpretation happens not at the level of me-or-you, but in a way in which we try to see what is happening here, but where our only real point of reference for what is happening is what we can perceive to be happening within ourselves about this experience of being-with while being-in and so that is ultimately what we interpret, hoping that the authenticity of the encounter encourages the client to do the same. This discourse is really what we’re seeking.
I worry, as a middle-aged man who practices psychotherapy professionally and reads and writes about it sine intermissione, that as my daughters reach their early-teens, they will already have become better at this “reading other people” thing than I am, for all the reasons teenage girls need to be adept at reading the other bodies in a room. I, of course, hope that I will also be able to support them in that task, and that once they’ve paced me, they don’t sense their dad as being fragile enough that they must pretend otherwise in order to preserve my ego. Maybe I will show them this piece of writing when they reach that age. We can read it together over snacks.
Interpretation is of course something that happens in both psychoanalytic practice and poetry (in discussing reading poetry recently, a client of mine uttered “Ah, the original psychoanalysis” or something to that effect). I find the interpretation of poetry incredibly difficult, especially as someone who once graduated with a degree in English. Though I rarely read as a matter of technique and to improve as a reader, but merely in the interest of reading the things I liked at the time. Though I did—and continue to—like difficult poetry that demands a lot of interpretation. It’s been fun to get back into that and be overtaken by the talents of various writers and find sneaky good sentences buried in otherwise fine writers who occasionally did pretty extraordinary things. But trying to know what someone is getting at, at all times, while trying to develop the imagery and underlying meaning of a poem, is tricky. Like if a writer suddenly and unexpectedly references muffins a lot in a poem. That would be unusual and would certainly be something you would want to pay attention to. That could mean something. Or it might mean nothing at all. But even that, then, would mean something.
If you think about it, the process of transference is itself a kind of interpretation, just not one we are actively making. The client reads something into the relationship and acts in such a manner as though their interpretation is not merely true, but obvious. As if you’d have to be stupid not to see it. Like in a situation where a client keeps talking about muffins, and you would have no idea why they are so fixated on muffins, but if you are a good psychoanalyst you get it, and say something erudite and somber and deeply penetrating and meaningful. And you scratch at your beard, or run your fingers along your necklace (which is what I imagine female analysts do when they don’t have beards to scratch) and go “ahhhh…” or “mmhhh…” And if you are a good analyst, you realize humor, and intellectualization, and probably (in some instances) absurdity are just defenses and that there is something else on the margins one ought to be paying attention to. And so, a muffin could both be something to interpret and not interpret in the metaphorical sense as well as the manifest content in the analytic sense.
As a side note, in a book I am currently reading (again not for the class I am teaching, which is brief therapy) there is a section of a chapter called I Am Melting and at the bottom of the page I free associated “melting-molting-molding-melding-maddening-meandering”. I probably could have added muffin-ing to that list.
I was noticing something in session this week as I was listening to a client of mine and thinking about embodiment and what it means to locate an emotion in your body and allow yourself to experience some relief around that emotion. I noticed that I don’t quite feel sad the way I used to. I used to feel sad quite a bit. Not depressed sad, though that was a phase as well. But just sort of melancholic and serious in a way. Once, after a breathwork retreat, I found myself commenting in a large group discussion about my awareness of this sadness, which would show up when meditating, or doing breathwork, or just generally being still, and how I had come to love it. This was maybe some seven years ago, when I had first met my now wife. And now it appears to be gone. Which is a weird kind of grief.
It’s hard to know the point sometimes when I sit down to do these things. Sometimes it’s clear, but I’m working very hard to be less clear these days. Which means it is probably a good thing I started with the muffin instead of the writing. I could reflect more on why that might be the case, and if it was the responsible thing to do, but that might bring the sadness back, as it’s being gone seems like it ought to be a fragile kind of thing, and indicative of a disposition that might not hold, and that is also a lot to be responsible for. I have two girls now.
But no more muffin. Both that—and this piece—are done.
