Classroom Talk
Spring - Summer 2002 Archive
Re: No more Mr. Nice Guy . . . coming soon! ;-) Posted by Perk Clark on April 30, 2002 at 13:32:57:
In Reply to: Re: No more Mr. Nice Guy . . . coming soon! ;-) posted by Douglas on April 30, 2002 at 09:47:20:
Douglas, Greetings!
Phoenix, AZ December 1985: I’m attending a week-long
conference where Satir, Masterson, Bettelheim, Szasz, Carl
Rogers, and R D Laing et. al. are speaking. I go to the first
presentation where Laing is talking about “Theoretical and
Practical Aspects of Psychotherapy”. I’ve never read page one of
his material.
After listening for a time I turn to my psychiatrist friend with grateful
tears in my eyes and say “this guy knows how I do
psychotherapy!!!”
“I can’t understand a f***ing thing he’s saying” says the
psychiatrist. I decide to attend every presentation Laing does for a
week.
From my notes:
++++++++++
“psychotherapy involves many words, meanings, definitions… the
etiology of therapy derives from a Judeo- Christian sect, the
“therapeutii”. The word means ‘attendants’ and refers also to
attention and meditation. This was a sect who didn’t go monastic
or into the desert but formed communities to practice the holy life.
They practiced “attentiveness toward each other,” therefore the
cultivation of attentiveness toward each other is the type of
psychotherapy that I practice.”
“social phenomenology is what is going on between us…
phenomenology is a descriptive discipline… we describe the
phenomena of what is going on and we reflect critically on that”
“people come to see us and are usually suffering about the
past… it is the past, but this is present in the present… is it what
happened an hour ago? Yesterday? Childhood? Birth? Past
lifetimes? Phenomenology here has a useful nuance:
‘suspended belief or disbelief’ can be useful. I can describe how
people feel stuck in some incarnation, some intrauterine state,
with an equal suspension of belief/disbelief… one can allow the
client to feel free to be anywhere in the wheel of recursive birth and
death…”
“a good deal of my therapy is “interpersonal meditation”,
meditating together, meditative conversation, a shared experience
of NOT going into separate worlds but a coming together in a
reflective meditative mood… out of this comes much intuition, and
value… the incubatorium was a snake pit under the temple at
Delphi: the person sits on a pedestal for 72 hours seeking
inspiration….
“showing people what they are ‘caught in’ can work: this could be
“dehypnotizing” rather than hypnotizing… you find very little written
about dehypnotization which should also be brought into the fore.
[my note: c.f. Arthur Deikman, The Observing Self, and his
concepts of dehypnotization and disidentification]
++++++++++++
As far as I can tell, what this site is about is applied on-going
phenomenological reduction: you do the self-referential
bracketing exercise and notice what you notice about what you are
(thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, avoiding)… you put that data
through a grid (the wheelbook), one of ten thousand possible
grids… from that you observe trends, failures, successes, which
you feed back into your responses to the world, which you
observe again, etc etc. The idea is to attempt to thus diminish the
hold that personality exerts on the practitioner so that their
essential nature can arise….
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