I’ve long tended to associate “psychotherapy” with cigars and hefty Viennese widows. An indulgence of the rich and idle. That the demons of the mind might be scattered by talk — “mere words” — seemed absurd.
For Lorenzo W. Milam, however, “mere words” represent the most potent of cures.
Milam put up in the Phoenix Hyatt Regency in 1985, in order to observe the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference then taking place. Milam details this experience in The Lourdes of Arizona, where he notes, “this was a one-of-a-kind conference, a circus of diverse, brilliant, challenging practitioners, those who were first responsible (and are still responsible) for leading this country out of the self-defeating, expensive, hidebound, inbred, incestuous, upper class morass which was and is Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud’s followers had a stranglehold on this country’s psychological thinking, public policy, and orientation for half a century. They only came under respectable and honest challenge in the last four decades, and many of the challengers are still alive and are here at this conference.”
Dry, tedious papers sporting convoluted titles and delivered by hirsute academics were little in evidence. Milam documents a number of concrete — and dramatic — instances of therapeutic intervention that occurred during the course of the conference. Something of a dabbler in the therapeutic arts himself, Milam brings an apt mixture of skepticism and wit to the proceedings. Above all, however, he brings his sense of awe — awe at what talk, simple talk, can sometimes accomplish: the pain it can lessen, the insight it can bring.
— T.L. Toma
R.D. Laing is a tweedy and pleasant-faced Scot who avoids the lingual tricks of the mind-change trade. With his Scottish accent (“Ego” for example becomes Egg-o, as in the waffles) and with his Oxfordian good looks, he comes across more like a doyen of English literature rather than one of the most controversial practitioners of psychotherapy in Great Britain and the United States.
This morning, the first of the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference, someone in the Phoenix Convention Center maintenance department has turned on all the air conditioners. It is December 11, and for the first time in forty years, measurable snow has fallen in Maricopa County. I confide to my seatmate that Laing ordered the cold air as some sort of obscure psychological test of his audience. “He wants to see who will be the first to react, to complain about the cold, to walk out,” I say. Then he will award a therapeutic medal of honor, Authority Defiance of the First Order or some such. Tricks and paradoxes are all the rage in contemporary psychotherapy to test the resistance of the various patients (or “clients,” in the preferred lingo of the trade). In any event, with the frigid blasts of cold air, and the absence of light, Laing has our unbounded if shivery attention. I am reminded of lectures in medieval France set in dark rooms so that no one could take notes and steal the ideas of the professor.
“All attempts to describe what goes on between me and my patients fall apart when I speak to a group like you,” he starts off. “I’ll be interested to see what I have to say. In a curious way, I am not myself all the time. I take my ego to be a schema; it is not fully a conscious part of me. It’s an auto-illusion. One can lose oneself in the presentation of the self to the self as an ego,” he says. “What the hell is he talking about?” I think. “No wonder it’s so cold,” I think. “This is like the penguins at Sea World.” Since they are out of their natural habitat, the habitat is brought to them: ice, cold, icy seawater. Laing’s natural habitat is the freezing islands of Orkney.
“One cannot understand another person without understanding what it is to be,” he continues. “Love isn’t enough. One needs a skillful means to facilitate transformation. One cannot use a technique in order to be oneself. The beginning of therapy is one of scanning the situation to find the easiest, quickest, cheapest, and least painful way in which patient and therapist can gain access to each other.”
Laing’s schtick has been to dismay the psychiatric profession by his eccentric behavior, strange writings, and unusual therapeutic techniques. He claims that one can never pre-plan a system of “intervention” but just has to let it happen. He is not alone in the fraternity in feeling that feeling is the key; indeed, he is in good company with, for example, Rollo May, Virginia Satir, and others in claiming that there might be elements of some kind of telepathy between therapist and patient. No wonder the traditionalists feel uneasy with the likes of Laing. “People are usually suffering from the past when they come to see us,” he says, “and the problem is — how do we move them into the present?” Here, he gets even more daring: “Does it go back to one’s youth, one’s birth, or one’s death in a previous lifetime? Some people feel they have died, and have not been reconceived, much less reborn. In this, we have to suspend our disbelief. One does not have to go over the hill or over the wall to let the client be anywhere in that wheel between birth and death, between death and rebirth.”
The Phoenix Hyatt Regency, the host hotel for the conference, looks like a giant peyote plant on a stick, and the innards have all the charm and grace of Folsom Prison. From the three glass elevators in the lobby, you can ascend past 500 or 600 cell doors, all decorated with meganumbers for us blind and absent-minded prisoners.
The presence of Laing and twenty-five other heavies of the world of psychotherapy has brought people from across the United States and from dozens of other countries to this meeting. Salvador Minuchin, Bruno Bettelheim, Albert Ellis, Paul Watzlawick, Carl Rogers, James Masterson, Jay Haley, Carl Whitaker, Virginia Satir, Murray Bowen, Rollo May: the gurus, the masters, the stars in the diadem of psychology, psychotherapy, social work, counseling, and family therapy — many of them brought together for the first time. These names may mean little to those who are not in the “change” profession — but to the cognoscenti, they are wizards. It would not be unlike having a writer’s conference with Gabriel García Márquez, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Jerzy Kozinski, and John Barth — all under one roof. Or an all-star baseball conference with Ted Williams, Dale Murphy, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, Dave Winfield, Orel Hershiser, and Stan Musial.
In any event, Laing, Bettelheim, et al. are gathered in Phoenix for the better part of the week. And a conference which was designed for 2,000 people has blossomed into one with 7,200 attendees, with another 3,000 to 4,000 turned away. As the originator of the conference, one Jeff Zeig, said, “It’s the Woodstock of psychotherapy.”
Zeig is a therapist in his own right, and a young disciple of the late eccentric Milton Erickson. All agree it is a miracle that Zeig has gotten so many of the top-drawer savants to join this venture. The second miracle is that they are willing to appear on the same panels with others, often bitter professional enemies, some considered to be authentic crackpots. Salvador Minuchin, one of the mavens of family therapy, suspected to be rather quirky himself, at one point refers to his colleagues here as “psychiatrists, psychologists, Zulus, and Eskimos.”
Carl Whitaker and his sidekick David Keith call themselves “genuine imitation psychiatrists.” Their first presentation is more like that of Chico and Groucho Marx. Whitaker says he decided to take on a co-therapist “because I was so afraid of appearing stupid. . . . I found that I was in the imitation psychiatry business, and the people in front of me were in the imitation patient business.” Whitaker delights in making heavy fun of his profession, not to mention those he treats: “Schizophrenia is a disease of abnormal integrity.” “Six months after you cure a schizophrenic, they’re back with their mother — crazy as hell again.” “Families of schizophrenics are abnormally normal.” “We’re all crazy. I have delusional visions every night between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m. It’s called dreaming.”
Whitaker looks not unlike an aging deliveryman for the north Jersey Schlitz beer route. Not only is he an apologist for madness, he encourages it. “It’s craziness that gives you courage — that’s where life is.” Yet he’s convinced schizophrenics are stupid. “You and I may want our mothers to breast-feed us even though we’re forty years old, but we don’t act on it. The schizophrenic will not only want to be breast-fed, he will go downtown and ask the corner policeman to do it, even though,” he adds tartly, “the policeman isn’t equipped properly. If you are smart, you just aren’t considered crazy.
“Look at Picasso,” says Whitaker. “He was crazy. There are people in our society who are crazy as hell who make a living. [Pause.] I make a living.”
Later, on families: “I think divorce is wonderful, but it’s really an ‘irrevocable trust,’ so divorce is the wrong word.”
On hallucinations: “All pathology is a function of what we already are. Hallucinations are already a part of society, so one who is pathological just has ’em in high relief.”
On teaching psychotherapy: “Anything that is worth knowing in this field cannot be taught. You’re just getting a dilution. You can’t understand technique through what we tell you.”
Keith and Whitaker had a good portion of their audience leaving the room, looking troubled and shaking their heads. Keith told about a middle-aged lady who came to him for treatment. She thought she was being followed by the police.
“Are you working with them?” asked Keith.
“Working with who?” asked the lady, suspiciously.
“The Wisconsin board of psychiatric evaluators,” he said. “I read in the newspaper that they are investigating all the therapists in the state, looking for malpractice.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about,” said the lady.
“Oh, come on,” said Keith. “I know one when I see one. I’ll bet that pin on your chest is really a microphone.”
“Are you crazy?” she said. “It’s a pin. Touch it. I’ll show you.”
“Oh no you don’t,” said Keith. “Now I know you are trying to trap me.”
Of course as this goes on, a certain transference takes place, with Keith coming on so much more looney than the patient that, soon enough, she begins to move away from her madness to accommodate him. As Keith describes it, “My being crazy with her flipped her into playing the role of the sane one.”
In the exhibition hall, amongst the book stalls, tape stalls, and real-life-doll stalls, they have the Milton Erickson Memorial Bronze Project. It sports one of those jut-jawed sculptures of him, bright of metallic eye, balanced on a wrought base. It nestles uneasily next to statuary of wild horses in various states of jumping and running, and, for social and political reasons far beyond my ken, a carving of Abraham Lincoln.
It is ostensibly under the sponsorship of the Erickson Foundation that this conference is taking place at all. He would have been amused by that. Erickson was an iconoclast and a maverick, anything but a conference man. For the fifty or so years of his practice, first in Michigan and later in Arizona, he was one of the most paradoxical of professionals in the mind-change business. An M.D. by training, schooled in traditional psychoanalytic methods, he evolved into a trickster (in the Oriental sense), a hypnotherapist who used mind-boggling techniques to convince, jolly, encourage, and coerce his patients into changing.
Erickson is one of the most recorded of psychotherapists. Yet, despite multitudes of sound and videotapes of him in action, there is a swirl of controversy over exactly what he was doing — or thought he was doing. He used subtle methods for inducing trances; he said they allowed him direct access to his patient’s subconscious. Once there he could change habits, feelings, attitudes, fixations, hurts, and general stuckness, using techniques which have been the envy of and mystery to thousands of others in the helping profession.
Erickson was a subject of controversy throughout his life, a psychotherapeutic Peter Pan who was almost always on the cutting, if not actual, edge with his various techniques and elaborate “reframings.” Part of the legend was created by Erickson himself. He published a newsletter and a number of books which contained stories of the problems brought to him, the various strategies he undertook, and the requirements he imposed for treatment and remission.
Unlike the usually secretive psychoanalysts and psychologists, he regaled students and visitors with stories of patients who were cornered or conned into changing. One of the most famous of these is contained in the book Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley:
Interviewer: “To get back to adolescent schizophrenia. Suppose someone called you and said there was a kid, nineteen or twenty years old, who has been a very good boy, but all of a sudden he starts walking around the neighborhood carrying a large cross. The neighbors are upset and the family’s upset, and would you do something about it.”
Erickson: “Well, if the kid came in to see me, the first thing I would do would be to want to examine the cross. And I would want to improve it in a very minor way. As soon as I got the slightest minor change in it, the way would be open for a larger change. And pretty soon I could deal with the advantages of a different cross — he ought to have at least two. He ought to have at least three so he could make a choice each day of which one. It’s pretty hard to express a psychotic pattern of behavior over an ever-increasing number of crosses.”
By telling these long and often very funny stories about the people who came to him with their problems, along with descriptions of the spells, hallucination inductions, instructions, and mind-boggling mind-adjustments that he slipped to them, Erickson is violating one of the unspoken interdictions of his profession. Not only are patients expected to be given rigorous anonymity — their problems are to be treated anonymously as well. Clinical studies and reports can be presented for edification and instruction to certain restricted groups — for instance, other therapists, or students — but the tales produced thereby are chaste and dour. In contrast, the stories related by Erickson — especially the ones appearing in Haley’s book — are often Zen-like in their details, and are set in such a way that they cannot help but amuse and delight.
One of the basic tenets of Erickson’s methodology is that the subconscious has a reason all its own, separate from what we think of as “logic.” In its own way, it is just as consistent as the conscious mind. For example, if you are given to migraines, they are there for a very good reason. They serve some extra-logical purpose in your life; the exquisite pain fulfills a scarcely realized requirement of your subconscious. To contain them, a therapist might, for example, make provision to have the headaches put in an appearance at a specific time, for instance, every Tuesday afternoon from 3 to 4, an hour that is convenient for the patient and the subconscious.
Thus, much of our “nonspecific” pain fulfills a specific purpose — and we must honor that purpose. Central to Erickson’s theory is the notion that the subconscious must be, at all times, respected. Valium, pain pills, shock treatment, medications of any kind, most certainly lobotomy and insulin therapy, violate the elegant processes of the mind, for they brutally attempt to club it into submission, into what we think its priorities should be. The role of the therapist, according to Erickson, is to make contact with the part of the psyche that doctors think of as the “involuntary” part — and find out what its needs are. At all costs, we are to respect it. It was said that Erickson believed that his own subconscious could be in direct contact with the subconscious of his patients, and through that dual-trance interaction, appropriate patterns of cure, or at least remission, could be instituted.
There are several advantages to being a member of the working press at the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference. One is that we get into any of the lectures, workshops, and demonstrations, no matter how crowded (and several are jammed). Hard-working M.S.W.’s from Bakersfield and New Haven are moved to make room for us. Another is that we are not required to ante up the hefty $250 registration fee. (Someone figured the gross at slightly under $1,800,000 for the five-day conference.) A third is that we get the comforts and luxuries of a twentieth-century press room on the second floor of the South Convention Complex. Finally, we get the chance to attend the once-a-day press conferences, held there at 1 p.m.
Whoever devised the pairings was certainly of a waggish persuasion. We have truck driver Carl Whitaker at the same time as the urbane R.D. Laing. Virginia Satir was at the table with the authoritative Bruno Bettelheim. Carl Rogers appeared on his own, but later in the day; the respectable Judd Marmor of UCLA turned up in the same session as raucous Albert Ellis.
Of all the participants, only Bettelheim reminded me of the traditional picture of a shrink. He was courtly, scholarly, and earnest — a man who spoke with the integrity and insight of a half century of practice, of immense concern with humanity’s direction and the nature of evil (he spent two years in a Nazi concentration camp).
Dr. Marmor, on the other hand, looked like your typical Beverly Hills psychiatrist, a “shrink to the stars.” Bald, tan, short, and stolid, he was unwilling to put his foot anywhere but firmly on the ground, certainly not in his mouth. He was paired with Albert Ellis, Ph.D. Albert Ellis, oy!
Albert Ellis might well have been a New York taxi driver in another life, or — for all I know — might still be one. He tends to talk on at length, with the wild song of the Bronx in his voice. One might safely say that his responses to our reportorial questions were speeches, and these speeches studies in circularity. “Well, you might say that I pioneered sexuality studies in the United States,” he would say, “and what we did was to point out that the orgasm, to be effective, has to be studied, not as thoroughly as, you know, Masters and Johnson, but in our studies, we found that it could be a matter of fetishes, you know, we have fetishes in our society, and in one of the letters I wrote to The New York Times, I said that they were not getting to the heart of the matter [he pronounces it ‘hot’]. It was a fetish, you know what a fetish is — like in your primitive societies, as we show in Rational-Emotive Therapy, which I pioneered, you can understand what most people mean by your masturbation, your anal sex, your coitus,” etc., etc. Dr. Marmor was looking at his watch, and I was wondering how one who pioneered in sexology could possibly pronounce the word “coitus” like a local stop on the IRT-Canarsie line.
The first night of the conference, my co-worker Ruth and I run into Bruno Bettelheim waiting for the elevator at the Hyatt. “Dr. Bettelheim!” she says. “I’ve always wanted to meet you. How are you?” He turns away, a bit sullenly, I think, and keeps punching the UP button. Finally, in desperation, he gets in an elevator going down.
I tell her not to fret. “I’m sure this happens to him all the time,” I say. Still, Bettelheim could learn a few tricks from Milton Erickson. Erickson would always demand a kiss from women who detained him, or asked him a question, or wanted his signature. “Marvelous distancing technique,” I tell her.
“Bettelheim has to realize that there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” I say, quoting one of my favorite social work teachers. “If he’s going to get himself famous, he’s going to have to tolerate a little adulation from the likes of us. If he doesn’t want groupies,” I add when we get to the room, “he should start wearing a mask. I’d be happy to get him a mask of me.”
“It’s not like I was chasing him around,” she snaps.
“It’s just a little transference. It’ll pass,” I say.
Ruth and I have worked around each other in our respective trades with sufficient amiability for ten years, but at this point in the conference, we are getting tart with each other. Normal people would just tell each other to shut the hell up, but because she and I are so much a part of this Modern Neo-Psychology Movement, we have to communicate with each other in more subtle ways.
“The more I know you, the more you seem to me to be borderline,” she says, looking out the hotel window.
“My, my — we are getting hostile tonight, aren’t we?”
“Borderline, with just a little passive-aggressive,” she says. “Where in hell is all this coming from?” I wonder to myself. She’s obviously confusing me with her father. He ignores her the first twenty years of her life, and I get the blame.
She looks out into the brightly lit city. Through the window, I can see the Convention Center, with its great, dark blocks of striated concrete, randomly tumbled all over each other. What is it they call this school of architecture? Yes: New Brutalism.
“I’ve known you all these years, and I’ve never known how repressive you can be,” she says. Off in the distance, I can see the dark shapes of the Mariposas, hung off against the horizon.
“I suppose you are going to recommend that I go back into therapy?” I say.
“It wouldn’t be such a bad idea,” she says. “You really suppress a hell of a lot.”
“I know you’re in anger, but what I can’t figure out is whether you are also in denial,” I say. “Or depression. Or regression. In any event, you’re definitely driving me crazy.”
She picks up her things and goes out the door. Way off in the distance, I can see a light fluttering at the edge of the hills. Is it the moon struggling to get born out of the mountains? Or is it a mouse?
“She’s just like my mother,” I think after she’s gone. They both drive me crazy. I never know what they want. I can never give them what they want. And I’ll never escape. Ever.
She doesn’t really speak to me until the last day of the conference. Ruth, that is. My mother always speaks to me, even when I’m trying not to speak to her. I can always hear her babbling in my head, telling me — patiently and clearly — what I’m doing wrong. She’s always right. It drives me crazy.
That night, my subconscious provides me with the following dream:
I am flying backward in a DC-3. A cow is looming (and lowing) over my shoulder. The whole thing is taking place in a B movie with lousy color definition and ratty editing technique. The airplane is a cheap green, and the cow a cheap, washed-out red. I wake up feeling the strong need for the counsel of Fritz Perls. He would have sat me down and had me make conversation with the various parts of my dream:
“Why are you here?” I would have asked.
“Moo,” the cow would say.
“Are you trying to tell me something?”
“Moo.”
Then — Perls being Perls — he would have insisted that I make conversation with the airplane. “Where are we going?” I would have asked.
“Zoom!” the airplane would have replied.
One of the ongoing themes of the Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference is success: the sweet report of success that comes in the tales of this or that patient or client who was changed, improved, cured: “After that, I knew she wouldn’t be suicidal.” “She started eating again after our session.” “When I saw the boy seven years later, he was healthy and active.” “The child was no longer considered to be a problem, and the parents stopped talking about divorce.”
With all these testimonials, those who refer to the conference as the “Woodstock of psychotherapy” are using the wrong terminology; they should be calling it the “Lourdes of psychotherapy,” as in the place in the Pyrenees where the Virgin Mary came down to move the stars in the heavens and perform miracles for the young, beautiful, faithful Bernadette. “Maybe they should be selling miracle-cure kits,” I think, and then see they are doing exactly that. The kits aren’t filled with Lourdes water — they are filled with words. They’re called books. They have titles like Healing in Hypnosis; Helping Families to Change; The Situation Is Hopeless, But Not Serious. And if you buy one and thrust it at your favorite miracle worker, you might get a signature.
It’s the Lourdes of Arizona, isn’t it? Twenty-six of the holies, together with seven thousand of the supplicants, gathered together in the Arizona desert to talk about the morphology of miracles — and what a place to meet! It’s a desert in the middle of a city in the middle of a desert.
I think about those who say that Americans are in trouble because we have no shamans, no gurus, no mystics, no philosophers, no witch doctors, no prophets. Bosh. They are here in Phoenix (appropriate name!). There are twenty-six wizards. They can see, we think, into the hearts and souls of humans, and act on what they see. They act for change, for an end to the violence imposed by patients on others, or on themselves.
These shamans — they might be the salvation of the country. We have invested them with great powers (the legal system grants special protections for those in the mind profession). At the same time, we have no room for the Eastern gurus, the Rajneeshes. Indeed, we must chase them from our shores. We have our indigenous sacred masters, and they are called psychotherapists. We have no need of swamis from Poona. The shamans are already in place, on Park Avenue, in their ashrams on Lake Michigan, in teak-lined therapy rooms in Beverly Hills, and La Jolla, and Palm Beach, and in Cambridge, the campuses of Georgetown, Santa Barbara, Austin, the consulting rooms of Mount Sinai, Langham, St. Vincent’s. We scorn Muktananda, but we do so because he is redundant. His spirit already practices in the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center, or the Georgetown Family Center, or the Institute for the Study of Psychotherapy, or at the Center for Humanistic Studies.
It was Muktananda who said that therapists have to be wary of infection from their patients: “A healer’s vibrations are transmitted into a patient, and a patient’s vibrations are transmitted into a healer. As you work with a patient for a long time, his vibrations enter your body, and you are affected by them. As a result, you yourself become a patient.” He pointed out that more psychologists and psychiatrists suffer from mental ills than people in any other profession. The therapist “talks to a patient for hours on end, not realizing how much he himself is being affected by the patient’s illness.”
The grand old men of the psychotherapy conference are Bettelheim, Murray Bowen, and Carl Rogers. Bettelheim is majestic and knowing, Bowen is knowing and very old, and Rogers is absolutely seductive, even as he develops a dowager’s hump. “It’s from leaning forward so earnestly, listening to too many problems of too many troubled people,” I think. When Rogers appears in the now warm ballroom, he gets a standing ovation. He wears a string tie, a benign and earnest expression. He’s also bald as a hoot owl, and shows much vigor for one so far along in age. Talking to him now would be not unlike having a garrulous but totally sympathetic old uncle to listen to your problems. He smiles fetchingly at the applause, and says, “I was really touched by that.” He then adds, “It’s always best to have it beforehand, anyway.”
“After the forties and fifties, they thought I died in academia,” he says. “But I am still here, still working with individuals, doing client-centered interviews.” He was one of the first to react to the stultifying nature of psychoanalysis. Rogers, Fritz Perls, Alfred Adler, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Satir began trying something not so trying as seven years on the couch. They changed the language to go along with their change in technique. Just as some people are Platonists, and others Aristotelians, some therapists of that age were Freudians, and some — well, something else. The former tended to be more stolid, addicted to “deep” treatment, more interested in insight than change. The latter modified not only the style but the language of intervention. We didn’t do treatment, but interviews. We didn’t treat patients; we worked with clients. We didn’t cure; rather we facilitated change. It was revolutionary stuff.
The client-centered treatment of Carl Rogers could be done once a week, twice a week if there were a crisis. The cost of this could be borne by any middle-class family, and the once-weekly appointments could be shoved into an evening to accommodate those who actually worked for a living.
The first people I remember who had been or were being analyzed were wealthy widows and divorcees — people who could afford the time, money, and large change implied in deep analysis. Clients in “client-centered therapy,” by contrast, were often troubled rather than desperate (or rich) — and the difference between the two was the difference between one who is coping, however badly, and one who is at the edge.
Rogers created this revolutionary change. Part of the ovation is for that. The other is an acknowledgement of the fact that he is now a part of history.
Rogers and his helpmate, one fusty, old, white-haired, Oklahoma granny by the name of Ruth Sanford, spend an hour — an hour — setting up what’s to be done. The two of them, and the two thousand of us. They take questions, slowly, carefully, whispering back and forth, asking that the house lights be raised (or lowered), adjusting the microphones, adjusting the chairs, and then — taking a break. “It certainly is nondirective,” I think. And about as interesting as watching grandma and grandpa tend the garden, fix supper, watch TV, pull down the shades, lock the doors, prepare for bed. The two of them with their endless details, fussing, fussing, perpetually fussing.
Finally Rogers selects a woman from the audience who is willing to talk (intimately! in front of 2,000 people!) about her life. A thirty-five-year-old psychologist from the Midwest, who sometime in the past lost her twins by miscarriage. It still grieves her. As she talks, telling of her doubts, her loss of power, her sadness, Rogers takes each of her sentences and carefully, very carefully, reshapes the thought, with the same words, always the same words, reshaping them like a snowball, or a ball of clay, molding them so carefully, then handing them back to her. “I’m very confused,” she says. “It’s really a very confusing situation,” he rephrases, and hands the problem back to her. “I feel so helpless,” she says. “You find yourself left with a feeling of helplessness,” he says. A bit of clay, passed back and forth between the two of them, to be reshaped, molded, perhaps made into some sort of monument — one that is growing outside herself, one she can externalize so that she will be able to look at it and understand a little of what is going on in the mystery space called mind.
“Maybe I made a very grave error, in not planning sooner for them,” she says, and in the dark auditorium, 2,000 people watch the artistry of what they’ve come to call Rogerian analysis, and in the back of that breathless mass of people, a baby starts to cry. “I wonder what I lost,” she says. “I’m not quite sure — you lost?” he says. [Gentle emphasis. Pause.] “And you’re the type that likes to win.” Synonyms and antonyms of her words are returned to her, in a good volley from the kindly, understanding, universal listener. Truly, is there anyone who can listen as well as Carl Rogers?
“If I don’t have a child, something’s missing,” she says, and her voice begins to crack. “So if you don’t have a child, that leaves a terrible gap, a terrible void,” he says. Suspense. The room is crowded with her pain, and the shared pain of so many of us. How can 2,000 people stay so silent? She is silent. And in silent empathy, he says nothing.
He is poised, ready, ready for her next word. Waiting, we are kindly waiting. She is dressed in a black sweater, black pants, black shoes (one of the audience, later, would call it “wearing mourning”).
She: “The one thing I wanted — I didn’t get.”
He: “At some level, to yourself, you’re a failure.” He nods. “And so that brings a sense of failure.”
She: “It’s so hard. Especially at Christmas, when we go to visit their graves.”
He: “The tragedy continues. Going around . . . it can hit you.”
She: “Sometimes I think I should do nothing, just see what comes of it.”
He: “I can’t control this as much as I am used to controlling things. And I just want to sit back and see what comes of it.”
She: “Yes. Just to see what comes of it. . . .”
Later, Rogers was to describe his task as that of being a companion in the client’s world, so that he or she can be released. “My use of their words,” he says, “makes it safe to go forward. I am validating the client’s experience and feeling. The key is to be present for your client. There are silences — we’ve gone as long as fifteen minutes saying nothing — but it’s a working silence.
“I think of the transcendental nature of therapy,” he concludes. “Both the client and the therapist can transcend the experience, very much like a religious experience.”
The three-hour workshop on family therapy, presented by Minuchin in the ballroom, is one of the most eagerly awaited, and most heavily attended, of the whole conference. “I am glad this is called the ballroom,” says Minuchin, “because I have often thought in terms of dance, and I see my work as dealing with the dance of family and therapists.”
His accent is heavy, Latin American. He often speaks with metaphors as rich as any out of Shakespeare. Much of his work is done with videotape cameras, which he considers to be indispensible for therapy; he is as at ease with electronic equipment as he is with families (and large and eager audiences, for that matter).
“Patients come to you when they are stuck,” he says. “And it is a dance. There is a contract. They pay you, you help them, and give them hope for the possibility of change. All persons, all individuals are underutilized. We have to help the family to move out from its stuckness.”
Minuchin talks briefly of his pilgrimage to meet Milton Erickson two days before he died. “He gave people hope,” he says. “He gave them hope that they could pull themselves up by their bootstraps. People emphasize Erickson’s sense of technique. But he also used humor, wisdom, acceptance, and most of all, hope. The people that you are treating are not worse off than you, they’ve just lost hope.” In his book Family Kaleidoscope, Minuchin speaks of acknowledging the patient’s problems “as real things.” “Then,” he says, “I smile and ask for a new look, a different perspective. It’s not that I fail to see what other experts see. I simply prefer another framing.”
Minuchin often speaks of the dynamic force of the therapist: “You have power as an expert. You have a body of knowledge that gives power to your rhetoric, and your rhetoric has the power to persuade. Therapy educates the patient to the theories of the therapist. The patient comes to you with the knowledge that something is wrong. They say they want to change — but they really want to change without changing. We have to move them beyond that. I have to change their attributes of fear.” As I listen to him, I realize that Minuchin is, as much as anything, a semanticist. Of course, he has to be an expert on language because he is dealing with people through both spoken and body language — what he calls the dance. It is no accident that he is trilingual (English, Spanish, Yiddish). And it is no accident that he is so good at communicating. After all, the 3,000 of us, his eager listeners, are here for treatment as well — treatment of technique, treatment of worldview, treatment of our failings as therapists. Who is going to take care of those who are supposed to be taking care of us?
I want to set his next presentation before you as carefully as possible, since it is one of the most dramatic performances (in the artistic sense) that I have ever witnessed. It combines the best of Fellini and Chaplin. It is a videotape of one session with a Boston family. There’s the father, mother, and daughters Sarah and Maureen. The family is Jewish. The “IP” (identified patient) is the youngest daughter, Sarah, twenty-two years old, with five attempted suicides. The older daughter, Maureen, thirty-six years old, was born with spina bifida. She works in a secretarial job, but is heavily handicapped with speech and walking impairments. The father is a pissed-off, working-class stiff. The mother has bleached blond hair and a good case of the Martyred Whines.
A standard therapist would work with the suicidal daughter alone. Not Minuchin. He homes in on Maureen. What does she do? What is the extent of her disability? Is she more handicapped now than twenty years ago? How much does the family have to help her feed, dress, go to bed, get up? Who does it? She is an integral part of the system, and her handicap becomes a metaphor for the family handicap — in Minuchin’s words — their stuckness, their enmeshment in each other.
“I am different from Carl Whitaker,” says Minuchin. “I choose not to work with an exterior co-therapist. I choose my co-therapist from within the family.” In this case, it’s Sarah. “But I am not a nurturer,” he says. “I’ll work with her; later, I’ll kick her. I will join with their tragedy, but I will later show them that it is sapping them.
“All my movements are props, scaffolding. Above all I am saying to them, ‘What are the possibilities for change?’ You’re making a mess of your life, and Sarah’s life. Do you think you can change?”
Minuchin dips into the videotape, starts it, stops it, explains. The father, mother, and Maureen sit closely bunched together — Minuchin between them, and Sarah apart, by herself. He chooses to leave them in the position they’ve selected. It is, he acknowledges later, significant. Both Bowen and Erickson have pointed to the importance of the physical position families choose with relation to each other when they first come in the room; it’s as important as what they do with their hands, their legs, their eyes, their words.
Minuchin comments on the then-him in the tape from a year ago; and we watch the Minuchin-now, with us, there on the stage, sometimes magnified on the screen, as he tells us, frankly, “I don’t like this father. He’s a bullshitter.” To them, on the screen, he says, “You are fascinating people. So bright. You know it’s wrong, yet you keep on doing it.” And to Sarah, “You decided to quit, only you took a very strange exit.” A bizarre metaphor for her suicide attempts.
“My goal is to challenge them in their structures,” he says. “My attitude is detached (‘Why do things when you know they are wrong?’), and I say to the wife not, ‘Why don’t you change?’ but, ‘How can you change your husband?’ That makes her a partner in the change that must come. The family is an organism, the yin-yang. The message is that change is possible. Sarah has had all the responsibility — she is identified as the pain-in-the-neck, but she has taken the role of nurse. Maureen is going to be the most resistive to change: as dependent, she has the most to lose. In what I do, I always assume there is going to be resistance. If there is no resistance, then something’s wrong.”
Minuchin thinks in terms of the dance, the music, the ballet of the family members and the therapist. When asked by a member of the audience if he is a manipulator, he says that he is a finely tuned instrument. “I will take the information that I have gathered and use it to help the family. I will use every nuance that is available. The behavior of Sarah is the context of the family. She must have a directed self-change, and this change must come in the change in her attitude toward her father.”
Minuchin acknowledges that attempted suicides are the scariest patients a therapist can take on. “My first target,” he tells us, “is that the girl has to leave the session and I want not to be afraid. Those who have tried suicide as often as Sarah have a certain expertise.”
In the video, Minuchin gets up, stands before her, and says, “Who gave you responsibility for being therapist for the whole family? It’s crazy.” “This is typical Minuchin,” he says to us. “I pay a lot of attention to moving. Many of my metaphors have to do with moving — dance, closeness.” He intervenes directly, by physically standing between Sarah and her father. “Who gave you that responsibility?” he asks her. “When did you start your job?” And we can hear the voice of her father, booming in, “We never put any burden on Sarah.” “That’s resistance,” says Minuchin-now.
“You should notice how Sarah is beginning to use Salvador Minuchin language: she has accepted the responsibility of being my co-therapist. Someone in the family will agree with you, there will always be someone. That makes your job so much easier.”
“Have you always been a parent-watcher?” he says on video to Sarah, as she tries to look beyond him to her father. And the audience sighs. The perfect Ericksonian double bind. If Sarah says she has been a parent-watcher for a long time, it means that she admits to what is, after all, a key element of the family stuckness, that is, always watching her father for clues, always looking to him for cues when a question is placed to her, always looking to him. If she says she’s only been a parent-watcher for a short time, it means that she is still copping to having that lock with him. “When you go out with your father,” he asks her, “is he a good companion, or is he boring?” The famous double bind again, with a special arrow aimed at the old man.
Enter Maureen with a question about whether it is her fault. What she means is, “Is it spina bifida’s fault?” Minuchin elicits the fact that at one time she walked by herself, was independent. Now she is not — despite a doctor’s statement that she should be even more so now. Minuchin: “I’m surprised that you are less able to walk now, even with a walker. I know something is wrong with your body, but is there something wrong with your brain?” The audience gasps, the family gasps, Maureen gasps.
Minuchin (to Sarah): “You’ve taken on an impossible job and then you decided to quit. I see now why you want to quit, to take an exit from life. It’s a ridiculously crazy job!”
Minuchin (to us): “I have created a therapeutic construction to separate Sarah from the family. The family has defined her one way, and I have chosen to redefine, by metaphor, what’s happening in the family. I have to provide the family with a rationale for change. There is here a tremendous amount of love, and a tremendous amount of hate. Sarah feels cheated, and the family sees itself in a sacrificial, loving way. I join with them, and start to move them on a different path. I have to do it with love; they would give increased resistance if I take on the hate.”
Minuchin (to them): “You are a fooked-up family because you love each other too much. I think in this family it’s very hard to grow up. How can we help Sarah to grow up? Yours is a depressed family. You [Sarah] are quitting, saying, ‘Fook you. I’ll not spend all of my life taking care of you.’ ”
Minuchin (to us): “There is a tremendous pattern of proximity between Sarah and her father. I would have a suspicion of incest somewhere down the line, but they don’t screw because it would be redundant. They are so close, and it is at the expense of his wife. My strategy is to challenge this system. I do it by what I say, the way I move. But I also note what they say and do, the way they move. I use them for feedback. Sometimes I try to increase the conflict between them to see how they negotiate conflict. In all that I do, I have to think like a pool shark. To sink a ball, you must hit another ball.
“The mother is already distant from Sarah. Sarah is trying to distance herself from her father, and suicide is the only method she’s discovered so far to do that. But the father told her that if she killed herself, he would kill himself, so she’s even denied a successful death. This family is a violin, with only one string, and it’s a funeral march.”
At one point we watch Minuchin, who’s been on the old man’s case, pause for a moment, and then ask him (winningly!) for a cigarette. He says, “I have stopped, for a moment, my attacks on the father. I tell him a story about my aunt who used to go to the Yiddish theater and cry through it all ‘because she loved it so.’ I have joined with them, not only in hidden metaphor, but in being Jewish, and sad.”
This sets the stage for the last scene, where Minuchin has asked the mother and father to discuss, for five minutes or so, how they can help change to come about. The camera watches as this discussion starts, and quickly devolves into a battle, with the father in a raised voice saying how hard he tries, how little-appreciated he is. The argument of the ages, or at least of thirty-nine years (they’ve been married thirty-nine years!). The sordid, tedious, mind-numbing, endlessly circular arguments out of the tenement row house of grimy South Boston, where the interaction of the two of them has finally led one of the children to contemplate self-destruction.
The video camera then pans to Minuchin on the far side of the room, lounging back, talking easily with Sarah, isolated from the battle, filled with their own ease. There is a murmur from the audience. We have become enmeshed with this family, and especially with the sweet and troubled Sarah. We have a commitment to change, and we can see her so much more relaxed now, all of us more relaxed now, turned away from her warring parents (their voices raised in eternal battle). She is starting, perhaps, for the first time, on a new road, her new role, neither as nurse nor as caretaker for the family, and, indeed, no longer the one who must act out so dangerously for the whole system. Their voices continue in strenuous counterpoint to the change taking place, a change unbeknownst to them, a change that will help Sarah exit their lives in a far less drastic, a far less hurtful, a far more creative way.
“There is an unseen presence at this conference,” I find myself thinking. “It is all those psychotic, neurasthenic, at-risk, schizo, looney-cakes out there that keep these 7,000 helpers in business.” Actually, the presence isn’t all that unseen. During Rollo May’s talk, Tom o’ Bedlam appears near the stage, a man of wild eyes and perfervid mien, a perfect metaphor for the bedeviled characters that turn up in the mental repair factories around the country. He is here, I think to myself, to let us know that we are not alone, that we are being watched. Unfortunately, the conference masters are not given to toleration, so Tom is led away by one of the many gun-toting security guards that infest the convention center.
Later, as I am going from “Resistance” with Arnold Lazarus to “Strategic Therapy” with Cloe Madanes (I always read her name as “Cloe Madness”), I run into another wambling, disheveled, recalcitrant sort who slipped past the guards. “Should they be keeping him in or keeping him out?” I wonder.
These questions are partially answered when Laing sends out word that, for his next presentation, he will be interviewing someone who is “at risk,” (the lingo for someone who’s not making it in contemporary society). The Mariposa County Homeless Alternative Psychiatric Services Center, called CHAPS, cast out a dragnet, and brought in Christy.
For the first twenty minutes, Laing interviews her at the back of the stage. The two of them are alone, in a curtained-off section, alone except for the several thousand of us peeking in via the video monitor. Our presence remains unacknowledged except for the moment when she says she despairs of “figuring things out.” She asks Laing if he has been able to do so.
Laing: “What difference does that make?”
Christy: “Well, you’ve had more time. Have you figured anything out?”
Laing: “You don’t get any wiser when you get older.”
That generates an outburst of laughter from the audience, the huge audience that is peering over their shoulders in this most intimate experience, as intimate as — say — making love. “The poor,” I think, “they never get any privacy.” Their bedrooms are filled with children, their workplaces with hundreds of fellow workers — and even when they go to the shrink, there are thousands of us looking over their shoulders, hearing their every word, watching their every move.
Christy looks a bit frayed, but shows herself to be well aware of the nature of the conference, her role in it, the way she is viewed by our profession, and the nature of her own tortured head. At one point she says, “I get things turned around. I get opposites confused. When I write I get my letters confused, I get words confused . . . Either I tend to be paranoid, or they really are after me — I don’t know which.” Laing responds to this by saying, “You might be after me for all I know.”
Later, when he questions her further about what she feels, she says, “I’m just trying to help you guys get some sense into your brains. I don’t know if it’s worth it though, you know?”
Christy and Laing chat of this and that, sometimes succeeding, sometimes not, in ignoring us. They talk about Christy’s parents (her father is a fundamentalist minister back in the Midwest), her guru, the Universal Mind, and The Conspiracy.
Laing: “What brought you to Phoenix?”
Christy: “I was trying to escape the conspiracy, and it didn’t work.”
Laing: “What conspiracy?”
Christy: “Well, if there is one, I suppose you’re a conspirator — so you know already. If there isn’t, I guess I just imagined it.”
At all times, Christy seems to be going in and out of her delusions, but she also plays with Laing, using words that would certainly set off alarm bells for professionals: her fear of having her mind read by doctors, her fear of The Conspiracy, and, at one point, her fear of “getting eaten by the gods.”
Laing and Christy, both experienced in their way with the workings of the mind (and mind-doctors) use the conference as a metaphor for what’s going on inside:
Christy: “They’re watching us.”
Laing: “This whole setup is an enormous conspiracy, and you’re right in the heart of the conspiracy just now. If you came to Phoenix to get away from the conspiracy, you haven’t done very well.”
Christy: “What do you mean?”
Laing: “Well, you’re sitting here in this situation.”
Christy: “You mean the conference is a conspiracy?”
Laing: “Yah, of course.”
When they terminate their twenty-minute exchange, Laing says that he has to return to the podium, and she asks if she can come along, “to see what you say.” This wasn’t in the script, but Laing, always the maverick, welcomes her with the other panelists. After all, she does have a certain expertise, a place in the operation. Questions from the audience come at her and Laing — and to the heads of the CHAPS program. At one point, Laing suggests to the audience that it would be impossible for him to communicate what went on between him and Christy:
“When one tries to explain one’s awareness of that trans-personal field to people who are not aware of it . . . you know how difficult it is to talk about. Don’t be too impatient; don’t — because you don’t understand it, because you are mystified — don’t get angry. Something is happening. Something is happening between us in this hall at this very moment. You can’t express it in words. There is a conspiracy, there is a divine conspiracy which has brought us together.”
A member of the audience stands to complain that his explanation is obscure, perhaps purposefully so. A dialogue develops between Laing and the man, and is fascinating as an insight into one of the core conflicts running through current psychotherapeutic practice. It is a conflict as old, really, as the one that finally split Freud and Jung. There are those who choose to see psychotherapy as a rational science, with scientific parameters, and teachable techniques — and those who see it as a process which is either instinctual, or, even more bizarre, a mystical transference of thoughts and feelings between client and therapist.
This particular dialogue ends with Laing shouting at his interlocutor — presumably another therapist — telling him to step down, to let others be heard:
Man: “It seems to me that a vacuum has been created. It reminds me of a professor friend of mine who said, ‘I feel, I feel, I don’t know what I feel, but oh, how I feel.’ What I’m wondering is, that vacuum allows people in the medical profession to bring zombies to us and we have to work with them. And the vacuum doesn’t really give to me, at least, a feeling of understanding, and when you refuse to understand, refuse, it sounds sort of nirvanish. Although I’m not against that, I think some clearer explanation, clearer understanding should be given, so we know what we’re doing. When you avoid those things, you’re breaking down the whole therapeutic process, it would seem to me. Enlightenment does not come just by remaining silent, although that’s a nice feeling.”
Laing: “This young lady sitting beside me is supposed to be an absolute paranoid schizophrenic on medication. She’s sitting here just now perfectly clear, facing a most intimidating situation from this stage, exhibiting no symptoms of schizophrenic disorder. If you knew of any medication that could do that in twenty minutes, would you say you wouldn’t give that to a patient? You would have to spend the rest of your life as a biochemist to understand what the chemical effects of that sort of thing are supposed to be in the central nervous system. So you don’t know anything about this sort of process. Have the humility to admit that, and keep your place! Instead of the arrogance that you seem to have, to think that you . . . because you don’t know something that there’s something the matter with those who do.”
Man: “No, I didn’t say that I don’t. I have a mind that can understand, I’m sure you do. And I don’t think we should call each other names, and say ‘arrogance.’ I think there is more arrogance in silence, sometimes, than there is in expressing wisdom, if somebody has it. If there is wisdom, give it to us. But don’t let us feel as though there’s some kind of mystical communion going on when there isn’t. And to call . . .”
Laing: “There is. There is, that’s the point. There certainly is. But — see — you say, ‘There’s some kind of mystical communion going on when there isn’t —’ ”
Man: “Well, again, it’s ‘I feel, I feel.’ ”
Laing: “Yah, ‘I feel, I feel, I feel’ — who’s talking about I feel?”
Man: “ ‘I don’t know what I feel, but oh, how I feel it!’ ”
Laing: “Well — I do know! And you don’t know! It is not verbal; it can’t be put into words. And because you can’t understand it, obviously, you say, ‘Ha, ha, ha, some sort of mystical communion going on.’ ”
Man: “But there are people who claim to see the devil. There are people who have claimed all kinds of things.”
Laing: “Give someone else a chance at the microphone!”
Man: “If it bothers you, I can quit.”
Laing: [Loudly] “It bothers me!” [Applause.]
After some discussion about drugs in the CHAPS program (whether the clients are being coerced — as is true in so many street programs — into using drugs by the therapists), Christy is cited by one of the doctors as a good example of a street person who has been helped by the program, but then Christy interrupts, saying:
“The reason I’m doing better is because I quit putting mental energy into the conspiracy. And creating it, to a certain point. But this guy says that there is one. And I think that’s because you [points to Laing] know how to share minds, because he knows how to tap into other people’s minds. You know, on a subtle level, not by just asking questions. Because everybody reads minds. You guys read minds. I tell ya, everybody does. If you observe, if you look around, you’ll notice it. Thank you. And I would like to say something else while I got this [microphone]. I don’t go around like a paranoid schizophrenic all the time. I know how to keep my cool. And I think this guy would be a great psychotherapist, because he does that. [Laughter.] Because he knows how to tap into other people’s . . . where other people’s minds are at. You know — not by just asking questions and trying to figure things out like some. . . .” [Nods at one of the CHAPS doctors.]
Salvador Minuchin — not on the panel himself — steps from the audience and addresses himself directly to the CHAPS doctor:
“I think you should learn something from Ronald. Because I don’t think you have. You see, what we have experienced here is a communion of love. It was experienced at the level not of the words, but there was an element of joining that was expressed in their hands, in their legs. They were moving exactly in the same way. I loved it. It’s important that you know that. I am talking to the physician who talks about drugs. Because the drug that existed there is very, very powerful.” This is followed by bravos from the audience.
Obviously, the whole meeting is turning me into a dingbat, if not a melancholic sociopath. When I repair to the eatery in the conference center with my 3,500 peers for a luncheon of chicken glue in leathern shell with smushed rice, they push me one notch further toward the borderline by having the Cactus Plant Contest. The man with the microphone says we have to look under our chairs, and if there is a yellow dot stuck to the underside of it, we win the cactus plant which has been residing in the middle of the table for all these awful meals. I know it is another one of those anxiety-producing psychological challenges devised by Milton Erickson’s ghost to get us to lose weight, rid ourselves of headaches, stop drinking, nagging our husbands, and belittling our wives. I know mind tricks when I see them: how can you indulge in antisocial behavior patterns when you are busy crawling about on your hands and knees, looking at the bottoms of folding chairs (and the bottoms of your fellows!) for mythic yellow seals? And if you win, and they give you the plant, you have to start worrying about carrying an open bowl with eight pounds of Arizona sand, all in your suitcase. One false move by the porter and you have a year’s worth of desert in blouse, bra, and pantyhose. I know instant cure when I see (or hear) it.
The last night of the conference, I repair to the Hyatt Regency watering hole. I have become autistic from psychodynamic overload, coupled with traces of anxiety (will I ever get out of Phoenix?), alienation (there are too many psychotherapists in the world), displacement (I need another drink), and psychotaxic depression (if I hear one more schizophrenia success story, I’ll cry).
Despite my burgeoning catalepsy, I attract the attention of a wiry counselor from the Eastern Shore of Maryland by the name of Lisa. She is a helper, another trench-worker. She tells of alcoholics, the wife- and child-abusers, the lonely and the depressed, all the terminal cases that she sees in the course of a week. “The trouble with this conference,” she says, “is that they tell you techniques for dealing with stuck families, or wife-beaters, or alcoholic, violent fathers — but they don’t tell you how to deal with all of these in the same family; where do you begin?”
Like most people in the helping profession, Lisa is in there trying to help. She gets a crummy salary, miserable working conditions, and terrible bosses. Every time there is a budget cut in Maryland social services, her department is affected. She does what she can to bring some kind of solace to the hundreds of clients in her all-too-large service area. She is a social worker because she cares for the job. Like most of her peers in the profession, she is conscientious, thoughtful, and wise beyond her years. She does some counseling on her own.
“What do you do for a living?” she asks me.
“I’m a taxidermist,” I tell her.
“Really?” she says. “How interesting. Why are you attending this conference?”
“Actually I’m at the meeting next door,” I tell her. “The AASA — the Ataxic Animal Stuffers of America. We just happen to be here at the same time as — what do they call your group?”
“What do you do for a living?” she asks.
“Actually, I was just joking. All that about me being a taxidermist. I’m a reporter — press and radio. I’m here covering your conference. I just said all that about taxidermy because I’m basically shy.”
“Hm,” she says. “You say you’re shy. What do you mean?”
“It might have something to do with the fact that my father was a taxidermist, and my mother was into ichthyology. I was always afraid they were going to stuff me.”
“You say your father was a taxidermist?” she says.
“No, I’m just being silly. Actually my father was a lawyer who divorced my mother and married his job. My mother divorced her children and adopted stocks and bonds.”
“What makes you think you are shy?” she says.
They never really stop practicing their craft, do they? Do surgeons come home and cut up their children? Do plumbers come home and take the water heater apart? Do attorneys come home and cross-examine their wives?
“I never know what to say to people,” I say, “so I just shut up.”
Murray Bowen, in his wisdom, says there have been therapists around for centuries, for as long as people have been speaking with more than guttural grunts and cries. Somewhere, 5,000 years ago, in Chaldea, at the edge of the Euphrates, there must have been a good, nonjudgmental, noncritical, supportive listener. In India, at the time of the birth of the masters, there was another kind of master, wasn’t there? — an early master of the masters, not saying, “No,” or, “What you are thinking is wrong,” or, “You have sinned” — but, rather, giving forth with an understanding phrase: “It may be best not to judge others — or even yourself,” he might have said. “The dreams,” he would say, “they are hard to give up, aren’t they? Harder, even, perhaps, than giving up the anger. . . .”
Our seer from the past, living in a simple place, with whitewashed walls, two chairs, a bottle of wine, a table — perhaps even a golden bird to turn its head, to watch what is transpiring with bright, unblinking eyes. “Of course,” the sage says, “of course it hurts. It goes around, going around, again and again. You aren’t sure what you have lost,” he says. “That may be the pain of it.”
I can see the two of them now, see them seated at the edge of the dusty square, or in the darkness at the side of the cathedral, along the great medieval wall, next to the quiet stream. A man listens patiently to a tale of suffering that we, as humans, seem to be capable of inflicting upon ourselves, and on others. The quiet listener nods, making it easy to speak, to ease out the hurt.
Once the words take flight into the void, they need not return. Words carry the buzzard out, the buzzard that has been pecking so viciously at the soul for so long. The wound we think can never be healed is, slowly, despite ourselves, ameliorated. It never goes away, entirely — but it does get turned. It is like a great, flawed jewel. There are other angles from which we can view it, making it not so unendurable. The words pass, the pain gets parted a bit; the soul comes to feel lighter, raised out of the dark.
Bowen is right. We’ve been talking ourselves out of the worst for eons, telling secrets to the one who understands, who cares, who will not judge. The feelings we nurse are not futile, and they certainly are not wrong — but they can be transcended. The yielding in itself may cause anguish. There is the knowledge that we are surrendering — but there is also the knowledge that we are surrendering to ourselves. That knowledge is magic.
A nonjudgmental hearer, there to ease us out of the midnight of feelings, ease us into freedom with our own words. It is magic. Perhaps as special as the magic they say grew from the visions of Lourdes.
Thanks to Mho & Mho Works for permission to publish excerpts from The Lourdes of Arizona. Milam’s book, written under the pseudonym Carlos Amantea, is available for $13.00 postpaid from Mho & Mho Works, Box 33135, San Diego, CA 92103.
— T.L. Toma
