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Thursday, 01 May 2008
Extractive identification - Part 3
This is from a lecture given by Christopher Bollas. At the workshop I went to a few weeks ago, he was the one credited with the term Extractive Identification.
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We all free associate; it is a natural way of thinking. It will not occur if the analyst is too talkative or hijacks the hour. There is the concept of a larger secret to be revealed. Freud believed if a person freely talked they will go on to many things, leaps, chain of ideas. If allowed to speak long enough you discover a line of thought in a chain of ideas, a logic sequence. We must go back to the one way Freud saw unconscious communication. The value is in discovering forgotten material. The analyst surrenders himself to his own unconscious mentation. He must not try to fix anything, but to catch the drift of the patient’s unconscious with his own unconscious. The engine of psychoanalysis is unconscious communication between analyst and the patient’s unconscious.
If you relax and listen, you will discover a tissue, a chain of thought, it is meditative, without ambition. You must trust that your unconscious mind will perceive a pattern. Certain things patients’ say will strike us, more often than other things. You can echo the word, repeat, active echoing their word, not yours. It may move or puzzle you, so have sincerity in questioning the word. The analyst can’t eradicate curiosity. The analysand may have a spontaneous and new arrival of fresh material if the analyst is the receptive unconscious other to receptive unconscious thinking. If the analyst is out of touch with the patient’s flow, material will stop.
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This piece says a lot to me about the type of psychotherapy that was being displayed at the workshop.
The client will give you their unconscious thoughts and feelings. But are you, the psychotherapist, listening or receptive to it is the question? To start listening to such communications from the client is somewhat of a narcissistic pursuit by the therapist. He must start listening more to his own unconscious thoughts arising in him. So in this sense the psychotherapist listens less to the client and more to self.
The unconscious communication between client and therapist is what is being sought as the means to understanding the client and the important mode of communication between the client and therapist. I particularly note such statements as:
“The analyst surrenders himself to his own unconscious mentation.“
“If allowed to speak long enough you discover a line of thought in a chain of ideas, a logic sequence”
“The value is in discovering forgotten material.”
“You must trust that your unconscious mind will perceive a pattern.”
“It may move or puzzle you”
“If the analyst is out of touch with the patient’s flow, material will stop.”
This is a diagram that can explain the unconscious communication. Again the therapy is very much about the relationship between the client and the therapist. How they communicate and relate, in this instance at an unconscious level.
How does the therapist do it on his side? That is why I like the statement of surrendering to his own unconscious mentation. One lets their unconscious thoughts appear along with the client’s and hence the interactive or relational quality in the psychotherapy. And a trust in self that you will perceive the unconscious pattern provided by the client. So the concepts of surrender and trust are important for the therapist in this approach.
When the therapist feels something like being moved or puzzled then you know you are on to something. Again this is a very relational approach where the therapist is ‘in’ the therapeutic relationship, not just analysing it form afar.
I particularly like the last sentence and I had personal experience with this in the work that I did as a client. I saw the workshop leader do this with other clients over the 5 days and then experienced it myself which is a real bonus to actually have had first hand experience with it at least on the receiving end.
The therapist is very much in tune with the tempo, tone and communication pattern of the client. This can get disrupted if the therapist makes a jump too fast or in the wrong direction with the client. I recall myself feeling a bit fuzzy and confused at a statement made by the therapist in my work. I don’t usually feel confused and then at that point the therapist mentioned that he had gone too fast, I think it was.
A very interesting and useful learning experience with a style of therapy which I am finding how to integrate into the approach that I use, at least with some clients. It is a very sensitive approach so it is particularly useful with clients who at that time need such a quality from the therapist and also quite fragile clients could benefit from it. In other situations I would never use it. If you counselled prisoners with this modality you would be considered a joke and thus wasting your own and the inmate’s time. Also clients with a good ego strength and a mental toughness you don’t need to always be so gentle and thus one can use more ‘strong’ interventions and achieve gains that would take much longer using the approach described by Bollas.
Graffiti
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