First Posted on April 29, 2012 by alisonball

In the last year or so I find that I am gradually moving toward retirement. Maybe it is entirely due to aging but also due to coming to a great involvement with a new interest. And perhaps the two are linked. My sister died in 2007 and for the previous fifteen or twenty years she had been absorbed into tracing our family history. I had been only marginally interested but as she would say- it has now become my laterst “obsession”- supplanting to a fair extent my twenty- five year “obsession” with psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

My family is definitely not an illustrious family- very ordinary indeed but what intrigues me is the search- the exploration and the variety of what can be discovered when we begin probing “the depths”. I think the interest is very similar to how I have always felt with doing the work of psychotherapy with the many and varied people who have come to see me over many years.

It is common to believe that people in the helping professions are in that work because they are “obsessive helpers” and must forever “care” for others. I have never thought that that explanation felt true for my major motivation in being a psychotherapist. What I love and have loved is the search and the exploration. In the case of psychotherapy it is an exploration of what are the precise experiences in life and the precise interpersonal, inter-relational and intra-psychic dynamics that make this person different from this other person. What is it that is in so many ways quite typical dynamics that can be found in many people and what exactly is it that makes this person unique?

I have always found great excitement in exploring the depths of the psyche and when it is done in a collaborative way most people can find their own way through their life issues when we can both understand how they think and feel in all sorts of situations. What I have also found is that the learning is endless; there is always something new to learn and fortunately you can never “know it all”.

I find with my new interest that some of these same excitements are very similar. I have absorbed much of the information that my sister had found and which passed onto me. This is similar to absorbing and making sense of all the “book learning” that went with becoming a psychotherapist. But the experience of searching for myself has led to enormous learning in a wide range of areas. It has also brought me in touch with many and varied people from the wider family group who once I would have paid very little attention. And it has brought many new insights into the family and put my life and my family’s lives into a much broader context.

Psychotherapy also brings that broader context to our lives even though it frequently seems focussed on the internal.