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While I was writing the previous paper I also gave some thought as to what else, other than psychoanalysis, had influenced me over the years of working as a psychotherapist. Here is the list as it came to mind.
(1) My training as a Social Worker which I think gave me a capacity to sit down with anyone under any circumstances and have some hope of at least trying to understand them in their environment. And the version of social work that I learned at Monash in the Mid 1970′s taught a model that was different from the more prevalent model of the time that channelled new social workers into streams of either becoming “Case Workers” or “Community Workers”.The Monash Model at the time basically said that social workers were “Change Agents” and that could apply no matter the particulars of the context in which they worked. I notice that these days many people claim to be “Change Agents” but Monash was well ahead of the flock in the 1970′s. They also taught the “Bio-Psycho-Social” Model of thinking which also is now fairly common parlance.
Many of my class mates took on jobs that allowed them to become “change agents” at organizational or community levels but very soon, I realised that what I loved most was just sitting with individuals. Fortunately, I could see that in a small corner of the model there was room for my sort of work too.
(2) An introduction to Carl Rogers book “On Becoming a Person” while I was still training as a Social Worker. This was really the first book during the Social Work Degree that inspired me. It was not part of the curriculum but I was guided there by my social work lecturer and mentor at Monash, Cliff Picton. That book gav e me a model for the way of working that suited my way of being. I read it cover to cover.
(3) An introduction early in my Social Work career to Transactional Analysis and a particular variety of Gestalt that was linked closely to TA. I did a couple of weekends with the man who, at the time was the head of Church of England Marriage Guidance” in Victoria. To this day I frequently fall back on a some of the ways of thinking that were given to me then and which are phenomenally helpful at times. TA or what I took from the Teacher’s version of it deals with the most complex psychological machinations of the mind in very simple and understandable ways.
To this day I can frequently hear when clients talk, evidence of “decisions” made very early in life and of the “scripts” they cleverly but unconsciously worked out as tiny children, in order to survive and or prosper in their life situation. And the simple Gestalt technique of suggesting a client might shift chairs to listen to the competing “voices” in their heads took me out of my frozen state when feeling “stuck” in a chair.
(4) Of phenomenal influence was my training with Jeff Barlow in body- oriented psychotherapy. The training did not have a great deal of theory as it was primarily experiential and it gave me some sort of foundational, almost organismic, understanding of the links between body, mind and feeling. But most of all, I learned from Jeff himself how to simply be with a person no matter what and to allow that person to be in whatever it was that was there for them in the moment.
(5) Attachment theory was and has always been enormously useful for me and fitted extremely accurately with my own experience.
(6) The emphasis on the “Self” in Self psychology really appealed to me and also the concept of repair of disjunctions rather than only looking at what was going on for the client.
(7) And from Intersubjectivity the notion of emphasis on the interplay between therapist and client being totally to the fore brought a different light to transference and countertransference.
(8) And of huge importance as it evolved in the mid to late 90’s for me was the burgeoning of knowledge of neuroscience and its relationship to emotional development.