Violence in Psychotherapy

Violence is being exercised in various ways. Today I will speak about a way which is almost consistently encountered in psychotherapy and can be expressed by the words: "I am in haste". I am in haste, means also I suffer violence. It is a peculiar violence, because it is not being exercised by another person but by my own self. Moreover, here, we will turn our attention to just one facet of haste, which is expressed by the words "...what...to do?"

In order to clarify how the words "...what...to do?" are spoken out of a haste that violates, let me not begin from psychotherapy, but from a phenomenon of our age. It is an age that renders life, a vita activa, as it is often called, life of doing and acting, and man animal laborans, the animal which perceives its relationship to things, the others and himself primarily as action and work. This is not confined to occupational activities. Let us keep in mind that Freud instead of "dream" often says "Traumarbeit", "dream-work" and instead of "grief" "Trauerarbeit", "work of grieving". We elaborate our relationships, we "work-through" our problems, so that our relationships "work", so that things "work". For animal laborans everything presents itself in terms of process, e-laboration.

In the last centuries the field of vita activa had the form of a boxing ring: a narrow place, with the gladiators trapped within its ropes, where the one would come through and the other would fall down. The ring was the figure of warm and cold war on the international scene, class war in society, repression of the worker by the boss in the workplace, dominance of man over the woman in marriage, "molding of children" in family – as the title of a popular Greek magazine in the first half of the 20th century. Violence was personal: there was an opponent, an enemy, somebody who questioned me. The issue at stake was whether I am going to survive or him. It was the age of homo homini lupus: man for man was a wolf.

In psychoanalysis this has been expressed e.g. in the form of conflict between drives and the so-called "reality principle", in the form of the "oedipus complex" as a war between father and son for life and death. Psychoanalysis was "analysis of resistances" that had to be broken and the analysand had to be "persuaded", as Freud writes, about the interpretations of his therapist.

In our century the place of vita activa slowly and steadily is being trans-located from the boxing ring towards the highway. The highway, due to its construction, and if there is no traffic jam, is an open course. It allows someone, it challenges someone indeed, to drive flat out. It does not only not impose any constraint, but the lack of limitations, the endless straight course ahead, its open horizon acts almost as a whirlpool that washes one down in its vortex and causes him to say: "Even more! Even more!"

Some examples of how the figure of the highway determines our life:

- In the place of the subtle poignant-painful, bitter irony of "Moon of Alabama" comes the absolute let go in the music hall, in the clubs, at the sports stadium.

- In the place of the wise good-man comes greed for money, success, fun, security, health, beauty, juvenility.

- In the place of pedagogics as taming of the child's nature comes the "everything for the child".

Here vita activa is a life practise without opponents. Rather the opponent is just an intermediate station on the way. About what kind of violence do we speak then? "Even more! Even more!" is a sort of doping. It begins already with the morning coffee. One is compelled to outrun himself steadily. In front of the horizon of limitless possibilities, haste and its innate violence are inscribed in the way of life. It is a way of life where one is totally left, and exposed, to himself. The matter is how in his single-seater, if I may borrow a term from Formula 1, he will go ahead, will break his record again and again. The violence innate in the conflict of the former age, victory and defeat, is no more purpose for its own sake, but places itself at the service of gluttony and greed appropriate to the present age and, in the form of haste and doping, it has its own peculiarity.

The disorders of the 21st century are formed accordingly. There are people who on this course of unlimited possibilities have suffered a blow-out: Burnout, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, Borderlines, Depressions. Burnout would be a battery drain where dominates the Duracell-paradigm. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) can be conceived of as a disorganisation in front of what in computer language is called "multitasking". Borderline Disorder can be conceived of as the breakdown of a hypertrophied self that crushed under its own overweight. Depression, its "I can't", is conceivable only in a world where one is supposed to can anything.

In this view our clients are to a great extent the losers, the inefficient ones, who can not cope, have been left behind, have been exhausted regarding their goals and their intentions, either in reference to their job, or to their relationships or to something else. And their most usual question is - "...what...to do?". As I mentioned at the beginning, that is the question and that is the perspective of the solution in the age and in the field of vita activa.

Of course this is a cardinal question for the therapists, too. Most psycho-pharmacological and psycho-therapeutic methods constitute exactly answers to it and one way or the other, directly or indirectly, they say: "You should do this...". The way of doing is almost the only one we know, sufferers and therapists.

But how is there a haste in "doing" which the sufferer demands and the therapist proposes? How does "doing", in the form of haste, exercise violence? At first let us look at the sufferer who is hopeless, perplexed, desperate. He asks himself "What do I do?", or he addresses us: "Do something!" He asks us to do something that will somehow relieve him from hopelessness, perplexity and despair. "I can't stand it!", he says.

Sometimes, when I happened to hear this appeal, I answered in the following way:

"You don't say this 'I can't stand it!' with all your heart. If you really have said it, if you really can't stand it, then something would change. But you can still stand it, you stick to things as they are. The situation, albeit the suffering, has something familiar, it is like being home. If and when you really can't stand it, you will open the door and step out from this house, whatever this could mean. You are not yet there."

In psychotherapy, and not only here, this what to do, to do something, is almost always untimely and out of place, because one says it either without having an idea about that, or having in mind an image of it which is abstract, remote. In those cases throwing the slippers and getting out would be a leap of faith in the void. "To do something" would mean to build a bridge over the void, to bridge the passing from the present situation to another unknown or fictive.

Often such fictive bridges builds the therapist, too. Therapeutic ambition looks forward to a happy end that is not here yet. The various models, the therapeutic methods deriving from them, are road maps which promise such a transition. Many times the various interventions, interpretations, advices, exercises, coaching, but also psycho-pharmacological therapies squint, with one eye looking at the present situation and the other eye looking over there, towards the supposed end of the tunnel and its alleged light.

The sufferer, as well as the therapist, driven by the impulse to do, seek something, whose time has not come yet. They put the cart before the horse. They rush. They are in haste. They suffer the same violence to which the embryo is exposed having been untimely out of its mother's body. It is, even though not so emphatically, the same violence to which the raped woman, and, let me say, also the rapist, are exposed because a "doing" took place ignoring, disregarding if ever time were for this act.

Nevertheless psychotherapies, irrespective of school and direction, often are beneficial. - A plant can blossom in spite of the fertilizers we may use.

The man coming to us is not near the change and the relief from his troubles and in fact he has no idea how this could be, because his demand is usually part of his problem. He is at an impasse and he relates to this impasse in some way - by resisting and falling upon its wall, by writhing like a fish caught in the net, by giving up in hopelessness, by accusing the one and the other for his situation, by accusing me for not helping him etc.

This is his place. The therapist could not haste but wait. And, by his art, he can encourage the sufferer to wait, too. I say by his art, because it is not a matter of teaching and consultation, but of his own live example at the session and the communication between them. In Greek "wait" is "peri-meno", meaning literally "staying by" - I stay by his talking and his silencing, I do not regard them as material with which I have to do something, as instruments in order to arrive somewhere else, at a progress, at a change, at a healing. But the more we stay by the talking and the silencing of the therapeutic meeting, the more haste fades away, the more impasses lose their pressure and their burden.

Our meeting is no more work and working-through of the problems; we stay rather at the place we are. We have time, plenty of time. We almost forget that the one is therapist called to heal and the other patient asking to be OK. We have abandoned the highway and the road assistance; we wander amidst the landscape. And we see things which, behind the windscreen, and with our eyes laid on our objective with blinds, we would never have thought of. We speak, we remain silent without any perspective.

When I hear, I do not do something, for example I do not translate his saying in the language of a model, and, when I speak, I do not do something, for example I do not translate my model's language into everyday language in order to speak to him. I do not make connections, comparisons. I do not make so-called interventions, where "make" would be: interject, interfere, introduce something which would act upon what preceded, influence it, transform it. To put it shortly, I do not think. I wait. When I speak, my words emanate almost by themselves, like an underground current which occasionally comes to an opening of the earth and gushes.

But equally important are silences. Some weeks ago a woman told me she woke up early, with a heaviness, and then she realised that she was coming to me today and she was happy. I asked her, what in my presence or in this place made her happy. Here, she said, things are not that grave, it is something like "so what?...", not in the meaning of underestimation and indifference; they are simply lighter. She referred to a meeting of ours some weeks ago, where after a while we remained silent the whole session. It was, she said, as if we were sitting speechless by the sea, loosely and calmly. Sometimes silence also belongs to what here is meant by "waiting".

Sometimes then, in a miraculous way, one day one finds out that anxiety and depression and any suffering whatsoever are not here any more. We haven't done anything but, if I may say so, the transition from haste to waiting did something to us. Maybe these are hours like those, about which Odysseas Elytis speaks, "where the world becomes / beautiful all over again to the measure of the heart".