When Marian arrives from the waiting room, it occurs to me that there is a
reddish glow on her long dark hair and that it is a bit shorter than I thought it
was. It’s already in the beginning of the interview that I get a special feeling
behind my eyes. Questions come up: ‘Could it have to do with sadness? If so,
where does it come from?’ With these questions at the back of my mind I
continue listening and waiting to see if the answers will emerge from her story
more or less by themselves. I wait, part of my awareness being with my breath
in the belly and at the same time I continue talking with her. She feels so
insecure, she tells me, and is ashamed of the quarrels between her parents. She
cries. She says her father would never say something nice to her mother when
she had been to the hairdresser. Immediately the thought pops up that, not yet
consciously, she may be disappointed that I didn’t say anything about her new
hairdo and that this evokes the sadness from her youth again. I continue
listening attentively.Only when her story would become superficial or when she would relapse into
repetitions, would it be necessary for the transference to be brought up, but this did
not happen. Afterwards this session appeared to have been a turning point in her
therapy, until then she was always hiding her insecurity and shame behind quite a
lot of verbal aggression, as in the transference. We talked about that in her recent
session, when I interpreted the negative transference in order to maintain the
therapeutic alliance.
Gaining insight into variability and interwovenness, one learns not to cling to all
sorts of concepts and theories. A concept never becomes reality. In a therapy session
this means one flows with the stream of developments which occurs in the transference
and countertransference constellation. The here and now of the relationship of the
therapeutic partners is immediately present in the experience. To be open to this,
feeling what happens, staying attentive to it and looking how the feeling develops,
are the first tasks at hand. Every attempt to control the situation by trying to discover
if it is either transference or countertransference or who’s sadness it is after all, would
interfere with the openness of the attention and with that the possibility of the client’s
story unfolding itself. If one is aware and does not cling to concepts, one sees the
suchness of the situation directly, without thinking whether it is this or that, mine
or yours, good or bad. It is what it is and nothing more. In the example of Marian it
was a feeling of wetness behind the eyes. This feeling—generally the most important
information—was already there before the story.
Psychoanalytic concepts and theories can be very helpful to understand the
therapeutic process, but during the session in particular it is important to insure that
thinking doesn’t take the place of direct experiencing, functioning as a defense against
it.
ENKO ELSE HEYNEKAMP 253