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On March 23, 2000, Inner
Eye announced the initiation of
collaboration between CIIS and Tokyo mental
health service agency Japan Institute of
Psychotherapy (JIP) that would explore U.S.
and Japanese contributions to the field
of psychotherapy. Somatic
Psychology professor Don
Hanlon Johnson and Haru Murakawa
'90 (East-West
Psychology) are the project coordinators.
In an update on the project Don says, "Haru
and I just returned from a trip to Japan.
I gave the lecture that formally opened
the JIP at the Green Goddess Hotel in Tokyo
on January 7, entitled 'Psychotherapy as
a Practice of Ordinary Life.' We also visited
the Toshiba Foundation, which is helping
to fund a San Francisco visit in summer
2001 by Dr. Hayao Kawai. Dr. Kawai is the
first Jungian analyst in Japan and director
of the International Research Center for
Japanese Studies in Kyoto."
In July 2001, several seminars,
co-sponsored by CIIS and the San Francisco
Jung Institute, will be held in San Francisco.
Dr. Hayao Kawai will participate in two
seminars, one on clinical sand play therapy
and another that will be an intramural seminar
for analysts and candidates. He will also
give two public lectures/symposia. The first
will address Asian spiritual traditions
and Jungian psychology. The second will
cover the topic of Japanese culture and
Western psychology.
Below is the text of Don Johnson's lecture.
I link psychotherapy and everyday life
in addressing the situation at the beginning
of the 21st Century. I do that because it
has taken nearly a century for the field
of psychotherapy to find its own way apart
from medical psychiatry and religious counseling
with which it has been typically confused.
It has finally shown its unique value as
a way for adults to deal with the complex
challenges of life in the world as it faces
us now, at a point when religious and nationalistic
conventions no longer contain the crises
of ordinary life and death. And it found
its way to its uniqueness first of all in
America, for reasons I will detail, and
offers the possibility of a rich dialogue
with the much older wisdom traditions of
Japan.
Only someone who had missed knowing anything
about the 19th and 20th centuries by living
in the wilderness, away from schools and
books, would not know that it is foolish
for a person in one culture to enter another
unfamiliar culture and pretend to teach
something of value on the supposition that
it is superior to what they already have.
Japan is an ancient culture of beauty, healing,
and spirituality. I come from a young and
rough people whose culture is only now being
cobbled together. Like so many Americans,
my ancestors were uneducated farmers and
craftspeople who came to California during
the Gold Rush, ferociously intent on leaving
behind the languages and customs of an Old
World where they suffered too much. I was
the first in our lineage to attend college.
Our culture is a patchwork, taking shape
and gaining depth only very slowly over
centuries, as it does in any culture. I
dare to make these remarks with that wary
sense of being from a world so much more
undeveloped than yours, thinking that there
may be something of value in our adolescent
culture for Japan's ancient world. Perhaps
Japan's relationship to the U.S. is like
that of parents to our children; despite
our age and experience, we can always learn
something from the raw expressions of youth.
Because children are as yet relatively unfettered
by the bonds of convention, they are able
to make surprising new formulations, come
up with outrageous ideas that would not
be allowed within the adult world of established
ideas.
The influence of traditional Japanese culture
on America is enormous, especially in the
field of psychology. The cultivation of
a quiet and discerning mind, a central element
in the practice of psychotherapy, has been
developed and articulated among Japanese
teachers and scholars to a level far beyond
what we have accomplished. The rich attention
to aesthetic detail, the nurturing of the
nonverbal aspects of imagination and sensitivity
are elements in old Japanese culture which
have deeply impacted American psychologists.
My remarks about the American contribution
are made within this sense of respect for
the depths of the Japanese wisdom practices.
I want to address the peculiar nature of
psychotherapy as a useful if not essential
component of learning how to be an adult
in the 21st Century. Psychotherapy is a
distinctively new thing created within the
past century with conceptual roots in philosophy,
religion, and biomedicine. But a commonplace
mistake has been to confuse this new practice
with those older practices from which it
evolved.
Religion and philosophy are the
most ancient ways of dealing with the challenges
of living. Throughout the histories of Europe
and Asia, monastic practices and philosophical
reflection have been fundamental ways of
dealing with the meaning of life. They have
been and remain powerful and essential aspects
of developing one's soul. And yet, from
the perspective of this moment in history,
these old traditions of Buddhism, Shinto,
Christianity, Islam, and Judaism, and even
older shamanic traditions, have shown themselves
inadequate in dealing with crucial areas
of human development.
One such area is that of authority. The
absolutist patriarchal notions of authority
permeate every tradition, often leading
to the extremes of cults like that of AUM
in Japan and the Jonestown community in
San Francisco, to mention only two more
recent instances of a long history of fanatical
behavior in the name of spiritual ideals.
At a more everyday level, the spiritual
traditions have not had much to offer families
going through the hardships of negotiating
a marriage, and the challenges of successfully
being parents. There are a host of commonplace
problems—addictions, depression, conflicts
with fellow workers, dealing with chronic
illness—for which religious traditions
have offered general help, but not the specific
kinds of help that have developed within
the field of psychology.
Medical psychiatry, psychotherapy's
closest relative, is based on diagnoses
of objectively defined disease entities,
developed within the older more established
biomedical models originating in Europe.
It utilizes the brilliant array of discoveries
about the cellular mechanics of human consciousness,
in particular the increasingly sophisticated
analysis of the organic roots of mental
disturbances, and a variety of human dysfunctions,
and the substances that might ameliorate
their ill effects. It has made its advances,
however, by a very deliberate and systematic
elimination all of those aspects of the
person that are viewed as subjective and
idiosyncratic. The human being studied in
biomedical psychiatry is the objectified
human being, an object like all objects,
more complex, of course, with its unique
biological systems. But the daunting human
world of personal experience, dreams, imagination,
hopes and despair, will power, are not on
the agenda.
Psychotherapy, by contrast, has
come to show its uniqueness as a form of
education for adults in their developing
unique personalities. As essential as learning
mathematics, reading, and writing, psychotherapy
is for learning how to deal successfully
with the challenges that any adult has to
face: learning to care for oneself and for
other people, especially one's loved ones;
gaining control over one's intense emotions
so as to be able to work effectively; being
a good parent; coping with addictive tendencies;
dealing with aging, sickness, and death.
Its beginnings were in late 19th century
Vienna, Zurich, and Berlin. The radical
and revolutionary insight of Sigmund Freud
was that in addition to so-called mental
diseases and spiritual malaise, there is
what he called "the psychopathology of everyday
life." He recognized that the realm of unconscious
processes—dreams, fantasies, projections,
raw impulses—is part of the makeup
of every human being, even the most polite,
seemingly well-ordered and successful. If
those processes are kept in check and organized
within a highly ordered social system, the
adult appears to be a rational person. And
yet, despite all the surface controls, the
unconscious creeps out, willy nilly, in
addictions, irrational fears, explosions
of anger, suicidal and homicidal feelings,
and on the social level, wars, torture,
abuse of various groups of people perceived
as other.
From Freud's radical perspective, the psychotherapist
is not so much like a doctor as like a wilderness
guide, helping the confused adult find his
or her way through the poorly marked trails
and scaling the rock faces of a territory
that is known only in the broadest of outlines.
Psychotherapy is just as important for learning
how to be an adult—learning to love
and work, in Freud's formulation—as
are all the subjects that occupy the schools.
It was hard to see clearly the radical
nature of that seminal insight for the reason
that in prewar Vienna the institutions of
education and healing were shaped by medicine
and the Catholic Church. Deviations from
formalized acceptable behavior were categorized
by that society as sinful or sick, to be
treated by religious or medical strategies,
in the hands of priests and physicians.
Psychoanalysis became the preserve of those
few who were educated enough to recognize
the unique significance of this new approach,
and wealthy enough to travel to Vienna,
Zurich, or London.
It was in the youthful United States that
Freud and Carl Jung's foundational insights
found a home where the new and unique character
of psychotherapy could flourish on its own
terms. We have a strong populist tradition
that looks with skepticism at the old European
institutions of medicine, law, and religion.
The emphasis in the New World was on the
freedom to assemble and discuss, town meetings,
community control, personal freedom, and
innovation. There were a plurality of healing
methods warmly accepted: the folk traditions
brought from Europe, midwifery, the healing
traditions of Native Americans, and new
experiments, not subject to medical scrutiny,
such as chiropractic and osteopathy. Freud
and Jung's view of psychotherapy as a means
to personal freedom, a liberation from the
bonds of family prejudices and fears, addictive
tendencies, mechanical behavior, fit in
well with the spirit in this new culture.
Moreover, the emphasis on dialogue and free
association—the heart of American democracy—created
a climate of widespread direct verbal expressiveness
which was unknown in Europe.
One of the first American psychoanalysts
was a man named Trigant Burrow, who, although
little known himself, had a great impact
on Carl Rogers. Burrow, analyzed by both
Freud and Jung, returned from Europe in
the early 1900s troubled by what he saw
as a European authoritarian residue contaminating
psychoanalysis. He initiated a series of
attempts to find a more peer-like style
of counseling, which, while recognizing
the need for skill in the therapists, would
maintain respect for the adult resources
within the patients themselves, not treating
them as helpless children. Burrow was the
first to emphasize peer group counseling
with an emphasis on very specific bodily
experiences. His spirit proliferated in
many versions of psychotherapy: Carl Rogers,
Harry Stack Sullivan, Heinz Kohut, Eugene
Gendlin, and countless others. They all
shared a vision of psychotherapy as a means
towards gaining freedom from the mechanisms
of past history and addictive patterns,
with an emphasis on experience and individuality.
Yet even with this fresh American transformation
of European psychoanalysis, it took decades
to purge out old notions of emotional disturbance
inherited from the old morality and religion.
Psychotherapy was seen as for "sick" people,
those with "nervous disorders," or those
who suffered a "nervous breakdown." It was
with some shame and secrecy that people
saw psychotherapists. Anyone who had consulted
a psychotherapist was thought to be unfit
for public office. But slowly psychotherapy
has come to be viewed more like elementary
school education, an education in how to
deal with the inevitable problems of becoming
an adult, dealing with relationships with
one's family and community, raising one's
children, coping with depression, chronic
illness, approaching death, etc.
Certainly, there is a place for crisis
intervention, and psychotherapy will always
continue to play an important role in that
area. But more and more, with extended life
spans and the inadequacy of religion by
itself to provide guidance for the larger
population, psychotherapy is a major help
in becoming a healthy, well-functioning
adult, an effective worker, and a kind parent.
Psychotherapists in the present era function
more like postgraduate educators, providing
the basic tools needed to negotiate an adult
life.
Given the uniqueness of psychotherapy as
distinct from medicine and religion, the
question arises of how to provide a training
for the effective practice of psychotherapy.
Because American universities are so much
more flexible than the European—our
curricula, even in the most traditional
colleges, are changing all the time in response
to new insights and research—we have
had the opportunity to experiment with that
question in very effective ways.
European graduate students in psychology,
for example, have often enrolled in our
program in San Francisco because they have
not had the slightest training in how to
work with people. They have exceptional
intellectual knowledge about history, literature,
and science, and of the specific fields
of psychopathology and developmental psychology
that are so necessary for practicing psychotherapy.
But they don't have the faintest idea of
how to apply all that marvelous knowledge.
I had the opportunity some 15 years ago
to be one of three scholars chosen to draft
new laws governing the education of psychotherapists
in California. It was widely recognized
by legislators, academic scholars, and public
health officials, that a traditional education
in abstract experimental psychology, and
in abstract themes of the field of clinical
psychology, was not at all sufficient. What
was needed was a systematic education in
a variety of so-called human qualities,
which included such abilities as:
• listening carefully,
• observing nuances in non-verbal expression,
• communicating honestly with one's
clinical supervisors and peers,
• warmth and empathy,
• flexibility in relating to different
people differently, and in giving up ideas
that were not workable,
• noticing one's projections and biases.
But a widely held assumption gets in the
way of designing an appropriate training
for psychotherapists. It holds that those
human qualities and others like them are
not learned educable abilities, that their
acquisition cannot be accomplished by formal
schooling. In this assumption, people come
by those qualities or they don't. They are
due to the luck of one's genes or parents
or something beyond the educational process.
And yet, it is the very development and
proliferation of clinical psychology in
the U.S. that has shown the falsity of this
assumption. Clinical psychologists have
successfully developed widespread replicable
methods for learning such skills of being
fully human. These methods are widely articulated
in the psychological literature, established
in clinical and educational research, and
replicable. They are now widely taught in
university and clinical settings, as well
as in private institutes that offer such
trainings. They have become part and parcel
of what is thought to be a reputable education
to practice as a licensed psychotherapist.
I want to emphasize the peculiar new elements
that we, in the U.S., have seen as critical
for the education of competent and effective
psychotherapists. The emphasis is not on
any particular school of psychotherapy,
but on the development of those basic human
qualities which are necessary no matter
what the method. And cultivating the kinds
of flexible and curious spirit that makes
one capable of learning from the unique
events of clinical practice, on examining
what works and what doesn't work for particular
clients in discussion with senior practitioners
and peers.
The training we have designed for our collaboration
between American and Japanese teachers,
designed for Japanese psychotherapists,
is focused on these elements:
• Clear, direct, and honest expression.
A psychotherapist's skill progresses primarily
through honest and direct communication
about the actual course of therapy with
peers and skilled practitioners. This is
not an easy task: some of us are afraid
of exposing our weaknesses, which are in
fact the rich soil of continuous learning.
Others of us are afraid of retribution,
that if we express our honest feelings and
doubts, those in authority will look down
on us, even to the point of dismissing us
from our position in a clinic or school.
The role of group process in the training
of a good psychotherapist is not primarily
a matter of learning techniques for use
with clients, but a basic foundation for
continuing to improve one's therapeutic
skills. Particular emphasis in this program
will be devoted to authentic communication
with peers with an eye towards developing
skills so that participants will be able
to work effectively with each other throughout
the long duration of the program, and to
build an effective and personally satisfying
community of working clinicians.
• An emphasis on the non-verbal
foundations of personality: gesture,
movement, breathing patterns, dreams, feeling,
emotion, with an eye towards helping therapists
to be more fully present to their clients,
instead of being absorbed in their own ideas
of what should be done. Emphasis is on exploring
the body as the dwelling-place of psyche
and communal learning. In the U.S., there
has been a remarkable flourishing of research
in the importance of nonverbal behavior,
and the meaning of nonverbal expressions.
A well-known researcher in early child development,
Daniel Stern, argues that the transition
from preverbal to verbal behavior in the
infant is a crucial stage. Failure to negotiate
this transition in a way that maintains
a sense of connection with the preverbal
modes of expression leaves an adult with
a profound sense of alienation. Much of
the success of psychotherapy consists in
knowing how to help people recover lost
connections between the preverbal realm
of body memory and feeling, and the later
stages of intellectual notions.
• The heart of the practice of psychotherapy,
in contrast to biopsychiatry, is systematic
and careful attention to the experienced
relationship between the therapist and
client during the course of the session,
with particular attention to the ebbs and
flows of the empathic bond. This is a radical
theory that challenges an older notion of
the ideal therapist's role as a detached
observer. There will be special emphasis
in this training on developing the empathic
link between client and therapist, on boundary
development, and power issues.
• Great emphasis in the training will
be on the development of flexibility in
adapting to the needs of individual clients,
rather than staying wedded to a particular
approach.
• Finally, the gap between experience
and language. Crossing from highly personal
experience to speaking about it is dangerous,
fraught with temptations to buy ready-made
phrases and the ideas of experts outside
oneself, giving into the desire to please
the other, to do what is right. A great
work of the psychotherapeutic process is
helping people slow down enough, learn to
respect themselves enough so that they formulate
carefully what it is that they feel moved
to say. While the rush into speech and rational
thought can lead to superficiality, the
tendency to remain quiet in the realm of
experience serves to diminish the capacity
of non-verbal knowing to move into the larger
world of community, challenging false, inadequate,
and flimsy intellectual notions. Our training
will put great emphasis on helping psychotherapists
to learn how to speak carefully and close
to the bone about their experiences so that
they can help their patients do the same,
and so that they can work profitably with
their peers and supervisors in advancing
their own skills.
This new millennium presents all of us
with severe challenges; our personal and
collective souls are in great jeopardy.
I think that you better than Americans will
understand when I say what I mean by soul
is not some individualistic ethereal thing,
but that dimension of ourselves which is
connected with the whole, the seat of inspiration,
imagination, love. That soul is in jeopardy
when the forests are cut down, the water
and air polluted. When countries like ours
need so much oil to light these vast hotels
and drive so many huge vehicles that we
must support the destruction of tribal peoples
to get the oil on which they have built
their ancient cultures. At such a dark time,
we need to combine forces to resist these
dangers to our common humanity, a shared
battle for the human soul.
Somatic
Psychology Program
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