A NOD TO CARL WHITAKER: WHAT’S NEXT FOR ?

Exhuming his Gems A where to from here, for family therapy as a clinical intervention. Boudi Maassen 27/1/21 Email: [email protected] Carl’s Basic Premise

• Out of my experience as a family therapist came the capacity to be the patient at the drop of a hat.

• It’s a bilateral altered state of consciousness, the freedom to be more of myself by using the other.

• My wife Muriel, with her integrity, her antennae always on the alert, her whole person resonance, her capacity for locked in place intimacy, she was my role model. Whitaker’s Journey

• A period of isolation in his adolescence, on the family farm • Then in college studying medicine, deciding to team up with fellow students, which he describes as a structured co- therapy team to break up his isolation, a threshold decision. • Moving out of surgery, calling it mechanical carpenter work. • Exposed to people suffering psychosis in the Manhattan ghetto and electing to study child psychiatry. • An internship in Kentucky, discovering schizophrenia, with young children watching them talk about their families through his toys, discovery of Melanie Kleine’s work. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.) • The arrival of his first child and working in child psychiatry, gave him the courage to be more human, noting how quickly medical students retreated from humanism once they got into medical school. • Introduction to who emphasized the process of therapy itself and the investigation of traumatic content. • Learning about the uses of tenderness and the uses of toughness in his work with adolescents. • Discovering the power of co-therapy. Going into his boss’s office for help, worrying that a Veteran wanted to kill him. His boss took one look at his patient and said “You know I don’t blame you. There have been times when I’ve wanted to kill Carl myself” and walked out. An example of a paradoxical intervention. • Learning that co-therapy gave you a freedom to back away and look at what is happening, and the freedom to plunge in while not being afraid of what is happening to you and thepatient. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.)

• Learning how to talk about emotional experience in the team. • Mandating group therapy for medical students in the medical school in Atlanta. • Meeting colleagues who inspired, pushing him to be unified by the fact of their own integration. • His discovery of his areas of impotence, as an administrator, using his toughness to get out of lame duck situations. The art of reinvention, and renewal. • Grasping that administrators and educators wedded to a theoretical structure, could not/would not, were resistant to, learning new methods. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.)

• Understanding the objective of was to humanize pathology, seeing all psychopathology as an effort to heal, and that schizophrenia was an effort on the part of the child to heal the family. • His own psychosomatic symptoms including anxiety convinced him to become a patient in a co-therapy team over an eight-year period. • Began to have more access to his psychosomatic symptoms in relationship to patients, eg. itches, twitches, coughs, yawns. • Used his dreams about patient dilemmas. • Became convinced the relationship between the therapist and the patient was the curative factor. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.)

• Began to get bored with individual therapy, enjoyed couple therapy, became concerned with the phenomena of schizophrenic symptoms in individuals being allayed in treatment, only to take centre stage once the patient resumed contact within the family of origin. • Every six months set up a four-day residential workshop with colleagues to brainstorm the schizophrenic individual in a family. • Moving into private practice and adopting the idea of using a consultant inthe second interview whose role emerged as generating ideas, insights and conceptual organizational thinking. • Dual contract idea. Having listened to the initial story, then in a second interview introducing the consultant who formulates a description that was delivered to the family thus the initial contract was considered ended. The family was recommended to talk together and decide on termination, or to re-contract for ongoing work. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.) • Developed a professional supervision system of endless give and take. • In the absence of the prior united struggle with public sector administrators. Private sector success led to tensions in the team. • Left the private psychiatric clinic, returned to university life in Wisconsin, became a full- time family therapist on staff, grieved powerfully, a year after leaving his prior family of colleagues. • A conceptual understanding that emerged in his new work in family therapy included: • The therapist proves their ability to manage and take charge as required, of the therapeutic process. • Detuning the importance of the scapegoat or finding additionalscapegoats. Increasing the anxiety among all family members. • Reversing dependence on others, so that the family regained responsibilityfor generating their own change. Whitaker’s Journey (cont.) • Recognising that all of us, to some extent, are crazy. Being driven crazy, a form of malignant isolation. Going crazy as in falling in love, which can also take place in the therapeutic setting. The quasi craziness that happens in social groups. Imitation craziness. • The relief of killing off fantasies, in Whitaker’s case killing off the fantasy of being an administrator, thereby releasing a new freedom within his personhood. • With age, learning to de-mythologize, using laughter to puncture the absurdityof his own myth making. The stories we tell ourselves, that become mythologies fully subscribed to, when ruptured, bring necessary pain, individuation, and a freedom to self actualize. • A powerful shout of praise to his wife as they developed as co therapists. The Whitaker’s Manifesto

• Psychopathology is proof of psychological health. • Being is akin to a state of receptivity. Excessive doing is a flight from being, an expressed dissatisfaction with one’s current status. • Being is the waiting for something to happen from inside of you. All expressions are symbolic, that is, they represent more than they specify. • There is no truth, only approaches to truth. • The dialectic of ‘I-ness’ and ‘We-ness’, the push and pull of aloneness, relationship and intimacy. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

• Preoccupied by the past and the future requires endless thinking, endless rumination. • An existential shift to the present sometimes requires you to forego past and future preoccupations. A narrowing of focus until you arein present tense. • A corrective emotional experience can lead to a reorganization of lifestyle. • Role reversals. Being childlike while in play, encourages children to be themselves and to play at role reversal. • Playing allows for a relaxation of blood vessels and muscles. A relaxation that interrupts the endless power- driven purposefulness. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

On Intimacy: • The yen for intimacy is much greater than our tolerance for it. • Intimacy is conditional, its understructure is paranoia. Even intimacy with Selfis conditional given the trickiness of self. • The freedom to endure this paranoia leads to a capacity to laugh at oneself,to punctuate self-mythologizing. • Leads us to a whole person, the whole person relating with one different other. • The intimacy of suicide: Suicide can be the reversal of murderous impulses, towards others, redirected towards Self. • Is suicide a two-person event, and an exit from relational demands? • Whitaker’s unorthodoxy took various forms including telling a suicidal patient he would jump up and down on her grave while cursing her, if she took that step. The patient described this reaction as helpful in giving up her suicide narrative. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

• What is love in life and in psychotherapy? • Being more of myself, modelling to the patient to become more themselves. • Love could be defined as an affective union resulting in a sense of self fulfillment moving from self-consciousness to self- awareness.Increasing union leads to increasing individuation. • Love is when both participants in a couple are being themselves. • Love as a desire for completion and complementarity. The relationship brings biological and relational needs together for satisfaction. • I may look at the patient and see myself in the past, present or the future. This identification increases my involvement which is a relational stance. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

• Insanity is a two-person event. If the therapist know of their own craziness, and brings that into the therapeutic space, this allows the patient to develop a freedom to move between insanity and sanity in the relational field. Whitaker says this capacity points to interpersonal love in the therapeutic relationship. • In marriage, the We is even more powerful than the summation of the two individuals. • A tennis game of doubles, as a metaphor for marriage, the opposing team represent external forces. • Styles of Marriage: The bi-lateral adoption contract, a covert arrangement where unconscious agreements to care for and be cared for, becomes problematic. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

• The bilateral pseudo therapy project where one plays at being all knowing and offers tutelage to the infantilized other. These roles are interchangeable. Couples need to risk psychological divorce and remarriage moving towards an evolution of ‘peerness’. • Symbiosis an unconscious to unconscious interlocking, which takes place without either partner recognising it. • A healthy marriage is a kind of whole person to whole person change process involving some trade off in individual rights and privileges to develop a twosome that meets the challenges of their social andcultural structure. • Couples stay married when they move from being united to individuating and then remarrying or reuniting. This repeating process takes place over time. Whitaker said “every few years I seem to be married to a new wife”. The Whitaker’s Manifesto (cont.)

• Marriage is a process of endless dialectical alternations between union with the danger of enslavement, and individuation with the danger of isolation. There is no resolution of this endless process between belonging- ness and separateness. • The delusion of a good marriage as a disappearance of two individuals into a We has resulted in the massive repression of individual needs. • We have now moved culturally from the struggle over a delusion that we-ness was sacred, to a delusion that ‘I-ness’ is sacred. Carl Whitaker’s Tools, Tricks, Gems of Practice

For a critique of Carl Whitaker, read Rich Simon’s article: Take it or leave it, in the Psychotherapy Networker, Sept 1985. 1. The notion that play itself is a dialectic. The more you can play the more you disrupt the seriousness of family pathology. The more you can transcend the language of complaints the more you can enter into the meta-territory of second orderchange. 2. I am the only model I can share. Sharing information. Identifying with thepatient’s pain by utilizing a fragment of my own pain. This process of sharing requires a disciplined competence in not becoming the patient or in not playing the game of “follow me” or “I know better”. Sharing information is joining with the family and its struggles. 3. Authority that is counterbalanced with a one down truthfulness, and thatis employed to establish boundaries regarding time, space and process, isessential. 4. The process of logic and the process of reason are both artificial. Communicationis listening and a responding as if the two ‘I’s’ were seeing and responding as whole people from separate places. The only real communication that lasts is ‘meta-communication’, that is, communication above the level of the usual give andtake. Carl’s Toolkit (cont.)

5. First degreechangeis aboutdecreasingor increasingwhatis alreadythere. 6. Second degree change is like shifting gears, it changes the dynamics of the whole system. Second degree change requires a crisis with no scramble to resolveit viasociallyacceptableor ordinary communication. 7. The gradual awareness and capacity to produce confusion. Without confusion, yours andtheirs,thereis no change.To speakto whatis alreadyknown,already acceptable only speaks to the patient’s standard life experience. Confusion by itselfhasthevalueof stimulatingnewconnections,newconsiderations,within thesystem. 8. The decision to write for yourself. Its best if the writing has flow and captures your fantasies and your dreams, your writing becomes a vehicle for intra- psychic exposure. 9. As a receiver of patient night or day-dreams I have learned to not try and understand their dream, that there was something secret and sacred in their dream.Teaching thepatientabouttheirunconsciousor dreamsymbolismdoes not support change. The important thing is for the patient to hear themselves tellingtheir dream. Carl’s Toolkit (cont.)

10. As a professional, being increasingly clear you are not a peer with patients. That invisible separationis importantand is maintainedby the therapistnot by the patient, otherwise there is no professional therapy, there is only education and adaptation training. 11. Be careful about repetitions, sharing memories is not a way of sharing yourself, it’s a way of avoiding being who you are, by talking about who you were,or when you were, or what you know. 12. A danger in being a professional is thinking about what is happening in session and trying to steer the family or the patient to a “healthy state”. It requires courage to wait for something to drop out of one’s creative person. To allow free associations, and brainstorming, rather than retreating into thinking oraccumulated knowledge. Carl’s Toolkit (cont.)

17. Oscar Wilde said, “nothing is more real than nothing”. Silence is its own communication. The temptation to fill the silence can be unbearable for the therapist raised in a demand culture. 18. Painful though it is, all failures in therapy are failures of the therapist. The patient never fails. 19. The therapist is responsible for the therapeutic hour and for being responsive in it. The patient is responsible for his life and hisdecisions. 20. A powerful ploy of the therapist is to admit his work is about income. It can be modified or balanced by the fact that the therapist also notes he is doing this work to increase his own growth, his own change, his own increased integration, his own decreased pathology, and enriching his life journey. Thank you Boudi Maassen 0424 416 969