Making of Psychotherapists an Anthropological Analysis

THE MAKING OF PSYCHOTHERAPISTS

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ANALYSIS

JAMES DAVIES

First published 2009 by Karnac Books Ltd. 118 Finchley Road London NW3 5HT

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A C.I.P. is available for this book from the British Library.

ISBN-13: 978-1-85575-656-4

www.karnacbooks.com

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements.................................................................................v Introduction..............................................................................................1 1. The Rise and Fall of the Psychodynamic........................................25 2. The Therapeutic Encounter..............................................................54 3. Irony in the Therapeutic Encounter................................................84 4. The Seminar Encounter: The Transmission of Psychodynamic Knowledge...............................................................102

5. Deflecting Doubt, Maintaining Certainty.....................................124 6. Clinical Supervision.........................................................................146 7. Illness Aetiologies and the Susceptibilities of Training..............173 8. The Transformed Practitioner........................................................202 9. The Conclusion.................................................................................250 Appendix One The Distinction Between Analytic and Interpersonal or ‘Object Relations’ Therapy.............................................................257

Appendix Two The Genealogical Structure.................................................................260

Appendix Three Curricula of Training Institutes in the BCP......................................263

Notes......................................................................................................266 Bibliography.........................................................................................290 Index......................................................................................................307

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

he process of writing a book is rarely free of all difficulty. To the following people I owe a great debt of gratitude for help-

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ing me through the more demanding times. I first wish to thank Professor David Parkin for his kindness, goodwill, and invaluable guidance, as well as for providing me with the priceless example not only of how a scholar should work (but also, unbeknown to him) of how a scholar should be. What a precious model he provided. I am also greatly indebted to my discussions with Dr Matias Spektor—a most dear friend and always a positive force behind the scenes. Important others who challenged and/or helped me were especially Dr Ben Hebbert (a true companion), Dr Audrey Cantile, Dr Elisabeth Hsu, Professor Wendy James, Professor Roger Goodman, Dr Maria Luca, Professor Tanya Luhrmann, Professor Andrew Samuels, Professor Peter Fonagy, Joe Yarbourgh, Rob Waygood, Professor Roland Littlewood, Dr Adrianne Baker, Dr Simcha Brooks, Professor Richard Sholzt, Mark Knight, Nancy Browner, and, more recently, Rev James Wilkinson. To all of you I offer my deepest gratitude. Finally, I owe especial thanks to Dr Karem Roitman who gave me the great benefit of her close reading of the text, her sensible advice, astute commentary, as well as her tireless encouragement and support.
I must also thank the training institutes that allowed me access to their staff and students, and all the interviewees and informants who kindly gave up their time for the benefit of this research. I wish to thank for their assistance the librarians at Regent’s College

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
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School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, the Institute of Psychoanalysis, Oxford University, Senate House (University of London), Cambridge University. My gratitude also to my colleagues and students at Roehampton University, and especially to Professor Del Lowenthal for his constant backing and encouragement.
Financial help for this book came through the generous assistance of the Equity Trust Fund (John Fernald Award), and from various sources from St Cross College and the University of Oxford —to all these benefactors I am greatly indebted. I also owe deep gratitude to the staff and members of St Cross College, Oxford, whose kind and stimulating company (often during a lunch) offered solace during the dips in research.
Finally, I wish to thank my parents and family for their support, encouragement and love. If this book is to be dedicated to anyone at all, then let me dedicate it to them.

INTRODUCTION

n this book I shall analyse from an anthropological perspective the training of psychoanalytic psychotherapists. I undertake this

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anthropological task since psychotherapy not only constitutes a clinical practice, a professional association, and a way of making a living, but also a moral and cultural community with wide social influence and standing. If we wish to study how the values, practices, and knowledge of this distinct community are maintained and reproduced over time, we must investigate the sites, the training schools, where these cultural forms are transmitted. In this book I offer a detailed survey of the hidden institutional devices used in psychoanalytic training to help reproduce this world of shared practice and meaning. I ask why and how such devices are used, I discern their meaning and consequences, I explore how they profoundly alter the outlook of trainees and practitioners, and finally I show how they shape the fortunes and functioning of the therapeutic community itself. By taking the reader by the hand through the core stages of therapeutic training, while at the same paying close attention to what trainees do, say and feel as they pass through these stages, we will see how professional training not only grooms trainees as practitioners, but as specific types of persons who also become the main agents of community maintenance. We will see how trainees are coaxed into supporting an avowedly secular enterprise that can offer rewards (i.e. a new orientation to life, increased status and a deep sense of belonging) reminiscent of certain political or religious movements; an enterprise

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which also advances behind its professional façade a robust ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ regime of wider social ambition and significance. We will see, then, how these training institutes, or what I refer to as institutions of affirmation, work to create practitioners who will sustain the values and hegemony of the psychoanalytic tradition itself, usually vis-à-vis other therapeutic institutes and schools. Whether institutes are successful in their aims, and whether these aims are actually proving to undermine the status and standing of the profession itself, are other important questions I shall explore.
This book, then, is not only written for social/cultural anthropologists interested in the new field of ‘professional socialisation’ (the study of how professional institutions transform persons and social practices, as well as create social structures), and for psychotherapists who wish to understand why their community is divided internally as well as set against more powerful social institutions (medicine and academe), but also for current and prospective students of psychotherapy who wish to understand the formidable institutional forces to which they are invariably subject; forces which leave their inevitable imprint not only upon their clinical/professional practices and beliefs but also upon their deeper subjective selves. Finally, it is hoped that for those with a general interest in psychotherapy this book will offer a stimulating introduction to the behind-the-scenes features of this alluring professional world.

A NTHROPOLOGY OF P ROFESSIONAL S OCIALISATION

Studying how powerful institutions (training or otherwise) transform the subjectivities of those individuals passing through them has always had an important place in anthropological enquiry. As this book therefore falls within this established field of study, let it first be seen as providing an example of how this particular species of social enquiry proceeds. By reviewing some of the work already written in this area to familiarise the reader with this existing research, not only will we see the relevance such work has for understanding psychotherapeutic training, but we will also uncover the central methods and deeper aims underpinning this book.

INTRODUCTION

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To start, from the early days of the American ‘culture and personality school’ (Bateson and Mead 1954; Benedict 1934; Kardiner 1939) to the more recent British work in the anthropology of learning and cognition (Tyler 1969; Dougherty 1985; Bloch 1998) there has always been an anthropological interest in how individuals adopt the cultural beliefs and practices of their specified group; beliefs and interests that ultimately come to guide their lives in particular and predictable ways. While most of this research has admittedly focused on how children are socialised into their social group, a smaller collection of anthropologists have studied ‘adult’ socialisation: including adult conversions, transformations, and ‘cognitive restructuring’ (Heelas 1996; Luhrmann 1989, 2001; Goffman 1961; Gusterson 1996). Within this smaller body of work we find investigations of professional training, or what I shall refer to here as ‘professional socialisation’. These studies by and large explore how individual subjectivity is shaped and transformed in professional training contexts, largely with the aim of socialising trainees into the particular professional group. They further investigate how the ‘transformed persons’ these professional trainings produce come to support and perpetuate the existing institutional practices that underpin the professional community at large. These researchers thus study not only what professionals produce and reproduce (i.e. the artefacts—linguistic, symbolic, material—left by individuals), but also the social factors and institutional devices that precede and fashion us as individuals who produce in pre-

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scribed directions (Gusterson 1996: 3). In exploring psychoanalytic socialisation, then, I investigate this interplay between individuals and the training institutes to which they are subject; institutes that through strategies of self-survival seek to self-perpetuate over time.

A NTHROPOLOGICAL E THNOGRAPHIES OF P ROFESSIONAL S OCIALISATION

Investigating how individuals are transformed to help construct and maintain social reality is a common thread binding anthropological studies of professional socialisation. Simon Sinclair’s (1997) anthropology of medical training is a case in point. He starts by showing how medical training takes place not only in the obvious ‘official’ and ‘front-stage’ educational contexts (e.g. in seminars,

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lecture rooms, and on ward rounds), but also in many ‘backstage’ and ‘unofficial’ locations—in the bar, on the games field, and during more ‘theatrical’ social events. Students’ lives are thus inundated by institutional demands and directives (p.16). It is this more penetrating education that leads students to acquire deep professional ‘dispositions’ (professional habits of thought, feeling and action), which ‘fit’ with their profession’s existing norms and expectations—a ‘fit’ which ensures that these professional mores are transmitted and maintained (p.32). At the end of Sinclair’s work he calls for the reform of medical training, largely because the ‘dispositions’ being transmitted to trainee doctors support a medical system that undermines the health of both trainees and doctors. But since the trainee’s capacity and willingness to undertake reform is largely weakened by the ordeals of training, he concludes that changes to the medical system must come from without. One vehicle for change consists in educating doctors to become more critically and sociologically aware of what they do and how they do it; this, he believes, will increase the young doctor’s awareness of the side-effects that medical training not only produces in the medic and the medical profession, but also in society at large. Sinclair advocates that cultivating critical awareness of the taken-forgranted norms and practices of medical culture is the first step in reforming those aspects of biomedical training, practice and belief that generate harmful consequences for self and society (p.326).
Tanya Luhrmann (2001) in her highly acclaimed anthropology of psychiatric training is also interested in the effect professional training has upon self and society. Unlike Sinclair, Luhrmann does not use the language of ‘dispositions’ to define that which professional socialisation instils in trainees. Rather she prefers the language of ‘moral and technical instincts’—these are the qualities trainees need to develop in order to enter with the professional community. While still retaining an approach similar to Sinclair, she seeks to understand how sets of authoritative practices and ideas change how persons subject to them feel, act, and think. By following the training of young psychiatrists in the United States she arrives at an understanding of why psychiatrists come to think, diagnose, and practice in the world as they do. Psychiatry in recent decades has become a divided profession, creating almost two different and competing kinds of practitioner. She shows comparat-

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ively how the biomedical and psychodynamic traditions each produce very different moral and technical instincts in psychiatrists. This has led to competing perceptions of illness, disease, prognosis, and treatment within the one psychiatric social space. By studying socialisation at the local level she explores the interplay between practitioner, system, and society: as biomedicine is ever more wooed by corporate pharmacology, old psychodynamic practices die away. Psychiatric socialisation is thus adapting to the wants and aims of powerful insurance and pharmacological companies. And as new trainees are subtly socialised into complicity with corporate and ‘pharmacological’ aims and interests, not only does a new clinical hegemony prevail, but a new kind of practitioner is produced.
In many ways both these studies presuppose Goffman’s (1961) early idea that institutions (themselves pressured by outside forces) transfigure persons via ‘direct assaults on the self.’ With this phrase he was describing, albeit in the case of asylums, how individuals adapt to institutional expectations and demands simply in order to acquire the security and rewards that conformity brings. One of the unintended consequences of such ‘fitting in’ is to accept as ‘normal’ the institutional imperatives that bear upon the individual. People often prefer to remain in warm accord with their social surroundings than to suffer the difficulties non-conformity can create. Conformity when ‘naturalised’ legitimates actions which are rewarded by institutional paybacks; this sets in place relationships of mutual confirmation and constitution between persons and the systems in which they operate.
As we shall see, and as both Becker et al (2002 [1977]: 437) and
Sinclair (1997: 327) assert to be the case in medical socialisation, psychoanalytic institutes prefer a student body that conforms with authoritative demands; and the institutes clearly resist any kind of autonomous student culture or sub-culture which might challenge

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the status quo. Institutes, by and large, prefer a trainee community that is predominantly compliant with the wishes of the leadership. Revolt against established procedures is institutionally resisted by

processes of what

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come to call ‘exclusion’, ‘secondary

elaboration’, and by the fashioning of ‘imaginations’ and ‘dispositions’ sympathetic to institutional demands. These devices attempt to render trainee innovation into a form of dissent, to brand trainee

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protests as symptoms of pathology, and to exile any inconsistent student ideas behind walls of private doubt. Thus through a variety of strategies trainees’ intellectual and cultural life becomes subject to institutional expectations. This stimulates a mood of conformity in which the inculcation of dispositions that ‘conserve’ rather than ‘challenge’ the tradition is easily performed; inculcations which, from the standpoint of the institutes, keep any threats to their ‘regime of truth’ at bay.
How and why the rewards of conformity can lead individuals to embody contradictions, warranted or unwarranted certainties, or new ways of seeing, practising, and imagining, has its history of

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interest in anthropology. For instance, Hugh Gusterson (1996) in his anthropology of science offers a detailed account of the moral transformations nuclear physicists undergo as their professional training proceeds: he sets out to discover how once politically liberal young men, hesitant about nuclear arms proliferation, were gradually transformed by their training into keen weapons scientists. As they progressed through their studies the adventure of entering a secret group, of making light of their work, and of developing a sense of technical mastery, were principle instigators of their personal transformations. For Gusterson, the rewards these acquisitions brought gradually dulled the concerns that were once impediments to their becoming professionals—such new acquisitions, because of their allure, prompted individuals to rationalise their old objections away.
Like the process of becoming a physicist, becoming a psychotherapist offers attractive and seductive rewards: those of belonging, of a new identity, and of new mastery—namely, it offers incentives as desirable as the ‘economic and status rewards’ identified by certain sociologists of the professions (see Rustin 1985). Professions first and foremost need new recruits—thus investigating what inspires newcomers to train is to unearth alternative sources of community maintenance. One of my contentions is that psychotherapeutic training transforms more than just ‘cognitive processes’ and instils more than just ‘clinical expertise’, it also initiates persons into a moral and social community. Learning is then not simply a process of ‘knowledge acquisition’ or a process of ‘technical and cognitive instruction’ but a process of ‘becoming’—

INTRODUCTION

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becoming a full participant, an accepted member, and finally, a kind of person.⁴

P IERRE B OURDIEU —A P OINT OF T HEORETICAL O RIENTATION ?

To make explicit one theoretical tradition influencing my analysis of psychoanalytic training, let me offer a brief sketch of Pierre Bourdieu’s socio-anthropological theory in order to highlight which of his concepts may usefully illuminate hidden aspects of psychoanalytic socialisation. Although Bourdieu’s work is notoriously difficult to understand, principally because of the language he uses (Jenkins, 1992: 162-72), there is no doubt that once we have understood his concepts of ‘habitus’, ‘disposition’, and ‘cultural field’ we will find them useful aids in our analysis of psychoanalytic training.
Let me start with Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’. This refers to a collection of habits of thought, feeling and action that ‘dispose’ individuals to behave in certain socially and culturally predictable ways (Bourdieu 1977a: 78-9). For example, an individual whose habitus was developed within an individualistic and capitalistic society may well display actions, thoughts and feelings that are consistent with the values and aims of that society—he may be industrious, competitive, and keen on making profit, he may display a marked capacity to sever ties in order to move with the demands of market etc. The particular habits of thought and action that comprise the individual’s ‘habitus’ Bourdieu refers to as ‘dispositions’. ‘Dispositions’ are ways of being and acting which help individuals to ‘fit’ with the ‘fields’ in which they are located—this is to say, dispositions are those embodied actions, thoughts and feelings that his or her community rewards and expects. But what does Bourdieu mean by ‘field’? He is not talking here about a geographically bounded concrete space, such as a nation state or a city state. Rather he uses the word ‘field’ as a kind of metaphor to denote an area in which people and institutions engage in shared practices and behaviours—thus we can speak of the fields of ‘academe’ of the ‘media’ of ‘politics’ and indeed of ‘psychotherapy’. Such fields are not circumscribed by geographical bounds but rather by

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bounds of interest, shared values, knowledge and belief.

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In sum, a ‘habitus’ (an orientation to life) consists of a set of
‘dispositions’ (acts and feelings) which generate ‘practices’ (social actions) characteristic and supportive of the shifting and dynamic ‘fields’ (e.g. academe or politics) with which they are congruent.
The first step in using these concepts to help our analysis of psychotherapeutic training is to note that certain education theorists have employed them to understand other educational con-

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texts. For instance, students can be taught to develop certain thoughts and acts (i.e. dispositions) by means of either ‘overt’ or ‘covert’ modes of learning.⁷This is to say, many of the strategies or ‘devices’ used in institutes to transform trainees into professionals are not necessarily overt educational tools nor clear pedagogical strategies or techniques. Rather they are often hidden, covert or ‘unintentional’ educational devices that operate outside the awareness of both learners and teachers, and which can therefore only be revealed through close analytical enquiry. As I intend to expose such hidden devices at work in therapeutic training, I shall follow Lave and Wenger’s (1991: 40) distinction between ‘learning’ and ‘intentional instruction’. That is to say, as people learn things beyond what they are openly and ‘intentionally’ taught, intentional instruction can never account for all that is learnt, for far more is learnt than what is intentionally taught—things always seep in through the back-door, so to speak.
As we shall see, psychotherapy students learn by overt and explicit educational ‘devices’, but more importantly by devices that are covert, insensible or hidden from both they and their teachers: I shall show that through shrouded devices that work to ‘transfigure the trainee’s imagination’, to ‘socially induce anxieties and uncertainty’, to ‘alter the trainees sense of personhood’ and to ‘instil a sense of clinical mastery’, that is, I shall show that through devices not always explicitly recognised by the trainees and institutes as such, trainees learn to accept as true the professional reality with which they are presented. In fact, we might go so far as to say that it is these covert and insensible modes of learning (rather than overt and intentional devices) which constitute the most powerful factors and forces facilitating the making of psychotherapists.