«в приемной, где сидят пятьдесят пациентов, ко мне обращается женщина лет сорока. Минут пять она несет что-то невразумительное, а затем спрашивает: „Что со мной, доктор?“

Некогда было сесть и побеседовать с нею обстоятельно и разумно, поэтому я просто ответил: „Вы сумасшедшая“. Она обрадовалась: „Слава Тебе, Господи! Я так и думала, была у пяти врачей, но никто мне не сказал об этом. Большое спасибо. Что же мне теперь делать?“

„Почему бы вам не найти работу, и тогда у вас будут деньги на частного психиатра, с которым вы можете пару лет позаниматься вопросом о том, как вам жить в этом мире“. Через несколько лет я узнал, что она так и сделала.»

— Карл Витакер. Полночные размышления семейного терапевта

«Laing believed that it was essential that therapists did not collude with the phantasy system that clients would almost inevitably be projecting onto them – phantasy systems in which clients would often construe themselves as powerless, and ‘the other’ as responsible and in control. Laing was unequivocal that such invitations to collusion should be rejected; and not, in the psychodynamic manner, with tentative interpretations over a period of time, but with direct and honest challenge. Resnick (1997: 378) reports that a typical ‘Laingian’ ‘construction’ might be: ‘You seem to feel that you are unhappy because I am not giving you what you want. But if you look closely at what leads you to this expectation I suspect you will find its origins entirely within yourself.’ Laing, himself, puts it more bluntly: ‘I might say “Do you realize that by virtue of what you’ve just said you are treating me like your father. Now I want to point out to you that I’m not your fucking father”’ (Mullan, 1995: 319). Laing (1969) believed that such non-collusive therapy would almost certainly be experienced by the client as frustrating, but he felt that therapists needed to be able to tolerate a client’s basic hatred as a way of evoking a more genuine human relatedness.»

— Mick Cooper. Existential Therapies

«Indeed, Laing believed that the decisive moments in therapy were often the ones that were unpredictable, unique, unforgettable, always unrepeatable and often indescribable – moments of I–Thou encounter, which, as Buber (1958) states, cannot be ordered or planned. Laing gives the example of a seven-year-old girl who was brought to him by her father because she had stopped talking. Without any plan, Laing sat down on the floor in front of her and touched the tips of her fingers with his …

And for something like forty minutes or so, nothing [happened] except a gradually developing movement/dance with the tips of her fingers …. After about forty minutes, I opened my eyes and as I opened my eyes I found her eyes opening just at the same moment, without a word having been spoken. So we withdrew our fingers from each other, and went back to my chair. I said to her, bring your dad along now if that’s all right with you, and she nodded. (Quoted in Schneider, 2000: 596)

According to Laing, when the father subsequently asked the young girl what had gone on between her and Laing, she had replied ‘It’s none of your business!’ – the first words she had spoken for approximately two months (in Schneider, 2000).»

— Mick Cooper. Existential Therapies

«In discussing the nature of ‘the self’ and the meaning of ‘I’ it is important to remember that the questions raised by these words are practical ones and not theoretical. From birth we are fundamentally engaged with the world and things in it. We have to be able to deal with the world before we can talk about it. When we think about ourselves and wonder who we are, we are in a context. In dreaming, or meditating alone in a cave, we are still somewhere. It makes no sense to abstract ourselves from our practical relations to the world, to what is already given, and imagine ourselves as without a context, a sort of essence in a vacuum that we can define. The meaning of a word is not in me but in its place in the symbolism and this is shown by the way it is used.»

— John M. Heaton. Wittgenstein and Psychotherapy: From Paradox to Wonder

«The word ‘I’ means, but it does not mean a thing. Then who am ‘I’? I am not nothing, as if I put my hand up for coffee you would not give coffee to nothing! You would give it to me but not to ‘I’. I am not something or nothing. The use of ‘I’ has nothing to do with being or non-being. You can refer to me, pick me out from others, describe me in all sorts of ways, know all sorts of things about me. But is ‘I’ something that can be known? As we have said, it is not a thing as it has no properties, so cannot be picked out and known. When you say ‘I’ you speak from no place, there is an interval born by the difference between us.

[…]

We tend to imagine that ‘I’ can represent an image of myself if we are wedded to creating meaning-objects; we take this image to be some sort of substance, a fixed entity, a meaning object, which exists over time and is in my mind, our ‘real self’ for example. But this is a concept having no substantial existence.»

— John M. Heaton. Wittgenstein and Psychotherapy: From Paradox to Wonder

рабочий стол

«It turns out that the Latin roots of the word patient lie in words connoting “one who suffers,” whereas the roots of the word client point to “one who depends.” Indeed, client derives from the Latin cliens—freed (Roman) slaves who are still dependent on their masters. Thus, one can make a strong case that the word patient is more empathic with the person’s suffering and the word client is unwittingly demeaning.»

— Wachtel, P. L. Inside the session: What really happens in psychotherapy

«The rubric of the two truths has its origins in hermeneutical worries about the resolution of prima facie inconsistencies in the discourses of the Buddha. In some suttas, for instance, the Buddha talks about the self or the person, emphasizing the fact that we are each responsible for the kinds of beings we become; in others he emphasizes that there is no self, and that persons are illusions. The hermeneutical mechanism for reconciling such statements is the device of upāya, or skillful means. The idea is that the Buddha adopts the language and framework of his audience in order to best communicate what those in the audience are capable of understanding and need to hear. For some, who cannot really understand the doctrine of selflessness, he speaks with the vulgar about a self; for others, whose difficulties are conditioned by their adherence to a belief in the self and who are capable of moving beyond that, he talks about selflessness. But the exegetes who deployed upāya in this way do not want the Buddha to be convicted of lying, of speaking falsely, or deceptively. So there must be a sense in which when he says something at one level of discourse, or in one context, that he disavows at a higher level of discourse, or in a more sophisticated context, he nonetheless speaks the truth in that discourse, in that context. Enter the two truths.»

— Jay L. Garfield. Engaging Buddhism: Why It Matters to Philosophy

Phyllis Shafer. Black Rock Dome (2022)

Phyllis Shafer. Moonrise (2015)

«A significant moment in my own development as a psychotherapist occurred when I realized that my wish to make my patients better was actually interfering with my ability to do so. I was overattached to the idea of cure and frightened of the aggressive implications of detachment. I was unable to synthesize attachment and detachment into a position of nonattachment, one in which I could see my narcissistic need to be a successful therapist for what it was, to balance therapeutic zeal with realism, and realize that ultimately what helps patients to get better is an impersonal force that I needed to recognize and align myself with but could not control.

What does this position of nonattachment mean in practice? Again, there have been various attempts to describe what the therapist should do with her mind in relation to the patient: "listening with the third ear" (Reik 1948); active receptiveness (Winnicott 1971); "evenly suspended attention" (Freud 1912). The therapist must be both active and passive, penetrative and containing, motherly and fatherly, in control but not controlling. I find the idea of focus helpful; one has to focus on the patient, while at the same time being aware of oneself focusing. An appropriate therapeutic mantra for nonattachment might be, "Focusing on the totality of the patient, and the totality of my response to the patient, I am aware that I am focusing on the patient and my response to her.”»

— Jeremy Holmes. Attachment, Intimacy, Autonomy: Using Attachment Theory in Adult Psychotherapy

Важнейший навык терапевта — не слишком активно кивать головой и нераздражающе повторять “угу” на разные лады.