SYMBOLIC RELATIONS

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

In this text, I would like to touch upon the desire and seduction aspect of the therapeutic relationship. What makes the therapist attractive to the client and creates an opportunity for a lasting relationship? What gives the spring to these relationships, which are not limited only to the resolution of psychological difficulties? Why is the therapeutic relationship becoming a laboratory for the exploration of something that does not seem to exist, but is more important than the expected relief of suffering or eventual happiness

Any relationship is somehow scanned on the desire to enjoy. Each of us, being in a relationship, claims something, because he supposedly has a right and this right is not disputed by default. A therapeutic relationship is a special kind of relationship because the right to demand is limited by the factor of time and money. The therapist, like the client, cannot be possessed, and therefore their relationship becomes entirely symbolic. A therapeutic relationship is a relationship between two symbols at an equal distance from their objects. This is not a relationship between real people, but a relationship of two hallucinations with each other.

If the therapist is seduced and, instead of symbolically satisfying the client's need, satisfies it in reality, for example, sleeping with the client or worse, giving advice or working with a linear request, he traumatizes the client by reducing the degree of his desire, literally extinguishing his vitality

Instead of maintaining the tension necessary for growth, he traumatizes the client with his response by reducing the intensity of his desire. Doesn't answer the question, but it kills the opportunity to ask them.

Therapeutic work begins with an attempt to symbolize what appears to be possessed - a symptom or a therapist. Self-possession leaves one hungry, while absorption of the therapist remains impracticable - in this place psychotherapy allows the emergence of an additional pleasure from better self-recognition with its help. For this, of course, the client must be fascinated by the therapist.

The client's desire is aimed at the impossible and therefore it cannot be fully satisfied

The symbolic appears only in the case of a prohibition, and the boundaries of relations become this prohibition; the hallucinatory process is triggered by the refusal of possession. The client may want from the therapist what he does not have, but he cannot take it directly, but only extract what is missing from the intermediate symbolic zone, for the creation of which an effort must be made. For example, experiencing disappointment.

The client cannot heal about a real therapist, hallucination becomes a necessary superstructure over reality, because with its help the desired takes on the most clear form. This is what the client creates for himself, starting from the real in order to discover what does not exist without him. The intermediate symbolic zone forces one to create without being satisfied with the ready-made. An infantile request is an attempt to appropriate something without placing it in psychic reality. To become healthy, to be in a different experience, to possess the desired qualities bypassing the process of hallucinatory transformation of reality. The hallucination is triggered by the loss of the possibility of immediate possession. The client's hallucination is more than the therapist can give and it is this that creates the effort and the opportunity for change.

Just as the client is tempted to take, so the therapist is tempted to give. The essence of mutual seduction is this: the client and the therapist cannot help but enter into a relationship, but they cannot reach the point of possessing each other. This is the fundamental difference between these relationships from all others. The fate of a hallucination is to be appropriated afterwards. Hallucinations are necessary in order not to be content with the first gratification that comes along, but to create personal meaning for oneself.

In order for changes to take place, the therapist and the client need to get into and become familiar with the intermediate symbolic space. They both have to reinvent their unique language in order to gain access to shared experiences. With the help of hallucinations, we appropriate not what reality suggests, but what we really need. The impossibility of possessing pushes us from identification with reality to its loss and keeps us in the form of what comes from us and is us.

The loss of reality activates the extraction of one's own psychic material to restore this gap of being

The client's language in its pure form is incomprehensible to the therapist, since it contains a huge number of gaps, references, substitutions - in the intermediate space, this compressed language unfolds and connections are re-established. As if the process is going backwards - from a picture to an experience, because in life we move in a different direction - from an experience to an image. Sometimes the client does not even have this image from which to push off, because he is absorbed in experiences and cannot reason about them. In this case, the interaction takes place outside the symbolic space - through projective identification, transference, acting out.

In Gestalt therapy, there is such a capacious concept as fusion. Fusion is a form of resistance to contact. There are many interpretations of this mechanism, but within the framework of this topic I would like to emphasize that in the state of merging there is no way to discover the other as an autonomous being. Accordingly, there is a feeling that everything is clear about the other. There is no need to unfold how the client calls things to the things themselves. There is an illusion of understanding based only on projection.

The exit from the merger is an attempt to reflect the client in a place where he is not clear for himself, because the symbols that he offers the therapist on the fly actually hide a gap in awareness

The therapist's job is to ask questions, especially in those places that seem clearest. In them, the client understands everything about himself and loses the ability to ask questions to himself. The therapist should be as incomprehensible as he has the strength to do. For an attempt to explain triggers a symbolic function and this prompts the client to understand the absence of an object behind the symbol.

Neurosis is the presence in the psyche of an empty sign in the traditional understanding of this phenomenon as evidence of the absence of a connection between the signifier and the signified. The semiotic construction is not determined by actual experience; it rather covers up its absence and the impossibility of living it. Where a full-fledged flow of experiences is impossible, a certain picture appears, which seems to replace its necessity. Metaphorically, it is like a closed door in Bluebeard's domain, which cannot be entered; it is a forbidding sign, behind which is a frightening and incomprehensible reality. For the client, this prohibition, and as a consequence, the preoccupation with the image, is natural and not arousing doubts and questions. The therapist, in a hooligan manner, offers prohibitions to break and look where it turns out to be incomprehensible. The task of therapy, since it is not to acquaint the therapist with what is already known, but also to tell what you yourself do not yet know at all. Because what you do not know about, one way or another seeks to get out to freedom.

The symbol that the client offers (in the form of self-knowledge, habitual behavior, or symptom) is in some way devoid of any meaning. More precisely, this meaning is introduced into the therapeutic situation, not constructed in it. This meaning is only the client's property and the client offers to perform operations with him, or he does not offer anything, taking it for granted. This has nothing to do with therapy, since one can get into the intermediate space only by producing interpersonal meaning, which is symbolized in a state of basic obscurity and uncertainty.

The meaning does not obey the established structure, but is constructed anew in the presence of another. Being addressed to someone changes the perspective of meaning

In other words, the client is addressing the therapist with a lack of meaning that needs to be filled. The client needs a person who knows nothing about him in order to extract ambiguity from premature understanding.

So, the logic of the therapeutic process can be described as follows. The client feels something unknown in himself as a kind of deficiency, emptiness or lightness that needs to be filled. A symptom that worsens the quality of life only makes this emptiness more concentrated, woven into the language, because one can talk about suffering, but there is no reason for it. The client comes to the therapist as a person who supposedly knows about these reasons and he is fascinated by this knowledge, he tries to appropriate them for himself through absorption. However, absorption is not possible because the therapist cannot be possessed. And then the therapist invites the client to dance, which fills the space between them with ghosts that do not have a body, and they tell stories of their lives. During this dance, the client encounters the most important idea. It consists in the fact that he himself becomes a therapist for himself, since what he previously looked for in another is inside. In this place, she is fascinated by herself and appropriates to herself the part that previously seemed to be emptiness.

This part of the job is very important because it involves frustration. The therapist, in a sense, traumatizes the client and thereby creates a moderate mental stress, which the client must cope with himself, here and now, without resorting to the usual ways to reduce this stress using protective mechanisms. This tension may seem excessive to the client, but it is worth recognizing that change occurs where the effort appears.

The subject who senses himself and the subject who addresses himself to someone are, in a sense, two completely different characters

The one who turns to another finds himself in need and functions as a shuttle, transporting the resource of interpersonality from the space of exchange to the individual pole. The paradox of some therapeutic situations is that the client, in need of help at the level of sensations, does not address himself to the space of relations, presenting himself as a result of his own reflection, without risking expressing himself anew in front of the gaze of another. And then a well-known story is observed when the client simultaneously asks for help and avoids it in every possible way. From the point of view of symbolic relations, this long-known phenomenon takes on a different meaning and requires other points of application for correction.

The following metaphor can be offered to a therapeutic relationship. In the course of the Oedipal conflict of the symbolic, the Father prohibits a certain register of desire, thereby triggering repression and forming a neurotic character structure. In therapeutic relationships, the Oedipal conflict unfolds again, only here its task is not to acquaint the person with the law, but, on the contrary, to return, to reanimate the previously repressed part of desire. To do this, the client must be seduced by the therapist, as was previously seduced by the mother. And precisely because possession is impossible in symbolic relationships, such seduction does not lead to fusion and regression. In a therapeutic relationship, the client regains his own as he learns to use previously unacceptable drives.

Neurosis is a kind of investment in the future, but income from it can only be obtained with the help of a therapist