2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
The client's symptoms are those "fences"
behind which it is necessary to look in order to understand what is hidden behind them.
Does the therapist need a concept of the client's personality?
Despite my love for phenomenology, my basic scientific deterministic worldview requires a search for the causes of the phenomena observed in therapy, and the systems approach I profess in therapy is aimed at understanding their meaning. And for this, along with the questions about the manifestation and functioning of this or that phenomenon (What? And How?), A search for answers to the questions Why? And for what?
In the context of this article, we are talking exclusively about the therapeutic level of work and about the clients who will be indicated for therapy, and not other forms of psychological assistance. I will not describe here all the differences between psychotherapy and counseling (I wrote about this in detail earlier), I will only indicate what is important in the context of my presentation - the nature of the conditionality of the client's problems.
Problems at the advisory level are determined by a situation external to the client's personality and are primarily associated with the characteristics of this situation: complexity, novelty, suddenness, etc. At the time of its occurrence, the client does not have enough understanding, holistic vision, skills and experience to overcome it. This is the focus of the consultant's attention and the tasks for solving such problems.
Problems of the same therapeutic level directly related to the personality of the client, with the peculiarities of its structure, due to all the previous experience of the client. This is the story when not the situation, but the person himself is the source of his own problems. And here, the specialist is faced with the task of understanding not so much the situation and the symptoms of its manifestation, but knowledge of the structural and functional characteristics of the personality, as well as the reasons, conditions and mechanisms of its development.
In this kind of situation, it is obvious that the symptoms the client is dealing with perform for him. double function. On the one hand, this is what causes him negative experiences (and sometimes physical pain) and interferes with his life, on the other hand, these are those individually developed protective, compensatory coping methods that allow him to somehow survive.
And then, before "removing" this or that symptom, it is necessary to understand:
- Why does the client need it at the present time?
- How did he form in his unique individual experience?
"What will the client" meet "after getting rid of him? What can we offer him in return?
In a therapeutic context, the last question is particularly relevant. If we remove the symptom without offering anything in return, then the client is left without the usual, albeit not ideal, ways of adapting to reality in a state of disintegration. We "take the crutch away from him without teaching him to walk."
If you describe such a situation figuratively, then the metaphor of the fence is born, which at the same time protects something from the world and prevents contact with it. The client's symptoms are the “fences” behind which you need to look to understand what lies behind them. And for this, the therapist must have some kind of tool that allows him to "look over the fence" or "through the fence" and see the buildings that are hidden behind them. But since our "armament" does not have devices that allow us to see through fences (by analogy with X-rays in medicine), we have to create concepts that allow us to judge the possible outlines of buildings by the characteristics of the fences that hide them.
Such a tool, in my opinion, can be a model of healthy and problematic variants of personality development, which makes it possible to perform a diagnostic function and look “over the fence”.
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