March 2019
by Dr Elizabeth McCardell, M.Couns., PhD
Many years ago,
sometime in the mid 1970s I was in Zurich, Switzerland sitting in an interview
with the head of the Jung Institute talking about things. I was querying a
fundamental doctrine of Jungian psychotherapy and the man said my question
showed the emergence of the shadow of my father. I thought to myself, “bull,”
but politely smiled and stayed silent. This one instance ultimately gathered
enough steam for me not to stay a Jungian. They were not open to examination
and questions.
Last week, in a peer
group gathering after hearing a lecture on an aspect of Freudian
psychoanalysis, I once again piped up expressing my doubt about something said as
an apparently irrefutable fact by the lecturer. I said then that I’m still
thinking about the matter at hand and that I’m unwilling to accept the
explanation given, unexamined. Interestingly, the guy running the group told
me, in a roundabout way, that my question demonstrated some developmental anomaly
in my psyche. Again, I thought to myself, “bull,” but didn’t saying anything in
reply. I did say, I sense there is more to be thought about here, that we need
to examine this thing further and maybe it’ll take twenty or so years to do
that, but let’s do it. The idea that there is only ever one answer, a thing set
in stone, is just lazy and not terribly useful. It’s sort of like saying, as it used to be thought, that
fire obviously has a substance called phlogiston and everybody who is anybody
knows this. Phlogiston, they said, is contained within combustible bodies and
released during combustion. For a very long time, this was the “scientific”
explanation of what fire is, and people accepted it, and many people stopped
thinking about it. In the late 18th century, freer thinkers came to
understand fire very differently. Fire is the rapid oxidation of a material in the exothermic chemical process of combustion, release heat, light, and various reaction products. There is no phlogiston.
A
teacher of mine once said of me, I have a bull dog personality and won’t let
go, unless I am satisfied. No
amount of persuasion, no amount of appeal to a “higher” authority will move me,
as I am more interested in the fluidity of possibilities than apparent
certainty. This is all very nice, but too often I find myself on the outer
because of this, acquiring “diagnoses” along the way!
The laziness in accepting something because a person in
authority has said so is giving up one’s personal agency as a thinker and that
means getting stuck in stone, in my view.
Fritz Perls, a
founder of Gestalt Therapy, coined the term “introjection” to describe the
unexamined, undigested, swallowed whole foreign bodies (ideas) taken in uncritically
from the caretakers (mother, father, school teachers, church ministers, social
media) of our lives. Quite often these introjects are consumed like this
because of the pressure of fashion, tradition, shame and fear about being
different, and direct coercion. Usually the introjects are contradictory and
the person spends agonizing hours trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. The
noise from introjects consist of “should should”, leaving little room for
developing one’s own personality. Interestingly too, where a person is
dominated by introjects they also have a lot of digestive issues. They
literally cannot digest what has been fed them, everything sticks in the craw
(nothing goes down, nothing nourishes). Quite often, as soon as introjects are
identified and known as coming from elsewhere, their tummy troubles ease up. Identifying
introjects is one very important function of counselling. In each counselling
session we work together on identifying what is yours, what came from your
parents and other caregivers, whose ideas about this and that have you swallowed whole, and
why, and getting to think beneath the stone to the soft earth and water below
where all of us are free to examine whatever it is we wish without taking on
board another person’s dogma and doctrine for our own creative life.
Beyond the certainty of
stone is a fluidity of being open to multiple ways of seeing and a freedom of
being.
