The Habituation of Novelty
Abstract
In this paper I explore what I am calling the habituation of novelty within
psychotherapy, with reference to a recurrent theme in the work of R. D.
Laing. I discuss its consequences as well as what it has replaced. I make
recommendations for the practice of existential assessment too. The
background of this paper is the observation that psychotherapy within statefunded settings no longer exists. This is because the state-funded
psychotherapist no longer exists. I do not refer to current cuts within
services, but implicitly to a number of basic principles upon which the
practice of psychotherapy - as I was taught it and attempt to learn it - rests,
and their erosion within state-funded settings (see Szasz 2003).
Key Words
Novelty, decay, assessment, non-assessment, R. D. Laing, mental illness,
‘investigative stillness’, petrification.
Within the profession of psychotherapy, novelty is now its highest value.
The competitive demand for constant innovation and constant change differs
radically from that which is encountered in most other service industries
however, and with different consequences. Unusually, it reflects a lack of
direction. What Esterson writes is as true for psychotherapy now as it was
then:
‘In most disciplines, no matter what controversies there are, there is usually
an agreed body of theory and practice which delimits this practice from
others, and defines specialisations within it. This allows its members to take
certain matters for granted when speaking with each other and with other
disciplines […] As for what workers do [Esterson is no longer writing about
‘most disciplines’ but ‘workers’ in the ‘health professions’]; there is a
complete confusion, not least among the workers themselves. This can be
seen by the profusion of names by which they define their activities.’ (1988:
161-2)
Like the schizoid individuals studied by Laing (1959; see especially the case
of Rosa pp 150-7), whose basic problem consisted less in being perceived
harshly or critically, and more in the simple fact of being perceived – of
being ‘in any particular place at any particular time with any particular
person’ (ibid: 156) – mainstream psychotherapy has responded to criticism
by refusing to define itself, by ‘reducing herself to vanishing point’ (ibid),
on all accounts other than in the relentless pursuit of, and accountability for,
novelty. Szasz has accurately defined the ‘starting point’ of the state-funded
psychotherapist as that of ‘predicting non-predictable dangerousness’ and
‘detecting non-existent illnesses’ (2002: 47), and I am emphasising another
such starting-point, that of promoting antiquated novelty.
Spinelli introduces a typical example:
‘A couple approach a therapist for ‘sexual dysfunction’ complaining of
being ‘trapped in a tedious certainty […] we’re doing the same thing over
and over again […] it’s boring and tedious’. Typically, the expert therapist’,
Spinelli suggests, ‘introduces novelty by helping the couple to begin a
structured process of relating in a new way. It is powerful for a while, but
they soon return, saying: ‘Sex is an expression of something more; we are
not connected as people’. So the novel behaviour starts to take on the quality
of what was to be got away from originally. So the idea is, if things become
too repeated, introduce something new’ (2008).
Thus, a throw-away mentality is now rife. The current push is towards
emptying and starting afresh, favouring what Harvey, in his analysis of
modernity, describes as: ‘the new, the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fugitive’
and promoting the idea that unwanted difficulties, unwanted complexities
and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from our field of vision.
Why be who I am where I am, when I could be someone else somewhere
else, doing things differently? Psychoanalyst Ian Craib, reflecting near to the
end of his life, on his recent experience of his profession, summarises the
situation as follows:
‘We are pulled forward into the future and away from the past in such a way
that it becomes very difficult to take things with us – internal things, an
awareness and an understanding of our experiences; instead they often seem
to lie jumbled up inside us, and we find we have an inner world like a
rubbish bin…So the debris of the day piles up, and it becomes easier to
imagine that I can just leave the day behind, that each day I can become a
new person.’ (1994: 107)
At the same time, more and more people visit psychotherapists because they
find themselves in the same predicament: living life at death’s door; caught
up in lives which are over-full of experiences, and carrying within
themselves the permanent possibility of falling apart, whilst saying, often
quite clearly, that the heart of the matter is this: ‘I am frightened of being left
with nothing’, as if in continual preparation for the day they will no longer
be able to function.
French existential psychiatrist Eugene Minkowski, commenting on the
experience of the ‘levelled-off’ sense of time that he attributes to the
‘depressive schizophrenic’ wrote:
‘Each day life began anew, like a solitary island in a grey sea of passing
time’. (1933: 33)
The Forgotten Element in Assessment
As psychotherapists hop from perch to perch, moving from one school to
another, looking for something which works more quickly and more
completely, it becomes harder to maintain a sense of professional continuity
and stability, such that, even to attempt to do so is to be at the risk of
becoming significantly outdated very quickly.
The relative absence of writing on ‘assessment’ in psychotherapy is a
significant omission in this respect. It is relevant to this discussion because it
is the ‘starting point’ from which the client hopes to begin to find, perhaps
for the first time, a ‘starting point’ within themselves, from which they can
begin to live more as they would like to. In my mind, this absence has
everything to do with the above claim that mainstream psychotherapy is in a
state of ‘ontological insecurity’ (Laing 1959: 39-65, see also Giddens 1991:
35-70), and that any attempts at self-definition are instead directed towards
self-preservation, and nothing to do with a refusal to imply ‘…an objective
situation independent of time, place and the contribution of the assessing
therapist’ (Cohn 1997: 34) as is often assumed. In other words, its ‘startingpoint’ is not within itself.
Nowhere in the literature on ‘assessment’ in psychotherapy is the task
viewed as possessing the central aim of clarifying one’s own position, in
order to see clearly that of another. Instead, what one finds is a proliferation
of interpretations (‘trial interpretations’) of what people are doing, without
their having first defined for themselves their intention in doing what they
do. ‘Clinical need’ is the favoured term for the arbitrary authority, which
arises at the point when it is not clear to the therapist who needs what from
whom or why. For a clear omission by the therapist in defining the task of
‘assessment’, and how recognition of this omission by the client is translated
immediately into ‘transference’ by the therapist, see Hinshelwood (1991:
171). i ‘The situation has to be discovered’ Laing says (1969: 33). The
frequency of examples like this, at institutional levels too, in which the false
impression is given that the practise of psychotherapy speaks with a unified
and coherent voice, despite evidence to the contrary, is striking.
While it is not new to comment on how the therapeutic industry perpetuates
the difficulties it tries to resolve, it is more difficult to address these
inconsistencies within one’s own practice and within oneself, and perhaps
impossible to do so now within state-funded settings. But existential analysis
claims to address practice not at the level of technique, but in terms of the
values and assumptions that underlie practice (see Spinelli 1999: 65). Its
philosophy is said to be more explicit than in other approaches (see Van
Dusen [pagination missing in quoted source] quoted in Ungersma 1961: 52).
Existential ‘assessment’ therefore should be concerned with active and
rigorous self-assessment through self-definition, rather than client
‘assessment’ as such. So while Esterson writes: ‘In getting one’s own
position straight it is amazing what may come into view’ (1997:174), this
way of seeing is nowhere considered in recent literature on ‘assessment’.
The habituation of novelty therefore is neutral. The habituation of novelty –
as with Spinelli’s couple and their expert therapist – is an expression of, as
much as an attempt to resolve a fundamental lack of direction. Furthermore
the habituation of novelty, as discussed below breeds suspicion in one’s
frank experience of oneself.
The Assumption of Mental Illness
When novelty becomes a habit, a similar split within the psychotherapist is
necessary to that within his client if their experience of themselves in
‘therapy’ is to be deemed ‘successful’ by the profession. This attachment to
novelty is an expression of hope for both that the client’s unwanted
difficulties are simply disappearing - and those of the profession too! Yet the
client’s dissociating of novelty from decay is increasing of his attachment to
each.
Minkowski’s image [see section one above] makes this clear. He is
describing – through his psychiatrised look - the habituation of the novel
within his patient, but also the patient’s experience of falling victim to an
impersonal and autonomous force of which he himself is not the author.
Minkowski’s image shows a basic mistrust and suspicion starting to
characterise the origin of his patient’s thoughts, feelings and perceptions too,
seen by him as evidence of ‘illness’. The form of personal panic this is
engendering within his patient, I surmise, stems from his patient’s need to
gain a secure footing within his now alienated existence whilst being denied
the possibility of doing so due to ‘illness’, as Minkowski passively looks on.
More and more clients attend therapy with the expectation that they too will
be looked at in this way by their ‘therapist’ and may have begun to do so for
themselves of their own accord. This way of thinking by the client – and the
‘therapist’ - often begins at the point where the habituation of novelty fails.
Many re-referrals for psychotherapy within state-funded settings are of this
kind. Even in the relatively short time of just over a decade since I started
practising full-time as a psychotherapist, a couple, like the one described by
Spinelli above, is much more likely now than when I began, to return to
therapy feeling in this kind of a despair. After one or more failed attempts at
introducing novelty into their relationship, as Spinelli explains, they are now
assuming that one or the other of them is falling victim to some kind of
disease-type illness of the mind. This they are evidencing either by one
member’s feelings of suspicion about the other which they are avoiding, or
by the suspicious acts themselves which they are not seeing or ‘owning’.
This spiral of suspicion and mistrust is being aggravated by a search for
novelty, itself based upon mistrust, which has been provoked by the initial
experience of ‘therapy’.
Both attempts at ‘therapy’ are originating from the same predicament. Like
the once ‘addict’ who is now filtering his life through the perspective of
‘reformed addict’; whilst what is dissociated from within the couple might
have changed, the stance the couple is taking towards dissociation is
remaining essentially the same (see Spinelli 1994: 353-5). The
‘phenomenological dynamics’ (Stadlen 2003: note 77) are entirely
unchanged.
Psychotherapy starts with the client’s experience of doubt, and a question as
to its justification. Yet in the current context the ‘therapist’ is seeing doubt
not as a means of strengthening faith to become a function of the client’s
search for truth, but as a function of suspicion. And this suspicion is still
being viewed by the profession as a whole as a function of ‘illness.’ Szasz
writes:
‘The result of this national mental health mobilisation is a false sense of
safety purchased at the cost of undermining intimate human bonds’ (2002:
47).
Non Assessment
In demonstrating the ‘social intelligibility’ of ‘schizophrenia’, Laing showed
with precision and clarity how the attempts of one family member to stand
on their own two feet, were, when continually placed within a context of
conflict with the contradictory views of the family of the person exhibiting
it, accompanied by an increase or a ‘stepping up’ in the level of
mystification from the parents. Demystification for the child and thus
autonomy could not occur, and the child’s life became existentially
unliveable. By being continually related to in ways which were inconsistent
and incompatible, the child was muddled up and mystified about the true
nature of his or her thoughts, feelings and perceptions, until the ground was
taken from under their very feet (Laing and Esterson 1961). What Laing’s
patients could not do and were prohibited from doing was to discover for
themselves the situation that they were in, and to maintain for themselves a
feasible identity.
Psychotherapists at this present time, I suggest, are in a similar predicament,
and might begin to show a degree of empathy with Laing’s patients, as this
task is no mean feat. In terms of the practise of existential psychotherapy as
outlined above, I am calling this task of the therapist non-assessment. While
the client is not ‘assessed’, one’s own position as psychotherapist is. And the
client, who may not know whether he is coming or going, has the chance at
last, either to come to therapy, or to go. ii For example, the term ‘complexity’
- when a psychotherapist is using it as a vague criticism of a client rather
than as an achievement - and its increase within the ‘client population’, is
understood not as an attempt to say something truthful about the people that
consult us, but, as Esterson (1988) explains above, as a direct expression of
an increasingly complex and mostly unacknowledged muddle within the
‘helping professions’ over self-definition, and an urgent need for clarity on
the part of its practitioners and the public too.
This idea of non-assessment is based upon the assumption that the aim of
psychotherapy is to help a person understand themselves primarily so that
they can then forget themselves and become absorbed in their world, whilst
simultaneously helping practitioners to understand their own position and
thus risk becoming absorbed in their work too. Whilst it is also not new to
say this, a central aim of this paper is to point out how at present this
reciprocal understanding - which starts with the therapist – requires a
thorough appreciation of the often irreconcilable misunderstandings,
conflicting demands, Catch-22s, knots and double-binds that are currently
inherent in the position of psychotherapist, of which the consumption of
novelty is entirely obscuring.
Petrification and Stillness
In his writing R. D Laing often makes reference to a stillness which moves,
and its proximity to a stillness which does not and cannot. He repeatedly
returns to the fine line between bewilderment and release. Laing himself
may have used ‘faux meditation’ for exhibitionistic purposes too, as Szasz
(2008: 338) points out, but in his misuse may also have been trying to say
something serious. This he often did with humour. For example, he is
reported to have said, on being alerted by the police that one of the residents
of Kingsley Hall had caused a commotion in the local community for
standing completely still without moving, doing nothing, for a very long
period of time, that if the Buddha were alive they would have him hauled off
and labelled ‘catatonic’ because he was not moving (Cobb 1996: 370).
Similar anecdotes abound.
Likewise a Buddha is said to be a ‘Tathagata’: one who does not come or go.
This phrase points toward someone whose attachment to life and therefore to
death, has dissolved, and who is free. The same phrase however may also
point to the problem with someone who is in a muddle about himself, who
does not make a move, who goes nowhere but here, who does not know
where he stands with himself and others, who does not know whether he is
coming or going.
The current situation of psychotherapy can be seen in the light of this type of
misunderstanding and misuse. In order to stand up with dignity it is essential
to be able first to push down. To continue the analogy; only by first
clarifying the ground iii of psychotherapy can further opening then take
place for both psychotherapist and client. With the ground of psychotherapy
insecure, or increasingly within state-funded settings non-existent, how is it
then possible to freely adopt the differing positions and dispositions that the
psychotherapist is ‘put into’ and required to embody by his client and for his
client respectively? How can I sacrifice what remains of my ‘role’ and
become absorbed in my work if I cannot first of all understand it?
Regaining Lost Ground
Analysis derives from the Greek word analusis. This term refers to a
dissolving, an undoing, or a taking apart of a whole. In my discussion of
‘assessment’ I have tried to emphasise how in the current climate this
understanding has been inverted; it is the structure of mainstream
psychotherapy that has dissolved and come undone, and because of this, it is
the practise that has become concerned instead with (compensatory)
preserving, strengthening and doing, rather than the reverse. The true state of
affairs appears to have been turned entirely into its opposite. The habitual
devotion by practitioners to a form of pseudo-novelty in which nothing
changes is one expression of this. I believe the above distinction requires
careful preservation by contemporary psychotherapists. A firm ground could
create a starting point for opening into, or returning to, analysis.
I have explored the habituation of novelty at times through the language of
ground, groundlessness and grounding, and through the idea that
psychotherapy can never stand still. I have connected what I have called the
habituation of novelty to a lack of direction in contemporary psychotherapy
and to the continuing assumption of ‘mental illness’ by professionals within
the field, and thus its ‘increase’ within the client population. I have made
suggestions for the practice of assessment too. I started this paper with
reference to a couple who approach a psychotherapist feeling a
misconnection and with nothing new to say to each other.
In occupying itself with novelty, the profession is at risk of occupying itself
only with decay too, rather than with life itself. Returning to Spinelli’s
disillusioned couple in search of novelty at the start of this paper he makes
the same point. He goes on to ask:
‘What about all those couples who repeat the same pattern, but who are
perfectly satisfied? Is it that they are more repressed, or are they ok?’ He
answers: ‘Might it be that the difference between the two couples – those
that are satisfied and those that are dissatisfied in that one group only
emphasises the certainty, the other repeats the same behaviour but does it as
though it were the first time, their stance towards it contains an element of
uncertainty in it.’ Spinelli (2008)
I agree therefore with Holmes (1996: 30-31; 84-87; 183-201) when he
argues for the Buddhist ideal of nonattachment as an ethical ideal for
psychotherapists. iv The sustained capacity within the therapist for what
Spinelli (2007: 123/7) terms ‘investigative stillness’ is a further expression
of this. Yet the capacity for such ‘freedom of movement’ is contained within
a larger context, which as I have tried to show is anything but still, built
instead on the tides of fashion, which come and go. It is in this respect that
Laing’s quip, of petrification masquerading as enlightenment, is a good one.
Jan Sheppard BA MA Adv. Dip. Ex. Psych. Couns. MBACP UKCP is an
existential psychotherapist working as Adult Psychotherapist for Redbridge
Psychological Services at Goodmayes Hospital, and Lecturer in
Psychotherapy at Regents College, London and Matrix Psychotherapy,
Norfolk. He also works as a psychotherapist in private practice in
Walthamstow, East London with individuals and couples.
Contact Information: Redbridge Psychological Services, Psychology Dept,
Goodmayes Hospital, Barley Lane, Goodmayes, Essex IG3 8XJ.
Email: jansheppard@btinternet.com
Notes
Perhaps there is a limit to the usefulness of the term ‘transference’ without
greater clarity on what it is that is being distorted.
i
This is similar to Hillman’s (1975: 98-9) point regarding depression. He
describes it as the last of the psychopathological threats to society precisely
because it reminds of death, whilst elsewhere (Hillman and Ventura 1992)
ii
he traces this back to the actions of therapists via their pursuit of ‘openness’
at the expense of restriction and constraint within their work.
By ‘ground’, I mean the frame of reference being that of psychotherapy (in
terms of the definition of role, task and boundary) as opposed to psychiatry,
social work, psychology etc or other members of the ‘helping professions’.
iii
iv
No other author within the field of attachment theory makes this
connection with Buddhism, as far as I am aware.
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