Dear Sigmund...
So I'm fascinated that my thing about Factor X and 'the compelling explanation' brings me back to Freud. I admire him. I'm grateful to him. But I don't like him! I see Herr Freud as Eros's pornographer, unlike Jung, and Hillman, who work from an older symbolism, with awe and wonder. Nevertheless, Freud stands behind modern day psychotherapy, and he certainly had encountered the process I'm seeking to unravel.
So, let's go back!
When Freud was listening for the client's 'Factor X' he heard a lot of compelling explanations. Unfortunately Freud thought he knew what Factor X was, because in his view it was always the same one. Freud understood that the client's symptoms or compelling explanation was caused by the client's feelings. Or rather, the client's confusion and compelling explanation was an effect of the client blocking recognition of those feelings. Freud understood that Factor X was like a rock under the river, causing the water flowing over it to spin and swirl in a strange way. And the unconscious effect of the swirling comes from a desire for everything to appear OK, denial misleads both the speaker and the listener. This is why in therapy no subject is beyond discussion "nothing is off the table." The hidden stone can be seen...
Freud didn't rate the Id, the unconscious home of instinct and emotion very highly. Notions from Darwinian theory fuelled a concept of the brain as containing archaic, reptilian and modern mammalian processing centres. Darwinian theory in it's original form gave rise to a belief that civilised society is more complex and ethical than nomadic or 'tribal' society. So 'primitive' was portrayed in films and books as human sacrifice and cannibalism, fear and irrational taboos and the 'witch doctor'.
Indeed in 1913 Freud wrote:
Totem and Taboo - Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics
Civilised meant towns and cities, church and morality! As Freud regarded the Id as primitive and beyond civilisation, any ideas from the Id would need to be controlled, and civilised rules and order would have to be enforced.
We will compare the system of the unconscious to a large ante-chamber, in which the psychic impulses rub elbows with one another, as separate beings. There opens out of this ante-chamber another, a smaller room, a sort of parlor, which consciousness occupies. But on the threshold between the two rooms there stands a watchman; he passes on the individual psychic impulses, censors them, and will not let them into the parlor if they do not meet with his approval. You see at once that it makes little difference whether the watchman brushes a single impulse away from the threshold, or whether he drives it out again after it has already entered the parlor. It is a question here only of the extent of his watchfulness, and the timeliness of his judgment. Freud, Sigmund. A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (p. 174).
Freud's model casts socially unacceptable impulses as 'psychic pressure', to be repressed, suppressed and sublimated. When a well adapted, socialised person has a socially unacceptable desire within himself, the idea brings a sense of unease and shock and the fully fledged, forbidden scenario is rapidly hidden away before the conscious mind has time to actually see the desire in its full glory! To keep the ideas hidden, the superego expends a lot of energy in 'repression' and the conscious mind starts to formulate narratives to explain away the sensations as the unacceptable idea tries to break free. The narrative tries to be acceptable to both the speaker and any listener. This is a process of concealment. And the speaker isn't aware of doing it. The Compelling explanation, is a type of denial process: rationalisation.
In psychotherapy the question 'when you think of X, what does this feel like physically, as you think of it?' Might be met with, 'I feel uncomfortable because...' . 'Because' indicates to me that I'm going to hear a rationalisation. To which I would say, 'thinking of X, how do you experience this thought, what is it like'? Metaphors are helpful as a bridge...it can be too unusual for some people to connect thought with feeling straight away.
We must constantly focus on feeling while addressing anxiety and defences as detours. Jon, Frederickson. Co-Creating Change: Effective Dynamic Therapy Techniques (p. 29).
You see I couldn't believe that Kit would keep quoting a compelling explanation after I'd stated that I was not a client at least three times...If I'm being kind I could say that he must have been speaking from Nurturing Parent. I certainly wasn't speaking from Child, I was being deadly serious - and possibly at that point I was the only Adult in the room.
I cannot for the life of me conceive of any circumstances where I'd chose to work with a therapist who practices transactional analysis ever again, let alone Kit as a therapist! The argument that clients do come back, sadly didn't ever give way to anything more realistic, any deeper and certainly never truthful enough to create trust!
And yet again he wasn't addressing me as an individual - which I find very strange.
So was this the defence of rationalisation, or was it denial in fantasy?
I sometimes let myself cling to the later!
I'd indulge in a delicious moment of thinking, he can't let himself believe that I wont come back!
Compelling explanations seek to prevent change. The cover story prevents the person feeling how broken they are, how vulnerable and overwhelmed. A compelling explanation covers up fear, despair, failure, shame and guilt. The person may well be aware, but prefers not to think about why they are in effect lying...And to be honest, it's best to work within their narrative rather than confront it, because often the story indicates a certain degree of personal fragility that requires scaffolding before it can be healed. Sometimes the story I'm told contains a poetic truth, because I'd class the compelling explanation as part of psychotic process. For such a client it feels so important to keep a mirror over the wound reflecting back something you should believe in (that is how it feels). And mirror is a good metaphor because the best defence is to reflect the other's version of the world. This is how 'confidence tricksters' work; it is the equivalent of a cloned website, the grifter's coop ting of 'science' language.
If Kit had admitted how irrational his argument was within the context of my responses?
Couldn't happen - because feeling leads to contact with the whole of it.
It was a verbal lock down to prevent 'opening up'.
Meanwhile, Factor X is about change, a blocked emotion that seeks unblocking...but it is forbidden...
Well, that's how I think of it.
Kit had the rule that he must appear to be in-tune with what the client needs, and clients never need radical self disclosure from a therapist (I agree) until they do! But this was not our situation. I needed radical honesty to be able to understand what was going on!
Call me simple, call me stupid, but the consequences of his policy meant that I felt yet again that I could not trust my feelings and thoughts.
Unfortunately I wasn't empowered to ask questions, if I could have been open and honest and not felt like I was in a spider's web I'd probably have said something like:
Well, clients can come back is the reason you are giving me, but that doesn’t tell me what your feelings are towards me! If you don’t explain your reasons, could you tell me instead what your feelings toward me are, for asking you to consider a different relationship with me?
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