Imagining Contexts In the Consulting Room: Faith, Psychotherapy & Rhizomes
Catherine Stevenson, M.D., STL, Clinical Assistant Professor, Menninger Department of Psychiatry, Baylor College of Medicine
This paper uses the lens of psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden’s theory of the analytic third to explore the impact that the context of the tacit religious belief of a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst has on clinical encounters with patients.
The analytic third is the newly created entity that arises when the unique subjectivity of the analyst joins, in the work of analysis, with the singular subjectivity of the patient. But subjectivity does not exist within a vacuum. Each individual subjectivity dwells within a series of contexts. We create contexts consciously and unconsciously, choosing elements from our personal situation and experience. Some contexts are given, not chosen. Our gender, age, native language, class and education all contribute to our understanding and experience of ourselves, and of others, in the world. Contexts are such powerful constructs that they do not usually need explicit disclosure. They imbue everything we say and every movement and gesture that flows from us. Sitting with someone who is imagining a different context than ours, opens us to a new world of possible meanings. Imagining our own contexts, we offer new ontological experiences to those who sit in our consulting rooms.
The multiplicities of contexts we inhabit are not like a series of enfiladed rooms, occupied sequentially, but more like a matryoshka doll, with a clearly identifiable shape and image on the outside, and progressively deeper and sometimes surprising variations within. But even the matryoshka doll may be too static a metaphor--the rhizome of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offers a more organic, dynamic paradigm to explore. An unspoken yet lived belief may dwell at the center of the rhizome, cloaked, yet exerting a powerful force on all it encounters.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis are not, on the whole, very friendly toward religion. At best it is viewed as an immature coping method, and at worst, as outright psychosis. But religious belief is a formidable constitutor of subjectivity and of context. This paper examines the effect of the nesting forms of an analyst’s context, with the power of the unseen belief in the depth of the rhizome, on the therapeutic encounter as experienced by an analyst in the countertransference, and in the co-creation of the analytic third.
This paper uses the lens of psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden’s theory of the analytic third to explore the impact that the context of the tacit religious belief of a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst has on clinical encounters with patients.
The analytic third is the newly created entity that arises when the unique subjectivity of the analyst joins, in the work of analysis, with the singular subjectivity of the patient. But subjectivity does not exist within a vacuum. Each individual subjectivity dwells within a series of contexts. We create contexts consciously and unconsciously, choosing elements from our personal situation and experience. Some contexts are given, not chosen. Our gender, age, native language, class and education all contribute to our understanding and experience of ourselves, and of others, in the world. Contexts are such powerful constructs that they do not usually need explicit disclosure. They imbue everything we say and every movement and gesture that flows from us. Sitting with someone who is imagining a different context than ours, opens us to a new world of possible meanings. Imagining our own contexts, we offer new ontological experiences to those who sit in our consulting rooms.
The multiplicities of contexts we inhabit are not like a series of enfiladed rooms, occupied sequentially, but more like a matryoshka doll, with a clearly identifiable shape and image on the outside, and progressively deeper and sometimes surprising variations within. But even the matryoshka doll may be too static a metaphor--the rhizome of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offers a more organic, dynamic paradigm to explore. An unspoken yet lived belief may dwell at the center of the rhizome, cloaked, yet exerting a powerful force on all it encounters.
Psychiatry and psychoanalysis are not, on the whole, very friendly toward religion. At best it is viewed as an immature coping method, and at worst, as outright psychosis. But religious belief is a formidable constitutor of subjectivity and of context. This paper examines the effect of the nesting forms of an analyst’s context, with the power of the unseen belief in the depth of the rhizome, on the therapeutic encounter as experienced by an analyst in the countertransference, and in the co-creation of the analytic third.