On Getting Started and the Possibility of Being Incomplete

**In having gone back and reflected upon what I wrote here, I wanted to offer a brief prologue of sorts, which will likely only make sense after the piece has been read.  And so, in someways, I am going to ask here that we actually start with an ending and then travel backwards in order to catch up with our beginning.  It seems important to note at the top, however, that what was shared here, in retrospect, still feels a bit insufficient or incomplete (dare I say inadequate) in its expression.  Which is likely a necessary function of the problem of trying to express the kind of felt bodily knowing I’m talking about here.  I’m sure in time, further reflection on the below will find some means of discovering itself in later musings I will offer in this space.  Until then, we’ll have to make do with what is already here.**

The idea of writing about the process of doing therapy and its underlying theoretical considerations has always intrigued me.  There is the obvious means by which it would help to sharpen my own understanding of the concepts I utilize with the clients I work with.  But it also carries with it the notion that it would allow me to further communicate and transform some of those ideas into something new through the process of de- and reconstruction that can be a foundational part of the writing process.  All writing is in some measure a creative act, wherein the output of the act is intended to stimulate the reader, the writer, the concept, or (ideally) some combination of the three via some possible Oedipal arrangement which may be interesting to explore in a later post (and likely already has some thought-provoking literature behind it).  Reading about the structural concepts which make up the process of therapy, rather than the typical introduction of participating in long-term therapy itself, is also how I first encountered the world of ideas which inform my own therapeutic process, and to be frank I maintained some rigid thoughts about the process of doing therapy before I had ever even done any therapy.  By turn, writing about the process is one I’ve often romanticized.  This likely runs in parallel to some idealized notions of what it is I think I might like to accomplish as my career progresses and as my thoughts about the work seemingly become more refined in their precision and complexity.

Notably, though, the idea of using this platform as a space in which to begin exploring that process was initially met by some level of trepidation within myself.  The obvious answer was that writing in some capacity would either be a violation of the privacy of my clients or would in some measure be a violation of my own inner workings and therapeutic process, either of which could potentially harm the work that I do.  There does seem to be some distinction to be made between the process of writing for publication in a journal or a book, as opposed to writing something that will be posted in a space where, immediately upon viewing it, one can then click back to a page that directly advertises my work as a therapist.

However, as is often the case, something about the obvious answer felt insufficient.  I have been reflecting a lot over the last year or so on the work of Eugene Gendlin, a somewhat obscure thinker in the realm of psychotherapy who seems to me to be in need of serious reconsideration and reevaluation in terms of how his philosophical work overlaps with the process of doing therapy specifically and living one’s life more broadly.  In his final work written before his death in 2017, A Process Model, Gendlin engages in a project which I would describe as an inquiry into implicity and the ways in which the implicit can be revealed and made explicit by ruptures in the hermeneutic process of Being.  (This project actually links back to Gendlin’s first published piece of writing Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning and is consistent with his ongoing project of understanding the ways in which symbolization and the “felt-sense” of experience are inextricably intertwined).

Essentially, as Gendlin would have it, “felt-senses” that cannot be articulated are actually ruptures in an ongoing process of “occurring” and “implying” that inevitably suggest their own continuation within the rupture.  This occurring-implying continuum exists in a field of interaffecting, wherein things already imply that which they are occurring into and that this process, in it’s being a priori whole rather than discreet, can be symbolized and rendered comprehensible in an interminable number of ways depending on the relationship we maintain to ongoing processes of conceptualization.  These ideas guided Gendlin in his development of theories like “Focusing” and “Thinking at the Edge”, which are the ways in which he described the process of feeling into our bodily impression of what is, in order to find more precise forms of symbolization that would assist in penetrating a barrier to some previously uncrystallized aspect of our lived experience.

Which is to say there could be a number of reasons why I would be resistant to this process, and the wellbeing of the work I do and those I do it with is always going to take priority in determining the ways in which I choose to conduct myself personally and professionally.  But, absent the idea that there would probably be no real immediate harm in the work I do by maintaining this space as some other piece of my overall business platform, as I spent more time with the conundrum, and thought into the feelings of those reservations, I found myself coming upon two other very real concerns that likely carry more weight than those initially landed upon.

The first is something having to do with theoretical allegiances, and the idea that I might write or share something that misaligns with my own future belief system or might be seen as problematic/injurious at present by some of those who come across it.  Much of my philosophical foundations for therapy come from the world of psychoanalysis and realms of philosophy founded on inquiries into phenomenology and ontology, albeit augmented as best I can by more contemporary and critical lenses related to social theory and psychological phenomena.  As intellectual traditions, these two disciplines can be a rich source of extremely sophisticated thinking on the problems of living, which seem foundational enough as to have plagued the likes of Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche over a hundred and fifty years ago as much as they do people living today.  On the other hand, given their datedness and the ideological systems in which they were cultivated, many of these texts carry problems both related and completed unrelated to the time and place in which they were originally written.  Homophobic and narrow conceptions of human sexuality abound in the early world of psychoanalysis, even in its most forward-thinking theorists (a tendency it has thankfully outgrown in its present iterations).  And, of course, the world of philosophy is rife with problematic thinkers, not the least of which is Martin Heidegger, who, though being a Nazi sympathizer and very likely antisemitic in his own right, wrote one of the most important texts in the history of phenomenology.

The other problem as I see it, seems to be something to do with sustainability and whether I might be setting myself up for some sort of public embarrassment.  Once something like this is initiated, my preference is that it would continue to be maintained and be an ongoing focus of mine in conjunction with the other activities I use to occupy my time.  Which raises two separate questions related to stamina: one as a function of making the time for writing and another as a function of having the intellectual endurance to craft things worth writing/reading.  Either opens one up to an inevitable narcissistic injury.  I often find myself reading those whom I admire, having paradoxical competing thoughts of “I think I could do a version of this” and a gob smacked “Holy shit, that line…” or “Hold on, what was that turn that just happen” while I backtrack through the text trying to plot out how point A culminated in point B.  But I suppose that’s the process.  When Freud sat down to write the Interpretation of Dreams he wasn’t writing into some sequence of words and syntax that already existed only to be drawn out by him.  It was labor and discovery and the ongoing risk of disappointment and fear of failure.  Which is not to suggest that anything here will rise remotely to that level, but if one wants to get there eventually you need to start somewhere.

Which brings me back to Gendlin.  Theoretically, there is always something to ponder.  To be exploring our way into.  Gendlin’s last chapter in A Process Model is called “Thinking with the Implicit”, and opens with a passage about Isadora Duncan and the way she would find the movements that eventually transformed the world of contemporary dance in a meditative stillness as she examined the bodily experiences she was being called into.  Novelists and poets as well often cite some sense of the idea that they write not because they know, but that they write to either begin to know or to know better.  Of course there’s the potential for some risk involved.  That’s the uncertainty we are always being asked to move into.

I will likely write more directly on his work later on, but this seems as good a time as any to introduce a concept from the work of Ernesto Spinelli that I think about often and has become central to how I organize my thinking about the work.  In his book Practicing Existential Psychotherapy: The Relational World, Spinelli describes the process of Being as one of “relational embodied uncertainty”, believing that the problems that we address in the process of therapy (and in the processes of living) are structured around the problems posed by this truth about our experience.  He notes at some point in the text that our awareness of this can be at once dread-inducing and completely exhilarating, binding us in a paralyzing fear or freeing us to the possibility of our own existence.  Which leaves me where I am now: a being in a world with other beings; a form faced with the perplexing nature of its own ambitions; a body venturing into an ever-unfolding wilderness and one in which I would like to have even some say, no matter how potentially minute, in the outcome.  There’s a lot in there that is by necessity unknowable.  That, even if I find some potentially satisfying answers, will always remain as such.  We never answer.  We simply find new questions.  We venture endlessly, hopefully with some awareness, into the implicit.  And in this present cycle of occurring and implying, I question: “What will I do now?”

I suppose I will write.