Early March now, and the beginnings of Spring. The first cherry blossoms on the trees, and even magnolias starting too open, surely too early. I also feel that I’m able to open up a little too, to get a greater sense of what I’m doing in the program at UBC, and how I place myself socially and politically in relation to it.

I’ve been struggling for intellectual engagement since I started my program at UBC. We’re often presented with different modalities of therapy, all of which, we are told, are possible ways of practice. We learn skills. We’re enjoined now and then to think about contexts, especially to decolonize our own practice, to think about how power and social context come into counselling. And yet often this seems to be an afterthought: we don’t engage with the epistemological basis of psychotherapeutic schools, and we don’t really place them critically within a social and historical context. Readers of this blog will know by now that this has troubled me. On the one hand, as a practitioner and indeed even in terms of understanding, I have much to learn. What I learn in theory does not yet manifest itself in the clumsiness of my own practice, and sometimes I wonder if it ever will! And yet at times I find the views of the world that lurk behind what we are being taught are not questioned or even thought through. We are given recipes, but not told anything about where the ingredients we use come from, nor why those we feed might be hungry, or might find what we prepare difficult to digest.  

            In the last I’ve come across three different resources that have helped me think critically about counselling practice in a wider sense, although, given the pace of my course, I haven’t had the luxury to look at them in depth. The first is an article, the introductory chapter of Bruce Wampold and Zac Imel’s The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work. Wampold and Imel are conceptually and theoretically eclectic, and begin by exploring the origins of modern medicine, and its Cartesian assumptions about the world. Psychotherapy, Wampold and Imel note, has become legitimized through its association with medicine, its efficacy supported through the experimental manipulation of variables, through manualization, and the development of empirically supported treatments. Such an association, however, has cut it from another history, that of a socially-located healing practice. Psychotherapy has spiritual and religious roots as much as medical ones, and the social world in which healing practices take place is central to it. To paraphrase remarks I heard Wampold make in a lecture at UBC last semester, psychotherapy is a form of practice, a ritual enacted in conversation between people we often call a client and a therapist. Together, they co-construct a myth, a story of how the client will become whole. 

            The second resource was also an article, published as part of Keir Martin’s recent edited collection Psychology, Anthropology and the Work of Culture. James Davies’ “Lessons from the Anthropological Field: Reflection on Where Culture and Anthropology Meet” arises from his own life experience. Davies spent two years in his twenties undergoing psychotherapy, and reading many of the classic texts by practitioners such as Sigmund Freud, Fritz Perls, Carl Rogers and Karen Horney. Following this, he enrolled at university to study social anthropology, and in the process began to question the psychotherapeutic texts he’d taken for granted, while remaining committed to the utility of psychotherapy as a social practice. As he trained as a therapist, contradictions mounted:

The highly critical and expository culture that I had become familiar with as an undergraduate was now supplanted by what felt like an asinine vocational training that taught us, in almost seminarian fashion, what to believe and what to do, without requisitioning any inquiry into the social construction of belief and action. I soon learned that the critical atmosphere of my anthropological training was less welcome in the therapeutic academy (25)

Davies solved this contradiction by an ingeniously self-reflexive plan. He placed his studies in psychotherapy on hold, enrolled for a doctorate in anthropology, and wrote his dissertation on the manner in which therapists were socialized, returning to psychotherapeutic training as a trainee but also as an auto-ethnographer carrying out participant observation. He is now both an anthropologist in academia and a therapist, not quite sure if he is an anthropologist doing fieldwork in psychotherapy or a psychotherapist analyzing anthropology. 

While I’m not sure I have the capacity for self-reflexivity Davies has, I did appreciate his honesty, and the paragraph I quoted above, while too strongly worded – I don’t consider by current training “asinine” or its delivery “seminarian” – does speak to an important aspect of my own experience at UBC. Two of Davies’s propositions also appeal to me. First, he argues that therapeutic naming through theoretical models and diagnosis are “just as much proscriptive … as they are explanatory and descriptive” (28): therapy is a cultural practice. Second, he also notes that therapeutic change occurs due to factors such as the relationship between therapist and client, or the client’s desire for change, rather than individual techniques. In this he mirrors Wampold’s stress on the “common factors” that all psychotherapeutic modalities share. Davies explores the explanatory systems of psychotherapy as “mythic systems,” which connect between individual experience and a wider cultural world. What is important, he argues, is not if they are objectively true –if this can ever be established — but the extent to which they fold “experiential truth for their users” (35). Although he gets there by a very different route, he seems to arrive at the same place as Wampold.

My third resource was something a little different: at the end of February I attended a five-day introductory course at the Vancouver School for Narrative Therapy. In the last two years I’ve developed an interest in narrative therapy, initially because I’m someone who is interested in storytelling. Lately I’ve found myself drawn to narrative therapy because of its deep engagement with both epistemology and practice. In epistemological terms, it was great to have almost a whole day out of five in discussion with a philosopher, Todd May. May worked through Foucauldian ideas of practices, and how they applied to narrative therapy’s critique of both psychoanalytic orthodoxies and neoliberalism – the latter is a word I certainly don’t hear in my UBC Counselling Psychology classrooms! More impressive were the ways in which various practitioners walked us through their own practice in working with people living with bulimia, sexualized violence or bereavement. Narrative therapy does have some specific techniques: externalization, for instance, or therapeutic letter writing, but much more fundamentally it’s a way of being and practice in which, in Todd May’s words, the “person formerly known as the therapist” approaches from the position of someone who does not know, avoids diagnosis, and sees the person they are in conversation with as having, sedimented within them, the possibility of new stories. There are still many questions for me: I’m allergic to groups and groupism, and indeed I myself tried to do some of my own private participant observation, following Davies’ example, on how narrative therapists are interpellated through othering all other modalities and constructing prestigious pedagogical genealogies. Yet this experience was the first time for me that practice and big intellectual questions around counselling have come together.

What’s next? I have another month of classes, then a break, when I’m hoping to get back to literary research. By then the cherry blossoms should be fully out, and then early green leaves on the trees.