Love in the therapy room
feature article
Therapeutic encounter – a kind of loving The emotional connection between client and therapist is at the core of therapy, regardless of theoretical orientation, explain David Bott and Pam Howard. But theory and an objective setting can help to keep away the turmoil Trouble begins, though, when you find, of the pigeons being put into Skinner boxes, that first of all there is a rule in the lab that nobody but a particular lady is allowed to handle the pigeons. And then you find that the pigeons adore the lady who puts them in the boxes, that they swoon with pleasure in her hands. And this part of the story is not generally recorded in the research results. Because love, you see, is not what it is supposed to be about. (Gregory Bateson, in Kirschenbaum and Henderson, 1990: 187)
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he work of psychotherapy is largely concerned with love (Bott, 2001; Howard, 2008). It seeks to bring about an exploration of the client’s own unique way of loving, or, as Sigmund Freud famously stated,
Pam Howard
Pam is principal lecturer and course leader of the MSc Psychotherapy at the University of Brighton. She is also a UKCP- registered psychoanalytic psychotherapist in private practice. She has been chief executive of UKCP and has chaired the Universities Psychotherapy and Counselling Association. She writes on aspects of the psychoanalytic therapeutic relationship and her book, coauthored with David Bott, The therapeutic encounter: a cross-modality approach has recently been published by Sage.
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‘his specific method for conducting his erotic life’. The client’s particular way of conducting their intimate, relational and erotic life is thought to be at the root of suffering. The interplay between love and suffering is at the very heart of the psychotherapeutic relationship. Psychotherapeutic narratives are characterised by a series of accounts of how the human infant comes to be who he or she is and how he or she sustains this in later life.
“ The work of psychotherapy is largely concerned with love. It seeks to bring about an exploration of the client’s own unique way of loving ”
Despite important differences, they share a belief in the formative nature of our experiences of early relationships. In order to protect ourselves against suffering in infancy, we engage in what might be called ‘distortions of love’. These distortions seek to balance the need to gain the love of those on whom we depend with the need to protect ourselves from suffering.
Paradoxically for most clients who find themselves in psychotherapy, these distortions, originally designed to mitigate suffering, are now, in adulthood, at the heart of their distress.
David Bott
David Bott is director of studies in psychotherapy at the University of Brighton and a UKCP-registered systemic psychotherapist. His publications include a number of papers which address the relationship between theories and models of psychotherapy and counselling. He is co-author with Pam Howard, of The therapeutic encounter: a cross-modality approach.
Enduring themes of human relatedness The position we take is that all therapeutic narratives are organised around enduring themes in human relatedness (Bott and Howard, 2012) which arise out of early experiences of love, family context and social arrangements. These themes are encapsulated in the ‘problem saturated story’ brought by the client. In essence, they are complex love stories, which have given rise to confusing feelings of desire, abandonment, anger and hurt, providing the content around which sessions take place. As the details of this love story unfold, they are also enacted with an implicit invitation for the therapist to join in the performance. Against this, they are faced with the task of opening the way to a more productive kind of loving. For example, the client who has experienced early significant losses and abandonment faces the dilemma of finding love when they are unable to allow themselves to be vulnerable. In the
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