Pretending to Care

Abstract

I want here to tease out a few issues which seem to me to have some importance in the process of becoming a clinician. More particularly, I’m concerned with the move from a general training in psychology as a science, towards being a clinician involved in psychotherapy. Movement between these two worlds has sometimes been, for me, a confusing and threatening progression. I’ve been tussling, for years now, with the more theoretical (but none the less, practical) issues that are involved in the transition. We still seem, in practice, to be trying to carry across the methods of exploration and research that have been developed in general psychology, to apply them in the psychotherapeutic domain. I believe that this is, in the longer term, a hopeless task. It may be akin to trying to colonize and subjugate a spirited and distinctive race, with only superficial similarities to the aspiring master-race of scientific psychology. To the degree that the transfer of concepts and methods from one domain to the other is achieved, some understanding will be gained through imposing on the unknown realm the shapes of known conventions. Much of the native culture, however, will be driven out, underground or out of sight. In this situation, the experience of the psychologist moving from one domain to the other, is likely to become even more confusing. It will seem that we are gaining more knowledge, while actually obscuring the major issues and leaving the psychotherapeutic territory largely uncharted.