Yerra, Ngapartji and Yungayungaworta Indigenous Australian words meaning the 'duty of reciprocity' or 'brother from behind'
Ubunti a Nguni Southern African word meaning 'I am because we are'
Last edit of this page 15/10/07
Professional Biography
Go to: Personal bio * Meditation bioI chose psychology after dropping out of Veterinary Science, in part in response to reading psychology books about emotion that were on display for a Psychology conference. It sounds weird now, but then I had not used a language of emotion beyond happy, sad and angry. I went to UNSW School of Psychology in 1969 where to my everlasting gratitude there was internecine warfare between three ideologically incompatible professors - one a Kleinian psychoanalyst, one a humanist/hypnotherapist and the other a behaviourist. The result was a range of competing views and access to clinical practitioners proving the worth of their particular school of thought. Growing up in the sixties I expected this revolutionary atmosphere at a University.
As students we took part in what were then called sensitivity training groups and encounter group residentials. We treated phobias in student clinics; were subjects in electro-shock experiments researching the 'treatment' of homosexuality; required to do a self psychoanalysis as a final year assignment and encouraged to undertake a full analysis after graduation. We had academics who vigorously pursued radical social psychology, such as the PhD students who admitted themselves to psychiatric hospitals to expose human rights violations in those systems.
I was profoundly influenced by RD Laing's view of madness and the family:
Laing often told a story about a weeping mother who came to inquire about her teenage son, 'Julian' who had just been diagnosed schizophrenic. She would spare no expense to avoid the standard psychiatric zombification doled out to troubled teenagers like him. When asked about the initial onset of Julian's problems, she said that some months previously, he started to insist that the man his mother married was not his real father. Soon other delusional fantasies, charges of conspiracy and deception, appeared. But this was the central or core complaint, which he never relinquished, and which was driving her and her husband to distraction.
After seeing the boy once, Laing informed the mother that he might be able to help her son if she would level with him. Was her husband truly the boy's father? After beating around the bush, the mother finally confessed that he wasn't. In fact, Julian was conceived during a premarital fling she had hidden from her husband all these years. Laing then informed the mother that he could not help her or her son unless she was honest with herself and her husband about his real paternity. So long as she and her husband construed his suspicions as delusional, Laing noted, the psychiatrists she engaged to treat Julian would act as unwitting but thoroughly obliging accomplices to a sustained family cover-up. At some cost to herself, no doubt, the mother eventually leveled with her son and her husband, and in a few months, the boy was back to normal.
We were examined on Robert Carkhuff's research proving that every year we studied psychology at university, the worse we became as listeners and communicators. We marveled at the success of Arnold Lazarus' multi modal behaviourism and Albert Ellis' Rational Emotive Therapy. They treated phobias, anxiety and sexual dysfunction in a short time and we scoffed at psychoanalysts taking decades, if ever to fix the same things.
Today we take this ease of evidence based treatment for granted but then it was controversial. Less fortunate, we consider psychoanalysis dated even though it's influence is unavoidable. As if we remain amnesic to how Western thought changed when Freud found an interpersonal technique to apply Arthur Schopenhauer's empiricism and the knowledge he gleaned from the East:
"The ultimate aim of all love affairs ...is more important than all other aims in man's life; and therefore it is quite worthy of the profound seriousness with which everyone pursues it. What is decided by it is nothing less than the composition of the next generation.." This wild and powerful drive to reproduce, however, causes suffering and pain in the world. For Schopenhauer, one way to escape the suffering inherent in a world of Will was through music, art, sympathy for others and in simplicity.
Most of us graduated without knowledge of Schopenhauer's meeting with Buddhism and the Vedas. Let alone how they had drawn on the lineage of Isaac Lucia's Kabbalah. Nevertheless, we had that love of academic diversity and clinical inclusivity, open to the fringes of therapy that are now part of mainstream western psychology. Our passion to make a sympathetic difference unlimited by today's student experience of evidence based training that erodes the very diversity, compassion and active listening skills that so characterised our mentors.
Within two years of my graduation, the behaviourists and social learning theorists had won at UNSW and the resources of the opposition allowed to dwindle. Inter subjectivity and partnership became philosophical questions almost irrelevant to objective technique and evidence based treatment. We now have many psychologist in the field, superbly trained in administering a technique but don't know how to read the relationship with their client or it's influence on 'treatment'. This mirrors the evolution of medicine, which remains blind to the psycholgical transactions coinciding with illness.
Today's 'evidence' suggests that teaching active listening skills to couples does not solve relationship problems. Some like Harville Hendrix and Susan Heitler innovate around this evidence and expand active listening. Other's like Gottman accept the limitation of its use in treatment. Dionysus and Apollo remain tragically at odds.
The job found for me was at the School of Psychiatry, Prince Henry Hospital. I participated in amazement as people, who had lost the top of their brains sticking their heads out of train windows or disabled after stroke or were paraplegic after diving in the shallow end of a pool, were rehabilitated by the dedicated OT's and Physio's. The doctors were gods with big salaries and perks, who didn't know their patient's name - 'The C4 in bed 5!' One told me I wasn't required to begin the sex education program that I proposed because it would only upset the patients.
Some things don't change - one of my recent and young stroke clients who had an uncommon brain damage, was told very little in Rehab about what to expect emotionally and sexually and he was not afraid to ask. They said little research had been done on the topic. He later found quality research exactly about his so called 'unusual' condition on the web, which of course his Rehab specialist had claimed didn't exist.
