If you would like more information feel free to e-mail me at mstaples@sbcglobal.net. Feel free to download or print out a copy of this transcript and read it at your leisure. 

I love to have my friends here, some new, some familiar poets and psychologists. This is kind of a delicate talk for me because I'm trying to bring forward something I've rarily spoken of before, and I want to do it in a way that raises certain questions for you. At times I might just ask what you're thinking in response to what I'm saying rather than wait until the end.

The talk today is really something to get us focused on a certain moment in psychotherapy. I think we are aware of when this moment arises. Whatever our theoretical orientation, when we are working with someone...empathizing, mirroring, confronting, doing whatever we do...if we are successful, there emerges what you might call a "new space". I can only give the analogy of a Sunrise. This is the moment when the Sun comes over the horizon, when something new is possible.

I had one of these moments recently. I don't think they occur often, but they have to occur occasionally to keep us going. Anyway, I had one of these moments yesterday when I was working with someone and we spent probably a whole session on this pattern where she gets caught up in overdoing for others. For this person, the overdoing began early in her childhood. She began taking things on, never asking for anything for herself. We worked on this pattern that eventually lead to a suicidal place. You can't win from that place after awhile. It's exhausting, this overdoing, this not asking, this not feeling entitled to anything yourself.

Then suddenly, during the last five minutes of the session, she stopped and looked at me, and the quality of the space changed, and she feel silent, and I fell silent. She looked at me and said, "You know, I don't know how to ask for help. I don't know how to ask for anything for myself. It frightens me to do that." So that's the kind of moment I'm talking about, where maybe you confront and work on character patterns...this over giving, and all of a sudden she sees it. She sees it, she stops, and the pattern instead of living her is in front of her face and she sees me through the pattern...and she stops and says, "I don't know what to do now." She says, "How do I get anything for myself?"

That is moment of the rising sun, of the new moment. That is the subject of the talk today. And the question I'm raising for us is what is the therapist's job once you have arrived at such a moment? And I want to perhaps suggest that our job at that point may no longer be viewed as "treatment" or even "facilitation". At that point, the facilitation has passed...the facilitation has "worked". You have facilitated something. What Winnicott called the "True Self" is now emerging. And at that moment, what is our job? What is asked of us?

To try to answer that question, I'm going to take a brief excursion through the thinking of C.G. Jung. I would ask that you be thinking about what you do, what you conceive here as your work, if it is to be work at all, when this moment occurs, and you stand in the presence of your patient.

I think something very particular is asked of us in that moment, something very beautiful. I would say that it is not treating that moment, it's not facilitating that moment, it is meeting that moment. For that expression, I borrow from Martin Buber, the Jewish theologian. It's meeting the moment, where the therapist "steps up and into" the moment, not to master it, but to treat it, not to "do" anything with it, but to step into it.

Now to dramatize such a moment, I want to tell you about a class I was teaching at the Pacifica Graduate Institute here in Santa Barbara last year. It's the start of the class. It's a class on imagination and psychotherapy. There is all this excitement revolving around what the class is going to be. It's a wonderful energy. And this woman rises her hand in that moment and says, "I would like to tell you a dream." The dream is this:

I'm standing in a darkened theater and the curtain is down. It's the moment before the curtain goes up. [It's beautiful synchronistic moment of the start of this class] Suddenly a raven flies into the closed theater. I realize that the raven is looking for a person with a raven-like soul [that is her thought in the dream]. The raven comes directly over to me, right up to my eyes, and bites me on the face."

Within an hour, there were three analogous dreams reported by the class. One was of a buffalo looking someone in the face. Another was of a wolf looking someone in the face. This is another kind of sunrise moment, where something of great energy comes toward a person and attempts to arrest their attention...from within their soul, this something goes right into their eyes.

What is the work of the therapist in hearing such a dream? What is our job, when that new moment when a child comes right up to your life, looks you in the eyes, and says "I'm here, you've worked for me, you've done this, here I am...taking this risk...with you...now!" This is such a tender moment, such a special moment, when that force from within the person makes its attempt to come into the world and you at that moment are the world. It's coming right toward you in that moment. You've worked toward it. Here it is.

My favorite sentence, pulled totally out of context, that always inspires me is from Jung. It is this, "what is it at this moment that represents the natural urge of life?" I love that line. The raven flies, the sun rises, you feel this energy in your body, what is your response? What I did that day with the raven was simply to ask her to go back to the moment of the raven's staring into her eyes. "Would you go back there?" I asked. And as he did, I asked her to hold that gaze...hold that gaze...and as she did, a chill went through her body, and through mine. She said, "I'm feeling very cold right now." I felt it too. In holding that gaze, she entered that place...and so did I.

I think Jung's great value when it comes to the dream, to a drawing, to an image, to a movement, to a mood, is that he does not attempt to dissect the image into parts. He called his approach a "constructive" or "synthetic" approach to the image. What he meant was that he preferred to let an image, like the raven flying toward you, have its life. Your consciousness there, or what he called the "symbolic attitude" is going to be crucial as you are hearing that moment. It will determine whether or not the moment lives or dies. Wordsworth's famous phrase is that we murder to dissect.

If we're not going to murder the raven by asking "what does it mean?" we must instead try to help it live. Jung came up with the phrase "Active Imagination" here, which was his way of describing the process of dreaming the dream on, dreaming the image on...taking the movement further. So, if our subject was experiencing that chill as she looked into the raven, and I asked here, "how does your body want to move in that chill?" and I suggested that she might want to let the chill come through her, or describe what she saw, or where she was at that moment, I'm trying to help the moment elaborate itself. The thought is more about movement than about meaning. The work is about movement...to let the fish swim...to give it water. The dream you are presented with is like a petrified fish. When you become water in your consciousness, then suddenly the fish starts moving. When you become the water in your consciousness, so that its -- "What's happening with that chill? Show me with your body, show me with your hand, give me a drawing now of what's happening as you look into the raven's eyes." Or if people have the kind of voice that speaks poetry, "Let your voice go now...let me hear a tone, let me hear any words that come out now in this moment." How a person resources their imagination is important here. Some do it more easily through movement, others through their voice, still others through drawing or a kind of poetic speaking. Jung made a significant contribution to this question of the moment I'm telling you about, when the sunrises of the new appears in that child or adult, by instructing us to let the image live...to let it move before we start asking what it means.

I have found one poem that is so great. It is very short. You'll see, you'll hear a force, an image, an energy coming alive right in the middle of it. This transition I'm talking about of the fish suddenly swimming, of the image coming alive in the moment of the the sunrise something new. It's from the Sonnets to Orpheus by Rilke, and it goes like this:

"Oh this beast is the one that never was
     they didn't know that unconcerned they had
loved its grace, its walk, and how it stood
     looking at them calmly with clear eyes.

It hadn't been in fact it never was
     but since they loved it, a pure beast came to be.
They always left it room
     and in that heart space radiant and bare
it raised its head and hardly needed to.

Exist. They fed it not with any grain
     but always just with the thought that it might be
and this assurance gave the beast so much power
     it grew a horn upon its brow, one horn,
afterward it approached a virgin whitely
     and was inside the mirror and in her."

"The fed it not with any grain, but always just with the thought that it might be, and this assurance gave the beast so much power, it grew a horn on its brow..." That's the work! That's the work with the dream. That's the work...the legacy of Jung. We're keeping something alive so that it develops. The horse grows a horn. The fish swims. The sun comes up. And there we are. If we do that work well, there is a quality of aliveness now in front of us. It's the moment Winnicott says, "...when the playing child surprises herself." The surprise. The unexpected moment.

The link I want to make is a very simple one. I want to say that the response to an image, the response to a play scene or a dream, is equivalent to any important moment in psychotherapy, where there is this pause, and you are in a new moment. When my client looked at me and said, "I don't know how to ask for help." She was right on the threshold of something new.

I want to call a moment like that, if you'll let me, an image. I can call it a moment, but by calling it an image, I'm going to borrow everything I've learned from Jung on how to enter that moment, that silence in therapy where the new is finally coming into existence.

I might take a break right now to ask if any of you have any thoughts about when you are in the presence of the truly new, and if you are with me on the kind of moment I'm talking about. What comes up in you, or for you, as a way of deepening that moment or respecting that moment, or helping that moment to stay alive. I was asking you what you think that moment needs from us, and some of you may disagree with me, because I was throwing out some words. I said that moment doesn't need treatment, it doesn't need facilitation, but you might have some other ideas about, or responses to, what that moment asks of us. Anyone feeling like saying?

Stan: What comes up for me is clarity. I get a sense of clarity within myself. Kind of... "Aha, now I understand." We see it together, it's like a relationship. It doesn't happen, it's that bonding that happens to you. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does you know it.

Michael: Aha! See you added that very interesting term, to the bonding. Together something has now come into focus between us. I'm adding, together. What is essential here for you when you add those words, "bonding" and "Aha" together?

Stan: There is an experience that happens, a connection.

Michael: A connection right there...

Stan: Yes, a connection. And then what happens is that I want to reinforce that clarity. I want to tell her that I really feel clear now about what she is talking about. This really helps me to understand what's going on for her, and so that in some ways reinforces what she is saying, and it helps me to express what I feel. So there is a connection of understanding between us that I think is important in the relationship.

Michael: And the intensity with which you are saying those words to me, when you added, "...and I want to communicate what I feel..." is the specialness of that moment that now almost draws out the "I've got to say something to you now...I'm understanding this now with you."

Q: I think when you share that about the image...when you have these moments when you are with a client, or when you experience them with yourself, there is a joining together. And it is almost like the moment becomes so precious, so poignant that there is kind of a loss of self. There is something that brings you together that is hard to describe, but it is almost spiritual. It is very touching to the soul, and I think that what feels valuable to the client is your joining with them in that moment, and being with them in their moment. Sometimes there are no words you have to say, you just sense the moment together.

Michael: I agree with that word spiritual. There is a quality of experience...a kind of arising that we associate with the effervescence of spirit.

Violet: There is such a difference between the therapist saying to the client, "You have trouble asking for help or for what you need," and the client coming to that awareness themselves. They may have heard it a million times by others, but when they come to that awareness it's so strengthening even though its putting out that they have trouble asking.

Michael: And how is it for you receiving that moment? what happens inside you if that comes right toward you?

Violet: Well, I know that when such a moment happens, I feel tremendous joy.

Michael: Uh-huh.

Violet: And it is...it's as if this circle around the two of us, this connection...

Michael: Ah, you hear that image again? It's like a circle. First the joy, that is similar to Stan's image of spirit...it's like the joy, and its like a circle came around us, and from the psychoanalytic tradition, there is a wonderful reference here. There is a man by the name of Christopher Bollas who wrote a chapter called "The Analyst's Celebration of the Analysand." And he is referring to these moments where the work is to celebrate the arrival. It may be the arrival of humor that finally comes to a dead-pan person, and your celebration is your laughter and enjoyment of the joke that they finally got it together to tell, or perhaps someone who has taken a year to get around to confronting you on some issue. You feel like saying, "God...the aggressive force of the personality is being tried out with me," and you acknowledge that.

So I like that imagery that now we have a circle around us in the special moment. The light of the sun has come up. The life force is getting a second chance, and I am the world at this point. I am here to celebrate the arrival of that moment. I can acknowledge that person. This is it...what Buber called confirmation.This is the high point of a circle that we did not draw. It is a circle drawn around us as we come together. Stan said both get it. We both get clarification together of what is happening now as a circle is drawn around us, and we are partners in that moment. It is a very special thing that happens.

Q: I wanted to take off on what Stan said. As a therapist, you are getting a felt sense of the patient's perspective so that you are no longer outside listening to their stories or their issues. You are right there with them.

Michael: Exactly. You are inside in a different way than where you were before that moment happened. You are inside that moment. And it is a very alive place to be. Jung said, "Now at this moment, what is it at this moment that represents the natural urge of life...?" And yet, I would like to try to make the distinction between what we are talking about here, and what is generally understood as countertransference. There has been a lot of literature about the therapist attending to their own feelings in a dynamically oriented psychotherapy. What is being envoked in you by the person you are with? But the bias in the psychoanalytic literature is often that what is being invoked in you that goes by the name of countertransference are the unresolved old issues in your own life that are not quite conscious yet. This is not quite what we are talking about here.  In thinking about the image of the raven mentioned earlier, and how I felt a chill in my own body at the time, if you start thinking about that as a transference/countertransference issue of some old thing that is being restimulated through the chill, as if the raven were some early wounding childhood experience I think the emphasis lapses into the bias of repressed forces in an individual's life. The theme I'm speaking of here today is of your feelings tracking the arrival not of anything from the past at all. Rather, there is something emerging, a sunrise, of potential new life that has not yet been. You could call it the potential of the true self, as Winnicott used the term, but it is the coming into existence of some potential...a life force that is making its appearance now. It is not reflective of past history, but of the present encounter with you, that by your facilitation has allowed a tenuous moment of new experimentation and new energy to come over the horizon. You can attune yourself to this moment because you have learned to sit in your body in therapy. I sit here and I'm not so much in thought anymore. I'm sitting right here, and all I need to know is going to be evoked in me if I keep that space open. I'm listening to the story, I'm tracking the content, but what I'm waiting for is the raven to come in and say "Ah! Michael, track this moment because I believe what needs to find you in the therapy will do this to you. And whether it's the past or the new life coming into the present it will do this if you are sitting in your body open in the moment.

Fred: Michael, I've noticed at the times when, as you say, this moment arises, I notice I have to watch my response very carefully because if I go into the terror, the moment may shut down. It gets too scary. Could you expand upon that?

Michael: Sure. What's your initial thought about the word "terror" with respect to this kind of moment we are talking about? What do you think the terror is when you say that?

Fred: What comes to mind is the client cannot handle it, its too difficult, then I have to slow myself down and ask if my own terror is getting in the way.

Michael: I think that fear can be one of the markers of the sunrise moment, not just joy. Fred has introduced the idea of terror associated with the moment, and not only can we close this image down...but we can close it down very quickly in spite of the fact that this too is a marker of "Ah!" And that is where we want to work, exactly there, getting curious about what just happened. What just happened to us? We were right here, and all of a sudden we shut it down. I don't know what shut it down...it just shut down. So what happened?

Now let me tell you something interesting. When it comes to resistance, there are two points of view. You usually don't hear about the second point of view. The first is the point of view that the person will shut down when they feel the moment that will likely retraumatize them based on early experience. The idea here is that if I enter that experience with you, I can tell by your attitude, and the way you are talking to me, and by the tone of your voice, that something really bad is going to happen again. Clients shut down to protect themselves. It is the reimagining that I am stepping into a traumatic situation, and that I need to protect a vulnerable core of myself, because the sunrise reveals a very beautiful and vulnerable part of the self..

The second point of view is that on the verge of new moments when you are asked to do something in a way you have never done before...and the therapist has provided the client an opportunity to take a new step that's not the role you learned in your family or in your theoretical orientation, the normal response is quite often fear or terror, not because one will be retraumatized by a past experience, but because the conditions are there for you to do something so different that one's being says "I can't do this, this is not who I know myself to be!" In this latter case, the terror is not a fear of death, but a fear of life. The former is a fear of death -- I'm going to be retraumatized if I accept the therapists invitation to enter the moment. The second is a fear of life -- I'm afraid of change and this therapist is offering an open space in which he says I can elaborate myself in this moment...and I can't do it. This is important. the better we do this work, the more likely we are to hit that place of terror, because we are offering an invitation for something different.

Lynn: this makes me think about my work with couples, and people who have been deeply traumatized. I often come to that moment in therapy when my clients are about to tell met something that has happened to them, that they've kept secret and they've never told anyone else but me. They come to that moment with terror, and they often back away. I believe as you do, but I describe it in terms of a frame of reference, and our perceptions don't allow us to participate in something for which we don't have a frame of reference built. As many of you know, I'm involved with horses, and that's taught me a lot about therapy. One of the things you do if you're trying to touch a horse in a place that it doesn't want to be touched, is back off to a safe place and stroke that part. You go toward the place, back and forth, in a rhythmic way. In therapy, I find that's true as well. People get to the terror point, and then we might talk a bit about the frame of reference, and that being scary is OK, and needing to build onto a frame of reference is something we can do. The person might get into a little bit of the terror place, and they might back off. Eventually we get to that point you are talking about. I think you are teaching me how to do a better job of stepping into that moment with them, when they finally get to that place where they can allow me to participate.

Michael: Where they can allow me to participate.

Q: What she is saying is almost prior to the insight that I would see. The way I would describe it is almost more aggressive than that. I say that I push them to the edge, and let them look over, and then I pull them back. And I do that several times until finally they get to the edge, and they jump over. Then they have that awareness of what they are afraid of.

Michael: Now the interesting thing here is that at that moment you describe, something pulls me to the edge and I have to look over too. I think it was Violet's image that a circle is drawn around us. But let me tell you that a circle can be very scary when the therapy and the work we're doing pulls both of us to that edge, and you have to look over too; then the new moment, the new sunrise, the raven's bite, coming up through your body as well as the client's is a force in the therapy. You might say that the bird of the soul builds its nest in the tree of the mutual vulnerabilities of the participants. It's that moment when you can see where that hour is heading and you think, "Oh my God, it's going right for that stuff in me too!" The bird of the soul knows just where to build that nest...to take you both close to the edge.

I don't want to lose the basic question I asked at the beginning. In such moments of mutual vulnerability, when the circle is drawn around both participants, and the terror or joy arises in both participants, and we're asked to step into such a moment, to step up and into it, as Buber said, what is asked of us?

Here is one hint -- there are times when I believe all we can do is respond from our hearts. I say that if you think of such moments as images, you can respond to the image with an image, to the dream with a dream, to the poem with a poem. sometimes you step into a moment and all you can do is give an image back... a drawing, a fragment of verse...something that meets such an important moment on an imaginal, poetic, emotional level. And there is a poem that suggests this beautifully that I think I will use as the closing theme of our participation in such a moment. It is by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, and it is called The Poet's Obligation:
 

To whoever is not listening to the sea this Friday morning
to whoever is cooped up in house or office, or factory or woman
Or street or mine or dry prison cell
To him I come and without speaking or looking
I arrive and open the door of his prison
And a vibration starts up vague and insistent
A long rumble of thunder adds itself to the weight of the planet
And the foam.
The groaning rivers of the ocean rise
The star vibrates quickly in its corona
And the sea beats, dies, and goes on beating
So drawn on by my destiny
I ceaselessly must listen to
And keep the seas lamenting in my consciousness
I must feel the crash of the hard water
and gather it up in a perpetual cup
So that wherever those in prison may be
wherever they suffer the sentence of the autumn
I may be present with an errant wave
I may move in and out of windows
And hearing me my eyes may lift themselves
Asking how can I reach the sea
And I will pass to them saying nothing
The starry echoes of the wave
The breaking up of foam in quicksand
The rustling of salt withdrawing itself
The gray cry of seabirds on the coast
So through me freedom and the sea
will call to the shrouded heart.

So through me, what does he do here to the one's suffering the sentence of the Autumn? Enters his poet's heart and he gives them what? He doesn't give them bright sunrise, joyful, does he? To those suffering the sentence of the  Autumn, he passes to them saying nothing. The echoes of the wave, the breaking of the foam in quicksand, the rustling of salt withdrawing itself, the gray cry of seabirds on the coast. In that moment when you don't know what to do, when confronted with the new, when the new out of all your work finally comes up and bites you on the face, when the circle is drawn around you, when the terror begins to rise, when you absolutely are at the end of treatment (I loves these words of Jung's) "...my work beings where the treatment leaves off."

I think that Neruda gives us the clue. He stepped into that moment, and he listened in your terror, in your joy, in your connection, and a part of you said, "this is what we've been working for." The new has arrived. It is not the past. It is the newly arrived moment. What can I do? I listen into it. I contain myself thinking that I've got to do anything. I let it vibrate in me as Neruda does, and he passes to them a gray cry of sea birds on the coast. What is that? He holds that echo of that new moment. There is a lot we can do in that terror...to hold, to contain that moment. We step into it and be there. That moment that wants to grow between the two of us as a new life. That moment that falls over is the moment we've been talking about.

End