Credo: I Believe in What, Exactly?

I'm going to let you in on a couple of secrets from my previous life that bear directly on this book I shall be reviewing.

First, those of us with some scholarly background in religious studies and theology (especially its Christian variants) tend to hear the word credo and immediately have a set of fairly specific and rather clearly defined associations and connotations come to mind. In typical usage, a credo ("I believe" in Latin) is a very succinct and often dense statement comprised of propositions establishing belief on frequently contested points of doctrine. In some versions, after laying out the positive claims, a series of anathemas follow, establishing what beliefs are to be explicitly rejected as heterodox. 

In the book under review we have almost none of this at all. Given that we are talking about psychoanalysis and the authors are all analytically trained, it would be rather queer to find such statements being proffered too categorically for psychoanalysis, of course, seeks always to question definitive claims and probe what lies beneath the lust for certainty. 

While there are, as the eminent historian Jaroslav Pelikan and others demonstrated, many versions of such creedal statements within just Christianity, the most common example still in use today is the Nicene Creed, as it is usually called, though its fuller title is the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Symbol of Faith, reflecting the fact that the statement begun at Nicaea I in 325 was amended and added to at the first council of Constantinople in 381. Unlike the word "creed" and cognates, "symbol" in Greek is less a carefully and cogently constructed series of propositions but instead often translated as that which is thrown together.

I'm going to suggest straightaway that had the editor or contributors to this volume, Psychoanalytic Credos: Personal and Professional Journeys of Psychoanalysts, ed. Jill Salberg (Routledge, 2022) been aware of the etymological history I've just so roughly sketched, they would have called their volume Psychoanalytic Symbols of Faith or something along those lines instead of using the word credos, which promises a type of statement, and a corresponding level of certainty in its propositions, very nearly entirely absent from this volume. That is not a fatal flaw but merely a rather minor mismatch between title and contents. (Perhaps, they might reply, the subtitle, especially with its use of the word journeys, gives cover here, as indeed it does, for many authors seem to have written not tight compact creedal essays, but meandering autobiographical sketches, many of them quite banal and of very limited interest.) 

The second secret I shall let you in on also comes from my scholarly life organizing international conferences, editing two academic journals, and also being editor of scholarly collections and proceedings, several of which I have published. In every case, one often begins with a dream list of contributors, but then has to settle for those who actually say yes and show up. Roughly 15% will say yes and then drop off the face of the earth; roughly 35% will say yes and hold you hostage while they wickedly blow past all deadlines and may eventually get their submission to you months or even years after deadline; and the rest will usually be professional and accommodating in working with you to submit decent materials on time. The resulting collection, of course, is invariably going to be very uneven and even the most ruthless editing I could provide could never totally smooth it out entirely. Such is the fate of all collections. 

Sometimes it is fairly well accepted (though should not be) that especially "big names" may agree to give a paper or make a submission to your journal or book, but it will be some paper they've recycled four times already and couldn't be bothered publishing, or the paper was not really top-drawer stuff, but because of their status in the field they can pawn off second-rate materials and people will gladly take them because, of course, you want their name in your publication, and they know you want their name. Thus they send you some such material--not their best stuff because it may be incomplete, or the sources haven't been updated since they first gave the paper in 1998, or they wrote in sloppy haste--and you accept it even though it doesn't quite fit your focus. 

Similarly, if the "big name" really should be in your book or conference program--else people will sneer How could you publish on gravity without asking Newton for an essay?--but does not want to write something original, or finds you insufficiently important enough to think of writing something fresh for your focus, they may condescend to let you have a paper previously published that, they think after two seconds, clearly fits your focus (but doesn't really). Again, being glad to have this person, you will snatch up the previously published paper and include it in your collection even though it doesn't quite fit your focus.

There are, then, a number of prominent people in Psychoanalytic Credos who fit into this category. These essays, if not previosuly encountered, may be profitably and perhaps even enjoyably read here. I shall not name names nor pay them any attention in what follows.  

Rather, I am content to highlight a half-dozen chapters that offered some excellent insights. 

The first of these--it will come as no surprise--is Nancy McWilliams' chapter "Credo: Psychoanalysis as a Wisdom Tradition." I am, of course, greatly indebted to McWilliams, as I showed here. If I were the editor here, I'd have sent her chapter around to other contributors as a model of what to write: she begins with some autobiographical reflections and then, in a section labelled Credo, tells us how she believes psychoanalysis to be a wisdom tradition, and what that means. 

A central feature of her article, not encountered much elsewhere in the book or the wider literature, is that "much of the healing in analytic treatment seems to me to be essentially a grieving process...and deep acceptance of what cannot be changed" (p.74). What she does not say on this point, but clearly implies, is that such grieving can be a conduit to greater liberation and even to some change not possible until and unless grief happens first and is really worked through. 

The very next chapter is by the British analyst Michael Parsons. He gives us two gifts. The first is to remind us that "to be an analyst...is to lay oneself continually on the line," that is, clinicians (if they are to do what he calls "transformative" work) must "have their own psychic life at stake in an analysis." Only, he says, if you can tolerate this will you have the potential to be both changed and to help your patient change. (This theme is taken up in a later chapter by Lewis Aron, who suggests "the biggest thing getting in our way is that we're afraid to be bad objects, we're afraid to just let ourselves out.")

Parsons ends his chapter with a very striking suggestion: what if we conducted supervision or case consultation in a freely associative manner? How might this help the supervisor, supervisee, and patient? 

Jessica Benjamin (about whom I wrote a bit here) has a wonderful chapter which opens with the ringing declaration that "if psychoanalysis were a religion, I would be not only a practitioner but also a theologian"! She launches into a discussion about Winnicott on uses of an object, and the non-retaliatory stance of the clinician whose failures of the patient and ruptures in the alliance can be "developmentally necessary." 

She also draws on Emmanuel Ghent's celebrated distinction between submission and surrender to note that if the patient has to surrender to the clinical process, so too does the clinician, and the latter's surrendering first is a salutary model for the anxious patient to see that they are not alone (even if the level of surrender is, she notes, assymetrical).

To my mind, the best chapter in the book is, by far, Steven Cooper's "Credo: Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis." There is a refreshing candor in what he reports of how he talks to patients with great modesty:

"I have faith in your ability to grow even if I don't always know how to facilitate that. I believe that there is something unique about this setting and the two of us trying that can be useful. I would like to become useful in helping you with the process of becoming who you are." 

Cooper says that the key way he attempts to help patients is through play, which he learned from Winnicott, and about which published a book last year, Playing and Becoming in Psychoanalysis. 

Therapeutic play, Cooper argues, should help the patient to develop "elasticity," a term he borrows from Ferenczi. None of this should be thought easy; we cannot be seduced by the word 'play' into thinking of it as something facile. Instead Cooper says that "finding new forms of play is immensely messy and challenging" (p.106). Some of the challenge comes from patients who "hold on to bad, sometimes persecutory objects rather than feel alone or helpless." Only if they can play with you can they perhaps come to surrender those objects.

Echoing McWilliams, Cooper says that "the play of mourning" is crucial: "limit and mourning are just as constitutive of play as more frequently described forms." Mournful play, though, can facilitate movement "from the chains binding the self to an internal object toward new experiences with self and other" (109). 

Play is ultimately a form of love, Cooper briefly notes, quoting Hannah Arendt (who was herself writing about Augustine of Hippo) who said that love consists in saying "I want you to be." Play is useful here insofar as it expresses "the wish to appreciate the patient as he or she is." 

The last chapter I will note here is from Ken Corbett, "Credo: So Our Lives Glide On." He foregrounds the importance of freedom, drawing here on Freud (and not, as I expected, on Fromm) in several striking ways. Part of the freedom of the clinician, he suggests, is to not know, to not intrude with one's knowing too soon, and certainly to not talk too much: "too much talking is akin to wind drag, and slows the patient down" (p.162). 

He then links his discussion of freedom to "the eroticism of coming into existence" through periods and experiences of "libidinal turbulence." These striking phrases are not developed in any depth, alas, no doubt reflecting the limitations of a word count in a volume such as this. 

There are a few gems in almost every chapter of Psychoanalytic Credos, but I will not drag this on with more talking! 

On Play and Enjoyment and Laughter in Psychotherapy

  As Arthur Leonoff commented in his necrology for Dr Louise Carignan, who was my psychoanalyst for seven years, she had a very memorable and infectious laugh. I don't remember what provoked it on one particular afternoon while I was lying on her couch, but the memory of that laugh has stayed with me more than twenty years later. It helped me realize that psychoanalysis and psychotherapy were not solely about solemnly entering into deep, dark waters of trauma, but should allow for occasions of laughter and enjoyment. 

This is a theme I first found in the great Nina Coltart, about whom I wrote here at some length, reflecting my longstanding gratitude to her. Her book Slouching Towards Bethlehem was what inspired me to seek out Dr Carignan in the first place, and in that book she stoutly and rightly insists that patient and therapist should be able to find humour in situations and therefore to laugh together.

More recently, I have been hugely indebted to Adam Phillips, including his recent book The Cure for Psychoanalysis. It is in that book (about which more another time) that he reminds me of what Winnicott (whose biography Phillips wrote more than thirty years ago now) said about the role of playing and enjoying in psychotherapy. 

Though I wrote earlier this year a few jottings on D.W. Winnicott on the fiftieth anniversary of his death, I had not then quite managed to finish Playing and Reality, which I now have thanks to Phillips drawing on it in his recent book, where he says that "what appeals to me about Winnicott is his wish to enjoy the patient's company." Just so. 

Reading DWW is always such a wonderful experience. You never have to worry about being bamboozled by theory or assaulted by polemics, or confused by turgid and abstruse sentences. I really do have the feeling, through Phillips' portrait and others I have read over the years, that you could indeed see DWW making and enjoying a cup of tea with his patients. This still comes through even today in his writing, many of whose basic insights seem to age really well. (I have recently found some of his writings in Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis on the possible meaning of adolescent stealing helpful to thinking through a very difficult case I am involved with clinically.) 

In Playing and Reality, DWW stoutly opens his third chapter by insisting: "Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together." He goes on to say that if the patient is incapable of playing, then this must be the primary clinical task: to help them get to the point where they can play. In other words, modifying a famous Freudian saying, I would say "Where inhibition was, there shall playing be!" Or--if you will indulge me one more--modifying an equally famous saying of Ferenczi, the patient is not cured by playing but is cured when s/he can play (and do so, presumably, on his or her own). 

Later in the chapter, DWW says that health can be defined by the extent to which one is capable of playing, and that such playing "is itself a therapy." But in a clinical setting, there is a particular type of playing: "the playing has to be spontaneous and not compliant or acquiescent if psychotherapy is to be done." It cannot be coerced, in other words, but creative (a word DWW makes much of throughout this book) and always free. 

This, of course, requires certain things from the therapist, and here DWW is again equally direct: "If the therapist cannot play, then he is not suitable for the work." Therapists can also wreck the play of therapy, DWW warns, if they behave like experts who understand all the possible configurations of a game and act from this position of presumed omniscience instead of being at one with the patient in not knowing in advance how the game will play out. 

This, we know from several sources, is very much how DWW was with his patients, not just because he reports this to us, and his wife also noted this in a moving and important essay she wrote after his death, but also from some of his analysands including, perhaps most famously, Marion Milner, who charmingly recounts of DWW that was "on excellent terms with his primary process"! 

It is of course common today for therapists to have websites on which they advertise their philosophy of treatment, location, fees, etc. But in all my perusing of these, I have never once come across anybody who says that "Psychotherapy has to do with two people playing together." Imagine having that on a banner atop your website, or framed on your waiting room wall! 

Nor have I seen any self-descriptions by therapists today that they are on excellent terms with their primary process! Their websites sometimes groan under the weight of degrees and credentials, yes, and additional certification and training in whatever the acronym du jour is--certainly. But to advertise oneself as being on excellent terms with one's primary process?

If we cannot be playful and find the work enjoyable, and laugh at ourselves and with our patients, then it seems hardly likely that we will be able to keep at it for long or to do it very well. Thank God we have the witness of Donald Winnicott even fifty years after his death to save us from such ponderousness and to remind us of playing and enjoying not just outside our consulting rooms but within them.