Here’s an article, A Tailor In The Cyclops’ Cave?, by Steve Silverton, that I’ve just enjoyed reading. It’s a good reminder of what really works in psychotherapy, and a reality-check on notions that mechanical approaches can in some way address the poetic, relational worlds that we create, as they contemporaneously creates us.
… we humans tend to make ourselves up as we go along, not only our present but our past and our future as well. We are always re-writing ourselves and whatever the current story or pre-occupation is tends to change our sense of our past, present and future selves. The figure creates the ground and the ground creates the figure.
Steve Silverton’s writing comes with the clear mark of personal experience. His reflection on the question “How do you work?” (posed to the therapist by a potential client) moves not only into the nature of the relational venture of client and therapist, but raises the subject of how we potentially are limited by the words at our disposal (the words in that question), by collective sub-texts behind our endeavours and inquiries; how these endeavours can be limited by that sub-text.
