Читать книгу The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays - Edwin H. Friedman - Страница 19

In my own training, I was fortunate in having two mentors who understood as well as anyone I’ve ever met the folly of trying to will change. My first supervisor was Les Farber, a training analyst with the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, who had an existential rather than an interpretive emphasis. For Farber, the central issue in therapy was distinguishing between what could be willed and what couldn’t. For example, one could will sitting at the dinner table, but not appetite; one could will going to bed, but not sleep. (And I would add family members can will being together, but not togetherness.) Farber’s view was that almost all neuroses and psychoses are a disorder of the will. The failure to accept the inescapable limitations of conscious control led to willing one’s own thoughts (compulsivity) or one’s environment, including others (hysteria).

Farber believed that it was not only patients who had disorders of the will. He taught me that helpers can fall into the same traps, believing that they could will their patients to think the way they’d like them to. Ultimately, Farber took the position that ineffective therapy — and also therapist burnout — come out of trying to will too much in the therapeutic relationship. Eventually, I came to realize that in almost all unsuccessful cases, the family therapist has been locked into a conflict of wills with his or her patients that is identical to the struggle of wills the family members are engaged in with one another.

Though Farber was not a family therapist, over the years I discovered that his views on willfulness could be applied productively to a system as well as an individual. The most serious symptoms in family life, e.g., anorexia, schizophrenia, suicide, always show up in families in which people make intense efforts to bend one another to their will. Indeed, over the years I’ve come to see that it is the presence or absence of willfulness that determines the extent to which any initial, abnormal behavior in a family will become chronic. And I have learned that the key to most cases is getting at least one member to let go of their willfulness.