Читать книгу The Myth of the Shiksa and Other Essays - Edwin H. Friedman - Страница 20

All of this raises a crucial question. If our professional task is to bring about change, how can we avoid willing it? Farber’s solution was to emphasize the difference between expressing one’s own talents and desires versus achieving one’s ends by trying to control and manipulate others. This is a distinction my other mentor, Murray Bowen, was to echo in his contrast between an “I” position and a “you” position or what he calls “no-self” behavior. Being supervised by Farber first and later Bowen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time dominated by the Vietnam conflict, I learned the madness of thinking that the therapist could prevail in a contest of wills. They taught me that no matter how many bombers you thought you had as a therapist, you could never overcome the Vietcong lurking in the tangled jungle of the client’s resistance.

Since Farber left Washington a year after I began supervision with him, I’m not sure how much more influence he would have had on me had he stayed. I do know that I was more drawn to Bowen’s clinical approach because of a critical difference I perceived between the two men. For all his brilliance and insightfulness, I found Farber too serious. There was a kind of mischievous quality to Murray that intrigued me. Farber was always straight (perhaps that was his willfulness), whereas Bowen seemed far less “principled.” And I liked the irreverence implicit in fighting fire with fire and being devilish in the face of the satanic.

If Farber’s notions of willfulness helped me understand the ineffectiveness of most initiatives for change, whether in families or in other types of institutions, Bowen’s emphasis on the nonanxious presence helped me understand how to function in a nonwillful manner. As a born and bred Manhattanite, the only way I knew how to get things done was fast and aggressively. I was thus fascinated by how this “country hick” seemed to be able to take the “city slicker” every time. It was clear that he had heard it all before and was not going to be seduced by others’ efforts to get him to change them.

There is a story about Bowen when he was running his famous project at NIMH, hospitalizing the families of schizophrenics, that illustrates the way he operates. A schizophrenic known for her repeated threats of suicide came to him one day requesting a weekend pass and also a prescription for sleeping pills.