Without understanding yourself, without being aware of all that is operating in your own mind – how you think, whether you are copying, imitating, whether you are frightened, whether you are seeking power – there cannot be intelligence. And it is intelligence that creates character, not hero worship or the pursuit of an ideal. The understanding of oneself, of one’s own extraordinarily complicated self, is the beginning of intelligence, which reveals character.
J Krishnamurti, `Lifehead´
My latest read is a fascinating book that somehow eluded me when it was first published in 2008. It is David Richo’s `When the Past is Present´, with the sub-title: `Healing the Emotional Wounds that Sabotage Our Relationships´. That I missed it is all the more remarkable for the fact that the time of its publication coincided with my eager reading of his earlier books. These included `How to be an Adult´(1991), `When Love Meets Fear´ (1997), `Shadow Dance´ (1999,) and `Mary Within Us´, published in 2007.
David Richo, a Californian psychotherapist with almost five decades of practical experience, combines his deep knowledge of Jungian psychology and his passion for Buddhist practice in his clinical work and his writings. He has been a formative influence on my development since 2003, when I joined the worldwide motley crew of people living in addiction recovery. He writes with lucidity, elegance, depth, gentle compassion, and immense empathy, drawing upon his wide-ranging experience of helping clients heal and grow, towards manifesting their full potential.
The title of the book, alone , is a stroke of genius: `When Past Is Present´. That this is the case has become clear to me over the years. This does not mean that our life paths are in any way pre-determined, or that they are shaped exclusively by how we responded to what happened to us in our formative years, now generally considered to be the period between conception and the onset of adolescence. `We are not our stories´, as Eckhart Tolle never tires of telling us, while David Richo and others do point out that the early chapters of our biographies have the capacity to shape, for good and for bad, the subsequent phases of life.
The more we work through our issues, a process referred to as `inner work´, the less likely we are to be held hostage, in the patterns of both our thinking and our behaviours, by the untended wounds and unresolves conflicts from the past.
Carl Gustav Jung, one of the founding figures of depth psychology and psychotherapy, referred to the integration of supressed aspects of our personalities as `Shadow Work´, the idea being that, as we emerge from childhood, we consign those aspects of our history, thinking, and behaviour which we find unpalatable, to the shadows, in the hope that they would somehow be rendered harmless or even disappear.
They never do. Instead, they crop up again and again in different guises, like the serpent causing bumps in various places under the Persian rug, until we lift the rim and allow it to slither away.
The key to this phenomenon of the past reaching into and effecting our thinking and behaviour is a dynamic referred to as `transference´. In the context of therapy, transference is referred to as the client’s tendency to see a parent, sibling, or any significant person in the therapist and to feel and act in accord with that confusion. Indeed, it can work both ways, with the therapist seeing in a client someone of importance from their own past, and to act in accord with that confusion. This form of transference is called `countertransference´.
Transference is not restricted to the therapy context. It happens in our love relationships, in our families, at work, and in wider social and political contexts. Without realising it, we are glimpsing important figures from our past in our lovers, friends, colleagues, children, idols, strangers, and even in our enemies.
Unless we become conscious of this dynamic, we may be baffled at the `repeat performances´ of painful, destructive, and dysfunctional dynamics in our thinking and everyday lives, never getting to the bottom of how we keep sabotaging ourselves. One woman told me that only after marrying for the third time, and only subsequently discovering, as in the case of his two predecessors, that the new husband was an alcoholic, did she begin to ask if this pattern might have something to do with the inner workings of her own psyche.
What is the payload in the transference process? Feelings, needs, attitudes, expectations, beliefs, fantasies, biases, and our fears, to name but a few. The target onto which we transfer need not even be another human being. Many of us transfer considerable material onto our concept of God, for example. My childhood image was one of a very old man, staff in hand, with a long beard, no smile, and booming voice.
This omniscient figure could see both my thoughts and actions, real time, in their entirety, judged each severely, and was sure to ultimately send me to hell, where I belonged. Here we can see that my belief of unworthiness, formed very early in life, and the associated fears, had found an available target for transference, thus providing me temporary short-term relief.
But there is always a price to pay. Having a God which has nothing remotely to do with love is not much fun and can be a source of great ongoing anxiety. This anxiety and the ensuing suffering would force me later in life to begin my inner work towards integrating those parts of me I had banished. It appears to be a never-ending process, continuing to this day.
A classic example of transference became apparent to me some years ago in the work environment. There had been some turbulence and reorganisation in our business, and I had been given a new assignment, reporting in the temporary interim period to two Directors, both my old and my new bosses. The outline of my new role was still quite fuzzy and, as the weeks turned into months and the requested clarification had not been forthcoming, my frustration and anxiety began to steadily increase.
In a moment of reflection, I realised that there was a voice in me that said that both men were overworked as it was, without me adding to their workload by bringing up, once again, my need for clarification in terms of my new responsibilities and the corresponding replacement contract which would have to be drawn up. Perhaps it was better to hold my peace and hope that the matter would resolve itself.
`No!´, cried another voice deep within. `This is exactly how it felt as a young boy; a thoroughly unsatisfactory state of affairs.´ And then I though about my mother and father, both obviously overtaxed by their responsibilities as the younger of their ten children came into the world, and my reluctance to request that my needs be met, or at least what the boy in me felt those needs were. The danger was that they would not only not be met, but that I might be rejected, chastised, or even ridiculed in the process. `Better perhaps to hide below the parapet…?´
The penny dropped! It was clear that I was caught up in a pattern which was moulded fifty years earlier, caught up in the wake of ships that had long since passed. The welfare of my bosses was not my responsibility today, just as the welfare of my parents had not been in my childhood. That was a story I had made up. Now there were resources at my disposal which were not available or even imaginable back then. I resolved to speak my truth, to stand my ground, to be true to my self. That is what I then did.
On telling my dear friend and coach Michael, with whom I had, and still have a weekly transatlantic call, what I had discovered, he congratulated me on my insights, adding a perceptive remark, namely that it could well be the case that I was the only adult in that configuration who had become aware of transference at play. He had hit the nail on the head.
