Dr.
Graves:
If the person is considerably above then they can do this
over the short run of time. Now, this is an incredibly complicated
thing when you get into the status of it. In a childlike manner, the
individual progresses through the first six systems in the first
year. So, it isn’t such a long period of time before the mother
can’t stay with him. If it is too long a period of time, it begins
to be a difficulty and what I said before has to come into the
picture.
Question:
I wondered about this difficulty with going back to earlier
systems as a helper. It seems to me that therapy often involves
going back to earlier systems – unless you are saying that a
therapist can only help people in his own category whatever that is.
Dr.
Graves:
As soon as we come to therapy you are asking yourself, first
of all, out of what system does the disorder behavior emerge? When
one finds out the system of which the particular disorder behavior
– it may be just a single or it may be more – emerges then the
question is what kind of therapy is appropriate there. Now, if the
therapist in his psychology or her psychology operates at a level
higher than the system that is emerging he can work with him. But if
he is too high above he doesn’t like to do it, and is apt to do it
ineffectively. Now, I’m not talking here about anything anyone
doesn’t know or can’t find in the literature. Who were Freud’s
subjects? Who were Icorn’s subjects? Icorn worked with a human
being that Freud couldn’t stand. Who is Paul Fredder do therapy
with? Paul Fredder working in a Freudian group in
Vienna
did his
therapy with those patients that he observed to become psychotic
under Freud’s teaching. The patients got worse. Icorn chose his
group of humanity. Freud chose his and Fredder chose his. It is
notorious that Jung preferred to work only with affluent upper class
people who had made it in this world. Alder has his preferences. And
this is all well documented in the literature. Plenty of studies
have been done on this - that various therapists selected their
subjects.
Question:
You couldn’t be B.F. Skinner using Rogerian methods?
Dr.
Graves:
Skinner selected his subjects. . . hungry pigeons and hungry
rats.
Question:
I wonder if you might also explain that by a kind of
inflexibility on the part of each of these people partly about not
be aware of the need using this particular approach.
Dr.
Graves:
This is not in your good therapists. Anyone who knows
Freudian theory knows that it went through a number of revisions. He
knows also that Freud appeared to be quite inflexible and all you
have to do is to read the way he took off on Adler in Psychopathology
in Everyday Life
when Adler didn’t go along with him and how he cut him up into a
million little pieces. He was extremely inflexible at that time.
Freud was a tremendous scientist and when the data piled up the man
said; “By God, I’ve got to switch”
and he did. All the good therapists have done this . . . change when
the data changed. Adler started out, if you want to understand Adler
you’ve got to read Timewise(sp?) because early Adlerian theory is
not later Adlerian theory. But at the same time the people he was
studying were different at the early versus later periods of his
life. So it is not that they were necessarily inflexible.
Freud chose people who were confluent with his level of human
existence. And . . .if you know the E-R level you know that one of
the primary characteristics of a person attempting to come fully
into the E-R level is to be stubborn as hell about changing his mind
and then suddenly he’ll flip-flop.
This is very congruent with the kind of patient Freud really
had to work with, namely. the people struggling to get out from
under the dominant mother, mama. Maskin documents this magnificently
in the literature.