The father figure is the superintendent, and this guy loves
him. He’s the first human being that this guys has loved in his
life. And I am not going to take this love away. If you knew this
guy before and saw him now, he’s had 26 years of unhappiness and
this is his first year of happiness and I’m not going to mess it
all up for him. He’s got a good chance of having the
superintendent who is only in his late forties, around for a long
time. To move him I have to open him up by making him unhappy. I’m
not going to do that. I don’t think we should do that.
Question:
It may be that there is a therapeutic use of some of this and
a research use, but there is a difference. I’m sure in my own work
I have the diagnostic frame of reference that I’m sure that are
quite important to me and yet if I find myself focusing on them it
means that something has gone wrong in terms of the communication
between me and the patient.
Also if the patient starts focusing on them – one way or
the other. This happened the other day as
a patient moved away from something of personal relevance to her to
something else as she focused on how we were interacting. With this
frame of reference, with these systems, the primary interest when it
comes to therapy is what is the guy working on, what problems is he
dealing with, even more I think, than what level he is at.
Dr.
Graves:
Therapeutically, the primary thing is what problems is he
working on and what is he reaching for.
Question:
But I was thinking of the prisoners. As a therapist, we have
to pull back from value judgments about what a person’s
development ought to be. The whole idea that everyone should aim
toward H-U. You have to say, the hell with it. I can say it because
I don’t feel that I’m ever going to make it anyway. The patient
and the therapist need the freedom to talk at the level they are at.
I think something happens between this guy and the superintendent.
It’s conceivable to me that he may find a job in the prison if
they do turn him out or stay around the rest of his life. It’s
also conceivable to me that he would get something out of this that
would allow some change – that would allow some development. I
wouldn’t want to push him. I’d want to leave it up to him and
see what happens as he has a good experience.
Dr.
Graves:
I think that you are absolutely right. And you can see the
thing that I am particularly concerned with is that if you open him
up and enable him to change, you are going to change him from a D-Q
system to an E-R system and then he’ll be coming outside with all
those years as a convict behind him and now he is becoming
aggressive. Is this world ready to accept him? I don’t want that
guy opening up and going outside out side when the world isn’t
ready to accept him.
It’s
the age-old problem. We don’t have it quite as much today but we
sure had it more in the past. The guy is a latent homosexual and he
doesn’t know it. You look at that society and you ask yourself,
should this guy ever take a look at where he’s got to live? Hell,
no! Leave him alone. I’ll do everything I can to keep him from
finding it out. There is such a thing as homosexual panic when they
find it out. It’s rough!
Statement:
I’ve been noting, thinking, talking and discussing this
with some people. It seems to me that somewhere around 1945 children
born then and there after, around the end of world war II – a door
opened and the children began streaming out into a new generation
began. Children born around that time were pretty safe and adopted
the classic middle class values of education and work and so forth.
But then you see going on through their brothers and sisters
moderate and then even drastic changes taking them into the drug
culture and so forth. Is this generally true? What is the meaning of
it? Who is changing? Is
there any validity in this? In the timing of this change for a lot
of the youth today having begun to change. Those who are about that
age – over 25 being safe and under 25 being of the “non’
generation?