Meeting clients where they are
While psychological theories and models have an important place in both training and practice, they are not the heart of what happens in the room. At its core, therapy is about meeting our clients where they are in their experience. This calls to mind a well-known reflection from Carl Jung who, alongside Freud, is one of the founders of the psychotherapeutic tradition: ‘Learn your theories as well as you can but put them aside when you touch the miracle of the living soul.’ Written in 1928, Jung’s insight continues to resonate. So too does Freud’s The Ego and the Id, published just a few years earlier, which remains one of the foundational texts of psychoanalytic thinking.
More than a century on, Freud’s ideas are often so embedded in contemporary language and culture that their origins can go unnoticed. At the same time, they carry the imprint of the political, social and cultural context in which they were developed, and are not without their limitations. Yet many of the concepts he introduced – such as countertransference, projective identification and the superego – continue to inform clinical practice in meaningful ways.
Importantly, these ideas are no longer confined to the stereotype of the detached analyst: silent, objective and positioned behind the patient on a couch. Instead, they are often engaged with in a more embodied and relational way. Therapists draw on them not as rigid frameworks, but as tools to help make sense of their own experience in the room – what they feel, notice and come to understand in relation to their clients.
It is here that a fundamental divergence between Freud and Jung becomes especially relevant. Freud worked hard – arguably with limited success – to establish psychoanalysis as a scientific discipline. Jung, by contrast, maintained that what he called ‘practical medicine’ was, and always had been, an art.² From this perspective, theory can guide, but it cannot determine the work. As Jung writes, ‘True art is creation, and creation is beyond all theories… Not theories, but your own creative individuality alone must decide.’
For those in training, this can be difficult to grasp. The therapeutic encounter is often marked by uncertainty, complexity and, at times, confusion. Both client and therapist may feel its inherent anxiety. In response, there can be a strong pull – particularly for newer practitioners – to rely on theories and techniques as a way of managing the unknown, of creating a sense of stability in something that resists being fully known or controlled.
This tension extends beyond the consulting room into the structures that seek to define and regulate the profession. This work may be necessary, offering clarity and consistency. And yet, it also encounters an inherent limitation. Because when it comes to engaging with what Jung called the ‘miracle of the living soul’, formal training, clinical experience and assessed competencies – while valuable – can only ever offer a representation. They are, as the familiar phrase has it, the map, not the territory.²
References
1. Jung CG. Contributions to analytical psychology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co Ltd; 1928.
2. Korzybski A. Science and sanity: an introduction to non-Aristotelian systems and general semantics. New York, NY: Institute of General Semantics; 1933.
This is an edited extract from an editorial first published in Private Practice, March 2024, published by BACP©