The last nine Covid months have been weird. They have felt relatively unproductive, and yet I think something intangible or indefinite has happened. I think a great deal has been processing in the background. In the foreground, so to speak, one of the things I did was to write a piece for the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy in which I try, rather ambitiously, to set out what remote working has taught me about therapeutic process – or “being with”.
I attach a link to the pdf below and invite you to read it whilst respecting copyright. Here, though, are two essential points:
- I talk about content and process and assert that video conferencing platforms favour content at the expense of process. I give examples of how timing is messed with and non verbal material is sacrificed so that verbal content can be transmitted as intact as possible. But I acknowledge that the distinction between the two is not absolute or clear. “Which is the content and which the process, for example, when a mother and a baby look at one another?” The therapist looks for the content in the process. I believe this is one important reason for the increased effort needed to carry out certain categories of conversation when the participants are “remote”: How to be with someone when you can’t actually be with them.
- I invite the reader to an exploratory use of the idea of animus. I use this word, not in the gendered sense that Jung used it, nor in the sense of aggressive urge, but to denote that which gives life to or animates our utterance. If what I have to say to you is to reach you, and if you are to appreciate it in a holistic sense – ie not simply the overt content but also the content embedded in process – then it must reach you with its animus intact. Human contact is a living process. This, I believe, is something that the video conferencing platform with its binary coding, simplistic algorithms, and bias in favour of verbal content, cannot yet achieve.
Therapeutic Attitude 