Psychoanalytic Self Help: What would it look like?

I have just written a scholarly essay about the relationship of what I call “the experimental mind” to “the clinical mind”.  Of course, both of these are imaginary – or rather caricatures of ways that the human mind can function, but I think they are also deeply conflicting ideals within me.  I have been cajoled and encouraged to follow the one in particular – the experimental mind – both quite consciously and directly by my profession and particular mentors in it – but more subtly and insidiously by the culture and perhaps especially and most problematically by writers who are encouraging me, on the surface, to have a clinical mind but are actually functioning out of the experimental mind.

The experimental mind is the mind of the scientist – it looks for a single solution – a means of explaining how this phenomenon is caused by that event.  The clinical mind is intended to cull through reams of information – not looking for a silver bullet – but for the best course of action at this moment in a constantly shifting theater of opportunities and threats – that will best get us from this place to that with the most advantage and/or least loss.  If the experimental mind is definitive, the clinical mind is tentative.

 

Because it is tentative and uncertain (we could say feminine), the clinical mind is not to be trusted, it is feared, and frequently disdained – including by those of us (all of us) who must operate in this mode.  In fact, this is how we operate all the time.  But we pretend, I believe, to function as experimentalists – and we work towards having the kind of certainty that only experimentation – or, I think more accurately, mathematical proof, can provide.

Of course mathematical proof rests on axioms – and these are shifty things.  We have to agree to accept them – and what mind can do that but the clinical mind.  The point here is that even in clinical writing, the author presents their formulation – their understanding of the individual they are working with – their description of the intervention they make – as the proper one.  And we learn from that.  

If they were to write about how lost I feel when I am deeply in the mode of clinical listening, we wouldn't want to read that book - who wants to feel that way as a therapist - or as someone who is trying to help him or her self.  We need to be definitive and firm and clear – which, on occasion, all too frequently perhaps, I also am.

But what certainty (or perhaps false certainty) keeps us from seeing is that the multiplicity that the clinical mind – or I might say the mind of the dreamer – opens us up to is a strength not a liability.  It says not this OR that, but this AND that.  The trope about improv comes to mind – whatever the other player says, you reply, “yes and…”.

 

We live in a world that is filled with yes/and – especially because we are engaged with people who are as they present themselves – and they are so many other things as well.  Part of the clinical process is to help people get to the core of themselves – to articulate among those many versions of themselves which are the more central and important ones – which ones fit best for us at which moments.  And this is the job of not just the clinician, but the politician, the novelist, and every kind of artist.  Or rather both are.  We articulate the palette of possibilities – when we are functioning with the clinical mindset – and then we foreclose on a particular perspective with the experimental mindset.

 

Clinicians who work from my perspective work to remain in the clinical mindset as the patient forecloses on this OR that or this AND that result. Clinicians in other camps – ones that are more fundamentally informed by the experimental mindset – are more likely, like the politician – to articulate the preferred mindset – this will get you from here to there.  Their self help book reads - "Think this way" or "Don't think like that!"

How would a self-help book from the clinical mindset read?  It would say things like, “Stay open to possibility”, “allow things to emerge”, and “Don’t foreclose”.  And people who do this don’t ever quite get anything accomplished.  We need to shift into an experimental mindset – but the longer we can hold that mindset at bay while we come to consider the many available possibilities – and the more we can use the clinical mindset to realize when we have arrived at a critical mass for following a particular path – the more likely we are to follow a path that reflects more of the complicated and conflicting but relevant aspects of ourselves that will allow us to achieve something that is likely to help us feel that we are being who we feel ourselves most authentically to be.

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