[Reproduced by kind permission of the author from P. Gordon & R. Mayo. 2004. Between Psychotherapy and Philosophy. London and Philadelphia: Whurr.]

PAUL GORDON

Many years ago, when psychotherapy was being subjected to one of its periodic attacks in the media, I spent some time trying to write a piece called 'In defence of therapy'. The article came to nothing but it was some time before I realized what was wrong. The problem was and is that one cannot defend something called 'therapy', any more, indeed, than one can really criticize it. The beast of therapy is hydra-headed and one has to be specific, whether in criticism or defence. Ultimately I can defend and stand up for only what I do, what I think, not for what others may do, unless of course I have chosen in some way to associate with them. Even then differences in thought, style and approach are quickly and easily apparent. This chapter, which borrows its title from Russell McCormmach's dark and elegiac novel, Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist (Penguin, 1983), sets out not a sustained thesis about therapy or even a linear argument. It is rather a sequence, almost an alphabet, of observations written under the sign of scepticism.

A therapy that wishes to renew itself might well look to some writings on art for paths to follow. In his book The Intimate Philosophy of Art, John Armstrong argues that what helps us to get more out of works of art - pictures, buildings and so on - what aids a genuine appreciation is not information or knowledge, the traditional art historical approach whereby one learns about artists, periods, styles, methods and so on. Rather it is our own resources, in particular our capacity for contemplation, reverie and sensitivity. If we allow these to inform our engagement with a painting, say, our appreciation will be deep and authentic:

The therapeutic relationship is not, as some claim, an inevitably abusive one. If it were, no one could be involved in it in good faith. But it is surely beyond doubt that it is a relationship that can become abusive, and very easily so. All this has been well documented. What more is there to say about such things? When therapist and patient engage in a sexual relationship, whatever is going on it is no longer therapy. It is no longer a talking about things but an enactment of them.

What concern me more in a sense, because they are more widespread, are other forms of questionable behaviour. There are simply too many stories of such things - of therapists who hold on to patients long after the therapy seems fruitful, of therapists who seem unable or unwilling to engage in any real dialogue, particularly where it involves them being questioned or challenged. (Herein lie the dangers of dogma, of therapists who think they are the ones who really know what is going on. See for instance Gordon, 2003.) Here I want to address a couple of other issues.

Among the stories are those of therapists who seem distracted or bored or who go to sleep. Now here we are on difficult ground. Of course, as therapists we are affected by the people we are in the room with and these effects can be strange indeed, especially to people outside the world of therapy To speak of someone falling asleep sounds terrible, a gross dereliction of duty if you like. And yet all therapists must be familiar with the urge, or something similar. It is, after all, what theories of counter-transference arc all about, that one person can affect another, quite wordlessly, quite profoundly. These feeling states can be crucial communications from the patient, I do not doubt it for an instant. Indeed, the longer I work the more I trust these silent, sometimes bodily communications. And yet, when we hear such stories and maybe, too, if we are really honest in thinking about our own work, how often do we sense that 'countertransference' is just part of what is going on, that it might even be just a therapeutic excuse for, well, bad behaviour, not being in a fit state of mind for the work? Countertransference, Lacan (1988, p. 228) remarked, in the 'coded language we wallow in" is what we call 'being an idiot'. Therapists frequently work far too much, putting in hours that they would rightly question if a patient said they were doing the same. A certain omnipotence, a self-importance, hides behind the offered excuse of financial uncertainty. But maybe therapy isn't something you can do in this way - the intensity of the encounter is just too much hour after hour after hour.

As for the question of money, here one enters taboo territory, something therapists are extremely reluctant to discuss. There is, it seems to me, nothing wrong with charging fees for therapy if people have the money to pay and this is how I have chosen to make a living. What is questionable, however, is the notion that paying for therapy is somehow good for the patient, an integral part of the treatment. Now if this were true it would surely follow that any form of treatment that did not involve direct payment, for instance in outpatient psychotherapy departments or GP practice counsellors, must be flawed, but this does not seem to be argued. Otherwise arguments about the supposed benefits to the patient of paying are simply self-serving mystifications designed to obscure the fact that paying for therapy is good only for the therapist. Not only that, but psychotherapy must be the only profession where patients can find themselves being charged high fees because of what they earn. A plumber does not charge the well-off client more than someone else, nor do doctors in private work or osteopaths. Yet it is quite common to hear of therapists doing this. The claim that this allows them to see others for low fees must in some cases at least be treated with just a little scepticism. The truth is that therapy is a business as much as anything else these days and the logic of the free market, where one gets as high a price as one can, prevails as much here as anywhere.

Coming to terms

A great many of people's difficulties in life arise from an inability to accept who they are. We berate ourselves for not being something we feel we are not - attractive, successful, intellectual, younger, slimmer, gregarious - whatever. The list is probably endless. And people who have significant emotional or psychological difficulties berate themselves for these too, something therapy can play into with its confused talk of people 'taking responsibility' for their problems. The idea of a 'coming to terms' highlights a process of acceptance, an acceptance of who one is, of one's experience, both of what one has done and what one has suffered. The process is, of course, by no means easy. The idea that we are not, after all, masters of our fate is one most people find hard to accept. Coming to terms is not a surrender, nor a resignation, nor a quietism - 'there is nothing to be done' - but a modest aim that can make a difference.

Dogma

For you apparently it makes a difference who the speaker is, and what country he comes from; you don't merely ask whether what he says is true or false. (Socrates to Phaedrus)

Today dogma continues to have its authorities to whom reference is made in almost sanctified terms, not just historical figures who may have some claim to our attention because of their intellectual contributions, people who are seen as important because of their current professional status. It is 'the hem of the garment' syndrome, where to be in the same room as certain people, to have a conversation with them, let alone to have been analysed or supervised by them, is to have been touched by their supposed greatness. For a profession which sees itself as a great debunker of myth, a great demystifier of illusion, psychotherapy seems just as prone as any other field to idealising leaders, especially those with any hint of charisma, with an uncritical and unquestioning position towards those in clinical authority (In this regard psychotherapy, as RogerBacon has remarked, is a curious discipline in that the reputations of its leading figures cannot by definition rest on their actual work as therapists, which is private, but on their theoretical contributions which may bear no relation to how good they were/are in the clinical encounter. (Bacon, 2000, pp. 8-9) 

The other does not exist: this is rational faith, the incurable belief in human reason. Identity = reality, as if, in the end, everything must necessarily and absolutely be one and the same. But the other refuses to disappear, it subsists, it persists; it is the hard bone on which reason breaks its teeth. (Antonio Machado quoted in Paz, 1990, p. 5)

The 'other' (usually capitalized) has undoubtedly become a fashionable word of contemporary discourse, a word without which no contribution is complete. Indeed, sadly, it may be falling into that category of words that are being emptied of content, which will be impossible to use with real conviction. Yet what it speaks of continues to matter. It may sound paradoxical but there is a sense in which most psychotherapy has lacked any real sense of the other. Theories of therapy are based on concepts of an atomized individual, isolated from any context. Moreover, these theories place the individual at the centre of things, as a sun around which other entities must revolve. Even those theories that seem to grant more place to the other, primarily the mother, still depict the individual as centre stage, with others standing in adjunct, albeit important roles. The other is not only other but secondary. The great achievement of the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas is to put this into question. For Levinas, ethics is my responsibility for the Other, and this responsibility precedes any knowledge I may have of that Other and it is this ethical responsibility to and for the other that makes me a human being; it constitutes me as a subject (see Gordon, 1999, Ch. 2).

Levinas's work is a sustained and radical questioning of the preoccupation in Western thought with knowledge in which even other human subjects arc treated as phenomena - objects - to be known and to be understood. In this process their essential and fundamental otherness is lost. Levinas's conception of ethics also goes against the grain of thought that sees in the other only a version of my self, which appropriates the othher through some assumed knowledge or claimed understanding. Against this Levinas argues that 'there is no exceptional place for the subject'. For Levinas the important question is not 'To be or not to be?' but, rather, how being justifies itself.

Fictions (clinical)

Furthermore, as many people have written, therapists write about their work with one eye over their shoulder, anxious about what their colleagues, real and imagined, will think. People are not only afraid they might look stupid in something they have said or done, or failed to say or do - they fear their membership of a group or theoretical affiliation being called into question; the terror of hearing the words, 'Oh that is not psychanalytic'. (This is part of the reason for the popularity of Yalom's writings - that sense of freedom that says 'I don't really care how this will be judged; I stand by what I do.') Similarly writers will frequently make reference to an unnecessary number of other texts, not just to impress but as a statement of affiliation with a particular position and as a kind of intellectual self-defence. The words, 'As XX says' give us an alibi.

'Between the experience of living a normal life at this moment on the planet and the public narratives being offered to give a sense to that life, the empty space, the gap, is enormous. The desolation lies there, not in the facts.' (Berger, 2001, p. 176) A psychotherapy that wishes to be meaningful must dare to step into that space.

Psychotherapy, as we understand it today, came into being in what has justly been called the century of the self. It has both been shaped by its historical situation and contributed enormously to it. How we see ourselves today as individuals is a lot to do with the project of psychotherapy. The problem is that the theories on which psychotherapy are based invariably extract the individual from the social context. In fact, they rarely are able to see that the very concept of 'the individual' is one that is socially, economically and culturally determined and one that is possible only in a particular context. There is a paradox here. As David Smail has pointed out in many of his writings, therapists (of whatever kind) will readily accept the not-too-contentious notion that each of us is the product of our environment, that the individual man and woman is not self-generated or self created, that all of us, if we are human, are to some extent influenced, moulded, shaped - whatever - by social (including familial), economic and political forces. Yet, once people step inside the clinical encounter all this disappears and patients and clients are treated as though they exist in a vacuum. (At best one may hear some acknowledgement by the therapist of the 'external world' - 'But that's a reality issue', as though there were nothing further to be said and as though that is not our concern.) Now it may be said, and is said, that what happens outside is not our business, that there is nothing we can do about these matters. But even if this is true, there may indeed be little we can do, as therapists, about the material circumstances of people's lives. But something we can do is refuse to collude in the idea that people's problems are somehow all 'in them', in some supposed 'internal world'. This metaphor has become so concretized as to I have become mystification, no longer a possibly helpful way of thinking, if I indeed it ever was, but an obstacle in the way of truthfulness, of seeing the world, and the patient's place in it, for what it really is. (In the hands of some therapists, everything becomes a question of the internal world. Even torture and trauma, it is all in people. If psychoanalysis had been around at the time of slavery would it have told slaves that their problems stemmed from their internal worlds? Probably.) We are in the world and of the world. From the moment of our conception we are social beings, requiring other people to make us - literally - to nurture us, to give birth to us, to look after us, to give us the recognition as another human being without which we would be nothing. None of this is inside me, even metaphorically. It exists as social and material fact.

To say that therapy has become a substitute for religion in a secular society has become something of a cliche. But, as with all cliches, there something true in the allegation. Anyone who looks for the trappings religion - sects, texts and rituals - can find them all too easily. But what is more problematic in this regard is the judgementalism of psychotherapy, its moralism and its normativeness. Note that I use the word moralism and not morality. I have no objections to morality, although the word ethics is preferable, suggesting something more wide-ranging than rules. In a society when the force and authority of religion have rightly been superseded it is only right that we should give some thought to moral issues - how should we live, how should we act? But moralism is something different, with unavoidable connotations of prescriptiveness, of telling people what to do, how to live, how to behave, how to be. This is implicit, if not explicit, in many forms of therapy.

In the case of psychoanalysis, this is something that, like so many things, goes back to Freud He may have been relatively liberal, for instance, in thinking people should not be made to suffer for their sexual leanings but Freud clearly thought them perversions, in the literal sense they were turnings away from something that was designated normal, that is heterosexual intercourse The record of psychoanalysis since then has not been a good one. Women, generations of psychoanalysis has claimed, suffered from penis envy. Homosexuality, of course, was a form of pathology. Indeed, there is an argument that Freud's whole notion of the individual moral sense, located in the superego, is based on what he regarded as purely masculine attributes, born of the oedipal struggle between a boy and his father waged under the threat of castration. In this model, the pre-oedipal, the relationship between mother and child, is obliterated (see Sagan, 1988).

It will be objected that this has changed, that psychoanalysis, for example, has made a decisive turn to the pre-oedipal, that homosexuality is no longer regarded as an illness, and so on. And, of course, this is true - in some quarters at least. Nevertheless, one looks in vain for some self-criticism, some acknowledgement of errors in the past, some sense of the suffering in the pathologizing of individual men and women to which psychoanalysis contributed. (At the same time the public statements of psychotherapy, that homosexuality is not pathologized for instance, are contradicted by individual stories too numerous to ignore.)

Today the moralizing continues, albeit with different emphases and inflections. What is one to make, for instance, of the neo-Kleinian position that holds that the fount of all genuine creativity lies in parental procreative sexual intercourse? At a more ordinary and everyday level listen, in so-called clinical discussions, to the implicit judgments that are made all the time -people are envious, narcissistic, defensive, engaged in projection and projective identification, and while it will be readily acknowledged that these are universal attributes, somehow it is always others, the objects of the discussion in question, who are engaged in these manoeuvres. Hear, too, how much traditional (and deeply conservative) ideas of male/female functions and roles permeate the discourse. Fathers, it is said, are needed to help children separate from their mothers, to set boundaries which, one presumes, women cannot do. Listen to how easily therapists in their everyday discourse about patients cross the line from understanding to judgement, from 'mad/bad'. As therapists, we are among the first to dismiss any notion that people who are emotionally distressed and disturbed are somehow bad We say, quite rightly, they are the products of their histories, of their experience, and it is this that makes them who they are and do what they do And yet how easily under pressure of the intransigence and intractability of suffering this slips into its opposite, judgement and even condemnation, as though people choose to be unhappy, to cut themselves, to starve. As though their suffering were a sign of moral failure.

Too often this moralism infects the practitioners in a way that is insufferable. One encounters not an atmosphere of humility in the face of human suffering and human complexity but positions of presumed knowledge, insufferable preciousness and suffocating sanctimony. Therapists behave as though they are an elect, superior to other more ordinary mortals who have not come to share in their truth, who have not been enlightened. The common view of therapists as arrogant, earnest, smug, self-satisfied, lacking in ordinary qualities - a genuine warmth, a lightness of touch, a humour and spontaneity - is more than a little true. The 'plain speaking' claimed by many is in truth a lack of manners, a failure of tact.

The self-satisfaction is of course misplaced. Therapists live lives that are |no better than anyone else's. We are just as petty, envious, narcissistic, self-aggrandising, mean-minded as anyone else. The claims to greater insight and self-awareness can not only be a little hard to take but also alibis for bad behaviour, where 'insight' becomes an excuse, as in the frequently heard 'I know I'm deeply envious . . .' or 'I'm a terrible narcissist but…'

At the level of groups the history of therapy is the history of doctrinal disputes, organizational schisms and bitter fighting with an awful lot of demonizing, processes that continue to this day, as all involved know only too well and often to their cost.

'Kindness is what matters, all along, at any age - kindness, the ruling principle of nowhere!' (Morris, 2001, p. 186).

A political economy of the sentiments has developed in mimicry of all the sacralized marketings elsewhere. When interrogating our profoundest relationships, we ask, 'What's in it for me, is it a good emotional investment, what do I get out of it, what is the pay-off, where is the bottom line?' 'I gave you everything', cry the debtors of psychic economics, 'and I was conned, swindled, taken in, cheated'. A language of pecuniary fraud is deployed to describe our broken bonds and ruined attachments. Will it pay dividends, will I get a good return for love or friendship, how high is my stock right now. I staked everything, and I came away empty-handed. A bankruptcy of the soul and heart that is filed in no court. (Seabrook, 2002, p. 21)

Music may be the one cultural form that evades the psychotherapeutic grasp to understand and to subjugate. Psychoanalysis for example, George Steiner (1989, p. 46) remarks, is almost helpless in the face of music. This may be, as the saying has it, the exception that proves the iule. Freud, famously, did not like music. 'I am almost incapable of obtaining any pleasure' from it he said in the first page of his essay on Michelangelo's statue of David (Freud, 1914, p. 211). Is this not astonishing? Even Lenin, now one of the most vilified figures of the modern world, found Beethoven's Appassionata sonata unbearable, that such beauty could exist in such a terrible world. But he could hear it for what it was. In music as in no other art, Oliver Sacks suggests, we find expressed a whole range of emotions, some of them not even nameable, and their resolution. Maybe it is this unnameability that is so problematic for therapists, 'Why it circles and returns/ instead of giving a straight answer/ as the Gospel demands' as Adam Zagajewski puts it in his poem, 'Late Beethoven'. (RD Laing once remarked that music told him, a lonely child, that other people had the same thoughts and feelings as he did, that he was not alone in this. It was 'a connection to the heart of humanity'.) For some time I wanted to write a story about a character, the music healer, who would advise people on music they might listen to accompany them in difficult (indeed not always difficult) periods in their lives. 'Maybe,' he might say, 'you should listen to Miles Davis' Kind of Blue every evening for a while, or Shostakovich's Preludes and Fugues for piano or try Arvo Part's Fratres ...' (Incidentally, as the musician and writer David Toop remarks sharply, the music produced by men in popular genres surely gives the lie to the nostrum that men cannot express what they feel.)

A therapeutic buzz word, without a doubt, as the mountain of literature attests, not to speak of the confusion and doctrinal disputes. But is there not another kind of narcissism, a narcissism of the consulting room, not to say a solipsism, in which nothing exists outside of the room and where the patient's utterances are to be taken as referring either to himself or to the therapist? To speak of a colleague who is a bully and oppressive, for instance, is to be speaking not about a colleague who is a bully and oppressive, but about the 'bully in oneself' or the bully and oppressive therapist. In such situations is it any wonder that people feel unheard, that they are being driven mad?

Ordinary

What is ordinary is pathologized - loss, grief, ageing, illness, jealousy, obsession, anxiety, redundancy. Psychotherapy becomes part of the process of what Tana Dineen calls 'manufacturing victims'. (Dineen, 1999) Having started out as an attempt to normalize the pathological, or at least place it on a continuum with the normal, therapy has ended up making the normal a problem. What is called for, as Peter Lomas has consistently argued for a long time, is a return to the ordinary, to the everyday ways of I being and thinking that are too easily dismissed by the professional. Indeed, the further the therapist moves from the ordinary and everyday, in the speculation and investigation of fantasies for instance, which are in any case unprovable, the further he may disable the patient from being ordinary and living an ordinary life (Lomas, 1999).

Politics

Attempts to apply psychotherapy to political and social issues wrongly conflate two domains - the domain of psychotherapy and the domain of politics - that are separate. My work as a psychotherapist does not give me any special insights into matters that are, ultimately, political. Is there anything useful or meaningful that a psychotherapist can say, as a psychotherapist, about the environment or the economy, for instance? I doubt it very much. Therapists may well think a great deal about these and other issues but the resulting ideas do not emanate from what they have decided to do in their working lives. More than this, once therapists start to think psychotherapeutically or psychoanalytically about these things, a grave mistake is being made, a category error, mixing up terms from one discourse with those from another.

This is why so often attempts to speak about social and economic issues from the viewpoint of psychotherapy sound so unconvincing or even confused. Even if what is said is true, it is often just banal - for example, when people speak of group psychology, for instance about the nature of leadership or people's need for strong leaders. It is why much of Reich's work, for instance, is simply embarrassing. (That said, not all of it is by any means and one must in any case acknowledge Reich's commitment for which he paid the unique price of expulsion from both the official Communist and psychoanalytic movements.)

This is what is wrong with attempts in recent years by psychotherapists to have some political influence, to inject what they would see as an emotional dimension into areas of policy such as economics, education and the environment. Here, too, there is a confusion between what belongs in the personal lives of individuals and what belongs in the world of politics. Not only that, but there is also a dangerous reduction of material issues to psychological ones, as clearly shown in a proposal by one such group to investigate the 'emotional meaning of money'. What on earth does this mean? It is not that money does not have an emotional significance but this is hardly its most important attribute. A moment's reflection tells us that ours is a society that values money above all else and that money allows one a considerable degree of control over one's life. A shortage of money signifies a lack of value in what one is or does and the absence of any meaningful control over one's life. The emotional significance follows from these lacks. And only people who are comfortably off could possibly pose this question.

This kind of thinking, aimed at making politicians more aware of the emotional or psychological implications of their policies, is quite wrong-headed. While it is true that passions are aroused in politics, this does not mean that politics is or should be about emotions. Politics is about, or should be about, power and the distribution of resources. If politicians want to improve the psychological lives of the majority of men, women and children then they have to address this question.

'Oh my body, make of me always a man who questions' (Fanon, 1968, p. 165).

Despite all the criticism and qualifications, therapy matters, or can do. It is certainly not the most important thing in the world and there are many types of work that are more beneficial to the world. But, in small ways, and maybe not so small ways at some times, it is important and can help people to lead lives that are less disturbed and more creative, more alive.

In therapy we do what? We listen to another and in doing so we recognize her as another human being. We put into practice the idea of the Roman poet that 'Nothing human is alien to me'. This is not something other to me but this is also me, at least in possibility. This may be the first time that someone has ever taken this stance in relation to this person.

We listen to the people who come to see us and we listen in a way that other people do not listen to them, and maybe never have listened to them. We engage with them. We reflect with them and we offer a space in which such thought and reflection might, against the odds, take place. We are interested, and if we are not we are interested in thinking about why not. We help to clarify and demystify. We offer, as David Smail puts it, a form of solidarity. We show people that they are not alone. 'Do not leave me in my solitude', as the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas puts it, is the cry of the other to me (Mortley 1991, p. 15). We offer our thoughts drawn from our own experience in life as much as our work. We help people come to terms with who they are, to accept who they are with all their faults and limitations and, in so doing, maybe help to open up new possibilities of who they might become. Recognition is not about some phony niceness, although there is nothing whatsoever wrong with tact and manners, something too many of us have forgotten in our professional (de)formation. 'I would meet you upon this honestly', as Eliot puts it, an honest meeting, an attempt at one, where everything can be talked about. And if I experience someone as arrogant or mean or self-obsessed I have a responsibility to articulate this in a manner that is appropriate to the occasion and I must be prepared to hear difficult things about myself also.

Scepticism

Scepticism is not to be confused with cynicism - to know the price of everything but the value of nothing, as Oscar Wilde put it. Nor is it to be confused with a posturing, usually associated with a certain kind of post-modernism, which appears to hold that we can know nothing or that all positions and perspectives are of equal value. Scepticism holds, rather, that we are entitled, indeed enjoined, to question. 'What is the basis of your belief or assertion? How do you know that?' If we are unable to ask these questions we might as well give up whatever it is we are doing. 'Language' says the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, 'is already scepticism'. The very fact of language enables us to put things in question, not to take things for granted. This is part of the responsibility of being a human, speaking being.

Whether it is an epistemological position valid for all seasons is debatable. That it is a valuable, even necessary position for the psychotherapist seems less so. Scepticism is not some easy option, an excuse for mental laziness. Far from it. A sceptic has to work a lot harder, think a lot more for herself. Like the agnostic in the field of religion there are no easy dogmas to follow, to fall back on. ('It's in the Bible/Koran/Torah'; 'It's God's will', 'Jesus/Moses/Mohammed decreed . . .') Life is a lot harder when you have to think for yourself.

Therapization (of everyday life)

The growth of therapy has also contributed to what one might call, if rather inelegantly, the therapization of everyday life, the ways in which the language and culture of therapy have infiltrated spheres of life outside of the clinical encounter as well as the ways in which people have come to see themselves. In some ways this is no bad thing. It is right, for instance, if institutions such as prisons and the criminal justice system become less punitive and more understanding of what it is in people's lives that lead them to do the things they have done. It is right that we increasingly recognize that the experience of learning is a profoundly emotional one as well as an intellectual one. But there are other ways in which therapy affects the culture that are much less welcome - indeed, which ought to make us rather worried.

At an everyday level there is the way in which therapy is proffered as a solution for almost everything - bereavement, redundancy, illness, separation and divorce. It is shocking how quickly therapy or counselling will be offered or suggested to someone who has suffered in some way. Moreover, the suggestion, 'maybe you should think about seeing someone?' can, all too often, be a way of saying, 'actually I don't have time for what you are going through'. In this sense the culture of therapy can justly be accused of contributing to the weakening of more ordinary bonds, especially those of family and friendship. In the same vein, there is the terrible language of therapy that has invaded the culture. People don't talk to or with one another, they 'share'; people don't cut or burn themselves, they 'self-harm'; people don't refuse to do things, they are 'resistant' to them; people do not disagree about things but are 'in denial'; people are not oppressed or exploited but have low self-esteem.

There are more far-reaching ways in which therapy has invaded the public culture that are far from welcome. There is the way, for instance, in which the provision of therapy is seen as the answer to deprivation which is material. The denial of material resources to schools, for example, which prevents them doing the job they are supposed to be doing, not to mention the vilification and denigration of teachers that has become a regular feature of public discourse, is not going to be set right by the provision of psychological help. This is not, it must be emphasized, an argument against therapy. It should go without saying that schools should have access to whatever help they need, psychological or otherwise.

Universalization

One of the most regrettable tendencies in psychotherapy is the tendency to universalize, to make general statements from specific situations. Practising therapists fall into this trap all the time when they use a highly specific clinical example as proof of a general theory. More fundamentally, Freud generalized hugely from his own experience or, rather, his thoughts about his own experience. He assumed, for instance, from his own love for his mother and jealousy of his father, a universal syndrome, the Oedipus complex. What was true for Freud had to be true for everyone at all times, a pretty narcissistic view of things (Heaton, 1993, p. 116). Not only that, but Freud drew from his own experience of an authoritarian father-son relationship the conclusion of an inevitably authoritarian politics. This helps us to understand, although not forget, Freud's dedication in 1933 of a copy of Why War? (his exchange of letters with Einstein) to the Italian dictator Mussolini with the inscription 'with the respectful greetings of an old man who recognizes in the ruler the cultural hero' (Brunner, 2001, p. 170).

In his attentive and thoughtful reading of the writings of Primo Levi, Robert Gordon argues that what makes Levi meaningful to millions of readers who have never experienced a fraction of the horror that Levi endured, what can make him seem almost like a friend, are his 'ordinary virtues'. These are the virtues of listening, of common sense (not really that common of course), of friendship, of wit, of discretion. From every page exudes 'a practical, engaged sense of living, working and writing' along with an unceasing commitment to various forms of practical intelligence (Gordon, 2002, p. 89). It is this practical wisdom which through intelligent engagement with the world can clarify or humanize experience.

There is a predictability of intellectual life, a deadness even in the therapeutic culture. Nothing surprises. Nothing cannot be explained or understood. The book, the film, the play and, of course, the person -none can escape the grasp of psychotherapeutic theorizing. But let us be honest. How often does one really want to read that book or article or attend that lecture or seminar, particularly after formal qualification? Very rarely in my experience. The reason is simple. Before one has even opened the book or gone to the lecture one knows what one is going to hear. It is all so predictable, so lacking in any kind of freshness, let alone excitement. (Of course there are exceptions; there always are. But all too often the exceptions are less illuminating in themselves than as signifiers serving to point up what is wrong with all that is not exceptional.)

Wonder, Peter de Bolla writes, is not the same as awe, or rapture or surprise, each of which can involve a paralysis of other senses. By contrast, wonder requires us to acknowledge what we do not and indeed may never know, to acknowledge the limits of our knowledge: 'It is ... a way of knowing that does not lead to certainties or truths about the world or the way things are. It is a state of mind, of being with the world and oneself that, like being in love, colors all that we know we know' (de Bolla, 2001, p. 143).

Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does. (DeLillo, 1998, p. 465)

I am, as always, grateful to Melissa Benn for her encouragement and constructive criticism in the writing of this chapter.

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