The title is one to make most of us
in the business cringe, and the APA is of course the ‘big’ APA, the psychology
one, not the other.  Consequently the book is not about psychological or
psychiatric nosological categories, but about personal journeys, and the
painting, ‘giclee on canvas’ on the cover is Robert Firestone’s own creation. 
For those of you who don’t know, this term refers to a hi-fi digital
reproduction of an original artwork.  So this is a well-rounded family intent
on passing on to the world the secrets, or rather the wisdom that is human
resource allocated correctly. Metaphor carries away even Daniel Siegel in his
foreword, namely, a journey round the world, presumably the Firestones are into
sailing, or rather, they have ‘friends’ who do.

The book further claims to be the
result of 40 years of evaluation of the human response of resistance to
attempts at change (they mention the high seas, by now I am coming to realize
that someone is a sailor).

Statements like "all people
exist in a state of conflict between active pursuit of goals in the real world
and an inward, self-protective defense system characterized by fantasy
gratification and self-nurturance" pepper the book from page xiii
onward, and whether you agree with them or not, its heady enough stuff,
together with the "death of feeling and compassion in contemporary
culture", to whet the appetite of those seeking enlightenment, on or off
the regatta.

So the target then of enrichment
attempts is to deal with the defenses one develops in childhood against pain,
frustration, anxiety, and one hopes, yacht clubs.  In any event, this defensive
set of attributions colors us as adults, and we have to bypass or overcome such
barriers to switch on fulfillment or whatever makes us self-actualize.

Certainly Viktor Frankl and Martin
Seligman were going to be the first to get quoted, but this really is about the
‘Circle of Friends.’

This circle refers to an American
subculture, a culture of "a lifestyle of freedom, openness and
sharing" which instantly reminds me of hippies and Woodstock posters.  So
scratching around, one finds The Glendon Association: see the following web
page to find the Firestones, their lifework, theories, therapies, and their
books there too.  (http://www.glendon.org/#). 
The third author is also associated with this organization, a non-profit
organization that accepts donations so that its ‘high quality and timely’ works
can be distributed to health professionals, or so they say.

After 30 years of boating and other
shared activities, they are sharing their books, articles and documentary
films, in this book.  Now I know why I thought, "Hippies" since this
circle of friends, this community, grew out of the culture of the ’60’s in the
USA and elsewhere.  In this case, with teenagers in the groups experimenting
with drugs, sex and rock ‘n roll, a group encounter with adolescents and
parents led to a schooner setting sail around the world, sometimes staffed only
by about 11 of the kids, and other attempts at creating a lager that would
defend against the cold war world establishment.

While they were away on the boat,
some of those left behind went into business together.  This and other
developments led Firestone One to abandon his practice and go into the group as
a participant observer.

So then this book emerges as a set
of narratives which catalogue the human response to the cold war age, the
plasticization of the USA, the demise of spiritual values, the breakdown of
families, and a fair amount of boating, interspersed with psychodynamic
commentary on what is going on here.

If life in the 21^st
Century is challenging, and if our processing of information is inadequate,
then we will feel lousy, and there are values thus set out in this book that
are regarded as the way out of the trap of everyday life, then, and presumably,
now.

"Indeed, the isolation and
comfort of contemporary society carry with it the risk of reinforcing
psychological defenses that contribute to an inward, self-protective, and
somewhat emotionally deadened way of being and living" (page 16).  And they
say this as if it was a bad thing: after all, we have Oprah, Dr Phil, Tony
Robbins and TV soaps to create such outlets and instruct us in the art of
emotion and psychosocial to-ing and fro-ing.

The book begins to discuss the
fantasy solutions we all are presumed to have, illusions which substitute for
real closeness, warmth, empathy, and meaning, and Frankl again emerges, and of
course, real boating.  To be free, we have to be vulnerable, but that is the
exact thing our defenses are designed to regulate, and so we have to be aware
that there is more, feel unfulfilled and so on.  In healing, we would have to
hurt, feel more, be less defended, or as Mad Magazine used to write, I think it
was Dave Bergs who said it, turn on, tune in, drop dead.  Existential awareness,
a sense of the spiritual, a need for examination of the mystery of life, all
would be necessary pathways, without presumably the Timothy Leary vision of the
world through LSD lenses.

Thus the authors can define what an
‘undefended individual’ means, and profile such persons within the circle of
friends.

As good motivational literature
would do, by chapter two we are looking at the factors that would impede
personal development with a juicy quote from Ernie Becker about masses of
internal scar tissue and throbbing dreams.

And damaged humanness: blaming
parents already, although they admit that to blame mothers and fathers or to be
moralistic or punitive about child-rearing responses only compounds the problem
(page 39), we are looking at the several factors that cause parents to affect
their children adversely.  By now, one is seemingly looking at an extremely
American vision of life and the world, and parenting, middle class American
values, and even some references to Republican parents and Democrat
children-type illustrations.  Not everyone in the world experiences family and
parents in the WASP tradition, so many such as my self would have a hard time
with some of these arguments, coming from families that did not live in Susan
Faludi suburbia.

However I am gratified to see the
Milan School actually mentioned on these pages, one of the first times I have
seen that in years, and of course Professoressa Palazzoli was of the
psychodynamic tradition before she was influenced by the writings of the systemic
and ecosystemic theorists like Bateson, husband to Margaret Mead.  Even
Boszormenyi-Nagy, Murray Bowen, and Salvador Minuchin get a mention, and that
you don’t see everyday, telling you where the thinking on these pages found its
original impetus.  20^th Century responses to 21^st Century
life as well?

So, much of the influence of the
psychoanalytic tradition still carries on with Firestone, even though many
cultures would not have struggled with what middle class America found
pervasive in the baby boom days. And of course, the above influences all were
systemic, ecosystemic or family therapists or theorists, and the focus on
psychopathology had been urged out of the patient, to the identified patient
within a family; here, the Circle of Friends was an ecosystem, with its own
self-regulatory mechanism as can be seen in the writing, the narratives, the
testimony that follows.  Pathology is now no longer intrapsychic, but
intra-personal, and "with respect to physical or emotional child abuse,
virtually no family can withstand close scrutiny" (page 39).

Soon, we are back to discussing the
fantasy bond, the one where we imagine that we are one with the family, our
real one, not the therapeutic community, so one is self-parenting. For
instance, children dread separation, death is the ultimate loss of family by
separation then realization of one’s own mortality, children retreat into a
pre-knowledge-of-death state, and so regress, and other sort of psychodynamic
flowcharts close to Firestone’s heart.  So this is how psychopathology is
described from time to time in this work.  All this increases the defense, the
death anxiety defense, so kids can live on.  One therefore must see these as
barriers to successful psychosocial existence.

Ambivalence in the reader bounds
back and forth between what challenges one might face in the Western
TV-drugs-Playstation-type world, and the rest of us for whom this is a somewhat
different would, but nevertheless feel the cultural universals that plague the
modern world. One in every 115 people is a refugee today, every day millions
are displaced, starving, and so on.  There is a story about a rich, unhappy man
who asks God for the secret of happiness.  God tells him to go and seek a man
who is happy, and then buy his shirt from him.  The man sets out across the
world, and finally sees a man working in the fields, singing away and clearly
delirious with happiness.  Approaching the man to buy his shirt, he discovers
the happy man has no shirt to sell for he is too poor to own one.  The point
being that very poor people I know well begin each day with a keen sense that
if they can only feed their family this day, then it will be a good one.  As
they go to sleep that night, bellies reasonably full, a sense of fulfillment,
of achieved self-efficacy, fills their spirits, and so what they have done
makes a difference, each and every day.  Such feeling is denied to the rich,
they have to refurbish a boat and enter the high seas to create such a sense of
self-efficacy.

For the Firestones and friends, it
appears that little of such spirit is readily available, and they have to go in
search across the world and across their emotional ecosystems to avoid the rush
of plenty in the USA that followed WWII.  America certainly owned the
disestablishmentarianist movement, but Europe had a go too. However, ownership
of such struggles, as I said earlier, appears to be a very American thing, so I
will try and pluck out the Universalist application if that is possible.

I suppose it is true that all
unhappiness is relative, and needs a vehicle, and here the journey proposed by
the Firestones begins with disrupting the fantasy process that believes that
attachment has succeeded, but operates in mythology.  As the quote from Anna
Freud given here goes, gratification through fantasy is no longer harmless when
it occurs in an adult. In fact, the DSM rates it as part of narcissism and
psychopathy.  Again there are Universalist claims that all people exist in
conflict between an active pursuit of goals in the real world and a dependence
on fantasy gratification (page 59).  Fantasy solutions of childhood angst thus
have to measure up to the real world, and the rewards of living in the real
world may clash with the recalled world as it was. In a way it’s like the smell
of the steak that lures, compared to the taste of the steak as purchased and
consumed. Childhood advertises a life in the future, I can’t wait to be an
adult and do my own thing, but when I am an adult, I yearn for the carefree
days of yore.  The trick is to live in the here and now for the rewards of now,
but they are going to feel different to the brochure of Kiddieland.

Again denied, parent bashing
remains the subtle theme of such psychodynamic thinking, "If the child is
fortunate enough to have mature and loving parents who provide the necessary
love-food required for adequate sustenance, he or she would be able to live in
a real world and would have less need to depersonalize or develop defenses that
function to deny reality and avoid psychological pain and frustration"
(page 60).

How much influence parents really
have in the post-post-modern world is unclear.  In expensive countries, very
little time is spent in a family with both parents working, so kids spend
perhaps from 6pm till bedtime, maybe two and a half hours with parents who are
cooking food, doing homework, making phone calls and watching The Apprentice
on TV, wondering who is getting fired by D Trump. 

"Furthermore, the process of gratifying oneself
with internal images or self-parenting mechanisms and the pursuit of
gratification in the external world are mutually exclusive" (page 60).  My
trouble is that I believe it.  Even Donald Trump has to intervene to teach his
apprentices about the real world and shatter their illusions: work hard, take
risks, rely on yourself, provide leadership, follow your gut but pay the price,
there are no free lunches€¦..you’re fired.

So then, coming to the concept of
resistance mentioned earlier, resistance to change that is, is the patient’s
way of cooperating with the world.  Resistance to change is then defined as
resistance, by default, to a different, presumably better life.  In this way,
the individual protects against anxiety states that arise whenever fantasy
processes and the associated self-nurturing behaviors are threatened. 
Suffering is thus easier than change, which would challenge a more internal set
of corrupt values held over from childhood fantastic attachment. In essence,
the adult has to emigrate from the childhood state, adopt a "what was,
was" strategy, and take off the fantasy amour.  In essence, the core
skeleton was not laid down, and so an insect-like chitinous exoskeleton has
replaced the internal self.

Behavior as an adult has to be goal
directed, after insight has been introduced. So the Firestone position is
easily recognizable, defining neurosis as an inward defensive process that
leads people to invest more in internal fantasy rather than the parentless
adult world. Faced with the cruel world, the child-stricken adult comforts
internally in a secret world, and thus stays unattached externally, with no
rewarding relationships or friends in the real sense that Firestone envisages;
one of the pathological pathways involves idealizing the institutions of the
past, and maintaining a negative self image, calling now on Ferenczi and Anna
Freud again, and the individual’s paradoxical response to these perceptions,
with projection and so on.

What all this means is that we get
locked into an internal world, and can’t come out to play as adults would, in a
kind of fusion with the external objects rather than in a real relationship
where the individual is subsumed, like in the Circle of Friends.

Melanie Klein eat your heart out,
for you are seldom quoted, given your presupposition that we are born filled
with rage and aggressive impulses.  Carol Gilligan on the other hand, one of my
personal favorites (along with Suzi Faludi), is mentioned more often, if only
as an archetypical opponent of patriarchal societal influence, Faludi not at
all.  Voice therapy is however promoted briefly as a
cognitive-affective-behavioral methodology, rather like Michael White’s
narrative mixed with Carol Gilligan’s storytelling mixed with Seligman and
Beck.

So the authors move on to
challenging the addictive and nurturing lifestyles, namely habit forming
attempts to soothe the pain of a less than perfect parenting scheme in
childhood. Obviously, these behaviors may not be nicely addictive, just
rewarding in some way, which is defined here as less than optimally adaptive,
settling for second best.  The way out perhaps is a life of "adventure and
travel" (page 102).

Worse than death then is finding
out we have never lived in the Laing-ian sense. So we are shown the Promised
Land, or the up till now not visualized Promised Land, in other words insight
is really outsight when we move our vision across to ‘the what’ could be.  What
it is and what it could be, loss of feeling and ‘inwardness’.  In these ways of
being, we avoid coping with anger, passivity, and a victimized point of view,
all of which come with a sense of entitlement. 

So the book continues, imbuing
psychotherapy with the similar, now established litany of a psychodynamic,
intrapsychic struggle, with resolution of giving up the safety and limiting
stance of the fantasy of a self allocated none of the adult worlds’
cost-benefit dilemmas, opting for safety, a lonely and empty safety without
true emotions, without true attachments, without true adulthood, or true
freedom in the Frankl sense of choice within nothing.

Although heavily psychodynamic in
its approach, and peppered with contentious pronouncement about Universalist
realities, laden with culture-specific comments in a kind of paradoxical
conflation of levels of being, the book is a kind of Celestial Seasoning come
of age tea party for aging hippies that, like Woodstock, feels about right on
the Nostalgia scale, argues common sense clarities of explanation that have
virtually no evidence base since the underlying hypotheses are un-testable, and
hence cannot be refuted.  In an evidence based modern world, one would have to
argue that unproven theory is just observation, and in this case, just
participant observation.

But, there is something compelling
about the arguments here, because they feel right in their logic, and look
right in the multiple conversation-bytes given along the pages.  We all need a
reason to get up in the morning, a reason to escape our internal fantasy world
and deal with what is, instead of what was, what is outside and real and what
is inside and unworkable fantasy.  Psychotherapy may be the only setting for
this in the world of the Firestones and Catlett, for others, it may be in real
war, real poverty, real hunger, real perhaps as used by Firestone as ‘true’. I
don’t know what they mean by ‘true’ as opposed to real. Truth is subjective and
objective, real is just so too, and hence, both are not subject to proof, just
agreement.

So in order to agree with this
tome, with its pronouncement and pretension to alert us to a life of meaning
and compassion, via psychotherapy, you have to suspend many aspects of culture,
of opposition to the Universalist theme, to an acceptance of the messianic
path, truth and real, one comes only to the father via€¦..?

Is it worth having?  Daniel Siegel
and others, me included, find it compelling enough to read, and to reawaken our
love for a paradigm almost lost in the 20^th Century and now the 21^st. 
The metaphors created by Freud, reviled by the Feminists, carried on by Klein
and others, live on in the post-modernist world, nicely done and filled with
earnest writing from a circle of friends. I have to get me some of those.

 

 

© 2004 Roy Sugarman

 

Roy Sugarman,
PhD, Clinical Director: Clinical Therapies Programme, Principal Psychologist:
South West Sydney Area Health Service, Conjoint Senior Lecturer in
Psychiatry, University of New South Wales, Australia.

Categories: Psychotherapy, Philosophical, Psychology