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SYNOPSIS
You cannot cure a single human being, not even
with psychotherapy, unless you first of all restore their relation to
Being." Martin Heidegger
Listening is clearly central to the practice of both counselling and
psychotherapy. Given this, it is quite extraordinary how little thought
has been given to the nature of therapeutic listening and to the
cultivation and evaluation of the therapist as listener. Instead,
listening is a subject marginalised in both the theoretical literature
on psychotherapy and in the practical training of counsellors and
psychotherapists - not to mention physicians and psychiatrists.
In this collection of essays and articles by Peter Wilberg, the thinking
of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger provides the platform for an
exploration of the deeper nature of listening as a mode of active inner
communication with others - one of profound significance not only in the
'helping professions' but in inter-personal life. In professional
training contexts, the willingness of the trainee therapist to listen
and hear is taken for granted, and the "art" or
"skill" of listening reduced to learning different ways of
responding to what a client says. From the client's point of view
however, healing begins with being fully heard - not with the
therapist's responses. Indeed what a client says or does not say and the
way in which they say it or "unsay" it is already a response -
a response to the way in which the therapist is or is not listening.
Listening is no mere natural ability or technical communication skill.
It is a basic dimension of what Heidegger called our human Da-sein
or (t)here-being. What we are capable of hearing is determined by our
capacity to be fully present and here with ourselves, and at the same
time fully there and "with" the other. Listening is not just a
basic mode of Da-sein. It is also midwife to the word. What
Wilberg calls Maieutic Listening (from the Greek maieuesthai - "to
act as a midwife") is not a new form of psychotherapy, but the
embodied essence of therapeutic listening. "The Therapist as
Listener" not only critically questions many of the professional
modes of listening currently practiced in counselling and psychotherapy,
but introduces the principle and practice of Maieutic Listening.
Maieutic listening is not the application of a set of skills or
techniques but the disciplined cultivation of a basic inner bearing -
that of the listener as midwife. The therapist as midwife is someone
able to fully be and bear with others in pregnant silence. Their role is
not merely to help others give birth to new insights about themselves
but to help them give birth to a new self - their own listening self.
For what use is psychotherapy, if through it, the client does not find a
way to discover and embody a new inner bearing, a new way of being with
and listening to themselves and others?
PREFACE
Counselling and psychotherapy, like many other form of professional
practice are based on a specific framework of practical relations
between the professional and his or her clients. Similarly, training in
counselling and psychotherapy, like that in other professions involving
one-to-one relationships to the client, focuses on the knowledge and
skills necessary to pursue a successful practical relation with
the client. Herein lies a fundamental paradox however. For counselling
and psychotherapy are essentially relational practices. As such,
they cannot be reduced to a set of practical relations and the
professional knowledge and practices that shape these relations.
Despite the lip-service paid to the importance of the ‘therapeutic
relationship’, the very term obscures this distinction between
a therapist’s professionalised practical relations to their clients on
the one hand, and their personal relational practices, on the other.
We would be better off speaking not of some ‘thing’ called
the therapeutic relationship but rather ask ourselves what
constitutes therapeutic relating? A simple answer would be listening.
One might think that listening – understood as a relational practice
– would be the central focus of all forms of
psychotherapy and counselling training (not to mention medical
training). The fact that it is not is testament to a general ‘psychopathology’
of human relations to which the counselling and therapeutic ‘relationship’
can too easily falls prey. This general pathology – which affects each
and every client - is the subordination of relational practices to
institutionalized social and professional practices of all sorts.
The primary aim of the essays and articles collected in this book is to
emphasise the intrinsically therapeutic character of listening
– understood as a relational practice and not merely as the
application of a body of theoretical knowledge and professional ‘skills’
to the ‘therapeutic relationship’. Above all it is the thinking of
Martin Heidegger that allows us to understand listening not just as a
‘communication skill’ but as a fundamental mode of human being or Dasein
- that of being with others (Mitsein). Listening as a relational
practice is a practice of being with others in silence which
requires the listener to be both fully ‘there’ (Da-sein) and
to be fully with the other (Mit-sein). Yet being fully there
and with the other requires not just the professional
attention or personal empathy of the listener but their fully
embodied presence as a human being. For it is only by listening with
and from their whole body that the therapist can listen with and from
their whole being and in this way be both fully there (Da) and
‘all ear’. I understand
listening therefore not simply as a relational practice but as a bodily
relational practice – a relational activity of our whole body and
whole being and not just the instrumental professional use of our ears
and minds.
As for the innately therapeutic power of listening as a
relational practice, I believe this lies essentially in its maieutic
character (from the Greek maieuesthai – ‘to act as a midwife’).
Listening – being with oneself and others in pregnant silence - is the
midwife of speech. What I call ‘maieutic listening’ however, is a
specific mode of not only being but bearing with others in the
pregnancy of silence. Only such a therapeutic bearing can help another
to not only ‘endure’ their own suffering but bear and body it -
allowing it to give birth to a new inner bearing towards the
world and other beings.
The chapters of this books have been compiled from independent essays or
articles written over a period of ten years - during which time my own
understanding and articulation of the of listening has naturally
undergone its own changes and refinements. Though written at different
times, from somewhat different angles and with some variation in
discourse style, all the chapters argue that the phenomenology of
listening is a fundamental, missing dimension of psychotherapy and
counselling training. They also argue for a fundamental shift in the
primary focus of psychotherapy and counselling as such - from the
pathology of the client (in whatever way this is theoretically
understood) to the relational practices of the therapist as listener.
This in turn requires a shift in focus from specific psychological
states and processes that a client may present and be aware of to
an attunement (Einstimmung) on the part of the therapist or
counsellor with those felt tonalities of awareness that
tune and tone (bestimmen) the client’s whole way of being in
the world.
Feeling tones and ‘fundamental moods’ (Grundstimmungen) are
not psychic contents in themselves and yet they colour an individual’s
whole way of experiencing themselves and others.
They are also the very wavelengths of attunement linking
practitioner and client and as such ‘carrier waves’ of messages
which communicate directly to the client. The fundamental message of
this book is that listening is itself an active form of silent inner
communication with others. For
the mode and manner in which we listen to another human being – above
all the inwardly felt tone of our listening – is something that
directly communicates, bearing back or ‘re-lating’ its own message to
the other, and telling them – even before they speak – how we see
them and to what extent we are open to truly hearing them. It is in this
sense that listening is in itself a relational practice and therefore
also an ethical practice in the deepest sense.
In stark contrast to this message is the belief – so entrenched and
taken for granted that it is almost invisible - that listening is a mere
prelude to some form of verbal response or therapeutic
intervention on the part of the counsellor or therapist. This belief
ignores the intrinsically communicative character and potentially
therapeutic character of listening as such.
Instead of thinking of listening as a prelude to finding their own
response to a client’s words, counsellors and therapists need to
constantly remind themselves that what a client reveals to them in the
counselling or therapy session, along with the manner in which they
reveal it, is already and in itself a response to the inner
bearing of the counsellor or therapist as listener. |
