will never forget a recent visit to a South Carolina town that back in the 1960s had fought bitterly against blacks and whites even using the same drinking fountains. My first night I went to a restaurant and found it filled with interracial couples. But that was not the greatest shock. What was everyone eating in this one-time bastion of the Deep South’s resistance to any alteration of its tradition? Sushi!
The McCarthy era is now notorious for the hysteria that gripped public opinion and the way people’s careers were destroyed because of “undesirable associations.” One of my closest friends is a lawyer who defended all kinds of unpopular causes, including the Hollywood Ten, in the worst witch hunts of the early 1950s. Then in the 1970s, just before Watergate broke, Charles Colson joined his law firm. Being on the blind side of justice, my friend took his new partner’s case when Colson became involved in the investigation. When my friend tried to counter the pre-judging efforts of the local press, he suddenly found many of his long-term, liberal friends refusing to associate with him. In the midst of that, I said to him, “Things really have turned around, haven’t they?” “Hell, no,” he responded, “I’m still on the same side.”
When I first entered the field of psychotherapy a generation ago, family therapy was, at best, an obscure elective in social work schools. I decided to launch myself by sending a letter to physicians in my community announcing that I was going to start a counseling and consultation service. My naive idea was to help people find sources of counseling, the field then being so unfamiliar to the average lay person. I was immediately reported to the State Board of Medicine for conduct unbecoming a lay person. The charge, in fact, was that I was guilty of practicing medicine. The ostensible upset was that I had used the word “diagnosis” in my brochure (ironically a word I would never have used a few years later), and the act of diagnosing, according to some members of the local medical society, was a medical activity.
I tried, at first, to point out to the blue-ribbon committee selected to meet with me and my attorney that every Sears in town had a diagnostic center, but to no avail. Eventually, they agreed over a bottle of Jack Daniels to let me alone, if I would only stop using that word, and, of course, the brochure that contained it. Several years before, the first president of the American Association of Pastoral Counseling had been similarly challenged by the local psychoanalytic society because he had people lie down on a couch during therapy. That conflict was also resolved by compromise; he agreed only to do therapy with people when they were sitting up.
All this may sound absurd today at a time when analysts, representing an ever smaller percentage of therapists, seem like an endangered species. (These days they even submit papers for presentation at AAMFT conferences.) Today their chutzpa at trying to corner the market in therapy seems a bit ludicrous. But back when that was happening no one could have envisioned in his wildest dreams that the psychoanalytic dominance of the therapy world would decline so precipitously.
Each of these vignettes touches on the basic paradox of change. Despite human beings’ extraordinary ability to maintain the status quo, the world keeps throwing the unanticipated developments our way that sometimes thwart our extraordinary talents for resisting change. For professional helpers the important point is that the more deliberately intended the attempt to bring about change, the more easily the resistance demons are triggered.
Mentors
In my own training, I was fortunate in having two mentors who understood as well as anyone I’ve ever met the folly of trying to will change. My first supervisor was Les Farber, a training analyst with the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, who had an existential rather than an interpretive emphasis. For Farber, the central issue in therapy was distinguishing between what could be willed and what couldn’t. For example, one could will sitting at the dinner table, but not appetite; one could will going to bed, but not sleep. (And I would add family members can will being together, but not togetherness.) Farber’s view was that almost all neuroses and psychoses are a disorder of the will. The failure to accept the inescapable limitations of conscious control led to willing one’s own thoughts (compulsivity) or one’s environment, including others (hysteria).
Farber believed that it was not only patients who had disorders of the will. He taught me that helpers can fall into the same traps, believing that they could will their patients to think the way they’d like them to. Ultimately, Farber took the position that ineffective therapy — and also therapist burnout — come out of trying to will too much in the therapeutic relationship. Eventually, I came to realize that in almost all unsuccessful cases, the family therapist has been locked into a conflict of wills with his or her patients that is identical to the struggle of wills the family members are engaged in with one another.
Though Farber was not a family therapist, over the years I discovered that his views on willfulness could be applied productively to a system as well as an individual. The most serious symptoms in family life, e.g., anorexia, schizophrenia, suicide, always show up in families in which people make intense efforts to bend one another to their will. Indeed, over the years I’ve come to see that it is the presence or absence of willfulness that determines the extent to which any initial, abnormal behavior in a family will become chronic. And I have learned that the key to most cases is getting at least one member to let go of their willfulness.
The Dilemma of Change
All of this raises a crucial question. If our professional task is to bring about change, how can we avoid willing it? Farber’s solution was to emphasize the difference between expressing one’s own talents and desires versus achieving one’s ends by trying to control and manipulate others. This is a distinction my other mentor, Murray Bowen, was to echo in his contrast between an “I” position and a “you” position or what he calls “no-self” behavior. Being supervised by Farber first and later Bowen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time dominated by the Vietnam conflict, I learned the madness of thinking that the therapist could prevail in a contest of wills. They taught me that no matter how many bombers you thought you had as a therapist, you could never overcome the Vietcong lurking in the tangled jungle of the client’s resistance.
Since Farber left Washington a year after I began supervision with him, I’m not sure how much more influence he would have had on me had he stayed. I do know that I was more drawn to Bowen’s clinical approach because of a critical difference I perceived between the two men. For all his brilliance and insightfulness, I found Farber too serious. There was a kind of mischievous quality to Murray that intrigued me. Farber was always straight (perhaps that was his willfulness), whereas Bowen seemed far less “principled.” And I liked the irreverence implicit in fighting fire with fire and being devilish in the face of the satanic.
If Farber’s notions of willfulness helped me understand the ineffectiveness of most initiatives for change, whether in families or in other types of institutions, Bowen’s emphasis on the nonanxious presence helped me understand how to function in a nonwillful manner. As a born and bred Manhattanite, the only way I knew how to get things done was fast and aggressively. I was thus fascinated by how this “country hick” seemed to be able to take the “city slicker” every time. It was clear that he had heard it all before and was not going to be seduced by others’ efforts to get him to change them.
There is a story about Bowen when he was running his famous project at NIMH, hospitalizing the families of schizophrenics, that illustrates the way he operates. A schizophrenic known for her repeated threats of suicide came to him one day requesting a weekend pass and also a prescription for sleeping pills.
Passive-Aggressive Therapy
I once heard someone say that Bowen practices passive-aggressive therapy, and there is something to that. The passive-aggressive
