Among the many reasons that a Psychoanalyst undergoes his own Psychoanalysis is to be able to identify as clearly as possible his own emotional reactions so as to differentiate them as much as possible from his patient's emotional reactions. In other words, if an analyst does not understand and appreciate that based on his own history he has unresolved bitterness toward his mother, he may be too ready to see and interpret bitterness toward his patient's mother, when the patient is actually feeling disappointment or frustration. While there are commonalities to the feelings, the differences are crucial in understanding what is going on in the patient's therapy. When a therapist misses an interpretation of his patient's emotional state, ie interpreting bitterness when disappointment is closer to the patient's experience, it is referred to as a "failure of empathy." The therapist thought he knew what the patient was feeling and was wrong. A therapist who does this consistently, in short order is a therapist with many open hours in his schedule. The typical reaction to a therapist's "failure of empathy" is anger. Generally the patient feels misunderstood and unfairly criticized and reacts accordingly. How the therapist handles such inevitable failures is crucial to the success of the treatment.
Since therapists should always strive to minimize such empathic failures, it is almost always a good idea to interpret emotional states in a modest and tentative fashion. After all, just because the therapist might react with bitterness at losing a job, maybe the patient is actually relieved. The best approach is to suggest that "perhaps there is some bitterness mixed in with relief." This way the patient has the opportunity to clarify, or deny, and further clarifications can follow. The worst approach is to make a pronouncement to the patient of what he is feeling. Whether correct or incorrect, whether the patient is aware of the feelings or not, whether they need to deny painful feelings or not, telling him what he feels can all too often be, a priori, a failure of empathy since it addresses the therpaist's concerns rather than the patients.
For example, a patient may be "bitter", yet for myriad reasons not yet ready to acknowledge his painful feelings or not even be conscious of such feelings. Further, what may look like bitterness to the therapist, is actually something different. Perhaps the patient is more distracted and preoccupied; maybe the patient is not even concerned about what you think he is concerned about. A patient who looks bitter might be talking about a friend who snubbed him yet actually be preoccupied with his father's illness. A therapist can never assume they understand all the influences at work on their patient at any one moment. We try to focus on the most significant material emerging during the course of a session, but we do not know what a patient is feeling until he tells us. (They may "tell us" non-verbally or through a defensive maneuver; that is reason to exercise some tact and allow the material to develop and confirmation to emerge in its own time.)
This is all a round about way of reflecting on Barack Obama's recent gaffe of saying what he actually believed to a group of extremely wealthy San Fransisco liberals.
Bill Clinton set the standard for those running for President as Therapist-in-Chief. He famously "felt our pain" and was deeply empathic for those less fortunate than him. Luckily for Bill Clinton, the 90s were a time when American and much of the West took a vacation form history and he was not terribly challenged in the international realm. This is unlikely to be the case for the next President. Hillary Clinton, lacking the talent of her husband has made a virtue of necessity and has been running a campaign designed to show she could be a reasonable Commander-in-Chief. Barack Obama, mesmerized perhaps by the adulation in which he has been basking since starting his surprising run, has been running a campaign designed to show that a Therapist-in-Chief to the entire world could preclude the need for a Commander-in-Chief. That is why his comments are so damaging to his prospects.
Barack Obama, so far as I know, did not have the benefit of a therapeutic or training Psychoanalysis, and so never understood that his experiences in life were not necessarily generalizable. Hugh Hewitt understands how problematic this is for a Therapist-in-Chief:
Politics as therapy; Americans as bitter, failed people. That's the senator's story and he's sticking with it. It is the very vision that motivated Jimmy Carter's malaise speech --"It's clear that the true problems of our Nation are much deeper -- deeper than gasoline lines of energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession"-- recycled and with a much better delivery.
But Obama's vision just isn't true for the majority of Americans. Most Americans are productive and generally happy; hard-working and actively involved in their communities through church and their children's schools.
Most Americans are generous, and favorably disposed towards strangers and eager to help the world.
Obama doesn't know this America, which is certainly the backbone of most suburbs, small towns and rural communities in flyover-country and, truth be told, on most of the coasts outside of the largest urban centers.
Maxed Out Mama has a summary of the imbroglio, along with many links; she takes an excellent and incisive point by point look at his comments, and notes that he has mis-read the concerns of small town America:
When Jane Smiley Gets On Board...
When Jane Smiley gets on board, your campaign ship is sinking in small-town America.
...
Obama's basic failure is the failure to respect the concerns of the population, which is a very bad error for a US politician. It will not be fatal, yet. He's going to have to correct this, though. DC is out of touch. The US government has made multiple policy changes over the last 20 years which have hurt the people of the US. Those include relaxing controls over financial institutions without implementing a correspondingly increased regulatory regime, allowing wide-scale illegal immigration, which created a subservient, marginalized class and drove down the wages of the average worker, negotiating free-trade treaties which were sometimes quite imbalanced, and overspending on a monumental basis.
The people of the US do not need to apologize to the federal government for their complaints. The politicians in the federal government need to sit down and take those complaints seriously.
Her comments about Smiley are on point as well; read it all, as the saying goes.
From Barack Obama's attempts to spin and damage control, it is clear that he doesn't actually realize that his comments, characterized buy many as elitist, out of touch, arrogant, display a kind of disdain that is fatal to therapy. If a patient feels he is not being respected, he will never open up to his therapist and will never allow the therapist to actually get to know him well enough to actually help him solve his problems. It is the height of ignorance to believe you know what a person is feeling better than he does. A Therapist-in-Chief who believes he knows what people are feeling better than they do is half way to defeat, even when he is correct; when he completely misses the reality of his population's experiences of their lives, he is finished. The arrogance and elitism is simply another way of saying that his experience nowhere intersects with the experiences of the small town Americans he unknowingly disparages.
The Anchoress gets it just right:
Now, of course, they will tell us hapless rubes - if we can be persuaded to look up from quoting our bitter bibles and polishing our resentful gun racks - that what we heard ain’t what we heard at all. Instapundit is giving major linkage to the story here, here and here.
Two great candidates the Democrats have brought us this year, aren’t they? Don’t y’all forgit to vote fer your’n betters, now! They’ll learn ya an’ tell ya anythin’ you wants ta hear, an’ they’ll laff n laff if’n it gets too serious, an’ they’ll take care all yer needs, too! so you don’t never have to be lovin’ that old time religion anymores, cuz yer govimint will be yer god, and y’all will be her people.
Unhappily for Barack Obama, this kind of therapist "blind spot" is an almost impossible problem to address in Supervision. The therapist who makes the same kinds of errors Obama has made, and then compounded, has a fundamental problem understanding his own limitations because he doesn't even know he has such limitations
Recent Comments