14 Apr 2012
The “Real” Relationship
I was just struck by a recent book about the “real” relationship in psychotherapy. When people use the term “real” to describe the psychotherapeutic relationship, they are usually contrasting it with the “transference” relationship. Simply put, the transference relationship is the template based on past experience that the patient applies to the current experience with a therapist; the countertransference is essentially the same thing in the mind of the therapist. There’s nothing mysterious about transference. It’s how we learn. The way we think about parents or siblings enters into all our relationships. The “real” relationship is thought of as contrasting with the transference relationship, and the term “real” contains, I think, a subtle putdown of the psychoanalytic focus on transference. What, after all, is the “real” relationship? Real according to who? To an outside observer, perhaps. But, there’s the rub: in psychotherapy there is no outside observer, there is no objective perspective. If there is such a thing as the real relationship, it is an amalgam composed of two people’s perceptions, fantasies, fears, hopes, distortions, and transferences, etc. It is something that lives in the mind of each participant and in the interpsychic field between them. To privilege any point of view as “real” inevitably destroys at least half the richness of the relationship if not more.
From a Buddhist point of view, there is possible an even deeper deconstruction of the idea of the “real” relationship. Buddhism distinguishes between absolute and relative reality. The absolute perspective questions any and all of our ideas as being essentially illusions based on our craving for something “real” to hold on to, including most importantly the idea that we have a self. On the other hand, the relative perspective acknowledges deeply that we have to get through our day to day struggles, and that some of these illusions are very practical. “After the ecstasy, the laundry,
as Jack Kornfeld put it. From an absolute perspective, one where we recognize that even our notion of having a separate self is illusory, one where the distinction between self and other is very hazy, the question of what is the nature of relationship itself becomes very hard to grasp, if not ungraspable. What is the nature of a relationship between two illusory selves? Mindfulness and meditation clear a path to understanding this question. This is one of the main reasons why mindfulness and meditation can be so useful in psychotherapy.