Demystifying Therapy

by Ernesto Spinelli

During the last decade, as public awareness of the role of therapy has increased, so too has the criticism of specific approaches to therapeutic practice.
In this book, Dr Spinelli examines the assumptions of his profession. He argues that in seeking to cure, heal, educate, free and change the client, in seeking to promote 'mental health', psychotherapists and councellors not only end up abusing their clients and themselves but they also succeed in setting themselves impossible tasks and goals which actually impede the therapeutic process. Through his critiques, Spinelli demystifies therapists' language and theories. He argues that the key areas of the client-therapist relationship have been neglected and, using case material from his own practice, explores in full the way in which therapists should engage with and listen to their clients in order to be of help.
Over the years, Spinelli has become increasingly aware of the philosophical naïveté of many therapists - their unnecessary and artificial reliance on 'techniques' and their abuse of the power bestowed on them in the therapeutic relationship.

... this is a brilliant book, which I unreservedly recommend to anyone in the
counselling field... It will most surely provoke fertile, enlightening and
constructive engagement within our profession with years to come.
Richard House, Counselling

Professor Ernesto Spinelli, PhD is a fellow of both the British Psychological Society (BPS) and the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) as well as a UKCP registered existential psychotherapist. In 1999 he was awarded a Personal Chair as Professor of Psychotherapy, Counselling and Counselling Psychology. His authorship of numerous specialist articles and several highly respected and widely read books dealing with the theory and practice of existential psychotherapy has earned for Ernesto a BPS Counselling Psychology Division Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Advancement of the Profession as well as an international reputation as a leading figure in the advancement of contemporary existential psychotherapy.

Genres: Psychology, Counselling

248 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 1994

Reviews

[Oliver]

The writing in this book is simply outrageous. Just look at this single sentence:

“While anyone reading this text may well have a sense, or 'gut feeling', either from previous readings or from his or her own experience of being in therapy' - either as a therapist or as a client - of what therapy is or means to them, and, if pressed, might well be able to put such into a sufficiently suitable and representative statement, nevertheless it would appear to be the case that any such statement, while by no means incorrect, would almost certainly remain incomplete and open to some degree of dispute.”

It's almost parodically bad academic writing. It's not all as egregious as that, but a lot of it is - I'm sure the book could have been half the length, and I wish it had been.

That aside, I think this is a really valuable and challenging read for therapists and trainees, and I'm very glad I read it. Although some of it is a little strained, many of the basic ideas are fascinating. I particularly liked the challenge to the idea of therapists creating a plausible and coherent past for their clients (either directly via interpretation, as in psychoanalysis, or in collaboration with the client, in more humanistic approaches). The idea that the past is an invention that can be believed in as a device for exploration, but is no more fixed and a 'source of truth' than anything else, is very useful.

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Great content and some really interesting ideas, but the writing style was too ornate for me.
I found the style in which this text was written convoluted and at times hard to penetrate. Sentences are are long and richly peppered with clauses. It made me think of caution in writing, where each statement had to carry an explanation or interpretation. In that respect I must admit the book reads as a curious inquiry compared to Masson’s accusatory and unforgiving stance in Against Therapy. But boy was it easier to read!
Spinelli is a font of knowledge and I am glad I read this work. I will be referencing it frequently for sure. The only reason for my rating is the difficulty I had reading his book. I can argue that I read it thrice - that’s how many times I had to read some sentences. Other than that excellent read.

[Braden Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stop Trying to Be A Therapist

If I were to distill Ernesto Spinelli's main thesis of his "Demystifying Therapy" into one pithy sentence, I would use a constant refrain that I hear from my supervisor almost every time we meet: "stop trying to be a therapist!"

What does this mean for me as a therapist? It certainly doesn't mean stop seeing clients, nor does it mean that I should immediately quit my vocation and find another job. What Spinelli, as an existential-phenomenological therapist, and my supervisor (whose own sensibilities leave him allergic to talk of modalities and frameworks) have in common, is that therapy is not about "doing" but about "being", or better yet, "being-with."

Now, this is not something that many of my person-centered peers have heard before. In fact, many of us were taught, to a perhaps almost anti-intellectual degree, to be "non-directive," to offer no self-disclosures or theory-based interventions that could rupture the mirroring or holding environment out of which a client, we were taught, can "self-actualize."

Now, I have a lot of strong feelings about this way of thinking about therapy. I am no longer convinced that a strictly non-directive approach is helpful. In fact, I sometimes feel that clients could do with some, or at times, a lot of direction, and Spinelli does not necessarily disagree on this point. For him, the process of demystifying therapy forces us to ask not whether or not we will use theories or the stories of our own lives with our clients, but rather it asks us how we will do so when we do. Spinelli asks us to consider not only what our theories do for our clients, but what they may reinforce about our own sense of self, our "self-construct" (to use existentialist language). Chapter by chapter, Spinelli looks at each major modality of therapy that has developed in the west (given, the book was published in 1994, and so may not account for more recent developments) such as psychodynamic and psychoanalytic therapies, humanistic therapies, and cognitive behavioural therapies. With each modality, Spinelli attempts to "demystify" what exactly it might be within all of these modes that can, and often do, inhibit practitioners from encountering their clients and inhibit themselves from being-with their clients. For example, a psychodynamic therapist who begins with an assumption that a client has repressed unprocessed unconscious trauma may be too busy looking for latent and hidden expressions of this instead of trying to enter the world-view of their client. Likewise, a cognitive-behavioural therapist might be too quick to instruct a client away from what they might deem an irrational feeling into something that they believe to be a more reasonable emotion. Both might, without knowing it, make a therapist less likely to be with a client in their worldview, to really being an encounter that can build an understanding relationship. A Rogerian therapist might be too concerned with facilitating a clients "true self" that he is unwilling to accept that the so-called "false selves" are very real, very true in the clients experiencing of them.

Spinelli uses the example of the Disney film Dumbo. Dumbo, being an elephant with large flappy ears, believes that a feather will enable him to fly. The feather, says Spinelli, is a kind of safe-structure, a placebo that provides a springboard to Dumbo's flight, but that in itself has no power. So too are many of the so-called "frames" that we think we might need to encounter a client (from staging Kleenex on the center of the table to using a notepad to take notes). The truth is that these things are often needed as much by us therapists as the clients, small protectors to ensure that we continue to "mystify" the client into an emotional state, or perhaps more dangerously, to keep a power imbalance between the authoritative therapist and the vulnerable client.

By taking away our feathers, Spinelli intends to encourage more honesty and authenticity in the therapy profession. Perhaps we take ourselves too seriously when we claim to "be" therapists who "do" therapy? Perhaps we are simultaneously giving ourselves too much and too little credit. After all, what is therapy? Do we even know exactly what it is that we practice? Embracing an existential-phenomenological stance, Spinelli encourages his readers to abandon beliefs such as "the true self" as much as to abandon the bad-faith mentality of following a therapy script. The self, so say the existentialists, is a construct that is interpreted from our relational world, a world that is constantly being "co-constituted." Without going into too much detail, what this means for us therapists is that we should be very careful not to allow our roles to become our identities, or for our constructions of self to become our dumbo feathers, but to always be open to our clients teaching our how to be with them, even if that means demolishing our preconceived views of what it means to "be" a therapist. We might shout back, "can our presence be enough? Surely not!" And yet, more often than not, it is. I think about my supervisor, whose persistent reminders that it is not my job to be clever or original continuously breakdown my own projections of my self as the guru-therapist, the philosopher-therapist or the saviour-therapist. This does not mean we cannot use theory. It just means that, in the end, the theory might need to be left behind with the feather.

[João Vaz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although somewhat old - and thus many of its critiques outdated, which renders the first chapters a little less insightful - its still quite important and impactful both in its critique of the main models of psychotherapy and suggestions on how to work them out.