Of Rites and Wrongs
By Nick Child
For many years I was more (than now) actively interested in psychodynamic psychotherapy. In the early 1980s I did half the analytical psychotherapy training at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. At that time I was also Secretary and Organiser of the twice yearly residential 'Pitlochry Conference', a residential meeting of the Psychotherapy Section of the Scottish Division of the Royal College of Psychiatrists but open to others. When it came to the 25th Anniversary in 1995, I suggested 'anniversaries' as the theme, and offered a contribution given my interest in rituals in life and therapy. Seeing ritual as a missing element in the thinking of both psychodynamic and family psychotherapy, I saw it as an important (very old and) new perspective and one that bridges those two otherwise rather separated fields. It also touches, more than most rational psychologies do, on ordinary human life and experience, spirituality, and our common 'irrational' psychology. This paper's pair is Possessing the Key, a published version of a paper and performance at AFT's 21st Anniversary Conference in Bolton in1998.
For many years I was more (than now) actively interested in psychodynamic psychotherapy. In the early 1980s I did half the analytical psychotherapy training at the Scottish Institute of Human Relations. At that time I was also Secretary and Organiser of the twice yearly residential 'Pitlochry Conference', a residential meeting of the Psychotherapy Section of the Scottish Division of the Royal College of Psychiatrists but open to others. When it came to the 25th Anniversary in 1995, I suggested 'anniversaries' as the theme, and offered a contribution given my interest in rituals in life and therapy. Seeing ritual as a missing element in the thinking of both psychodynamic and family psychotherapy, I saw it as an important (very old and) new perspective and one that bridges those two otherwise rather separated fields. It also touches, more than most rational psychologies do, on ordinary human life and experience, spirituality, and our common 'irrational' psychology. This paper's pair is Possessing the Key, a published version of a paper and performance at AFT's 21st Anniversary Conference in Bolton in1998.
THE STORY SO
FAR
An important part of this paper is the story behind it. Starting with a seminal influence: I'm the son of a preacher man. I thought you ought to know that, in view of various personal and professional similarities between him and me around pastoral and ritual work - rituals and psychotherapy being the subject of this paper today. And also, to prepare you for my administering an innocuous little ritual here too!
I think there were rather more profound and conflictual sources for the course of my life than this paternal identification! But, whatever the reason, the interest in rituals crystallises for me the strong family resemblances between priests, helping professions, and psychotherapists, originating as we do from a common ancestor, the shaman, that priestly healer of primitive tribes (Ellenberger 1970). And, whatever the reason, I have also inherited a passion for demystifying and looking for common sense behind sectional jargon, and about taking responsibility for making connections with and between any parent bodies in my life, for finding communality between unnecessarily separate systems of thought and practice.
At present, the very different post-modern view is highly influential in family systems thinking, and slightly influential in psychoanalysis. Post-modernism holds that there is no ultimate integrity or truth, that all stories are to be respected. This philosophy has some uses - it fits with analytical open minded floating attention; and it fits with the prevalent forms of family therapy practice with their recent return to respect for each individual's different 'story' or 'social construction' within their social system. But my view is that post-modernism is a faulty cop-out in the face of a few difficulties in building an integrated world picture. I think the drive to integrate and to integrity is a basic human universal, and certainly a core of the psychotherapist's character. At its best then - and this is why I think it is interesting and important for us - ritual has a special power to integrate individual, family and cultural complexity, doing this through integrated thought, feeling, action and relationship.
I have some souvenir handouts with references available. The sections I will cover are headed: Examples (including today's anniversary ritual itself!), Defining Rituals, Psychotherapy and Rituals, and then Psychoanalysis and Rituals. Meanwhile, back to The Story So Far:
After my Edinburgh medical and psychiatric training, and as Mrs Thatcher began her reign, I was pleased to be banished to the challenge of my present job in the peripheries of excellence. At that time a similar process developed in my relationship with the Scottish psychotherapy scene. I had ardently been attending what had become Pitlochry and I began the SIHR adult analytical psychotherapy training. I completed the easy selfish half - that is, not the training cases. Five years of enjoyable and hard work as Secretary (both kinds) to the Psychotherapy Section, and to the course, led up to a liberating acting out as I gave up two parent bodies who were securely accepting though not interested in my broader horizons (at home and at work). While I played my part in developing Pitlochry as it now is - a kind of cathedral to mainly analytical psychotherapies - I had (as Secretary) wanted this 'church' to be the platform for a broader and more outgoing psychotherapy scene in Scotland. I brought, as it were, the low church background where the Pitlochry 'Sunday morning service' should be only slightly different to the rest of the week, not a glorious high church ritual that frees you to be fallibly human until next time. In my activities since then in various fields I continued a minor crusade to constructively deconstruct and demystify jargon, poor thinking and poor organisation. Any marks I have made in those fields seem to have been ignorable adolescent graffiti, easily washed off by the authorities. And somewhere along this line - at home and work - my interest grew in rituals in life and therapy.
During the 1980s, family therapy had various competing schools of thought. Now, in gentler forms, they are all fairly comfortably co-habiting within the accommodation of the aforementioned post-modern non-marriage - generating pleasant ideas and reflections but I think without sex or children. It is my nature of course to find and keep a foot in all camps. But one camp which then and now is generally ignored in family therapy is the psychodynamic one. The originators of family therapy - analytically trained medics almost to a man - explicitly made their break from individualistic and analytical psychologies. They claimed 'the system' as paramount (but only when controlled by individuals like them, of course!), and they discounted any need for attention to the individual within the system. They held this even though, within family systems' own terms, the individual is a valid subsystem of the family and other human groups, and even though the best measure of the quality of functioning of the wider system is the experience of the least individual within it. And at a recent conference of family therapists, 95% had been in personal therapy of some kind and almost all of this was (of course) individual not family or marital therapy. One rule for ourselves, another for our clients, it seems.
Alongside the post-modern developments I've mentioned, integrations of other kinds have been tried - some with Scottish connections too. But there is a general muttering in family therapy about the irrelevance of psychoanalytical ideas. Otherwise excellent books actively ignore them. One fine new tome, Understanding Family Systems (1993), nevertheless gives no place to psychodynamics, though Broderick argues sophisticatedly that individuals in human systems have powers that the system itself does not (such as intentionality); the nearest he gets is to admit 'unconscious goals' into his scheme. And in the important book, Rituals in Families and FT, the excellent introductory chapter's short section on the individual only links in ideas about 'right and left brain' functioning! So there remains a definite gap between individual and system, and especially between psychoanalysis and family therapy. That is the gap that I am trying to bridge with the help of ritual. On the analytical side, the question is: 'What are rituals to psychoanalysis?'
My own professional integrations of family and individual have been first idiosyncratic philosophical ones, and then pragmatic ones developed within our Motherwell Child and Family Clinics service with its family-systems and multi-disciplinary team approach. But I've never found a satisfactory theoretical back-up to my never quite satisfying practical integration, and particularly not an integration of the psychodynamic bit. Rituals, however, intuitively felt like an area that connected and bridged all kinds of school, and particularly so the psychodynamic bit. So I was looking for a push to get reading and thinking this intuition through. The theme of anniversaries seemed to me to require a contribution on rituals, so I offered and here I am - an un-prodigal son returning from my wider journeying to this parent body. In a nicely coincidental way, I acknowledge the help of a recent landmark, the founding in Lanarkshire of a small analytical interest group just in time for an earlier draft of this anniversary paper to be discussed there.
So, a year ago, I thought I would look around, find literature that covered what I wanted to say about ritual, add some bits and examples, and (er) Bob would be your Uncle. Like Douglas, I have found very little that did my thinking for me. My paper grew towards book size. Among the chapters I must leave out this morning would be:
· Chapter 2 - Rituals and dynamic psychotherapy in historical perspective: (or) psychotherapy's ancestral similarities - exorcism, mesmerism, and hypnotism.
· Chapter 3 - The personal origins of ritual, religion and the supernatural.
· Chapter 15 - The therapist's intention to influence: (or) 'telling it slant' doesn't mean you're not trying to control the client, while disculcating 'memory or desire' doesn't stop your patient working out what you want.
· Chapter 38 - What kind of philosophy do rituals push us toward?
EXAMPLES OF RITUAL
To keep things lighter for a Saturday morning, here are some examples of rituals and a few questions they raise. Even more than a good clinical example does, a description of ritual needs no preparatory explanation or theory; a brief cameo can encapsulate rich meaning in a satisfying, positive and self-contained way. So here's a question: Is it true that the usual Pitlochry analytical listening mode is the same one needed for listening to accounts of rituals? [Pause] What might this show about the relatedness of analytical work and rituals? [Pause]
Eg One: A Family Bereavement
Our much beloved cat died. Human family members are loved and hated; pets can be purely loved. We had time to prepare for this and held a full family funeral for her. She lay in state all day in our front room. By candlelight that evening, she was buried deep inside a brick and paving slab pedestal that was already part of our garden design. In her box she was made comfortable with blanket, food and cream for the journey away from us. Under the paving slab at our side of the earth barrier we placed a Tupperware box preserving things that represented our human attachment to the cat. Maureen recited part of The Owl and the Pussycat and put in the cat's collar and things; I read out and put in a wide-ranging description of what the cat and her death meant to me (I had wept each time I re-drafted this and again at the grave side); Silas had recorded a tape of tracks from his favourite rock music that expressed what he felt for the cat; Jake read out a beautiful poem he had written for her. Then and since we have felt the integrative and therapeutic effects of this process and ceremony, though no new cat yet.
Ritual incidentally is the whole process, not just the ceremony. We are all aware how our patients and clients can be lastingly traumatised by absent or inadequate rituals for major life events. With other examples to prove it, I am always ready to talk about the importance of people reclaiming control of their own weddings and funerals so that they are not empty vessels when the event needs to brim over with emotion and importance. A question: how much less need for psychotherapy might there be if there were more adequate rituals in the rest of our lives? [Pause] There are no rituals for some quite common life events:
Eg Two: The Separation
Will Harris described in the Guardian (13.3.93) the lead up to his wife's leaving him, and his attempts to prepare for it, where to be, what to say, what gesture to make. 'But none of these took place. There were no valedictory words, no sign that we had been man and wife for long enough, surely, to have got right this final, brief, important ceremony. For I did regard the final leave-taking as a ceremony. It would symbolise the gravity of the situation, the ending of what for me at least had been a wonderful relationship. It would betoken some kind of dignity as we each entered our new lives. Instead, nothing happened. We exchanged the briefest of goodbyes and the front door shut. The separation had begun. I still feel something important is missing. I haven't yet been able to ask my wife whether she too felt short-changed. Maybe I am too idealistic or unrealistic. Maybe I should have pumped all my feelings for ceremony and symbolism into contesting the idea of separation, rather than meekly becoming an unwilling accomplice. Maybe at this late stage we should have had our one and only blazing row. But there was nothing beyond the muttered farewell and I am left strangely cheated. My marriage, although effectively over, was the high point of my life and it deserved better at the end than it got.'
In my own family, rituals were absent, empty, or at least confusing. Returning from boarding schools at the tenderest ages, our parents had no notion of how to ask how we were since the last holiday 12 weeks before. Yet, we would go through Christmas celebrations and Birthday parties. I used to hate parties and I was a scrooge about Christmas.
Eg Three: The Office Christmas Party
At work, we had problems organising our Office Christmas party. Organising was left to those taken-for-granted, underpaid but absolutely essential office 'mothers', the secretaries. After some years of thus having even more reason to play Scrooge, and since rituals like the office party cannot be avoided, I realised that complex matters like this needed whole-hearted planning. My parents didn't know what it took, but that didn't mean we didn't and couldn't. We elected a Father Christmas from the professional staff (me) with proper authority to sort out and plan the event (beginning in July!) It's been good fun ever since, and Scrooge is a ghost of Christmas past.
There is mystery in ritual but not mystique - it requires the ordinary application of individual and group thinking and planning to make it work. And here's a rather over-the-top example of a therapeutic ritual of the kind I was coming across.
Eg Four: A Reconstituted Family: (From Imber-Black et al 1988)
When presented, I read out the full and moving account from the book about a couple who had split up. The depressed father came for help and this eventually led to joint sessions with the couple and a decision to get back together again. But their children had some reservations about how reliable the 'new' dad was going to be compared with before. They were all invited to 'plan a surprise' for each other. The children's contribution was to make a cake by themselves while rooms were booked in a hotel, big and small sized bottles of champagne opened, inscribed glasses for each of them used, and new rings handed via the children at the new wedding ceremony (with its new anniversary date). The example illustrated all the functions of rituals, as well as how the family's difficulties arose in the parents' conflicting experiences of family rituals and events in their families of origin.
(If you want to know more about the family-systems theory and construction of rituals, that's the book to read.) The work described is largely normal therapeutic work. Yet it links easily with a positive awareness of the complexity of life transitions and the place of ritual processes in making and marking them. But the final ritual ceremony itself was the family's own work - the therapist only asked them to 'plan a surprise' for each other. You hardly need to have a special interest in rituals though:
Eg Five: The Stillbirth
In discussion about ritual with me, Jim Gallagher, a Consultant Psychotherapist, recalled a woman he had seen over some time who was still significantly affected by the unmarked loss of a baby at birth. A natural question occurred to him: 'Do you know where the baby's buried?' This question directly engaged the patient's interest to search and find out. And that process, a kind of healing ritual, helped or coincided with her improvement and finishing therapy.
Some more questions: How much of Jim's foregoing ordinary psychotherapeutic work was necessary before finding the missing ritual was possible? [Pause] How often do we anyway incidentally touch on these issues in our work, and how much more effectively might we touch on them in assessment and therapy if we were more systematically informed by a framework of ritual? [Pause] But was the dead baby also a symbol in itself for the woman in the therapy? [Pause] Was the patient's behaviour strictly 'acting out' from the analytical point of view? [Pause] And was Jim's question analytical? [Pause] Even if it wasn't, was the 'therapy' of the ritual enactment first necessary before any such more 'analytical' step could be taken with its more analytically 'therapeutic' result? [Pause] So what place might there be for the therapist to hint or more knowingly guide the patient into ritual awareness and acts outside or inside the therapy room?
Now for a bit of fun - the following was read out with due ceremonial pace, emphasis, performance and significance:
A PITLOCHRY ANNIVERSARY RITUAL
You should, of course, get much more warning than this in order for you to prepare and participate. I promise, however, that it will be done in the best possible Pitlochry taste, requiring only mental activity on your part. But as part of the induction of the mildly hypnotised state required for ritual (if not analysis), I should ask if anyone feels uncomfortable about this?
OK, so if you're comfortable, we've had 25 years of 'Pitlochry', and in a moment I'm going to ask you, if you will, to recall and reflect on what coming to Pitlochry has meant for you in the past, what you've heard about it if you haven't been coming for long, the informal personal and professional bits, the formal 200 presentations there have been, good and bad memories, likes and dislikes, big or little things, private or public, and so on.
Before we begin, I have here a couple of lists of attenders at this conference; when I ask you to start reminiscing, I shall count slowly to 25 and scribble on the printed side with this silver anniversary felt tip pen, thereby capturing something of the collective reflections which I would ask you to project in this direction. OK: Start, 1 etc.
Now the blank side is the future, the next 25 years. Can you do the same, but this time imagine while I scribble with this invisible gold pen what the next 25 years might hold for Pitlochry and psychotherapy in Scotland? Starting now, 1 etc.
Now, I shall cut these up [24 = 1 page = 4 quarters x 6 strips] and (I was going to get an 'old-stager' and a 'young-stager' to) set these bowls to go round (especially provided by Mr Penker). But in view of the 'evil eye' the Chairman and I will play the part of these representatives. You can each take away an individual marker of the event, to do with what you like, but perhaps to be used as a book mark for your psychotherapy reading. There are more than needed here - the extra ones stand for all those who aren't here today - perhaps you could take one for someone you know. When you later think about what that marker means to us all here, I think even the most rationalist of you would not lightly throw away what is otherwise 'only' a scrap of paper.
DEFINING RITUALS
So, what is a ritual? There are events that we would all agree are rituals proper. Rituals all over the world (Ingpen and Wilkinson 1994) demonstrate the variety and richness of human culture responding to the ubiquitous events of life and nature - the seasons, anniversaries, the life cycle (birth, puberty, marriage, and death), surviving (hunting, harvesting, eating, drinking, healing and 'acts of God'), socialising (initiation, gifts, disputes, justice), and spirituality (worship and art). Our Age of Enlightenment has eliminated the basis for much of this through the displacement of supernatural beliefs. And the technological control, comfort and reliability in our lives removes the hardship that drives people to look for supernatural powers of influence. So the significance in rituals may nowadays not refer so much to the spiritual or supernatural. But whenever the supernatural is still called on, this would signify it as 'ritual' for us - from coronations and church weddings, to superstitiously inducing good luck with a 'touch wood' or a 'Bless you!' for sneezing.
But, we would also want to connect many secular events and everyday things with rituals - birthdays and other anniversaries, secular Holy-days (or holidays as they are now called), greetings and leavings, meal-times, souvenirs, gifts, the goodnight ritual at children's bedtime, and so on. Lots of other common and everyday repetitive patterns seem more debatably ritual though they often get called that. The lowest and the highest rituals have both given ritual a name for being empty of real significance. But this needs to be looked at more carefully. For example, though they often seem very routine and emptily unconscious, rituals like neurotic obsessional rituals, or greeting and leaving rituals, express and contain heavily significant hopes, fears and feelings.
Anyway, some of my abbreviated conclusions about defining ritual are as follows :
· Firstly, the term ritual is not used consistently, or for a uniform phenomenon; it is not a single category and the different groups have different characteristics. So, rituals can be unique one-off events (not just repetitive), the patterns can be full of significance (even when they seem hollow), and they can be very much created by the participants (not just socially prescribed).
· Secondly, not only is ritual not a single category but there is no distinct boundary anywhere. There is overlap with many other classes of patterned and other behaviour - for example, behaviour that is merely functional, habit, etiquette, social skill, social structure and rules, art, religion, and healing in all its forms.
· Thirdly, since there is inherently a variable degree of unconscious meaning in all behaviour and especially ritual behaviour, each individual instance is indefinite. The question itself generates meaning where it wasn't. So, more than usual, the observer can never be objective.
· Fourthly, rather than categorically defining behaviour as ritual or not, I think it may be more helpful to use a number of parameters of ritual-ness. The question then becomes 'What would make something more like a proper ritual (or less like one)?'
Finally, taking proper ritual as the epitome, the common characteristics are:
Once you leave the supernatural aside, doesn't a lot of this sound right for psychoanalysis too? But I'll come back to psychoanalysis via psychotherapy and a very mundane indirect route - through Newarthill and Carfin, to be precise.
Eg Six: The Old Route
For a decade the few miles at the work end of my daily commuting has taken me along the most unremarkable, slow, small town road you can imagine through Newarthill and Carfin in and out of Motherwell. I noticed that something new was being done to one bit of the road, but (with no contact with local news) I was entirely surprised when the new by-pass route to join the M8 was sign-posted and open for immediate use. Thoroughly pleased with the short cut since then, I have nevertheless felt I was missing something. I realised this was not just that I missed the old route, but that I hadn't said goodbye to it properly. I comfort myself with a plan to go down the old road for a special goodbye journey. I am aware of a feeling of hurt and abandonment, that the road through Newarthill also needs a chance to say goodbye to me. I am aware, of course, that the special goodbye journey is a minor healing ritual following a minor traumatic event.
So here are a number of basic points illustrated, entirely free of anything supernatural.
PSYCHOTHERAPY AND RITUALS
There are many examples in the literature of sometimes very elaborate therapeutic rituals. I've only tried one or two fully developed attempts in my own work. But I often use bits as we all might - considering how appointments are best set up, wording of letters, careful use of copies of letters or casenotes, or bringing in photographs or other mementos, suggesting letters that might not be sent. It seems only a short step from a standard psychodynamic or family systems framework of maturational tasks and life cycle processes, to thinking about life's transitional rituals. When taking a history, for example, we all look at the quality of grieving after bereavements. And there are many more ordinary social structures and events that we can learn to respect and identify when they have been missing. But I think it is easy to forget to take it further. Becoming more aware of these areas helps guide our work with people who have usually missed out during difficult and complex life transitions.
But here's an example (or two) where, like my still not enacted Newarthill road ritual, the idea of a ritual seemed to work without having to actually do it:
Eg Seven: The Family Feud
Mary was an able single mother from a complicated and often traumatic Catholic, working class, housing scheme, background. She had used and benefitted from a longish (for me) period of not very analytical weekly individual psychotherapeutic work. Growing away from her loyalty demanding social class, she trained as a social worker - or 'fucking social worker' as her family called it. I saw her intermittently and met her in a further crisis or two. One extended family dispute, with her mother as the eye of the storm, left her so infuriated that she felt literally ready to tear into her mother and kill her unless she avoided meeting her. Somehow psychodynamic interpretations didn't seem valid. It seemed more like a furious genuine feud where neither side felt heard and where, without any other arena for a hearing or justice, each side felt like provocatively taking the law into their own hands, though nothing really criminal had yet occurred. It seemed to me that a court-like arena was indicated. Mary said that her mother saw me as the enemy that had helped turn her against the family values. So, on my own, I could not offer to convene a meeting of both sides. Discussing this with Mary, the priest was my nearest equivalent on the mother's side. I followed up with a written version of my suggestion, with copies available for Mary to give to her mother and their priest, carefully outlining my readiness to liaise with the priest in order to set up a meeting for the purpose of providing a fair hearing for both sides. I think Mary did give a copy to her mother. But anyway, without anything further being done, that feudal crisis dissolved.
In other words, applying the framework of justice and the ritual structures appropriate to it, allowed a way of thinking and a proposal to be made that did enough justice in itself for things to move on.
Eg Eight: The Abuser's Grave
Another single mother with another history of childhood and marital abuse was, in a not very psychologically minded way, also making use of weekly sessions. The abuse was still a secret. Keeping her feelings and memories mostly to herself, she mentioned that, without knowing why, she wanted to find and visit the grave of her sexually abusive grandfather who had died while she was still in her early teens. The idea was disturbing for her and she didn't feel able to go to the graveside alone. 'But you must think it's a stupid idea,' she concluded self-deprecatingly. Given my usual readiness, I said that I didn't think it was a stupid idea, and that I would go with her if she liked. This concrete offer was obviously more moving, meaningful and therapeutic for her than my usual comments, which she usually cut across in the pressure of what she wanted to say. But she has moved on in various ways and now, though she has found out where the grave is and may visit in due course, she feels able to do so alone.
Perhaps something more than spitting on the abuser's grave is required. Which reminds me of John Steiner's point about mourning and forgiveness not being possible until the person has somehow 'really' killed them off (Steiner 1993). Has ritual got a place here? [Pause - shades of voodoo!] Which leads us into:
RITUALS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
So what are rituals to psychoanalysis? I've mentioned a number of features rituals and psychoanalysis have in common: life transitions and maturational stages, difficulty and complexity due to multiply determined ambivalence and paradox, symbol and metaphor, conscious and unconscious, a particular mode of attending, historical antecedents, etc. Psychoanalysis and rituals share their investment in symbol and metaphor to a degree that tends to forget that symbol and metaphor is what they are. Both take leave of reality to wonder 'What if such-and-such were really true?' Analytical theory itself is slowly being allowed to be the metaphor it is, not a concrete discovery. I feel there is a question in the air about whether analysis is grimly analytical (in the sense of razing everything to its ground), or whether it is creative (in the sense Bollas uses with his reviving of free association). If psychoanalysis is a creative business, then ritual should be some kind of friend or ally, not something to be just taken or set apart.
Psychoanalysis may stand apart from ritual where ritual seems to be sublimation, catharsis, gratification, projection, or at worst, primitive functioning, crowd psychology, pathological defence and abuse. Rituals may seem to deny the analytic emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals, but they shouldn't. Rituals should give individuals their own space and meaning, as well as greater access to the more oceanic commonality, the social and biological destiny, the potential dignity, we all share with the rest of the human race.
Theoretically, you could look at rituals through any analytical frame and come up with something - though I have in no way systematically done so yet.. But, guided by discussions with my colleague Anne Hood, I suggest that the most obvious connection with rituals is in symbol formation. Symbolisation is an early and basic human development, just as ritual would have been in man's earliest tribal cultures. Ritual proper, then, is: the mature use and elaboration of the infant's original need and purpose in developing the tool of symbolic function. Let me expand on this by tracking the animism back through inanimate objects to the original animating relationship.
If I take you back to the Newarthill road, you'll remember this wasn't in itself a specially ritual attachment. With even the road needing to say goodbye to me, it illustrated just how animistic cathexis is, precisely because of that particular object's insignificance and impersonality. In passing, please note the important link between this psychological animism with the animism found in all religious thinking and rituals. Though we can't easily accept it when it goes supernatural, we readily accept more grounded animism.
Bollas, with his literary background, captures some of this liveliness and animism in his description (in Being a Character) of how we 'dream' our lives:
We each live amidst thousands of such objects that enlighten our world - things that are not hallucinations (they do exist), but whose essence is not intrinsic to what Lacan calls real. Their meaning resides in what Winnicott termed 'intermediate space' or 'the third area': the place where subject meets thing, to confer significance in the very moment that being is transformed by the object. The objects of intermediate space are compromise formations between the subject's state of mind and the thing's character.. (p18)
Poets and novelists feed on these thousands of minor things which (like the Newarthill road) we take for granted and pass on by. Our subsequent appreciation of the poem or novel shows how we feed on them too. Bollas describes how we 'fall into' some rather than other objects - works of art are objects specifically designed to facilitate our 'falling into' them. So are rituals and ritual objects.
Next, speaking of intermediate spaces and Winnicott, isn't the child's transitional object a fair prototype of a ritual or ritual object, helping it through transitional areas in life, and particularly in those first stages of individuation and separation? Reading Anne's baby observation, I found an almost constant ritual quality in the spatial behaviour and use of objects, carrying (more transparently than with adults) the significance and the child's working through of inner issues. Here is a more ritualistic than usual scene - though you really need a fuller picture to value the interpretation. Anne writes:
On one occasion (18 month old) Ruth wanted to put (her Mum's) perfume on her gran, on herself and on me as if I was to be integrated into this family, somehow made the same. Perhaps (Ruth) was beginning to see us as different people, parts of the same object that could be split into good and bad. However, the use of the perfume felt to me as if (Ruth) was magically trying to make us (all) the same.
Rituals and transitional objects help us through the pain and pleasure, the paradox, of separation and loss while remaining connected. But symbol formation itself we think of as occuring in the infant's development to deal with just that problem. For a neat summary, I can't do better than give Anne's note:
The importance of ritual, as of art, music, literature and poetry, is that it captures the magic communication of the non-verbal and pre-verbal. Even more so because it is at the point of symbolisation that the baby responds to absence and separation by creating a fantasy or symbol. Winnicott on transitional objects, Segal on symbolisation, and Bion on thinking, amongst others, highlight the importance of the first me/not me objects and experiences. These (transitional processes) moderate the loss of omnipotence, allowing some control and power as the baby moves to a depressive position. So the ritual (helps by) encapsulating the experience of helplessness and loss of control Projecting into the (ritual or) symbol and then controlling it is a way of accessing (otherwise) unspeakable feelings.
So Anne and I reckon that rituals work through being that same combination of me/not me, controlled/uncontrolled, conscious/not conscious. Bion saw the symbolic object or idea as standing in for the alpha-functioning container that the mother used to be, receiving, digesting and feeding back the baby's raw material. The first rituals or (strictly) pre-rituals, are the alpha-functioning, pre-symbolic, pre-verbal activities of infant feeding, cleaning, holding, and baby-talking. From this point of view, when it occurs, symbolisation is in itself the baby's first ritual event, developed to cope with a very early 'difficult and complex life transition'.
This also helps understand pathological use of rituals. These same functions can be a cul-de-sac, rather than a road forward. Symbols and rituals get used, not to access the unspeakable, but to shut off thinking and feeling. So 'rites' are also used 'wrongly' or perversely, as fetish, torture, abuse, self-abuse, obsessions and so on. The purpose there is not to name something but to cut off knowledge. The split off beta elements (as Bion called them) then keep returning to be lived through compulsion. This is the kind of thing you see in therapy, when a patient does something spontaneous but then has to destroy the gesture's meaning. The ritual may serve this compulsive and destructive purpose.
Clinically, I think the play of child analysis comes close to a continuous ritual use of symbolic objects and enactments. In adult work, because of their express and elaborated symbolic and psychological functions, I think rituals need to be given more special thought and place than they get. For some things, even mature and healthy adults may need more than analytical processes to work it through. Sometimes the emotion and work in a ritual genuinely moves us on where therapy does not. And on the other hand, you can be just as defensively stuck up a cul de sac with an analyst as you can with a ritual - and just as usefully got on the road by either!
But I think there are reasons why it's not the analyst's task to think or promote rituals. We could see the mind as an arena for privately created mental rituals, internally expressing and defending and attempting to resolve difficult or complex troubles across internal boundaries. Psychoanalysis has the special task of exploring and understanding these inner rituals. To do this it needs to prevent external rituals from confusing things.
In addition, some deeply personal matters are unconscious and complex in a way that makes them just not identifiable or bearable (or bare-able). For these, there is no way open to mutative ritual of any kind - even if you tried. Analysis can be seen as a method of exploring and opening up the significance of these hidden matters, notably through transference. Indeed, through transference, the analyst offers him or herself to be, as it were, the potential ritual object - shades of the voodoo doll here! - to be fashioned and used by the patient, assisted by the analyst's unique 'insider's' understanding. Here too, promotion of other rituals would confound the task. Enactment occurs, but on a shared mental stage, a private psychodrama or ritual involving only the analyst and patient - and their very own cast of thousands.
In the clinical examples I've given, the ritual described tends to follow a substantial period of psychotherapy. Perhaps ritual celebrates progress, rather than causes it. To be able to enjoy life's rituals, perhaps you first need a level of healthy and integrated functioning.
Finally let me bring things together into a partnership with a return to the Newarthill road. One analytical reservation about my ritual goodbye journey would be that there are deeper issues there. For example, I certainly suffered unexpected and unmarked goodbyes when I was young. And, on reflection, I do feel those undigested remains are contained in my projection of concern for poor Newarthill being abandoned just like that! [Pause] However, that explanation in itself also serves to advance my other thesis of the importance of rituals - in this case, undone rituals of parting and meeting. Now, if I do enact my Newarthill trip, I will be aware of another (analytically derived) level to that ritual. Maybe ritual and analysis go further in tandem.
My conclusion is . . . the start of our discussion!
REFERENCES
Barker, P. (1985) Using Metaphors in Psychotherapy. Brunner Mazel: New York
Barker, P. (1992) Basic Family Therapy. Norton:New York (pp176 et seq)
Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Routledge: London
Broderick, C. B. (1993) Understanding Family Systems: Basics of Family Systems Theory. Sage: London
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books: USA & Fontana: London
Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo. In Penguin Freud Library:13. The Origins of Religion (Ed) Albert Dickson. Penguin: London
Hood, A. (1995) Baby Observation, and Personal Communication.
Imber-Black, E., Roberts, J. & Whiting, R. (eds) (1988) Rituals in Families and Family Therapy W. W. Norton: New York and London.
Ingpen, R. & Wilkinson, P. (1994) A Celebration of Customs and Rituals of the World. Dragon's World:Limpsfield.
Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. Routledge: London
van der Hart, O (1983) Rituals in Psychotherapy: Transition and Continuity. Irvington: New York
FURTHER READING Friedman, E.H. (1980) Systems and ceremonies: a family therapy view of rites of passage. In "The Changing Life Cycle" 1st Edition, (eds) Carter and McGoldrick. Gardner: New York
Carter & McGoldrick (eds) (1989) The Changing Family Life Cycle: A Framework for Family Therapy. 2nd Edition. Boston:New York Gardner: New York
McMillan, J. (1995) Article on Scots-English hurt alive in 'Flower of Scotland' etc. Scotland on Sunday, 12 March 1995
Sutcliffe, P, Lovell, J. & Walters, M. (1985) New directions for family therapy: rubbish removal as a task of choice. Journal of Family Therapy, 7, 175-182.
Whitehorn, K. (1995) High days that mark our humanity. Observer, 23 April 95 And other articles in the press.
Wolin and Bennett (1984) Family rituals. Family Process. 23, 401-420.
An important part of this paper is the story behind it. Starting with a seminal influence: I'm the son of a preacher man. I thought you ought to know that, in view of various personal and professional similarities between him and me around pastoral and ritual work - rituals and psychotherapy being the subject of this paper today. And also, to prepare you for my administering an innocuous little ritual here too!
I think there were rather more profound and conflictual sources for the course of my life than this paternal identification! But, whatever the reason, the interest in rituals crystallises for me the strong family resemblances between priests, helping professions, and psychotherapists, originating as we do from a common ancestor, the shaman, that priestly healer of primitive tribes (Ellenberger 1970). And, whatever the reason, I have also inherited a passion for demystifying and looking for common sense behind sectional jargon, and about taking responsibility for making connections with and between any parent bodies in my life, for finding communality between unnecessarily separate systems of thought and practice.
At present, the very different post-modern view is highly influential in family systems thinking, and slightly influential in psychoanalysis. Post-modernism holds that there is no ultimate integrity or truth, that all stories are to be respected. This philosophy has some uses - it fits with analytical open minded floating attention; and it fits with the prevalent forms of family therapy practice with their recent return to respect for each individual's different 'story' or 'social construction' within their social system. But my view is that post-modernism is a faulty cop-out in the face of a few difficulties in building an integrated world picture. I think the drive to integrate and to integrity is a basic human universal, and certainly a core of the psychotherapist's character. At its best then - and this is why I think it is interesting and important for us - ritual has a special power to integrate individual, family and cultural complexity, doing this through integrated thought, feeling, action and relationship.
I have some souvenir handouts with references available. The sections I will cover are headed: Examples (including today's anniversary ritual itself!), Defining Rituals, Psychotherapy and Rituals, and then Psychoanalysis and Rituals. Meanwhile, back to The Story So Far:
After my Edinburgh medical and psychiatric training, and as Mrs Thatcher began her reign, I was pleased to be banished to the challenge of my present job in the peripheries of excellence. At that time a similar process developed in my relationship with the Scottish psychotherapy scene. I had ardently been attending what had become Pitlochry and I began the SIHR adult analytical psychotherapy training. I completed the easy selfish half - that is, not the training cases. Five years of enjoyable and hard work as Secretary (both kinds) to the Psychotherapy Section, and to the course, led up to a liberating acting out as I gave up two parent bodies who were securely accepting though not interested in my broader horizons (at home and at work). While I played my part in developing Pitlochry as it now is - a kind of cathedral to mainly analytical psychotherapies - I had (as Secretary) wanted this 'church' to be the platform for a broader and more outgoing psychotherapy scene in Scotland. I brought, as it were, the low church background where the Pitlochry 'Sunday morning service' should be only slightly different to the rest of the week, not a glorious high church ritual that frees you to be fallibly human until next time. In my activities since then in various fields I continued a minor crusade to constructively deconstruct and demystify jargon, poor thinking and poor organisation. Any marks I have made in those fields seem to have been ignorable adolescent graffiti, easily washed off by the authorities. And somewhere along this line - at home and work - my interest grew in rituals in life and therapy.
During the 1980s, family therapy had various competing schools of thought. Now, in gentler forms, they are all fairly comfortably co-habiting within the accommodation of the aforementioned post-modern non-marriage - generating pleasant ideas and reflections but I think without sex or children. It is my nature of course to find and keep a foot in all camps. But one camp which then and now is generally ignored in family therapy is the psychodynamic one. The originators of family therapy - analytically trained medics almost to a man - explicitly made their break from individualistic and analytical psychologies. They claimed 'the system' as paramount (but only when controlled by individuals like them, of course!), and they discounted any need for attention to the individual within the system. They held this even though, within family systems' own terms, the individual is a valid subsystem of the family and other human groups, and even though the best measure of the quality of functioning of the wider system is the experience of the least individual within it. And at a recent conference of family therapists, 95% had been in personal therapy of some kind and almost all of this was (of course) individual not family or marital therapy. One rule for ourselves, another for our clients, it seems.
Alongside the post-modern developments I've mentioned, integrations of other kinds have been tried - some with Scottish connections too. But there is a general muttering in family therapy about the irrelevance of psychoanalytical ideas. Otherwise excellent books actively ignore them. One fine new tome, Understanding Family Systems (1993), nevertheless gives no place to psychodynamics, though Broderick argues sophisticatedly that individuals in human systems have powers that the system itself does not (such as intentionality); the nearest he gets is to admit 'unconscious goals' into his scheme. And in the important book, Rituals in Families and FT, the excellent introductory chapter's short section on the individual only links in ideas about 'right and left brain' functioning! So there remains a definite gap between individual and system, and especially between psychoanalysis and family therapy. That is the gap that I am trying to bridge with the help of ritual. On the analytical side, the question is: 'What are rituals to psychoanalysis?'
My own professional integrations of family and individual have been first idiosyncratic philosophical ones, and then pragmatic ones developed within our Motherwell Child and Family Clinics service with its family-systems and multi-disciplinary team approach. But I've never found a satisfactory theoretical back-up to my never quite satisfying practical integration, and particularly not an integration of the psychodynamic bit. Rituals, however, intuitively felt like an area that connected and bridged all kinds of school, and particularly so the psychodynamic bit. So I was looking for a push to get reading and thinking this intuition through. The theme of anniversaries seemed to me to require a contribution on rituals, so I offered and here I am - an un-prodigal son returning from my wider journeying to this parent body. In a nicely coincidental way, I acknowledge the help of a recent landmark, the founding in Lanarkshire of a small analytical interest group just in time for an earlier draft of this anniversary paper to be discussed there.
So, a year ago, I thought I would look around, find literature that covered what I wanted to say about ritual, add some bits and examples, and (er) Bob would be your Uncle. Like Douglas, I have found very little that did my thinking for me. My paper grew towards book size. Among the chapters I must leave out this morning would be:
· Chapter 2 - Rituals and dynamic psychotherapy in historical perspective: (or) psychotherapy's ancestral similarities - exorcism, mesmerism, and hypnotism.
· Chapter 3 - The personal origins of ritual, religion and the supernatural.
· Chapter 15 - The therapist's intention to influence: (or) 'telling it slant' doesn't mean you're not trying to control the client, while disculcating 'memory or desire' doesn't stop your patient working out what you want.
· Chapter 38 - What kind of philosophy do rituals push us toward?
EXAMPLES OF RITUAL
To keep things lighter for a Saturday morning, here are some examples of rituals and a few questions they raise. Even more than a good clinical example does, a description of ritual needs no preparatory explanation or theory; a brief cameo can encapsulate rich meaning in a satisfying, positive and self-contained way. So here's a question: Is it true that the usual Pitlochry analytical listening mode is the same one needed for listening to accounts of rituals? [Pause] What might this show about the relatedness of analytical work and rituals? [Pause]
Eg One: A Family Bereavement
Our much beloved cat died. Human family members are loved and hated; pets can be purely loved. We had time to prepare for this and held a full family funeral for her. She lay in state all day in our front room. By candlelight that evening, she was buried deep inside a brick and paving slab pedestal that was already part of our garden design. In her box she was made comfortable with blanket, food and cream for the journey away from us. Under the paving slab at our side of the earth barrier we placed a Tupperware box preserving things that represented our human attachment to the cat. Maureen recited part of The Owl and the Pussycat and put in the cat's collar and things; I read out and put in a wide-ranging description of what the cat and her death meant to me (I had wept each time I re-drafted this and again at the grave side); Silas had recorded a tape of tracks from his favourite rock music that expressed what he felt for the cat; Jake read out a beautiful poem he had written for her. Then and since we have felt the integrative and therapeutic effects of this process and ceremony, though no new cat yet.
Ritual incidentally is the whole process, not just the ceremony. We are all aware how our patients and clients can be lastingly traumatised by absent or inadequate rituals for major life events. With other examples to prove it, I am always ready to talk about the importance of people reclaiming control of their own weddings and funerals so that they are not empty vessels when the event needs to brim over with emotion and importance. A question: how much less need for psychotherapy might there be if there were more adequate rituals in the rest of our lives? [Pause] There are no rituals for some quite common life events:
Eg Two: The Separation
Will Harris described in the Guardian (13.3.93) the lead up to his wife's leaving him, and his attempts to prepare for it, where to be, what to say, what gesture to make. 'But none of these took place. There were no valedictory words, no sign that we had been man and wife for long enough, surely, to have got right this final, brief, important ceremony. For I did regard the final leave-taking as a ceremony. It would symbolise the gravity of the situation, the ending of what for me at least had been a wonderful relationship. It would betoken some kind of dignity as we each entered our new lives. Instead, nothing happened. We exchanged the briefest of goodbyes and the front door shut. The separation had begun. I still feel something important is missing. I haven't yet been able to ask my wife whether she too felt short-changed. Maybe I am too idealistic or unrealistic. Maybe I should have pumped all my feelings for ceremony and symbolism into contesting the idea of separation, rather than meekly becoming an unwilling accomplice. Maybe at this late stage we should have had our one and only blazing row. But there was nothing beyond the muttered farewell and I am left strangely cheated. My marriage, although effectively over, was the high point of my life and it deserved better at the end than it got.'
In my own family, rituals were absent, empty, or at least confusing. Returning from boarding schools at the tenderest ages, our parents had no notion of how to ask how we were since the last holiday 12 weeks before. Yet, we would go through Christmas celebrations and Birthday parties. I used to hate parties and I was a scrooge about Christmas.
Eg Three: The Office Christmas Party
At work, we had problems organising our Office Christmas party. Organising was left to those taken-for-granted, underpaid but absolutely essential office 'mothers', the secretaries. After some years of thus having even more reason to play Scrooge, and since rituals like the office party cannot be avoided, I realised that complex matters like this needed whole-hearted planning. My parents didn't know what it took, but that didn't mean we didn't and couldn't. We elected a Father Christmas from the professional staff (me) with proper authority to sort out and plan the event (beginning in July!) It's been good fun ever since, and Scrooge is a ghost of Christmas past.
There is mystery in ritual but not mystique - it requires the ordinary application of individual and group thinking and planning to make it work. And here's a rather over-the-top example of a therapeutic ritual of the kind I was coming across.
Eg Four: A Reconstituted Family: (From Imber-Black et al 1988)
When presented, I read out the full and moving account from the book about a couple who had split up. The depressed father came for help and this eventually led to joint sessions with the couple and a decision to get back together again. But their children had some reservations about how reliable the 'new' dad was going to be compared with before. They were all invited to 'plan a surprise' for each other. The children's contribution was to make a cake by themselves while rooms were booked in a hotel, big and small sized bottles of champagne opened, inscribed glasses for each of them used, and new rings handed via the children at the new wedding ceremony (with its new anniversary date). The example illustrated all the functions of rituals, as well as how the family's difficulties arose in the parents' conflicting experiences of family rituals and events in their families of origin.
(If you want to know more about the family-systems theory and construction of rituals, that's the book to read.) The work described is largely normal therapeutic work. Yet it links easily with a positive awareness of the complexity of life transitions and the place of ritual processes in making and marking them. But the final ritual ceremony itself was the family's own work - the therapist only asked them to 'plan a surprise' for each other. You hardly need to have a special interest in rituals though:
Eg Five: The Stillbirth
In discussion about ritual with me, Jim Gallagher, a Consultant Psychotherapist, recalled a woman he had seen over some time who was still significantly affected by the unmarked loss of a baby at birth. A natural question occurred to him: 'Do you know where the baby's buried?' This question directly engaged the patient's interest to search and find out. And that process, a kind of healing ritual, helped or coincided with her improvement and finishing therapy.
Some more questions: How much of Jim's foregoing ordinary psychotherapeutic work was necessary before finding the missing ritual was possible? [Pause] How often do we anyway incidentally touch on these issues in our work, and how much more effectively might we touch on them in assessment and therapy if we were more systematically informed by a framework of ritual? [Pause] But was the dead baby also a symbol in itself for the woman in the therapy? [Pause] Was the patient's behaviour strictly 'acting out' from the analytical point of view? [Pause] And was Jim's question analytical? [Pause] Even if it wasn't, was the 'therapy' of the ritual enactment first necessary before any such more 'analytical' step could be taken with its more analytically 'therapeutic' result? [Pause] So what place might there be for the therapist to hint or more knowingly guide the patient into ritual awareness and acts outside or inside the therapy room?
Now for a bit of fun - the following was read out with due ceremonial pace, emphasis, performance and significance:
A PITLOCHRY ANNIVERSARY RITUAL
You should, of course, get much more warning than this in order for you to prepare and participate. I promise, however, that it will be done in the best possible Pitlochry taste, requiring only mental activity on your part. But as part of the induction of the mildly hypnotised state required for ritual (if not analysis), I should ask if anyone feels uncomfortable about this?
OK, so if you're comfortable, we've had 25 years of 'Pitlochry', and in a moment I'm going to ask you, if you will, to recall and reflect on what coming to Pitlochry has meant for you in the past, what you've heard about it if you haven't been coming for long, the informal personal and professional bits, the formal 200 presentations there have been, good and bad memories, likes and dislikes, big or little things, private or public, and so on.
Before we begin, I have here a couple of lists of attenders at this conference; when I ask you to start reminiscing, I shall count slowly to 25 and scribble on the printed side with this silver anniversary felt tip pen, thereby capturing something of the collective reflections which I would ask you to project in this direction. OK: Start, 1 etc.
Now the blank side is the future, the next 25 years. Can you do the same, but this time imagine while I scribble with this invisible gold pen what the next 25 years might hold for Pitlochry and psychotherapy in Scotland? Starting now, 1 etc.
Now, I shall cut these up [24 = 1 page = 4 quarters x 6 strips] and (I was going to get an 'old-stager' and a 'young-stager' to) set these bowls to go round (especially provided by Mr Penker). But in view of the 'evil eye' the Chairman and I will play the part of these representatives. You can each take away an individual marker of the event, to do with what you like, but perhaps to be used as a book mark for your psychotherapy reading. There are more than needed here - the extra ones stand for all those who aren't here today - perhaps you could take one for someone you know. When you later think about what that marker means to us all here, I think even the most rationalist of you would not lightly throw away what is otherwise 'only' a scrap of paper.
DEFINING RITUALS
So, what is a ritual? There are events that we would all agree are rituals proper. Rituals all over the world (Ingpen and Wilkinson 1994) demonstrate the variety and richness of human culture responding to the ubiquitous events of life and nature - the seasons, anniversaries, the life cycle (birth, puberty, marriage, and death), surviving (hunting, harvesting, eating, drinking, healing and 'acts of God'), socialising (initiation, gifts, disputes, justice), and spirituality (worship and art). Our Age of Enlightenment has eliminated the basis for much of this through the displacement of supernatural beliefs. And the technological control, comfort and reliability in our lives removes the hardship that drives people to look for supernatural powers of influence. So the significance in rituals may nowadays not refer so much to the spiritual or supernatural. But whenever the supernatural is still called on, this would signify it as 'ritual' for us - from coronations and church weddings, to superstitiously inducing good luck with a 'touch wood' or a 'Bless you!' for sneezing.
But, we would also want to connect many secular events and everyday things with rituals - birthdays and other anniversaries, secular Holy-days (or holidays as they are now called), greetings and leavings, meal-times, souvenirs, gifts, the goodnight ritual at children's bedtime, and so on. Lots of other common and everyday repetitive patterns seem more debatably ritual though they often get called that. The lowest and the highest rituals have both given ritual a name for being empty of real significance. But this needs to be looked at more carefully. For example, though they often seem very routine and emptily unconscious, rituals like neurotic obsessional rituals, or greeting and leaving rituals, express and contain heavily significant hopes, fears and feelings.
Anyway, some of my abbreviated conclusions about defining ritual are as follows :
· Firstly, the term ritual is not used consistently, or for a uniform phenomenon; it is not a single category and the different groups have different characteristics. So, rituals can be unique one-off events (not just repetitive), the patterns can be full of significance (even when they seem hollow), and they can be very much created by the participants (not just socially prescribed).
· Secondly, not only is ritual not a single category but there is no distinct boundary anywhere. There is overlap with many other classes of patterned and other behaviour - for example, behaviour that is merely functional, habit, etiquette, social skill, social structure and rules, art, religion, and healing in all its forms.
· Thirdly, since there is inherently a variable degree of unconscious meaning in all behaviour and especially ritual behaviour, each individual instance is indefinite. The question itself generates meaning where it wasn't. So, more than usual, the observer can never be objective.
· Fourthly, rather than categorically defining behaviour as ritual or not, I think it may be more helpful to use a number of parameters of ritual-ness. The question then becomes 'What would make something more like a proper ritual (or less like one)?'
Finally, taking proper ritual as the epitome, the common characteristics are:
- The behaviour stands out in some way as special from run-of-the-mill life;
- The use of symbolism and metaphor.
- Usually there is an enactment, with a characteristic
- Structure and
- Quality of attention, which along with the characteristic :
- Real or implied social group, gives the quality of
- Solemn observance. And finally:
- Rituals accompany life's transitions. The transitions are various, but for our purposes the key is that: Rituals help us make and mark difficult and complex transitions in life. The difficulty and complexity occurs when there are too many confusingly ambivalent and paradoxical factors to be expressed or addressed adequately otherwise.
Once you leave the supernatural aside, doesn't a lot of this sound right for psychoanalysis too? But I'll come back to psychoanalysis via psychotherapy and a very mundane indirect route - through Newarthill and Carfin, to be precise.
Eg Six: The Old Route
For a decade the few miles at the work end of my daily commuting has taken me along the most unremarkable, slow, small town road you can imagine through Newarthill and Carfin in and out of Motherwell. I noticed that something new was being done to one bit of the road, but (with no contact with local news) I was entirely surprised when the new by-pass route to join the M8 was sign-posted and open for immediate use. Thoroughly pleased with the short cut since then, I have nevertheless felt I was missing something. I realised this was not just that I missed the old route, but that I hadn't said goodbye to it properly. I comfort myself with a plan to go down the old road for a special goodbye journey. I am aware of a feeling of hurt and abandonment, that the road through Newarthill also needs a chance to say goodbye to me. I am aware, of course, that the special goodbye journey is a minor healing ritual following a minor traumatic event.
So here are a number of basic points illustrated, entirely free of anything supernatural.
- Firstly, repetition on its own, even with the most insignificant things, breeds attachment or cathexis - familiarity breeds contént (and cóntent)
- Secondly, this cathectic attachment to a frequent but otherwise empty routine - my daily drive through Newarthill in the example - is perhaps what people commonly imply when they call such a routine a ritual. That is, simple routine through repetition cultivates silent attachment and thus personal significance. But I don't think this is symbolic significance per se. So the routine is not a proper ritual in the way my whole commuting journey is, for example.
- Thirdly, note how animistic the cathexis to inanimate objects can still be - even the road needed to say goodbye. I'll return to this later.
- Fourthly, in contrast with my sudden change of route, usually people get enough warning of change to work through their loss and de-cathexis - and missing this out in minor matters can be easily ignored anyway. Either way, most often the change would happen without anything we would notice as a ritual to mark it.
- Fifthly, there is a clinical question here about being directive or not in therapy. Psychotherapists can act in a more intervening way or in a more reflective way. I have not yet made my ritual goodbye journey through Newarthill; my insight and capacity to bear and think about the loss instead could continue to suffice if I am hard on myself. But why should my journey or my therapy be hard? Is there anything wrong with the therapeutic ritual journey if it can do the job in as rich, satisfying, and therapeutic way as the reflective route? [Pause] Or is it that, in itself, thinking about the ritual I could carry out (as opposed to thinking about the loss) is therapeutic enough to allow me not to actually have to do it? Which leads us into:
PSYCHOTHERAPY AND RITUALS
There are many examples in the literature of sometimes very elaborate therapeutic rituals. I've only tried one or two fully developed attempts in my own work. But I often use bits as we all might - considering how appointments are best set up, wording of letters, careful use of copies of letters or casenotes, or bringing in photographs or other mementos, suggesting letters that might not be sent. It seems only a short step from a standard psychodynamic or family systems framework of maturational tasks and life cycle processes, to thinking about life's transitional rituals. When taking a history, for example, we all look at the quality of grieving after bereavements. And there are many more ordinary social structures and events that we can learn to respect and identify when they have been missing. But I think it is easy to forget to take it further. Becoming more aware of these areas helps guide our work with people who have usually missed out during difficult and complex life transitions.
But here's an example (or two) where, like my still not enacted Newarthill road ritual, the idea of a ritual seemed to work without having to actually do it:
Eg Seven: The Family Feud
Mary was an able single mother from a complicated and often traumatic Catholic, working class, housing scheme, background. She had used and benefitted from a longish (for me) period of not very analytical weekly individual psychotherapeutic work. Growing away from her loyalty demanding social class, she trained as a social worker - or 'fucking social worker' as her family called it. I saw her intermittently and met her in a further crisis or two. One extended family dispute, with her mother as the eye of the storm, left her so infuriated that she felt literally ready to tear into her mother and kill her unless she avoided meeting her. Somehow psychodynamic interpretations didn't seem valid. It seemed more like a furious genuine feud where neither side felt heard and where, without any other arena for a hearing or justice, each side felt like provocatively taking the law into their own hands, though nothing really criminal had yet occurred. It seemed to me that a court-like arena was indicated. Mary said that her mother saw me as the enemy that had helped turn her against the family values. So, on my own, I could not offer to convene a meeting of both sides. Discussing this with Mary, the priest was my nearest equivalent on the mother's side. I followed up with a written version of my suggestion, with copies available for Mary to give to her mother and their priest, carefully outlining my readiness to liaise with the priest in order to set up a meeting for the purpose of providing a fair hearing for both sides. I think Mary did give a copy to her mother. But anyway, without anything further being done, that feudal crisis dissolved.
In other words, applying the framework of justice and the ritual structures appropriate to it, allowed a way of thinking and a proposal to be made that did enough justice in itself for things to move on.
Eg Eight: The Abuser's Grave
Another single mother with another history of childhood and marital abuse was, in a not very psychologically minded way, also making use of weekly sessions. The abuse was still a secret. Keeping her feelings and memories mostly to herself, she mentioned that, without knowing why, she wanted to find and visit the grave of her sexually abusive grandfather who had died while she was still in her early teens. The idea was disturbing for her and she didn't feel able to go to the graveside alone. 'But you must think it's a stupid idea,' she concluded self-deprecatingly. Given my usual readiness, I said that I didn't think it was a stupid idea, and that I would go with her if she liked. This concrete offer was obviously more moving, meaningful and therapeutic for her than my usual comments, which she usually cut across in the pressure of what she wanted to say. But she has moved on in various ways and now, though she has found out where the grave is and may visit in due course, she feels able to do so alone.
Perhaps something more than spitting on the abuser's grave is required. Which reminds me of John Steiner's point about mourning and forgiveness not being possible until the person has somehow 'really' killed them off (Steiner 1993). Has ritual got a place here? [Pause - shades of voodoo!] Which leads us into:
RITUALS AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
So what are rituals to psychoanalysis? I've mentioned a number of features rituals and psychoanalysis have in common: life transitions and maturational stages, difficulty and complexity due to multiply determined ambivalence and paradox, symbol and metaphor, conscious and unconscious, a particular mode of attending, historical antecedents, etc. Psychoanalysis and rituals share their investment in symbol and metaphor to a degree that tends to forget that symbol and metaphor is what they are. Both take leave of reality to wonder 'What if such-and-such were really true?' Analytical theory itself is slowly being allowed to be the metaphor it is, not a concrete discovery. I feel there is a question in the air about whether analysis is grimly analytical (in the sense of razing everything to its ground), or whether it is creative (in the sense Bollas uses with his reviving of free association). If psychoanalysis is a creative business, then ritual should be some kind of friend or ally, not something to be just taken or set apart.
Psychoanalysis may stand apart from ritual where ritual seems to be sublimation, catharsis, gratification, projection, or at worst, primitive functioning, crowd psychology, pathological defence and abuse. Rituals may seem to deny the analytic emphasis on the uniqueness of individuals, but they shouldn't. Rituals should give individuals their own space and meaning, as well as greater access to the more oceanic commonality, the social and biological destiny, the potential dignity, we all share with the rest of the human race.
Theoretically, you could look at rituals through any analytical frame and come up with something - though I have in no way systematically done so yet.. But, guided by discussions with my colleague Anne Hood, I suggest that the most obvious connection with rituals is in symbol formation. Symbolisation is an early and basic human development, just as ritual would have been in man's earliest tribal cultures. Ritual proper, then, is: the mature use and elaboration of the infant's original need and purpose in developing the tool of symbolic function. Let me expand on this by tracking the animism back through inanimate objects to the original animating relationship.
If I take you back to the Newarthill road, you'll remember this wasn't in itself a specially ritual attachment. With even the road needing to say goodbye to me, it illustrated just how animistic cathexis is, precisely because of that particular object's insignificance and impersonality. In passing, please note the important link between this psychological animism with the animism found in all religious thinking and rituals. Though we can't easily accept it when it goes supernatural, we readily accept more grounded animism.
Bollas, with his literary background, captures some of this liveliness and animism in his description (in Being a Character) of how we 'dream' our lives:
We each live amidst thousands of such objects that enlighten our world - things that are not hallucinations (they do exist), but whose essence is not intrinsic to what Lacan calls real. Their meaning resides in what Winnicott termed 'intermediate space' or 'the third area': the place where subject meets thing, to confer significance in the very moment that being is transformed by the object. The objects of intermediate space are compromise formations between the subject's state of mind and the thing's character.. (p18)
Poets and novelists feed on these thousands of minor things which (like the Newarthill road) we take for granted and pass on by. Our subsequent appreciation of the poem or novel shows how we feed on them too. Bollas describes how we 'fall into' some rather than other objects - works of art are objects specifically designed to facilitate our 'falling into' them. So are rituals and ritual objects.
Next, speaking of intermediate spaces and Winnicott, isn't the child's transitional object a fair prototype of a ritual or ritual object, helping it through transitional areas in life, and particularly in those first stages of individuation and separation? Reading Anne's baby observation, I found an almost constant ritual quality in the spatial behaviour and use of objects, carrying (more transparently than with adults) the significance and the child's working through of inner issues. Here is a more ritualistic than usual scene - though you really need a fuller picture to value the interpretation. Anne writes:
On one occasion (18 month old) Ruth wanted to put (her Mum's) perfume on her gran, on herself and on me as if I was to be integrated into this family, somehow made the same. Perhaps (Ruth) was beginning to see us as different people, parts of the same object that could be split into good and bad. However, the use of the perfume felt to me as if (Ruth) was magically trying to make us (all) the same.
Rituals and transitional objects help us through the pain and pleasure, the paradox, of separation and loss while remaining connected. But symbol formation itself we think of as occuring in the infant's development to deal with just that problem. For a neat summary, I can't do better than give Anne's note:
The importance of ritual, as of art, music, literature and poetry, is that it captures the magic communication of the non-verbal and pre-verbal. Even more so because it is at the point of symbolisation that the baby responds to absence and separation by creating a fantasy or symbol. Winnicott on transitional objects, Segal on symbolisation, and Bion on thinking, amongst others, highlight the importance of the first me/not me objects and experiences. These (transitional processes) moderate the loss of omnipotence, allowing some control and power as the baby moves to a depressive position. So the ritual (helps by) encapsulating the experience of helplessness and loss of control Projecting into the (ritual or) symbol and then controlling it is a way of accessing (otherwise) unspeakable feelings.
So Anne and I reckon that rituals work through being that same combination of me/not me, controlled/uncontrolled, conscious/not conscious. Bion saw the symbolic object or idea as standing in for the alpha-functioning container that the mother used to be, receiving, digesting and feeding back the baby's raw material. The first rituals or (strictly) pre-rituals, are the alpha-functioning, pre-symbolic, pre-verbal activities of infant feeding, cleaning, holding, and baby-talking. From this point of view, when it occurs, symbolisation is in itself the baby's first ritual event, developed to cope with a very early 'difficult and complex life transition'.
This also helps understand pathological use of rituals. These same functions can be a cul-de-sac, rather than a road forward. Symbols and rituals get used, not to access the unspeakable, but to shut off thinking and feeling. So 'rites' are also used 'wrongly' or perversely, as fetish, torture, abuse, self-abuse, obsessions and so on. The purpose there is not to name something but to cut off knowledge. The split off beta elements (as Bion called them) then keep returning to be lived through compulsion. This is the kind of thing you see in therapy, when a patient does something spontaneous but then has to destroy the gesture's meaning. The ritual may serve this compulsive and destructive purpose.
Clinically, I think the play of child analysis comes close to a continuous ritual use of symbolic objects and enactments. In adult work, because of their express and elaborated symbolic and psychological functions, I think rituals need to be given more special thought and place than they get. For some things, even mature and healthy adults may need more than analytical processes to work it through. Sometimes the emotion and work in a ritual genuinely moves us on where therapy does not. And on the other hand, you can be just as defensively stuck up a cul de sac with an analyst as you can with a ritual - and just as usefully got on the road by either!
But I think there are reasons why it's not the analyst's task to think or promote rituals. We could see the mind as an arena for privately created mental rituals, internally expressing and defending and attempting to resolve difficult or complex troubles across internal boundaries. Psychoanalysis has the special task of exploring and understanding these inner rituals. To do this it needs to prevent external rituals from confusing things.
In addition, some deeply personal matters are unconscious and complex in a way that makes them just not identifiable or bearable (or bare-able). For these, there is no way open to mutative ritual of any kind - even if you tried. Analysis can be seen as a method of exploring and opening up the significance of these hidden matters, notably through transference. Indeed, through transference, the analyst offers him or herself to be, as it were, the potential ritual object - shades of the voodoo doll here! - to be fashioned and used by the patient, assisted by the analyst's unique 'insider's' understanding. Here too, promotion of other rituals would confound the task. Enactment occurs, but on a shared mental stage, a private psychodrama or ritual involving only the analyst and patient - and their very own cast of thousands.
In the clinical examples I've given, the ritual described tends to follow a substantial period of psychotherapy. Perhaps ritual celebrates progress, rather than causes it. To be able to enjoy life's rituals, perhaps you first need a level of healthy and integrated functioning.
Finally let me bring things together into a partnership with a return to the Newarthill road. One analytical reservation about my ritual goodbye journey would be that there are deeper issues there. For example, I certainly suffered unexpected and unmarked goodbyes when I was young. And, on reflection, I do feel those undigested remains are contained in my projection of concern for poor Newarthill being abandoned just like that! [Pause] However, that explanation in itself also serves to advance my other thesis of the importance of rituals - in this case, undone rituals of parting and meeting. Now, if I do enact my Newarthill trip, I will be aware of another (analytically derived) level to that ritual. Maybe ritual and analysis go further in tandem.
My conclusion is . . . the start of our discussion!
REFERENCES
Barker, P. (1985) Using Metaphors in Psychotherapy. Brunner Mazel: New York
Barker, P. (1992) Basic Family Therapy. Norton:New York (pp176 et seq)
Bollas, C. (1992) Being a Character: Psychoanalysis and Self Experience. Routledge: London
Broderick, C. B. (1993) Understanding Family Systems: Basics of Family Systems Theory. Sage: London
Ellenberger, H. F. (1970) The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. Basic Books: USA & Fontana: London
Freud, S. (1913) Totem and Taboo. In Penguin Freud Library:13. The Origins of Religion (Ed) Albert Dickson. Penguin: London
Hood, A. (1995) Baby Observation, and Personal Communication.
Imber-Black, E., Roberts, J. & Whiting, R. (eds) (1988) Rituals in Families and Family Therapy W. W. Norton: New York and London.
Ingpen, R. & Wilkinson, P. (1994) A Celebration of Customs and Rituals of the World. Dragon's World:Limpsfield.
Steiner, J. (1993) Psychic Retreats: Pathological Organisations in Psychotic, Neurotic and Borderline Patients. Routledge: London
van der Hart, O (1983) Rituals in Psychotherapy: Transition and Continuity. Irvington: New York
FURTHER READING Friedman, E.H. (1980) Systems and ceremonies: a family therapy view of rites of passage. In "The Changing Life Cycle" 1st Edition, (eds) Carter and McGoldrick. Gardner: New York
Carter & McGoldrick (eds) (1989) The Changing Family Life Cycle: A Framework for Family Therapy. 2nd Edition. Boston:New York Gardner: New York
McMillan, J. (1995) Article on Scots-English hurt alive in 'Flower of Scotland' etc. Scotland on Sunday, 12 March 1995
Sutcliffe, P, Lovell, J. & Walters, M. (1985) New directions for family therapy: rubbish removal as a task of choice. Journal of Family Therapy, 7, 175-182.
Whitehorn, K. (1995) High days that mark our humanity. Observer, 23 April 95 And other articles in the press.
Wolin and Bennett (1984) Family rituals. Family Process. 23, 401-420.
