I
Integration, Interpretation, Intervention, Introjection
Integration
On the whole, we’d all prefer not to disintegrate. The opposite of disintegration is - no kidding - integration. What does this mean, though? Well, here’s what it means to me.
Each of us has four strands of our relationship with ourselves: our thoughts, our emotions, our body, and our behaviour. Most of us are incredibly strong on one of those, maybe two. Many of us are nowhere on at least one of the others.
This is how it works in practice. Izzy will say “I can feel stuff and I understand why, but I can’t actually do anything different.” Ian will lead a highly active life but say “I have no idea what you mean by emotions.” Ibrahim will say “I feel sad” but when asked where in his body he feels it he’ll draw a blank.
In each of these very typical examples, some parts of their life experiences are unavailable to these people; as such these strands can work against them. It’s like having one of the key members of your support staff going rogue.
Therapy is a place to try to activate and integrate each of those areas; to attempt to make this team work together in the interests of their boss: you.
Interpretation
An interpretation is an intervention (see below) a therapist does which involves suggesting a possible meaning for what the client has just said, rather than reflecting it back or trying to deepen the client’s thought. Inga says “I just feel so angry every time I eat toast which my husband has burnt”: an interpretation might be “Your husband knows you like your toast under-done; when he burns it I wonder if it feels to you like he doesn’t care or he knows better.” Isaac says “Every time I come to these sessions I feel like I’m going to the dentist”; the therapist might say “It sounds like you feel these sessions could be quite painful for you.”
As a rule of thumb, interpretations are best made by the client themselves. But a therapist can usefully help them to do that; indeed, often the most useful moments can be when a therapist makes an interpretation which is wrong or limited. For instance:
Client: I don’t want to forgive my mother: it may sound horrible but I kind of want to hate her.
Therapist: You don’t want to let her off the hook.
Client: It’s more than that. If I forgive her then the only one left to be angry at is me.
Intervention
An “intervention” is the therapists’ word for more or less anything the therapist says in a session. It’s the shorthand we use for anything from the “Uh-huh” to the extended paragraph of interpretation or the shared discussion. It’s useful as a term of art, but I also like it because it implies the therapist is ‘intervening’ in a client’s challenges. That’s as it should be: it’s the client’s life, the client’s process, the client’s capacity to change. The therapist is in support of that, rather than the oracle or saviour.
Introjection
There are two main classes of challenging psychological experiences.
First there’s the brick falling on your head and leaving you with constant migraines: that’s trauma.
But there’s another: the breathing-in of subtle (sometimes even imperceptible) quantities of poisonous gas, the effect of which is to make us cough for years later but we have no idea why. That’s introjection.
“See that person over there? He’s such an angry motherfucker” we say, while hurling a chair at a wall and spitting blood. That’s projection: something from within us (like the film in a cinema projector) is projected onto the ‘screen’ of someone else.
Introjection is the opposite. If we introject we are the screen experiencing what someone is giving to us. So our mother and father are constantly arguing; we feel their tension so that by the end of the disagreement the two of them are calm but we are full of rage ourselves.
Melanie Klein, the expert on such matters (see ‘K’), explained in her seminal book Envy & Gratitude: “The outer world, its impact, the situations the infant lives through, and the objects he encounters, are not only experienced as external but are taken into the self and become part of the inner life.”
Introjection is often completely unconscious. We can spot it by asking the question “Why would I feel that? I have no reason to” and wondering where we learnt it, where we breathed in that toxic gas.
Next Week: J
Joy, Judgment