A revision of "the relationship"

Pardon my lack of energy to look this up, but I’m quite sure that in the original (and possibly the present) Primal Therapy, each therapist saw only one client over the course of a three-week intensive. The client, lying on a mat in a semi-darkened, soundproof room, could reach super depths for an hour or two or three or more – as his inner need compelled – every day for those three weeks. I never paused long enough ’til today, my sixty-eighth birthday, to realize that this is perfect. I’ve known – as any depth therapist will know – that the fifty- or sixty-minute hour is an arbitrary convention that has nothing to do with success. People in the throes of painful truth can be frustrated by it, certainly those I’ve worked with who may not fall into their dungeon until the last few minutes of the hour.

Ideally, I’d like to go even further: have only one client for an hour-and-a-half or longer, two or three times a week over the course of a two-to-five-month term, pre-contracted but revisable. That’s because, to contradict James F. Masterson’s solidly respectable insistence that psychotherapy is a professional not a friendship relationship, it should have the undercurrent of a friend, or rather a soul-meet, relationship.

I believe this to be true even though the client typically wouldn’t want it. He doesn’t want, for the most part, the one person who cares and sees him the best to occupy that place in him where his parents failed to be.

Let’s question the wishful thinking that the client can be changed outside of a deep, core, abiding relationship. There’s the trite blather about how even Cognitive Therapy – the injection of therapist-approved improved thoughts into the benighted – works through "the relationship," but that requires the most superficial definition of a relationship possible, consisting of what? Benevolence, good cheer, respect for the person’s wrongheaded feeling and thinking? People are injured because their original relationship was not right. It was abusive or distracted or absent, was the parent’s neediness for enmeshment or love or revenge. What the person will, then, always need is the original symbiosis that evolves, over time, to its internalization and to separation and messy independence – the adult.

Clients don’t come in for this process that some would call reparenting, though it is closer to rebirthing. But they can be excused for not knowing what the hell is best.