The car mechanic model of energy psychotherapy
In much of contemporary psychotherapy, the role of the therapeutic relationship is privileged as the key factor in change. Psychoanalytic frameworks emphasise the role of transference, whilst other approaches see the creation of safety and trust as core elements in a reparative relational cure. One way or another, the majority of explanatory models of psychotherapeutic change see the therapeutic relationship as the means whereby the formative experiences of childhood can be modified to enable a fruitful engagement with life and reality.
At one time, many years ago, I would have been inclined to agree with this position. As a psychoanalyst, I would have viewed interpretation of the transference as the crucial skill and basis of therapeutic efficacy. Now I fundamentally disagree with my younger professional self. Sometimes, I humorously exaggerate my stance by saying I view myself as more akin to a car mechanic – my point being that you do not take your car to a mechanic because you have a problem with the mechanic, nor because you think a relationship with an empathic mechanic will fix your car, but because you hope he or she is competent in diagnosing what is wrong and fixing it.
For me, this issue first came into clear focus with the emergence of EMDR as an effective treatment for trauma in the late 1980s/early 1990s (Mollon, 2005). I found the method very effective, but there were some striking features of the process. There seemed to be a natural healing capacity in people, that a therapist could facilitate, but which depended crucially on the therapist keeping out of the way. It was a process internal to the patient – not one that was played out in the relationship. In general, comments from the therapist would get in the way of the process. What was required of the therapist was technical skill in facilitating an effective EMDR process.
Later, as I embraced and explored energy psychotherapy (Mollon, 2008) – working at the interface of the mind, the body, and the subtle energy system – my awareness of the essentially inner (as opposed to interpersonal) nature of the work became even more pronounced. In energy psychotherapy, we work in the location of the client’s problem – the patterning in the mind and energy system. We use a range of modalities to target and dissolve these troublesome patterns.
In this work, transference may occasionally arise – in the original Freudian sense of the intrusion into the relationship with the therapist of elements more properly belonging to the realm of memory and the developmental past. It is a misperception. As Freud noted, this gets in the way of the work. The task then is to shift this out of the realm of the relationship, figure out the origin, and then dissolve this with energy work.
In many of its versions, particularly in the UK, psychoanalysis has moved away from Freud’s original view of transference as misperception. Instead, the analyst may work within the transference, in a continual analysis of the psychodynamic template as expressed in the relationship (Mollon, 2011). Here is what Freud actually said:
Freud (1940) described transference as a menacing illusion:
“It is the analyst's task to tear the patient away each time from the menacing illusion, to show him again and again that what he takes to be new real life is a reflection of the past.” (p 53)
And earlier (1920)
“He is obliged to repeat the repressed material as a contemporary experience instead of, as the physician would prefer to see, remembering it as something belonging to the past.”
Some of my clients, particularly those who have trained as psychotherapists in conventional modalities, remain inclined to think that the positive change they experience in our work is due to the nature of the therapeutic relationship. I counter this with my car mechanic analogy. Of course, it is important that the therapeutic relationship is good enough, appropriately boundaried, and that it does not contain elements that impede the work, and that the therapist is skilled in recognising transference when it does emerge. It is also helpful if the therapist has a capacity for deep and thoughtful empathy, since this is a source of important information that can guide the work. Nevertheless, I do not believe the relationship is the key vehicle for change. Like a good car mechanic, the important skills are in knowing how the system (a car engine or the mind-body-energy system) functions, what can go wrong, and in how to fix it.
In energy psychotherapy (as in EMDR), the clinician engages with the client to identify key formative experiences, which are then targeted to process and dissolve the emotional charge and the patterning in the inner psychodynamic template. The work is focused within the client, where the problem is actually located, rather than in the relationship with the psychotherapist. For clients who are new to psychotherapy and uncontaminated by culturally shaped expectations of a therapeutic relationship, this mode of work can feel congruent with their goals in seeking help. Other clients may come with an expectation, whether explicit or implicit, that they will be experience a reparative relationship that will make up for what was adverse or absent in their original family of origin. This attitude can be an impediment to the work. I also have the impression that some of those psychotherapists who particularly emphasise the relationship, and/or the intersubjectivity of the encounter, might really be seeking gratification of their own relational needs and deficits.
I can extend the car mechanic analogy a little further – to that of an oil change, the most crucial part of a combustion engine service. From an energy psychotherapy perspective, I view the client as captured by a variety of dysfunctional energy fields – fields of subtle energy that contain information relating to earlier adverse experiences. These are the attractor fields that maintain the recurrent problematic patterns of the psychodynamic template, governing thought, emotion, and behaviour. They are derived from formative, emotionally significant early experiences. They may impede optimal perception and functioning in the present. By activating these ‘thought fields’, as they are sometimes called, and stimulating the subtle energy system, of meridians, chakras or other energy centres, we cause these to dissipate. We introduce a little optimum entropy into the overly ordered problematic patterns. The emotional charge is dispersed. At that moment, a little more of the person becomes liberated into the present.
As we dissipate the old energy fields, the waste is discharged. Fresh energy is drawn in. In Blue Diamond Healing (Mollon, 2022), this higher dimensional breathing is represented by clockwise energy emerging from the Unified Field streaming down, whilst the waste orgone drains down the counter-clockwise spiral into the earth. This is the oil change metaphor.
Much of contemporary psychoanalysis emphasises ‘object relations’ of one kind or another – internalised representations and relationships with the original ‘objects’ of desire or attachment (predominantly early caregivers). Purists might see the psychoanalytic task as exclusively that of analysing the analysand’s object relations as they are played out in the transference. I view this position as misguided. In optimum energy psychotherapeutic healing, the aim is to get beyond object relations and instead to form a deeper relationship with the core self and with Source. This comes about by dissolving the attractor fields of the formative relationships of childhood, releasing the energy bound up in those for life, work, and pleasure in the present. When set free of the psychodynamic templates of the past, the person achieves greater capacity for present relationships. By contrast, psychoanalysis as conventionally practiced is likely only to lead to modified or improved inner object relationships rather than a release from object relations.
It is worth noting that not all psychoanalytic frameworks are based on object relations. For example, Heinz Kohut’s self-psychology (Kohut, 1971; Mollon, 2001) was concerned with the structure of the self and the factors that weaken or strengthen this. For Kohut, the healing process rested not so much on the relationship itself but on the natural dissipation of the “selfobject transferences”. The analyst would function as part of the analysand’s own system, until innumerable micro-failures of empathy would fuel a process of transmuting internalisation, resulting in a building up of the internal structure of the self. Kohut saw the dysfunction of the structural self as arising from narcissistic traumas and derailments of the healthy line of development of narcissism. These can indeed be addressed through targeted energy work – but this was not a modality known to Kohut.
Rather than modifying a person’s pattern of internal object relations, we seek to restore his or her connection to the higher dimensional realms and the Unified Field. This might be thought of as a vertical connection, contrasting with the horizontal connection with others. It may involve restoring the deeper energy grids, the inner tree of life, and removing errant coding from its signets. By becoming free of the attractor fields of the childhood patterns, and connecting to the higher realms and to Source, the person’s capacity for realistic and loving relationships in the present is enhanced.
References
Freud, S. 1920. Beyond the pleasure principle. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. XVIII. London. Hogarth.
Freud, S. 1940. An outline of psycho-analysis. Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. XXIII. London. Hogarth.
Kohut, H. (1971). The Analysis of the Self: A Systematic Approach to the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Narcissistic Personality Disorders. New York. International Universities Press.
Mollon, P. (1993). The Fragile Self: The Structure of Narcissistic Disturbance. London, Whurr (republished by Wiley).
Mollon, P. (2001). Releasing the Self: The Healing Legacy of Heinz Kohut. London. Whurr (republished by Wiley).
Mollon, P. (2005). EMDR and the Energy Therapies: Psychoanalytic Perspectives. London, Karnac (Republished by Routledge).
Mollon, P. (2008). Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy. London. Karnac (republished by Routledge).
Mollon, P. (2011). A Kohutian perspective on the foreclosure of the Freudian transference in modern British technique. Psychoanalytic Inquiry. 2011. 31(1):28-41.]
Mollon, P. (2022). Blue Diamond Healing: Exploring Transpersonal and Transdimensional Aspects of Energy Psychotherapy. London, Karnac.