CRITICA

When asked Who was his favorite musician, Yo-Yo Ma replied: Pablo Casals. He said it was because Casals was a human being first, a musician second, and a cellist third. To me this is the model for a psychoanalyst: a human being first, a therapist second, and a psychoanalyst third. 

Neville Symington’s book The Psychology of the Person was published in 2012. It epitomizes this attitude. In fact Symington customarily referred to himself as simply a psychotherapist. Reading the book led me to take my occasional contacts and consultations with him to an in-depth personal study and relationship. I want to briefly describe what this term “Person” meant to him and how it may shape one’s attitude to psychoanalysis. 

Background: Symington was raised in a conservative Catholic family and as a young man, became a priest practicing in the poorer parts of London. His experiences brought him to the conclusion that orthodox Catholic teachings about one’s relation to a “received religion” were in fact an obstacle to a personal relation to a “natural religion”, which he defined as “reflection upon the nature of existence” (2004). He entered psychoanalysis and decided to leave the priesthood – and his exalted role in his family. His becoming a psychoanalyst was, as for many of us, driven by the need for new principles by which to live. 

I describe this in order to underline his subsequent vigorous arguments in favor of personal moral courage, acts of inner emotional freedom and outer candor, and liberation from conventionalized thinking and language (including the “received” wisdom of our institutional selves).

To be a person first is to embrace the role of therapist and the traditions of psychoanalysis within an attitude which spans both being and doing. Symington was inspired by the mystery of how, if our lives are finite and our understanding limited, we may still participate in the infiniteness and eternality of the universe. The person and the analyst meet at a place of simultaneous surrender to experience and ownership of our intentionality. To him, we reach to the universal through our immersion in the emotional truth of the particular. 

In my experience he was completely personal with me at all times: unpretentious, generous, highly curious, and alive to his intuitive responses. He once said that the only tools and analyst has are his thoughts, why do we not share them more? And in practice, it never seemed that he was offering me a useful idea that hadn’t already been useful to him. I would often leave our meetings feeling quite unsure about what he thought about my issues, but then I would gradually realize that I had become much more sure about what I thought about them. 

Mental illness is partially a high degree of sensitivity to the emotional states of mind of those around us. It is key therefore that the analyst is both conscious of and authentic about his or her own feelings. An analyst should mean – and feel – what they say. To see oneself as the object of others’ emotional states is to not be a person. Seeing oneself as a “me” is to be stuck in a static image of oneself as an object governed by whether others satisfy, frustrate, or approve of us. Those others may be external or internal and they challenge the analyst to make an “act of freedom” from them. 

The “I” (or the “person”) on the other hand is a moving embodiment of personally discovered truth, infused with a sense of one’s continuity and interconnectedness. This differs in some sense from the concept of a subject? The concept of subjectivation in psychoanalysis is about self-differentiation and freedom from intrusive superego injunctions; I believe Symington adds a spiritual dimension. That is the aspect of the emotional assimilation of one’s experience of, and awe at, the mysteries of human existence. 

He thought that the hidden damage caused by traumatic events is that they mask the absence of the necessary developmental experiences that should have been taking place – including a feeling of gratitude for one’s existence. This absence is replaced by a substitute negative self-evaluation which takes on a rigidity and certainty that prevents the nourishing of the self. Therefore he saw the aim of psychoanalysis as not the repair of what is damaged but as the building of what is not there. This starts with emotional congruence in the analyst. 

He ended one consultation saying: “I don’t think I have been able to help you very much today.” Later, as I reflected on the session, it came to me that his statement was exactly what I had been unwilling to admit to my patient. 

Symington, N. (2012) The Psychology of the Person. London: Karnac Books.

Symington, N. (2004) The Spirituality of Natural Religion. Int. Jnl. Applied Psychoanal. Studies 1(1):61-72.