Stephen van Beek MA (Tripos), Dip CTP, Member CAPT

Three Relationships

Much of psychotherapy in our era focuses n the notion of relationship, a change in orientation that reflects- at least in North America- the concept that what is ultimately important in life is our inter-personal relationships with a beloved Other.

It's next to impossible to discount this view since an intimate physical life is so important to adults living in a predominantly urbanized wasteland where the nurturing connection of the vegetative and animal world is so limited, and the pressures of the industrialized economy are so strident.

Yet consider that there may be more relationships than the great romantic one with the 'perfect partner' that go towards enabling or individual growth as human beings.

Our ancestors, certainly, regarded as most important connection their connection one with the spiritual realm, whence they prayed for a life beyond death. Whether they believed in a god or a pantheon, they regarded this as the most significant relationship, and the love of another human being for oneself was in second place.

It was only in the twelfth century, after the Crusades began, that knights brought back from the Middle East the mystic philosophy that another human being could actually embody the Godhead n acts of romantic connection. This foreign idea gained an irreducible foothold in the western consciousness, subverting the orthodoxy of Christianity which despised the love of woman.

So at this stage there were two choices; the relationship with the spiritual world and a supreme Being, and the beloved woman or man who incorporated some of the profoundly spiritual qualities of the spirit realm in a fleshly embodiment.

The resulting conflict between love as a spiritual expression or a corporeal one continues to haunt contemporary existence.

To add further to the 'either-or' of these kinds of Love, the rising consciousness of Western culture eventually led many thinkers and artists to question seriously the concept of a Supreme Being. Science and the rise of rational thinking are have been credited with overthrowing any notion of a Supreme Being in the form of a superior parent figure. In Voltaire's wry phrase. " If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him."

The last five hundred years have seen many intellectual revolutions of course; who today would believe that the sun revolves around the earth, or that things fall because they wish to do so? Gravity is understood to be a matter of physics, and since the era of Freud most people have become sufficiently aware of the human tendency to make things up and to treat them as real that it is difficult to treat the notion of a physically existing heaven, invisible to all telescopes, with any degree of seriousness.

Oddly enough this leads to the third form of relationship, one that was no t to be imagined in the days in which a Supreme Being ruled over all. Given that the heaven predicted by Christian theology ceased to be provable three hundred years ago, the new world of the spirit is now spoken of in terms that are both ancient and new. The tendency to interpret ' heaven' as a psychological state leads inevitably to the concept of the third relationship as a 'master' relationship.

The intra-psychic relationship, foreshadowed by the sophisticated of Siddhartha Gautama, later to be called " The One Who Is Awake' or simply the 'Buddha', is the most documented form of the third relationship of which I am aware.

It focuses on the psychodynamic activity that exists I what may loosely be termed our mental 'inner dialogue' or 'inner mind' -borrowing a terminology from F.H.W. Myers- both terms attempting to describe the inner life of the mind.

Modern literature and related art forms in the past and current century are entirely based on the expression of the inner dialogue, in expressing states of awareness, physical sensations, emotional feelings, and all forms of what is usually called thinking, al of which were categories of experience and perceptions that in previous centuries were unimaginable within the prevailing Western philosophical tradition. William Blake had the forethought to recognize this development in Beethoven's time, saying " what is now thought was once only imagined". For his mystical imagination foretold the time when an increased psychic consciousness would enthrone the relationship with the self as the paramount relationship, going beyond both the first tow.

Does this mean that narcissism is inevitable, that all we can do is to contemplate our navels like bad yoginis? Not at all: Real awareness means breaking the shackles of self-involvement that limit our capacity both to love other humans and to connect transpersonally to all that represents the Beyond that some still call God.

So a new schema is gradually emerging. In terms of the slow evolution of consciousness over many centuries, we have only recently begun to dethrone the Supreme for the Other; perhaps we still need a few more years to realize that focusing only on the inter-personal Other as the source of our individual salvation is inevitably a blind alley. Now, I think, we are more able to recognize that our capacity to love and receive love depends on our capacity to relate to this internal force we may (following Jung) call the Self, or following Heidegger, the project of the self in our relationship towards death and a possible eternity.

What this implies for a psychodynamic therapy is exciting, if demanding: we must shake off our false focus on the importance of our own existence in order to embrace the love of the Other, while not forgetting we are also needy Others. In unifying as a slowly integrating personal Self with all the pressures that existence brings to test us, we may inch forward to an understanding of the transcendent power of Being.