About five months ago the head psychiatrist at the clinic where I work approached me about starting a peer supervision group for the Interns and Externs training there. He wanted to construct a space where they could present and discuss their cases, receive feedback from their peers and also raise any issues that they were having in the clinic. As a 5^th year psychology Intern, I was the most senior training clinician (it feels as much as an oxymoron as it sounds) and we agreed that it would be my responsibility for creating this space. Our initial discussions outlined the goals of the group, that it would be voluntary, confidential, open to all the trainees, run for twelve weeks, and that each week a different clinician would present a case for discussion.

However, we were less clear when defining my role and exactly how I would create the space for this to occur. We contrasted the pros and cons of the traditional group supervisor role to the supervisor as a group facilitator. While the former provided more in the way of structure and boundaries we were concerned about it feeling like a therapy group or clinical rounds. Indeed, having established collegial and friendly relationships with the clinicians it was important to be clear that the supervision group was not a therapy group. Alternatively, the latter appeared to engender more space for open discussion but provided less structure and clarity around roles. After going back and forth over the differences, we agreed to use a facilitator model. In this model, I was responsible for bringing the group to a beginning and an end, ensuring that there was a presenter each week, and generally facilitating discussion. We also decided that I would not present my own cases and that I would generally try to allow others to answer questions so that they would not be directed at me. Having established the framework, we ended our conversation with the psychiatrist sounding the ominous and prophetic warning that he had never participated in a successful peer supervision group.

As the group started and began to meet weekly, some of the outlined aspects worked well. Notably, some members appeared to benefit from presenting cases and being given an open forum to ask questions. Furthermore, clinicians felt they could discuss issues they had in the clinic in a confidential area. However, as predicted by the psychiatrist, for the large part the group did not feel like it ever took off. Attendance was spotty from the second week onwards, robust discussions were sparse, and much of the group process seemed to go through me.

Succinctly, the group never seemed to take ownership over itself. While there are likely many reasons and contributing factors for this, reflecting back over the course of the group I am struck by how much my own role influenced the development of the group. Specifically, I believe that I failed to commit to the role of group facilitator. Instead, I moved back and forth between supervisor and facilitator and by not being consistent limited the group’s growth. In hindsight (which is not always 20/20) this is not surprising and seems to me a product of the ambiguity inherent in peer supervision groups, and my own ambivalence towards authority.

There are two important differences to peer supervision groups and other forms of groups, including regular supervision groups, therapy groups, and even support groups. The first is that in peer groups, the members either already know each other, or will at some point through their interactions come to know each other. Thus, unlike other groups, where members maintain little contact with each other outside of the group, in a peer supervision group they frequently interact outside of the group. Secondly, in other groups, the supervisor or leader is typically a more experienced clinician, whose role and position is defined, however in peer groups all members are expected to contribute equally.

The result of these differences is that the boundaries established in other groups to ensure safety are less pronounced and more ambiguous, meaning that the peer supervision group members themselves have to establish trust amongst each other. Although this may seem easy, it is as I learned actually a complicated process requiring a lot of faith and an ability to tolerate vulnerability. Without a supervisor to orientate around (more on that in a minute), group members are asked to establish trust through the act of discussing cases with their peers. This is potentially frightening, case discussions reveal aspects of us as therapists or individuals that we may not be aware of. Doing so in an ambiguous setting, with colleagues we trust, but perhaps not entirely, is daunting, difficult, and anxiety provoking for even I imagine experienced clinicians. Compounding these obstacles, is that many of the trainees were just starting to gain clinical experience and may have felt vulnerable and out of place discussing their experiences with others. It is not that the members did not explicitly trust each other, as much as the valence of the group pulled them away from easily building trust with each other.

One of the ways of lessening anxiety – or countering this valence – is for the supervisor to take an active role in running supervision, establishing boundaries regarding member interaction and a consistent structure for the group to follow each week. In doing so, individuals come to know what is expected of them less through their interactions with each other, than with the supervisor, who acts as an anchor for them to orientate around. Two of the most likely configurations are that either supervisee’s develop trust in the supervisor and it expands towards the other members, or alternatively, they develop trust in each other and perhaps later the supervisor. In either case, the supervisor’s role is defined by stability and consistency.

Notably, while trust can develop amongst all the parties, the power differential of supervisor and supervisee remains. Peer supervision offers the opportunity for a greater balance of power. Each individual can temporarily step into different roles, each taking turns at supervising, facilitating, being supervised, etc. In other words, by giving up the traditional role of supervisee (or group member) and managing the anxiety that comes with it, other interpersonal relationships are possible.

However, not only does the supervisee have to give up their role, but the supervisor as well. Indeed, while I thought that I was ready to do this, in retrospect it proved more difficult than I anticipated. In trying to establish the space for peer supervision I was also (although likely unaware of it at the time) moving away from my own basis of security. In this sense, much as I was asking the supervisee’s to handle anxiety by giving up their role, I was also asking myself to deal with anxiety of not having a clear role either. This process seemed to entail an interesting paradox whereby in order to give up authority I first had to use it.

Broadly speaking, initiating a group already entails a certain relationship between supervisor and supervisee’s (initiator and initiates), although as already described the aim of this group was to move that relationship into the background and place peer relationships in the foreground. In order to accomplish this, I originally thought it would be enough to describe the aims, goals, rules, etc. However, as described earlier, this did not work – and indeed, may have likely contributed to increased anxiety and ambiguity in the group. Looking back, I now wonder if it would have been more effective to use the authority present from initiating the group, being senior, etc to attempt and remove that authority. While I am not entirely certain of the form that this process would take what seems clear is the need to act, as an authority to communicate that there is no authority. In other words, by actively placing my trust in the group (only something the supervisor/authority can do) I would have more fully taken the role of facilitator.

Of course, this is easier said then done, particularly in a peer setting. Indeed, early in the group, the question of authority was raised and despite my wish to move away from these traditional group issues, by spreading authority around I found myself more often then not responding from a place as the supervisor. While this involved using authority it was in the form of maintaining a more conventional relationship. Instead, I wonder what it would have been like to use my authority to let it go. By constraining the extent to which I would reply (perhaps less as supervisor and more as a peer?) would that have facilitated a more effective peer group experience?

I believe that my difficulties doing this, reflects some of my own ambivalence to authority and hesitancy to fully embrace a facilitator role. Indeed, much like supervisee’s look to quell their anxiety through the supervisor, I was doing the same. Retreating into roles makes managing anxiety easier but also limits some of the opportunities for novel experiencing. In this respect, my movement between facilitator and supervisor limited the extent to which I committed to either and thus the extent to which a genuine peer interaction could develop.

For me, anxiety around authority stems from the possibility of overly constraining self and other. Accordingly, my response is to make space by either reluctantly (or inconsistently) accepting authority or alternatively challenging it. Although at times effective and important it can also be confusing and prevent roles and novelty from becoming fully developed. Instead I find it necessary to remind myself that authority much like other roles can be taken up, released, and modified, and that constraint enables action, which of course modifies constraint. Being more flexible at doing so may allow for more productive peer supervision groups!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NhP1EN83bI

The problem with Cargo 200, in a sentence: it wants to maintain the shocking locus of the film as both a thematically coherent linchpin of events, characters, narrative strands, etc. and as a decidedly “meaningless,” shocking violence that cannot be articulated, grasped, or accounted for “finally” by the film in which it appears.

Accordingly, the literature that attempts to negotiate or justify this rhetoric of shock – that is, where the shock must both “exceed” and “express” meaning – finds itself in a tight spot. Gregory Carleton’s article in Studies in Soviet and Russian Cinema, “A tale of two wars: sex and death in Ninth Company and Cargo 200,” seems to me representative in this regard (and there don’t seem to be all that many English language essays on Cargo 200). On the one hand, he writes, Cargo 200 is “groundbreaking precisely because of the visual explicitness of sexual scenes”: which is to say, it is the “explicitness” and “excessiveness” itself that becomes meaningful through its negative, transgressive gesture. This is also to say that the “content” is both relatively unstylized and of secondary importance. What matters most is the raw, visceral shock of the scenes: for this reason, “the graphic scene is essential, especially as it plays on audience expectations.”

It is thus first and foremost a matter of “affect” and moving the spectator, of which “shock,” in this view, occupies a privileged relation, as the first affect amongst affects. (Much could be said of the literalist, direct, and unmediated character attributed to “shock,” and how this “ground for the real” itself piggybacks off conceptions of the body as “corporeal” and “material” – or in any case, self-identical.) The proximity of discourses of shock to discourses of physiology should in this respect be questioned. I mean, are “quieter” responses the less affective for it, or for that matter the less shocking? Can love shock? Can laughter? If shock is nothing more than the “touching” of the subject, as told through a discourse of physiology, then it becomes difficult to assign a magnitude or threshold past which a given affect breaks free of the pantheon of responses to become a more direct, visceral elicitation. It seems to me that everything said of shock could just as well be said of jokes and laughter.

That being said, this logic of shock is in actuality only strategically (and rather disingenuously) dispensed, if only for the reason that, paradoxically, it is the shock itself that is supposed to express, or bear the weight of, determinate, historical themes. Which is to say, shock cannot remain an exclusively affective phenomenon if it is to find historical or cultural justification. To become allegorical, it must move beyond this simple, reductive “explicitness.” So after describing the rape scenes as “groundbreaking” for their “visual explicitness,” Carleton turns to their “symbolic conceit,” though it’s never said how the one is able to suddenly, if selectively, coextend with the other. The “explicit” is after all directly opposed to the “symbolic” and the “allegorical”; where the former claims to require nothing of the viewer, of culture – it circumvents the interpretive process, which is why it’s presented as “affective,” i.e. direct, unmediated, ‘of the body, not the mind’ – the latter suggests a specific critical or allegorical motivation at work in its presentation.

Though the affective, unmediated character attributed to shock is able to secure for itself a “ground” for inquiry, it also, for the same reason, cuts itself off from history, politics, culture. How can the explicit, the unmediated, the direct, be made to link up with the broader, and certainly “mediated,” problems that surround it? Carleton seems to be struggling with this problem when he writes:

“Moreover, visualized sexuality in each [Ninth Company and Cargo 200] is not a coincidental occurrence but connects the films in an intertextual relationship and broader meta-narrative. It draws from and informs the legacy of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in particular how the war’s figuration has been shaped by glasnost/early post-Soviet representations. Central to this meta-narrative is rape, as a symbolic conceit of the anti-epic and its themes of violation and betrayal.”

In a way, Carleton here simply repeats the question. Even his language for describing the relationship between the rape scenes and the historical forces represented in the film carefully maintains their distinction (“connects,” “draws from,” “informs,” etc.), no doubt because the relationship between them is tenuous, unmotivated, and difficult to locate. In which case, it becomes difficult to describe the shockingly violent center of the film as an allegory for anything, if only because it is what it was meant to be: arbitrary, gratuitous, and non-symbolic.

Carleton’s attempt to find a “symbolic conceit” in the rape scenes, after having presented them as “explicit” and ahistorical in their “affect,” seems to me symptomatic of the methodological problems within the film itself. But even if we were to give generous readings of Carleton and Cargo 200, the allegorical reading suggested would be just as problematic. I mean, if, as Carleton argues, “Central to this meta-narrative is rape, as a symbolic conceit of the anti-epic and its themes of violation and betrayal,” then it would be like comparing the relationship between the Soviet people and its government to the rape of an adolescent girl. So, even if we did grant this film the allegorical status it seems to desire, we would be confronted with still more problematic metaphors and analogies, none of which seem particularly insightful or sophisticated.

After all, the film is titled Cargo 200, which suggests that the true concern of this film is the death of soldiers in a needless, foreign war; in which case the rape of Angelika would stand in for the “rape” of Soviet men by the Soviet state? That the corpse of Angelika’s fiance is rolled into bed with her suggests as much, symbolically-speaking, but why these two acts – rape and war – should be drawn as homologous is left unexplained, assumed. (That both are horrible seems to me the thinnest of possible relations. By this logic, any horrible act could serve this narrative just as well.) In any event, the rape of Angelika would in this sense appear as a rather curious, and it would seem inappropriate, symbol for what “cargo 200″ represents: the murder of young men by the state. That said, we are never really told why this young woman’s body has been made the site for the suffering of innumerable symbolic violences, why this body should be made to bear the problems and violences of the nation in its entirety – from religion to politics to the military to pop culture. However, as soon as the question becomes too irritating to turn away, the film is of course able to fall back on the “shock” alibi, according to which the film’s own inability to explain itself is supposed to be the explanation.

Anyway, my friend said she’d noticed that, when academics talk about other academics, they are likely to use the first and last name when referring to a woman academic, while men academics often get mentioned by last name only. This to her was entirely part of everyday life, undesirable but obvious.

But I was taken somewhat aback by this claim, and I think the other guy there was too. I realized afterwards, to my shame, that our common reaction was one of doubt. We wanted to think of counterexamples. Exceptions that would disprove the rule. Isn’t Judith Butler pretty reliably called Judith Butler? we were asked. But isn’t Butler a pretty common name? Well, but there aren’t any other famous academics called Butler, now are there? Or take Simone de Beauvoir. Pretty much always Simone de Beauvoir, isn’t she? Well, yes. Who could deny that? While on the other hand Sartre, it came to my mind, is indeed pretty much always just Sartre. Or take Hannah Arendt. Is Hannah Arendt always Hannah Arendt? Well, yes, pretty often, though I think maybe at the philosophy department in Paris-8 she may occasionally become just Arendt. But other mid-century German male philosophers seem to go by their last names far more often. Marcuse is just Marcuse. And “Adorno” also seems to travel pretty well by itself, as a practically self-contained sign of pessimistic dialectical prose convolution. Or take Eve Sedgwick. She’s pretty often called Eve Sedgwick, no? But not really Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that’s a mouthful. We didn’t reach agreement about that.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=98X2_JYbhos

After having established the “determinate functioning” and systematic appearance of the Cecafumo cityscape shot in relation to the narrative of Mamma Roma – “The shot is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position” (116) – Rhodes now argues the opposite, that its repetition is uncontrolled and unprovoked – which is to say, incessant (“it keeps returning” [121]) and therefore symptomatic of a “maddening” disavowal.

“Furthermore, the shot’s power extends out of its own indeterminate functioning in regards to the narrative. Again, its muteness and repetition and detachment from the characters’ point of view all contribute to make the shot ever more strange. Meanwhile, it brushes so close to familiarity (it ‘recalls’ neorealism; it almost suggests subjectivity grounded in point of view; it keeps returning) that it maddeningly seems to solicit and refuse comprehension through the simple fact of its mute, insistent reappearance. This shimmering opacity induces a restless, uncertain experience that draws us into the register of the sublime.” (121)

Drawing upon vaguely psychoanalytic concepts (trauma, disavowal, the uncanny) to characterize this shot, or the repetition of this shot, Rhodes describes the repetition as the effect of a kind of “organizing intelligence” (127) or subjectivity coextensive with the film itself (and not with Mamma Roma). Thus the image’s recurrence is described in terms of an affective, experiential subject, as a matter of traumatic repetition – “It is something not so much understood as suffered” (120); it marks “the ‘pain’ of a ‘failure of expression’” (121) – but its appearance, “diegetically,” is non-subjective. For Rhodes, that is, this shot specifically resists attaching itself to a character or assuming a point of view.

Rhodes then turns to Micciché who argues that the shot does not correspond to a strong and completed narrative nucleus, that it is “discontinuous” within “the diegetic fabric of the film,” and that it is therefore not a “subjective image,” but an “ideological image.” “Thus the image’s logic and its message belong to the organizing intelligence of the film, to Mamma Roma, if you will, but not to Mamma Roma.” (127) Though it’s safe to say that this particular logic of repetition does not find its means of expression in a character, neither do most shots: which is to say, it’s simply not clear why this logic should secure the impossibility of that shot (which is not, mind you, the same exact shot) becoming “inhabited” by a character, by a point of view – or at least opening onto that possibility, rather than specifically canceling it out. Rhodes, however, defines point of view in opposition to repetition, as if subjectivity itself – and, by extension, shots that represent subjectivity through point of view – cannot only not be ideological but is by definition insulated from pregiven forms, patterns, and repetitions.

“But we would be wrong to ascribe the landscape image to Mamma Roma’s point of view. First, this shot has been repeated too often at too many different moment following too many different types of shots for us legitimately to believe that it belongs to any character’s point of view. It has established its own autonomous functioning.” (126)

In point of fact, arguing that the final instance of the “sublime” panorama is also not a point of view shot is especially difficult because it is the first instance where the shot does approximate, and rather clearly suggests, the point of view of Mamma Roma. Which is why Rhodes is forced to admit that the point of view of Mamma Roma is at least “solicited.” However, following a rather contorted logic, Rhodes declares outright his agreement with Micciché, who “argues forcefully, and I agree, that the shot ‘is never – not even when it seems to be – a subjective image but is instead always an ideological image, and it does not function within the film as a diegetic surplus (which would enrich the story) but rather an ideological surplus (which enriches the meaning of the film).’” (127) So even where the shot “seems to be” subjective, it’s not “really” subjective – which is a fancy way of rendering this argument unfalsifiable (and unverifiable).

In anticipation of the more predictable objections, Rhodes lingers on this last scene, struggling to recast the shot sequence as one that specifically neutralizes the possibility of a point of view. So, though the shot does “solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view,” it is only a simulation:

“I want to add to Micciché’s analysis the further consideration that the work of this shot sequence (shot/countershot, character looking/putative object of vision) is precisely to solicit our identification of the sequence as point of view. Furthermore, an identification of the sequence as such solicits our identification with Mamma Roma. These solicitations, however, are lures, ideological snares. We are meant to understand that such a pursuit of identification (of shot with character’s vision, of our emotions with those of Mamma Roma) is exactly what this film means to disrupt, to interrogate.” (127)

Rhodes here cleverly turns the appearance or possibility of the point of view in the final shot into the lure, or snare, of ideology itself, and in such a way that to affirm the shot as suggestive of a point of view (and not a “point of view” qualified by quotes) is to fall for the trap, the trap of “sentimentality.” For Rhodes’ argument, to be sure, much is made to hang on this final shot not being subjective, to the extent that subjective means “sentimental,” as in the comparable scene in Umberto D where the image dramatically assumes the character’s point of view (looking down, out a window) (127), though for this viewer the comparison seems overly literal and rather inappropriate. Yes, it’s a shot looking out a window; but beyond that, it’s hard to see how the one and other relate to the same object or the same state of affairs. (One could just as well refer to the final scene of Germany: Year Zero, though to what end, I don’t know.)

In any event, the more obvious, or less counter-intuitive, reading of the final shot would make room for the possibility that it does in fact suggest, or “solicit,” Mamma Roma’s point of view. This seems to me not only intended, but essential to the film’s trajectory: it marks a final, dramatic coincidence of the film’s and Mamma Roma’s points of view. As Rhodes himself points out, “The shot [of the Cecafumo cityscape] is inserted each time Mamma Roma or Ettore begins or concludes a line of action meant to improve his or her social position.” But in each case, the damning representation of the cityscape or the INA Casa Tuscolao project – beginning with the “ironic” nod to Renaissance architecture – contradicts the optimism and false hopes of Mamma Roma’s dialogue. It’s as if she has not yet learned that her “dreams [are] fostered by the INA Casa Tuscolano project’s masquerade of progress and social equality” (125), a critique reflected or anchored in the framing and representation of the projects.

In other words, as a viewer, we are consistently clued-in, behind Mamma Roma’s back, to the fate that awaits to her. Thus, in the final image, Mamma Roma finally “gets it”: the ideological image to which we have been privy all along is suddenly, through her loss and wretchedness, “inhabited” by her, subjectively. Or, from another perspective, this image which was previously extra-diegetic becomes diegetic; the “organizing intelligence” of the film now coincides with her “intelligence.” That the image is not entirely or exclusively a point of view shot does not seem to me evidence of a “lure” or “solicitation”: aside from the fact that point of view shots don’t have to be strictly or exactly from the point of view of a character to approximate it or reference it, the framing of this final shot seems to be strategically oriented to mediate or convincingly “span” subjective and objective views. In being loosely centered on Mamma Roma, it prevents the “ideological image” from being eclipsed, and vice versa. In this way, without devolving into a pure sentimentality, Mamma Roma and Mamma Roma do finally coincide.

Nina Beier, "Non Finito Series," Wood, metal, 20 x 20 cm, 2009

Though interesting enough on their own, these two works by the Berlin-based Danish artist Nina Beier form something entirely new when taken together. In the first (and the order is important), a “horizontal skyscraper” is displayed in (possibly) unfinished form. We say “possibly” because, according to its placard, this “sculpture in process is exhibited or sold on the agreement that the artist might or might not choose to continue working on it.” Though this gesture may seem tired, practiced, potentially disingenuous, it nonetheless strikes a key that reverberates across the “life” of an artwork. For one, the work itself may or may not be finished; which is to say, one may or may not know what one is exhibiting or buying; which is also to say, one may expect more and receive something “less,” the artwork as it already is. It could even be said to undermine the concept of a work of art in the most direct way possible, through the threat that it may only be a rough draft, a scribble. That it depends upon an “agreement” with the exhibitor or owner may even promise to raise legal issues, should the artist choose to exploit that contract in a way that would startle, and no doubt enrage, any party naive enough to not take it seriously. The possibilities, needless to say, are endless – literally.

Nina Beier, "Framing Horizontal Skyscraper Non Finito," framed photograph, 2009

The work does not “end” there, however. A separate work, “Framing Horizontal Skyscraper Non Finito,” is nothing more than a “framed studio shot of an artwork. When documented during each exhibition, a print of this new photograph replaces the previous one in the frame.” Again, this gesture could easily be mistaken for a tired, pseudo-Modernist reprieve, or for yet another bout of feigned institutional self-reflexivity, if not for the fact that the original work is itself (possibly) “in progress.” Thus a “system” of sorts manages to emerge from this careful delineation. With the modification of the one, comes the modification of the other, and in such a way that it need not end there. “Agreements” could be exploited to complicate still other agreements. Of course, Beier’s formula (and it is at this point that it becomes a formula) could rather easily be be made to grow tiresome, or in any case tedious. But that’s just it: through this clever variation on the artwork that awaits “completion,” this work demands that further steps be taken elsewhere, according to protocol that begin to resemble bureaucratic measures, or at least needless stipulations. It makes a mockery of what it at first seems to be: yet another work that depends upon the viewer’s “realization.”

Brakhage Meets Tarkovsky

A client speaking to his Rogerian therapist says: “I am so depressed, I just don’t feel like is worth living.” The therapist replies: “I hear you saying that you are in pain and that you are not sure how you will ever feel better.” The client replies by saying: “I really feel I would be better off dead.” To which therapist comments: “You really are at your wits ends about what to do.” The client stands and moves to the window of the office and opening it up, the therapist says observes, “You are showing me how much pain you are in, how desperate you are.” The client then jumps out the window – the therapist says, “Splat.”

The therapeutic approach of Carl Rogers (1995a; 1995b) is one of empathy, listening, acceptance, and minimal intervention. For Rogers, person-centered therapy is based around two related concepts: reflective listening and unconditional acceptance. In this manner, the therapist is able to listen and reflect the client’s narrative in a space where the whole of their experience (affective, content, etc.) is unconditionally accepted by the therapist. This allows the client to become increasingly comfortable with aspects of themselves that may be threatening, shameful, scary, anxiety-causing, etc., which facilitates growth and eventual change. Rogers stated this process as follows:

“I can state the overall hypothesis in one sentence as follows. If I can provide a certain type of relationship, the other person will discover within himself the capacity to use that relationship for growth, and change and personal development will occur” (Rogers, 1995a p 33, my emphasis).

Accordingly, two aspects of person-centered therapy are immediately clear. First is that the therapeutic moment is relational, involving an interaction with an “other” and second that this interaction is markedly different than most other types of relationships. While it is generally understood that the therapist’s unconditional acceptance of the client is what makes this relationship different than others, I would like to briefly argue that this is only a part of the story. Instead, I will make the case that it is the reflective listening of the therapist that provides the groundwork for a type of relationship that is therapeutic and helps the client to achieve a greater subjective sense of understanding.

I would like to begin by simply noting that the above quote is preceded by the word “if”. To me, this signifies that the type of relationship that Rogers is talking should not be taken for granted but should instead be seen as a goal that the therapist is working towards. Indeed, in addition to unconditionally accepting the client, Rogers also stressed the importance of having a genuine and real relationship with the client. Accordingly, it seems clear that he was aware that the idea of having a real, unconditionally accepting relationship is paradoxical. The “if” then puts the onus on the therapist to work to create a relationship with the client, where they become a companion who is both idealized (accepting) and real (genuine) to the client. It is worth noting that this is an extension of the typical therapeutic alliance, in that there is not only an alliance but it is of a certain type – idealized and real.

This paradoxical relationship is established through the use of reflective listening, whereby the therapist tries to sensitize him or herself to the phenomenological moment-to-moment experiencing of their client. Importantly, despite the mirroring connotations, reflective listening is not so much a matter of reflecting back a mirror image of the client as it is about altering it in subtle ways. In this manner, the therapist joins the client not only in the construction of their narrative but also helps to deepen and broaden out certain aspects of it, which the client may or may not have been aware of. Accordingly, the “real” quality of the therapist is revealed in their ability to be an “other” to the client who is able to express a full range of human thoughts and emotions in an integrated and comprehensive fashion

One way of seeing this process is through the metaphor of the therapist acting as a scaffold for the client’s subjective experiencing. Through reflective listening the therapist not only embraces the client’s subjectivity but in a manner deepens it by giving voice to other aspects of the client’s experience, which for whatever reason are not being stated. Clearly, the therapist is never able to mirror phenomenologically the experiences of the client but he works to co-construct with the client a richer subjective world. In this manner, the therapist scaffolds – or provides a structure, which both supports and extends the client’s experiencing. That this experience occurs in a space where they feel they will be accepted unconditionally helps to enable them to become more comfortable with their narrative.

What both limits and enables this process is the therapist’s inactivity within other spheres of the client’s experience (as illustrated by the joke above). By existing primarily as a scaffold for the client the therapist is able to maintain the illusion of being both unconditionally accepting and real. Through limiting their activity to reflective listening the therapist lessens their own subjective experiencing giving the illusion of an idealized other. In turn, the client becomes able to more fully develop the reflective qualities of subjective experiencing, which the therapist reflectively supports (via scaffolding). In this manner the client brings increasingly richer subjective experiences to the forefront that receive the support and validation of the therapist.

What differentiates the properties of reflexive listening from those of the therapeutic alliance is the manner in which they are used. For Rogers the increased reflective capacity of the subjective self became the main motivation for change. Accordingly, he was able to limit the activity of the therapist towards working on his or her own unconditional acceptance (no small task!). Other therapies, while stressing the importance of the alliance, augment it through increased interaction with the client. This speaks to the romantic and in my opinion endearing and permanent aspects of Rogers’ view of human growth as able to overcome the distance individual subjectivity.

References:

Rogers, C. R. (1995a). Client Centered Therapy: Its Current Practice, Implications, and Theory. Philadelphia, PA: Trans-Atlantic Publications.

Rogers, C. R. (1995b). On Becoming a Person. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company.

From Simon Goldhill’s review in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review:

There are at least three types of reception study in classics. The first takes a work of the ancient world — the Aeneid, say or the Antigone — and sees how it has been adapted by later artists. It derives its logic and its focus through a linear genealogy — a sequence of works descended from an original text, interrelating with each other. The second type takes a post-Classical author and sees how this particular artist works with a classical paradigm — Dante’s antiquity, Wagner’s Greeks. It derives its logic and focus in the vision of a single artist, reading antiquity. The third type takes a more general cultural model and explores how classical antiquity has provided models and inspiration in a time in history or in a genre or an artistic movement: the Victorians and ancient Greece; modernism and the classical body. In this case, there is potentially a more diffuse focus and potentially a wider set of cultural questions. The specific problem for contemporary reception studies is how these three models fit together. When looking at the reception of the Antigone (say), how much can the broader vision of any one artist find a place in the analysis? When looking at an individual artist, how much can cultural context or the reception history of a particular text play a part?

Ted Hughes and the Classics is very much a work of type two. It looks at how one artist reads antiquity — adopts, adapts, translates, manipulates the texts of the classical past in his poetry. It has a tight focus, for sure, and one cost of such a focus is that there is very little sense of the wider reception of classics in the twentieth century. Thus we get Ted Hughes on Ovid’s Metamorphoses but very little of how this might fit into a tradition of the reception of Ovid’s epic; Hughes on democracy, but very little on the class and education issues Hughes invokes. You get what it says on the tin: this is “Ted Hughes and the Classics”.

This volume is the seventh or eighth in the Classical Presences series edited by Lorna Hardwick and James Porter. It has already published some exceptional volumes, both in terms of the sheer quality of research and in terms of the interest of the topics. The series has made a name for itself in supporting both monographs and collections of essays on the cutting edge of reception theory — feminism and myth, French political thought and the classics, African version of Greek drama (and so forth). In such a context, this volume, edited by Roger Rees, is rather more conservative in scope and ambition. It looks at Hughes’ works in roughly chronological order, roughly by genre, and discusses his allusions to classical texts, his translations, and his general classicizing techniques.

The authors and titles of the individual chapters:

• Keith Sagar, ‘Ted Hughes and the classics’
• Stuart Gilespie, ‘Hughes’ first translation: ‘The Storm from Homer, OdysseyV’
• Lorna Hardwick, ‘Can (modern) poets do classical drama?’
• John Talbot, ‘Eliot’s Seneca, Ted Hughes’ Oedipus‘
• Janna Stigen Drangsholt, ‘Living Myths’.
• Vanda Zajko, ‘”Mutilated towards alignment?”: Prometheus on his Crag and the “Cambridge School” of anthropology’
• Neil Roberts, Hughes’s myth: the classics in Gaudete and Cave Birds‘
• Roger Rees, ‘Between monarchy and democracy: neo-classicism and the laureate poetry of Ted Hughes’
• Garrett Jacobsen, ‘”A holiday in a rest home”: Ted Hughes and the vates in Tales from Ovid‘
• Anne-Marie Tatham, ‘Passion in extremis in Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘The transformations of the Actaeon myth: Ovid, Metamorphoses 3 and Ted Hughes’s Tales from Ovid‘
• Genevieve Lively, ‘Birthday Letters from Pontus: Ted Hughes and the white noise of classical elegy’
• Michael Silk, ‘Ted Hughes: Allusion and Poetic language’
• Hallie Marshall, ‘The Hughes Version: Commercial Considerations and Dramatic Imagination’
• Sarah Annes Brown, ‘Classics reanimated: Ted Hughes and reflexive translation’
• David Gervais, ‘Beyond tragedy: Ted Hughes, Racine and Euripides’

295 pp. | 6 x 9
Available November 2009

FORTHCOMING

from Zone Books:

The pirate is the original enemy of humankind. Before humanitarian organizations, human rights, and the establishment of international law in the early modern period, the Roman statesmen already made this point perfectly clear. As Cicero famously remarked, there are certain enemies with whom one may negotiate and with whom, circumstances permitting, one may establish a truce. But there is also an enemy with whom treaties are in vain and war remains incessant. This is the pirate, whom the ancient jurists considered to be “the enemy of all.”

Departing from Cicero’s account of foes, The Enemy of All reconstructs the shifting place of the pirate in legal and political thought from the ancient to the medieval, modern, and contemporary periods. Antiquity already encountered the sea thief in politics as in the law. Classical letters from Homer to the end of the Roman Empire contain ample accounts of pirates of various sorts. The Roman jurists assigned to the pirate as a legal person an exceptional position in civil and international law. Their theory was to be the point of departure for the Christian jurists of the Middle Ages, who defined the pirate as “the enemy of the human species.” Later, the thinkers and statesmen of modernity went one step further. Elaborating a new international code of law and ethics, the writers of the Enlightenment represented the pirate as the ultimate “enemy of humanity.” Today, as Heller-Roazen argues, the pirate furnishes the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe. This is a legal and political person of exception, neither criminal nor enemy, who inhabits an extraterritorial region. Against such a foe, states may wage extraordinary battles, policing politics and justifying military measures in the name of welfare and security.

Drawing on the diverse materials of several disciplines, from law and history to political theory and literature, The Enemy of All brings to light a single paradigm that defines the act of piracy. This “piratical paradigm” consists in the conjunction of four traits: a region beyond territorial jurisdiction; agents who may not be identified with an established state; the collapse of the distinction between criminal and political categories; and the transformation of the concept of war. Whenever we hear of regions beyond “the line of the law,” in which acts of “indiscriminate aggression” have been committed “against humanity,” we must begin to recognize that these are acts of piracy. Long said to be a person of the distant past, the enemy of all is closer to us today than we may think. Indeed, he may never have been closer.