I invariably seem to like, admire and feel stimulated by Chris Oakley’s writings – and this piece, ‘Enabling Difference: the Difference One Makes’, is no exception. Of course, it may not make for very interesting reading simply to agree with a paper one has been asked to comment upon – but even less am I into pretending that there are differences (or exaggerating them) where they just don’t exist, merely for the sake of delivering some exciting, controversial copy! What I will do in this commentary, therefore, is briefly to list some areas where I agree with Oakley – perhaps with the odd bit of embellishment of my own; and then – like ‘on-message’ politicians are so good at doing – use this opportunity to introduce some issues of personal interest which are arguably only tenuously related to Oakley’s piece (analogous to the politician answering a question s/he hasn’t even been asked, perhaps!); but hopefully there will be just enough of a link so as not to make my own contribution too shamelessly self-indulgent.

Oakley’s discussion of the ‘guidance’ or ‘suggestion’ issue raises interesting questions which surely need a wider airing in our field (by ‘field’, I am referring to the broad range of practices which label themselves as counselling, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy). For me, there is an important distinction between guidance, on the one hand, and ‘having an effect’ on the other. ‘Guidance’ has an active, deliberate connotation, where the guide is self-consciously guiding the other towards a destination that s/he, the guide, presumably decides upon (the ‘I-know-what’s-good-for-you, even-if-you-don’t’ syndrome). I do believe that it is, in practice, possible for a practitioner not to be a guide in this sense; but to deny that our being has an effect on the other – or more accurately, that the other will engage with our otherness in whatever way they wish or need to, and that both protagonists in a human encounter will be doing this co-creatively and at the same time - would be nonsensical, and would be to deny some quite fundamental axioms of human relationship. Without a paradigm shift in human consciousness, perhaps as far as we can currently get with this is to recognise that, in any and every human encounter (including the therapeutic one), each co-creates the other in indissoluble intersubjectivity – a dynamic ongoing creating, that simply cannot be decomposed into a simplistic linear causal-empiricist way of explanation and understanding the world - or, for that matter, into the linear-causal ‘effects that people have upon each other’, the very notion of which is, in my view, incoherent and unsustainable (cf. House, 2003: 213-16). It seems to me that anyone who has taken any time to explore the devastating critique of positivism and empiricism in the philosophy of science literature cannot fail to be convinced that to import a scientistic ‘billiard-ball’ ideology into the human realm is totally inappropriate, and signally fails to throw any light whatsoever on what matters most in human relationship and experience. (Much of the modern Psychology field, together with the more mechanistic psychotherapy modalities, are arguably pretty much irretrievably caught up in such a way of seeing the world – e.g. Woolfolk and Richardson, 1984.)

This much is all very well, but there is another problem with all this… namely, that we are couching this discussion within a particular ‘regime of truth’ that may well be completely missing what matters most about relationship (which, if true, would explain why, despite at least some self-proclaimingly ‘scientific’ approaches to psychoanalysis valiantly attempting to account for everything human ‘without remainder’, there always seems to be a mystery left over, which our most ardently painstaking analytical endeavours simply cannot seem to touch; and in his approvingly quoting Laing that anything that is worth something cannnot be measured, I assume that Oakley would probably agree with this). I now begin to move into what are potentially controversial (and professionally dangerous!) waters: for in my experience, to introduce notions of karma and destiny is, in some quarters, likely to provoke ill-disguised contempt and disdain – not least from a particular kind of post-Marxian, Critical Realist-type mentality which still essentially holds to the materialism of the later Marx, and eschews any explanatory belief system that could be remotely construed as possessing a ‘spiritual’ dimension.

As I move rapidly towards my fifth decade in life, I have found myself increasingly drawn to the work of people like Rudolf Steiner, James Hillman and Robert Sardello (e.g. Hillman, 1997; Sardello, 2001), who all quite explicitly embrace spiritual ways of understanding and working with human relationship which at least offer the prospect of accounting for the ‘mysterious remainder’ that analytical, this-world materialism seems incapable of explaining. (Of course – and I am all too aware of this - we must always be alert to the possibility that the very drive to account for ‘the mysterious remainder’ can itself just be yet one more manifestation of the ‘tyranny of truth’ that George Steiner wisely cautioned us against many years ago – Steiner, 1978, and any ‘final rendezvous’ with which Lacan ‘unrelentingly subverted’ - Oakley). Hillman’s book The Soul’s Code seems to me to be an admirable – albeit early and, in places, necessarily stumbling – attempt to articulate ways in which, in admirably Winnicottian fashion, we can dare to think the erstwhile un-thought, and play with anything that loosens up our conventional taken-for-granted, ‘modern’ ways of thinking about ourselves, in our attempts to make sense of the human condition and our place in the cosmos. For this latter reason alone, I believe that what I will call the ‘Hillman-Sardello tendency’ offers a rich vein of possibilities that psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are peculiarly well placed to embrace – as long as we are able to loosen the ‘regimes of truth’ that often unwittingly hold sway in our own field, and which can so easily (and paradoxically) place a fetter on human possibility and potential during very ‘professional’ act – psychotherapy - of claiming to liberate it (House, 2003). More on this at the end of this commentary.

Oakley also maintains that there is never one ‘psychoanalysis’, but only what he calls ‘a multiplicity of psychoanalyses’. I unreservedly agree – but I would like to express this in a slightly (or very) different way. His view is consistent with what we might call ‘the argument from uniqueness’ (and which he evocatively refers to as ‘an instance of irretrievable singularity’ and ‘the philosophy of singularity’): that is, that each and every human encounter is a necessarily and unavoidably unique event that has never happened before, and will never happen again, in the history of the cosmos. It is easy to fail to embrace the deep meaning and implications of this truth – one which is, incidentally (but not coincidentally), consistent with much New Science thinking. Not least, it adds ballast to the view that ‘personal factors’ relating to the individual practitioner and client, and the (hopefully) healing relationship which their encounter fashions, surely constitute a far more important ‘active ingredient’ in the therapeutic-change experience than does the specific modality of therapy that is claimed to be being offered.

We can note in passing that it is for precisely this reason – among others – that the kind of evidence-based positivism and naive empiricism routinely applied to conventional medical treatments is singularly inappropriate in any attempt to evaluate the efficacy of psychotherapeutic interventions. Thus, it is patently absurd for empiricist research to seek rule-bound repeatability in the psychotherapy experience when, as Oakley points out, ‘I, as analyst, am never the same in terms of how I respond to the people who come to see me for analysis’. Oakely’s argument about research in psychotherapy is certainly well made (‘this underscoring of the statistical and the numerical leads us away from what humanity is about’ he writes – amen to that; cf. House, 1996, 1997a); yet I think what we really need to be doing is to look undefensively at just why it is that ‘repeatability’ (Oakley) and nomothetic (law-seeking) scientific endeavours hold such uncritical sway in late modernity. Just how is it, for example, that the apologists for ‘objective’ technocratic science are able to self-justify their arguably arrogant assumption that their totems of research acceptability somehow constitute eternal, ‘objective’, culturally context-less truths that are in some extraordinary way independent of the particular epistemological and ontological assumptions suffusing the materialistic age in which we are all embedded?

Again, of course, our unconscious cultural defences against anxiety have something to do with it, as Oakley implies – but equally, I’m far from sure that this is the whole story; and in my view we urgently need a thorough-going understanding and critique of the Zeitgeist of modernity itself if we are to make any real progress in understanding these urgent questions. It might help us to recognise, for example, that the polarised swing between ‘nomothetic’, quantitative, law-seeking approaches to research, on the one hand, and ‘idiographic’, qualitative, case-study research approaches, on the other, reflects a far wider struggle in the overarching Zeitgeist between the ideology of standardising sameness and normality, on the one hand, and ‘the argument from uniqueness’ and radical individualism, on the other. My hunch is that we won’t begin to approach a maturely sensible position on psychotherapy research until we succeed it locating its contested terrain within the wider modernist Zeitgeist and, by extension, within the evolution of human consciousness more generally.

My own current view on these matters is that our fixation with proudly wearing the label of our own particular therapeutic approach is actually quite irrelevant to whether our therapeutic meetings will be effective for our clients/patients or not; and more than this, that such a fixation is just one more, and increasingly outmoded, function of a modernist world-view which is rapidly losing all credibility, both epistemologically and as (anxiety-dispelling?) solidly reliable rules to live by. The excellent Jerome Frank has a lot to say about the ways in which, pretty much unconsciously, we dress up what are essentially culturally specific - and culturally relative - healing rituals in the misleading garb of (respectable, professional) analytical scientificity and rationalism (Frank and Frank, 1991).

Moreover, if we begin to introduce notions of karma and destiny into the argument, then again, very interesting things begin to happen. Not least, if two specific people (in the case of a therapeutic relationship) are drawn together through some as yet little understood destiny-driven or karmic process, then this can elegantly account for the ‘argument from uniqueness’ which says that every human encounter has a unique and quite specific purpose which, as yet, human consciousness is not anything like mature or developed enough to perceive or comprehend. Of course, that notions of karma and destiny can be shown to be consistent with what we observe about therapeutic encounters is by no means any decisive proof of their veracity, for we must always be aware of the phenomenon of equifinality – i.e. that there is any number of plausible explanations that can be adduced to account for a given observed reality. But nonetheless, if we find a framework that not only is consistent with our observations, and which also seems to appeal to some deep elusively intuitive notion of ‘what feels right’, then at the very least we need to be as open as we are able to embrace whatever purchase this framework can have on our struggles to make sense of our human existence.

At the risk of ratcheting up this commentary’s level of self-indulgence somewhat, one aspect of what one might term the whole ‘discourse of difference’ that interests me is what our current preoccupation with it is saying about human consciousness; or more specifically, what models or explanatory frameworks do we possess that might help us towards a contextualising, meta-understanding of our burgeoning preoccupation with difference? This concern, in turn, gives me the pretext for talking about the work of one of human histories most brilliant and spiritually realised individualities – Rudolf Steiner. One of the great mysteries of the History of Ideas and contemporary philosophy is just why the extraordinarily wide-ranging contributions to human knowledge of philosopher-cum-scientist-cum-educationalist-cum-polymath, Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925), have been so ignored by mainstream ‘establishment’ thinking in all of the fields about which he possessed such a spiritually mature and prophetic understanding. With a staggering collected opus of some 360 volumes, it comes as little surprise that Steiner had profound things to say about just about any and every subject one can think of – including psychoanalysis and psychotherapy (Steiner, 1946).

In terms of the notion of difference that is one of Oakley’s main concerns, Steiner’s meta-view of the evolution of human consciousness is instructive and revealing. He spoke of the age of ‘consciousness soul’ as that which began in the fourteenth century (in 1413, to be precise), much as philosophers, incidentally, similarly date the beginning of the so-called Enlightenment, and economists like Emanuel Wallerstein date the beginnings of the capitalist ‘world-economy’. On this view, both modern technocratic science and the industrial economy are creatures of the age of consciousness soul, as are the capacity to experience authentic freedom, to philosophise, to withdraw and separate the self from that which it is observing, and to become manipulative and controlling of the outer world (Easton, 1982: 21, 57-8, 180)… – for one central task in the consciousness-soul age is to come to terms with the material world (ibid.: 100).

Steiner, and the global spiritual movement which his work has spawned, Anthroposophy, have much to say about the dark side of the consciousness-soul age – not least, the so-called ‘Ahrimanic’ forces of egoism, one-sided over-intellectualism and cold thinking, the love of power, and soullness technological forces (Steiner, 1993). Many of the more pernicious modern tendencies that Oakley correctly identifies – e.g. technocratic control-freakery and techniques of domination (Cooper, 2001), valuing speed and quantity over quality (Gleick, 1999; Honoré, 2004), the rampant commodification of just about everything, the paranoia-inducing but futile drive to neutralise risk and guarantee security (Furedi, 1997, 2001), the entrancing and depowering effects of televisual technology (Large, 2003), and, in our own field, the standardising coercion of regulation and the absurd infantilising nannying that is ‘Continuing Professional Development’, and the professionalising surveillance culture of which both are an instance (House and Totton, 1997; Bates and House, 2003)…. All – and more - of these disquieting cultural developments are plausibly and convincingly explicable within the ‘consciousness soul’, consciousness-evolutionary framework. Which is not to deny that at least some of the specifically psychoanalytic ways of gaining purchase on these issues have some validity, not least our less-than-conscious acted-out ways of coping with anxiety – though there are of course myriad sources of fear and anxiety, the origins of at least some of which we might not – as yet - be remotely aware of (Sardello, 1999).

Anthroposophy’s approach to ethics also affords us a way of linking with the professionalisation question – about which I know Oakley to have strong views (Oakley, 1998) – views, moreover, which I share. In the realm of ethics, then, we find the anthroposophical view that ‘all morality in the future must be individual, and… we have to reach our own individual ethic through out own free spiritual activity’ (Easton, op. cit.: 313) – a view which, in relation to the therapy world, was strongly argued for by Heron (1997) and House (1997b) – with such ethical individualism being balanced within the framework of the British Independent Practitioners Network (IPN), the latter being an example of what Heron (op. cit.) termed a self-generating practitioner community. It would be wrong to assume that those who are highly sceptical about the institutional professionalisation and statutory regulation of psychotherapy are ‘against’ any kind of accountability whatsoever. Far from being either flakey with accountability, or occupying a virulently anti-social, radically individualistic position in relation to ethics (and at the risk of being accused of political correctness again!), the IPN does stands for accountability – but accountability with heart, accountability that works, and accountability that is consistent with the core philosophy of the therapeutic work we do.

In Britain, the Independent Practitioners Network, now approaching its 10^th anniversary following its founding in 1994, is a national network of practitioners offering an accreditation or competency route based on continuing peer assessment. Practitioners participating in the IPN come from a wide variety of therapeutic and educational backgrounds, and the Network is independent of training and accrediting bodies. IPN is altogether a remarkable piece of leading-edge social innovation that reverses the top-down power dynamic of conventional accountability structures, in favour of devolving responsibility for competence and ethical conduct to localised, continuing, face-to-face contact. By its existence IPN is very challenging of the mainstream approaches to accountability, since it represents the kind of social creativity that is in danger of being eliminated or severely restricted by statutory regulation.

Returning now to the question of difference, I think the time has come for us to begin to grapple with the profound dualism-transcending subtleties that are required of us if we are to find a way to forge a healthy life which both honours the unique individuality of every human being, while at the same time finding ways of living together in a way such that everyone’s contribution to the social good is valued and fully recognised. In his extraordinarily apposite ‘Motto of the Social Ethic’, Rudolf Steiner eloquently expressed just how subtle and complex is our evolutionary task in the consciousness-soul age, not least in the sense of how individualism can cohere with a viable framework of shared social mores and societal structures. As Steiner wrote, ‘The healthy social life is found when in the mirror of each human soul the whole community finds its reflection, and when in the community the virtue of each one is living’ (quoted in Lipsker, 1990: 60).

In the field of therapy, this perhaps implies that there is an increasingly urgent imperative for us to create new cultural forms which meet the challenge that Rudolf Steiner’s Motto of the Social Ethic so eloquently describes. And in turn, this suggests that we need to find new ways of encountering and thinking about the issues with which therapists and psychologists typically deal; and I would like to refer to Robert Sardello’s work in this regard. Sardello, whose work is also shamefully neglected in the prevailing mainstream literature, is of central importance in the emerging paradigm of a new ‘spiritualised psychology’ which offers new and exciting ways of grappling with the perennial problems and challenges of human existence and evolving consciousness, and which mainstream positivist psychology, through its narrow materialist world-view, has long since relinquished any purchase upon. As long ago as the late 1980s, Sardello - like Steiner, whose work he so admires - was also years ahead of his time in electing to leave his erstwhile profession, psychotherapy, for the principled and informed reason that its practices were quite irrelevant to, and a distraction from, what really matters in human development. He wrote, for example, echoing Rudolf Steiner’s very early and criminally neglected critique of Freudian psychoanalysis (Steiner, 1946), of the ‘inadequate knowledge’ that was used in the original founding of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, and that since that founding, the original method has multiplied endlessly with little if any questioning of the kind of knowing involved. Sardello continues:

More recently, Sardello has written a lengthy introduction to an important translation of Gerhard Wehr’s book comparing the work of Carl Jung and Rudolf Steiner (Wehr, 2003; House, 2003b). He has also shed important new light on the issue of identity and the emotions, threatening comprehensively to undermine much that is taken for granted in the ‘regimes of truth’ of modern therapy and psychology. In relation to fear, for example, and contrary to the taken-for-granted assumptions of the humanistic therapies, Sardello bemoans how ‘we have completely personalized a domain [i.e. that of fear] that rightly belongs together with the surrounding world…. The subjectivizing of feeling signifies a flight from the sensuous world… When our participation with the world is disrupted, feeling begins to feel like a quantifiable item…. Psychotherapies are available to help us feel our feelings rather than to feel the world ’ (1999: 137-8). This kind of radical, spiritually informed thinking about human emotion promises to revolutionise the way we think about – and ‘treat’ – emotion; and once taken on board, as I believe they eventually will be, then our therapy practices can and will surely never be the same again.

Oakley also has strong views about the accountability culture, or the so-called ‘audit society’ (Power, 1997). The evidence-based (some might say manic) accountability culture that has recently swamped the public services in general, and the NHS and education in particular, has received devastating criticism from a whole range of sources – and surely constitutes little more than a culturally ephemeral fashion that will in due course take its rightful, discredited place as a minor footnote in human history - but which, nonetheless, many believe to be perpetrating untold damage in modern public culture. Not least – and I think Oakley agrees with me on this - the very values and associated practices of the accountability culture are antithetical to, and incapable of authentically measuring even in accordance with their own favoured metric, the healing value or otherwise of psychotherapy. Here, again, we observe a fundamental clash of paradigms or world-views – whereby one approach prizes the criterion of quantitatively measurable efficacy and ‘cost effectiveness’ above all others, while the other questions the hegemony of such symptom-based evaluation criteria, preferring instead to embrace hermeneutic values of meaning-making and human potential development.

It is also important to be extremely careful when considering the fashionable shibboleth about Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) being one of the few ‘empirically validated’ treatment modalities, for the CBT approach entails a ‘philosophy of the person’ which is squarely rooted in the ideology of modernity (Woolfolk and Richardson, 1984; House, 1995) - so it is hardly surprising that it ‘passes’ an empirical assessment whose methodology is mechanistically positivistic in conception and execution. In this sense, CBT can be seen as an example of what Marxist geographer David Harvey once referred to as ‘status quo theory’ – that is, an approach to therapy which is unrepentantly reproductive of the world-view of modernity in its theory of distress and change; so anyone who sees modernity and technocractic materialism as the main part of the problem should surely pause long and hard before embracing CBT as a valid solution to human malaise.

In sum, then: I passionately believe that therapeutic practice will only continue to evolve and progress if the field is left unfettered by rigid professionalising imperatives, with the freedom to encourage leading-edge innovation and diversity (Bates and House, 2003), free of the deadening encumbrances of institutionally professionalised ‘Regimes of Truth’ (House, 1999, 2003); and if we can stay as open as we are able to challenging the ideologies of modernity at every opportunity – and, concomitantly, to opening ourselves to the possibility of discovering modernity-transcending realities that we have as yet scarcely dreamt of. Of course, Oakley raises legitimate concerns when he refers to the enormous pressures upon therapy to fall in line with prevailing cultural madnesses and buy into their pernicious accoutrements, lest time pass us by and we end up being, as he writes, ‘out of tune and out of time’. What is called for here is, above all, courage in the face of these culturally fashionable intimidations and their ‘unwavering tickbox form of thinking’ (Oakley), as displayed in the case of the Independent Practitioners Network, and also in Oakley’s staunch defence of the soul of psychoanalysis from those who would standardise and legislate it out of any meaningful existence; and, above all, trust (a rare phenomenon in these dark days) that the good will ultimately prevail – and especially if we can begin to understand just how these cultural machinations make sense within the broad evolution of human consciousness.

I must just refer, finally, and I hope not too defensively, to Oakley’s reference to my own book’s citing of the potential abusiveness of the therapy experience (House, 2003). It would, I think, have only been fair for Oakley to have referred to my own careful and (I think) radical deconstruction of the notion of ‘abuse’ on pages 72-82 of the book – with which I can only assume that he would have at least some sympathy. So it seems that we agree that the notion of ‘abuse’ has been strongly overplayed in our painfully politically over-correct culture. But it does not follow logically from the fact that the notion of abuse has been overblown that we should polarise to the other extreme and avoid any reference to it whatsoever – for this would surely be a kind of reactive political-correctitude-in-reverse. What I tried to do in Therapy Beyond Modernity is to show how practitioners who display a kind of rigidly professionalising mentality can constrain and interrupt a healing process rather than augment it; and that there are in the literature a number of pretty clear and well documented examples of where this has actually happened (Ann France, Rosie Alexander, Ana Sands). That therapy has the potential to be abusive in this sense by no means places me in the uncritically politically correct camp on this matter, and I hope Chris Oakley will accept that we are almost certainly much closer on this issue than his critical passing reference to my book might suggest.

I hope that Chris Oakley and the readers of this journal will want to join in helping counselling, psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to take a major role in the evolutionarily crucial struggle which I have sketched out in the foregoing discussion, and the outcome of which we can all take a role in influencing, if we have the commitment, the will and the unimpeachable integrity so to do.

Richard House MA (Oxon), Ph,D. is a General Practice counsellor and a Steiner (Waldorf) early years teacher living in Norwich, UK. With seven years training in counselling and body-oriented psychotherapy, he is deliberately unregistered, having been an active participant in the Independent Practitioners Network since 1995. He has contributed extensively to the literature in both psychotherapy and education, with over 250 publications to date. His latest book, Therapy Beyond Modernity, was published by Karnac Books in 2003; and he has co-edited two widely acclaimed critical anthologies – Implausible Professions: Arguments for Pluralism and Autonomy in Psychotherapy and Counselling (with Nick Totton, 1997), and Ethically Challenged Professions: Enabling Innovation and Diversity in Psychotherapy and Counselling (with Yvonne Bates, 2003, both published by PCCS Books, Ross-on-Wye).

Particular current interests include early years learning and educational practices in the era of late modernity, the evolution of human consciousness, and operationalising Rudolf Steiner’s visionary notion of the threefold social order in modern social formations.

Address for correspondence: richardahouse@hotmail.com