I'm trying to recall his name but can't? But suddenly I thought of when in my thirties I had this Austrian psychotherapist and he was a trip looked like Freud, I kid you not complete with the accent, the bow tie, an old, heavy leather couch that I would lie on - a wonderful cliché. I found him in Fairfax, Virginia, of all places when in between therapists and feeling ready to commit myself to traditional psychotherapy.
I was really sorry when he retired in the middle of my work with him but he was ancient when I started and the work of psychotherapy is long work. The transference was strong with him, me being a fatherless child with abandonment issues to boot, so it was a bit traumatic for me at the time to loose him.
My memory was of him telling me how as a kid swimming in the Adriatic sea there were these strong whirlpools and the older kids would dive down into them. It was like a rite of passage, he explained, "and when I was ready to do it, one of the older boys took me under his wing."
The older boy instructed him, "you will get scared right away and try to exit but that is a mistake because the whirlpool is very strong near the surface and there you could struggle uselessly until you die but if you push through that fear and force yourself down deeper into the whirlpools vortex, against all your instincts, then you will find that deeper down into the whirlpool´s depths it looses it's strength and you can then easily swim out and away from it and resurface" - and that was his take on psychotherapy, in a nutshell.
"Zhere is no othzer way," he smiled.
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