When asked about their own positioning, both interviewees were aware of the impact of the scenario they meet, with the difficulties and possibilities it brings forth. This excerpt from P1 reinforces the notion that there’s a whole practical dimension that needs to be accounted for when one is not exclusively studying or doing controlled research:
“ We often leave university very determined to follow one, I don’t know, a theoretical framework, that with your practice you see that it’s not the thing, it’s the famous ‘theory is one thing, the practice is another’”
…
”professional experience helps you a lot to identify yourself with other theories that you didn’t have the opportunity to see in university, or those who finish university and already start a post-graduation course. Many times you need a little more time to perceive If that’s really it, or to identify yourself with other theories”
(P1)
Which is not to say she disdains theoretical discussions and classical authors, but she can’t focus on that as much as she’d like in lieu of other necessities, and theoretical preparation often falls short of what you’ll find and need, as exemplified by the following quote:
“to read a clinical case, proposed by a theoretician, it’s extremely important, and I think that If I could do it, If i didn’t have other questions like work, post-graduation, I’d do it every week, which I love, but for you to hear this same case from that person that arrived in front of you, you’ll rethink a lot of things, you’ll print in it your perception too” (P1)
Interestingly, both of our participants define themselves as theoretically inclined to psychoanalysis, at least in the first glance. But even the dividing lines of what it means to one and the other to be guided by a theory are different, and so are the criteria for justly adopting a theoretical identity. For P2 to be considered a lacanian psychoanalyst, it would not be just a matter of feeling compelled by the theory:
“I consider myself I lacanian psychoanalyst, but I don’t feel myself comfortable to say that, expressly so, you know, like a few colleagues of mine I perceive this difficulty too, because I see that it’s much harder at the lacanian paths, I don’t know If it’s your area too, right, but, it’s a very hard area, I think it’s harder to say lacanian psychoanalysis because there’s a lot more to know yet, a lot to acknowledge, it’s a very complex area. So (saying I’m a) psychoanalyst I feel much more comfortable. But to myself I know it’s not psychoanalysis in a general way, it’s a lacanian psychoanalysis”
(P2)
It’s fair to say that the institutions they frequent have an impact in what is required of them in terms of identifying with an approach or not. While P2 frequents institutions to study, practice and build a community of peers who mutually recognize in this specifically this branch of psychoanalysis, P2 works and studies at places where this is not an institutional demand, an identity needed to justify your belonging. She says:
“I have been studying more psychoanalysis, but I think that also the matter of the basic care (in public healthcare) makes us study a lot more of public healthcare and the psychologist professional of public healthcare, so we end up, some authors we don’t study deeper so much more when older in the profession. We end up sticking to technical matters of our work” (P1)
Consequently, the very value and need for such an identity is changed, with some benefit to more fluid positionings. She herself connects that to her current institutional work within public policies, comparing it to other professional situations, which can be seen in the following fragments:
“There are psychologists who prefer saying that they don’t have a specific approach. Which in my opinion, in the institutional (work within psychology), for example, it’s quite feasible”...”it’s not the theory that’s going to make the professional into a psychologist” (P1)
“at the classical work, let’s put it like that, it’s a bit more evident, but, when we work in the institutional (psychology), which’s my case, and which is also most of my professional experience as a psychologist, I realise that this is a bit more vanished”
…
“I think that the very complexity of what reaches us from the people demands that we leave that place of having only two or three theoreticians and having a single reference, I’ll say it like that. I think that, to me, the psychoanalytic orientation is what I’m the most comfortable at, but there’s no way to work in the SUS, working with families, and not using social psychology, to study other things, you know, talk to colleagues and learn with them too”
(P1)
And once again, it’s not implying she never wanted to recognize herself more fully within one theoretical framework. It’s interesting to notice in the following piece, how it’s not put as just a matter of rationally opting to increase your knowledge through eclecticism, but also a matter of feeling:
…
“ever since I graduated I soon realised, to speak the truth, that I wouldn’t be the psychologist like that, ‘I’m such (approach)’, I’d even like that and think that I’ve been for a good while trying to have a specific basis like that, but, that’s not how I see myself, how I feel comfortable”
(P1)
The choice on how this positioning will be made happens on a larger network of personal experiences, goals and social positionings. The other participant, from his part, points the comparison between two remarkable experiences as a patient as determining what he envisions as a good practice and what is or isn’t a goal to that practice. About the first therapist, who gave him ideas on what he could do or could have done to solve some personal issues:
“I thought it was too extremely directing, I left there feeling very bad, feeling guilty, why didn’t I do it (what the therapist suggested), and with the other lacanian analyst, which was my second therapy, I didn’t feel too guided like that, and I used to get very intrigued, because he spoke very little and did cuts at the sessions, very lacanian, and I didn’t know what was happening in there but I wanted to go back”
…
“of course, we read a lot, but I think that the strongest thing are really the experiences, the way I attend and the way I’m attended, both by this first psychoanalysis and by this second one that I’m seeing now”(P2)
This experience came into play when, in the last years of his graduation as a psychologist, he chose two parallel supervised internships guided by two different theoretical systems that allured him, namely psychoanalysis and behaviourism. He enjoyed the behaviourist process until the moment when he felt it became directive towards the patient.
“that’s when there was a problem to me, then there were exercises, some certain dynamics, I didn’t like it very much because I thought it was too directive, while it wasn’t like that in psychoanalysis”
(P2)
The very ethics of our relationship to the theoretical landscape that guides our practice changes based on what we understand as required of said practice and how knowledge works in it. For P2, for example, the criteria of theoretical consistency seems to have a high priority due to the quality of the work, as exemplified in the following quote:
“I think that the psychologist must have a theoretical approach, that guides his work, be it cognitivist, be it a lacanian psychoanalysis, freudian psychoanalyst, it needs one, a guidance, I think, I think we cannot mix theoretical perspectives, I think it ends up creating confusion”(P2)
For P1, at the same time, having a more flexible positioning has a priority for the same concern of quality of the work done, to the point she’s actually actively striving and acting to fill gaps in her knowledge.
“well, lately, I’ve been involved with neuropsychology, because I work in the centre of convivence where most people have an intellectual deficiency”…”I’d go after it, which is what’s going to happen next month onwards, the cognitive rehabilitation course, me in there, it’s another technique, the more technical knowledge of psychology that I felt was very lacking in my formation” (P1)
Also, both of them seem to favour a mindset when listening to the patient that’s lived by them as more intuitive and less of an obstinate effort to theorise. But the ways to achieve it are different. For P2, this is accomplished through immersion on a theoretical system to the point you start interpreting the world with it more naturally, while to P1, it’s through focusing more strongly on what the patient says and having the theory and technique as a later addition. While P2 justifies keeping to only one theoretical system with it:
”for you to have a logic of thinking in your head, I think a logic so strong it gets to the point of being natural, spontaneous, this way of seeing the world, of thinking”(P2)
P1 uses this argument precisely to point that there’s something else that precedes theoretical affiliation to work quality:
“this very listening that we need to have, right, of the users (of the service), and they in the simplicity of what they bring, and in the complexity too, in the hard situations, a lot of times it takes two or three weeks for us to only listen and understand what’s happening, ok? Sometimes I think it’s not the authors right upfront who’ll make us think in it, or, right in the beginning what we’re listening to, but I think that sometimes, I wouldn’t like to use the word to disturb, but I think that sometimes we try to forget them a little bit” (P1)
But the kind of experiences that guide our entrance into institutionalised psychology escape what can be seen as just the acts of psychology itself. P2, for example, brings examples of how having the right companion introduced and kept him on the track of studying lacanian psychoanalysis, when his group of friends decided to go together to a cycle of studies at a lacanian institution:
“we went the four of us, it was two girls, me and another guy, then those girls didn’t go, there were four classes, they didn’t go in the second one, and this guy carried on with me, and I think that friendship was a factor like that, right, I had a friendship with them” (P2)
Both of them seem to share an opinion that given the impact of social exchange on how we learn and practice psychology, this social exchange needs to be taken care of, albeit with different approaches as to how. P1 focuses the difficulty of exchanging in the split theoretical landscape of psychology:
“the consequence is that sometimes we apart ourselves, so we’d need to think in possibilities of how these professionals can, even If having different theoretical orientations, diverse, how could they talk to each other more, and when I say ‘we’ I include myself too” (P1)
P2, whose practice doesn’t require exchange with colleagues of multiple approaches, expresses a difficulty more typically internal to those of the theoretical affiliated institutions, who may have a difficulty or disinterest in properly disseminating it, making it elitist, using difficult language or overall unavailable to newcomers.
“oftentimes the teacher don’t make it easier too, this access, I think that being more didactic in the teaching, being more accessible to the people like that, you know? Yeah, that’s it, what I think, right, that, thinking of the lacanians, If they think that psychoanalysis is something interesting they probably think that it s the best approach there is, that’s why they are using it, obviously immersed in it, it’s supposed that If psychoanalysis reaches the biggest number of people the better it is. But I think there’s little accessibility like that, both in teaching right, in forming new psychoanalysts, for psychoanalysis to reach more people, and maybe a gentrification of psychoanalysis too” (P2)
To summarise, one of the major points abstracted by those interviews, it’s that there's a meaning to staying in line, to crossing, to differently drawing the borders between approaches and the requirements to rightfully positioning oneself in one place or another, but also, that this meaning, although socially constructed, may change given a different context, experiences and interactions. Now, if we are choosing our position and ascribing a meaning to what it means to be in such a position in the first place, the possibility of moving, be it a positively or negatively valued possibility, means that this choice is not a factual definition set in stone, but rather, is a choice that’s constantly actualized in each step, while we practise being in that position.
The context in which this research happened made it collectively clear to our practitioners, though, that this choice is not only dependent on being actualized, but never relying on just one neutral and ethereal intellectual compromise, instead relating to a practice in a context we personally fit in. We have recently seen the views on the possibility and validity of online therapy sessions alter dramatically to many of our colleagues, from those who previously could have sworn they’d never recognize it as justified to suddenly having to learn how to implement it in a matter of weeks, as the pandemics came and settled in.
Now, this expanded outlook on the dynamics of individual positioning makes proper a few new reflections on the way the institutions of psychology are designed. First of all, if it’s not simply through rationally adhering to theories, but a rather complex dynamic, we are invited to ponder on how we could shape institutions to acknowledge these processes, making it possible and more prone for individuals to acknowledge the power play behind his own choices and make qualified choices with sufficient conditions, and, as Simão(2001) puts it, assuming a shared responsibility for the processes of entering into psychology, in which one part is responsible for actively making conscious choices and being open to the exchange with other psychologists, while the other part is imbued with the responsibility of taking proper and honest place in those exchanges.
Acknowledging this individual aspect of how each one constructs her positioning within psychology is also an argument for one kind of relationship to our knowledge and techniques. It’s an anti-authoritative argument. If each one is building their own positioning, they are not learning the only one psychology available, so they shouldn’t be simply taught what’s already available, but instead we should take collective care of how we pick and choose from what’s available. The conditions to learning, believing and justifying a theory or idea are not necessarily the same, and may feature different requirements. It’s also the case we pose for not having a purely technocratic formation, but rather, learning the history, the philosophy, the methodology and the epistemology of psychology. We should learn how psychology was built before, so we can constantly build it again without being alienated from our own knowledge, or even reject it if need be. It’s not a matter of blindly believing or disbelieving the authority of a science or author, but being part of it, calling those authors for a dialogue, and assuming the responsibility of our own saying in this dialogue.
Another reflection derived from this study is that any dream of theoretical unification of psychology is a dream of a different institution altogether. First of all, because the split is institutionalised, and institutions themselves are already split from one another. It could still happen, of course, through a theoretical system that’s so overwhelmingly popular that it eclipses all others and ends up reshaping institutions worldwide. But the division doesn’t seem to be just an uncertainty to what knowledge we should agree on. Maybe more markedly, it’s not only a division rooted in the differences of each one of the major systems we have across the world nowadays and those who back them. It’s a division that’s also rooted in a similarity. There’s a common tendency of designing psychological institutions, conceiving psychological knowledge and organising it following split lines.
Would it be desirable to have an unified psychology in the theoretical dimension? Maybe not, since science is not based on consensus. But, although a relatively short study, a takeaway from it is the desirability and current relevance in psychology of professional self-awareness and an enhanced awareness to the context through the exchange with others.