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Tuning in: An interview with Emmy vanDeurzen-SmithMaye Taylor aa Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology , ManchesterMetropolitan University , Elizabeth Gaskell Campus, HathersageRoad, Manchester, Ml 3 OJA, UKPublished online: 16 Oct 2007.

To cite this article: Maye Taylor (1995) Tuning in: An interview with Emmy van Deurzen-Smith, BritishJournal of Guidance & Counselling, 23:1, 127-137, DOI: 10.1080/03069889508258066

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British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, Vol. 23, No. 1, 1995 127

INTERVIEW

Tuning in: an interview with Emmy van Deurzen-Smith

MAYE TAYLOR Department of Psychology and Speech Pathology, Manchester Metropolitan University, Elizabeth Gaskell Campus, Hathersage Road, Manchester M13 OJA, UK

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The first question, from me to you, is how did you get to be such an important person? Flattery will get you anywhere! No, I’m interested. I am one woman, interested in another woman, who is a very important person, a very influential person, in the world of psychology. You would admit you are? Come on, admit it. Well, yes, I suppose so, but it doesn’t feel like that. It just feels like I’ve taken up whatever challenges have offered themselves, and just done it very seriously, and conscientiously. You know how it is, you get asked to do something and then from that you get asked to do another thing, and you end up just holding things for people. Where did it start, then? Well, I think if you want to go for a psychodynamic interpretation, it has a lot to do with being a foreigner, and feeling that I’ve had to fight hard to find a place for myself. I’ve had to do that consistently over the years. I’ve never belonged, either to a British university or to an established psychotherapy training organisation. I’ve had to invent it, and I suppose it is in the process of having to invent it, and work for it, that things have started to happen. And then once you’re used to working for it that hard, you carry on. It’s become a habit. I enjoy it, of course. But there’s more to it than you being in the right place at the right time. I haven’t been in the right place at the right time. I wondered if that’s what you were saying. Where does it start? You put yourself in the right place? Well, yes. ‘I came over to Britain from France to work with the Arbours Association, and that really didn’t work out. So I had a choice of going back to France or staying here and trying to eke out an existence of my own, and I opted for the latter. I started in a small private practice. I met someone at a conference who told me about this humanistic psychology MA programme run by Antioch University. And so, I made a contact there and I started working for them for just a few hours a week. It was a very small part-time job. But I

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I28 In tem‘m

took it extremely seriously. I enjoyed it, and there was much that needed to be done there, to get things working properly. I took it on, as a challenge, and before long people found that I had ideas that were useful.

I was made into the Associate Director within, I think, a year-and-a-half of joining, and from there on it was a challenge to ensure that the programme could continue to exist. The University constantly wanted to close us down. We had to expand and work really hard to convince them that it was right for us to carry on. And that was a real struggle. It was a job nobody wanted at that time, because it didn’t pay well at all-in fact, it paid very, very poorly-and I put in as many hours as most of my colleagues in cushy jobs elsewhere. It was because I didn’t have any other options that I did that. And sticking with that led to the thing becoming successful, to Antioch University actually beginning to support us and to our beginning to attract British students into the programme.

We changed the programme around to include other forms of psychother- apy, and then moved to Regent’s College in 1985. Four years later we made the connection with Regent’s College directly, rather than just remaining tenants, and convinced them that the programme was an interesting project for them to stick with. It’s been one struggle after the next, but each time having done one bit it seemed to have paid off, making it easier to go on to the next bit. It wasn’t just a struggle for sunrival, but it actually began to be about development and growth, and people started to believe in it. And then, suddenly, once people start to believe in you, and they see you have things to offer, it takes off one day. You begin to get some appreciation and some returns on all that investment. You said something interesting a little while ago. You said that you almost had no alternative.

So what you’re saying is that it was just necessity. You had to live. But you’re also saying that you make the best of what you find. You’ve been known for being a woman of enormous energy, yes?

Is that how you experience yourself? Are you still saying that you just have to do this, there is no other way? Are we talking about feeding your children-you know, that kind of necessity? What are we talking about? Well, it was like that. There are no two ways round it. When I became Director of the Antioch MA in 1982, my son was just a year old, and I was the main breadwinner in the family, and I had no other jobs to go to. I had applied for jobs, but I had often been considered very suspiciously because I was Dutch and I had trained in France, and people didn’t really want to give me a chance. And there was no other job. The other thing I could do was private practice. But as I had not trained in this country, I did not have the back-up system for referrals. When I worked in private practice it was very much under my own steam, and actually-I’m almost ashamed to say it now-in 1978, when I first started doing private work, it was through advertising in Time Out. Because at

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that time nobody wanted to refer to me. And that is really how it was, Maye. That was all I could do, and it was the only chance I had to make a living. That’s how it was. Did it make you angry? I mean, are you saying that you came here and met a closed system? Oh yes, totally. This is part of the secret of my energy. I’ve always felt cornered, and not recognised and acknowledged, and I’ve always responded to that by saying, ‘Well, I’ll show them.’ Just very keen, trying to break in. Why were they keeping you out? Why did you see yourself as being kept out? Because there was no parity of training, or . . . ? Well, simply because I didn’t belong. When you go ftom one country to another, unless you are actually invited in, and they offer you a job straight- away and you come into the job, it’s just like that. You haven’t got your networks, you haven’t got your connections. So nobody takes you seriously. You have to prove yourself. It’s just a fact of human nature, that’s how it works. It was, in a way, by choice that I did that. I could have remained in Holland and I could have gone into a Dutch university and built up my own networks and belonged and gotten into a job and been part of things in Holland, and it would have worked out very differently. But I did not want that. That seemed too easy. I wanted to be challenged, and see the world, and so I went to France. And got into the system there, through my first husband, who was a French psychiatrist and who was part of the system. But it was second-hand, you know. I was in the system, but through him, and that was not satisfactory either. The challenge of staying in Britain was to really make it on my own. . . In your own right. . . . in my own right, completely. And I think my whole motivation was with that, and that’s where the energy comes from. It’s not just anger. It’s also a kind of a wanting to show myself and to the world that it is possible to make things right, that it is possible against the odds to do it. Yes. Because what you’re talking about is almost that there’s a patronage system, You know, if you’ve got a patron who can introduce you, and say, ‘This person is good’, and introduce you to the network, then some of your work is done. But you did it on your own. Yes, and certainly that’s how it worked in France, and I know that’s how it was in Holland. In a way, I’m part of that now, myself. It’s funny. I have a big thing about wanting to do that for people that I know now, that I think highly of. I tend to be very loyal to them, and help them to develop their careers. And I take great pride and pleasure in doing that. I would have liked someone to do it for me. Right, so who’s the first person who really does help you, then. Who have you got as someone who you say, ‘Ah, that person was very significant’, in this country?

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Oh, there’s my husband. There’s no doubt about it. He is American, so he didn’t have the help, either. That put us together very closely because it was the two of us up against a hostile world. We often spoke of feeling that we had a ‘ghetto mentality’ and that we really ought to extend our ground more, and in those early years that’s very much what it felt like. Not having any family around, not having any contacts. But that brought us very close together, and that was very important. And you’ve not forgotten that. What you’re saying about your own practice, certainly in helping others, is that that period, when you were on your own and almost against the world, as it were, and had to do things in your own right, that that experience was. . . well I suppose in the old days we’d have called it ‘character building’, wouldn’t we? A lovely idea! Yes, but it does feel like that. I feel that if I’ve been able to do that, I can have confidence in myself, nothing has been given to me. I have worked for it, I’ve done it myself, so that must stand for something. And that’s actually given me a confidence that I used to lack totally and completely. Yes. And you’re currently Professor here, of the School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, and you are Chair of the United Kingdom Council for Psy- chotherapy. So let’s go back. How soon do you then start to become very important in Regent’s? In 1985 Antioch University was offered some rooms here, as tenants, because Regent’s College had just started then, and needed lots of tenants to fill the place, just to pay the rent. We were lucky enough to get in on that, because at that time Regent’s was an American college. So they invited any American universities, and we were with Antioch University so we were told about it. We decided that it was a good idea, and that certainly was a very important move, because up to that point we were functioning from an obscure street at the end of the city, near Hackney, and the students who came to do our course there always were quite apprehensive that we might not be a bonajide organisation. Even the BPS questioned us, dismissing us as an off-shore university. So, as an organisation you had to fight, and as an individual you had to fight. That’s why I think I had loyalty to the Antioch programme as well. It seemed very similar to how I felt myself. It was the programme that was very different to anything that was on offer in Britain at the time: the new ideas of humanistic psychology. Of course, that allowed me to put in my own philosophical interests in existential psychology and phenomenology, and to build on that for the new programme. So there was a real match here. It was possible to put a lot of my own philosophical expertise into the creation of that programme. So what you’re saying is that, although it was problematic, there was also a lot of freedom. So you had two things: you had the freedom to develop and put in ideas, and also to shape some very important developments in terms of the training of psychotherapists. And some early colleagues and students who believed in it, of course; that was very important too. How many students are we talking about at Antioch in those early days?

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When I started off at Antioch in 1978, I believe we had something like 15 or 17 students in the college. We now have close to 500 at any time. So this school is the old Antioch? That’s what it’s grown out of, yes. So, in a short space of time the old Antioch is now the Regent’s College School of Psychotherapy. That’s right. We still have a few students who are finishing their MAS at Antioch, but that’s now being phased out. And here you are, Regent’s, offering the first British PhD c o m e in counselling. Yes! Does that give you personal satisfaction. Do you like being the first in things? Yes, I suppose I do-well, only if it’s worthwhile. There are certain things that I believe in and that seem to me to be worth doing. If nobody else yet believes that it can be done, then that becomes a challenge. It’s like, ‘Well, let’s prove that it can be done’, and then it is something that is beneficial to people. In that sense, yes. So what’s behind it, then? What’s beneficial about a PhD? Where does that come from? Well, it’s a PhD in Psychotherapy and Counselling, for a starter, so it brings that whole discipline together. It doesn’t split the field into two. It recognises that there is a whole new discipline which is about understanding how people function in themselves, in the world, in relationship, and how you can enable people to do that better. To develop a whole back-up of research is, I think, an incredibly wonderful challenge which has no limits in possibilities of appli- cation. It seems to me that we’re still thinking on a very small scale. I, myself, think on a very small scale, in terms of what this is actually about. Right. Can you say more? I think it is about a whole new orientation towards what people are, and what this knowledge about what people are can change in how the world operates. So I think that there are some social, cultural, and political implications to what our profession could bring about. And we don’t always see that. Not only don’t we always see it, but most of us don’t even begin to think about it. We just do our jobs, in a little pocket somewhere, and we forget that we’re actually trying to learn something about everyday life, and all the things that people have problems with, all the reasons why the world is in a mess. You’re talking about ‘doing’ psychology. Yes. So you would certainly be uncomfortable with this discipline split from ‘psychology as a science’. . . I can see from the expression that you’ve had these battles. You’ve also had battles about the split between counselling and psychotherapy, too. And counselling psychology. Yes, you’re making a strong bid there. I’m interested in your views. You’re certainly indicating that you get irritated with what you see as the artificial split. Why?

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Well, certainly people can come to this field from different angles, and I can understand that some come from the more scientific psychology angle, others from a more psychodynamic angle, and others from a very pragmatic coun- selling angle. But the point of the matter is that we have lots of things in common and we actually are labouring with the same difficulties, we’re trying to enable people in very similar ways, and it just seems so wasteful for us to fight against each other and to split all these resources away from each other, rather than to face the fact that there is a huge challenge that we’ve not really dealing with very effectively yet, because we are allowing ourselves to be fragmented. And I think it comes about because we come from various professions, or we come attached to other disciplines and other ideas, and we don’t take the time to clear the decks and to re-define what we have ended up being interested in and pre-occupied with-which is to my mind a much wider issue, that of human well-being. No matter what the approach? Yes. You’re saying that the similarities quite outweigh the differences. Are you talking about a continuum, then, from psychotherapy to counselling, rather than attempting to separate even the theoretical models as well as the processes they use? Yes. So, psychodynamic counselling and psychotherapy: what would be the differ- ence, and how would you conceptualise the difference, if at all? Well, I wouldn’t even want to put any definitions on that difference, because I’m much too aware that some therapeutic counsellors would define them- selves in very similar ways to some psychotherapists, and some psychothera- pists would actually be closer, maybe, to psychology o r . . . What I mean is, sometimes people use the labels in very different ways. Because we haven’t got official definitions, so there are incredible overlaps, and people aren’t even aware sometimes that those overlaps exist. I know that we will develop clear definitions over the coming few years, because of some of the projects that are happening, but whether that will actually be an advantage or a disadvantage I do not know. It might drive us apart in some ways be defining counselling psychology as one thing, counselling as another, and psychotherapy as yet another. Maybe that is needed for people to feel secure in what they have on offer, which is different to what other people can offer. But maybe we also need to recognise how all those different pockets are part of a wider fabric, and what that wider fabric also has is a shared middle to it, and a shared overall territory, and objectives. I would be very sorry if we’re not able to do that. That’s one of the by-products of the library project, isn’t it? The mere title of it, and the talking about it, and the bringing together of UKCP, BAC, and BPS, ostensibly to talk about a library for psychotherapy, counselling, and mental health: at least it sets up a dialogue, and says that these all belong together and we should be looking at them as part of a profession. Not only-you see, you’re saying something very interesting-not only the well-be-

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ing of individuals, as they are, but actually by doing that work, by becoming more aware of that similarity and overlap, we’re talking about quality of life for everybody. Yes. Because this is what, I think, counselling psychologists felt about BPS, wasn’t it? I remember in the early days that it was important that counselling psychologists, often with quite different values from your ‘scientific’ psycholo- gists, felt that they had a duty to develop counselling psychology not only in terms of working with individuals, but in terms of doing something about BPS. That’s right. We’ve been up against those sorts of issues, those concerns, the human concerns. The funny thing, of course, is that we will all agree that it is the same literature that underpins all of that. In terms of the library, we all have no doubt that all of our disciplines are underpinned by a broadly similar literature, which we consider to be a specialist literature, that we share. That’s interesting. Yes. There are still huge debates when I find myself, still, having to justify my existence, at times, at larger meetings. . . Within the BPS? Yes, and I find that rather tiring. Do you still have those debates, or are you now, in your two positions, in a world of shared meaning? Do you fight, though: do you still fmd yourself fighting to justify? Yes, very much so. Where? Well, I had that very much in the College, of course, in the first few years after we merged with the College, when we had to prove that this was an important discipline, and that it could rival-and it was on that level-with an American Liberal A r t s programme, and particularly with a Business School. What we had to show was that this is not just some cranky, strange discipline, but that it has a place in society, and that it has a place in the academic world. I think we did that simply by showing that there were so many students interested in studying these disciplines. And then, I think, by showing that a lot of the expertise of counsellors and psychotherapists is relevant to ordinary people. It isn’t just about when someone is disturbed, or stressed. It is also about when someone is stressed, or ill at ease, or at a loss, or when someone has a sense of a lack of meaning in their life. Counselling and psychotherapy are relevant to ordinary sorts of issues. I think that is a more or less won battle now, within the College. But where I feel the battle is strongest at the moment is with government. Yes. That is where our energy is going now, within UKCP. To convince govern- ment that there are really significant resources here that would help governing a country. But we need to establish exactly what those resources consist of, and how they could be used. And I think if we succeed in doing that properly, we will surprise even ourselves. Because the professionals themselves think in very small terms: as professionals we too have a ghetto mentality.

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134 Interview

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Yes, and how you deal with that. I’m reminded of getting very angry one day, at a meeting in the National Health Service, because one of the Unit Managers was talking about long-term psychotherapy being nine months now. And I said, ‘Please do not call it long-term psychotherapy. Call it nine-month therapy, and conceptualise it as nine-month therapy, and look at what it can do, and how it should be. But don’t call it long-term therapy.’ So much of the profession is being economic-climate-driven, isn’t it, as well as ideological. . . Yes, but from a very short-term perspective. People are not thinking through the issues, and not realising that the insight and the skills that come with counselling and psychotherapy could actually make enormous differences to how children are raised, to how schools are organised, to how businesses are run, to how the ordinary life of people is actually lived. Yes. You’re talking quality of life, not mental health. Yes, absolutely right. How many people even begin to know what you’re talking about, outside here? Is it different here than in Europe? You mean the continent? Yes, the continent, all right. This is Europe! Sorry, yes, We’ve got a tunnel now: I must stop doing that! No, it’s not very different. I think it’s a very similar situation. There’s a lack of insight into what these resources can offer anywhere. There are some excep- tions. In Ausma, for instance, they are now starting to make psychotherapy available much more widely, reimbursed by the state. Because they have done some studies and shown that there is a long-term saving in other health services, in terms of unemployment, alcoholism-what in Europe are called the major health scourges. These problems are helped enormously when you start making things like counselling and psychotherapy available. Providing these has a knock-on effect on lots of problems throughout society. But of course, to clearly establish what that knock-on effect is, or could be, you have to make a commitment to psychotherapy services and counselling services, and you have to do a very long-term study of a society. So it’s very difficult to prove to people that that is what could happen. You must get very cross with all of the money being spent on research, then, to prove it doesn’t work. Yes, it’s pure silliness, because there are studies that show enough evidence that there are considerable savings in lots and lots of ways. Not just in terms of quality of life, but in terms of what quality of life does to all these other things. But not in this country? Even in this country, there is some research. Glenys Parry at the Department of Health has access to a lot of these studies. She spoke at Canterbury at the UCP Annual Conference. She made it quite clear that there are some studies that have been done, which people are simply ignoring. Then as soon as a

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study comes out that shows some negativity, people go berserk over them. They are often very small studies, and very badly done. Why do you think people react to them in that way? I’m not sure. I suspect it has something to do with people not wanting to acknowledge that something to do with everyday life, something as simple as how you conduct yourself, how you experience yourself, how you relate to other people, is actually open to improvement, to education, to questioning. I think it’s an area that people feel very strongly should be their individual prerogative, and should be part of their individual freedom. ‘This is just how I am, so don’t ask me to change.’ They only are willing to start thinking about it when something is dreadfully wrong, when they cannot cope any more. So it’s crisis . . . Yes. It tends to be connected to crisis, and distress, and disorder. And so it has a very bad press. It seems that to turn one’s attention to how one functions is related to being sick, or being ill, or being pathological in some way. And you don’t want to admit to needing help in that area. You commented on Austria. Even in Austria that isn’t recognised. We haven’t got basic principles of mental health. We’re centuries behind on medical science, in its very broadest sense. It is like the Middle Ages, when people didn’t understand about hygiene, and they used just to spread their products around, and were surprised that there were diseases; then they needed to develop medical science to cure those diseases. But actually, some of the developments that were much more import- ant were to understand about physical hygiene and how diseases spread, and how you can avoid that happening. That actual curing bit is tiny, in terms of the life-savings that have happened over the past centuries. It is that other side that has been the main thing, the understanding of the functioning of the body and prophylaxis. And I think we have a similar thing on mental health. We are still very much thinking in terms of how we can cure people once it’s gone wrong, but very little effort goes into understanding how we make things go wrong. We are very inattentive to how people function in psychological ways. Would you have wanted or hoped that kind of debate to surface where you get something like the James Bulger case, which is a horrible crisis, with all the evidence of what was going on in the lives of the two boys responsible for the murder? Absolutely right. It’s quite clear once people start to pay attention to what actually happened there, and they stop dismissing it as these two criminals, that there is a real catastrophe here-in society, not just in the life of those boys and in the life of James Bulger, but in society at large. And of course, that’s nothing new. That’s always happened. We simply haven’t gotten round to understand- ing how that works. We never have begun to look at that in those terms. But the situation is getting more and more difficult because there are more and more people in the world, and there are more and more organisations, and systems, and hierarchies, and God knows what else, to take into account. So it gets harder and harder to actually survive mentally in the world.

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But you’re still doing it, you’re still fighting. So, have you got any successes? Have you got things where you can say, ‘My energy was worth it’? Yes, very much so. And I think that starts on the personal level. What I’m really interested in is how can I not just survive, but actually survive with some quality and actually develop me? What is given as me, how can I actually use that in such a way that I understand something about my moods, that I can work with my moods rather than be worked by them, that I can work with people and with the negative things that happen between people, and how can I understand that, and how can I go across that, how can I transcend it, as it were. And that is the real challenge, it seems to me. And then to teach that to the students, as well. And I think, more and more, I’m aware of that really being the backbone to what one does when one teaches a course. It is not so much just preparing people to become professionals, but it is about helping those people to manage themselves, and their lives, in new ways. And I find that people come to counselling particularly, but also to psychotherapy train- ing, because of that motivation. More than just wanting to make a living, they want to learn to live. A lot of autobiographical stuff. . . Yes. So you would certainly not be, or I’m assuming that you would not be, happy with entirely skill-based courses. You’re shaking your head! Absolutely not! I’m very against skill-based courses. I worked on one for seven years, and I was always in contradiction with the course philosophy there. I strongly believe that the profession is done with much more integrity when people are willing to face their personal issues as part of their work. I don’t think you can really become a psychotherapist unless you are willing to face that, and work with that, and use yourself as the medium, and the resource, in a very personal way. So that would be a central part here, at Regent’s. Yes, and I think that’s why students come here. That almost inevitably is what they say. They’ve looked around, and one of the things that attracted them to our courses is the personal and the philosophical emphasis. And I make no bones about it at all: I have no doubt that a lot of people come to our short courses, or our certificate courses, instead of going into psychotherapy. Yes, I was going to mention that, but you’ve anticipated the question. So what. . . And I think that’s great. I think one has much better results with people if they come willing to learn, willing to be in situation where they say: ‘I’m actually ignorant about myself. I’m actually ignorant about some of the things I do, and some of the things that happen to me. Let’s study the literature that is available, let’s study with each other, interact with each other, and then observe what happens, and try to draw some conclusions, and see what happens.’ I think when people do that, even just for one year, they often gain far more than from years of being in psychotherapy.

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Interview 137

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So you’ve got some feelings about ‘being in psychotherapy’ then? Come clean! What are they? You’re hinting. . . Well, I think there is a problem in counselling and psychotherapy that there is a passivity. There is a risk, let’s put it that way, that people come to that situation wanting to be fed, to be taken care of, and to be nurtured; wanting to some extent to be sorry for themselves and somewhat complacent about the wrong that was done them and the hardship they have endured. You have probably gathered from my own life history that I have concluded that that is not the best way forward, and that it is better to say. ‘These are the problems I’ve got. This is the situation. Now, what do I do?’ And then to find a way forward from there. And I think that people are more easily helped and encouraged to take that stance when they come as a student on the course than when they come to psychotherapy. It’s a big cognitive analytical step you talk about and analyse there. . . No, I don’t think that’s right. I think it is also about sort of tuning in to yourself and actually becoming aware of various possibilities that are there which you might not become aware of when you are just in the one-to-one situation of counselling or therapy. Because on the course, people meet other people, and that’s a very important aspect. It’s a bit like group therapy, if you like, or family therapy, which are two modalities that I believe in very strongly. Because they work with people in relation to each other. You’ve got a real situation where people are in context, and in the context they are being challenged, and they have to question themselves. Having said that, don’t get the wrong end of the stick. I still believe that there is a wide scope for individual personal therapy, and people do need that individual attention and that space, to go down into themselves, and to have that exclusive time for themselves. Yes, there’s room for that, too. Yes, because as a Freudian trained psychotherapist, I was getting worried there! No, no, not at all. I just don’t think that that is an option for large amounts of people for a long time. There needs to be something else, as well. And I think we need to look in the direction of groups, family work, and course work. There is a largely unmet need for education for life. Psychotherapy and counselling have a contribution to make to teaching and understanding about the pitfalls and possibilities of ordinary living. That is what I am most committed to working for, when all is said and done. I think that makes an excellent point to close on. Thank you so much for agreeing to be interviewed. I have found the conversation quite fascinating- and have learned a lot.

Glossary

BAC British Association for Counselling BPS British Psychological Society UKCP United Kingdom Council for Psychotherapy

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