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Freudian Psychology
The Neverending Story Applied to Therapy
The Nothing feeds on certainty; engagement in the present moment fights it.
Posted February 15, 2021
In the film, The Neverending Story (I haven’t read the book), a boy named Bastian is reading a book whose plot involves the encroachment of The Nothing on Fantasia. Bastian quite reasonably has a hard time believing that the things he does affect the characters in the book he’s reading, but at the climax, when The Nothing has all but destroyed Fantasia, he finally participates. In the book, The Nothing can be stopped only if a human child renames the Empress in the book. Bastian shouts out a new name for her—Moon Child—and Fantasia is saved.
In my view, there are two kinds of therapy moments: lively and deadly. To understand lively therapy, it helps to start with the family therapy idea of enactment. Instead of talking about how a couple argues, the therapist brings up a contested topic and has them discuss it. If they argue in real time during the session, the therapist is in a position to do something about what goes wrong in their conflicts. That makes it a lively therapy moment. The same applies to a boy’s tantrums, a girl’s refusal to eat (Minuchin scheduled family sessions for anorexics during lunch), or a host of other problems that can either be talked about in a deadly therapy moment or enacted and changed in a lively therapy moment.
Some problems cannot be reproduced in the office, whether because the pattern is anchored in a particular situation or because the individual or family is not in a position to attend sessions regularly. In these situations, the therapist has to meet the patients where they’re at—literally.
The psychoanalytic view is that individual patients are already enacting their problematic patterns of relating—you don’t have to ask them to. Well, this is true if you offer a modicum or neutral, ambiguous space for them to use. Relational therapy depends on the patient messing up the therapy the way they mess up other things, enabling the therapist and patient to change the pattern rather than just talking it to death.
It’s true of all therapy, but especially true of therapy for depression, which in many of its forms can be usefully considered a surrender to The Nothing. Deadly therapies confirm the patient’s fear that nothing, and only nothing (Poe’s “surcease of sorrow,” Hamlet’s “end the heartache”), can be hoped for.
In education, there’s little doubt that you can learn more by being corrected in vivo than by reviewing things later, especially for the first several years when you are still learning basic techniques. But correction all-too-often means a loss of face, a recognition that you still have much to learn. I’ve never understood how a therapist can expect to be responsive to real-time feedback from patients if they find real-time feedback from teachers insufferable.
Why correction should be a loss of face I also have trouble understanding. I suspect it has something to do with coddling children and telling graduate students how marvelous they are (and how easy psychology is), which fosters a sense of perfectibility that correction defiles. Still, if anything, I would think it shameful and embarrassing to get caught acting as if you have nothing to learn. People often disguise their claims of having nothing to learn by attacking the therapist or teacher: “It was the way you said it.” Dialectical behavior therapy was invented to help people manage the “insult” of having to change to get better.
The upshot is that deadly classrooms involve people commenting on things that happened outside the class, and lively classrooms involve something educational happening right here and right now. “What do you want me to do if you say something incorrect?” I have asked students. They said they wanted to be corrected, but many of them still glared at me sullenly when I did it. The Bible says (Proverbs 12:1), “Whoever hates to be corrected is stupid.”
Some might say the deadly classroom also saves face for the professor, who doesn’t have to explain things that they weren’t prepared to explain or manage clinical problems on the fly. But that, too, is a kind of hubris, to claim that it is a loss of face not to be omniscient. All the professor (or the therapist, for that matter) has to do is say, “I don’t know, let’s find out,” and the space can be lively, with two people trying to understand together.
So, in therapy and in training, one can engage with relevant patterns in real time (like Bastian and the book), or one can reduce oneself to Monday-morning quarterbacking, a talking head not in the arena.
One great fertilizer of The Nothing in my field is the use of drugs, whether purchased on the street or in a pharmacy, whose purpose is to change your mood rather than to change your personality. Drugs disrupt involvement in human interactions. Manualized treatments also feed The Nothing, scattering theater and poetry and human interaction away from the therapy space. Fantasia is fingerpainting; manualized treatment is paint-by-numbers.
Many mental health problems are biologically-based, but the vast majority of depressions, anxieties, dissociations, impulse disorders, and inner conflicts are not. Freud brought literature, philosophy, history, and imagination—the language of the soul—to bear on problems that patients were framing as biological (such as hysterical paralysis). Nowadays, it’s the other way around: people frame their life problems as psychological, only to meet practitioners who convince them that it’s medical. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry’s multi-billion-dollar ad budget, persuading us that life’s problems are chemical, doesn’t help.
A prescription pad and a manualized treatment are detached, uninvolved, like a parent who tells a child to go get herself some cookies or to go watch TV when she’s sad. You have to enter a pattern to change it, and the only way to enter Hamlet or Macbeth or any other drama is to play one of the parts available, as Bastian finally does in the film (playing the “human child”). Freud realized (during a dream in 1895) that explaining the patient’s problem was not therapy; therapy was changing the pattern. The entire field slowly realized that the therapy dyad is, in fact, a dyad—two people working together to change the patient, often by not overtly changing the patient but instead conferring the hygienic effects of welcoming understanding. If you’re handing out pamphlets to people in psychological pain, The Nothing has already won.
The Nothing feeds on certainty. When you are positive that you know why someone else is behaving as they are, you don’t consult your imagination for ideas about what might be going on. The Nothing also feeds on an unwillingness to talk about what’s going on with a big heart and an open mind—the unwillingness to engage—although such refusals are typically in the service of maintaining one’s certainty. In a lively, imaginative space, to quote R. Richard Williams, “Bad ideas are good, good ideas are better, and right answers are stupid.”
Fantasia is full of conflict, since dreams and wishes have a way of colliding with each other. Engagement in the present moment exposes conflict, which is why it is central to good therapy, since conflicts need to be exposed to be resolved. The Nothing mutes conflict and claims it isn’t necessary. It doesn’t address conflict face to face; The Nothing silences conflict, by silencing spontaneous interaction in the present moment, like oppressive regimes that shut down theaters and debates.
The Nothing is knowing; Fantasia is finding things out. The Nothing is prescribing a solution; Fantasia is an invitation to explore. The Nothing says, “Research shows ...”; Fantasia says, “I wonder ...” The Nothing is about the story; Fantasia is the story. The lesson of The Neverending Story is that, to make something better, and especially to improve the human condition, you have to be a part of the story.
