Abstract
When we change for the better in our lives – when patients and their therapists transform and heal – is that something we do, or is it something that occurs in us? Put differently: can we design our way out of our psychological problems and imbalances, given the right set of instructions, or is transformation rather a spontaneous, unpremeditated event, that we can only ever allow and open to? Common sense and clinical experience would both tend to suggest that the answer lies somewhere in the middle. And yet the theoretical formulations on the nature of the process of psychic change both whithin the field of psychotherapy and outside it diverge widely in their emphasis on change as either a deliberate or a spontaneous process. The purpose of this thesis is to explore this dilemma and mystery on a theoretical level. The inquiry will hopefully provide resources to approach the underlying questions of what the nature of the process of psychic transformation is and whether it is characterised by any universal, cross-theoretic characteristics and mechanics, in the intrapsychic and intersubjective domains. In order to work with this inquiry, I will throughout the thesis utilize two primary conceptual aids: the concept of the being mode and the concept of the doing mode. These two concepts have their origin in the psychoanalytic theory of Winnicott (1966) and Guntrip (1968), and have also been used more recently in Barnard and Teasdale's theoretical model of cognitive processing and the cognitive psychology of mindfulness (Barnard & Teasdale, 1991; Teasdale, 1999). Briefly, the doing mode is used to refer to a mode of internal processing or a way of being that is goal-oriented, active and conceptual, while the being mode refers to processing or a way of being that is present-centered, receptive and experiential (cf. Teasdale, 1993; 1999). The investigation will have two interrelating aspects. On one level, it is the exploration of the question of whether transformation is the result of our doing, or whether it is an emergent process of our being; on another level, it is an exploration of the nature of the two modes themselves. Understanding the problem of transformation through the lens of the modes will inevitably teach us something about what being and doing is. I am not aware of any such specific exploration being, doing and their relationship whithin the psychological literature, aside from the original formulations by Winnicott and Guntrip.