How much is a word worth? How much a look? How much a silence?
How much a gesture? Is there a way to objectively quantify your impact on another? Can its effect be measured? Should we restrict our activity to the “purely scientific”?
It is obvious that mental problems have an organic and biochemical facet. It would be foolish to try to renounce the benefits that adequate medication can provide us. But it is also true that the patient needs something more than that. And I think that this other one is closer to a creative process (sometimes something artistic but not necessarily), and less to something measurable or quantifiable. Could anyone question the transformative power of a given novel for a given person? Or a song? Or from a movie? Does it occur to anyone to try quantify the change they have produced in us and then classify them as effective, probably effective, in the experimental phase, etc.? Of course theory and technique are important, but is it possible to reduce the transformative power that is produced (or not) in the other to a few writing techniques or a harmonic sequence?
The inheritance passed down
A few years ago my father wrote a beautiful novel with autobiographical overtones in which the protagonist said that one of the things he had always tried to do with his children had been play with them as much as possible. I have that memory of my father, and I am infinitely grateful to him. He now plays with his grandchildren. And me with my son. All I can. Because, in fact, I believe that he is one of the inheritances healthier, physically and mentally, than we can leave.
Psychotherapy, as Winnicott said, is also “related to two people who they play togetherand when the game is not possible, the psychologist’s work is guide to take the patient from a state in which he cannot play to one in which it is possible to do so. That playing always has something to do with a creative experienceand it is likely that creativity cannot be taught, it is, rather, about generating the conditions that make its possible. deploymentwhich almost inevitably leads to dismantling those repetitive configurations in which we are immersed and building new experiences.
