Care and Boundaries
Care as the Heart of Therapy
What if, in an attempt to understand “what therapy is?”, Care is placed at the centre of the hermeneutic situation?
And how does ontological Care appear when it is refracted into therapeutic care?
Let us suppose.
The therapist’s Care is to create a space and to be present in such a way that the client’s concern with their life situation becomes more accessible for exploration and expands the possibilities of describing both that situation and an understanding of who and how they are in the present moment.
Is a certain instrument, a certain language, being created that helps a special kind of truthfulness to mature? A human being is a creature endowed with — and condemned to — choosing their own way of being. We search for the “right line,” we search for “how to act,” how to explain or understand this or that.
It is this complex task that, in the context of therapy, will sound like a complaint.
The question arises: what does the context of Care as a hermeneutic situation give to therapy?
Do additional possibilities of understanding the complaint and working with it appear, and if so, what are they?
To work with the “complaint” as something that grows out of the ground of how the client is (as Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others).
To consider the “complaint” as pointing to a certain “unfreedom” (“passivity”) in the way the client is (in the mode of “Care”) in relation to certain kinds and domains of beings and with other people.
The joint search with the client for a “transcending” (overcoming) movement in the direction of a more “free” (“from the first person,” “active”) mode of being-concerned.
“At the same time, it is important that this transcending movement is carried out in the direction of otherness or another person, which is precisely why the discourse of openness/closedness in joint care becomes relevant.”
A. Lyzlov
In this sense, the therapist is not exempt from the constant reflection on their own concern — both with their life situation as a whole and with the specific therapeutic situation included in the overall flow of their care.
Thus an anti-rule takes shape (something akin to Freud’s “rule of abstinence”).
The cultivation of truthfulness in relation to the conditions of human existence is possible only mutually. In that sense, care in such therapeutic relationships means the continuous cultivation of truthfulness in both.
We both (therapist and client) within the framework of therapeutic care somehow relate to and understand (are concerned with) our life situation as a whole. Not in the sense that I am the wise teacher and you are the pupil. Rather, we both respond from the singularity of our own understanding of Being.
This is the path of care. The path toward the client themselves creating “their own” therapist out of you, by accepting the power and responsibility for understanding their capacity to live.
Or, in Heidegger’s words, the path/effort toward
"to become clear-sighted for one’s care and free for it."
