Because I came into the world of CYC from such a peculiar angle, I sometimes find that I have residue from my previous investments that periodically demand my attention. By residue, I mean bits and pieces of my practice and theory that I haven’t been able to integrate with my understanding of the fundamentals of CYC. I have spent some time in this column over the years working with the political and relational aspects, but I haven’t taken as much time exploring what has informed my practice.
To my way of thinking, it is sometimes useful to ground practice in the broader field of thought that informs how we have shaped what we do. For example, it seems clear to me that many of the foundational frameworks for how we think about CYC practice originate from the zeitgeist of the late 1950s to the late 1960s. For progressive circles of people exploring how to engage with young people in institutional settings during that time, the available frameworks drew heavily from the philosophies of existentialism and phenomenology. These philosophies were filtered through the emerging understanding of human motivation and healing to be found in humanistic psychology.
In the writings of the early thinkers we admire and those who carry the legacy today, the influence of Maslow, Rogers, and Perls is clear. From notions of being and becoming to the importance of the lifespace and the centrality of the relational encounter, the echoes of radical humanism are powerful. To say that these ideas were the cutting edge of alternative thinking at the time is to state the obvious. And even today, many of these ideas are of central importance in rehumanizing our lives and the work we do.
The early thinkers and practitioners of CYC used the ideas of the mid-twentieth century to challenge the established orthodoxies of the Freudian psychoanalytic view of children and childhood. They broke the template of psychiatric pathologization of childhood and opened new ways of seeing adult-child relations as humane and hopeful, rather than brutal and deterministic. However, in breaking with psychoanalytic thinking about children, they lost track of something that I would say is quite important. That is the unconscious. In the literature of CYC over the years, there has been little or no discussion of the unconscious. For me, as someone trained in hypnotherapy, this has been an odd omission.
In terms of the foundations of the field, phenomenology and existentialism had to wrestle with the question of the unconscious. After all, in their time, psychoanalysis was at the apex of its influence, and its key concepts had to be addressed in order to be challenged. So, Jean-Paul Sartre, Otto Rank, Viktor Frankl, and Irvin Yalom constructed variations of an alternative unconscious. In doing so, they stepped aside from the Freudian unconscious as a site of repressed desire that, if unattended, would lead to a variety of forms of psychopathology.
The existentialists saw Freud’s unconscious as secretly governing human behavior, which they argued was at odds with the existentialist commitment to the idea that human beings are free to act and responsible for their choices. They asserted that having a fundamental aspect of who we are that predetermined our actions outside our awareness would destroy free will and undermine any notion of personal responsibility. Sartre argued that this could allow for the production of excuses to avoid taking responsibility for our actions and would encourage us to simply accept our circumstances.
However, the concept of the unconscious was so powerful that it couldn’t simply be ignored, and so the existentialists produced their own versions. For example, Sartre proposed an unconscious that operated pre-reflexively to determine our project in the world. He made a distinction between explicitly thinking about something and our awareness of something in the background without actively or conceptually focusing on it. The unconscious, in this sense, is the aspect of our world that we are not consciously aware of yet. Otto Rank saw the unconscious as that part of ourselves responsive to the trauma of becoming fully aware of our capacity to act. Viktor Frankl saw the unconscious as a deep human drive focused on meaning, responsibility and spiritual aspiration that operates pre-consciously. Concepts of the unconscious influenced by Irvin Yalom accept the Freudian understanding that people harbor blind spots, defenses, and implicit meanings. These are understood not as repressed libidinous impulses but as ways of avoiding core existential givens like death, isolation, meaninglessness, and freedom. Common to all these approaches was a move away from Freud’s focus on biological drives and internal structures such as the id, the ego, and the superego. Instead, the existentialists’ unconscious was derived from hidden mental processes responsive to human existence.
In thinking about this legacy for CYC and the absence of the unconscious in our discourse, Sartre’s notion of pre-reflexive thought comes to mind. This is the idea that perhaps our sense of the unconscious in CYC operates in the background without any overt theorizing or conceptual focus being placed on it. When Freeman and Garfat assert in the Characteristics of Relational Child and Youth Care that our work focuses on assisting people to think about and live their lives differently as they live it, could we see this as an affirmation of the existential unconscious? That is to say, work that is implicitly built on the belief that human beings have a deep drive focused on meaning, responsibility and spiritual aspiration that operates pre-consciously. Could our job be to bring young people’s projects in the world to the surface of their awareness so that they can act on them?
The other foundational thread for CYC that I have noted is phenomenology. If existentialism is centered on the capacity to act as fully and freely as possible, what does phenomenology offer? For CYC, phenomenology offers us the ability to explore how human beings become conscious of their experience in the world. Instead of trying to understand young people from the outside, we are afforded the opportunity to learn how the world appears to them from the inside out. We can learn about it from a subjective first-person point of view.
It is important to note that there is a branch of phenomenology called existential phenomenology that blends both approaches. It posits that we first exist and then, through our encounter with the world, make choices and take action. There is no underlying premade mapping of who we might become. In our encounter with the world, we are not outside observers of reality but actively immersed in all aspects of lived experience: social, historical, and physical. The question for us, then, is: what is the phenomenological unconscious?
Like the existentialists, the phenomenologists rejected the Freudian unconscious as the site of repressed desire and instead conceived of it as a layer under the surface of our conscious awareness. Phenomenologists such as Husserl saw the unconscious as a passive site that contained past habits, emotional capacities, and the edges of past experiences. This layer of possibility supports our active consciousness. The existential phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty conceptualized it as the fundamental elements of physical reality that connect us to everything else before we can speak. In both accounts the unconscious operates as a set of latent capacities made of real-world elements that can be drawn on in developing and understanding our experience.
In terms of CYC, this version of the unconscious might be thought of as the pool of resources that we seek in strength-based work. It might also be thought of as the ecological understanding we see in more systemic approaches to working with communities and families. For our purposes, it supports a non-pathological, resource-based approach that focuses on the material world and our actions in it. When we co-create an experience with a young person that opens capacities neither of us knew we had, we could be drawing from the phenomenological unconscious.
That said, neither the existential nor the phenomenological account fully explains the unconscious for me. I began by saying that I came into CYC from a peculiar angle, and the way I came to understand the unconscious is a good example. I began my work in a day treatment program for young people coming out of psychiatric facilities, unlike many of my colleagues in CYC, who came through residential programs. My training was focused on what we now call community mental health. It probably had a more clinical focus, with an emphasis on the role of psychiatry and psychology in the “treatment” of the young people we saw.
That said, the particular mental health center where I entered the field as a community volunteer took a rather unconventional approach to the work we did. There were certainly psychiatrists, psychologists, and psychiatric nurses on staff, but generally speaking, very few of them adhered strictly to the medical model. It was a moment in the late 1970s when innovation and creative approaches were accepted, if not encouraged. This meant that as a volunteer with little or no training in conventional approaches to mental health, I was thrown into a milieu that was rich in alternative ways of thinking and practicing, which I embraced wholeheartedly.
At the time, this meant exploring different explanations of severe psychological and emotional distress. Since many of the young people I worked with were coming out of a psychiatric facility after having a first psychotic break, a non-medical model explanation of what we thought of as radical states of consciousness was on the agenda. Among these were explorations into the thought that psychosis had something to do with trance states and that trance states had something to do with the unconscious. A lot of our thinking here was influenced by the anti-psychiatric movement, the residues of the psychedelic pioneers from the 1960s, the investigations of the alternative states of consciousness found in spiritual practices, and the edges of the emerging therapies associated with cybernetics and systems theory. This framing of madness led the center to bring in several unconventional psychotherapists, and it was through training with these alternative thinkers and practitioners that I began to frame my own ideas about severe psychological and emotional distress.
Among the practitioners I was exposed to was the psychiatric hypnotherapist Milton Erickson. Erickson was and is a controversial figure whom some key figures in the mainstream psychiatric community literally called psychotic. His ideas about using the unconscious to solve seemingly intractable human dilemmas seemed to be extremely successful, but the methods he used were often unconventional, to say the least. He believed that every person who came to see him should receive care tailored to who they were as unique individuals. As a result, he didn’t use diagnoses or a particular type of intervention. Everyone he saw got what some of his students called a different Erickson. There is a lot to say here about his approach to working with people, but I want to focus on how he thought about the unconscious.
For Erickson, the unconscious was composed of everything you have ever experienced, whether fantasy, dream, or material reality. It was not a dark place of repression or a reflection of existential anxiety. Instead, it was a rich source of infinite resources that had the capacity to combine all of the elements of your lived experience into variations of possibility for new actions and thoughts. He saw accessing and using the unconscious as a much more efficient way to develop pathways through the vicissitudes of life than relying on the conscious mind.
He saw the conscious mind as limited by the social milieu out of which it was produced. The concepts and ideas that we have about who we are and what we are capable of are limited by the social prescriptions we are taught throughout our lives. Erickson suggested that the logic of what we have been taught to believe is true about who we are and how the world is composed limits our flexibility to think in new ways. We have a sense of what is logical and true, and we have a hard time violating what has always made sense to us. Erickson believed that to really find a new way to see an old problem, we needed to get our conscious mind out of the way. He saw hypnosis, or the development of a focused trance state, as a way to both distract the conscious mind and allow access to the richness of the unconscious.
Erickson pointed out that trance states are a natural phenomenon. We go in and out of trance all the time: when we are deeply engaged in a conversation, watching a fire, vividly remembering something from our past, or “spacing out.” He encouraged us to learn how to focus that naturally occurring state of consciousness in ways that could connect us in a more intentional way to the richness of our lived experience. I have always wondered why we haven’t spent more time in CYC exploring how to do this in our work. Of course, we already do this kind of trance work by accident all the time. Wouldn’t it be interesting if we could build on those accidents?
The psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari said in another context that we have the unconscious we deserve. In paying little or no attention to the unconscious in our work, are we constantly defaulting to an unconscious we have little or no understanding of or wisdom about? It is a troubling question, and one I hope we can begin to explore as we develop our work.
