‘Stuck’ Cases – the Politics Meta-frame and Impotence

When analysing a case that has become ‘stuck’, we need to understand it is stuck in all four of the Bower(method) meta-frames – Space, Time, Development & Politics.

The starting point is Politics. Be alert to any dissonance between responsibility and authority in terms of the therapeutic relationship, and whether the request, paralyses the possibility of movement in the matter. You need to be intuitively, 100% alert to this, so you are not surprised.

A huge proportion of matters we handle come with this poisoned chalice.

When responsibility and authority are out of alignment, unbalanced, then inequality is most likely mismanaged, which takes you directly into inequality as the most fundamental constraint to all change. This is not about producing equality. This is about not mismanaging inequality. These are entirely different ideas and not a trivial distinction.

Practitioners need to have a very clear head about the relationship between inequality (as manifest in the relationship between responsibility and authority) and justice and the idea that justice is an abstraction, manifest in the practice of fairness between people and between parties in any arrangement, legal or other. This takes you to the relationship between inequality, responsibility, authority, justice, and fairness as a set of recursive, circular, self-reflexive relationships, where each feed off the other, into the other, is invented by the other, is manifest in the other. Nothing exists without the other; this is the nature of recursion.

We need to have this order of analysis across all four meta-frames and some purchase on the implications of this analysis as applied to each matter. Without this the practitioner may be rendered impotent before they start.

Impotence is a common experience in therapeutic practice, and for most practitioners an experience to be avoided. As a result, this is exactly what they do. What makes an exceptional practitioner is the ability to grasp their relationship with the experience of impotence and one’s own inexorable participation in their own impotence in relationship to a case. Most practitioners handle the experience of impotence poorly and to be a very good clinical practitioner you need to have serious command over yourself, over your experience of impotence and your response to it.