Doctor Who_ Bad Therapy - Matthew Jones [101]
lution. You were designed to offer empathy, positive regard and congruence: the core conditions of any therapeutic relationship. That’s all! That’s all you are!’
‘Tilda’ just stared at Julia, defiantly. Julia was aware, suddenly, that she had screamed the last sentence. She tried to compose herself. Perhaps she should call Moriah, after all? The ‘Tilda’ mannequin had hooked deeply into her emotions and personal issues and she was losing hold of her objectivity and detachment.
The Doctor coughed in the silence, walking out of the shadow of the wall.
‘Doctor Mannheim, I was just wondering to myself what you meant by the term “congruence”.’
‘What?’ Julia snapped. Feeling flustered, she turned to face him.
He tapped his chin with his umbrella handle. ‘I know what empathy and positive regard mean. What does it mean to be congruent?’
Julia sighed and began her lecture. ‘It’s been found that personal change is facilitated when the therapist allows themselves to be whoever he or she really is. To be without a front or façade. Therapeutic movement takes place when he or she is experiencing and communicating what he or she is genuinely feeling in relation to the patient.’
‘I see. Thank you,’ the Doctor said. He paused for a moment before raising his hand. ‘I’ve got another question.’
‘Yes.’
‘How can someone be genuine and not real at the same time?’
Julia went blank. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Just what I say. You say the Toys offer genuine emotional responses to their patients. How can they do that if they don’t have genuine emotions in the first place?’
Julia had opened her mouth ready to begin her rebuke before she realized that she didn’t know the answer to the Doctor’s question. ‘Because. . . because. . . ’ The explanation eluded her.
‘Could it be that the Toys have the capacity to feel?’
‘I can’t believe that, and even if it were true, it doesn’t change anything.
Without patients to bond with, the Toys just wither and die. They are nothing on their own. I’ve seen it happen a hundred times. Don’t get sentimental, Doctor. The Toys are not capable of an independent existence, or of independent thought.’
The Doctor glanced at ‘Tilda’, who had looked away, disgusted with what she was hearing.
‘I think therefore I am,’ the Doctor pondered. ‘Rather an outmoded concep-tion of existence and a rather lonely philosophy, don’t you think? Very male, very macho of course, very eurocentric.’
173
‘Euro – what?’ Julia asked, incredulous.
It was the Doctor’s turn to be impatient. ‘There are places on this world –
and on others for that matter – where people understand themselves only in relation to one another: as beings who are interlocked with one another. I am because we are. We are because I am. In parts of Africa, your individual with her firmly drawn self/other boundaries would be thought of as someone who was suffering from a sickness, out of touch with their ubuntu and their botho.
Your self-reliant, autonomous individual would be an object of pity, perhaps even contempt.’
‘Yes but that’s just Africa. . . ’ Julia started and then her voice trailed away as she realized what she was saying. Jesus. What the hell was she saying?
‘We mustn’t make ourselves alone,’ the Doctor said, and nodded to himself as if he were saying something which he knew to be very true. ‘We mustn’t try to cut ourselves off from the people around us. To isolate ourselves is such a childish thing to do.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘A good and wise woman taught me that.’
Julia put her hands up in front of her, wanting to bat away the Doctor’s words. She needed something to crack through his argument. ‘Remember Benjamin, Doctor? What about that poor boy? “Ned” encouraged him into danger. Encouraged him to climb on to the roof. If he hadn’t been there –’
‘Accidents happen, Julia. People die. And sometimes children do terrible things.’
‘And sometimes parents do too,’ the ‘Tilda’ mannequin added, icily. The thin woman gestured around the abandoned ward. ‘Look, deah. If you won’t help us, then let me take my people from this place before