daniel ilan

It’s a cliche of therapy that patients are routinely asked: how does that make you feel? Or some other version of the same question people ask each other all the time: how are you?

There are good reasons for this.

For example, take a man who struggles to repair after disagreements with his partner. In therapy, exploring his feelings could reveal that he is afraid of giving in. Going deeper, these same feelings might reveal the influence of ideas he inherited about what it means to be a man, from a father who was emotionally distant, and whose own pain was buried in a false strength: the ability to be unemotional. So now this man must learn to give what he never received, or risk being left behind, just as he was.

Using feelings in this way would be interesting. But would it actually help?

Perhaps this is why “how does that make you feel?” has become a cliche. Beyond making for interesting interpretation and analysis, there is something superficial about the kind of help it offers. Sure, it provides context and history — but the context and history of a saxophone doesn’t make it easier to play.

To become therapeutic, there must be something else about the question, which goes beyond generating context and history, towards helping people play.

That something else is called the here-and-now. A concept with a long history in both existential philosophy and improvisational music making. The French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, called it le plan d’immanence, ‘the plane of immanence’, referring to Spinoza’s concept of immanence, which he developed to address the problem of locating God in the world.

Notwithstanding these lofty associations, the here-and-now includes two quite simple elements: here, as in place, and now, as in time. In other words, it is the present moment combined with all the material of the present moment. There is nothing in the here-and-now which exists outside of it, and everything that happens becomes part it, such that here-and-now is the ground of all possibility.

What does this have to do with therapy?

Well, in therapy, two people make a habit of returning, over and over, to that very same question people ask each other all the time. A question that can easily become a cliche; a lifeless copy, but it can also become a ground of possibility, the here-and-now, where both people can truly find out. They can become known, and free to choose their next note.

Not interpreted or analysed or diagnosed or treated, but known, as they are. Without running and hiding in old patterns of behaviour that belong to previous generations. And that — becoming known — is therapy.