Two kinds of dead ends can happen in psychotherapy: The first occurs when the therapy consists only of interpretation and inference without an experiential process. The second dead end happens when there are quite concrete emotions, but they are repeated over and over. In this chapter I discuss these dead ends further. I call the first a dead-end discussion.

At a party you may see an attractive stranger on the other side of the room. You want to approach this person but find it impossibly difficult. If you do approach the person anyway your actions will be awkward and you will feel the lack of your usual abilities. You might think, "My superego is too strong. It still identifies with my father who prohibited my sexuality when I was small. Now that I am not small, my superego should stop identifying with his prohibition, but it doesn't" (Freudian vocabulary). Or you might say, "I am afraid of being rejected. It's just an old fear. If I am rejected, I will be no worse off than if I go home without trying! I ought to try" (common sense vocabulary). But using this vocabulary and this logic does not change anything because you are engaged in a deadend discussion. Your intellectual interpretation does not change your hesitation or awkwardness.

Therapists may draw people into dead-end discussions; we all do it at times. We may use Freudian theory to do it, or Jungian, cognitive, or any other theory, or just common sense. But a good therapist would not try to get a client merely to substitute a sophisticated psychological vocabulary for a commonsense one, if the words are the only difference. Seen in this way, no one would argue that [Page 8] the mere substitution of one ineffectual line of thought for another can constitute successful psychotherapy.

In our example a longer discussion might ensue in your mind, but it would still change nothing. For instance, is it your fault, your responsibility for your failure, or should you blame your parents? This is a very important question, but not one that would effect a change. Should you call it "cowardice" or a "dynamic" problem? Again, issues like these have great importance for how we view life, but in this case nothing would be changed by accepting either position. Should you adopt a sociological theory—the norm in your culture (or subcultural group) might be that one is not supposed to address strangers of the opposite sex, and that this is why it is hard for you? Perhaps this is a social norm that one is supposed to break, but it can be taught too well. Or should you say that your difficulty is a lack of "security," that your self-esteem would collapse if you got rejected? Any of these interpretations would probably leave you quite unchanged