One-Up and One-Down: The Art of Relationships
Drawing from Haley’s framework of relationships, in a radio talk from the 1960s, Alan Watts explains that in a therapist-patient relationship, as well as in most normal life relationships, there is typically one person who is one-up and the other person who is one-down in any given situation.
Being one-up means that you have the upper hand in the relationship. Not in a manipulative manner. You have leverage, as they'd say in business. You are of higher status and every move you make is essential in maintaining your one-up position. That's very tough for the therapist, who is constantly challenged by the patient to be dethroned of his one-upmanship.
That's the fundamental process of psychotherapy, as Alan Watts (through Haley’s work) explains. It's a constant dance between the therapist and the patient. A dance between being one up and one down and being challenged in one's own position at any time. When you are one down, you may be aware of being one down and you want to be one up. You try to reach that position of psychological superiority, so to speak. But that position comes with responsibility and tough mental challenges.
This reminds me of high-status positions in the social hierarchy. When you have a leadership position, for example. You are the CEO of a billion-dollar company. Many people would like to be in your position, one-up. But not many people understand the implications of such a status. The struggles that come with it. The sleepless nights. The tough daily decisions to make. There are also very high rewards, certainly. But they don't come merely because of the one-up position. They come because being one up is high-risk, high-reward, and high responsibility.
The objective of a psychoanalytical relationship is for the patient to learn to be one up in life while being one down in his/her relationship with the psychotherapist. The patient desperately tries to put the analyst one down. The analyst keeps pushing the patient one down in order to teach him/her how to be one up.
According to Haley, patients will use clever and often subtle behaviors to put the analyst down during certain phases of the psychotherapeutic relationship. The job of the analyst is to constantly be receptive to those cues and remain impermanent before them.
The traditional setting of psychoanalysis is to have the patient lying on a bed, with the analyst sitting behind him/her. This has a symbolic meaning: the therapist has his/her feet on the floor, and the patient doesn’t. The patient can’t see the analyst, while the analyst can scrutinize the patient. Such a setting shapes the positions of one up and one down from the very beginning of the analyst-patient relationship. In addition, such a position emphasizes the importance of every word uttered by the analyst. The patient is highly dependent on the analyst’s words. By definition, this puts the patient “one down”.
The psychoanalytic environment is carefully designed to keep the analyst one up and the patient one down. The ultimate goal is that the patient will learn to be one up in their relationships with other people. Silence is one of the key indicators of one-upmanship. Those who are one up are comfortable with silence.
“Really” is a frequent and essential component of the therapist’s vocabulary. By often asking questions including “really”, the analyst implies that there are motives behind the patient’s words that transcend his/her conscious knowledge. That is part of being “one-up”.
“In his training, the young analyst learns the few rather simple rules that he must follow. The first is that it is essential to keep the patient feeling one-down while stirring him to struggle gamely in the hope that he can get one-up (this is called ‘transference’).”
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Resources
The Art of Psychoanalysis | PDF | Psychoanalysis | Jay Haley. (2022). Retrieved 28 April 2022, from https://www.scribd.com/document/251112878/The-Art-of-Psychoanalysis
(2022). Retrieved 26 April 2022, from http://web-facstaff.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Ogden_Art.pdf
Watzlawick's Five Axioms. (2022). Retrieved 28 April 2022, from http://www.wanterfall.com/Communication-Watzlawick's-Axioms.htm
Buddhism and the Art of Psychotherapy — Kawai, 1996
(2022). Retrieved 28 April 2022, from http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:231452/FULLTEXT01.pdf
