I propose to develop a counseling case study as seen in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. This will include clinical teaching material taken from the book to develop core psychotherapy skills for beginning counseling students. It will include mindfulness and its role in the healing process, creating hope, and congruence. Stream of consciousness is a major technique in helping students and patients to become aware of basic fundamental issues in the psychotherapeutic counseling sessions. This psychotherapeutic technique may be usefully compared to Joyce’s development of the quintessentially modernist compositional technique of stream of consciousness, whose articulation in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will be shown to similarly facilitate a life of authentic existence.

This will be an examination of how A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man can be used as a resource in the counseling hour as a therapeutic tool. I will read Stephen’s “case history” as the story of Stephen’s development in counseling. The novel takes Stephen Dedalus from the beginnings of childhood to his early youth and the beginnings of individuation. We see him moving from the early stages of Eriksonian developmental work to the higher levels of moral and spiritual growth, as seen in the works of developmental psychologists, Lawrence Kohlberg and James Fowler, which I will discuss later in the paper. The uniqueness of Joyce brings a portrait of a “clodhopper” to an understanding of Aquinas’s motif on art and beauty: “three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony, and radiance” (229). Therapy is an inward journey of the spirit and the mind that parallels the changes undergone in Stephen both geographical and mental. As Seamus Deane comments, “Our sense of Dublin as a place is to a large degree found by the variety of journeys he [Stephen] undertakes from ever-shifting abodes of the downward-spiraling Dedalus family.”(1)

We see in this spiral downward a picture of a dysfunctional family attempting to maintain its place in society while its son, Stephen, struggles with his place and role in society. Thus, Stephen, through his inner voice, stream of consciousness, gives voice to the inner-most thoughts of his heart, soul, and mind. We see a fine example of this early in the novel, when Stephen ruminates on the word “suck”: “His father pulled the stopper up by the chain after and the dirty water went down through the hole in the basin…there were two cocks that you turned and water came out: cold and hot… he felt cold and then a little hot.”(2) Stephen feels used, wasted, and washed away, “sucked down” the drain of life.– This passage reminds one of Lewis Carroll’s Alice sucked down the rabbit hole into a new and changed life: “‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar. This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’”(3)

This is a picture of the internal conflicts, anxieties, and fears of the counselee coming into therapy not knowing what to expect in the process. In Jungian terms, archetypes of the collective unconscious, the animus and anima, are in conflict, and this conflict later plays out in Stephen’s agonizing between pursuing the profession of priest or of artist. On the one hand, Stephen debates accepting traditional values. On the other, he struggles with developing his individual artistic mindfulness: the inner awareness of the soul, the inner male and female seeking wholeness, fulfillment, and transfiguration. In this sense, Dumas’s Mercedes, a literary figure internalized by Stephen, is legible as the archetypal anima: “They would meet quietly as if they had known each other and had made their tryst, perhaps at one of the gates or in some more secret place. They would be alone, surrounded by darkness and silence: and in that moment of supreme tenderness he would be transfigured. He would fade into something impalpable under her eyes and then in a moment, he would be transfigured.”(4) – Stephen stages the drama of his psychical struggle in textual terms, and through authoring this new fantasmatic text, Stephen tries to attain his “transfiguration” as a new or changed individual. He searches for a new way of thinking, perceiving life in more hopeful, helpful, positive manner. This leads to congruence, a state of psychological wellbeing, or as the narrator claims, “Weakness, timidity, and inexperience would fall from him in that magic moment.”(5)

The transfiguration that Stephen seeks is the Aha-Erlebnis that comes with the insight of the counseling session. In Protestant religious faith, it is seen as the conversion experience:

He began to taste the joy of his loneliness. The mirth, which in the beginning of the evening has seemed to him false and trivial, was like a soothing air to him, passing gaily by his senses, hiding from other eyes the feverish agitation of his blood while through the circling of the dancers and amid the music and laughter her glance travelled to his corner, flattering, taunting, searching, exciting his heart.(6)

This joy of the moment, with its sense of Maslow’s Peak Experience, comes down to the afterglow of “what have I done?”(7) Abraham Maslow, the founding father of Humanistic psychology, develops a theory of the pyramid of psychological needs for human growth and behavior. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are the “peak experiences” of self-actualization, which are transcendent and experiential. One often feels empty after the delirium of the peak experience, just as Stephen, after experiencing the euphoria of his first forays in the expression of corporeal sexuality with the prostitutes of Dublin’s Nighttown, quite suddenly finds himself depressingly mortal. Stephen “knew that he stood in danger of eternal damnation….the fountains of sanctifying grace having ceased to refresh his soul…while he knew that he stood in danger of internal damnation for by the first sin alone, by every succeeding sin, he multiplied his guilt and punishment.”(8).

We find Stephen developing ethically, a process that we might chart in terms of Lawrence Kohlberg’s stages in the development of moral judgment. Stephen is in level II conventional/role conformity.(9) Stephen is conflicted about his attempt to please those in authority by doing his duty in the maintenance of the social order. This is seen in his mindfulness, whichis calm awareness, being present to one’s body, mind, emotions, and what is taking place in the moment one is currently, presently experiencing. “…to make what our holy founder calls in his book of spiritual exercises, the composition of place.” Stephen goes on to discuss “two different forms of punishment, physical and spiritual.”(10) The “spiritual pains” are magnified in great detail by St. Thomas of Aquinas, “the angelic doctor” (the counselor/therapist). These are compounded by the damnation of the souls in hell by the “pains of conscience.” This is Erikson’s fifth stage of “Identity vs. Role confusion,” “Who am I?, How do I fit in?, Where am I going in life?”(11)

In Swiss epistemologist Jean Piaget’s terms, Stephen is beginning to assimilate and accommodate society, church, and family into a cohesive philosophical schema of viewing his adolescent life.(12) In James Fowler’s spiritual developmental schema, Stephen is moving from synthetic conventional thinking (stage three) to early adult, individuative and reflective thinking (stage four).(13) He begins taking personal responsibility for his beliefs and feelings. This is major step in the counseling process. The changes in moving from youth to adulthood mimic stages in a counselee’s progress toward self-knowledge.

Stephen is beginning to differentiate between mortal and venial sins, and he begins to recognize the pain of making choices. These choices involve self-inflicted denial in an attempt to reconcile his faith with his growing questions about God, the church, and family. “He beat his breast… love your neighbor…it was easy to be good”;(14) ”The muddy streets were gay…God had pardoned him”(15)

In chapter four, we see Stephen growing in the concept of inner consciousness, or mindfulness: “Life became a divine gift for every moment and sensation of which were it even the sight of a single leaf hanging on a twig of a tree, his soul should praise and thank the Giver.”(16) “I have amended my life, have I not? He asked himself.”(17)

In the midst of his newly recovered belief in God, we find a Garden of Eden experience with the Serpent, the tempter, in the form of a priest: “I sent for you today, Stephen, because I wished to speak to you on a very important subject…Have you ever felt that you have a vocation?... I have sometimes thought of it, said Stephen…. Perhaps you are the boy in this college whom God designs to call to Himself.”(18)

We begin to see Stephen seriously considering the question of becoming a priest, with the power, the prestige, that attends this position in a country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church and its clergy. Note that in Gnostic tradition, the serpent is the bearer of Sophia—wisdom and knowledge—not the bearer of evil or sin. Thus the director of the college intimates to Stephen that as a priest, “[h]e would know obscure things, hidden from others.”(19) This is an example of the therapeutic hour, the client/patient relationship with the therapist, looking deep with in the counselee’s psychic /soul. We see the crossroads emerging: Stephen’s destiny, following his Garden of Eden experience, was to be “to learn his own wisdom… apart from others or to learn the wisdom of others himself wandering among the snares of the world.”(20)

In wandering among men Stephen is attempting to show his independence and his need to be free from his “Perceived Reality,” as Alfred Adler puts it, and his perception of Ireland as “a nation of clodhoppers.”(21) In so doing Stephen sets out in the hope that his choice will be fruitful and rewarding:

In the broken lines of Virgil… yet the hope of better things… (to come)…. has led him to escape by an unseen path and now it beckoned to him once more and a new adventure was about to be opened to him. It seemed to him that he heard notes of fitful music leaping upwards a tone and downwards a diminished fourth…like triplebranching flames leaping fitfully, flame after flame, out of a midnight wood. It was an elfin prelude, endless and formless; and, as it grew wilder and faster, the flames leaping out of time, he seemed to hear the boughs under the boughs and grasses wild creatures racing, their feet pattering like rain upon the leaves.(22)

In this passage we see the excitement that comes from a “fruitful,” revelatory counseling session. This opens up a new, magical world of insights, growth, mindfulness: a new narrative, a new story, with a fresh new ending.

Hence we detect in Stephen’s character the beginnings of maturity, a lessening of the narcissism of youth. “Idle and embittering, finally, to argue, against his own dispassionate certitude… to love our neighbor as ourselves…His soul has arisen from the grave of his boyhood.”(23) “There was a lust of wandering in his feet that burned to set out for the ends of the earth.”(24)

In chapter five we come to the closure of the therapeutic process. As part of the final days of his school work, the dean begins by asking Stephen questions for the road, his journey in life. He begins by asking, “You are an artist, are you not, Mr. Dedalus?”(25) The dean then describes what he understands to be the artist’s aim and burden: “The object of the artist is the creation of the beautiful.… What the beautiful is is another question…to distinguish between moral beauty and material beauty….Per aspera ad astra.”(26)

The therapist, like the dean, understands that even with all the gains that have been made in the psychotherapeutic sessions, the real work is ahead of Stephen when he no longer has the dean/therapist to lean on. We see the realization when Stephen states: “The soul is born [in therapy]…in those first few moments.…You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”(27) Good counsel, good analysis transcends nation, gender, religion, or language. Counseling opens windows to the world at large. It embraces an egalitarian, ecumenical, global citizenship in which every man or woman is my brother or sister united against the sufferings of the world. As Stephen explains, “Pity [empathy] is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror (fear) is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”(28)

The counselee and the therapist move beyond pity/empathy, terror/fear to the heart of the counseling process. This is where the body of life changing “work” takes place, where the heart of the inner soul becomes fulfilled, understood, and experiences rebirth. Stephen gives us a definition of the soul united in beauty as seen in art. Therapy and the therapeutic process is as much about art as it is techniques and theories. The splendor, the grandness of the art of psychotherapy is seen in the personification of truth as perceived by the client and therapist working together in harmony. It is the harmony of fellow travelers on a journey that will leave both individuals changed. As Stephen puts it,

Truth is beheld by the intellect which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the intelligible: beauty is beheld by the imagination which is appeased by the most satisfying relations of the sensible. The first step in the direction of beauty is to understand the frame and scope of the imagination, to comprehend the act of aesthetic apprehension.(29)

In the end we return to the beginning, the labyrinth of a young man seeking to discover his true essence of being, seeking to discover his role in life. One begins the counseling process with a presenting problem, a chief complaint:

The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended (discovered)… You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas… that is consonantia… the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol…. The claritas is the artistic (therapeutic/spiritual) discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything … a synthesis (of the whole)… is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state [of mindfulness].(30)

The therapist is not unlike “the artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.…Well? Stephen said. Do you remember the rest?—what you said, is it? Cranly asked. Yes I remember it. To discover the mode of life or of art (therapy) whereby your spirit could express itself in unfettered freedom.”(31)

In conclusion, we see evidence of the influences of psychotherapeutic techniques in post modern therapy. Motivational interviewing that supports the self-efficacy of the client discovering his or her hidden strengths and using them to build a successful life—a new narrative, a new story, a new way to look at life with all of its hidden possibilities and truths to be explored. A new narrative provides a primary focus on the logos, the word, focused on the freedom to find the ultimate meaning in life. Psychotherapy gives individuals the opportunity to achieve peak experiences, individuation, self-actualization, and self-realization. It gives hope and the opportunity to live a life of congruence, psychological well being. Or in the words of St. Thomas of Aquinas, a life of “wholeness, harmony, and radiance.”