Dr. Murray Newell Cox died 28 June 1997.
....I have met people who walk off the edge of language - and then they DO THINGS."
They point to the astonishing simplicity at the heart of Cox's practice: he listened, took patients at their word, and really noticed what they said - not just in words, but in emphasis, expression and gesture. Perhaps the most distinctive thing about him was his respect for the dignity of patients who had been doubly written off as "mad and bad". He risked disappointment again and again and had said once about his Broadmoor work:
"There is nobody I can't have hope about"...
If that was the simplicity, the complexity of what he brought to bear on his therapy was dazzling. He was superbly well-read in his own field and many others, had intensive friendships with a wide range of people, loved music, and was a Christian who knew much of the Bible by heart and had a profound, well- considered theology.
The most striking of his therapeutic resources was Shakespeare. Not that he just "used" Shakespeare. Rather he revelled in those dramas, knew large parts of them by heart, lectured on them and savoured their "paraclinical precision" about the sorts of extremes of evil, madness, horror and death with which he dealt daily. He was an honorary research fellow of The Shakespeare Institute in Birmingham University, and from 1989 an adviser to the Royal Shakespeare Company.
With the director Mark Rylance, he began an extraordinary tradition of having RSC productions performed in Broadmoor, and later edited Shake- speare Comes to Broadmoor (1992), describing the effects on patients, staff and actors...
Among the last things he wrote was an article called "A Good Enough God? Some Psychology-Theology Crossing Places", and when he died he was working on a collaborative book on "the secret self" in theology, psychology and psychotherapy.
"What seest thou else?" was a favourite quotation, and he excelled at seeing more, deeper, wider, from new angles...co-author of two books on therapy, Mutative Metaphors in Psychotherapy (1987) and Shakespeare as Prompter (1994)... ===============Thank you, Dr. Cox, for enriching my life when I was at my worst and lowest. May you rest in peace.
No comments:
Post a Comment