The King’s Speech

I have seen this great movie today. A very well composed film with interesting historical insights into the life of the Royal family of the United Kingdom.  From a historical point of view I start to understand why the Brits are so committed to their Kings and Queens. They are really symbols for them representing the unity of their nation. This year the grandchild of the Queen will get married and from my culture it was not really clear why is that so important, why is that the biggest news of the year as the Royal family plays only a very particular role in the politics of the UK. I thought it was only a commercialized celeb hype but from this movie I got an impression that somehow these people are deeply connected with the culture of that country representing something continuous and something common for every single soul living in the Kingdom.

The real reason I am writing this post is about the speech therapy-line in the movie. In fact this is the main theme and I found the film very professional to describe one of the main element of every kind of therapy which is so often forgotten by professionals. And this is something that the literature of psychotherapy calls RAPPORT.

Quite a stupid word indeed, they might replace it simply with the world relationship but I agree that it is something more complex.

Wikipedia says the following about rapport:

Rapport is one of the most important features or characteristics of subconscious communication. It is commonality of perspective: being “in sync” with, or being “on the same wavelength” as the person with whom you are talking.

From this description its visible that rapport is not something difficult. I guess everybody knows the situation when you feel being in sync with someone else, that you are on the same wavelength. Every friendship, relationship or even good working teams are based on these feelings.  And it is also obvious that without this mutual feeling almost nothing can happen between two human beings. At least nothing positive, building, creative…

It is easy to speak about it but it is hard to establish it, and especially harder to keep establishing it with anyone, anyhow, anywhere.

I guess the good relationship between Lionel Logue and Prince Albert was not based on the professional skills of Logue but the combination of their personalities allowed an atmosphere that has established the feeling of rapport. The hypocrisy of the helping professionals is that they create technics and methods to be able to establish this rapport, their trainers usually promise that they will be good professionals if they learn these practices and they really believe that all they have to do is to implement these strategies and that will be a guarantee for their success.

However, I believe that there are no technics only meetings, or with a more descriptive English word: only encounters. Technics are degrading. It means I am able to do something on you, only by using some tricks that I have learned.  For real encounters, two is needed. It’s the dynamic of minimum two persons and spite of any schools and degrees there is no guarantee.

Not Logue was such a genius to manage to help Albert to combat with his speech disorder. Their encounter was fruitful enough to establish an inspiring and encouraging atmosphere. The movie shows somehow the little moments of these encounters and that made the movie so great.