Philosophy
Against psychotherapy...
29/07/08 14:01 Filed in: Psychotherapy
I wanted to say a few words about questions that I am asked all the time about psychotherapy.
First, I am not a therapist. It’s not what I do for work nor would I wish it to be. I have worked in mental health and I hold a recognised qualification in analytical psychology. I have in the past spent brief periods doing relationship and marriage counselling. I chose not to work as a therapist.
I have been asked if “I believe” in psychotherapy. My answer is that I don’t, which is not the same as saying that I do not approve of therapists or necessarily, disapprove of their work.
I believe that therapists face terrible and enormous pressures in their work resulting from our social, political and economic failures. Many work hard and receive little or no credit for all that they do. The problems that they face frequently come from areas they cannot possibly address.
What I dislike most about psychotherapy is that it turns all the problems in on the individual. You are the one that is wrong. It can also produce a victim culture, one where if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those causes when my life goes wrong. I believe that we are all more than the products of our past.
I’ve been writing this blog in various forms for many months now. I have joined blog social networks, like blog catalog. I have made a few friends there too! But it gave me the opportunity to see a new world full of different types of therapist.
In correspondence with a friend here, we talked about “quick fix” merchants. Quick fix merchants reflect our culture, where we treat ourselves like we treat our cars. We take our cars to the garage and we want to know ‘what’s wrong with it, how much will it cost and how long will it take?’
On the internet, these people are everywhere. They promise health, seven steps to success, happiness and self-esteem, sometimes for prices as low as $29.99!
They are generally American and perhaps they are part of the cultural tradition of that country, where snake oil salesmen and travelling circus quacks originated.
There are far worse examples on the net, and they are often called “Doctor”. They promote psychological dependency and “appropriate” medication with an enthusiasm that I might reserve for a good night out. I find those the most terrifying of all.
It’s something about our state of mind and our culture. People feel bored, alienated and sick at heart. They feel like life has lost its purpose. So they are fast to jump at all these quick fixes.
Psychology has tried to gain respectability in the medical world by resorting to scientism. I do not believe all aspects of our lives are accessible to science, nor would I trust science to tell me how I should feel, believe or experience the world.
Perhaps I should say more about economics. I have skirted around any direct comment on economics before, but it dominates our thinking and our way of life. Its maxim is ‘More, more, more!” It’s nothing less than a slave driver. No one has free time, no one has leisure, no one has time to feel or think; we don’t have time to live anymore. Our very existence is under pressure and it’s fraught with anxiety.
In my post here, Beyond Psychology, I was grappling with my own uncertainty. I still am. I talked about a new philosophy. Perhaps I might have talked about a therapy of ideas that would have been equally valid. But I’m not sure of either expression. I’m concerned about a world dominated by intellect, where feelings, emotions and creativity are subjugated by thought, especially scientific thought. I question to what extent economic man is also one-dimensional intellectual man.
There’s something else I want to say before concluding about psychotherapy and good psychotherapists. It’s something I struggled with when I thought I might become a therapist. Psychotherapists may fill a gap in our lonely and alienated lives that I feel may be better attended by lovers and close friends with whom we can talk and share intimate understanding. I suspect that the best psychotherapists are little more than paid surrogate friends and lovers. There are profound complications in the psychotherapeutic relationship when the psychotherapist assumes the role of a lover. He or she is treading on very dangerous ground.
In summary, I am against psychotherapy. It is being held accountable for that which it cannot possibly apprehend. Further, it individualises many problems that are the product of our society. It makes every problem, an inner problem and that’s not where problems come from. They come from a world which we have created, and which we can choose to change.
A footnote about suffering
None of what I have written is intended to deny the reality of psychological suffering. It is very real and very painful. Sometimes a therapist or medicine may help in the remediation of this suffering…that I do not deny.
My experience, however, is that ultimately the sufferer who recovers, recovers more as a result of their own courage and determination, than the application of therapy or the use of medication.
The best therapists, in my opinion, are those who enable sufferers to find answers within themselves, which will necessarily entail looking beyond themselves, and beyond their personal histories for the source of their difficulties.
First, I am not a therapist. It’s not what I do for work nor would I wish it to be. I have worked in mental health and I hold a recognised qualification in analytical psychology. I have in the past spent brief periods doing relationship and marriage counselling. I chose not to work as a therapist.
I have been asked if “I believe” in psychotherapy. My answer is that I don’t, which is not the same as saying that I do not approve of therapists or necessarily, disapprove of their work.
I believe that therapists face terrible and enormous pressures in their work resulting from our social, political and economic failures. Many work hard and receive little or no credit for all that they do. The problems that they face frequently come from areas they cannot possibly address.
What I dislike most about psychotherapy is that it turns all the problems in on the individual. You are the one that is wrong. It can also produce a victim culture, one where if I’m only a result of past causes, then I’m a victim of those causes when my life goes wrong. I believe that we are all more than the products of our past.
I’ve been writing this blog in various forms for many months now. I have joined blog social networks, like blog catalog. I have made a few friends there too! But it gave me the opportunity to see a new world full of different types of therapist.
In correspondence with a friend here, we talked about “quick fix” merchants. Quick fix merchants reflect our culture, where we treat ourselves like we treat our cars. We take our cars to the garage and we want to know ‘what’s wrong with it, how much will it cost and how long will it take?’
On the internet, these people are everywhere. They promise health, seven steps to success, happiness and self-esteem, sometimes for prices as low as $29.99!
They are generally American and perhaps they are part of the cultural tradition of that country, where snake oil salesmen and travelling circus quacks originated.
There are far worse examples on the net, and they are often called “Doctor”. They promote psychological dependency and “appropriate” medication with an enthusiasm that I might reserve for a good night out. I find those the most terrifying of all.
It’s something about our state of mind and our culture. People feel bored, alienated and sick at heart. They feel like life has lost its purpose. So they are fast to jump at all these quick fixes.
Psychology has tried to gain respectability in the medical world by resorting to scientism. I do not believe all aspects of our lives are accessible to science, nor would I trust science to tell me how I should feel, believe or experience the world.
Perhaps I should say more about economics. I have skirted around any direct comment on economics before, but it dominates our thinking and our way of life. Its maxim is ‘More, more, more!” It’s nothing less than a slave driver. No one has free time, no one has leisure, no one has time to feel or think; we don’t have time to live anymore. Our very existence is under pressure and it’s fraught with anxiety.
In my post here, Beyond Psychology, I was grappling with my own uncertainty. I still am. I talked about a new philosophy. Perhaps I might have talked about a therapy of ideas that would have been equally valid. But I’m not sure of either expression. I’m concerned about a world dominated by intellect, where feelings, emotions and creativity are subjugated by thought, especially scientific thought. I question to what extent economic man is also one-dimensional intellectual man.
There’s something else I want to say before concluding about psychotherapy and good psychotherapists. It’s something I struggled with when I thought I might become a therapist. Psychotherapists may fill a gap in our lonely and alienated lives that I feel may be better attended by lovers and close friends with whom we can talk and share intimate understanding. I suspect that the best psychotherapists are little more than paid surrogate friends and lovers. There are profound complications in the psychotherapeutic relationship when the psychotherapist assumes the role of a lover. He or she is treading on very dangerous ground.
In summary, I am against psychotherapy. It is being held accountable for that which it cannot possibly apprehend. Further, it individualises many problems that are the product of our society. It makes every problem, an inner problem and that’s not where problems come from. They come from a world which we have created, and which we can choose to change.
A footnote about suffering
None of what I have written is intended to deny the reality of psychological suffering. It is very real and very painful. Sometimes a therapist or medicine may help in the remediation of this suffering…that I do not deny.
My experience, however, is that ultimately the sufferer who recovers, recovers more as a result of their own courage and determination, than the application of therapy or the use of medication.
The best therapists, in my opinion, are those who enable sufferers to find answers within themselves, which will necessarily entail looking beyond themselves, and beyond their personal histories for the source of their difficulties.
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Tell me a story! - Part 1
28/07/08 00:36 Filed in: Beyond Psychology | Healing stories
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with stories for as long as I can remember. As soon as I was old enough to read books, I devoured them. I had my first library ticket when I was about six years old.
But this is not about the confessions of a bibliophile, even though I am one. I had this metaphor in my mind tonight of how I would like to take all of my writing here on psychology and put it in a food mixer in the hope that the blending process would turn it into some coherent and cogent whole. Needless to say, I teased myself with thoughts of making a psychology pudding! ‘How many calories would that be?’ I wondered. ‘Too many,' I expect.
For those of you who have not caught the plot so far, I have rejected the duality of objectivity and subjectivity in human understanding in favour of a model of intra-personal and inter-personal (social) constructs that I have described as “consciousness”. This is both an individual and collective consciousness that upholds all of our beliefs in the world including those about science, that change through time in relation to our historical circumstances. I cannot posit any causal or relational ideas about the development of mankind. I also believe that doing so leads one to a form of philosophical circularity where one attempts to make sense of the world through the dominant ideas of the time that tend to be self-proving. If one looks through a green glass, one undoubtedly will see green. Similarly, if one examines social or historical developments through a specific branch of science, it will return a result that conforms to and validates that particular scientific approach within the limits of its understanding.
I have a real difficulty with the subject of history. I know people who love history. They can construe the entirety of our human development in terms of “great” men and women. I always have the same nagging question. I think, “Well, that’s interesting about that one individual, I suppose. But what were the millions of other people doing and thinking about at the time?” Our view of history in terms of the acts of “great” people may also be about an ideology that “great” people make history. As such, it is what we have chosen to believe.
It’s a story. It’s no better nor worse than a certain sort of journalism.
There are all sorts of stories: There are science stories that are forever changing, history stories told from the perspective of “great” individuals; there are political, moral, national, economic, war and religious stories too. But they are all stories, bodies of beliefs generally cast in terms of the consciousness of the time.
Understanding the nature of stories, that may underpin our consciousness in the world, has a personal dimension too.
We all have our personal stories, many of us may live them – sometimes over and over as repeated patterns of behaviour, some of us may believe them to be inevitable, others may regard them as pathology or science.
I believe them to be of our making. Also I feel that the only way to move beyond our current struggles in the world is to step back and examine the beliefs that underpin them, to listen to our story and decide if it’s the one we want.
At a personal level, I believe our stories are accessible to our understanding and capable of change too. Whatever others may tell us, we are capable of self-understanding and change.
But this is not about the confessions of a bibliophile, even though I am one. I had this metaphor in my mind tonight of how I would like to take all of my writing here on psychology and put it in a food mixer in the hope that the blending process would turn it into some coherent and cogent whole. Needless to say, I teased myself with thoughts of making a psychology pudding! ‘How many calories would that be?’ I wondered. ‘Too many,' I expect.
For those of you who have not caught the plot so far, I have rejected the duality of objectivity and subjectivity in human understanding in favour of a model of intra-personal and inter-personal (social) constructs that I have described as “consciousness”. This is both an individual and collective consciousness that upholds all of our beliefs in the world including those about science, that change through time in relation to our historical circumstances. I cannot posit any causal or relational ideas about the development of mankind. I also believe that doing so leads one to a form of philosophical circularity where one attempts to make sense of the world through the dominant ideas of the time that tend to be self-proving. If one looks through a green glass, one undoubtedly will see green. Similarly, if one examines social or historical developments through a specific branch of science, it will return a result that conforms to and validates that particular scientific approach within the limits of its understanding.
I have a real difficulty with the subject of history. I know people who love history. They can construe the entirety of our human development in terms of “great” men and women. I always have the same nagging question. I think, “Well, that’s interesting about that one individual, I suppose. But what were the millions of other people doing and thinking about at the time?” Our view of history in terms of the acts of “great” people may also be about an ideology that “great” people make history. As such, it is what we have chosen to believe.
It’s a story. It’s no better nor worse than a certain sort of journalism.
There are all sorts of stories: There are science stories that are forever changing, history stories told from the perspective of “great” individuals; there are political, moral, national, economic, war and religious stories too. But they are all stories, bodies of beliefs generally cast in terms of the consciousness of the time.
Understanding the nature of stories, that may underpin our consciousness in the world, has a personal dimension too.
We all have our personal stories, many of us may live them – sometimes over and over as repeated patterns of behaviour, some of us may believe them to be inevitable, others may regard them as pathology or science.
I believe them to be of our making. Also I feel that the only way to move beyond our current struggles in the world is to step back and examine the beliefs that underpin them, to listen to our story and decide if it’s the one we want.
At a personal level, I believe our stories are accessible to our understanding and capable of change too. Whatever others may tell us, we are capable of self-understanding and change.
New Horizons - Beyond Psychology
I’ve been delving into my psyche a little recently. It’s been a time of major adjustment for me of late. I’ve had the odd moments of uncertainty and doubt, but they have never persisted for that long. More often than not, those moments have been triggered by my past rather than my present. That happens too.
I wrote about synchronicity here a while ago. I still question synchronicity from time to time. I’m not sure I should since even in this time of change for me, wonderfully synchronous things happen all the time. The right person has that knack of turning up when I need them! Recently I’ve had the gift of another therapist talking to me from way across the pond. We’ve been chatting while I’ve been struggling through my bleaker moments. She has helped me no end in seeing that I struggle with those things that often she struggles with too, that my dilemmas not only relate to me, but that she has faced those same difficulties as well.
Last week we were talking about how we could describe a sense of our underlying connectedness, not only she and I, but all of us. I was grappling with that dimension of our lives in which synchronicity occurs.
I have been struggling with feelings and ideas about a new schematic for understanding how we exist in the world. Psychology spans only one dimension of our lives. It, along with all other single subject disciplines, fail to provide me with a framework through which I can make sense of our existence.
Suddenly I thought, “You’re not writing psychology at all, you’re writing philosophy with psychological overtones!” I love the idea of writing philosophy in a way, although I don’t like all philosophers. But hang on! I might be interested in a new humanistic active living philosophy, one that embraced the psyche too, of living, feeling and doing as well as simply thinking wise thoughts. The word philosophy is derived from the Greek “philo sophos” meaning a love of wisdom. I could buy into that, it might mean a whole body of beliefs that informed the way we are and acted in the world. Yes, I’ll take several large portions of that, please!
Somewhere deep down, I have a natural aversion to philosophy, all that old sterile hogwash about epistemology and ontology, of Popper versus Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kant. Who cares? But it does more readily lend itself to the overall consideration of the human condition.
So I started to ponder how one might set about approaching how we understand our lives.
I wrote to my friend, “I believe we might exist in three or four dimensions: Intellect or mind, intuition and emotions, a consciousness which is the body of "beliefs" (of which rational science is part) that upholds our way of living in the world that is infinitely changeable, and our universal interaction with nature of which our physical being is part. If I was a quantum physicist I might express all of these phenomena as variables that we might variously create, change or experience as different realities. If I were a quantum physicist and a metaphysicist, I would see all of these aspects of our being as being unified in some structural and spiritual way. I probably believe that too, but, as yet, I cannot explain it.
All that intuition is, is our own personal sense of knowing. I believe that we know or can know far more than we are frequently aware. Also I believe that most of us are more unconscious than conscious, that is to say, we are more influenced by our unconscious minds in seeing our personal reality as something that exists outside ourselves. There are all manner of things that emerge from the unconscious that I simply cannot explain...like those we are attracted to…”
She wrote back to me, “I also believe that there is another realm of awareness...that which I refer to (as many do) as universal consciousness. Is this what you mean by nature and environment? I am asking, because sometimes we connect in same thought-patterns with others that may live across the world...and, it can happen quite unexpectedly, and with very little prelude.”
She and me might be the perfect examples of what she is speaking about!
The “universal consciousness” idea worries me too.
I replied, “I wondered about the notion of our universal connectedness and where it fitted in or even what it was.
I'm not even sure I believe in it outside our physical being... I am a little concerned about creating a new metaphysical reality that may become to be regarded as god. But I do think there may be more...perhaps we need to fully comprehend our own consciousness first.
I'm reluctant to fall into the realms that may be construed as religious or other worldly and I'm very nervous of this whole phenomenon which has been the springboard everywhere for religions, cults and that which cannot be comprehended. Love to know your feelings here.
That was a big "Don’t know”. “
We share our concerns. Her reply was “I don't know either. There is something I cannot explain, but I have no idea. I do understand the concern you state about religion. It concerns me as well.”
I’m stuck at this juncture. I’ll have to ponder more on this point. I keep dipping in and out of the physical sciences to try and formulate an understanding of what this phenomenon might be. But I don’t want to go there, since inevitably that will take me towards the dogma of rational science, systems theory and mathematics. It’s not that I am opposed to rational science, but that it too is simply one part of our predominantly western collective consciousness. It too is a manufactured body of knowledge that changes in accordance with the beliefs within scientific communities, and our experience of being in the world.
Rather than imbue nature with some metaphysical quality. Perhaps I shall locate this phenomenon within consciousness, as a dimension of consciousness we have yet to understand.
I’ll finish with a few words about consciousness that I wrote in my farrago blog (Back to the Future - Part 2, Tag - "Future") last year, when I decided to revisit this subject:
“It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may overturn, or embrace one or the other, or synthesise them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.”
Special acknowledgement
A million thanks to my good friend, Tamera Daun, for her enormous help and wisdom in considering what I have written about here, and for her permission to convey parts of our conversations in this post.
Footnote
Last night, when I sat down to write this I had intended to write a piece about self-esteem! I have been thinking about that too of late. This piece flowed out and was almost written by an accident I can’t explain.
I wrote about synchronicity here a while ago. I still question synchronicity from time to time. I’m not sure I should since even in this time of change for me, wonderfully synchronous things happen all the time. The right person has that knack of turning up when I need them! Recently I’ve had the gift of another therapist talking to me from way across the pond. We’ve been chatting while I’ve been struggling through my bleaker moments. She has helped me no end in seeing that I struggle with those things that often she struggles with too, that my dilemmas not only relate to me, but that she has faced those same difficulties as well.
Last week we were talking about how we could describe a sense of our underlying connectedness, not only she and I, but all of us. I was grappling with that dimension of our lives in which synchronicity occurs.
I have been struggling with feelings and ideas about a new schematic for understanding how we exist in the world. Psychology spans only one dimension of our lives. It, along with all other single subject disciplines, fail to provide me with a framework through which I can make sense of our existence.
Suddenly I thought, “You’re not writing psychology at all, you’re writing philosophy with psychological overtones!” I love the idea of writing philosophy in a way, although I don’t like all philosophers. But hang on! I might be interested in a new humanistic active living philosophy, one that embraced the psyche too, of living, feeling and doing as well as simply thinking wise thoughts. The word philosophy is derived from the Greek “philo sophos” meaning a love of wisdom. I could buy into that, it might mean a whole body of beliefs that informed the way we are and acted in the world. Yes, I’ll take several large portions of that, please!
Somewhere deep down, I have a natural aversion to philosophy, all that old sterile hogwash about epistemology and ontology, of Popper versus Marx, Wittgenstein, Heidegger and Kant. Who cares? But it does more readily lend itself to the overall consideration of the human condition.
So I started to ponder how one might set about approaching how we understand our lives.
I wrote to my friend, “I believe we might exist in three or four dimensions: Intellect or mind, intuition and emotions, a consciousness which is the body of "beliefs" (of which rational science is part) that upholds our way of living in the world that is infinitely changeable, and our universal interaction with nature of which our physical being is part. If I was a quantum physicist I might express all of these phenomena as variables that we might variously create, change or experience as different realities. If I were a quantum physicist and a metaphysicist, I would see all of these aspects of our being as being unified in some structural and spiritual way. I probably believe that too, but, as yet, I cannot explain it.
All that intuition is, is our own personal sense of knowing. I believe that we know or can know far more than we are frequently aware. Also I believe that most of us are more unconscious than conscious, that is to say, we are more influenced by our unconscious minds in seeing our personal reality as something that exists outside ourselves. There are all manner of things that emerge from the unconscious that I simply cannot explain...like those we are attracted to…”
She wrote back to me, “I also believe that there is another realm of awareness...that which I refer to (as many do) as universal consciousness. Is this what you mean by nature and environment? I am asking, because sometimes we connect in same thought-patterns with others that may live across the world...and, it can happen quite unexpectedly, and with very little prelude.”
She and me might be the perfect examples of what she is speaking about!
The “universal consciousness” idea worries me too.
I replied, “I wondered about the notion of our universal connectedness and where it fitted in or even what it was.
I'm not even sure I believe in it outside our physical being... I am a little concerned about creating a new metaphysical reality that may become to be regarded as god. But I do think there may be more...perhaps we need to fully comprehend our own consciousness first.
I'm reluctant to fall into the realms that may be construed as religious or other worldly and I'm very nervous of this whole phenomenon which has been the springboard everywhere for religions, cults and that which cannot be comprehended. Love to know your feelings here.
That was a big "Don’t know”. “
We share our concerns. Her reply was “I don't know either. There is something I cannot explain, but I have no idea. I do understand the concern you state about religion. It concerns me as well.”
I’m stuck at this juncture. I’ll have to ponder more on this point. I keep dipping in and out of the physical sciences to try and formulate an understanding of what this phenomenon might be. But I don’t want to go there, since inevitably that will take me towards the dogma of rational science, systems theory and mathematics. It’s not that I am opposed to rational science, but that it too is simply one part of our predominantly western collective consciousness. It too is a manufactured body of knowledge that changes in accordance with the beliefs within scientific communities, and our experience of being in the world.
Rather than imbue nature with some metaphysical quality. Perhaps I shall locate this phenomenon within consciousness, as a dimension of consciousness we have yet to understand.
I’ll finish with a few words about consciousness that I wrote in my farrago blog (Back to the Future - Part 2, Tag - "Future") last year, when I decided to revisit this subject:
“It is shifts in consciousness, not technology, consumption, money markets or any aspect of our physical environment or social, political and economic systems that causes change. Back in 1962, when Kuhn wrote about "paradigm shifts", he talked about scientific revolutions occurring when a body of beliefs, what we are calling consciousness, could no longer uphold the reality they created.
There are conflicting realities in science too that co-exist, and one may overturn, or embrace one or the other, or synthesise them in a new form of consciousness.
It is consciousness that governs our perceptions of the world that in turn creates our realities. How and what we perceive is our reality, to that extent a philosopher might say that truth is relative. I am not that sure that discussions of absolute or relative truth are that helpful in a world that is governed by consciousness and our perceptions of that world.”
Special acknowledgement
A million thanks to my good friend, Tamera Daun, for her enormous help and wisdom in considering what I have written about here, and for her permission to convey parts of our conversations in this post.
Footnote
Last night, when I sat down to write this I had intended to write a piece about self-esteem! I have been thinking about that too of late. This piece flowed out and was almost written by an accident I can’t explain.