THE WISDOM OF BEING
YOUR OWN PSYCHOLOGIST
James
R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
©
March 1, 2019
“We
have had the Esthetic Greek Man, the Pragmatic Roman Man, the Guilty Christian
Man, the Searching Scientific man.
Today’s model is the believer in the Unconscious, the Self-Conscious
Psychological Man.”
Martin
L. Gross, The
Psychological Society (1978)
A CLOSER LOOK AT THE PRACTITIONERS OF THIS AND RELATED ART FORMS
When I completed my
Ph.D. in social, organizational and industrial psychology, a colleague of mine,
a clinical psychologist, asked me to join her practice. “But I have no training as a clinician,” I
protested. She waved her hand
dismissively, “You’re a good listener.
That’s all it takes.”
I thought that somewhat
apocryphal until (over the years) I’ve learned more about psychotherapy and its
practitioners.
A former professor of
mine at the University of South Florida,
now emeritus, Dr. Billy G. Gunter, developed a theory he called “Ambient Deficiency Motivation.” Gunter claims
many of us are attracted, not to our strengths, but to our gnawing debilitating
weaknesses when it comes to career choices.
In Anne C. Heller’s
biography Ayn Rand, And the World She
Made (2009), we learn how this applies to the Russian American émigré who first
became a novelist, then philosopher, psychologist and economist of note.
Rand wrote two compelling
novels, The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957)). In the first, she argued the case for
unabashed individualism, and in the second, the enthralling wonders of
capitalism. From this, she developed a
systematic philosophy known as “Objectivism.”
Her defense of radical
individualism and of selfishness as a capitalistic virtue won her scores of
contemporary public champions. These
include: former SEC Chairman
Christopher Cox, Congressman Ron Paul
(the father of the current Kentucky US Senator
with the first name, Rand), the Libertarian founder John Hospers, The Wall Street Journal editorial writer
Stephen Moore, the economist Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve in the Reagan administration and Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers
in the Ford administration, and even the news commentator Chris Matthews of
MSNBC and CNN, and former chief aid to liberal Congressman and Speaker of the House, Tip O’Neil.
Ayn Rand’s ideas
dominated the political conversation in the 1950s through the 1970s. Born in 1905, before the First World War (1914-1918), she was an impressionistic youth
during the Russian Bolshevik Revolution (1917-1918). Once in the United States at the age of
twenty-five, however, she turned her fear and hatred of communism, and
everything Russian, into art.
More than one critic
has pointed out that the engine of Rand’s soul was fear not rationalism, the
absolute dictums of her Objectivist
philosophy, and an irrational escape from her roots. The irony is that the more she attempted to
put Russia behind her, the clearer the evidence she had never left. Ayn Rand,
incidentally, was an invented name.
Beware
of taking movers and shakers at face value, whatever their discipline, for
lurking behind that agenda and prominence likely on display are aspects of Dr.
Billy G. Gunter’s “Ambient Deficiency Motivation.”
Several prominent
notables in psychotherapy and behavioral therapy come to mind who have made an
imprint on our psychological society in this rather twisted context. To put this in perspective, during the confusing
days of the 1970s, when the Hippies and Yuppies were looking to avoid the Selective Service Draft and military
service in the Vietnam War, saviors
of the delicate American psyche were coming out of the woodwork.
There was “est” or Erhard Seminar Training, a “new age”
rage to justify puerile angst and petty rebellion. It took hold on the fad
conscious West Coast of the United States.
Through the mid-20th century, California proved a fertile
landscape for painless escape from pressing social and cultural stressors. Consistent with this ambience was the creator
of “est,” a man new to the locale with a new name and identity running free of
personal demands left behind.
He was born John Paul Rosenberg (1935), changed his
name to Werner Hans Erhard, leaving a
wife and four children behind in Ohio to give purpose and identity to hapless movie
stars, celebrities, drop outs, and the disgruntled who simply felt lost. The “est” craze flourished from 1971 to 1985
and then died without fanfare.
“Erik Erikson” was born
Erik Salomonsen (1902 – 1994) in
Germany. His name was changed officially
to Erik Homburger when his stepfather
adopted him in 1911. His name would be
changed again to Erik Erikson when he took a position in the United States at Yale University.
Erik Erikson was a tall
blue-eyed man who had been raised in the Jewish faith but was said to look gentile. Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud, who
was continuing her father’s work at the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Institute, hired him “because he was good with children.”
It
would not come out for many years that Erik Erikson and Anna Freud had only
high school diplomas, and no academic training whatsoever beyond that of the
Institute.
This lack of academic
credentials proved no handicap to Erik Erikson once in the United States with a
prestigious teaching position first at Yale,
and then subsequently at the University
of California at Berkeley. He was
accepted without credentials not only by these institutions but by many notable
academics such as Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson and Ruth Benedict.
Erikson would go on to
win a Pulitzer and National Book Award. Ironically, this man of multiple identities is
most famous for coining the phrase “identity
crisis.”
In the December 1999
issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Erik
Erikson’s daughter, who was in crisis and felt suicidal, penned an article in this
periodical in which she complained that only her mother’s healing therapeutic
counsel and understanding saved her as her famous father “was not available.”
Perhaps more mystifying
but equally fascinating is that of the Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl
Jung (1875 – 1961). Jung is celebrated for
his psychological archetypes, theories on the collective unconscious, his
mystic symbolism, and his uncovering of the nature of the human psyche.
It would appear that he
preferred the mystical pursuit of the human soul more than the mundane practice
of psychotherapy. For example, he totally
botched the treatment of the emotionally troubled Lucia Joyce, daughter of Irish
novelist James Joyce (see “Lucia Joyce,
To Dance in the Wake,” by Carol Loeb Shloss, 2003).
Others have explored Jung’s
mystique and strange predilections including his somewhat double life in Jeb
Rubernfeld’s novel, “The Death Instinct”
(2010), and Richard Noll’s “The Jung Cult”
(1994) and “The Aryan Christ: The
Secret Life of Carl Jung” (1997) as well as Deirdre Bair’s “Jung, A Biography” (2003).
Famous
people in the sciences as well as the arts aren’t necessarily what they seem or
one might believe them to be.
Take the strange case
of psychotherapist Bruno Bettelheim (1903 – 1990), known as “Dr. B,” who was regarded
by the public at large to be one of the world’s most important psychoanalysts,
a Vienna intellectual and “one of Freud’s few genuine heirs to his science.”
The truth, however, is
that Dr. B was a lumber dealer who grandly reinvented himself with a fake set
of academic credentials after emigrating to the United States in 1939. The
University of Chicago hired him and placed him at the head of its Orthogenic School for Emotionally Disturbed Children which he ran for three
decades. He treated these children diagnosed
to be suffering from schizophrenia or autism with therapies shaped by bogus
statistics generating pseudonymous case histories to enhance his security and reputation.
More incredible, Bettelheim
wrote several bestselling books including The
Uses of Enchantment (1976) applying Freudian psychology to fairy tales, and
won the 1976 National Book Critics Circle
Award for Criticism and the 1977 National Book Award in the Category of Contemporary Thought.
Suffering poor health
with mounting questions about the validity of his therapeutic practices, he
took his own life by suffocating himself placing his head in a plastic bag (see
“The Creation of Dr. B” by Richard Pollack,
1997; and “Bettelheim: A Life and a
Legacy” by Nina Sutton, 1997).
Closer to home, we have
Phil McGraw who holds a doctorate in psychology, but is not a licensed clinical
psychologist nor certified to practice as a clinician.
Strangely, this
protects him from litigation in a way not available to practicing
clinicians. He can therefore pontificate
psychological and behavioral solutions to his television guests with immunity as
“Dr. Phil,” for his role is regarded as that of an entertainer who,
incidentally, earns in the neighborhood of $80 million a year while clinicians
make only a tiny fraction of that sum.
Phil McGraw’s Ph.D.
dissertation was “Rheumatoid Arthritis: A
Psychological Invention.” In other
words, he argued that this illness is primarily psychosomatic which has much in
common with his current role.
Alas, “Dr. Phil” can
dispense psychological advice to his troubled guests whom he sees within the
hour, sending them off with happy faces while millions of addictive viewers are
anxious to “tune in again tomorrow” for more of the same. Nothing changes!
How does he get away
with this? Better yet, why does he do it? The obvious answer: “for the money!” But
perhaps closer to the truth is that “Dr. Phil” fulfills a real need.
Are people that
vulnerable to the belief that a stranger on television is key to their health
and happiness? You bet they are! The evidence?
80 million dollars!
During the “Sexual Revolution” of the 1960s and
1970s, Masters & Johnson came on the scene with their “sexual
therapy.” William Masters and Virginia
Johnson had no training in psychotherapy or any other type of therapy. Masters was a gynecologist with an M.D.
degree, while Johnson had only a high school diploma with no training in
medicine much less psychotherapy. Among
their claims were success with impotency, changing homosexuals into
heterosexuals, and an assortment of other psychosexual hang-ups, only to have their
“research” methodology questioned later and discounted for errors and false
claims.
You may ask, if such professional
counseling is only a self-indulgent luxury and not a necessity, what is your point?
My
point, and this will be more evident as you read on, what we all need is to have
someone to talk to; someone who will tell us we are all right; that we belong;
that our motives are sensible and that we don’t have to apologize for our
occasional mental lapses in judgment or feel guilty for our tangled sometimes ridiculous
lives – in other words, we need someone to listen to us. Since most people are too busy and
preoccupied in their own lives to listen, we are willing to pay for that
service.
Once the neighborhood
minister, priest or Imam fulfilled that function without charge, unobtrusively,
confidentially and effectively, but alas, that service and that role has
largely faded into the mist.
Many reading this have
never sought professional help finding solace instead with a brother or sister,
a best friend or acquaintance, mother or father, husband or wife, colleague at
work or teammate in sport, a classmate in school or a fellow parishioner at
church or some other social group.
[When I was a global executive, I traveled a lot by plane across four
continents. Invariably, the person next
to me would unburden his soul as if I were his confessor. More than once, the stranger said upon
landing: “Thank you for all your advice.
I can’t thank you enough,” when I hardly said a word during the entire flight,
only listening. I’ve often thought of
writing a small book about these conversations, but haven’t because they were
given in confidence as if I were, for the moment, their priest and, indeed,
their confessor.]
We live in an obsessively
compulsive “Psychological Society”
and in a psychotherapeutic culture. Our world
has been psychologized in direct proportion to our failure to be good listeners
to each other, creating a culture of paid listeners practicing pediatric
therapy to adolescent therapy, and at the other end of our lives, geriatric
therapy.
But are these times so
terrible that we need all this professional attention? Psychologist Bernie Zibergeld writes:
There
is not a shred of evidence that we are under more psychological stress than
were our ancestors. Until recently, the
masses of people suffered the daily stress of not knowing if there was going to
be enough food to eat and they also had to deal with the possibility of
infectious diseases, now largely conquered, that could wipe out a significant
portion of the population in a few months.
Nuclear weapons are new, but the threat of annihilation has been with
mankind since the beginning. There is
also no evidence of an increase in the incidence of serious emotional disorder
since the advent of advanced industrialization.
The best studies have failed to discover such a pattern of growth. To be sure, we talk more about our problems
and seek help more often, but that is not the same as an increase in the number
or severity of problems. The only sense
in which it can be said that the number of problems has increased is that we
now busily label as problems everything that limits and frustrates us.
THE
SEEDS OF THE TANGLED WEB OF OUR IMAGINED PSYCHOLOGICAL CRISIS
We are in an era when
the only thing that seems to interest us is what is happening “now!”
Historians, sociologists and anthropologists write books about the
phenomenon that only they and their students seemingly read. That does not hide the fact we are in a
ninety year Post Great Depression
swoon which we are unable to overcome.
In 1930, most African
American families, then known as Negroes, were with two parents in stable and relatively
happy homes despite the incipient collapsing economy of the times. There was no drug culture, per se, except for
isolated pockets of society occupied mainly by movie stars, musicians and other
entertainers.
Children went to school
and were boxed on the ears by teachers if they misbehaved. If they cheated on tests or were caught in
nefarious behavior, they would be sent to the principal, disciplined and
sometimes expelled. If they stole from
other students or were caught in bullying tactics, they could be sent off to
reform school, which in those days was the equivalent of a prison for
teenagers.
The majority of America’s
workers were unskilled and under educated doing menial jobs working paycheck to
paycheck but still finding a way to survive with family support. They had not yet assumed that the government or
their employer was expected to bail them out of their misery.
Self-reliance was part
of the collective American DNA with the required pride to take care of oneself
and one’s family. Everything changed in
the early 1930s.
President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt became President of the United States. It was a time when the world was in freefall
with capitalism on trial. Many leaders
of the United States and Europe were intrigued with the ideas of Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels and their Communist Manifesto of 1848. This philosophy was then reinterpreted by
Lenin and Trotsky to lead to the Russian Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which
successfully turned Russia into a communist state.
FDR,
as the president was known, virtually turned the United States into effectively
a socialistic state to combat the threat of Communism and save the nation with
several executive orders circumventing the constitutional role of the United
States Congress. In the process, he gradually
changed the nation’s character, mindset and approach to its economic, political
and social problems.
Obviously,
this was a popular move as President Roosevelt was elected to four consecutive
four-year terms, dying shortly after the fourth election.
At
the same time, his actions, although well intended, stole the initiative from
ordinary Americans to fend for themselves with the same self-reliant vigor that
once had been characteristic of the American spirit since as colonists they won
independence from Great Britain in 1776.
Despite
the radical change in American politics or the popularity of a sitting
president, FDR’s actions did not rescue the nation from the Great Depression, or
the Western world from communism. World
War Two did.
Still,
once the die was cast, once people expected something for nothing, once the war
was over, and control of their lives no longer their primary responsibility,
with the heady and bizarre economic boom that followed that war, the nation lost
its identity, its moral compass and its way.
Industry
and government couldn’t do enough for Americans, that is, as long as they
surrendered control of their lives and what they did for a living. Workers handed that control over to their
employers and subsequently the government to manage their well-being. The same occurred in Europe in a slightly
different manner.
It
was a trust issue that worked as long as the United States was prosperous,
fiscally solvent and stable economically.
Post-World War Two gave birth to another entity, “corporate management.”
Corporate
management was distinct from corporate oligarchs as these managers were not
owners, but employees like everyone else.
They came to see themselves, however, as owners and acted the part so
convincingly that workers came to buy into their imagination of reality,
failing to act or to protest in any way when these managers paid themselves 10,
20, 100 to several hundred times what the worker in the trenches made for an
hour’s work.
Alas,
taking a thesis from the Good Book, corporate management successfully
promulgated the idea that they were indispensable and the infallible authority
of the organization.
If
you think this an exaggeration, should you violate the chain-of-command to seek
answers above your direct report, you were not excommunicated. You were censured, demoted or fired!
When
the Baby Boomer Generation, children born after 1945, came on the scene parents
had already ceased to be parents. They
were obsequiously cowering to the management at their place of employment. Baby Boomers were forced, as a consequence, to
be their own parents. Mother and fathers were working or partying
all the time to ride the boom for all it was worth. Meanwhile, Baby Boomers successfully
programmed themselves to have everything and anything “now!”
Planning
for the future became redundant as did delayed gratification. Happiness was defined in terms of having Baby
Boomers, now as parents, wanting to outdo each other, giving birth to the “spoiled
brat generation” that followed, and then the “Me” generation and on to the
present millennials and centennials.
This
has spawned cumulatively the “Culture of Narcissism” and the whimpering self-indulgent
solipsism of today’s “Psychological Society.”
Far
from finding fulfillment or happiness, many have walked into the “Chamber of Horrors”
where fear and anxiety, self-contempt and self-disgust reside, retreating
instead into alcoholism, drug addiction, workaholism, promiscuity, exhibitionism,
crime and suicide, or simply dropping out of school or the workforce waiting
for society to come to the rescue.
They
say collectively that “life sucks” and blame society for the discomfiture when
they are society. It is a “catch 22”
situation: failure to find purpose in life and reasons for being, they look to
be rescued by a society that is equally lost.
Of
course, who do they blame for their plight?
They blame parents, siblings, relatives, friends, classmates, teachers,
coaches, the church, the school, the government, religion, God, authority
figures, and the times. They are locked in forward inertia spinning their
wheels and going nowhere.
They
have no sense that this counter dependence and lack of self-regard and self-initiative
was seeded a long time ago in a time known as “The Great Depression.”
Thanks
to Sigmund Freud in his psychotherapy, and other psychologists, ethologists and
neurologists we are not responsible for the way we are. These dedicated scientists explain away our
symptoms or propose self-esteem, hierarchies of needs or other mantra to
assuage our discomfort, while sociologists on their part explain reasons for our
mood swings, labeling them to create yet another escape industry.
Academic
analyses and carefully researched remedies fail to take us off the hook of our
dysfunctional propensities. Why? Because they have no answers. They too are stumbling in the dark and part
of the same problem. They treat us as a
species apart, statistical numbers or sagittal samples viewed in petri dishes under
the microscope and not as flesh and blood holistic functional and vulnerable
human beings.
Life
has become impersonal and the best indication is when someone claims to have a
thousand “friends” on Facebook. If one
is lucky, a person has three good and trusted friends in a lifetime.
ENTER
DR. THOMAS SZASZ INTO THE FRAY
Psychiatrist Dr. Thomas
Szasz sent shock waves through his community in 1961 with his book “The Myth of Mental Illness.” The Hungarian born American doctor lived to
be 92, dying in 2012, but was largely treated during his long medical career as
a “gadfly,” which means not to be taken seriously. While admitting there is such a thing as
brain disease and brain defects, Szasz does not see mental illness as a
disease. He writes:
“Disease
cannot be cured by conversation. What so
many doctors call mental illness is human conflict expressed in ways society
cannot live with.”
In his book “Second Sin” (1973), the First Sin being knowledge of good and
evil, the Second Sin being the
knowledge of clear speech, he writes:
If
a man says he is talking to God, we say he is praying. If he says God is talking to him we say he is
a schizophrenic.
Treating
addiction to heroin with methadone is like treating addiction to Scotch with
bourbon.
Mental
hospitals are the POW camps of our undeclared war and unarticulated civil wars.
There
are two very different kinds of psychiatry, voluntary and involuntary. The difference is at least as important as
the difference between psychotherapy and organic therapy. I consider all involuntary psychiatry to be punishment. The physician should be a healer not a
jailer.
I
object to only two things. First, I
object to any and all involuntary psychiatry; to any kind of psychiatric
measure that’s imposed on a person against his will. Second, I object to the widespread
mislabeling in psychiatry, whether it is voluntary or involuntary psychiatry, that
is, calling personal problems “diseases,” calling prisons “hospitals,” calling
conversation, “treatment.”
We
have already forgotten what doctors did in Nazi Germany, and we don’t want to
know what they did in Communist Russia.
We thus persecute millions as drug addicts, homosexuals, suicide risks,
all the while congratulating ourselves that we are great healers curing them of
mental illness.
Elsewhere, he has
written about the symbiotic relationship between psychiatry and the state:
This
is a complicated matter. As the prestige
and popularity of organized religion diminished, following the Enlightenment,
medicine took over many of the functions formerly performed by the
churches. Physicians became the new
priesthood who have played the roles of priests. They are our secular and scientific
priests.
I
am personally opposed to electroshock treatment. It’s a barbarity. I have never used it and never would. I wouldn’t dream of recommending it. If someone asked me about it, I would point
out that neurologists go to great lengths trying to prevent seizures in persons
who have epilepsy,
because
every time a person has a grand mal seizure, his brain gets damaged.
Nevertheless,
psychiatrists claim that giving someone a seizure is a form of treatment. But then the history of medicine is full of
instances of so-called cures that were actually harmful. You know the old saying, “The cure is worse
than the disease.” It applies to a lot
of things psychiatrists do – electroshock, lobotomy, often the use of drugs, and
sometimes even psychotherapy or psychoanalysis.
THE
POSTMODERN HUMAN ZOO EXPOSED
Author Francis Fukuyama
in “Identity” (2018) insists that a
sense of individualism is essential to the well-being of us as persons, along
with a sense of recognition, appreciation, and sense of worth.
But the irony is that identity, which is an internal monitoring device and the engine to our motivation has
been nullified by our overwhelming preoccupation with being “other-directed” rather than “self-directed,” imitating, emulating,
comparing and competing with those we esteem, while we become increasingly self-estranged
to the point that we don’t know ourselves very well if at all.
This finds us anxious
if not terrified to be alone only with ourselves, or to find ourselves temporarily
in a climate of silence with a total absence of noise.
In such a situation, we
are apt to be close to panic with a feeling of being neglected and excluded
from the company of others. Why? Being left alone, unoccupied and unstimulated,
cut off from the outside world if only for a short time is for many tantamount
to being abandoned.
Alas! The wonder of iPhones and other electronic
devices have come to the rescue. These
inventors couldn’t have chosen a more propitious time although they were
actually trying to create electronic video games for those addicted to this
form of escape. Now, escapism has become
the modus operandi cultural poverty
breaker. The evidence?
Persons below the
poverty line, who lack the wherewithal to conduct healthy lives, not only are likely
to have cell phones, but their children as young as five or six as well. How is that possible? Necessity is the mother of motivation.
Electronic
manufacturers and advertisers know this well.
These electronics have become the 21st century’s ultimate
pacifier with society showing little need or intent to grow up much less take
charge. These devices are the new opium
of the masses, an approvable escape into wonderland.
Not only Western
society, but societies across the globe have caught the fever, which is a flight
from the reality of imagination into the imagination of reality. Dr. Thomas Szasz’s “Second Sin” message still rings relevant.
Physicians,
psychiatrists and psychotherapists know that patients today cannot stand
discomfort, pain, failure, success, struggle, loneliness, depression, anxiety, or
exclusion, so they designate stressors of life as “diseases,” and propose pharmaceuticals
and “talking cures” as remedies.
People
don’t get better for all this attention, but have become more dependent on these
pacifiers. It has resulted in the
society we have today.
Electronics have become
necessities as well as “toys of the mind” and the new “social media” religion. Manufacturers
of these devices treat what is legal with the same broad brush as what is ethical. Not surprisingly, manufacturers are
constantly in litigation or caught in some scandal.
Facebook,
alone, has nearly two billion participants
who give new meaning to passive aggression and approach avoidance
behavior. Twitter adds the bizarre to it with its voiceless contributors and surrogate
newsmakers, its faceless hackers and unprincipled troublemakers who have too
much time on their hands.
[As this was being written, Tampa Florida’s Police Department was investigating how Tampa’s Mayor Bob Buckhorn's Twitter account had been hacked posting racist tweets and pornographic messages. Among the tweets was one threatening the City of Tampa staff, Tampa International Airport and the Tampa Veteran Administrations offices (February 21, 2019).]
It may change in the
future when participants grow up and take control of this new medium. Meanwhile, the chatter is mainly white noise
with many users spreading veiled threats, hatred and evil.
On another front, we
still arrest and prosecute drug dealers when the biggest drug dealers, the
pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession, receive essentially a free pass
or a slap on the wrists for dispensing mind altering prescriptions in a rather
cavalier fashion.
Meanwhile, people in
the limelight, many career politicians or lobbyists play to the social media and
the cable and network television audience to promulgate polarizing policies or
to make divisive pronouncements. Is it any
wonder that gridlock has taken hold of the United
States Congress or that this is the “Age of the Absurd”?
THE
FALLACY OF PSYCHOTHERAPY RESEARCH – THE PLACEBO EFFECT
There are nearly
110,000 psychotherapists in the United States today with nearly 60 million
Americans in regular psychotherapy. Since
Americans spend so much for this treatment, it should not be surprising that the
majority claim the therapy beneficial.
This is however misleading. The therapy movement has been driving traditional
values to the curb for decades while successfully forwarding its own postmodernism
therapeutic worldview.
That said, people don’t
talk much about Sigmund Freud today, but the
“Father of Psychoanalysis” remains a real presence in the psychotherapy of
this “talking cure,” as the therapy fills the void left by the decline of
religion and members of the cloth who once were primary dispensers of such care.
Yet, given this
development, how effective is psychotherapy?
Studies comparing
behavioral therapy and psychoanalytical therapy have proved interesting. Conducted by highly experienced therapists, roughly
90 percent of the behavioral therapy clients and 80 percent of the
psychotherapy clients show improvement on a scale of overall adjustment. This looks impressive until you compare these
results with the control group which
consistently measures an 80 percent improvement on a scale of overall
adjustment as well (“The Shrinking of
America,” p. 125).
The control group, incidentally, involves
people who don’t receive the therapy but who have similar problems to those receiving
the treatment.
Study after study
conducted in this manner fail to demonstrate statistical significance with the control group. This is “the placebo effect” produced by a
placebo procedure (in this case a therapeutic treatment) in which the results cannot
be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and therefore must be
due to the patient’s belief in the treatment.
Thus, the positive results of the treatment are considered “the placebo
effect.”
Consequently, when it
comes to the efficacy of the therapeutic benefit of therapy, there is vast
disagreement on what are the beneficial elements to such treatment. Too often therapists believe changing
behavior rather than gaining an understanding of the client as a person is more
important than what is happening and why.
You
flunked out of school; were fired from your job; you can’t hang on to gainful
employment; your wife (husband) has left you; your teeth are falling out, but
you can’t stop smoking; your friends won’t hang out with you anymore; your
children are driving you crazy; your husband won’t work; your wife is never
home; nobody listens to you; you have an eating, spending, gambling, or other secret
disorder you can’t talk about; you’re dying inside but nobody cares.
Exhausted, at wits end,
with nothing making any sense to you anymore, you rush into therapy, pay a
stranger with credentials for what is wrong with you in the belief that therapy
is the answer to your dilemma when what you receive in treatment is a new
vocabulary to master as to what is wrong with you and why.
Dr. Thomas Szasz would
say, “Loosen up, you’re just experiencing the normal conflicts of life. Your best therapist is a friend who knows and
understands the person that you are.”
That person, however,
cannot solve your quandary. Only you can
do that. But by talking to this friend,
whom you trust, that deep down terrible pain causing you such heartache may gradually
surface as Dr. Szasz suggests. Once no
longer remote or buried in your psyche, disturbances are far less intimidating. This is an introduction to yourself as a
person who has confronted his disturbances to deal with them and get on with
your life.
[A person of whom I had not seen since my youth, dropped by out of the
blue. He told me he flunked out of
college in his freshman year, then went into the US Army, came out of it and
labored as a construction worker for a few years, took some junior college
courses, then asked his university if he could return, now that he had found
purpose in life. The registrar of his
university was impressed with his candor and allowed him to re-register. Now in his late twenties, he went on to become
a scholar, claiming to having received only two “B’s” on his way through his
master’s and doctorate studies in plant physiology to earn his Ph.D. Once out of the university, he became a professor
writing a textbook and doing scientific work.
It was obvious he delighted in looking back and sharing his productive
life with me these many years later.]
German philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) points out that when you reach an advanced
age and look back over your lifetime, it can seem to have had a consistent
order and plan, as though composed by some novelist. Events that when they occurred had seemed
accidental and of little moment turn out to have been indispensable factors in
the composition of a consistent plot. So
who composed the plot? Schopenhauer
suggests that just as your dreams are composed by an aspect of yourself of
which your consciousness is unaware, so, too, your whole life is composed by
the will within in you.
Nothing in life is
written in concrete. Nothing is final or
absolute in the ups and downs, successes and failures, peaks and valleys of an
ordinary life. Why? Because this is but the rhythm of life. When you talk with a friend, and the friend
listens, the nature of your problems come to be defined and prioritized with
clarity. Over time, that clarity
improves as conversations take on form and develop substance. Eventually, if sincere and mature, you will
choose to act in your own best interest.
Not only will your
situation improve, but you will be more of a mind to listen to someone else who
needs help to climb over the obstacles holding him back, obstacles now treated
as if the grandest of mountains.
Psychologist Carl
Rogers has been ahead of this charge.
His “client-centered” therapy
was a reaction against analysis while the aim of his therapy was not to solve a
client’s particular problem but to assist the individual to grow and mature.
Among
other things, this means that the person in pain must come to understand that
he is the cause rather than the effect of his experience. Once the cause is clear the effect can
ultimately be dispatched, not immediately, but with due diligence.
Meanwhile, this is not an
attempt to convert the masses who believe in behavioral and psychotherapy. On the contrary, it expresses the benefits I
have enjoyed in my long life from friends listening to me and therefore helping
me to liberate myself from the ties that bind.
That said, there appears little unity among therapists. Take the assessment of the eminent psychotherapist
Carl Rogers:
Therapists
are not in agreement as to their goals or aims . . . They are not in agreement
as to what constitutes a successful outcome of their work. They cannot agree as to what constitutes a
failure. It seems as though the field is
completely chaotic and divided.
So, while the wisdom of
being your own psychotherapist may be a road less traveled, it could be the road
that leads back to becoming your own best friend.
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