Talk of the Town - Defending psychology July 22 2000

Thank you for your column on establishing calling ... What leapt out for me was your mention of how therapists have explained adult roles as results of childhood trauma. I have long believed that traditional therapy perpetuates the mindset of being a victim. The irony is that often the patient is not a victim of their past but a victim of the therapist!

I received at least a dozen e-mails and as many calls about my recent column on calling and destiny. Many readers, like this one, focused on my criticism of the way psychotherapy conceptualizes our adult selves as consequences of childhood experience.

Interestingly, the same week I wrote that column, I went to a coffee shop and found myself in a four-hour conversation with two people about this same subject. One was a seminary student who told me he often hears people say their therapists won’t stick to the presented complaint. “The client,” he said, “says his marriage is falling apart and the therapist says something else is the problem.”

The other was a woman writing a very interesting book about a particular form of abuse perpetrated by psychiatry. For her, therapy’s failure arises from its being insufficiently scientific. For me, the problem is just the opposite: It’s scientific preoccupation with causes that fails to address the actual nature of the psyche.

Ironically, despite my intense criticism of therapy, I ended up defending it to both people. What follows is meant to qualify my critique of psychotherapy.

First, it is essential to separate psychology from its practical application as counseling psychotherapy. It is possible to be psychological without also purchasing all 200 of psychotherapy’s methods. Depth psychology — the psychology that Freud, Jung and Adler developed — maintains that, because of the existence of the unconscious, things are never just as they seem on the surface.

That is why listening is so important to a therapist trained in depth psychology. It’s about compassion, but it’s also about learning to listen to the way the unconscious expresses itself as a subtext in people’s narratives. Dreams, reverie, slips of the tongue, offhand remarks, metaphors, stories of odd experiences, accidents, synchronicities, the body’s posture and processes undertaken to elicit images like art or movement, all may give clues to concerns deeper than a client’s presenting symptom.

Undertaking therapy with a depth psychologist — whether psychoanalytical or Jungian in orientation — means making a broad inquiry into the nature of being. It starts with the assumption that your complaint is symptomatic of something deeper. This seems generally to be true, and when one develops a psychological eye toward life, one learns to see through more than one’s personal life. The whole of creation, the soul of the world, begins to reveal itself in new ways.

An example might be bringing a psychological eye to environmental issues. On the surface, it seems almost silly that people devote themselves to saving, say, an insect from extinction. But a psychological inquiry reaps deeper meanings. We don’t become politicized over the insect itself. The insect becomes the symbol of ourselves, our relationship with the world. How are we going to maintain our own relationship with the living world? What, in fact, does the world want from us? Psychology doesn’t explicitly answer the questions. It broadens and enriches our lives by opening the discourse.

Thus, depth psychology is a method of seeing and inquiry. It is not a litany of answers. How psychotherapy — particularly the counseling psychotherapy taught in most schools now — corrupts psychology is by trying to provide rigid explanations. Because it has come under the purview of science, far beyond Freud’s own original intentions, it feels the posing of a question demands a concrete answer. The symptom must have a remedy.

Professional psychology took Freud’s basic theory of development and turned it into a dogma. At the same time, it all but abandoned the theory of the unconscious. By dogmatizing, say, the influence of the mother on development, but also eliminating the theory of the unconscious, counseling psychotherapy turns life into a reductive narrative of causes and effects. It becomes your mother who is the problem, not how you are going to live with the complexity of desire for mothering and its loss as an adult. The mystery of the unconscious, the unseen, is that our lives are much more complex than therapy’s explanations. For example, we love all kinds of things that hurt us now and then; we hate things that love us. What does that mean for us?

If psychotherapy could return to its original meaning as a tending of soul, I’d be all for its salvation. But it is clear that therapy as it’s now taught, practiced, regulated by the state and controlled by clients themselves, has become something quite different, even harmful. It is ironic that so many of us, like the people I encountered at Starbucks, can object to therapy for such very different reasons, with such diverse ideas of how it should change.

Cliff Bostock, M.A., is a doctoral candidate in depth psychology. Contact him at 404-525-4774 or in care of his website, www.soulworks.net, at cliff@soulworks.net.