Sometimes I feel like Jerry Garcia. The leader of the Grateful Dead used to question himself in an enviable way. The rock group that was the best-selling live act of the 1980s, making groundbreaking music for 30 years, was treated as a religion by ardent fans, and supported and provided a livelihood to hundreds of people – band members. and their families, road personnel, administrative personnel, tour managers, merchandising personnel, sound and construction and transportation engineers et al It was headed by García and possibly without him (and this was evidenced after his death in 1995) it was finished. Yet Garcia felt brave enough to ask, “Are the dead a good thing?” Some feel that he felt unable to dissolve the Dead organization corpus on the grounds of abandoning his conscience to serve such a large community, which depended on him and the band for its livelihood.
Now, cut to the analogy: many times I have questioned and re-questioned therapy and its stated and implicit goals, essentially wondering if it works and, imitating Garcia, asked “Is therapy a good thing?” Of course I am not the only one to do it.
From Crocodile Dundee, who spoke with the voice of the common man when he commented on someone seeking advice “What, you have no partners?” For the renowned and rebellious Jungian analyst James Hillman, co-author of the book “We’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the world is getting worse,” psychotherapy has had its detractors en masse.
The criticisms are innumerable, well-known, and well-expressed: Can people really change? Aren’t therapists just trying to make their patients / clients think and feel like them? They are only looking for your money. What do they know anyway?
In one of the first studies, Hans Eysenck concluded that two-thirds of psychotherapy patients / clients improved or recovered on their own, whether they had received psychotherapy or not.
Certainly the history of psychotherapy is forged with suspicious examples of so-called cures. From the acclaimed “treatment success” of Anna O by Sigmund Freud, about which Jung declared was “nothing of the sort” (it was institutionalized after being possibly misdiagnosed in analysis) to the modern account of Paris and Donovan’s verbal and emotional relationships. abuse of power at the hands of an abusive therapist (see Richard Zwolinski’s book Therapy Revolution), the reasons to doubt or at least mistrust therapy seem to make sense.
So let’s go back to Jerry Garcia’s question about the dead. To paraphrase: “Is therapy a good thing?”
As a therapist, I am naturally predisposed. But I am also curious and upright by nature. I really don’t want to waste my time on a search that doesn’t have a positive effect, that I can’t carry out with a clear conscience, that is fundamentally flawed in focus and effectiveness.
Sometimes therapy doesn’t work, or it doesn’t seem to work. But this is a difficult matter, difficult to measure, monitor and evaluate. I remember a boy from a personal growth group that I had an incident with where we “fought” and he left the group. A failure? A few months later he wrote to express his gratitude. Meanwhile, he had realized that he had transferred (originally a psychoanalytic term that meant redirecting feelings to another person) his father complex to me. The incident in the workshop had opened up all kinds of useful inner material, which he had addressed in individual psychotherapy and transcended, resulting in a deep healing for him. So was this a failure turned into a success?
But other times it really doesn’t work and mistakes are made. I remember a client who ironically became the focus of my supervisory sessions. My supervisor, an analyst with extensive therapeutic experience, encouraged me to choose one of my clients and focus on him each week. The idea was that receiving intense supervision on a single therapy client would have an effect on my overall practice.
However, the result was that I, as a young, ambitious, and aspiring therapist, focused too much on this client. I began to worry too much about him as the supervision deepened my involvement in his life. One day he appeared in my office looking horrible and I asked him what had happened. He explained that he was testing a new pharmaceutical product, which was not yet entirely safe or proven, for an allergy he suffered from. He was outraged, not so much at him, as at the medical authorities who would allow such a practice. The medication was clearly not doing him any good. I told him, with great regret, to discontinue the medication. He stormed out of the room. He had entered directly into the transfer of his parents, who always told him what to do and denied him his right and ability to choose in matters related to his own life. After one insulting final session, he left and I never saw him again.
We have no way of knowing, of course, if this client subsequently had any insight or clarity, like the previous one who transferred me to his father, and thus benefited in the long run from my excessive attention. Similarly, we have no way of knowing whether the client who had subsequently benefited had a long-term negative turn to their detriment.
And the grateful customer? Perhaps people who have been in therapy are silent about it today, when the stigma of seeking help has been reestablished in direct contrast to the self-proclaimed and shared glory of the 1970s in personal and collective awareness. But my walls have been covered and overlaid with cards containing joyous proclamations of gratitude over the years. Today emails tend to replace cards, of course. But recently, when I was putting my website together and my web designer was dealing with the weight of testimonials, we made the joint executive decision to minimize and use a select few so as not to appear too “full of ourselves”. And this despite the fact that, in general, the majority of clients who have therapeutic success in all probability do not write or email their therapists.
My point is not to show what a great therapist I am, but rather that therapy works and when it does not necessarily the beneficiary or the grateful client screams from the rooftops.
That said, we must be painfully aware that not all therapists are good. It is beyond the scope of this article to go into what we should or can do about it when inadequate, short-term trainings produce therapists and healers of many descriptions and the general public is totally ill-equipped to distinguish between them and a multiple variety. . qualified, effective and talented practitioner. Nor can the new requirement of a university degree as a requirement for training in psychotherapy inspire greater confidence in the user of therapy services. Most therapists are aware that untrained therapists may be fully capable and often of higher quality than trained ones; such is the nature of the work that compassion, wisdom and intuition, which are possibly essential, are probably impossible to teach.
My conviction has resided in my continuous objections and criticisms of the field of psychotherapy. I have maintained a surgical approach to shady and useless theories, approaches and methodologies that I felt were suspect. Fortunately, I have expanded so much around the area of therapeutic endeavor that as the years have passed, through writing (there is no better way to expose unclear thinking) and practicing therapy with individuals, couples, groups and communities, I formulated my direct work. experience in an understanding that comprised a philosophy and a psychology of how therapy works and I have summarized them as the three stages of awakening.