 LTHOUGH
many individuals
and organizations might try to tell you otherwise, the science of psychology,
and its clinical application in psychotherapy,
have their definite limits. Here are some of them.
Desire
Psychotherapy
can reveal to you what you unconsciously desire, but
it has no right to tell you what you should desire. Even the concept
of “reprogramming” is just psychobabble and has no place in
psychotherapy. Who, after all, will do this reprogramming? What
will be the basis for and substance of this reprogramming? And by what
authority will this all be done? The psychotherapeutic encounter must
be just that: a genuine encounter with the unconscious
through free will and personal responsibility.
Social
Desirability
Psychological
research might be able to describe what happens when a person experiences
a particular event, but neither psychology as a general science nor any
psychological organization has any authority to say that anything in particular
does no harm morally or that it should be advocated politically
in society.
Politics
Politics is an
adversarial system in which individuals obstruct their opponents’ goals
with the hope of eliminating the opponents altogether. Psychology, however,
must be based in the hope of making peace with your internal
“enemies” so as to find healing; it’s not about “getting
rid” of pain or blaming others. Therefore, nothing
in psychology needs to be expressed in political terms because psychology
is about helping you find out what you want to do, not about
telling you what to do. Or, to say it another way, whereas politics
tries to dictate the behavior of others, psychology helps you willingly
change your own behavior.
So remember that
it’s simply not possible to use blame, hatred, and aggression to make
someone else—or yourself—act with kindness. And for that very reason,
“political correctness” has no place in the consultation office.
There’s room only for three persons: you, your psychotherapist, and
the unconscious.
Counseling
Counseling
(or “counselling” in British English) should be distinguished from
psychotherapy because the two processes are different aspects of
psychology
and have different “ethics,” or underlying philosophies. Neither
ethic is “better” than the other; you should, however, understand
the difference. I, in fact, have an MSE in Counseling as well as a PhD in
Clinical Psychology—and I sometimes mix the two approaches of counseling
and psychotherapy when I provide
Spiritual
Direction. So the difference between counseling and psychotherapy is
not just a simple matter of more or less education or training.
A
counselor—whether a school counselor, a drug and alcohol counselor,
or any other counselor—is, in the end, trying to “get you”
to do something. Are you using drugs? Then the drug counselor will try to
get you to stop. Are you disrupting the corporation? Then the job counselor
will try to get you to obey the regulations. As such, a counselor’s
ethic is about getting you to adapt to and function smoothly in a
particular social role.
Although a poorly
trained psychotherapist is not much different from a counselor in terms
of ethics, a well-trained psychotherapist should have an ethical system
directed to helping you to disentangle yourself from the desires of the world
around you, rather than adhere to the psychotherapist’s desire. (Note,
however, that certain forms of brief psychotherapy, as in
Managed
Care, are not much different ethically than counseling.)
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AN EXAMPLE
The differences
between the approaches of psychotherapy and counseling can be subtle, and
sometimes the counseling approach may be preferred, and even necessary, as
in beginning substance abuse treatment.
But let’s suppose a person is having problems dealing with the death
of a close family member.
A counseling approach would attempt to lessen the symptoms in order to get
the person back to work as soon as possible.
A psychotherapeutic approach would focus on stabilization, at first, but
it might also be led (by the client’s
dreams
and other associations) to work on underlying (and often
unconscious) issues such as old guilt feelings or
long-standing personality and relationship problems.
In this approach, the client might discover issues that have been “hidden
away” all these years and are now becoming more troubling. In learning
to acknowledge them—to be more honest with his or her limitations, and
to trust his or her creative potential—the client might end up discovering
a whole new way of living. And—ironically (who knows?)—there is
always the risk that the client might even decide to quit his or her job
in the process of finding a more meaningful life.
But let’s not be deceived into thinking that psychotherapy can reveal
to you some deep, inner mystery of a “true
self.” [1]
Psychotherapy can show you how to live your humanness with
honesty
and integrity. What you do then is anybody’s guess. Psychotherapy simply
makes a gamble—a bet on the unconscious—that the therapeutic journey
into the “unknown” will be worthwhile. The ethic of counseling,
on the other hand, relies on the proven limits of a safe and well-known party
line. |
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The Desire of
the Psychotherapist
The practice
of psychology is, after all, a job, and your psychotherapist should have
only one desire: to help you get close to your
unconscious
motivations, and to change them if they are causing you problems. Your
psychotherapist should want nothing from you except fair payment for a job
well done—and this demands a well-defined
therapeutic
neutrality.
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NOTE
WELL
Sometimes a
psychotherapist works for an agency or in a government setting that is more
concerned with its own needs than yours. You would be well advised to recognize
this and to understand exactly whose desire your treatment is
fulfilling. |
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You have a right to know how your psychotherapist or counselor
thinks about these points. I, myself, would not want to entrust the guidance
of my life to anyone who wasn’t perfectly clear about the nature and
limits of his or her job.
Remember one
thing: the world is unfair, and your psychotherapist or counselor should
be helping you to cope with an unfair world, not to pretend that he or she
can make the world less unfair.
No
advertising—no sponsor—just the simple truth . . .
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Notes:
1.
Jacques Lacan, “The signification of
the phallus.” In Écrits: A selection, trans. Alan Sheridan
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1977). See p. 287:
“In any case, man cannot aim at
being whole (the ‘total personality’ is another of the deviant
premises of modern psychotherapy), while ever the play of displacement and
condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks
his relation as as subject to the signifier.”
Additional
Resources
Related pages within this
website:
Consumer Rights and Office Policies
Dream Interpretation
Honesty in Psychotherapy
Managed Care and Insurance Issues
Psychology: Clinical or Counseling or...?
Psychological Testing
Questions and Answers
about Psychotherapy
Types of Treatment
The Unconscious
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