[lbo-talk] Psychotherapy

Thomas Seay entheogens at yahoo.com
Mon Apr 11 11:31:22 PDT 2005


--- tully <tully at bellsouth.net> wrote:

I realized that the field was
> simply a racket.

I agree with Tully with qualifications....Of course, I might be partly wrong since my opinion is just based upon my own experiences. I think "talk therapy" is just bullshit. It might or might not help, in the same way as talking to a friend might help. Look at all the various talk therapies and, if I am not incorrect, they all have much the same percentage of effectiveness...which is pretty low. Of course, I dont know how levels of effectiveness are quantified.

I have had personal relationships with several people who are "talk therapists" and I found them to be the most dogmatic people in the world...and, what's more, they try to pathologize all human interactions. If you have an argument with them, it quickly gets turned into a psychological problem that the other (non-therapist) party has.

Cogntive, behavioral methods seem to be the most succesful and, it seems to me, the least invasive in many ways. Of course, even those psychotherapists seem to have a penchant for stating emphatically what "normal" is.

Let's face it, psychotherapists in general (I know there are exceptions) are a new caste of priests. You go to school, get a bullshit degree in psychotherapy and then you are fit to mold the world according to the theory of [Melanie Klein...put in your fav psycho-guru here].

Obviously psychiatry has its applications (and can of course be abused) but at least it seems to be effective (whether that effectiveness is a good thing or not varies according to case).

-Thomas

<<We are at such a point in mankind's evolution where changed conditions invalidate all our policies that have been so successful even in the recent past, and that presumably have constituted the ideal response to a presumably unchanging and unchangeable human condition. No wonder we are stupefied and confused-but our mistake is the same which many cultures have made before us, namely to force a rigid model upon a fluid reality.

Erich Jantsch - "Design for Evolution: Self-Organization and Planning in the Life of Human Systems"

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