PSYCHOTHERAPY AT THE CROSSROAD - SEPTEMBER 2017

ALTERNATIVES TO PSYCHOTHERAPY – WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

For the past 60 or 70 years we have experienced (in the Western society) a plethora of therapies with hundreds of techniques of personal growth. We participated in long weekends (some were 24 hours of sleep deprivation), week-long seminars and 30 days intensives with expert facilitators. Therapies flourished in many forms: Psychoanalysis, Kleinian Analysis Rational Emotive therapies, Bioenergetics, Rebirthing, Existential and Humanistic approaches, Gestalt therapy, Postural integration, Voice Dialogue, Rolfing, Psychodrama, Transpersonal Analysis, Archetypal therapies, NLP (neurolinguistics), Psychosynthesis and so on.

The objectives of most of these therapies was to develop a deep sense of Self and an integration of body, mind and spirit to achieve a fully aware individual with a connection to the Universal Oneness.

My own long-term experience and learning was in Gestalt therapy. It developed by Dr. Fritz Perls at Esalen Institute California in the 1960’s. He conducted group seminars, month long workshops and public demonstrations of his unique style of therapy focusing on the “here and now” process. Seeking the integration of Body Mind and Spirit, Fritz made deep studies in Japan about Zen Buddhism, Psychodrama with Moreno in New York, Body work with Ida Rolf and his early training in Psychoanalysis. He enabled his clients (mostly workshop participants) to open their self  to the present awareness and stay honest to their higher Self as a contrast to the rigid, automatic and passive dependent social paradigm in America of the 40’s and 50’s.

The other giants of Holistic Health, as the movement was eventually defined, were: R.D. Laing, the promoter of ‘antipsychiatry’, Alan Watts, the promoter of Zen and Buddhism to the West and Humberto Maturana, the Chilean doctor researching the biology of Cognition. Here are the stories of each as quoted by Wikipedia.

RD Laing ( 7 October 1927 – 23 August 1989)

Laing spent a couple of years as a psychiatrist in the British Army Psychiatric Unit at Netley, part of the Royal Army Medical Corps; conscripted despite his asthma that made him unfit for combat, where he found an interest in communicating with mentally distressed people. In 1953 Laing left the Army and worked at the Glasgow Royal Mental Hospital, becoming the youngest consultant in the country.

In 1956 Laing went on to train on a grant at the Tavistock Institute in London, widely known as a centre for the study and practice of psychotherapy (particularly psychoanalysis). At the time, he was associated with John Bowlby, D. W. Winnicott and Charles Rycroft.

In 1965 Laing and a group of colleagues created the Philadelphia Association and started a psychiatric community project at Kingsley Hall, where patients and therapists lived together. The Norwegian author Axel Jensen contacted Laing at Kingsley Hall after reading his book “The Divided Self”, which had been given to him by Noel Cobb. Jensen was treated by Laing and subsequently they became close friends.

In October 1972, Laing met Arthur Janov, author of the popular book The Primal Scream. Though Laing found Janov modest and unassuming, he thought of him as a 'jig man' (someone who knows a lot about a little). Laing sympathized with Janov, but regarded his primal therapy as a lucrative business, one which required no more than obtaining a suitable space and letting people 'hang it all out’. Later this method became known as “rebirthing”.

Inspired by the work of American psychotherapist Elizabeth Fehr, Laing began to develop a team offering "rebirthing workshops" in which one designated person chooses to re-experience the struggle of trying to break out of the birth canal represented by the remaining members of the group who surround him or her.

Laing and anti-psychiatry

Laing was an important figure in the anti-psychiatry movement, along with David Cooper, although he never denied the value of treating mental distress.

“If humans survive, future men will, I suspect, look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savour the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh is on us. They will see that what we call "schizophrenia" was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.” (R.D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, p. 107)

He also challenged psychiatric diagnosis itself, arguing that diagnosis of a mental disorder contradicted accepted medical procedure: diagnosis was made based on behaviour or conduct, and examination and ancillary tests that traditionally precede the diagnosis of viable pathologies (like broken bones or pneumonia) occurred after the diagnosis of mental disorder (if at all). Hence, according to Laing, psychiatry was founded on a false epistemology: illness diagnosed by conduct, but treated biologically.

Alan Watts(6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973)

Watts attended The King's School, Canterbury next door to Canterbury Cathedral. Though he was frequently at the top of his classes scholastically and was given responsibilities at school, he botched an opportunity for a scholarship to Oxford by styling a crucial examination essay in a way that was read as "presumptuous and capricious."

When he left secondary school, Watts worked in a printing house and later a bank. He spent his spare time involved with the Buddhist Lodge and under the tutelage of a "rascal guru" named Dimitrije Mitrinović who was influenced by Peter Ouspensky, student of G. I. Gurdjieff, and the varied psychoanalytical schools of Freud, Jung and Adler. Watts also read widely in philosophy, history, psychology, psychiatry and Eastern wisdom.

In 1936, aged 21, he attended the World Congress of Faiths at the University of London, heard D. T. Suzuki read a paper, and afterwards was able to meet this esteemed scholar of Zen Buddhism. Beyond these discussions and personal encounters, Watts absorbed, by studying the available scholarly literature, the fundamental concepts and terminology of the main philosophies of India and East Asia.

In his writings of the 1950s, he conveyed his admiration for the practicality in the historical achievements of Chán (Zen) in the Far East, for it had fostered farmers, architects, builders, folk physicians, artists, and administrators among the monks who had lived in the monasteries of its lineages. In his mature work, he presents himself as "Zennist" in spirit as he wrote in his last book, “Tao: The Watercourse Way”. Child rearing, the arts, cuisine, education, law and freedom, architecture, sexuality, and the uses and abuses of technology were all of intense interest to him.

Though known for his Zen teachings, he was also influenced by ancient Hindu scriptures, especially Vedanta, and spoke extensively about the nature of the divine reality which Man misses: how the contradiction of opposites is the method of life and the means of cosmic and human evolution; how our fundamental ignorance is rooted in the exclusive nature of mind and ego; how to come in touch with the Field of Consciousness and Light, and other cosmic principles.

Watts sought to resolve his feelings of alienation from the institutions of marriage and the values of American society, as revealed in his classic comments on love relationships in "Divine Madness" and on perception of the organism-environment in "The Philosophy of Nature". In looking at social issues he was quite concerned with the necessity for international peace, for tolerance and understanding among disparate cultures. He also came to feel acutely conscious of a growing ecological predicament; writing, for example, in the early 1960s: "Can any melting or burning imaginable get rid of these ever-rising mountains of ruin—especially when the things we make and build are beginning to look more and more like rubbish even before they are thrown away?"

Humberto Maturana (1928)

Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, is particularly known for creating the term "autopoiesis" about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and concepts such as ‘structural determinism’ and ‘structure coupling’. His work has been influential mainly in the field of systems thinking and cybernetics. Overall, his work is concerned with the biology of cognition.

Maturana's research interests concerns concepts like cognition, autopoiesis, languaging, zero time cybernetics and structural determined systems. Maturana's work extends to philosophy and cognitive science and even to family therapy. His inspiration for his work in cognition came while he was a medical student and became seriously ill with tuberculosis. Confined in a sanatorium with very little to read, he spent time reflecting on his condition and the nature of life. What he came to realize was that “what was peculiar to living systems was that they were discrete autonomous entities. All the processes that we live are lived in reference to ourselves ... whether a dog bites me or doesn't bite me, it is doing something that has to do with itself." This paradigm of autonomy formed the basis of his studies and work.

Maturana and his student Francisco Varela were the first to define and employ the concept of autopoiesis. Aside from making important contributions to the field of evolution, Maturana is associated with an epistemology built upon empirical findings of neurobiology. Maturana and Varela wrote in their Santiago Theory of Cognition: "Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system." Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

I am very interested to get feedback and your own thinking about the above question. Writers abound in many books on the topic of psychotherapy. From James Hillman & Michael Ventura “We had 100 years of psychotherapy and the world’s getting worse” (1992), to “Dance of the Ancient One - How the Universe Solves Personal and World Problems” by Arnold Mindell (12013). These are only two books that may be seen as opposite in view, but all seem to state that the MIND is not a “thing”, it is a process: the process of cognition, feelings and it has an identity with life itself.

My own opinion is that Psychotherapy (of any orientation) needs a shaking up, a push past the ‘contemporary’ boundaries of its accepted ‘modern’ ideas; therapy needs to emerge, again, ( as it did in the 50’s and 60’s) to shift the accepted paradigm of healing. Now we need to speak to the new generation of psychotherapists to point out how we are shrinking people into false and forced normality and doing business out of the human pain.

THE NEW AGE HAS COME TO AN END

Some 35 years ago, there was an era where I participated in, with great passion and excitement. It was the 70’s and 80’s and the emerging Human Potential Movement. The songs sag; “this is the age of Aquarius!” – the NEW AGE - the time after the wars ended and a new generation of baby boomers begun to explore all aspects of the human possibilities. But like all eras in history, this had also its positive and negative aspects. The positive aspects were the opening of a wide range of existential visions as to what the person in society can accomplish and that will lead to a new freedom from any kind of oppression. It exposed all kind of false beliefs that were kept from the rigid social order of the Victorian era and settled in the morality of the 30’s and 40’s.

As far as the negative aspect are concerned, the New Age left many people traumatised and confused by the many false ‘therapies’, magic solutions to personal problems, self-appointed ‘gurus’ and promises of a new life for all and thus leaving enormous expectations for those seeking change but leaving many perplexed and lost.

The NEW AGE arrived at a time when the world religions, particularly the Christian Church were in a crisis of faith in the West. The youth that experienced the WWII and the Viet Nam wars, lost all trust in the establishment. The New Age generation’s motto was:” Make Love Not War!”  They embraced the Oriental spiritual principles that did not place God as a single powerful entity. The Oriental spiritual practices offered a different point of view of what it is to be human. They promoted individual responsibility, all-inclusive and universal connection with spirit, the possibility of other entities ‘out there’ and the importance of personal growth to discover the whole person: body – mind- soul.

Over the many years of the human potential movement that spanned the Western world, we witnessed an emergence of such centres like Esalen Institute in California, the residence of Fritz Perls that pioneered Gestalt therapy. There were seminars by Abraham Maslow, Body work by Ida Rolf, and many others. Many more ‘schools’ opened across USA and Canada first and then in the rest of the Western world later. Some of the leaders were really change agents and some were of dubious quality. There was such a great response to these centres of wisdom that we witnessed ‘gurus’ from India, enlightened teachers form the East teaching meditation and yoga skills. Astrology seminars reaching a wide public by way of TV, Tarot readers, inner awakening groups, encounter groups and so on.

Over time, many of these “schools” degenerated into cult- like groups that created untold damage to the naïve members that followed those false leaders who promoted extra-terrestrial contacts, rebirthing, mind control and even suicidal events.

Today most of the authentic institutes that were at the cutting edge of human transformation and development no longer are the old ‘outsiders’ of the mainstream education but have adapted the academic models of teaching. Many have aligned themselves to University programmes that offer the standard diplomas and master’s degrees. These pseudo-schools depend largely on government grants and must follow the mainstream University course requirements and thus losing the freedom of exploration of new ideas.

Therefore, the NEW AGE era with all the utopian ideas has ended. Today most courses are offered on line with little or no human contact. Here is what the Wikipedia is writing about this phenomenon:

“As a form of Western esotericism, the New Age drew heavily upon many older esoteric traditions, in particular those that emerged from the occultist current that developed in the eighteenth century. Such prominent occult influences include the work of Emanuel Swedenborg and Franz Mesmer, as well as the ideas of Spiritualism, New Thought, and Theosophy. Many mid-twentieth century influences, such as the UFO religions of the 1950s, the Counterculture of the 1960s, and the Human Potential Movement, also exerted a strong influence on the early development of the New Age. Although the exact origins of the phenomenon remain contested, it is agreed that it developed in the 1970s. It expanded and grew largely in the 1980s and 1990s, in Europe and within the United States. By the start of the 21st century, the term "New Age" was increasingly rejected within this milieu, with some scholars arguing that the New Age phenomenon had ended.

Despite its highly eclectic nature, a number of beliefs commonly found within the New Age have been identified. Theologically, the New Age typically adopts a belief in a holistic form of divinity which imbues all the universe, including human beings themselves. There is thus a strong emphasis on the spiritual authority of the self. This is accompanied by a common belief in a wide variety of semi-divine non-human entities, such as angels and masters, with whom humans can communicate, particularly through the form of channelling. Typically viewing human history as being divided into a series of distinct ages, a common New Age belief is that whereas once humanity lived in an age of great technological advancement and spiritual wisdom, it has entered a period of spiritual degeneracy, which will be remedied through the establishment of a coming Age of Aquarius, from which the milieu gets its name. There is also a strong focus on healing, particularly using forms of alternative medicine, and an emphasis on a "New Age science" which seeks to unite science and spirituality.

Those involved in the New Age have been primarily from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds.

The degree to which New Agers are involved in the milieu varied considerably, from those who adopted many New Age ideas and practices to those who fully embraced and dedicated their lives to it. The New Age has generated criticism from established Christian organisations as well as modern Pagan and indigenous communities. From the 1990s onward, the New Age became the subject of research by academic scholars of religious studies.”

Today we are filled with technological tools that give us all the information needed to make a more accurate and well researched data about the many beliefs promoted by the New Age leaders. People interested in spiritual matters, inner work, mindfulness can access webinars, eBooks and on-line courses available at a small cost. There is also plenty of good research available about the effectiveness and value of the various esoteric ideas, beliefs and practices.

One current book that I recommend reading (Amazon.com) deals with a new or different way of dealing with personal growth. That book is entitled “Soulcraft: Crossing the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche” by Bill Plotkin.

SOULCRAFT  – THE NEXT STEP IN CONTEMPORARY PSYCHOTHERAPY

My reflections, this month, are based on my own experiences, personal observations and research about the New Age movement in Canada and USA. It all began in the 1960’s when I graduated in Psychology and later with a Master’s in Social work. In 1973, I graduated from the 3-year course in Gestalt therapy in Toronto, Canada. At that time, I became totally immersed in the New Age movement as all my colleagues were. I visited many of the growth centres and institutes in California, attended a week encounter group in New York, travelled to Sonora Mexico in search of the wise Yaki Indian mentioned by Carlos Castaneda, visited 15 alternative communities all over the world and established several training institutes and gestalt groups in Australia.

These experiences, over 40 years, helped me to discover my own and the Western world’s paradigm shift that became to me an integration of science and soul. The book on Soulcraft, by Bill Plotkin is mapping the future of psychotherapy. We no longer can help anyone if we do not include the SOUL and SPIRIT in our work. There is an emerging need to co-create and develop a clear ecological awareness to save humanity and the planet Earth.

The new and emerging technologies help us to understand clearly the scientific facts of human growth and at the same time bring a new ‘shadow’ side. This shadow aspect is evidenced in the commercialism of everything, corrupt political leadership and economic growth for growth's sake.

However, it is evident now that the major scientific discoveries in astronomy, medicine, psychology and soul work are directing the new paradigm towards the acceptance of the most fundamental fact: that the Universe and the individual are co-dependent and co-creative. This paradigm is supporting the principle of SOULCRAFT. See my previous blog post for details.

“Knowledge is doomed if we cannot understand that knowledge alone is recursive, and harbours the seeds of its own destruction, if taken to extreme”

Neil Rush, Parabola, 2017

                                      “Make Love Not War”: Hippies 1970’s

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 By the late 1980s, some publishers dropped the term "New Age" as a marketing device. In 1994, the scholar of religion Gordon J. Melton presented a conference paper in which he argued that, given that he knew of nobody describing their practices as "New Age" anymore, the New Age had died. In 2001, Hammer observed that the term "New Age" had increasingly been rejected as either pejorative or meaningless by individuals within the Western cultic milieu. He also noted that within this milieu it was not being replaced by any alternative, and that as such a sense of collective identity was being lost.

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