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.
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