Luther - Series 1

Rules of Attraction

Playing by Heart

MYTH OF THE UNTROUBLED THERAPIST Private Life, Professional Practice (2014)

Rating: 60%

(www.amazon.co.uk)

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Unknown

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Original research

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First

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2014

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154 pages

Review Format:

Book

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Predominant Genre:

Non‑Fiction

Authors:

Authors

Marie Adams

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Irrelevant

Premiss:

Genuine engagement with problems psychotherapists possess can provide the surest means for therapeutic practice.

Themes:

Advertising | Aggression | Alienation | Capitalism | Character | Coming‑of‑age | Compassion | Corporate Power | Courage | Cowardice | Curative | Curiosity | Destiny | Emotional repression | Empathy | Equality | Ethnicity | Family | Fortitude | Grieving | Guilt | Honesty | Human nature | Humanity | Identity | Ideology | Irrationality | Loneliness | Love | Materialism | Narcissism | Paranoia | Parasitism | Passivity | Persona | Personal | Personal change | Political | Preventive | Propaganda | Rationality | Sadomasochism | Schizophrenia | Solipsism | Western culture | White culture | White people | White privilege | White supremacy

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Non‑Fiction:

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The Myth of the Untroubled Rapist

Those who choose to enter the profession typically manifest significant psychopathology of their own, which, if sufficiently understood and mastered, may actually enhance their ability to understand and help their clients. From this perspective, personal suffering is a prerequisite for the development of the empathy and compassion that characterize competent therapists.

US psychotherapist & writer. A Curious Calling, page 25 (2007).

Summary: Inside every therapist there is a client.

I t is a statement of the bleeding obvious that White psychotherapists have personal problems and may even be quite neurotic – they are, after all, human just like everyone else. It is mostly only psychotherapists, themselves, who buy into the myth of their own infallibility because it makes them feel good.

The psychotherapists’ problem, however, is the desire to hide this obvious fact from their clients in order to suggest that they have conquered life’s traumas and that, therefore, therapy works. Any other way of thinking makes them feel like impostors who cannot help others because they cannot help themselves; making them a psychological danger to the public they claim to help. This desire for professional self‑validation can become more important than actually helping patients; suggesting therapy can only work if it is clearly seen as giving clients a perspective on their lives so that the latter can manage or solve their personal problems and not their therapists.

Pain is pedestrian. It affects everyone. There is no one in the world who has not suffered pain. Money can’t spare you, nor can intellect or fame. Pain can’t be reasoned away, or ignored. By its very nature it will follow you down into every hole in which you try to seek shelter, or every activity with which you choose to distract yourself. Medicine may mask the pain and drive it underground for a while, but it is still there, ready to break through when the drug wears off or the distraction grows thin.

British psychotherapist & writer. The Myth of the Untroubled Therapist, chapter 3 (2014).

Psychotherapy for Whom?

This further means that the basic problem with modern therapeutic practice can be the belief that all personal problems can be talked about as if they were mental problems. This can lead people with problems to assume that they are illnesses rather than just the vicissitudes of life and that the solutions are, therefore, not their responsibility.

Psychotherapists do this to increase their power, prestige and income by treating the patient as a vicarious source of narcissistic gratification, to relieve guilt, to overcome feelings of helplessness or to gratify their infantile needs. Ultimately, to conceal any psychic problems they have behind a need for a career based pretending to help clean other people’s dirty laundry. Thus, White loneliness makes therapy more lucrative than it need be as therapists pose as mental mechanics for people whose culture never taught them to appreciate themselves for what they are.

Sanity?

People are either mentally‑ill or mentally‑healthy. A mentally‑ill person is trying to make reality fit their emotions. A mentally‑healthy person is trying to make their emotions fit reality. Both groups have problems, the difference lies in the diametrically‑opposed manner in which they attempt to resolve them: The former can never work; the latter might.

Once this distinction is forgotten, merely having problems can so easily be diagnosed as mental‑illness. This does not benefit prospective patients, makes the psychiatric profession appear nothing but mercenary by lining their pockets from non‑existent diseases. It also has the effect of making therapists power over others that can easily be abused, as in Soviet‑psychiatry.

Therapy?

This deceptively‑titled book focuses on all human problems, not just the ones people run away from; making it not so much about therapy as about self‑help. In this way it conflates such affects as grief (healthy) and depression (a sign of disturbance) to suggest that mental‑illness is whatever psychiatrists say it is; suggesting that psychiatry is nothing more scientific than voodoo.

Counselors exacerbate the problem by distinguishing between private practice for affects like grief (which no‑one needs since grief is natural) and potential confinement in institutions for depression (which may be pathological). The former sufferers can more easily treat themselves since they are inside the feeling and are actually and actively‑interested in processing their pain rather than running away from it.

So why pay a therapist for treatment of a non‑existent illness? Why allow a therapist to act as a paid friend when there can be no such thing? Calling patients clients does not make them any more like medical patients, a vain attempt to subvert the medical metaphor constantly being applied in psychotherapy.

Although people do not need to have solved their own problems before helping solve others, they do need to know, at the very least, how to manage them – as the piano teacher needs to know about the piano before they can teach others about the piano.

Parasites who depend on the dependency of others to maintain captive audiences of people in order to derive an income; believing they are gurus preaching perfection in order to obtain followers to worship them. This book is proof that the author still has problems of her own – primarily the belief that the rest of us cannot see how screwed‑up psychotherapists like her really are and that the myth she talks about is only a myth to her fellow practitioners.

White Culture

It is one of the oddities of White culture that normal human processes become both medicalised and pathologised such that help is then needed to navigate ones way through perfectly‑normal emotions – help which is actually not needed. Whites wish to live problem‑free lives to such an extent that any problem is willingly‑medicalised and instant, time‑saving solutions (drugs &/or therapy) sought in a vain effort to pretend that a kilo of cure is worth more than a gram of prevention. Thus, White people’s endemic loneliness is not resolved by making friends, but by making therapists – as if the latter could ever be an adequate substitute for the former.

Therapists have problems too and the belief that they are immune to the mental‑illnesses they treat is a pseudo‑scientific image they, themselves, try to create – to give the false impression that they are practicing hard science. This book is dishonest about this by suggesting it is only therapists and not the entire culture that is at fault. Like White supremacists who claim that only individuals are racist, not entire cultures.

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Appendixes

References (Fiction):

1. Chase, D (1999), The Sopranos. New York: HBO;
2. Levi, H, Sivan, O and Bergman, N (2005), BeTipul. Israel: HOT3;
3. García, R (2008), In Treatment. New York: HBO;
4. Campbell, A. (2008), All in the Mind. London: Hutchinson;
5. Fitzgerald, F. S. (1933), Tender is the Night. New York: Scribner;
6. McGrath, P. (2008), Trauma. London: Bloomsbury;
7. Whitehouse, P. (2005), Help. London: BBC;
8. Yalom, I. (1996), Lying on the Couch. New York: Basic Books.

References (Non‑Fiction):

1. de Zulueta, F. (1993), From Pain to Violence, page 262. London: Whurr;
2. Geller, J. D., Norcross, J. C. and Orlinsky, D. E. (editors) (2005), The Psychotherapist’s Own Psychotherapy, page 6. New York: Oxford University Press;
3. Guggenbühl‑Craig, A. (1971), Power in the Helping Professions, page 10. Irving, TX: Spring Publications;
4. Guy, J. D. (1987), The Personal Life of the Psychotherapist, page 15. New York: John Wiley & Sons;
5. Mair, K. (1994), The Myth of Therapist Expertise, In W. Dryden and C. Feltham (editors), Psychotherapy and its Discontents, page 167. Buckingham: Open University Press;
6. Renn, P. (2012), The Silent Past and the Invisible Present: Memory, Trauma, and Representation in Psychotherapy, page 94. London: Routledge;
7. Rogers, C. (1990), The Carl Rogers Reader, page 47. London: Constable;
8. Sussman, M. (2007), A Curious Calling, pages 4, 25, 193. Lanham, MD: Aronson.

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