All psychotherapy is harmful. I am talking here about any kind of process which involves a patient/client producing a monologue while being “listened to” by a ‘counsellor/psychotherapist’. This is harmful whether the “theory” (all therapy is based on folk theories) is based on “transference”, “insight” or anything else.
The links below arise from or concern my experiences in “therapy” many years ago. I got involved when I was about 21 years old. I was, “lost and lonely” – that is, in a prime state to end up in a cult. I was, as I told the “therapist”, having difficulty figuring out “what to do with my life” – a pretty normal state for a 21 year old to be in and certainly not some kind of pathology requiring “5 years” of talking therapy “to get in touch with your feelings” – which is what Dr (he is apparently a medical graduate in the US) Leon Redler assured me. For those who don’t know, Redler was an “apprentice” of the disgraced drug-using psychiatrist R. D. Laing. “Apprentice” is our clue that Redler did not undertake anything resembling a formal training in what he was doing. This process caused me considerable harm, not directly but because it diverted my attention way from the world and towards my past and interior life – at just that time in life when I should have been looking ‘outwards’, engaging with the world. I spent about 7, off and on, fruitless years churning over my past – and got not one inch closer to understanding what to do with my life! Redler though, got richer. Much of the time I was on benefits and a large chunk of these paltry benefits went directly into his pocket – further disabling me, since I had no money left to do anything. The whole process was based on some falsehood that “getting in touch with your feelings” was the panacea for, apparently, absolutely everything. And, also that this could be achieved by 5 years of producing a monologue about my childhood. The only serious question is how I could have been taken in by this farrago. I think the answer to that is twofold. I “fell” into therapy because I was lonely and lost. I am using these words specifically because I recently watched a film about why people join cults and the programme essentially said this; because they are lonely and lost. I had dropped out of Oxford University having found the education there lacked meaning for me. It was, with hindsight, not unnatural that I might have wanted to meet someone associated with R. D. Laing, who had seemed to me like some sort of alternative intellectual who was concerned with the kind of questions that I was interested in and had not found covered on my Theology and Philosophy course at Oxford. The chance arose when a friend of mine told me he was dating the daughter of this associate of R. D. Laing. But I could see him only as a paying client…. The trick that therapists use is relatively simple; they ‘catch’ people at vulnerable moments; look at the advertising; it focuses on just such moments in people’s lives. (In my case not only had I dropped out of University but I had rendered myself homeless). The ‘lonely and lost’ person is attracted by the apparent concerned interest of the therapist and starts the monologue – since this is the price one has to pay for the attention. The monologue is the process of talking to the therapist about one’s inner life while the therapist simply does nothing beyond giving an appearance of interest. However; once one has started this unequal process of (by analogy) undressing one’s soul in front of someone who tells you nothing about theirs, you have fallen into a trap. Your self-respect plummets. (Just as it would if you stripped in the bedroom while your partner remained fully clothed). The second stage is well explained by Richard Webster [1]. He points out that once you have told the therapist your secrets you cannot leave until there has been some reaction, until you know what they think about what you have told them. Skilfully, they will never tell you this. They will never respond. This is a kind of torture. The only way to get out of therapy is to wrench yourself away – a process which can be unsettling and induce feelings similar to having a nervous breakdown. (The alternative way to leave is to accept the claim that you have been helped by this superior being, or, more technically, to permit the humiliating fiction that you have been able to reconstitute your subjectivity in the sovereign gaze of the analyst [2]).
These are the links. I am just reproducing them as I wrote them about 20 years ago. There are a few minor typos here and there.
- Essay on psychotherapy
- Psychotherapy recommended reading list
- “Leon Redler – story of disillusionment ”.
- Anti anti-psychiatry
Notes
- Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis, Richard
- Madness and Civilization. Michel Foucault. Vintage Books (28 Nov. 1988)
