PSYCHOTHERAPY: WHAT WE SEE WHEN WE LOOK BEHIND THE CURTAIN

Why do most people speak highly of their psychotherapist and their healing process? In an article entitled “Freud is a Fraud,” Chris Noble, MD, had written:

• Speculation was and is at the heart of psychoanalytic theory and practice. However, unlike scientific speculation, which leads to testable hypotheses and controlled experiments, psychoanalysis was developed mainly by unscientific, if not anti-scientific, minds. One searches in vain among the analysts for any semblance of the typical concerns and attitudes of scientists. There is no concern for testing their claims, which are put forth dogmatically rather than tentatively. Skepticism about their work is rare; bravado and bold assertions are common.

Psychotherapists now widely accept the many findings that the relief that their clients derive is not the result of their theoretical approach or even of their particular practices, but of the empathetic relationship they form with their clients.

Some practices are even widely regarded as arrogant:

• Freud's theories and practice can be attacked not only for his ideas and methods, but for his arrogance and contempt for his patients and colleagues. (Noble)

Freud had even stated:

• "I can't help being convinced that my dear fellow men, with few exceptions, are worthless." http://somniloquy.online.fr/TSI3/freud.html

The real Freud wasn’t the one that his patients had been seeing. In the midst of the Vietnam War, I had asked my psychiatrist to write a letter claiming that I was unfit for military service. He gave a copy to me. I was glad to read that the letter made an excellent case for my psychological unfitness. During our next meeting, I thanked him for his convincing letter. He answered, “I meant every word of it.”

The curtain had been pulled back, and I was devastated to find what he really thought about me. He saw me as Freud had seen his clients - as “worthless.”

I too saw myself as worthless - as irreparably damaged merchandise, despite his positive affirmations of me during our counseling sessions.

Years later, after I had a life changing encounter with Jesus, I returned to college and obtained a degree in social work and did my fieldwork in a community mental health center. I would sit in as the psychotherapists would share their cases and receive feedback.

The mask was put aside, and they discussed what they really felt towards their clients. I was surprised by the contrast between what I was seeing in these meetings and the face they wore with their clients.

I wondered if this would happen me once I became a Christian psychotherapist. In retrospect, I found that our Lord painfully humbles us so that we would accept our unworthiness in the face of His love and acceptance for us:

• Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort those who are in any trouble, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. (II Corinthians 1:3-4 NKJV)

Years later, I have found these verses true. I has now became unthinkable for me to regard anyone as worthless or even beneath me. It is because of God’s love and acceptance of me that I can now love and accept other broken people - no mask needed!

Alienation: What is it and what does it Cost

Any good manager must be aware of what is happening in each area of his domain. To not be aware of what is happening in one area might undermine the entire enterprise. He must also ensure that the different parts are working in harmony.

The same principles pertain to our individual lives. If we are alienated from certain parts of ourselves, we will not be able to function properly.

Why are we alienated from ourselves? There might be certain parts we cannot accept. They are just too painful or too disruptive. We therefore try to bury feelings of guilt, shame, and inadequacy.

However, if we are alienated from certain parts of ourselves, we will also be alienated from others. If there are certain parts of ourselves we cannot accept, we will also be unable to accept them when we see them in others. If we cannot tolerate failure in ourselves, we will be uncomfortable when we see it in others.

We are also alienated from ourselves when we adopt a philosophy that refuses to harmonize with the rest of our lives. The writer and apologist, Francis Schaeffer, cites Sigmund Freud’s alienation from himself. Freud was a materialist. For him, human experience was reduced to a series of bio-chemical reactions. Love was reduced to the sexual impulse. Freud understandably wrote to his fiancée:

• When you come to me, little Princess, love me irrationally.

To love Freud rationally was to understand that her feelings of love were no more bio-chemical responses. Therefore, Freud wanted his fiancée to regard her feelings as irrational – as more than just robotic reactions, as, instead, impregnated with the fullness of meaning.

Freud had a schizoid worldview. His loving feelings were alienated from his materialistic beliefs. Only irrationality could bring them together. He wanted to believe in his feelings, but his worldview prevented him from affirming the message articulated by these feelings.

Similarly, I have often asked college students, “Is it objectively and absolutely wrong to rape?” As easy as it should be to answer this question, it caused considerable discomfort. Why? The mental and emotive parts were at odds and alienated. While their mind informed them that there is nothing absolutely wrong, their feelings offered a very different answer. Answer?

When we experience such dissonance, the natural and healthy response would be to resolve the dissonance by bringing our thoughts into harmony, but they could not. Why not? They had alienated themselves from the voice of their discordant feelings.

Jesus explained this costly failure as the product of our love for the wrong things:

• This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed. (John 3:19-20)

We have condemned ourselves. Why? Schaeffer explains that we have rejected our appointed role, our station in life:

• Thus, in rebellion, not staying within the circle of what man is, but trying to move into the circle of the existence of God, man falls crushed within himself at every turn.

When we decide that we are going to be the captain-of-our-own-ship, we reject God – His oversight and boundaries – and reap the consequences of our rebellion against the truth. We no longer want to listen to what our own voices are telling us. We harden ourselves against our guilt, shame, and even what is so patently obvious – that rape is absolutely wrong. We also harden ourselves against God’s inner voice, which has become an unwanted interference and a threat to our autonomy.

Yes, we are the captain-of-our-ship, but it is a rudderless and directionless ship, without a light, map, or even a destination.

Psychoanalysis and how it has Failed to Address Human Need

Psychoanalysis has been no friend to religion. Sigmund Freud regarded it as no more than a “childhood neurosis” and even worse:

·        The whole thing is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life. It is still more humiliating to discover how a large number of people living today, who cannot but see that this religion is not tenable, nevertheless try to defend it piece by piece in a series of pitiful rearguard actions. (Civilization and Its Discontents,1930)

Therefore, psychoanalysis failed to give it any credibility as an aid in treatment. However, many therapists now recognize the need to take faith seriously and respectfully. Alan Fontana and Robert Rosenheck wrote about those who have experienced severe traumas:

·        One of the most pervasive effects of traumatic exposure is the challenge that people experience to their existential beliefs concerning the meaning and purpose of life. (“Trauma, Change in Strength of Religious Faith, and Mental Health Service Use among Veterans Treated for PTSD,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 192, 9 (2004): 579)

If we are flesh and blood, we have to seek flesh and blood solutions to our problems. However, if we are also moral and spiritual beings, then these dimensions must be addressed, and even more so if this is the presenting concern of the client:

·        Pursuit of mental health services appears to be driven more by their guilt and the weakening of their religious faith than by the severity of their PTSD symptoms or their deficits in social functioning.

·        A primary motivation of veterans’ continuing pursuit of treatment may be their search for a meaning and purpose to their traumatic experiences.

While Freud regarded feelings guilt as an artifact of evolution, perhaps even neurotic, at the least, these feelings require serious attention. A.A. Howsepian, assistant professor of psychiatry, UC San Francisco, writes:

·        Guilt about one’s own perceived morally damaging combat actions is a significant additional risk factor for suicide in war veterans. (Christian Research Journal, Vol.36, Number 02, 23)

However, resolving guilt requires more than a therapist simply communicating, “You are a good person. Be gentle with yourself.” Counseling has to recognize that guilt is more than a feeling. Instead, it is like a fire alarm. It is not enough to turn the alarm off. The reality – the fire - that set the alarm off must be addressed. Feelings of guilt usually indicate that there is a fire raging somewhere. Sometimes, the fire is a matter of making reparations for the offense of the soldier. Howsepian affirmatively writes about Vietnam Veterans of America, an organization that seeks to help veterans heal by linking them up with humanitarian projects in Vietnam.

This program recognizes that there was a real and objective wrong that, at the least, must be restituted. Clearly, it is not enough to merely visualize helping victims – a technique of systematic desensitization. If guilt is real, it has to be addressed as such. If I cheat on my wife, and she finds out about it, it would not be appropriate to inform her that I feel better about the situation, having done some visualization exercises. Neither would it be enough for me to apologize by saying:

·        I don’t really believe that I did anything wrong, but I feel bad because I can see that I hurt you. Therefore, I won’t cheat on you anymore.

This is a demeaning response. It fails to acknowledge that my wife has a legitimate grievance. It treats her feelings as if they are completely arbitrary, subjective and not reality-based. It conveys to her that she is simply not “enlightened” enough.

Even more importantly, if my morality and behavior merely depend upon feelings, then I will eventually return to the same tempting behaviors when the feelings change, which they will. Besides, if my wife goes out of town, and I think I can have a fling and get away with it, why not!

On top of this, my wife will never trust me. If I really don’t believe that my behavior is wrong in an objective sense, then she will realize that I lack sufficient motivation to resist future temptations.

Instead, contrition and confession offer the only real hope of forgiveness and reconciliation. Where there is a complete and humble confession acknowledging real guilt, there is real healing and forgiveness. I’ve experienced this relief and reconciliation many times. Without this, the discomfort is so great that we are inevitably constrained to deny and rationalize our guilt.

If we refuse to acknowledge that our guilt feelings reflect very real transgressions, we block the possibility of an authentic reconciliation. When we don’t experience this reconciliation with our closest friends and family, it might also be that we don’t experience this on a divine level.

Therefore, we have everything to gain to consider the possibility that we have transgressed a higher moral principle. Admittedly, this idea can be terrifying. However, Scripture promises:

·        If we confess our sins, he [God] is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness. (1 John 1:9)

Richard Dawkins, Atheism and Sexual Faithfulness

Can we be good without God? Certainly not sexually!

Richard Dawkins has been termed “the world’s most famous atheist.” He also insists that we don’t need God to be good. However, he makes some interesting admissions:

• Why are we so obsessed with monogamous fidelity in the first place? The underlying presumption — that a human being has some kind of property rights over another human being’s body — is unspoken because it is assumed to be obvious. But with what justification?   

• And why don’t we all admire — as I increasingly do — those rare free spirits confident enough to rise above jealousy, stop fretting about who is “cheating on” whom. (Banishing the Green eyed Monster)

What does Dawkins admit? He admits that monogamous marriage is a matter of “property rights” and cheating is admirable. Of course, this must also include lying. If you’re a cheat, you must also be a good liar:

• Bill Clinton was impeached not for sexual misconduct but for lying about it. But he was entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so

If cheating requires a “positive duty” to lie in order to cover it up, perhaps that says something about the nature of cheating. If a couple can’t handle the truth that one party is cheating, perhaps self-control is more in order. And perhaps true love requires faithfulness!

However, Dawkins might be right that the cheater can’t be honest about the cheating. His partner might not be able to handle it. When I returned to college, I wanted to try what had become a rage – a sensitivity (therapy) group. I wanted to stay close to “home,” so I decided to join a group sponsored through the United Campus Ministry. However, before long, it became apparent that the “minister” was putting-the-make on two attractive females in the group. They confronted him about this, and he responded that he and his wife had an “open marriage.”

However, he later admitted that they had to carry out this “openness” in secret. Once he came home early to find his wife entering their home with her cheating-prey. The minister admitted that this sight so disturbed him that he had to be committed to the mental hospital for two weeks.

However, these are precisely the “free spirits” that Dawkins “admires.” But are they really free spirits? Is it freedom to jump from a 12-story building or to drink lye? Dawkins think so and therefore rhetorically asks,

• Why should you deny your loved one the pleasure of sexual encounters with others, if he or she is that way inclined?

There seems to be many good reasons – mental breakdown, divorce, disease, damage to children and even to society. John J. Davis (Evangelical Ethics) wrote of the work of British Anthropologist, J.D. Unwin:

• After a comprehensive study of both Western and non-Western cultures throughout human history, Unwin concluded that the record of mankind “does not contain a single instance of a group becoming civilized unless it had been absolutely [heterosexually] monogamous, nor is there any example of a group retaining its culture after it has adopted less rigorous customs.” Unwin observed that a society’s adoption and maintenance of heterosexual monogamy as a social standard “has preceded all manifestations of social energy, whether that energy be reflected in conquest, in art and sciences, in extension of the social vision, or in the substitution of monotheism for polytheism.” (p. 116)

Why wasn’t Dawkins cognizant of the various costs of “open” marriages? Perhaps his own lusts clouded his thinking. However, it seems that this has clouded the thinking of many non-theists.

Psychiatrist G. Brock Chisholm, president of the World Federation for Mental Health, had stated in 1945:

• The re-interpretation and eventual eradication of the concept of right and wrong which has been the basis of child training, the substitution of intelligent and rational thinking with faith in the certainties of the old people, these are the belated objectives of practically all effective psychotherapy.

• The fact is that most psychiatrists and psychologists and other respectable people have escaped from these moral chains and are able to observe and think freely.

• If the race is to be free from the crippling burden of good and evil, it must be psychiatrists who take the original responsibility.”

How widespread was this thinking “In a 1976 survey of members of the APA, 95% reportedly admitted to being atheists or agnostics.” Were these philosophical commitments the product of evidence or lifestyle choices? According to Al Parides, Prof. of Psychiatry, UCLA:

• If you look at the personal lives of all Freud’s followers—his initial disciples—these people certainly have an unbelievable amount of particular problems in the sexual area…The amount of deviancy as far as their sexual behavior and so forth is enormous. If you are saying that psychiatry promotes a certain form of morality that is a deviant morality in regard to many areas including sexual behavior—yes, I would agree. (Psychiatry: The Ultimate Betrayal, Bruce Wiseman, 12-14)

Perhaps God is necessary for the well-being of the family!