TBD

TBD on Ning

I see a psychotherapist once a week. I've been thinking about cutting down the sessions to once every two weeks, or even once a month. There is no magic in our sessions. I attach no feeling of specialness to our interaction. Psychotherapy should be magical, it should be special. Special in the sense that one feels sensations that are not experienced in the mundane world. One should feel some connection to one's inner self, a connection to one's past and one's future possibilities. One should begin to see the grand connection between the inner world of wish fulfillment and the everyday human world of real objects. Psychotherapy should inspire a sense of the connectedness between past and present, between the self and others, and between conscious and unconscious. Therapy should be a process of synthesis and integration of the consciously-experienced self and the world of the seemingly alien. The revelations of the patient should be allowed to flow naturally, they should not be forced. The patient should act, feel, and say in the moment things that resonate at all the levels of his existence -- that resonate with the past; with unconscious wishes, conflicts and prohibitions; and with the Others of his life. Therapy should be a succession of moments of greater than normal psychological sensitivity. The therapist needs to confer significance upon the patient's suffering by making meaningful interpretations.

My therapist treats our interaction as an interrogation: an Inquisition of the self, as it were. It is an unholy Inquisition that torments and troubles me. I don't like being closely questioned. It seems that my therapist is only capable of asking questions, one after another. I like being questioned as much as a resistance fighter likes being interrogated by the Gestapo or an atheist by the Inquisition! But I don't, as some seem to think, just blindly disregard my therapist. There are therapists like mine who want facts, facts, facts, and of course I know their pursuit is profoundly useful. It's just that my daily, present world sometimes seems very remote from theirs. Therapy should be like old love affairs -- there is so much, not all bad, that one doesn't want to talk about, so much one can't talk about -- either because of reservations or repression. A great deal of therapy's beauty and excitement for the patient lies in the now in which the facts of one's life are being revealed. Like most, I am a bit manic-depressive, though the poles for me seem to lie much more between an active self and a nonentity. One self knows profoundly that it is neither important nor socially relevant at all; another, seen at far rarer moments, seems sometimes possessed. I feel identity with the average tribal shaman or the object of the shaman's ministrations.

The shaman, healer and spiritual expert in aboriginal Siberian culture, acts as the intermediary between humanity and the alien forces of disease and environmental catastrophe. Thus he fills the void wrought in the texture of existence by the incomprehensible experience of suffering. He serves as the link between the everyday human world and the realm of the ineffable, the unconscious, or, in his subjective belief the supernatural, and like Persephone he inhabits both worlds. He must experience the alien in himself as a prerequisite for interpreting and conferring significance upon the suffering of those who consult him for help against illness or misfortune. This personal experience of the alien, which resembles a mental disorder, is a major source of the apparent effectiveness of his form of psychotherapy, as it encourages the development of a greater than normal psychological sensitivity for his ever-renewed attempts to heal himself and his culture mates.

The ultimate aim of psychotherapy should be a kind of hatching: the birth of a new self out of the shells and slime of one's past existence. Psychotherapy should not simply be the accumulation of more and more facts about the patient.

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Comment by Alla on July 16, 2009 at 4:02pm
Something is not right here. I got it! They usually say 'hot' Latina woman. There has to be a reason for that. Yes, Gary, you might have problems right there.
Comment by Gary Freedman on July 16, 2009 at 1:40pm
Maybe I need a wise Latina woman as a psychotherapist.
Comment by Gary Freedman on July 16, 2009 at 1:39pm
I just started seeing a new therapist on Tuesday, and I feel comfortable with him.
Comment by Alla on July 15, 2009 at 9:27pm
Gary, if you are not really happy with your psychotherapist, you might want to consider getting a Siberian Shaman. They make visits, you know.

I wonder if I get a psychotherapist, and we start talking about the movies, will I feel better about myself? Actually, there is a chance: I will start going to the movies.
Comment by OCNaturalDoc on July 15, 2009 at 5:47pm
perhaps you 'hatched' this realization through the process you've experienced with this therapist. if you feel you've outgrown this connection and seek something else, look to your next opportunity.
truth is, the answers you seek are all inside you. just open yourself up and take a look.
if you're feeling as though you're being 'interrogated', you may have reached a place where you're feeling some deeper issues you haven't yet explored and are feeling vulnerable and/or protective. you may have made more progress with this therapist than you realize.
Comment by Allen on July 15, 2009 at 2:39pm
Actually being a psychotherapist...my role is to allow you to be yourself in a place where you are safe. I hold no answers, neither do I judge, I merely allow you to freely explore. If your not feeling special in that place then perhaps you do not have that connection and should find another. Interrogation? Maybe, if he/she is asking you to explain yourself. Your choice in all things.
Comment by brujo on July 15, 2009 at 2:01pm
Really Gary. I thought the goal of therapy was to get out of it.
Comment by ZenDog on July 15, 2009 at 1:09pm
The ultimate aim of psychotherapy should be a kind of hatching: the birth of a new self out of the shells and slime of one's past existence. Psychotherapy should not simply be the accumulation of more and more facts about the patient.

geez, I thought it was to reveal facts about patient to self so that a new perspective and insight may be gained, thus enabling new and more functional behavior to take the place of the old . . .

But what do I know - they all say I'm clinically insane . . .

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