The widespread dispensation of psychology has been one of the great plagues on modern society. Underestimating the psyche’s genius for maintaining its protective perversions, psychological knowledge in the public’s hands has served little purpose but to give the psyche one more line of defense- to believe itself ‘cured’ through alignment with academic insights. And yet we are the worse for it, since the human believes its psyche to be cured, where instead its neurosis has only hidden itself farther from view.
I have no doubt that the first generation of psychiatric patients under Freud’s care experienced miraculous recoveries. The healings arose spontaneously from the psyches of those seeking cure. They were not attempting to match up their unfolding with a textbook description of some generic healing process. They were authentic.
But modern psychological healings are over-contaminated by patients' presuppositions about psychological complexes and "defense mechanisms." This complicates the matter infinitely.
To draw an analogy, we can look at the evolution of musical compositional technique in the western world. First there was the music. The composers who innovated and developed the language, from Monteverdi to Bach, from Beethoven to Schumann, did so out of their own imaginative psyches. Their music was authentic.
Then, following their developments the discoveries were codified, mass-disseminated, and became fixed canons of musical technique. The result was a kind of ‘plug and play’ compositional style in which the forms conscientiously imitated those of the masters, presumably in order to get good marks in the music conservatory-factories of the 19th century (particularly in France). You have probably never heard these pieces, since their ability to stand the test of time was nonexistent. They were not “cured” the way the originals were. They became exercises in imitation and people-pleasing rather than creative revelations from deep beyond.
We moderns do the same thing with our psychology. We understand the forms- repression, projection, and the Oedipal Drama, and we plug our lives and experiences into them. And the result is just the same as with the French conservatory composers- a dull shade of a life, an unremarkable journey.
Because it is not the forms that cure, it is the process- the organic unfolding that defies prediction, regularity, or reliability. “Psyche” both in myth and fact is feminine, and she flows and changes and has no desire to be pinned down. She has her own rhythm, her own destiny process. This process is usually unknown even to herself- and it is certainly unknown to you and your books.
Marie-Louise von Franz is one of those rare psychologists (herself in the Jungian tradition) who understood the destructive quality that psychology had on modern life, particularly on the young. She went so far as to say that it would be better to grow up in an unconscious, neurotic household than one which had learned to ‘tame’ their neuroses with the morality of psychology, yet which still remained neurotic underneath. This situation gives the developing child the doubly hard task of discerning what was farcical overlay and what was foundational in terms of their own psychological troubles.
For von Franz, the process was receptive, as would befit Psyche herself. In “The Cat,” she describes an analysis she had with a young man who came to see her with a stock set of problems. She knew what the problem was and what the solution would be, and yet when the man told her his dreams, it didn’t add up. The dreams led in a completely different direction. It was von Franz’s genius (and courage) to place her diagnoses on the shelf and follow the dreams instead, which led, eventually, to the self-same conclusion she had drawn in the first place. And yet it was clear that in order for the patient to realize that conclusion in a useful, cathartic way, Psyche had to dream her own journey, her own unraveling, perhaps retracing the steps the neurosis took in forming- which were, in any case – in every case – unique to the patient.
This is masterful analysis, and really requires far less analysis than the other version, the young shrink eager to prove his “theories” and “cure” the patient. As happens often enough (see “Lying on the Couch” by I. Yalom for a brilliant satire) the patient will conform his psychic healing to the expectation of the therapist, just as French conservatory students would compose in order to get their “prix” from the designated authority figure at the Conservatoire.
Certainly there are therapists trained to deal with this version of ‘counter transference,’ but Psyche is usually cleverer than they. After all, if you are subject to desiring this kind of professional vindication, simply “knowing about it” won’t make any difference to your psyche. Just as the patient pretending to be cured, your own psyche will pretend to be objective. And in both cases one is swindled by one’s own mind.
As with the patient, the analyst must have the degree of certainty possessed by the likes of von Franz to relinquish control of the process in order to allow it to unfold as it desires. Holding such a healing environment for the patient may be the one guarantor of success, and yet the manner of that success will be entirely without precedent. How magical indeed. And yet it’s just another day for Psyche.
0 comments:
Post a Comment