Blind Leading the Blind

In a letter to the Science Times, a professor of psychology took issue with the prevailing “wisdom” that psychotherapists should themselves undergo psychotherapy:

“Despite years of research, there is virtually no evidence to support the belief that personal therapy produces a more empathetic or a more effective therapist. Rather than lament the passing of required personal therapy for psychiatry residents, why not reserve it for those with an actual mental health problem.”

Judging from the suicide rate among psychiatrists, they have more need for counseling than most any other profession. Nevertheless, it is revealing that psychotherapy fails to produce positive results for its residents-in-training. Why is this the case? Perhaps because very different products go under the name “psychotherapy!” For instance, two psychotherapists (or counselors) can offer advice or interventions that are diametrically opposed to each other.

Let’s take an example. One friend related that he didn’t want to return to a certain supermarket because he felt uncomfortable about an altercation he had had with a clerk, even though she had started it. One psychotherapist might take a subjective view of the discomfort and try to reason that there is no rationale for the discomfort and therefore apply “systematic desensitization.” However, another therapist (generally one coming from a Judeo-Christian perspective) might take the opposite point of view—that the discomfort is signaling a real and objective problem that requires a specific solution, namely, to apologize for his part in the altercation, however small. Although the clerk might fail to reciprocate, at least my friend would do what he knew to be correct.

Feelings of guilt trouble me when I speak unlovingly to my wife and prompt me to confess. Sometimes guilt can be irrational, but I never want to dismiss these feelings until they have been given a chance to speak.

By automatically dismissing our feelings of guilt and shame as pathological, secularism has rejected the accumulated wisdom of all the major world religions in favor of permissiveness. Freud famously called religion the “enemy,” and he and his cohorts sought to weaken its hold. Nevertheless, it was inevitable that Freud would merely substitute one religion, an inferior one, for another. Dr. Al Parides, Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA, observed the impact of this new religion:

“If you look at the personal lives of all of 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.” (Quoted from Bruce Wiseman, Psychiatry—The Ultimate Betrayal, 12)

Why doesn’t psychiatry and psychotherapy work for those being trained as its practitioners? Perhaps it’s a matter of the blind leading the blind.

Daniel Mann