Why Psychotherapy Doesn't Work...And Religion Doesn't Either
/A couple of days ago I googled how many kinds of psychotherapy are there, and a 2012 article in Scientific American Mind told me that a study out of Scranton University found over 500 of them. Now if I went into hospital with heart disease or cancer, I would be despondent if I was told there are over 500 competing methods for how to deal with my problem and no one knows which is best. We have had psychotherapy for about 150 years, give or take, and rather than narrowing the options down, our scientific method seems to have been used to create a huge marketplace of therapies that battle it out like brands of toothpaste or competing designer clothes.
You might point out that some studies suggest that it is the relationship between the therapist and the client that is the real healing agent, and not any given method at all, but to my mind this complexifies the question rather than solving it. If the psychotherapy method is simply the ice breaker for the party, why should there be 500 of them at all? Why do some therapists swear by the polyvagal theory while others strictly enforce Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy. etc., etc., etc.? Why then should therapists be like everyone else and take time to hone their skills or learn new ones? In my own experience, I have found that the methods I use are crucial in helping people get to the next step in their healing.
Another issue: Since we live in a finite world, surely we can only accumulate a finite number of emotional wounds and traumas. It can only make sense then, that after an appropriate amount of work over a reasonable period of time, we should be able to check the emotional wounds off our list until they are all fixed, or fixed well enough. So why, after endless extended time with therapy, yoga, meditation, and a bunch of other practices, so many of us are still crazy after all these years? Puzzling.
Next, I turned to religion. A quick google search showed that there are 4000 plus of them. But that is only the tip of the ecclesiastical iceberg: a study by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity counted 200 versions of Christianity in the United States, and a staggering 45,000 denominations worldwide. Now if there is a God in the way we ordinarily think of him/her/it, then why would it/her/him play footsie with us like that? A God who wanted things to work would leave some sort of clear breadcrumb trail past all the fake religions so we could find it/her/him and let the worshipping begin. But just like psychotherapy, there is a huge marketplace filled with perfectly plausible, and often very intolerant, competing brands. I’m not sure I even want a God with so little common sense.
This leads us to an unavoidable conclusion: in everything that matters the most in life, we are either living in a Kafka’s castle of pointless torture or else we are asking completely the wrong questions. Let’s go positive and explore the second alternative. The Hassidic scholar Martin Buber gives us an all-important lead:
One of the main points in which Christianity differs from Judaism is that it makes each man’s salvation his highest aim. Judaism regards each man’s soul as a serving member of God’s Creation which, by man’s work, is to become the Kingdom of God; thus no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation. True, each is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake – neither for the sake of its temporal happiness nor for that of its eternal bliss – but for the sake of the work which it is destined to perform upon the world.
The Way of Humanity
When I read this, I felt like the fish that was finally alerted to the fact that it was swimming in water. My water – I mean our water in the Western world – is the idea of the primacy of the individual. Speaking as an ex-Catholic, I accuse the Protestants of foolishly bringing this idea of extreme individualism to its apogee when Martin Luther declared that it was the relationship of the individual to God that was of the greatest importance. He asked, what is my personal relationship with my Savior, and each person in a sense became their own chapel. But, as an ex-Catholic, I accuse the Catholics of inventing the idea of personal salvation in the first place, where my deeds or misdeeds will secure my salvation – or not. It’s nice if I pray for the souls of my brothers and sisters, but in the end it’s their idiotic choice if they go in the wrong direction. For as long as getting to Heaven is purely the business of the individual, the Christian sense of “us,” as in “us all in this together,” is rather nominal. And when psychotherapy took up the baton of religion in the race towards well-being, it didn’t for a moment question the idea that the unit of salvation was the individual, it just kept on running. An abused wife is prescribed Prozac to assuage her depression, but the community and the culture she is in take no equivalent medication to heal their hardness of heart over how they could let this happen.
By insisting that in Judaism “no soul has its object in itself, in its own salvation,” Buber puts the whole idea of personal salvation on the backfoot. Buber was writing in 1948, and I have no idea if this is how modern Judaism sees it, I just like his idea from back then. Buber is not saying we may as well give up on the therapy the meditation or the yoga class, in fact he says please continue: “each [of us] is to know itself, purify itself, perfect itself, but not for its own sake.” We have a larger belonging than our own private selves, we are not just sad little isolated specks trying to carry inordinately heavy burdens of communal karma all on their own. We are part of “man’s work,” which is to make “God’s Creation” (the world as it it) become “the Kingdom of God,” (the world as it could be) though I prefer Phillip Pullman’s expression, “the Republic of Heaven.”
Now I understand why I was so taken with the story of Thor among the giants that I made it the title of a rather long (and as yet unfinished) blog. Thor is challenged to simple-looking tasks by a gang of giants, and to his shock, rage and absolute horror, he can’t do any of them. Thor, who prided himself as being the great drinking guy of antiquity, is challenged to down one tankard of beer, and he can’t do it – not knowing that the giants have magically hooked the tankard up to the world’s oceans. This is like our relationship to our mental health issues; how come I, as the individual speck of me, with all these medications and therapies, can’t overcome simple anxieties that don’t even make sense, or shake a downer mood on a perfectly nice day? Or, even worse almost, after a lot amount of therapy, and maybe a lot of psychedelics too, I have all the insights in the world about what is wrong with me, but I still can’t shake that mood. The whole process is far more dark and mysterious than the linear world of mental health would let on.
The reason I can’t drain my own little personal tankard of grief, pride, fear, depression, etc. is that it is hooked into an ancestral ocean of human pain, you might say species pain, or you might go so far as saying the pain of life itself. My task never was to figure out me and thus attain “temporal happiness,” (or what we might call “mental health”) the task of the little speck of me is to contribute to humanity’s understanding of suffering and put in my very little, but very actual, effort towards creating a Republic of Heaven. Not for my own sake, “but for the sake of the work which [I am] destined to perform upon the world.” By doing something little, like wrestling with my own personal pain, I am actually doing something big, and contributing to making the brave new world we all really want.
That is why I like Teilhard de Chardin’s idea of the noosphere. He casts the noosphere as a next phase in our evolving where we, as purveyors of consciousness, spread that consciousness across the globe as it works to become a communal consciousness where the little specks start to treat each other better by not having wars, not exploiting one another, and all those good things. Instead we work in cohesion with one another to make a world where creativity and joy are what’s on everybody’s mind – a serviceable Republic of Heaven. Teilhard describes his vision of this upcoming new world, this noosphere like this:
It was not merely that I found no difficulty in apprehending, more or less intuitively, the organic unity of the living membrane which is stretched like a film over the lustrous surface of the star which holds us. There was something more: around this sentient protoplasmic layer, an ultimate envelope was beginning to become apparent to me, taking on its own individuality and gradually detaching itself like an aura. This envelope was not only conscious but thinking, and from the time when I first became aware of it, it was always there that I found concentrated, in an ever more dazzling and consistent form, the essence or rather the very soul of the earth…
The Heart of Matter
I said before that either we are in Kafka’s castle or else we are just asking the wrong question. The wrong question of religion is: how do I find my own personal salvation, and the wrong question of psychotherapy that picked up where it left off is: how do I heal from my personal wounds and traumas? It seems like in the Enlightenment we learned very little after all. The right question is: how do I better contribute to the creation of the noosphere, the Republic of Heaven, or whatever name you wish to lay on it. Healing is certainly part of that process, but not a healing along the lines of reducing my score on a depression scale administered to me by a qualified practitioner. Many of our wounds are ancestral, as in Phillip Larkin’s “they fuck you up, your mum and dad, they didn’t mean to but they do” and these wounds, the deliberate self-limiting of the soul, go back as far as the eye can see, and it makes sense that it might take more than one decade, or one lifetime, to redress what took innumerable generations to create. If we look at our personal work as a program of self-improvement, we so often get stuck in it; if we look at it as a contribution, not only does every little bit count, but we have no idea in this lifetime how much it may count, and how much a little opening of the heart across many years may contribute to a healthy future noosphere for everybody. If we are all here together building, let’s say, an enormous pyramid that will take thousands of years to finish, I should not expect to be at the apex when I am done with my little bit, just because I worked very hard at controlling my temper, going on meditation retreats, or whatever it may be.
I think this new viewpoint frees us from expectations that are not just unrealistic, but don’t relate to our needs. As someone said to me recently, “I am every card in the deck of who I am,” and I may come round to cards and faces that I thought were done with long ago, just to find that my jealousy, my down mood, my small-mindedness, have gone and shown up in the shuffle again. As in Rumi’s poem of the Guesthouse, is there a way in which I can be welcoming and unfazed by these “guides from beyond,” when they come to my door? Psychotherapy wants to be the science of suffering reduction/eradication, but its very starting point – the individual as the container of the problem and its solution – is the wrong formulation. As well as the self- wrestling and course corrections we do in relation to our pain, we also need the experiences of awe, wonder, and joy that psychedelic experiences – and nice sunsets – can give us. These experiences will contribute to the Republic of Heaven, and even if they happen out in the woods with nobody there for miles around, they are the lasting treasures that won’t rust. With enough of these experiences we may get into new relationship with our suffering selves, and sometimes mitigate that suffering, or, just as important, dislodge it from being the centrepiece of my life’s “wellness” project. Let’s stop playing defense all the time in the dynamic between pain, healing, and ecstasy. I don’t look for spiritual insights as part of my personal healing project; I look towards “symptom alleviation” of my personal pain so I can contribute to the far more precious project of the triumph of love in this world.