Why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work — Truth, Values and Freedom
I recently posted part 4 of my series The Collapse of the First Global Civilization: The A3 Brain, Human Consciousness and the Crisis of Psychology. The entire article was listed as a 46 min read. There are subsections that stand on their own that I’m sure will interest special audiences in a smaller format. Here is one of them.
This post discusses why modern psychotherapy doesn’t work as evidenced by its poor success rate and very long treatment programs.
My series on the collapse of civilization blames the unfolding collapse as primarily due to a cultural psychology problem. Is so, couldn’t psychotherapy help? Unfortunately, NO. The reason is, psychotherapy, as a modern medical specialty, is a tragic failure. The reason is its inability to deal with TRUTH and VALUES.
To understand this, it’s important to understand a point that was made earlier in the series: modern society is equivalent to living in an insane asylum. The primary reason for this is that civilization has lost the ability to agree on two concepts: TRUTH AND VALUES. While we hear politicians talking about values every day, and every politician has his own list, none of them understand what they’re talking about. They are not able to understand values based on logic and reality. Ayn Rand provided a lot of insight about it. A good summary with a sound evolutionary basis came from Nathanial Brandon in Psychotherapy And The Objectivist Ethics:
“Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generating action…. Value presupposes a standard, a purpose and necessity of action in the face of an alternative. It is only the concept of ‘life’ that makes the concept of ‘Value’ possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.
The key to motivation lies in the realm of values. … it is a man’s notion of what is for him or against him … that determines the goals he will pursue and the emotions he will experience.
The majority of men hold values that are part rational, and part irrational… and they spend their lives in anxiously precarious fluctuation… they pay the price of their unresolved contradictions in frustration.
The paradox … of psychology is that VALUES IS THE ONE ISSUE SPECIFICALLY BANNED FROM ITS DOMAIN. The majority of psychologists … have accepted the premise that the realm of science and the realm of ethics are mutually inimical, that morality is a matter of faith, not of reason, that moral values are inviolately subjective…”
In the modern world, where Cognitive Psychology is the new fad, one would think that therapists would discuss values with patients. Cognitive Psychology is based on the assumption that the human brain makes “logical” decisions based on “logical thinking” rather than the decisions being due to inherited biological drives, as assumed during the previous fad of behavioral psychologists. “Logical thinking” means making “rational” decisions based on what a person values. Most people, when they first go to a therapist, make the assumption that, things are going “wrong” in life because someone is “screwed up”. By “screwed up” they mean doing something “illogical” or “irrational” based on observations of “reality”. They usually believe it is the fault of someone else — NOT THEM. But, I think most people at least consider that they could be part of the problem. So, when they go to a therapist, they expect their therapist to tell them the right thing to do.
But modern medical psychotherapy FORBIDS this! The standard approach is called “non-directive counseling”. This was described by Lloyd Smith in 1950, when the fad was just starting, as follows:
“This therapy does not try to solve the patient’s problems for him, but rather establishes the conditions under which a patient can work out his own salvation.” (Ref. 1)
In short, “non-directive counseling” is a training class aimed at teaching people how to make “logical” and “rational” decisions. But the foundation behind psychological education has NO IDEA how to do that either. What that education has become is a rigorous review of a wide variety of medical studies with no solid framework related to mental illness to bring it all together. The result is an army of therapists, who went into school already locked into many forms of distorted world views, who just picked and chose examples from the studies they read to reinforce their existing beliefs. My interactions with many therapists supports this. Every one of them told me that what they learned in class was practically useless. So they have developed their OWN approach based on their work with patients. This is why the success rate of psychotherapy is so poor and is dragged out so long.
I will come back to this discussion with more detail in later parts of this series. But to finish up this part, here is a summary of the overall psychotherapy problem.
It is important to clarify that the science of psychology, even though it is messed up, is NOT the ROOT of the problem. The root of the problem, as stated above, is that the whole of human civilization lost its universal way to establish Truth and Values!
In ancient times, truth and values were easy. All societies were ruled by absolute monarchs: kings, pharaohs, emperors etc. They decreed Truth and Values. If a person accepted them and followed them, they lived. If they didn’t, they were killed.
In our modern world, the technologies of transportation and communication have brought many different beliefs together. Western cultures have also accepted the concept of “democracy”. That means, not only do we expect that separate nations might have different world-views, but individual citizens in the same nation might also have differing views. To maintain peace with such an arrangement, both governments and institutions, such as universities, professions, religions etc. have envisioned, as a RIGHT, that ALL people should be allowed to BELIEVE WHATEVER THEY WANT. In fact, modern culture believes this so strongly, it has become a foundation of governments. It sounds so “democratic”. It was a basis of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. What humanity does not understand, however, is that THIS CAUSES BIG PROBLEMS IN THE PRESENCE OF COMPLEXITY! Humanity has not thought this out well.
Consider medicine as an example. How would medical care work with an “anything you want” philosophy? What if every doctor, every nurse and every drug company could do things any way they want? How about paying taxes? Couldn’t everyone just follow their own beliefs about that? How about our legal system? Couldn’t everyone decide what laws they want to follow? How about automobiles? Couldn’t everyone decide to drive any way they want? Couldn’t construction crews build roads any size they want? How about living in a house? Couldn’t everyone decide to build a house anyway they want? Why do we need all those fire-prevention codes, or electrical-codes, or zoning ordinances? Couldn’t we all decide how and where to dump our garbage and sewage any way we want? How about on our neighbor’s lawns, or in the street? How about electric power? Couldn’t every power station decide to chose their own voltage, plugs and wiring? How about every railroad being able to put tracks anywhere they want and use any size track they want? Couldn’t every teacher decide to teach anything they want?
The point is, for a modern, COMPLEX civilization to work, with its tight interconnectedness of specialized labor, ALL world societies, and everyone in them, needs to rethink the entire fundamental concepts of FREEDOM, TRUTH and VALUES. Until society finds ways for people to agree on what citizens are free to do, and what not to do, and what parts of life can be understood as truths, and what can’t, we are essentially living in a world wide insane asylum! Everyone lives in their own world and it doesn’t have to conform to what science calls the material universe.
A major symptom of this “think anything you want” foundation is the breakdown and gridlock of communication and cooperation in democratic governments. This is not, as is so frequently reported, “just” due to differences of opinion. It is the lack of a basic structure to guide both communication and cooperation.
Related to psychotherapy, even at our ‘modern’ stage in human development, the human race still has no clue how to sit down and figure out “the right thing to do”. They have no clue how to list out, or even discuss a set of “positive human values” that all or even most of humanity can agree on. As soon as any formal effort tries to do this, people take sides with entrenched factions, pick up guns, and massacre each other. And if any college or government tried to do it, the same factions in those institutions would stir up a major crisis. So despite all the rhetoric about ‘family values’ and ‘human values’, formal large scale attempts to even try to agree on what “values” are, are still a big taboo.” And if no major social institutions, like governments, religions, medical schools or universities will do this, how can average people be expected to know what to do?
This is the dilemma of cognitive therapy. There is no fundamental social structure to base it on, even at the local level. Trying to teach people better logic skills fails because the multiple disagreeing underlying social structures they are forced to juggle to maintain daily life can not be logically tied together.
There is a much more detailed discussion of the problems of modern psychology at a3society.org under the psychology tab.
Other short excerpts from article 4 related to psychology are:
Sigmund Freud Vindicated ! — a New 3 Brain Model
Consciousness — the New A3 Model
Consciousness linked to Maslow’s Hierarchy
The Seven Deadly Sins
Additional discussions of this issue can be found on the A3 Society web page under the following tabs: Brain Theory ; Human Species ; Psychology
Images courtesy of flickr — ascriptions with photos
