threnody

Psychotherapy is facing a very profound crisis. I think the teaching of the fathers – Freud and Jung and Rank and Adler – has been in this crisis almost completely lost. The problem is that psychotherapy becomes more and more a system of gimmicks. People have special ways of doing their own therapy, they learn which particular buttons to push, they’re taught various techniques by which they can think they’ve cured this isolated symptom or that. And that wasn’t the purpose at all of Freud and Jung and the rest of the really great brand who began our field. Their purpose was to make the unconscious conscious, and there’s a great deal of difference between that and the gimmick approach.

The gimmick approach leads to a general boredom. And the reason there are so many new systems of psychotherapy that spring up – every time you turn around there’s a new system, there’s three or four hundred now that exist of this kind of therapy or that kind – and the reason that this happens is that people are simply bored. And the therapists are bored. And they have to find some new gimmick in order to make it amusing at least to them. Now, they’re bored because they deal with the minor problems of life. They patch a person up and send him on again. I don’t regard that as real therapy at all.

A therapy that is important, as I see it, is the therapy that enlarges the person, makes the unconscious conscious, enlarges our view, enlarges our experience, makes us more sensitive, enlarges our intellectual capacities as well as other capacities – this is what Freud was setting out to do. This is what Jung was trying to do. This is what Adler and Rank were trying to do. These people never talked about these gimmicks. It just didn’t interest them. What did interest them was making a new person.

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#psychology

#rollo may

#existentialism

#psychotherapy

#carl jung

#sigmund freud

#therapy

#subconscious