We do not cure with reasons

The psychotherapist can address the illness of his patient never with arguments & reasons, but only ever with what he is in himself.  It is not what the therapist does & says that matters, but what he is. 

Polonius in psychotherapy

In Polonius Shakespeare created a type we meet rather more often than we would like in modern psychotherapy. He thinks he possesses self-knowledge & yet lacks it. He is an expert on everyone else's life, yet is clueless on his own & on the lives of his children. He meddles & interferes in the affairs of others compulsively. He loves being on stage & has no sense of when to keep silent. Instinctively he takes the side of whatever is the authority of the day. He cannot think for himself. He extols the virtue of autonomy in his speech - "This above all: to thine own self be true," - yet he is unable to manifest it in his life. 

Freud & Courage

Central to everything Freud did was courage. It was his most ingrained habit. The men he revered - Joseph, Moses, Hannibal, Cortés, Cromwell, Goethe - were all men for whom courage was instinctual & inevitable. Freud showed us that for anyone who would explore the human heart & spirit courage is the first requirement. You will face resistance, in yourself & in others, & you must be prepared to confront this. 

The first task of the therapist

The first responsibility of the therapist is to speak for that which now has no one else to speak for it. It is to cut against the grain of consensus & what is thought of today as "good". The therapist is at war with every today, helping tomorrow to be born. 

Nestor to Telemachos

"Be brave too, so that men unborn may speak well of you." - The Odyssey, III, 200 (Richmond Lattimore translation.)

The problem of autism & moral chaos

How much of what is currently diagnosed as autism or its near equivalents is actually the result of a defence mechanism against the moral chaos of modernity? How much of it is a veiled or displaced moralism, in the sense of an inability or unwillingness to encompass moral dilemmas & uncertainties? It may be, for instance, a defence against "attention deficit", simply a refusal to acknowledge value choices which the ego is not able to make? 

Whatever the truth of this may be, we need to consider carefully within the modern context the inability of the individual to empathise with the other. 

Everything merges into its opposite.

Everything in human life is bound up inextricably with its apparent opposite. No life without death, no beauty without ugliness, no civilization without barbarity.

We deal with experience by opposing different parts of it. So why do we have this psychological need to create oppositions? Why do we allow ourselves to admit that we desire one part of the opposition but not the other?  

A recurrent danger for the psychotherapist

There is a recurrent danger that psychotherapy may provide for the practitioner an escape from a personal moral chaos he cannot deal with. In such cases the therapist may easily come to treat his patient as a simplified two-dimensional version of reality, & in that way attempt to retreat to a more manageable reality than the one he must inhabit himself. Psychotherapy can thus too readily become a highly intellectualised defence for the therapist. And the elaborated institutions of therapy all too easily shore up this defence.