Welcome. None of the articles shared under the 'BLOG ARCHIVE' are written by me (unless stated), or are about my life, they are just some of my favourite articles shared from my twitter account which are topics of interests surrounding counselling / therapy and psychology.
The 'PERSONAL PAGE' section is a mixture of content, including some personal and Counselling Learning Reviews to help other students with meeting criteria.
I've yet to start my own blogger, writing my own opinions yet :)
Russell Brand famously used NLP (neuro linguistic programming) to
assist him to finally kick his drug and alcohol addictions. Another
great example of the power of the mind.
Russell
has been clean for many years and openly declares NLP as a life saver,
although before marrying Katie Perry, Brand found himself slipping back
into his old ways, not with drugs and alcohol, but for not rehearsing
for sara marshals movie and womanising.
But brand quickly saw the old pattern starting to re emerge and so he
called for his nlp consultant and got himself back in line and the rest
as they say is history. Brand claims it changed his life.check out NLP
with this book How to Take Charge of Your Life: The User’s Guide to NLP if theres one thing you should do this year its read this book !
will blow you away.
There are many other high rollers that think the same. The man who
knows everything, Warren Buffet, another lover of neuro linguistic
programming saying “it helps get outstanding results”buffet also
mentions it in his book The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life .
Sports star Andre Agase is also a enthusiast and enjoys NLP for focus and concentration .
NLP can be a really powerful tool if you can learn how to use it
correctly. It is becoming more popular every year and the celebrities
are getting in on the act.
Darren Brown is probably the most famous British act, who is a master at the skills of NLP.
In many ways, in his book he really explains what its about, great examples of how it works and how to do it.
The benefits of NLP are untold, it can be used in so many situations,
for pain relief, taking in and remembering information at much higher
than a normal pace. The difference is visible, it can be seen by others
and felt by you, and in a lot of ways its a one way road as when you
start to learn the techniques, at first they might seem strange, or
uncomfortable, but you very quickly incorporate them into your life, and
this happens very easily and is generally a much betterbook is a must
read check it out at amazonTricks Of The Mind check it out!
Cheap and effective, CBT became the dominant form of therapy, consigning
Freud to psychology’s dingy basement. But new studies have cast doubt
on its supremacy – and shown dramatic results for psychoanalysis. Is it
time to get back on the couch?
Dr
David Pollens is a psychoanalyst who sees his patients in a modest
ground-floor office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, a neighbourhood
probably only rivalled by the Upper West Side for the highest
concentration of therapists anywhere on the planet. Pollens, who is in
his early 60s, with thinning silver hair, sits in a wooden armchair at
the head of a couch; his patients lie on the couch, facing away from
him, the better to explore their most embarrassing fears or fantasies.
Many of them come several times a week, sometimes for years, in keeping
with analytic tradition. He has an impressive track record treating
anxiety, depression and other disorders in adults and children, through
the medium of uncensored and largely unstructured talk.
To visit Pollens, as I did one dark winter’s afternoon late last
year, is to plunge immediately into the arcane Freudian language of
“resistance” and “neurosis”, “transference” and “counter-transference”.
He exudes a sort of warm neutrality; you could easily imagine telling
him your most troubling secrets. Like other members of his tribe,
Pollens sees himself as an excavator of the catacombs of the
unconscious: of the sexual drives that lurk beneath awareness; the
hatred we feel for those we claim to love; and the other distasteful
truths about ourselves we don’t know, and often don’t wish to know.
But there’s a very well-known narrative when it comes to therapy and
the relief of suffering – and it leaves Pollens and his fellow
psychoanalysts decisively on the wrong side of history. For a start,
Freud (this story goes) has been debunked. Young boys don’t lust after
their mothers, or fear their fathers will castrate them; adolescent
girls don’t envy their brothers’ penises. No brain scan has ever located
the ego, super-ego or id. The practice of charging clients steep fees
to ponder their childhoods for years – while characterising any
objections to this process as “resistance”, demanding further
psychoanalysis – looks to many like a scam. “Arguably no other notable
figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every
important thing he had to say” than Sigmund Freud, the philosopher Todd Dufresne declared a few years back, summing up the consensus and echoing the Nobel prize-winning scientist Peter Medawar, who in 1975 called psychoanalysis
“the most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the 20th
century”. It was, Medawar went on, “a terminal product as well –
something akin to a dinosaur or a zeppelin in the history of ideas, a
vast structure of radically unsound design and with no posterity.”
A jumble of therapies emerged in Freud’s wake, as therapists
struggled to put their endeavours on a sounder empirical footing. But
from all these approaches – including humanistic therapy, interpersonal
therapy, transpersonal therapy, transactional analysis and so on – it’s
generally agreed that one emerged triumphant. Cognitive behavioural
therapy, or CBT, is a down-to-earth technique focused not on the past
but the present; not on mysterious inner drives, but on adjusting the
unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions. In contrast to
the meandering conversations of psychoanalysis, a typical CBT exercise
might involve filling out a flowchart to identify the self-critical
“automatic thoughts” that occur whenever you face a setback, like being
criticised at work, or rejected after a date.
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CBT
has always had its critics, primarily on the left, because its
cheapness – and its focus on getting people quickly back to productive
work – makes it suspiciously attractive to cost-cutting politicians. But
even those opposed to it on ideological grounds have rarely questioned
that CBT does the job. Since it first emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, so
many studies have stacked up in its favour that, these days, the
clinical jargon “empirically supported therapies” is usually just a
synonym for CBT: it’s the one that’s based on facts. Seek a therapy
referral on the NHS today, and you’re much more likely to end up, not in
anything resembling psychoanalysis, but in a short series of highly
structured meetings with a CBT practitioner, or perhaps learning methods
to interrupt your “catastrophising” thinking via a PowerPoint
presentation, or online.
Yet rumblings of dissent from the vanquished psychoanalytic old guard
have never quite gone away. At their core is a fundamental disagreement
about human nature – about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope
to find peace of mind. CBT embodies a very specific view of painful
emotions: that they’re primarily something to be eliminated, or failing
that, made tolerable. A condition such as depression, then, is a bit
like a cancerous tumour: sure, it might be useful to figure out where it
came from – but it’s far more important to get rid of it. CBT doesn’t
exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s
relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs,
and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change
them.
Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated. For one
thing, psychological pain needs first not to be eliminated, but
understood. From this perspective, depression is less like a tumour and
more like a stabbing pain in your abdomen: it’s telling you something,
and you need to find out what. (No responsible GP would just pump you
with painkillers and send you home.) And happiness – if such a thing is
even achievable – is a much murkier matter. We don’t really know our own
minds, and we often have powerful motives for keeping things that way.
We see life through the lens of our earliest relationships, though we
usually don’t realise it; we want contradictory things; and change is
slow and hard. Our conscious minds are tiny iceberg-tips on the dark
ocean of the unconscious – and you can’t truly explore that ocean by
means of CBT’s simple, standardised, science-tested steps.
This viewpoint has much romantic appeal. But the analysts’ arguments
fell on deaf ears so long as experiment after experiment seemed to
confirm the superiority of CBT – which helps explain the shocked
response to a study, published last May, that seemed to show CBT getting less and less effective, as a treatment for depression, over time.
Examining scores of earlier experimental trials, two researchers from
Norway concluded that its effect size – a technical measure of its
usefulness – had fallen by half since 1977. (In the unlikely event that
this trend were to persist, it could be entirely useless in a few
decades.) Had CBT somehow benefited from a kind of placebo effect all
along, effective only so long as people believed it was a miracle cure?
That puzzle was still being digested when researchers at London’s Tavistock clinic published results in October from the first rigorous NHS study of long-term psychoanalysis
as a treatment for chronic depression. For the most severely depressed,
it concluded, 18 months of analysis worked far better – and with much
longer-lasting effects – than “treatment as usual” on the NHS, which
included some CBT. Two years after the various treatments ended, 44% of
analysis patients no longer met the criteria for major depression,
compared to one-tenth of the others. Around the same time, the Swedish press reported a finding from government auditors there:
that a multimillion pound scheme to reorient mental healthcare towards
CBT had proved completely ineffective in meeting its goals.
Such findings, it turns out, aren’t isolated – and in their
midst, a newly emboldened band of psychoanalytic therapists are pressing
the case that CBT’s pre-eminence has been largely built on sand.
Indeed, they argue that teaching people to “think themselves to
wellness” might sometimes make things worse. “Every thoughtful person
knows that self-understanding isn’t something you get from the
drive-thru,” said Jonathan Shedler, a psychologist at the University of
Colorado medical school, who is one of CBT’s most unsparing critics. His
default bearing is one of wry good humour, but exasperation ruffled his
demeanour whenever our conversation dwelt too long on CBT’s claims of
supremacy. “Novelists and poets seemed to have understood this truth for
thousands of years. It’s only in the last few decades that people have
said, ‘Oh, no, in 16 sessions we can change lifelong patterns!’” If
Shedler and others are right, it may be time for psychologists and
therapists to re-evaluate much of what they thought they knew about
therapy: about what works, what doesn’t, and whether CBT has really
consigned the cliche of the chin-stroking shrink – and with it, Freud’s
picture of the human mind – to history. The impact of such a
re-evaluation could be profound; eventually, it might even change how
millions of people around the world are treated for psychological
problems.
How does that make you feel?
* * *
“Freud was full of horseshit!” the therapist Albert
Ellis, arguably the progenitor of CBT, liked to say. It’s hard to deny
he had a point. One big part of the problem for psychoanalysis has been
the evidence that its founder was something of a charlatan, prone to
distorting his findings, or worse. (In one especially eye-popping case, which only came to light in the 1990s,
Freud told a patient, the American psychiatrist Horace Frink, that his
misery stemmed from an inability to recognise that he was homosexual –
and hinted that the solution lay in making a large financial
contribution to Freud’s work.)
But for those challenging psychoanalysis with alternative approaches
to therapy, even more troublesome was the sense that even the most
sincere psychoanalyst is always engaged in a guessing-game, always prone
to finding “proof” of his or her hunches, whether it’s there or not.
The basic premise of psychoanalysis, after all, is that our lives are
ruled by unconscious forces, which speak to us only indirectly: through
symbols in dreams, “accidental” slips of the tongue, or through what
infuriates us about others, which is a clue to what we can’t face in
ourselves. But all this makes the whole thing unfalsifiable. Protest to
your shrink that, no, you don’t really hate your father, and that just
shows how desperate you must be to avoid admitting to yourself that you
do.
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This
problem of self-fulfilling prophecies is a disaster for anyone hoping
to figure out, in a scientific way, what’s really going on in the mind –
and by the 1960s, advances in scientific psychology had reached a point
at which patience with psychoanalysis began to run out. Behaviourists
such as BF Skinner had already shown that human behaviour could be
predictably manipulated, much like that of pigeons or rats, by means of
punishment and reward. The burgeoning “cognitive revolution” in
psychology held that goings-on inside the mind could be measured and
manipulated too. And since the 1940s, there had been a pressing need to
do so: thousands of soldiers returning from the second world war
exhibited emotional disturbances that cried out for rapid,
cost-effective treatment, not years of conversation on the couch.
Before laying the groundwork for CBT, Albert Ellis had in fact
originally trained as a psychoanalyst. But after practising for some
years in New York in the 1940s, he found his patients weren’t getting
better – and so, with a self-confidence that would come to define his
career, he concluded that analysis, rather than his own abilities, must
be to blame. Along with other like-minded therapists, he turned instead
to the ancient philosophy of Stoicism, teaching clients that it was
their beliefs about the world, not events themselves, that distressed
them. Getting passed over for a promotion might induce unhappiness, but
depression came from the irrational tendency to generalise from that
single setback to an image of oneself as an all-round failure. “As I see
it,” Ellis told an interviewer decades later,
“psychoanalysis gives clients a cop-out. They don’t have to change
their ways … they get to talk about themselves for 10 years, blaming
their parents and waiting for magic-bullet insights.”
Thanks to the breezy, no-nonsense tone adopted by CBT’s proponents,
it’s easy to miss how revolutionary its claims were. For traditional
psychoanalysts – and those who practise newer “psychodynamic”
techniques, largely derived from traditional psychoanalysis – what
happens in therapy is that seemingly irrational symptoms, such as the
endless repetition of self-defeating patterns in love or work, are
revealed to be at least somewhat rational. They’re responses that made
sense in the context of the patient’s earliest experience. (If a parent
abandoned you, years ago, it’s not so strange to live in constant dread
that your spouse might do so too – and thus to act in ways that screw up
your marriage as a result.) CBT flips that on its head. Emotions that
might appear rational – such as feeling depressed about what a
catastrophe your life is – stand exposed as the result of irrational
thinking. Sure, you lost your job; but it doesn’t follow that everything
will be awful forever.
If this second approach is right, change is clearly far simpler: you
need only identify and correct various thought-glitches, rather than
decoding the secret reasons for your suffering. Symptoms such as sadness
or anxiety aren’t necessarily meaningful clues to long-buried fears;
they’re intruders to be banished. In analysis, the relationship between
therapist and patient serves as a kind of petri dish, in which the
patient re-enacts her habitual ways of relating with others, enabling
them to be better understood. In CBT, you’re just trying to get rid of a
problem.
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The
sweary, freewheeling Ellis was destined to remain an outsider, but the
approach he pioneered soon attained respectability thanks to Aaron Beck,
a sober-minded psychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvania. (Now 94,
Beck has probably never called anything “horseshit” in his life.) In
1961, Beck devised a 21-point questionnaire, known as the Beck Depression Inventory,
to quantify clients’ suffering – and showed that, in about half of all
cases, a few months of CBT relieved the worst symptoms. Objections from
analysts were dismissed, with some justification, as the complaints of
people trying to protect their lucrative turf. They found themselves
compared to 19th-century medical doctors – bungling improvisers,
threatened and offended by the notion that their mystical art could be
reduced to a sequence of evidence-based steps.
Many more studies followed, demonstrating the benefits of CBT in
treating everything from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to
post-traumatic stress. “I went to the early seminars on cognitive
therapy to satisfy myself that it was another approach that wouldn’t
work,” David Burns, who went on to popularise CBT in his worldwide
bestseller Feeling Good, told me in 2010. “But I passed the techniques to my patients – and people who’d seemed hopeless and stuck for years began to recover.”
There’s little doubt that CBT has helped millions, at least to some
degree. This has been especially true in the UK since the economist
Richard Layard, a vigorous CBT evangelist, became Tony Blair’s
“happiness czar”. By 2012, more than a million people
had received free therapy as a result of the initiative Layard helped
push through, working with the Oxford psychologist David Clark. Even if
CBT wasn’t particularly effective, you might argue, that kind of reach
would count for a lot. Yet it’s hard to shake the sense that something
big is missing from its model of the suffering mind. After all, we
experience our own inner lives, and our relationships with others, as
bewilderingly complex. Arguably the entire history of both religion and
literature is an attempt to grapple with what it all means; neuroscience
daily reveals new subtleties in the workings of the brain. Could the
answer to our woes really be something as superficial-sounding as
“identifying automatic thoughts” or “modifying your self-talk” or
“challenging your inner critic”? Could therapy really be so
straightforward that you could receive it not from a human but from a
book, or a computer?
A few years ago, after CBT had started to dominate taxpayer-funded
therapy in Britain, a woman I’ll call Rachel, from Oxfordshire, sought
therapy on the NHS for depression, following the birth of her first
child. She was sent first to sit through a group PowerPoint
presentation, promising five steps to “improve your mood”; then she
received CBT from a therapist and, in between sessions, via computer. “I
don’t think anything has ever made me feel as lonely and isolated as
having a computer program ask me how I felt on a scale of one to five,
and – after I’d clicked the sad emoticon on the screen – telling me it
was ‘sorry to hear that’ in a prerecorded voice,” Rachel recalled.
Completing CBT worksheets under a human therapist’s guidance wasn’t much
better. “With postnatal depression,” she said, “you’ve gone from a
situation in which you’ve been working, earning your own money, doing
interesting things – and suddenly you’re at home on your own, mostly
covered in sick, with no adult to talk to.” What she needed, she sees
now, was real connection: that fundamental if hard-to-express sense of
being held in the mind of another person, even if only for a short
period each week.
“I may be mentally ill,” Rachel said, “but I do know that a computer does not feel bad for me.”
* * *
Jonathan Shedler remembers where he was when he
first realised there might be something to the psychoanalytic idea of
the mind as a realm far more complex, and peculiar, than most of us
imagine. He was an undergraduate, at college in Massachusetts, when a
psychology lecturer astonished him by interpreting a dream Shedler had
related – about driving on bridges over lakes, and trying on hats in a
shop – as an expression of the fear of pregnancy. The lecturer was
exactly right: Shedler and his girlfriend, whose dream it was, were at
that moment waiting to learn if she was pregnant, and desperately hoping
she wasn’t. But the lecturer knew none of this context; he was
apparently just an expert interpreter of the symbolism of dreams. “The
impact could not have been greater,” Shedler recalled,
if his “words had been heralded by celestial trumpets.” He decided that
“if there were people in the world who understood such things, I had to
be one of them.”
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Yet
academic psychology, the field Shedler next entered, meant having that
kind of enthusiasm for the mysteries of the mind drummed out of you;
researchers, he concluded, were committed to quantification and
measurement, but not to the inner lives of real people. To become a
psychoanalyst takes years of training, and it’s compulsory to undergo
analysis yourself; studying the mind at university, by contrast,
requires zero real-life experience. (Shedler is now that rarity, a
trained therapist and researcher, who bridges both worlds.) “You know
that thing about how you need 10,000 hours of practice to develop an
expertise?” he asked. “Well, most of the researchers making
pronouncements [about which therapies work] don’t have 10 hours!”
Shedler’s subsequent research and writing has played a significant
role in undermining the received wisdom that there’s no hard evidence
for psychoanalysis. But it’s undeniable that the early psychoanalysts
were sniffy about research: they were prone to viewing themselves as
embattled practitioners of a subversive art that needed nurturing in
specialist institutions – which in practice meant forming cliquish
private bodies, and rarely interacting with university experimenters.
Research into cognitive approaches thus got a big head start – and it
was the 1990s before empirical studies of psychoanalytic techniques
began hinting that the cognitive consensus might be flawed. In 2004, a meta-analysis concluded
that short-term psychoanalytic approaches were at least as good as
other routes for many ailments, leaving recipients better off than 92%
of all patients prior to therapy. In 2006, a study tracking approximately 1,400 people suffering from depression, anxiety and related conditions ruled in favour of short-term psychodynamic therapy, too. And a 2008 study into borderline personality disorder
concluded that only 13% of psychodynamic patients still had the
diagnosis five years after the end of treatment, compared with 87% of
the others.
These studies haven’t always compared analytic therapies with
cognitive ones; the comparison is often with “treatment as usual”, a
phrase that covers a multitude of sins. But again and again, as Shedler has argued,
the starkest differences between the two emerge some time after therapy
has finished. Ask how people are doing as soon as their treatment ends,
and CBT looks convincing. Return months or years later, though, and the
benefits have often faded, while the effects of psychoanalytic
therapies remain, or have even increased – suggesting that they may
restructure the personality in a lasting way, rather than simply helping
people manage their moods. In the NHS study conducted at the Tavistock clinic
last year, chronically depressed patients receiving psychoanalytic
therapy stood a 40% better chance of going into partial remission,
during every six-month period of the research, than those receiving
other treatments.
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Alongside
this growing body of evidence, scholars have begun to ask pointed
questions about the studies that first fuelled CBT’s ascendancy. In a provocative 2004 paper,
the Atlanta-based psychologist Drew Westen and his colleagues showed
how researchers – motivated by the desire for an experiment with clearly
interpretable results – had often excluded up to two-thirds of
potential participants, typically because they had multiple
psychological problems. The practice is understandable: when a patient
has more than one problem, it’s harder to untangle the lines of cause
and effect. But it may mean that the people who do get studied
are extremely atypical. In real life, our psychological problems are
intricately embedded in our personalities. The issue you bring to
therapy (depression, say) may not be the one that emerges after several
sessions (for example, the need to come to terms with a sexual
orientation you fear your family won’t accept). Moreover, some studies
have sometimes seemed to unfairly stack the deck, as when CBT has been compared with “psychodynamic therapy” delivered by graduate students who’d received only a few days’ cursory training in it, from other students.
But the most incendiary charge against cognitive approaches, from the
torchbearers of psychoanalysis, is that they might actually make things
worse: that finding ways to manage your depressed or anxious thoughts,
for example, may simply postpone the point at which you’re driven to
take the plunge into self-understanding and lasting change. CBT’s
implied promise is that there’s a relatively simple, step-by-step way to
gain mastery over suffering. But perhaps there’s more to be gained from
acknowledging how little control – over our lives, our emotions, and
other people’s actions – we really have? The promise of mastery is
seductive not just for patients but therapists, too. “Clients are
anxious about being in therapy, and inexperienced therapists are anxious
because they don’t have a clue what to do,” writes the US psychologist Louis Cozolino in a new book, Why Therapy Works. “Therefore, it is comforting for both parties to have a task they can focus on.”
Not surprisingly, leading proponents of CBT reject most of these
criticisms, arguing that it’s been caricatured as superficial, and that
some decrease in effectiveness is only to be expected, because it’s
grown so much in popularity. Early studies used small samples and
pioneering therapists, enthused by the new approach; more recent studies
use bigger samples, and inevitably involve therapists with a wider
range of talent levels. “People who say CBT is superficial have just
missed the point,” said Trudie Chalder, professor of cognitive
behavioural psychotherapy at the King’s College Institute of Psychiatry,
Psychology and Neuroscience in London, who argues that no single
therapy is best for all maladies. “Yes, you’re targeting people’s
beliefs, but you’re not just targeting easily accessible beliefs. It’s
not just ‘Oh, that person looked at me peculiarly, so they must not like
me’; it’s beliefs like ‘I’m an unlovable person’, which may derive from
early experience. The past is very much taken into account.”
Nonetheless, the dispute won’t be settled by adjudicating between
clashing studies: it goes deeper than that. Experimenters may reach
wildly different conclusions about which therapies have the best
outcomes. But what should count as a successful outcome anyway? Studies
measure relief of symptoms – yet a crucial premise of psychoanalysis is
that there’s more to a meaningful life than being symptom-free. In
principle, you might even end a course of psychoanalysis sadder – though
wiser, more conscious of your previously unconscious responses, and
living in a more engaged way – and still deem the experience a success.
Freud famously declared that his goal was the transformation of
“neurotic misery into common unhappiness”. Carl Jung said “humanity
needs difficulties: they are necessary for health.” Life is painful.
Should we be thinking in terms of a “cure” for painful emotions at all?
* * *
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There’s something deeply appealing
about the idea that therapy shouldn’t be approached as a matter of
science – that our individual lives are too distinctive to be submitted
to the relentless generalisation by which science must proceed. That
sentiment may help explain the commercial success of The Examined Life,
Stephen Grosz’s 2013 collection of tales from the analyst’s couch,
which spent weeks on UK bestseller lists and has been translated into
more than 30 languages. Its chapters consist not of experimental
findings or clinical diagnoses, but of stories, many of which involve a
jolt of insight as the patient suddenly gets a sense of the depths he or
she contains. There’s the man who lies compulsively, in a bid for
secret intimacy with those he can persuade to join him in deceit, just
like his mother hid evidence of his bedwetting; and the woman who
finally realises how effortfully she’s been denying the evidence of her
husband’s infidelity when she notices how neatly someone has stacked the
dishwasher.
“Each life is unique, and your role, as an analyst, is to find the
unique story of the patient,” Grosz told me. “There are so many things
that only come out through slips of the tongue, through someone
confiding a fantasy, or using a certain word.” The analyst’s job is to
stay watchfully receptive to it all – and then, from such ingredients,
“help people make meaning of their lives.”
Surprisingly, perhaps, recent support for this seemingly unscientific
perspective has emerged from the most empirical corner of the study of
the mind: neuroscience. Many neuroscience experiments have indicated
that the brain processes information much faster than conscious
awareness can keep track of it, so that countless mental operations run,
in the neuroscientist David Eagleman’s phrase, “under the hood” –
unseen by the conscious mind in the driving-seat. For that reason, as
Louis Cozolino writes in Why Therapy Works, “by the time we become
consciously aware of an experience, it has already been processed many
times, activated memories, and initiated complex patterns of behaviour.”
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Depending
on how you interpret the evidence, it would seem we can do countless
complex things – from performing mental arithmetic, to hitting a car’s
brakes to avoid a collision, to making a choice of marriage partner –
before becoming aware that we’ve done them. This doesn’t mesh well with a
basic assumption of CBT – that, with training, we can learn to catch
most of our unhelpful mental responses in the act. Rather, it seems to
confirm the psychoanalytic intuition that the unconscious is huge, and
largely in control; and that we live, unavoidably, through lenses
created in the past, which we can only hope to modify partially, slowly
and with great effort.
Perhaps the only undeniable truth to emerge from disputes among
therapists is that we still don’t have much of a clue how minds work.
When it comes to easing mental suffering, “it’s like we’ve got a hammer,
a saw, a nail-gun and a loo brush, and this box that doesn’t always
work properly, so we just keep hitting the box with each of these tools
to see what works,” said Jules Evans, policy director for the Centre for
the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.
This may be why many scholars have been drawn to what has become known as the “dodo-bird verdict”: the idea, supported by some studies,
that the specific kind of therapy makes little difference. (The name
comes from the Dodo’s pronouncement in Alice in Wonderland: “Everybody
has won, and all must have prizes.”) What seems to matter much more is
the presence of a compassionate, dedicated therapist, and a patient
committed to change; if one therapy is better than all others for all or
even most problems, it has yet to be discovered. David Pollens, in his
Upper East Side consulting room, said he had some sympathy for that
verdict, despite his passion for psychoanalysis. “There was a wonderful
British analyst, Michael Balint, who was very involved in medical
training, and he had a question he liked to pose [to doctors],” Pollens
said. It was: “‘What do you think is the most powerful medication you
prescribe?’ And people would try to answer that, and then eventually
he’d say: ‘the relationship’.”
Yet even this conclusion – that we simply don’t know which therapies
work best – might be seen as a point in favour of Freud and his
successors. Psychoanalysis, after all, embodies just this awed humility
about how little we can ever grasp about the workings of our minds. (The
one question nobody can ever answer, writes the Jungian analyst James Hollis,
is “of what are you unconscious?”) Freud the man scaled heights of
arrogance. But his legacy is a reminder that we shouldn’t necessarily
expect life to be all that happy, nor to assume we can ever really know
what’s going on inside – indeed, that we’re often deeply emotionally
invested in preserving our ignorance of unsettling truths.
“What happens in therapy,” Pollens said, “is that people come in
asking for help, and then the very next thing they do is they try to
stop you helping them.” His smile hinted at the element of absurdity in
the situation – and in the whole therapeutic undertaking, perhaps. “How
do we help a person when they’ve told you, in one way or another, ‘Don’t
help me’? That’s what analytic treatment is about.”
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