8 Strategy of psychotherapy and Self-exploration Modern psychotherapy is plagued by an astonishing lack of agreement among its different schools about the most fundamental questions concerning the functioning and the main motivating forces of the human psyche, the cause, nature, and dynamics of symptoms, and the strategy and technique of psychotherapy. This does not apply only to the schools based on entirely different philosophical assumptions, such as behaviorism, psychoanalysis, and existential therapy, but also to the various branches of depth psychology that evolved historically from the same source, the original work of Sigmund Freud – the Adlerian, Rankian, Jungian, Kleinian, Reichian, and Lacanian schools, ego psychology, and many others. The world of modern psychotherapy resembles a large busy market place, in which it is difficult to orient oneself. Each of the many schools offers a different explanation for the same emotional and psychosomatic disorder and uses a different therapeutic technique. Each of these approaches is presented as the scientific way to understand and treat these problems. It is difficult to envision a similar degree of disagreement in one of the hard sciences. Yet in psychology, we have somehow learned to live with this situation and do not usually even question it or consider it strange. There are no convincing statistical studies showing that one form of psychotherapy is superior to others. The differences seem to be within the schools rather than between them. Psychotherapy is generally as good as the therapist; good therapists of all schools tend to get better results and bad therapists are less successful without regard to their orientation. Clearly, the results of psychotherapy have very little to do with the theoretical concepts of a particular school and with what the therapists think they are doing – the content and the timing of interpretations, analysis of transference, strategic use of silence, and so on. It seems that the factors, which play a critical role in psychotherapy, are very different from those that are usually discussed in professional books. They are also very difficult to describe in scientific terms, as exemplified by such descriptions as “the quality of human encounter between the therapist and the client” or “the client’s feeling of being unconditionally accepted by another human being, often for the first time in his or her life”. Under these circumstances, if we opt as beginning professionals for a certain school of psychotherapy, for example Freudian, Reichian, Jungian, or Sullivanian, it is because we are attracted to it for very personal reasons. It is a purely subjective choice reflecting our own personality structure and it has very little to do with the objective value and scientific accuracy of that particular approach. The work with holotropic states suggests a very interesting alternative: if the experts can not reach agreement, why not to trust one’s own healing intelligence, one’s own inner healer. This approach was first suggested by C. G. Jung. He was aware of the fact that it is impossible to reach intellectual understanding of how the psyche functions and why the symptoms develop and derive from it a technique that makes it possible to correct the psychological functioning of other people. According to Jung, the psyche is not a product of the brain; it is Spirituality Studies 2 (1) Spring 2016 31
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=