Commerce in Abuse
The Client-Therapist Relation
Therapy, in its naive form, sports a partial, or even false,
vision for change, a severe and autocratic purposefulness, which,
with tentacled reach, intrudes the therapeutic attitude into
situations pregnant with change and exploiting them anti-
socially. To handle the terror and trashing of therapeutic
control, you must practice a non-therapy of taking punishment for
standing firm. The therapy contract depends not only on your
consent to it but also on your accommodating the social relation
of contract itself, in the face of issues like channeling,
labeling and stigma. If you don't question the authority of the
therapy structure, and absent litigation, this contract empowers
a kind of scam on society by mutual pleasure, a brittle
conspiracy a deux to convert private transaction to social fact.
While therapy usually proceeds from benign intent, it is
necessary to challenge the philosophy of intentionality, with the
positivist reduction the therapist imposes via the structure of
therapy, irrespective of ideation. If you fail to exhibit a
coherent and convincing style of argument, this won't likely be
read as the intrusion of her reductive power pushing you into an
existential snit. Therapy offers the appearance of negotiations
on individual empowerment, but they are embedded in mutual denial
of the social side of the empowerment problematic. What is taken
to be a harmonious investigation into psychological truth comes
down to a human version of two monkeys contending for status.
The mirrors of therapeutic transactions show many instructive
things, but the real business transacted is the organization of a
relationship into a social institution. At its most meager, this
business is made up of habituations and ego boundary management,
but at a more vital level there is the potentiality of linkage to
reorganizing the society. If you treat, e.g., a depressed
condition as an adjustment problem, you are, in effect,
reinforcing in-turned anger and preventing or obstructing the
energization of social activism. At its best, the helping
practice is tuned to organize energy so that personal growth
resonates with the struggle for social justice.
The immanent kindness and helpfulness of therapy contrasts
with the role of the therapy contract as a pacification program
for upstart social dynamics, albeit ineptly. Missing is the
necessary ideation to identify, forget manage, the social
substrate of consciousness and pick out the social causes of
intrapersonal and interpersonal abuse. There is a terrible want
of social arrangement to identify and rectify historical abuses,
making for a difficult problem in affirmative action. Current
events, such as the Bakke decision, speak to the intricacy of
problems that arise in redressing botched situations in history.
Making Social Dinosaurs
With a non-directive here-and-now orientation, you can bring
to life the present in encounter group format, and individually-
based definitions. Add a semi-directive therapeutic leadership,
and what do you have but a small laboratory in ego boundary
science, with small group based definitions. With therapeutic
cults like est you can get factories for the manufacture of
individuation, whose definitions have a quasi-tribal basis. With
global social conditioning in the style of George Bush, you
obtain a general brainwashing process that therapizes the broad
masses.
The business of the therapeutic system is to create
artificial characters for (allegedly) deficient people, to
instantiate personalities by habituation. The obverse side of
birthing characters is character assassination, the methodology
of disciplining the excessive or inconvenient characters that may
arise. As against the potentiality of a homeostatic arrangement
with ordinary democratic processes regulating the making and
unmaking of adjustments, the authoritarian therapeutic system
empowers extremist hate methods and repressiveness. It inspires
and sustains conventions of abuse such as conformity from the
50's inspired by McCarthyism or yuppie-ism from the 70's whose
impetus derived from Cointelpro.
While you could identify Vision as an antidote to ego
underdevelopment, conventional psychology considers Vision to be
a form of surplus ego for artisans of the boundary-making
process. A person can capitalize on her insight and inspiration,
become an instant guru, achieve a kind of "Marin-think" of
commercialized vision, her immodest foolishness mimicking truth.
By neglecting the social dimension, you can get cheap and flashy
results, but the net result will be a kind of mental pollution, a
negative impact on the social process. The dynamics of glorified
ego adventure, i.e., spiritual meddling, betrays a kind of
isolated mental subsystem, whose phony reality principle can
never actualize the human potential.
So it comes about that therapists generally carry around a
lot of baggage, leading to their facing a radical problem in
socializing the impacts of their personalities. Beware, if you
don't understand the social balance of abuse, if you act with
maximal aggression as you struggle to overcome abuse and help
others to overcome it, that you will manifest abusive features.
You will play the role, of unaware social meddler, widely
practiced but little noted, except in indirect reflections -- the
ways this capacity gets regulated by interpersonal contractual
arrangements. A trained person is liable to convert the working
of her imagination into an exaggerated or disordered personality.
Institutionalized Abuse
The therapeutic paradigm's failure to employ social dynamics
is profoundly irresponsible, in the sense that responsibility
means the ability to respond. Long-standing abuses are, at best,
escaped or avoided, not rectified, and flagrantly abusive
behavior is commonly tolerated rather than disciplined. The
profiteers on this state of affairs are the instant gurus
disseminating instant gratification and the programmers gaming
the insecurities of the public with their novel disciplines.
There is a population of individuals hooked on these practices,
whose fragility must be respected, even as reformers discount and
refocus people's habituated processes for changing themselves.
It would be improper to identify the present counseling
institution, the therapeutic clinic, with its ideal of being a
sanitized ground of helping for a figure of interpersonal
process. Nor would a (fantasized) system imposing fixes for
abuse histories and the retraining of extant abusive patterns
serve as a clean rendering of that interpersonal figure. The
creators of today's institutions imposed the former mode and
shied away from the latter because they believed that they could
control clinical spaces, but lacked a recipe for social factors.
Reform of the present situation means political commitment to the
mediation of social factors relevant to abuse and a psychology of
moral interaction to reconfigure clinical dynamics.
Inter- and intrapersonal work are outgrowths of the mystical
theoretical construct of the unconscious. This metaphor for
mental process is a good salve for the excessively rationalistic
Cartesianism that pervades social discourse, but it is also used
as a theoretical tool to bolster the clinical approach. A more
workaday approach to this process is provided by Uznadze's
psychology of the set, which identifies the mindset of the
individual as the dynamic origin of the processes identified as
"unconscious." The under-content of people's thought, accessed
nowadays by arcane methods such as free association, is really
quite accessible by social methods that challenge the fig leaf
covering the adjustment to repression and sublimation.
Society has bought into the institution of therapy at the
price of tolerating a certain amount of private workspace for
personal growth. The practitioners of self-actualization have
incorporated as therapists by selling off the extreme aspects of
social critique that would embarrass the providers of legitimacy.
A therapeutic system structured to reinforce abuse promotes
itself as the proverbial Emperor's new suit, where everybody by
mutual agreement carefully avoids mention of the delicate
realities. The good will of the therapeutic workers is not the
issue, it is that the therapy trade-off institutionalizes abuse.
The Cult of Ego
The etiology of mental dysfunction, says Freud, is traced by
how the person responded to disturbances of sexuality, especially
infantile sexuality. The thought is that, by affirming your
earliest being, you can keep from being distracted by the
intervening years of bad attitudes toward your feelings.
Psychoanalysis then arranges its process so as to offer you the
opportunity to rework your feelings and get connected with
yourself in maximal isolation from environmental distractions.
Under the rubric of sado-masochism, psychoanalysis accommodates
the social condition of the person as a trauma of society, a
phenomenon thought not susceptible of engagement or remedy.
An ugly consequence of the purging of social engagement and
remedy was the formation by psychiatrists and others of a
eugenics movement which connected mental dysfunction to
(supposed) genetic deficiencies. They inverted their denial of
the social factors, turning the thought back-to-front, and
projected it as an affirmation of biological determinism. Today,
a hard core of medical model positivists has created a second
wave of "no fault," (supposed) neurotransmitter disorders, a neo-
eugenics movement. With reductive zealotry, this trend demands
that people believe in biopsychiatry, while curiously hushing any
concern on the danger posed by denying personal responsibility.
Today's culture of the brush off, of stonewalling, provides
an ambience for the cultivation of hypocrisy and the avoidance of
inconvenient truth. The so-called reality principle or EGO is
promoted from fetish to idol, with the underlying reality
asserted being the maintenance of systems of dominance and
exploitation. This realpolitik has it that, if there be no
alternative to mob psychology than the authoritarian relations of
social privilege, a stylized practicum of ego promotion /
dysfunction is called for. To a biosocial mystique is appended a
social psychology of reckless self-centered arrogance in the fin
de siecle crudeness of the cult of ego.
Whence comes this denial, whence comes this avoidance, whence
comes the principle that society, as presently constituted, is a
moral absolute, a flagpole to wrap yourself around? What is
being avoided is the proletarian cause, the moral obligation to
use knowledge of social process in the interest of social
justice. What is being denied, the very archetypical act of
denial, is the objective character of child abuse, the social
responsibilities inherent in and deriving from substantive
formative experiences. Retrieving the feelings buried by trauma
is only the first step, yet it serves as a cover-up for the
capitulation to patriarchy that prompted Freud's gutting of his
seduction hypothesis.
Challenge Capitalist Social Relations