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Philosophical Note
The tools of
psychology and psychotherapy can be, and are being used
for two different sets of people. one, the severely and
pathologically disturbed people who are dysfunctional and
cannot cope with reality, and two, the so-called `normal'
people with their states of unhappiness and misery, with
conflicts, but getting on with degrees of confidence and
competence with the tasks of daily life.
The first group is often given labels and shunned by our
society although many a times, their condition is the
product of the conditions prevailing in their families
and in the society. The extremely dehumanising trends of
oppression and violence existing in the society have
their effect of creating severe tensions in many
individuals whose innate instincts are towards creation
of love and harmony. The result is that they lose their
sense of balance. The institutions for the treatment and
cure of such individuals hardly solve the problem. The
concept of half-way houses which are more rehabilitative
in their approach is an example of a radically different
way of treating these persons.
The second set of people as mentioned earlier, are those
who cope with life and the tasks of living with varying
degrees of functionality. These degrees of functionality
or effectiveness are dependent on many factors. But
generally, it has been theorised, that once the basic
needs of food, shelter, and security are met, human
beings aspire for growth, for realisation of their
selves, for spiritual transcendence. Just before Abraham
Maslow's death, he wrote that he had discovered there
were two types of self-actualisers: non-transcenders and
transcenders, "those who were clearly healthy, but
with little or no experiences of transcendence, and those
in whom transcendent experiencing was important and even
crucial1". One type of person seemed"
practical, realistic, mundane, capable, and secular"
while the other was motivated more by a unity
consciousness and a sense of destiny, having had"
illuminations or insights or cognitions which changed
their view of the world and of themselves." Of
course, mild neuroses, anxieties, and conflicts are
present but growing or evolving individuals learn to deal
effectively with these.
The personal growth work of our team over the last 10
years has been with this second set of people. Our aim
has been to help evoke the latent potential in the health
care professionals and development workers, to help
release the creative energies within individuals. This
has not been sought as an end in itself, but as a means
to a wider goal of social transformation. For, as more of
us are healed, we seek to reach out and help others to be
healed.
The aim of this chapter is to provide the holistic health
practitioner with an understanding of the historical
development of various schools of psychology and
psychotherapy. Against this background, a framework of
looking at personality s described by two
psychotherapists, Roberto Assagioli and Jacquelyn Small,
will be elaborated. Their concepts of stages of growth or
evolution of a personality will be described. And the
final section will outline specific exercises that
holistic health practitioners can use in their growth
groups or work with individuals. Some cases of persons
who have worked through their psychosynthesis and
transformation are included.A Historical
Perspective of Schools of Psychotherapy
Therapists today
in the Western World are the heirs to the priest class,
shamans dressed up in a new professional garb. In the
more underdeveloped societies, in many parts of rural
India too, the priest and the `bhua' still perform the
function of the therapist.
__________
- Abraham Maslow. The
Father Reaches of Human Nature. Viking
Press, New York, 1970
- Joel Kovel. A
complete Guide to Therapy. Pelican
Books, Penguin Books Ltd., England, 1978.
The first `modern'
therapist to be traced is Anton Mesmer (1734 - 1815), an
Austrian. Through his life's work on healing magnetism,
he discovered a technique - suggestion for altering the
play of mental forces in his subjects and so produced
remarkable, if short lived changes in behaviour,
including the `cure' of neurotic phenomena of the
hysterical kind. Mesmer's work petered away, but was
rejuvenated towards the close of the nineteenth century
in France by Jean-Martin Charcot(1825-93) and his rival,
Hippolyte Bearheim (1840-1919).
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) studied with Charcot and joined
the late nineteenth century debate on hypnosis. His
achievement lay however, in vastly extending our grasp of
something hypnosis and afforded but a glimpse, of the
unconscious. Freud provided the first and still the
definitive theory, for conceptualising the irrational in
rational terms. His work was much more than a therapy
based on this theory, it was, rather, a new outpost of
the scientific approach. Whatever the fate of Freudian
psychoanalysis as an institution, for it has already sunk
to a relatively minor role so far as the actual
therapeutic practice goes, Freud with his methods and
central insight remains the founding father of modern
psychotherapy. All of the analytic schools of
psychotherapy derive directly from Freud, while many of
the nonanalytic therapies owe much of their impetus to
ideals introduced by him. Adler, Jung, Rank, Horny,
Reich, Fromm, Perls, Berne all share a common inheritance
of Freudian psychoanalysis.
For all its complexity, Freudian therapy is defined by a
rather limited set of criteria: theoretically, by an
emphasis on infantile sexuality and dynamically repressed
unconscious mental processes; and in practice by what is
called the Basic Rule, that is, the imperative to say
whatever comes to mind, as well as by attention to
resistance, that is, blocks in the past in the
therapeutic setting.
Following Freud, were Carl Jung (1875-1961) and Alfred
Adler (1879-1937). Jung minimized the importance of
infantile sexuality and introduced a drastically
different, expanded idea of the unconscious, while Alder
played down the sexuality and the unconscious altogether
and focused instead on social factors and what might be
called `egoistic' elements - assertiveness, striving for
power, self-esteem, etc.
Jung and Alder defined two main types of alternate
approaches, the transcendent and the social, and most
subsequent analytic schisms have occured along these
lines, especially the Adlerian. Included among such
approaches - which are usually termed (with little
justification or usefulness to anyone) Neo-Freudian - re
the schools have had wide influence in the United States,
especially in the fields of education and social work.
Two other schools of therapy that originated in close
connection with Freudian analysis were the existential
analysis and the Reichian school. Existential analysis
originated in Central Europe and was founded on the
philosophical principles of Kierkegaard, Husserl, and
Heidegger, and was developed by psychiatrists such as
Ludwig Binswanger (1881-1966) and Medard Boss (b.1903).
This school has been developed further by Rollo May and
R.D. Laing.
Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957)defined his early efforts in
relation to freud. Reich was a leading psychoanalyst but
became increasingly preoccupied with the biological
sources of neurosis. Thus from psychoanalysis came orgone
therapy (after the form of `life energy' Reich claimed to
have discovered), and from that bioenergetic
therapy, which is Reichian Therapy stripped of the orgone
hypotheis.
Reichian therapy has influenced therapeutic practice at
many levels. The important contemporary approach of
Gestalt therapy developed by F.S. perls (1893-1970) was
influenced by Reich (through Paul Goodman), Jung and
Freud as well as by Gestalt psychology, the school of
academic psychology to which it owes its name. One of the
most important approaches to human psychology has been
developed by the psychologist carl Rogers (b.1902).
Rogers has to be acknowledged as the main person for
bringing the psychological profession into the business
of therapy, thus breaking the monopoly that medicine and
its psychiatric speciality long held.
Other prominent contemporary approaches to therapy rely
on group experiences. At times, groups are
conducted along psychoanalytic lines which make them
prolonged and lengthy. At times, they are of a brief and
intense nature; the encounter movement in which
Rogerian and Gestalt therapy have played important roles,
transactional analysis founded by Eric Berne and
Werner Erhard's EST are examples of these. These are all
part of what may be called the human potential
approach.
The main point about therapies such as these latter ones
is that, rather than give the patient a traditional and
asymmetric relationship with a helping doctor, therapist,
or some other expert, they attempt to produce an altered
life experience with peers and a leader - guide who are
to directly affect the person and somehow `open' him or
her up. All such therapies are greatly indebted also to
the psychodrama of J.L. Moreno (who introduced the
concept of group therapy itself back in 1932). A similar
notion that direct alternation of the living unit of
personal life would change neurotic behaviour for the
better - also underlined the major recent development of
family therapy.
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