Part 3, Change

This will be the final post in the series. I started out enthusiastic but am losing steam. Ventura did such a good job of describing the wisdom of psychotherapy's elders that my attempt to summarize is going to be inadequate, no matter what. Will just quote a few more things and call it a day. My mental health is suffering enough.

Since I’m not an insider, but not exactly an outsider either, my “voice” might be of limited value. Still, as a person, I deserve to be heard. Pages 5 and 6 of the Elders document are about therapists taking positions on social issues. “The very fact that you’re neutral is a position,” said Hillman. There is nothing neutral about a political act, and taking a stand is political. A therapist’s mission is to awaken a sense of responsibility. How is this done? Erving Polster suggests extending psychotherapy into communities of large therapy groups, available for a lifetime. Therapists would “institutionalize friendship and group connection… and become, in effect, therapeutic community organizers and leaders.” Another elder, Mary Catherine Bateson, said, “All of us are complicit in a world system that maintains poverty and leads to environmental degradation.” To the question of political timidity, she said, “we’re using a lot of our energy to repress and stop thinking about the asymmetries in our relationship to the rest of the world.” Etc. Etc. Etc.

As mentioned in part 1, I attended the 2009 conference. When it was over, I spent my last night in California at a bed and breakfast in Newport Beach. It was a relief to be out of there, quite frankly. Although the training was superb, ultimately I would walk away from an internship and abandon the idea of becoming a therapist.

The End

(Newport Beach, 2009)

Part 2, A Moral Choice

The way we deal with our need for power is key, says William Glasser, another one of my personal favorite elders. The question of whether power is treatable is an interesting one. Continuing with Ventura’s article, he describes elder Thomas Szasz as “the longtime gadfly of traditional psychiatry.” An annoyance. Szasz sees pharmacology plus managed care as a deadly combination.

Yet another elder, Cloe Madanes, sees our violent behavior toward one another as the culprit. Because of this, “relationships are the battlefield of treatment.” Interestingly, in her expansion of the idea, she actually – maybe inadvertently, or not – advocates something that would ultimately lead all potential clients away from psychological services. “We have to organize people to help themselves, and organize them to change their relationships and determine their own future,” she says.

The gadfly took it further. Since the government controls managed care, Szasz says, therapists would in essence be colluding with “the government-instigated idea of who fits in and who doesn't.” Standing against that would mean risking their livelihoods in pursuit of mental health for all.

At this point, nobody cheered and nobody booed. Seems the audience was being asked to make “a moral choice that they were unprepared to face.” But a “collective national strike” is what another elder suggested was needed. James Hillman has made numerous appearances in my blog. While the topic of power as a treatable problem had already been raised, here was Hillman suggesting audience members use their power as essential workers to strike. The demand of the mental health care workers would not be monetary. It would be “for justice and compassion toward their patients – strike against bureaucracies, strike against managed care, strike against pharmacological quick fixes that often don't work.”

Political engagement is reactionary, though. People trained in anger management are by that very training cut off from staging a strike. Hamstrung by professional ethics, therapists typically don’t concern themselves with their clients’ political lives.

I invite you, dear reader, to engage with what I’ve written here. It’s an attempt at summarizing pages 3 and 4 of Ventura’s article. My intention is to write two more posts, covering the remaining four pages.

Dialogue: The Myth of Psychotherapy
James Hillman, PhD and Sue Johnson, PhD

December 2009, Evolution of Psychotherapy

(I snapped this photo from the audience)

Part 1, A World Gone Mad

I recently heard that a good way to tell a story is to arrive late and leave early. With that in mind, I’m starting with notes I took yesterday about an article written in 2006, one that I just discovered (maybe around the time I heard the chestnut about approaching writing as if you are going to a party). I now wish I’d seen the article in 2009. “The Wisdom of the Elders: Psychotherapy’s Elders Throw Down the Gauntlet” by Michael Ventura is a commentary on a psychological conference that is held every few years. If I had read it before volunteering at the 2009 conference, I would have walked in with different expectations. At the time, I was completing my coursework for a master’s degree in professional counseling. My practicum supervisor suggested I attend the conference as a volunteer, not only for the experience but to get a significant discount on admission.

Ventura’s article starts with a description of the conference site. It brought back my memories of staying in a hotel within walking distance. Both hotel and convention center are located directly across the street from Disneyland. While walking to and fro between hotel and conference, the sound of people screaming on the rides was constant. So, imagine my surprise while reading the opening paragraph:

"The Anaheim Convention Center, site of last December's ‘Evolution of Psychotherapy’ conference [2005], is a monument to the impersonal: antiseptic cavernous halls; inhumanly and impractically high ceilings; enormous, featureless rooms; and escalators almost the length of a city block. Its decor consists of hard and soft grays and whites, relentlessly neutral and acoustically dead. Without a microphone, no one can hear you, even if you scream.”

The screams coming from Disneyland were inaudible inside that “monument to the impersonal,” too.

I need to take a step back here. This is not a report on the conference, and it’s not just a review of the article. It’s my attempt to step back in time to remember a significant event, that conference. There is so much to tell and I don’t know where to begin. I learned in the article that “Patch Adams” himself was a guest at the 2005 conference. Last night, I watched a video of him speaking in 2010. He says this country, the United States, rewards fame rather than intelligence. His clowning has made him famous and on his tours he spreads an impassioned and intelligent message. Perhaps this comment by one of the viewers of the video sums it up: “No price should be placed on well-being, ever.”

Hunter Doherty “Patch” Adams gave the keynote speech at the 2005 conference. The speech was, according to plan, supposed to address mental illness as a normal response to disaster that requires not medication but a call for action to create healthy contexts. Ventura mused upon why a keynote clown was an appropriate tone-setter for a gathering whose stated theme was a call to social action.

Thinking about this today, I wonder whether sending in the clowns might be just the thing. Burn the place down and dance on the ashes with Bozo and his compadres. Why not? We’re never going to “all get along,” so let’s just laugh our way through what’s left. Of course, I’m joking! We need a lot more than laughter, and yet maybe we also need more laughter.

I’m grateful to Ventura for documenting his experience at that conference. I intend to write more about it idays to come. The article, after all, is eight pages long and what I’m covering today doesn’t even include the first two pages. He uses the word “wag” to describe someone he met who characterized the elders as Sinatras. (Frank liked clowns, didn’t he?) Business as usual, the status quo, occupied “much of what was presented,” Ventura writes.

We are now twenty years into the 21st century, which ends at the strike of midnight on the eve ushering in New Year’s Day 2101. In other words, the century is both 20% over and 80% unlived, yet to be experienced. The conference sessions dealing with the historical impact of therapy during these 100 years were mostly led by “radical visionaries... over 80.” The swan song of the Sinatras seemed to be, “What larger role can psychotherapy play in a world gone mad?”

Thus ends Part 1.

(Photo taken December 2009 in the Anabella Hotel lobby)