Opening of the Way

Well some have said that Psychotherapy works well when the therapist lives in more non-conformist ways than the client.

But this is usually not the case though because the clients tend to be more socially marginalized, whereas the therapist enjoys a good degree of wealth and legitimation.

I imagine that when David Smale did therapy sessions that they were more like Philosophical Counseling, and that this new Diagnostic Manual is intended to steer it more that way.

Please tell me if I am correct.

Okay, but do we really want people making appointments with counselors of any type?  How about peer relationships and political activism?

If John Brown had consulted with a therapist, would he have raided Harper's Ferry?

If Huey Newton and Bobby Seale had consulted with a therapist, would they have founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and then approached Oakland Police while carrying fire arms?

Would suffragettes in jail have gone on hunger strike, if they had first consulted with a therapist?

Here Shari Karney, she did see a therapist, but only for a while.  Then she committed herself and worked tirelessly to find a way around SOL's, finally just having to get the laws changed.  This took about 10 years and involved much conflict.  But as she said on her web page, this is why the US Roman Catholic Church has had $2 billion in judgments against it.

Excellent made for TV movie:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108110/

I believe that if she stayed in therapy, or was the sort of person who would stay in therapy, then her legal fight never would have proceeded.

Karney is a survivor of early childhood familial sexual molestation.  And she never was able to sue her own parents.  But she opened the door to all such suits, though most have been against large institutions.  Seems to me that people are still not ready to deal with abuse within The Family.

But no one would ever accuse Karney of just doing nothing, or of aiding the perpetrators.  She is ferocious.

So I put this forward as a question, and please tell me if I am wrong or right.  Seems to me that a universal among therapists is that they are not interested in political fights over anything other than therapy.  They are certainly not interested in revolutionary activities.  Their view is that the issues and the solutions exist between the client's two ears.  While they won't anymore do like Freud and call the client's liars, they still see the client's basic complaints as being unimportant.  Rather their objective is to help the client learn to live with things as they are.

So I ask this as a question, and it is the basis of my claim that all forms of Psychotherapy revolve around something like Original Sin.

Other's knowing more than me have said this about Freud, that it is all based on a religious world view, and that it comes down the client being the one who is wrong.

I see Life Coaching as wrong or foolish for the same reasons.  But Life Coaching is likely to be shorter term and of more narrow focus, and it is not government endorsed.

In the 70's feminist groups would meet and discuss things like Incest, ****, and other horrors of a life restricted to domesticity.  They saw these rightly so as political issues.

But in the 80's concern of these issues spread to a broader and hence more conservative portion of the populace.

Hence, it all became fodder for Therapy and Recovery.

Susan Faludi


https://www.amazon.com/Rocking-Cradle-Sexual-Politics-Happened/dp/0201624710

Today I read that psychotherapists say that the number one concern of millennials is that they will not be able to save enough money to retire.

Okay, so is their therapist going to change anything about this?

Why are they not at political meetings and in political protests and writing political articles, to try and bring this country to Social Democracy, and to end this politics of private wealth accumulation and of inflating the stock and real estate markets?

When one emerges from the office of their therapist, what objective circumstance of their life has changed?

I say, only if you believe in Original Sin, would you say that something has changed.

Yes, the clients are part of the problem, they seem to always be attached to reactionary social and political views, and to me this is the real source of their problem.

But you don't find therapy clients leading the charge for legal redress.  In a civilized society wrongs are redressed by law suits.  And most other industrialized countries do not even allow disinheritance.  But try to talk about this with therapy clients and they are mortified.  They don't want to even look at such ideas, because that would mean breaking out of the fantasy which therapy has created with its bad models of cognition, and seeing just how abusive this world really is.

I talk online to people from other countries and they talk about how their parents abused them.  I ask them about their country's inheritance laws, and they have zero knowledge of such.  And I am talking here about even civil law countries where the client will not even need a lawyer to collect.  Therapy has put them into this world, created by reflected memories made into a story line, and this is not how cognition works.

Where you find people who want to fight, its in those like Shari Karney and in those like the Munchausen's Survivor Julie Gregory, people who very early on excused themselves from Psychotherapy and Recovery.

Gregory ends her book, not in therapy, but dialing Montana CPS, because her mother has got a foster child, and a whole new pile of medical books, and she seems to be doing the same stuff all over again.

So I feel that the basic premise of therapy is that it is better to keep it within the therapist's office.  If this were not true, then therapists would have vast experience and knowledge about legal and political fights.

We want people hooking up with political comrades, people who are willing to take to the barricades.

What does the therapist think their sessions do, unless they believe in Original Sin or otherwise have a low opinion of the client?

Jeffrey Masson says that virtually all of the stuff discussed with a therapist would be better discussed in some other venue.  I have yet to see anything myself which contradicts this.

Deleuze and Guattari say that Psychoanalysis, but meaning Psychotherapy too, have been created by Captialism and that they are completely parasitic.

There is this 4 hour BBC documentary, Century of Self.  It is a deep and cutting critique of all forms of Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and Psychology, and its effect on politics.

They start by showing this Psychoanalysts Ball held annually in Vienna.  People say that because of Psychoanalysis, people can speak freely.  Example, say someone is a maid.  If they tried to complain about this they would be rebuked for not accepting their social position.

Whereas with Psychoanalysis they are free to say what they feel.

Well, is this really true?  A most basic area will be the exploitation and abuses which are the middle-class family.  So the client starts to speak.  But does the therapist really side with them?  Usually the therapist will say things which tend to exonerate the parents, and which tend to excuse what happened as being of the past, the old pedagogy manuals.

And Jeffrey Masson writes that it is part of the training to at a certain point stop listening and shift to drying to get the client to accept what has happened and to forgive.

And isn't it true that Psychotherapy is just Pedagogy Round 2?

Try to get the client to kneel down and worship the Holy Family, while acknowledging that there have been mistakes and errors, and that the old pedagogy manuals were worse than the new ones.

But the client must not see that the entire system is rotten, and all Pedagogy Manuals are just lessons in how to abuse children and get away with it.  The angry client is to be turned into a helpless neurotic.