Posted by badhaircut on February 29, 2004, at 20:51:00
In reply to Re: Don't chase deer » badhaircut, posted by antigua on February 29, 2004, at 10:12:47
> Have you ever chased the deer?
> antiguaOh, yes. For years. Under the supervision of an eclectic therapist and later with a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst. And by myself in journaling and reading and thinking.
And I loved it! That's why the deer-chasing analogy speaks so strongly to me. I've pursued all kinds of insights and intuitions that *felt right*, that resonated, that HAD TO BE REAL. Some of them were undoubtedly authentic in many ways. But they didn't really do much for me except give me a burst of enthusiasm for a few hours. An insight fix.
To be clear, in my case I'm not talking about recovered memories of abuse. Such abuse as I experienced as a child I've always been quite conscious of. I'm talking about the insights on inner motivation and the belief in some magic inner key that's controlling the problems of one's emotional life. The sort of trade that traditional psychotherapy spends one's time on.
The heightened expectation in such a search for *hidden* inner controlling factors means inevitably, I think, looking for at least some things that simply won't be there — including malignant false memories. Even in everyday therapy it means finding things (such as theories about one's subterranean emotional motivations) that are therapeutically useless, even if "true."
As William James asked 100 years ago, if it's useless, how can it be true?
The long, boring story of my disillusionment with insight therapy can be found at
http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20031221/msgs/292577.html
and in the thread above it.-bhc
poster:badhaircut
thread:318184
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/psycho/20040225/msgs/318826.html