Tag Archives: Therapy

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 4.3

28 Friday Aug 2020

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The last post concerning this book may be found here:

In the last section of the chapter In Defense of the Analytic Attitude, Rieff comes to the questions of Freud’s “children,” those who followed after him. This question of Freud’s descendants will comprise the majority of the remaining book. At this point, Rieff looks generally at psychoanalysts, with some mention of Adler and Jung. Jung will also get an entire chapter of consideration.

Rieff notes some basic elements of a system. There is a canon, or a source of authority: “Every science has its established body of authoritative makers of opinion.” (69) There is also a system of conveying that knowledge through education. Rieff notes the poor quality of the education, which rather than delivery intellectually inquisitive analysts who can quarrel with their “father,” “Those post-Freudian analysts who remain orthodox never have had that healthy bout of rebelling which sharpens orthodoxy.” (84)

He lays a great deal of the trouble to analysis being made a branch of medicine. The discipline thus took on a non-productive empiricism and reductionism which was counterproductive to the process of analysis.

There is also the tendency to fall away from Freud’s anti-commitment. In the Freudian there are simply powerful psychic forces which seek for place in the functioning of the human being; there are also countervailing forces which seek to limit the demands of the id. There is then a negotiated peace of the ego.

Freud’s work was to merely lay bare the process of these competing forces: one welling up in the individual; the other pressing down from the outside, mediated by an internalization in the individual. To maintain an objective distance, and to prevent the patient from being brought into a more intimate relationship with the therapist, there is the necessity of the fee. The fee acts to “guarantee the essential impersonality behind the ostensibly intensely personal character of the psychoanalytic relationship.” (87)

But the pressure will always be present to select a new system of symbolic commitment to make such a competition of forces and the resolution of such forces into a meaningful whole. 

Freud’s goal was to make men “free”: you could do what you wanted with your own forces welling up and forcing tapping down. There was a need for strength to understand these forces and to not succumb to any system which would soften the blow and make the resolutions on its own terms. 

But the power of such knowledge proves too much, oftentimes, “For inevitably, at a certain point of societal power, knowledge seeks to transform itself into faith.” (83)

Jung did this by means of a “God [] rendered completely interior. The ‘Thou’ term becomes a function of ‘I.’” (83) But since Jung will receive a chapter, he is presented briefly. 

Here Rieff directs some attention to Adler’s political theory of analysis. Rather than deal with the ambiguity of a multiplicity of forces and turns in the individual life, Adler however sought a single master narrative, an explanation which gathered up all the individual examples into a single force and competition. 

Adler’s theory of an “inferiority complex.” Rieff explains Adler in terms of Adler’s socialism and class war. The feeling of “organ inferiority.” The North American Soceity of Adlerian Pyschology summarizes it thus:

Adler photo
Alfred Adler

“In his youth, Adler was a sickly child, which caused him embarrassment and pain. These early experiences with illnesses and accidents probably account for his theory of organ inferiority and were the foundation for his theories on inferiority feelings. According to Adler, each individual has a weak area in his or her body–organ inferiority, which tends to be the area where illness occurs, such as the stomach, head, heart, back, lungs, etc. Adler said that to some degree every emotion finds expression in the body. From his understanding of organ inferiority, Adler began to see each individual as having a feeling of inferiority.”

Rieff explains this in terms of Adler’s transformation of psychoanalysis into politics.

“Viewed thus, Alder’s psychology reveals the quality of his socialism; it was, said Freud, characterized by (1) protest and (2) self-assertion, the aggrandizement of personality. Here is a sudden swoop down into the very bowels of the socialist dynamic, with its inevitable cult of personality wherever it triumphs.” (81)

Rieff quotes Freud further on Adler’s system, “The view of life which is reflected in the Adlerian system is founded exclusively on the aggressive impulse; there is no room in it for love. It might surprise one that such a cheerless view of life should meet with any attention at all.” (82)

Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, 3.1 (Community and Therapy)

07 Tuesday Jul 2020

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The prior post on Triumph of the Therapeutic may be found here.

Community and Therapy, Chapter 3

In this chapter, Rieff begins with an understanding of mental health as provided by means of a symbolic system. By means of a symbolic system, the society creates a matrix in which the individual person can achieve a character ideal. To be a functioning person, the person must belong to a “positive community” which “offers some sort of salvation to the individual through participant membership.” (60)

In this scenario, the system works if the individual functions reasonably well. The system will need a sufficiently robust symbolic format and mechanism for involvement in that system. 

For the individual to function well, the individual not may but must participate in the communal life: it was only the life of the community that the life of any individual would be sufficiently well served.

Rieff then subsumes the history religion and culture into a concept of therapy:

Ultimately, it is the community that cures. The function of the classical therapist is to commit the patient to the symbol system of the community, as best he can and by whatever techniques are sanctioned. (57)

Rousseau provided a seeming break from this concept by introducing the idea that the individual must break free from the confinements of the community. But in the end, Rousseau ended up in the same place, because he merely posited the creation of a new community in the future.  

Marx took Rousseau a step further and argued that the community was utterly broken and that all that currently existed is cash interactions. But Marx was still looking for a community, just a new future community where the individual could finally be integrated into the communal whole.

From a slightly different perspective, De Tocqueville considered the possibility of a wholly democratic society where all communal bounds would be broken down and all life would be private.

But for all that, Rieff contends that prior to Freud, mental health was a matter sociology: it was obtained by means of integrating the individual to the society’s system to simultaneously define and give room for expression of the individual. 

At this point, Rieff places Freud as the one who provides a therapy to the individual when no positive community exists. 

Rieff, Triumph of the Therapeutic, 2.3 (Culture)

11 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by in Culture, Freud

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Rieff ends the chapter “The Impoverishment of Western Culture” with a movement from the individual aspects to the way which these individual attitudes playout across a culture:

“Every culture is an institutionalized system of moral demands, elaborating the conduct of personal relations, a cosset of compelling symbols.” ( 52)

The system which surrounds the individual consists of a cultural wide system of both (1) moral demands, which is expressed by means of “compelling symbols.” Freud provided a mechanism to understand and resist those symbols.

Moreover, Freud’s system made it impossible for anyone to again try and resurrect and impose the fading moral order:

No moral demand system could ever again compel at least the educated classes to that inner obedience which bound men to rules they themselves could not change except at the expense of spirit, far beyond the usefulness of such rules to the continuance of cultural achievement.

Freud believed he had put human beings – at least educated human beings – beyond the power of some system to impose upon human beings moral demands which they did not personally find necessary. 

Rieff saw material comforts “rising expectations” as sufficient to stave off the ascetic strain of morality.  We can simply use “analysis and art” as a substitute for religion.

We were now in a place where only a “yielding demand system” could possibly hold sway (53). 

We keep seeing ourselves at the end of history, where this will just be the conclusion.

Rieff’s conclusion that Freud had created a stable place of yielding seems to fail with a vengeance. The moral demands may have changed (one must believe that biological sex is a social construct, and so on) from prior morality. That may make it appear to be “liberating”. But we are seeing moral demands as strict as anything which has been witnessed in any religion. People are keeping lists. Public displays of piety are mandatory. 

It seems that Freud may have provided a tool to go after a morality of one sort of sexual limitation, but he did not free humanity from any sort of exclusively personal moral freedom. 

Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic 2.2 (Therapy as Re-Education)

12 Tuesday May 2020

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The previous post on Rieff may be found here. 

Therapy as Re-Education

Rieff has a useful understanding of therapy in contrast religion (which in the case of Freud would be Christianity of Judaism) which Rieff refers to as “older moral pedagogies.” (45) The prior moral system required one “concentrating on the life of trying to order the warring parts of the personality into a hierarchy.” (45).

This ordering of one’s competing demands and impulses is done in accord with the requires of a “positive community” which promised “a kind of salvation” for such accord. (43).

Freud and therapy provide a completely different manner of understanding one’s self. Rather looking at the various “impulses” as a matter of good or bad, higher or lower, one should consider demands as “a jostling democracy of contending predispositions”. (46-47)

Freud realized that this new means of understanding the various “impulses” would result in a subversions of the expectations of life. In particular, the position of the “father” would be particularly subverted, because the position of father takes the position of maintaining of “repressive command”. (47).

Now it may be thought that Freud encourages immorality. But the understanding of the impulses as there does not necessarily result in the encouragement of acting on such impulses.  What Freud did do was seek to exhaust a sense of guilt built upon these moralities.

At this point, Reiff makes a rather self-contradicting argument. Freud’s analysis:

Help[s] us distinguish between guilt on one hand and a sense of guilt on the other, between responsibility for an offense committed and fantasies about offenses intended or merely imagined, seems a moral as a well as a therapeutic aim.

This argument seems to be that the older moral orders merely imposed a “fantasy” of moral order in exchange for a promise of salvation as contrasted one making a conscious decision based upon “responsibility.”  Upon what moral basis could one determine concern for “responsibility”?

There is not any rational basis for responsibility. You could say I would like to avoid whatever I might see as a negative consequence (like avoiding imprisonment) was rational – but seeing a connection between the consequence and the result does not determine whether I should not engage in the conduct. The decision to avoid the behavior to avoid the consequence is a moral decision. Granted it is a very limited morality (I want to avoid negative consequence), but it is still a moral decision.

If the negative consequence is less than imprisonment or death, than what do we mean by “responsibility”? Does he that I could care about what my behavior would do to another? That would be a moral decision.

The only sort of amoral decision would be one where I see the consequence and have not concern for the consequence.

Perhaps the concept is that I can decide whether I wish to abide by the moral code I see raised by my “impulse”. But one still must made a decision to be moral; that decision may have a very habitual basis, but it is not a reflex in the sense of blinking an eye.

Indeed the decision to forgo an “older moral paradigm” is itself a moral decision.

Freud may make one explicitly conscious of the moral decision. Freud also grants a certain sort of sanction to forgo moral decisions (this is an evil desire, it is just a desire – evil is what I have been taught to call this desire; but the desire is not in itself evil). All Freud has done lay the basis for a new morality where personal desire is necessarily good.

Thus, therapy is a matter of “re-education” into a new basis for morality.

Philip Rieff: The Triumph of the Therapeutic.3 (Religion and Therapy)

14 Tuesday Apr 2020

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On page 27, Rieff interprets religion in terms of therapy. Religion creates mechanisms for “therapeutic” control and remission: it is a mechanism for responding to and dolling out “instinct.”  The distinctions between religions are largely uninteresting except in the efficacy of providing for a means of successful in providing for “continuity of mood.”

There really is no question concerning truth or falsity; there is no morally objective right: that is the analytic posture of Freud. What Freud has done is to strip out all of the accidents, the fungible elements and consider only the real effect of religion: what and how well it controls and expressions the instincts. Thus, “The analytic attitude is an alternative to all religious ones.” (29)

There is an interesting charting of the similarity and distinctive nature of therapy and religion:

Similarities: (1) the patient or adherent must be honest “in performance”. Gravity cares very little for my position; but for either religion or analysis to “work,” I must be honest in my presentation. As a corollary, I must be “receptive” for the process to work. In short, the process must be internalized to have effect.

The divergence in the ways in which the character can be transformed.

Rieff here makes an interesting observation: While Freud is often seen as revolutionary, he actually is not poised to create some new revolutionary culture. “Freud appears as a defender of high culture.” (29) In the remainder of the book, Rieff contrasts Freud which his disciples who set far more revolutionary goals.

Since Freud’s analysis works upon the character, the eventual effect is a work upon the culture. As such it is not set to remake the world at the level of official politics, but rather at the level of the “mind.”

Freud came about because the “inherited moral systems have failed us.” (30) Since the inherited systems no longer function at a cultural level, the world was ripe for Freud to provide some mechanisms to shore up the psyche and permit human beings to function.

“The religious question: How are we to be consoled for the misery of living?” (23) Christianity and Judaism did not seek to make us happy, but to console us in our misery (although not said, you will have heaven later). Freud did not promise happiness, either; rather, he simply sought “less misery”. (30)

As such, Freud birthed an as yet not fully developed “psychological man” who has a “durable sense of well-being”. (32) This man has the capacity to make some sense out of the chaos of his psyche and the world about him. Morality is “that which is conducive to increased activity.” (33)

Freud preserved “the very notion of tradition,” by preserving a mechanism for understanding what was taking place with humanity. The theologians will find Freud helpful, because they need – as Archbishop Temple said was needed, “a theology based on psychology.” (33)

Rieff proposes that Jung has provided that psychology upon which the theologians can begin to build.

Philip Rieff, Trumph of the Therapeutic.1

07 Tuesday Apr 2020

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Introductory: Toward a Theory of Culture

If I am tracking Rieff correctly at the beginning, he speaks of the older forms of culture which fell apart in 19th Century; a culture which in particular utilized a religious form as the means of “controlling the infinite variety of panic and emptiness to which they are disposed.” (3) A culture is a mechanism which makes possible a communal understanding such that the people can live with one another and themselves.

A culture permits its members to “sublimate”, a process of renunciation and from that the creation of something greater.

But throughout the 19th century there was a “deconversion” form a “series of symbols” to a superior “system of symbols – Science”. (6) This system, which Rieff compares to a stiff collar is in process of being changed. Freud sought to “soften” the collar; others have sought to take it altogether off.

Freud saw as a necessary the elements of coercion and renunciation to the maintenance of a culture. This process of renunciation works itself out in sublimation, which the creation of cultural artifacts of value within the culture.

Here is where becomes interesting: There are those who seek not merely to soften the collar but rather to remove it altogether. They seek a culture with no aspect of renunciation. Rieff refers to this as a cultural suicide. It is a religion of self; thus, apparently something without any culture, because culture “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” (3)

This is an anti-culture of intellectuals Rieff describes as “the most elaborate act of suicide that Western intellectuals have ever staged.” (7)

He sees a force toward an atomization of the individual and the countervailing force toward structures which permit communal life. “Every culture must establish itself as a system of moralizing demands”. (8)

He then comes to the “unreligion of the age”, the “therapeutic” which has “nothing at stake beyond the manipulatable sense of well-being.” Prior culture had mechanisms to permit renunciation, provide for sublimation and provide a type of judgment, admonitions and reassurances. (11) There is a type of human aimed by such a mechanism. And when the culture changes the nature of human “perfection” changes. (8)

It should be noted that the mechanisms do not seek merely the complete extirpation of desires. In reference to Christian asceticism, the aim was “control and complete spiritualization” of sexual desire. (13).

Speaking of modern culture (at the time of his writing in the 1960’s) he noted that the movement of sexual desire was away from renunciation toward “release”. The previous “desire” has become a “need”. (13)

And so, since the previous religious (primarily) culture makers have failed to communicate their symbolic vision to others in an inherently compelling way, “We are probably witnessing the end of a cultural history dominated by book religious and word-makers.” (15)

We have moved to a therapeutic culture of individualized management of the self for a sense of well-being, “With the arts of psychiatric management enhanced and perfected, men will come to know one another in ways that could facilitate total socialization without a symbolic of communal purpose.” (17)

“Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.” (19)

Thus, what may have been before considered immoral may be rejected if it is seen in a therapeutic light of “enhancing one’s sense of well-being.” (21)

What is not mentioned in this end of individualized well-being (particularly as to sexual desires) brought about without a cultural control which applies to others is the conflict of my desire and your counter-desire. The history after Rieff has witnessed a contrast of predators and then the pain or remorse or shame or ruin of their prey. But on what account can they be accounted wrong? We have to reach back to prior categories that do not quite make sense.

We have the question as to why “consent” carries sufficient moral weight to require imprisonment. I’m not saying by any stretch that non-consensual actions are morally good. But rather that consent is made to carry enormous moral weight.

Consent is a difficult matter, because it raises all sorts of questions of moral ability, freewill, influence, excessive influence and such. Moreover, those questions of human moral capacity do not fit easily into a naturalistic empiricism. The moral reasoning which underlies such matters borrows from other understandings of human value.

We are also seeing the emergence of a new sort of insistent moral reasoning respecting sexual desire which is every bit as demanding as any parody of previous Western moralities (influenced obviously by Christianity). Indeed, this new religiously insistent morality sees it perfectly fit to end the public life of those who violate the rules (whatever those rules may be).

A new therapy for PTSD

31 Tuesday May 2016

Posted by in Biblical Counseling, Psychology, Uncategorized

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You need say nothing out loud. You just keep your body still and your eyes follow the tic-toc of the therapist’s hand going back and forth, while you think silently to yourself about the sights, sounds, and emotions that you want to loosen from your head, heart, and soul.

It’s called Accelerated Resolution Therapy, a new tool to treat acute trauma, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, and depression that is being adopted into the menu of treatments available at Walter Reed and other army centers, and a vanguard of trailblazing veterans groups.

Partly because it works so fast, military leaders hope it could help handle a backlog of PTSD cases, and encourage more troops to seek treatment. It requires no surgical procedure, unlike another new-ish treatment called stellate ganglion block, in which local anesthetic is used to numb or block part of the nervous system.

The other advantage: unlike talk therapy or other commonly used methods, where the subject shares what’s bothering them out loud, the soldier need share nothing with the therapist.

Instead, the patient watches the therapist’s hand with their eyes, while bringing up in their own mind the disturbing memories or images, first tuning in to how the body reacts. Through deep breathing, the patient focuses on the tension and releases it, and then focuses on the memory piece by piece, progressively remember it, then mentally painting over the image or memory, and finally replacing it with a new image. It doesn’t erase the memory, but helps it fade. The therapist need hear nothing.

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God in the Whirlwind (Review)

19 Thursday Feb 2015

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David F. Wells, God in the Whirlwind: How the Holy-love of God Reorients Our World

David Wells, senior research professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, has previously taken a hard look at the North American Evangelical Church and the effects of contemporary culture and thought upon the church (see the series which began with No Place for Truth). In God in the Whirlwind, Wells starts with the trouble and then lays out the Gospel which confronts and conquers such the contemporary world — not with violence or oppression or power, but by means of God’s holy-love.

He lays out the two-fold trouble we face in chapter one: First, there is the issue of where does one find God? Rather than a God who is outside and before us, a God who declares himself and to which we must give an account, our culture start with the self, the I — and that self has become the ultimate arbitor of true. Wells does not mean the subjective experience of something outside of us, but rather our own self as the measure of meaning and truth:

And out of this has come what Phillip Rieff has called “psychological man.” This is the person who is stripped of all reference points outside of him or herself. There is no moral world, no alternate rights and wrongs, and no one to whom he or she is accountable. This person’s own interior reality is all that counts, and it is untouched by any obligation to community or understanding from the past or even by the intrusions of God from the outside. The basis on which lives are being built is that there is nothing outside the self on which they can be built. And this self wants only to be pleased. It sees no reason to be saved. This is therapeutic deism, whose morals are self focused and self generated. (26).

Perversely this self-focus has only made the subjective experience of life worse (paradoxically, this has come during a time of material prosperity greater than any known in the history of the world).

When God– the external God– dies, then the self immediately moves in to fill the vacuum. But then something strange happens. The self also dies. And with it goes meaning and reality. (31)

The second trouble comes from distraction. The blessed man of Psalm 1 meditates upon the instruction of God day and night. But we live in a culture dead set against even the slightest moment of reflection and quiet. It has even invaded our congregations. It seems that our worship services are built around the terror that a moment may pass without sound.

Only an absolute conviction that we must come to know God will be sufficient to overcome the insistent culture which demands that we pay attention to ourselves.

Wells unpacks the redemptive work of God in Jesus Christ over the next 200 pages. For Christians who have grown accustomed to a gospel presentation which could fit on a tract, 200 pages might seem an overkill — but that is only because our understanding of the Gospel is far too small. Perhaps the reason why our Gospel understanding is too weak to even keep the attention of those who profess it is that we don’t even understand (much less meditate upon) the eternal pageant God’s work. We have a crimped view of God and thus even the Gospel can become boring in comparison to a baseball game.

The story of God’s work is a story of holiness and love, truth & love inseparably combined. Since we have a therpeutic understanding of God and a personal psychological understanding of situation, we look for a God who will show us “love”, that is, give us what we think we need without the intrusion of holiness.

However, the love of God comes only with God’s holiness; it is the holiness of God which makes love possible. This means that rather than applying therapy for our ailments, God works to kill our sins. To use the old-fashioned word, we must “mortify” sin:

Mortification is, of course, the language of the moral world, the world defined by God’s holy – love. Where we often live in our minds, as I have been arguing, is in a world that is psychological. The former is a world where faith is required and with the death of Christ is at the center. The latter is where self-help techniques replace faith. Where we once had redemption, we now have therapy. The one is all about dying to the morally deformed parts of the self. The other is all about finding, cherishing, and realizing the self, even in its deformed parts, if it makes us happy. An age whose temper is therapeutic and self-focused will find this language of mortification quite quaint. More than that, it will sound disagreeable. Indeed, some may even see it as an obscenity, perhaps the only one that now remains. (182).

Wells lays out the holy-love of God both in its theology and in its practice. Indeed, holy-love can only exist in a context of worship and counter-cultural practice. The Church must be the counter-culture to a world built around self, if the Church is to be a culture built around the declaration that the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.