Psychotherapy Has Gotten Too Easy. That's a Problem.

Psychotherapy has moved away a lot from its fountainhead. There used to be a lot more emphasis on understanding human psychology from all avenues and using that understanding to help people change. This process was never supposed to be easy and often depended on people facing things about themselves that they did not like. This included aspects of human psychology related to our animal nature.

Understanding animal behavior as a way of understanding humans has been a large of psychotherapy throughout its history. Freud in particular depended a lot on the animal research of his day. His most famous theories, including those of the Oedipal Complex and the Electra Complex (a theory developed by Freud although the term was actually first used by Jung), developed out of his understanding of competition within animal species.

What is most interesting about Freud’s theories is how they led to an approach for psychological change that has been important for over 100 years. Although many theories he developed based on his understanding of animal research have been debunked, they did lead to him developing an approach to therapy that was meant to reveal and challenge darker aspects of our human psychology. Psychotherapy developed as a way of acknowledging the truth about who we are as humans, including that part related to what it means to be another animal species, and find ways of both understanding and controlling those more problematic aspects.

You can get a real sense of what psychotherapy was supposed to be all about if you take a moment and consider a world where all of Freud’s theories were true. Now, as I said earlier, this is not the case and much of what Freud wrote about human development turned out to be inaccurate at best and just outright wrong at worst. It even turned out that he misinterpreted much of the evolutionary conclusions and animal research he was referencing.

But just imagine a world where there was more truth to the Oedipal Complex, Electra Complex and other, more shocking theories in psychotherapy than is now the case. Many of these are theories based on an understanding of comparative psychology research at the time (particularly research on competition within animal species). If those theories were accurate, how would you go about helping people confront and deal with the more negative aspects of themselves?

Theories like those posited by Freud emphasized that human children develop a strong sense of competition for love and acceptance from parents. This often results in the children feeling jealousy and resentment of one or both parents and other important people in their lives. These are issues most children grow out of in healthy ways but are also ones that can cause lasting difficulties for individuals who do not grow out of them. Psychotherapy, these theories go, helps individuals by getting them to be honest with what they are facing and finding ways of working through the darker parts of themselves.

If that is the goal of psychotherapy, then how would one go about doing that? You could not just say to someone “As a child you really wanted to replace your parent and hated that parent for a while”. That is not something people would readily accept and would lead them to leave your office quickly.

You could not just tell people some of the most negative realities about themselves, but would need to help them recognize these things for themselves. You would want to guide them towards recognizing these negative things and help them deal with them in a nonjudgmental and supportive environment. That was basically the nature of how Freud and others described psychotherapy from its very beginning.

Psychotherapy has thus always been seen as a process by which people are helped to recognize, confront and challenge the things about themselves that they dislike. Often these are things that bother them so much they do not even admit they are real and suffer a lot of anxiety trying to continue hiding them from others and, more importantly, themselves. These are aspects of our human psychology that often grow out of us having to overcome animal instincts. They often are instincts that may serve an animal well out in the wild but do not fit in with more controlled and domesticated environments.

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This intense process of psychotherapy is one that seems to be lost in many modern approaches. Worksheets and therapy manuals have replaced a more individualized and challenging approach to therapy. People are told in therapy that they are not to blame for anything they feel that is negative and have no real responsibility for change other than blaming other people. Psychotherapy often becomes focused only on helping people feel better about themselves rather than overcome the impact of very really and negative aspects of themselves.

It is shame to see how psychotherapy has become no more than repetitive “feel-good” statements that really does not help people understand themselves better. And psychotherapy often follows a “paint-by-numbers” approach where people are led to think that feeling better emotionally is just dependent on learning the right “steps”. People in psychotherapy are encouraged only to ask “What do I need to do next?” when trying to feel better rather than “How can I understand myself, both the good and the bad, better?”.

My hope is that psychotherapy will move further back to a process of helping people learn more about themselves. Expecting that therapy helps only by getting people to feel good about themselves and blame others is limiting, too easy and isn’t likely to really help anyone. What helps in therapy is often learning how to change things a person may not even admit needs changed at the start.