I have read and continue to read a lot of biographies; both formal biographies, and more journalistic accounts of people's character, actions, and lives.
And since the mid-20th century most biographies I have encountered - especially the worst ones, and the worst aspects of even the better biographies - adopt the assumptions of psychotherapy even when writing about older and the pre-modern people.
Yet; I am confident that people of the past were not motivated therapeutically in the way that modern people are motivated.
That is, I don't believe that past people lived with the implicit (often explicit) intention of reducing their (more or less severe, more or less long-term) psychological state of dysphoria (i.e. feeling bad/ adverse/ un-pleasant in some way).
Nor did past people have the over-arching life-purpose of "making themselves feel better"; by their life-choices and behaviours.
We moderns usually do have such a perspective on life - but it was not always thus.
Furthermore; the psychotherapy perspective in biography (i.e. in the intent of understanding people) usually traces dysphoria to either past experiences (e.g. childhood or early-life relationships, traumatic events, disappointments etc.); or to disease.
Whereas it would be more accurate to recognize that much of our character is inherited.
Yet, heredity was the first-line explanation for human behaviour for (probably) thousands of years - i.e. through most of recorded history.
I mean: to explain a person's behaviour, the usual thing in earlier times was to discuss what had been inherited from parents and other ancestors - including typical racial characteristics.
The consequences of these anachronistic distortions is profound; a gross failure to understand what it is to be human. We moderns populate history with versions of our own unusual modern consciousness.
This has many adverse effects; including eliminating from consideration a whole world of group consciousness, of people who lived embedded-in a psychological world derived from their ancestors.
Eliminating many centuries in which religion was such a powerful motivator that it was often primary - and overcame considerations of personal happiness or suffering.
And - because psychology and psychotherapy are products of the atheism and materialism of modernity.
Past experiences and diseases are typically explained in wholly materialistic terms; and when heredity is considered, it is materialist - only from the modern and narrow perspective of genetics.
Thereby eliminating a world in which "the spiritual" was pervasive; and relationships naturally and spontaneously extended to include the dead; spiritual beings such as angels, demons, fairies and ghosts; and eliminating, also, what used to be profoundly life-shaping experiences of direct relationships with the divine.
Thus modern biographical writing is yet another of the many ways in which - by our assumptions - we paint ourselves into a corner of alienation and soullessness; whereby we conceptualize ourselves as nothing more or other than material entities produced-by and acted-upon by material influences... In a world that has always been like this, with the implication that our condition is inescapable.
9 comments:
Very curious. Psychotherapy has done much good for many people.
If one finds oneself playing out roles that cost one what one holds most dear, It is possible to trace back those roles back to an origin scene, which almost always takes place in early childhood.
You can come to a complete understanding of these negative roles through simply observing them and when you do, you see that it is a false belief you've drawn about yourself (or the nature of reality). They can be bound for good, so that they never again arise.
@SWC - I believe that psychotherapy has done most people much more harm than good - but that's another story.
Psychotherapy may appear to do good if it helps an individual adjust to the deformed nature of the world as it is perceived today but actually it consolidates a person in the false, i.e.non-spiritual, self, and in that sense it certainly does harm. It may sometime offer a pseudo-spirituality but that only weakens potential focus on the real.
@William - I've written/ published a fair bit on this, back in the day; but one thing is that most people I have encountered who claim to have benefitted from professional specialized psychotherapy *seem to me* to have been made worse by it (if I knew them before and after) -- but to have become psychologically-dependent on the process.
So that stopping psychotherapy is experienced aversively, even when it was not doing good or was doing harm.
I have never myself had psychotherapy, as such. As well as reading and talking with people; I had a month of training (and a short supervised evaluative-therapeutic encounter with a client) by strict Freudians at Harvard when I was a medical student; as well as another six months of eclectic training as a junior psychiatrist - during which, as part of which, I was forced to undergo a kind of therapy by the trainer! I also made significant efforts at a Jungian self-analysis, at one point - after very extensive reading in and about Jung.
Of these, the Jungian experiences were by far the best; but I completely agree that even this is a "pseudo" spiritual half-way house, an attempt at materialist-spirituality - a dead-end, in which many people get trapped.
I think it's because people believe they CAN understand themselves, which leads to them feeling the NEED to understand themselves, and then followed by PARALYSIS when they experience hints that the understanding is a sham.
I believe this is the root of the fertility crisis, among other crises. Many spend their whole lives looking backward to their imperfect childhoods, and completely miss the opportunity to understand their childhood from the more complete perspective of being a parent themselves, which is how it's supposed to work.
@Lucinda - There's probably truth in what you say, but I don't really understand the voluntary subfertility of the whole developed world.
I used to think it was mostly the mass ideology of materialism and the consequent focus on this worldly hedonism; but if so, then religion must be defined very narrowly indeed if we are to find any groups that are significantly above replacement fertility.
As you presumably know, according to data on the Junior Ganymede blog and elsewhere - the CJCLDS seems to have slipped into significant subfertility (except among recent immigrants) unless active Mormon is defined very narrowly to make a small minority grouping. I think this probably reflects the high degree of socio-economic integration of Mormons with the mainstream as "the world" has becomes more leftist and materialist - because this integration inevitably carries tremendous ideological pressure nowadays. Only groups highly isolated from the economy etc have high chosen fertility in developed nations nowadays.
But there also seems to be a very weak desire to have children, compared with earlier generations - which may be biological. I think it may be related to cumulative genetic damage, generation on generation - but there are so many possible causes, the truth is anybody's guess. These causes may lead to widespread consequences that may Not be wholly reversible.
As a woman, it is easy to understand why sub-fertility abounds. Because women are wired to be a restraint on fertility. And as women gain power and influence, their perspective prevails.
I have never spoken to a woman who was worried. at. all. about the sub-fertility of the world. Despite myself loving being a mother, I don't really feel bad about the collapse in fertility either, aside from feeling isolated, which I think is a different thing. (Mormons all come from big families in the recent past, so the isolation is not as bad as it would be outside Mormon-dom)
Women are not co-creators, though they will often demand to be seen as creative as a litmus test of a man's acceptability. The drive to procreate is man's.
Modern women do want to be mothers at some point, but believe it should be postponed until after they "understand themselves". But a woman can't understand herself without being a mother.
This is the crux of why this world is necessary to the agency of mankind. And why Jesus is necessary. We cannot understand the importance of a decision until after making a decision. But once we make a decision and act on it, it is irreversible.
@Lucinda - These are strong arguments. But so incoherent is current ideology, I just known know what is (or are) the most important aspect/s. I find many ordinary everyday interactions - which are, of course, highly dominated by the mass media agenda - to be literally insane in terms of their incapacity at consecutive thinking, their indifference to joining the dots. Each idea is considered at face value and as if isolated.
Women are certainly more peer group orientated with respect to motivations; and it seems that when the perceived peer group of women was/is in favour of childbearing, then "having many children" was experienced as a very powerful imperative.
"I have never spoken to a woman who was worried. at. all. about the sub-fertility of the world. " - Indeed. Perhaps this is an indifference to strategizing, the long-term and large scale. Women are very seldom strategic in their thinking; whereas this is sometimes so dominant in men that they callously ignore the here-and-now and actual relationships.
I suspect "having a lot of children" doesn't exist as an imperitive for women, but "caring for a lot of children" (or "even caring for the children of the whole world") does. I myself do not strongly experience this imperitive, which ironically is part of why I have had a lot of my own. (It was relatively easier for me to exit parenting cooperatives in favor of focusing on my own affairs, compared to other mothers who render maximum energy into cooperatives, at the expense of their own fertility.)
The prolonged adolescence of modern life, characterized by children regarding themselves as grown while parents regard them as needy and unproductive, means that women see having more children as consumer activity rather than contributor activity.
This is part of what you are taking about, I think. The psycho analysis aimed at 'understanding' individuals is consumptive. We are drawn in by a promise of wisdom, but end up drained of the mysteries of self that were the fuel of our striving. The mysteries are accounted for and exposed, without producing anything of value.
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