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.
4 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.
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