Contemporary Psychotherapy

I wanted to share some comments from Healing Plots, a book by Amia Lieblich, et al, with which I very much resonate. They write that psychotherapy and counseling are unique and distinctive modern cultural inventions which resonates true to me. These forms could have never existed before in history and may never exist again. At least, I hope/think that we are evolving away from these structures toward a more indigenous healing template. Lieblich, et al write that therapy arose to fill the gaps left behind as traditional forms of problem solving and meaning-making dissolved. "Therapy provided meaning bridges between the compartments of increasingly fragmented modern lives." What John McLeod, in the first chapter in this anthology, writes, that means so much to me, is his description of how the key values of psychotherapy match the key values of rational modernity. Psychotherapy of the 20th century was all about rationality and a detached approach to the world. It was about controlling the expression of feeling. People who feel too much are labeled as are people who feel different from the established norm. These people gain diagnosis and are the subject of a system of "care" which purports to channel their expression of emotion into acceptable forms by any means possible, even electroconvulsive thrapies, or previously, lobotomies. The goal of 20th century psychotherapy was control. It is based upon the idea of continual self-improvement through the progression of science, which, in my estimation, has not apparently been borne out. McLeod writes about the explosion of possibilities of identity construction inherent in a capitalistic system of consumption in which we attempt to construct or purchase an identity of our choice based upon the stories rampant within the culture about what is desirable.