The Problem with “Modern” Psychology
The problem with “modern” psychology
The foundation of modern healing
All our relations
We’re going to be honest up front with you. We are not fans of modern psychology. There was a thing there to be proud of at one time. Back in the 1960s and 1970s psychology was diverse, sorta, with multiple schools (Behavioral, Psychoanalytic, Humanistic, Transpersonal) offering and blossoming approaches to human health and well-being. Had this diversity continued, today we would have highly evolved approaches to understanding health and healing human being, like behavioral, cognitive, neurological, psychoanalytic, humanistic, transpersonal approaches. But the diversity didn’t continue. For reasons we won’t go into here, Humanistic (and very likely Transpersonal) Psychology were “murdered” (Elkins, 2009). Subsequently, the field was sanitized down to a narrow and reductionist biological/neurological determinism whose function, frankly, is not to help people attain their highest potential, but is instead to keep the capitalist workforce functioning and docile. It’s not rocket science how they do this. They do this by gas lightning their clients into believing that the problem is always with them. Got a border-line personality disorder? There’s something wrong with you. Depressed? You must have the gene for that. Not happy with things at work? Don’t stew in that anger. Just try a little gratitude. Got a problem, try looking on the bright side.
Now, don’t get us wrong. There are good reasons to focus on yourself and your behaviors, particularly when those behaviors are harming others. But the problem never starts with the individual. Just look at any baby. Babies are born healthy, happy, loving, empathic, highly sensitive, and aware. That’s not how most of them turn out, of course. Most adults can barely claim physical health much less any of the other of their original attributes. So what happens to turn loving, empathic, giggly, sensitive babies into the manic, depressed, narcissistic, egoistic, disordered, insensitive, unaware adults of our so-called modern world? The answer to that is layered, of course, but at the root, it comes down to relationships. From your mother and father to your siblings, teachers, friends, acquaintances, co-workers, and so on, you became the adult you are today because of the relationship you’ve endured in the past. We feel this barely needs scholarly justification because when you think about it, it is so blatantly and obviously true. It is our relationships that fuck us all up.
So if this is true, and it most certainly is, then where does that leave modern psychology? Useless and confused, I suppose; but not hopelessly so. It’s very easy to set a new direction here. All we have to do is start our therapy sessions and our research processes with a different question. Instead of asking ourselves “what is wrong with the client,” or “how can we fix the client,” we need to ask a more indigenous, relational type of question — something like “what is wrong with their relations” and, equally important, “what is wrong with their environment,” or even their society.
Of course, while it may be quite easy to set a new direction in our therapeutic practices, it is quite another thing to provide actual answers to these new questions. Relationships are complex, multi-faceted, damaged by intergenerational trauma, and difficult to understand and sort out. It is even harder to come up with workable solutions, particularly since in order to do that we will have to rethink all our perspectives and revise all our assumptions about what a human being is and how to develop that being. But if we put our minds to it, we can do it, and we can start right now by simply starting our analysis, with two questions: “What is wrong with their relations” and “What is wrong with their environment.” If we start with these, in practice and in research, we can make progress forward fast.
Of course, that’s not the whole thing. In addition to those questions we also need to get a better grasp on what it means to be fully human, because until we get a better idea of that we’ll always be pushing people into a pathological and diminished “normal,” suitable for inserting humans into the capitalist matrix, but ridiculously inadequate at helping people achieve health, happiness, and full potential.
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References
Elkins, D. (2009). Why Humanistic Psychology Lost its Power and Influence in American Psychology. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 49(1), 267–291. https://www.lightningpath.org/readings/elkins-humanistic-murder.pdf
