1. When you look deeply into it what are therapists actually trying to do?
They are representing themselves as experts in "human psychology". This is a field that relies upon an abstraction and generalisation from certain kinds of human behaviour in the possibly relatively near past. But people's lives are generally more complicated and specific than these generalizations can express.
What does one gain from therapy? One's life must be simplified to fit the generalizations based on common experiences, or else, perhaps one could try to make use of the generalizations about other people's problems to see how they might apply to your specific instance.
No matter which way one chooses to respond, it seems to me that there remains a significant risk in terms of losing a great deal of one's life's previous intelligibility in talking to a therapist. What may have been important but specific to one's own experiences can be all too easily lost to the power of generalizations.
By contrast, certain types of shamanism offer a more holistic approach than conventional psychology, by embracing individually lived realities and experiences.
2.One might seek them for the pursuit of psychological knowledge. However, in contemporary industry, I have rarely seen it put to good use. The knowledge becomes an instrument of torture rather than a method of release.
The problem of knowledge in terms of the way it is applied in Western culture gave the writer, Georges Bataille, reason to coin the term, "non-knowledge" as indicative of deep inner experience, because contemporary knowledge tends to overlook the meaning of being an experiential subject and tends to produce, instead, narrow objectification and conformity.
They are representing themselves as experts in "human psychology". This is a field that relies upon an abstraction and generalisation from certain kinds of human behaviour in the possibly relatively near past. But people's lives are generally more complicated and specific than these generalizations can express.
What does one gain from therapy? One's life must be simplified to fit the generalizations based on common experiences, or else, perhaps one could try to make use of the generalizations about other people's problems to see how they might apply to your specific instance.
No matter which way one chooses to respond, it seems to me that there remains a significant risk in terms of losing a great deal of one's life's previous intelligibility in talking to a therapist. What may have been important but specific to one's own experiences can be all too easily lost to the power of generalizations.
By contrast, certain types of shamanism offer a more holistic approach than conventional psychology, by embracing individually lived realities and experiences.
2.One might seek them for the pursuit of psychological knowledge. However, in contemporary industry, I have rarely seen it put to good use. The knowledge becomes an instrument of torture rather than a method of release.
The problem of knowledge in terms of the way it is applied in Western culture gave the writer, Georges Bataille, reason to coin the term, "non-knowledge" as indicative of deep inner experience, because contemporary knowledge tends to overlook the meaning of being an experiential subject and tends to produce, instead, narrow objectification and conformity.
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