I have been in and out of shrink-o-therapy on and off--though, except for medication that has gotten me through the nightmare of working life in recent years--more off than on or much of my adult life. There has never been any question of "curing" me of "neurosis" or "psychosis"--where it has succeeded, most of it has involved the talking cure with suggestions and medications that have actually been quite helpful and have not by any means reduced me to a drooling, lobotmized wreck such as one might expect from the Ken Kesey libertarian horseshit view of the matter, or this rather antiquated and far less objectionable Communist Party view.
"Therapy" does remain unquestionably a potential instrument of social coercion and injustice. You can be sentenced to it against your will, medicated against your will, and subjected by the therapist, in collaboration with the authorities, to a truly nightmarish regime of antipsychotic medication or worse--as I understand it, even compulsory shock therapy is not entirely out of the question nowadays. Moreover, the more sadistic emanations of "psychology" as divorced from the main stream of "therapy" can stem from a variety of sources, such as the experiments of Stanley Milgram or the abuse inflicted at Harvard by the despicable--and still revered--Henry Murray on a brilliant, sensitive, and delicately balanced young man who eventually metamorphosed into the Unabomber. Perhaps the most destructive impact of "therapy" as practiced nowadays is its intrusion, in the form of pop and semi-pop psychology, into the domain of family relations, where charges of psychosis and sociopathy can result in exile from family relationships and other forms of actual harm extending far beyond mere insult and hurt feelings. I have experienced this directly from my only living close relative--in part because of my declared socialism and rejection of Biden-Harris, Hillary Clinton, and the Democratic Party. To call this destructive scarcely does it justice. I have trotted in and out of doctors' offices bearing indictments from this source for years, only to be assured again and again that I am not an -opath or a psychotic. None of that makes the slightest difference--while the relative in question clearly manifests the effects of decades-long abuse of alcohol and psychiatric medication. Not:hing in my life can be attributed to struggle or alienation, per my nemesis: only to my failure to take responsibility for my individual fate by undertaking precisely the form of therapy prescribed by her. This is not to deny that I am sometimes--in fact often--crazy or crazy-acting, or just plain nasty, but the catalogue of paranoid, alcoholic accusations to which I--like many others in differently unhappy families--have been subjected in this instance is the reverse side of the coin of therapeutic self-abuse to which my accuser has subjected herself, and which is slowly devouring what is left of her personality. I'm reminded of a book I owned in the 1970s, an anthology of fashionable "alternative" therapy essays entitled The Radical Therapist. I've forgotten the contents but what sticks in my mind is the paperback cover, with the syllables of the title broken so as to suggest the phrase, "The Radical The Rapist.'' I fear the pun may have been intentional, but prefer to think it was accidental. This ambiguity sticks in my mind as a sign of the deadly duality of "Therapy" as we know it. It's a minefield, but the essay discussed here strikes me as missing the point. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#541): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/541 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76240682/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br />#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
