Psychonalysis, in its more radical forms, helps the patient become aware of this conditioning. Its goal (like that of Buddhism) is to enable the subject to be fully present. This full presence is not something that is achieved once and for all, but a practice of awareness that must be kept up for an entire lifetime...because the present changes continually.
Like Woody Allen? Thanks. I'll stick with running in Central Park, cheap red wine and sex. Come to think of it, the last time I had any interest in Buddhism was at Bard College in 1961 when I read Alan Watts. At least reading Alan Watts didn't cost $150 per hour.
The neurotic (or in Buddhism, the man who is still "attached") is unable to live in the present; he lives in a constant hurtling between the past and the future. To such a man, becoming aware of conditioning as conditioning seems tantamount to peeling away the layers of his identity and discovering that at the center there is nothing. This is very frightening. It is impossible to show, except through experience, that there is a vast difference between the "no-thing" that is the "creative void" and the nothing that most men waste a lifetime running away from.
You mean the neurotic is not adjusted to one of the most maladjusted societies since the dawn of civilization? Much of the time I feel like Alan Bates in "The King of Hearts" anyhow.
Of course, psyhoanalysis as a normative "how to fit in" science, is a doddle. And of course, the money and the academic honors, and the learned journals are much more interested in normative psych, bad mothers, etc. But that's not to say that this is all that psychoanalysis is about.
The best thing I've read on all the various psychotherapies is Joel Kovel's "Complete Guide to Therapy from Psychology to Behavior Modification", which is sadly out of print. He was a psychiatrist at the time and his growing skepticism about "cures" is palpable on every page. He finally came to the realization that it was a complete waste of time and changed careers.
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