Spontaneous Therapy - - worldcongress自然疗法- worldcongress.doc

Spontaneous TherapyDr.Istvn Magyari-BeckIt is a deeply rooted theory today that we people are frequently attacked by the harsh reality in a spontaneous way and are subsequently defended by some kind of professional therapies. In this paper we shall speak first of all of psychotherapy, in spite of the fact that it is not so easy to make absolutely exact distinctions between psychotherapy and traditional medical therapy. That is illness comes spontaneously, whereas the cure is a professional job. In the course of the explanation of this state of affairs, the fight of everybody against everybody is frequently mentioned as a basic social rule of human life. We can be attacked both physically and/or psychologically. The psychological attack against our personality aims as a rule our superego, our value system trying to “persuade” us about the existence of a sharp contradiction between our behavior on one hand and our value system on the other one. This method of oral aggression usually in the disguise of everyday “education” is in fact a very effective method of the destruction of personality from its top level. The therapist goes an opposite way. He or she accepts us, expresses his or her esteem as for our personality and helps us with the solution of our problems. It is true that sometimes certain illnesses can also be created by therapists in the process of therapy. However, these illnesses are regarded either as mere accidents or the results of the lack of sufficient medical conditions in terms of finance, personnel, expertise and so on. It is worth also mentioning that not only the harsh environment and life conditions can lead to illnesses. Many times, high level culture and civilization acts similarly. E.g. when people are not able to adjust, being socialized if the original gap between their childhood and the real society proves to be too large. This can happen if a society is accumulating a large number of working innovations and people cannot follow them (Jung, 1989; Lorenz, 1988). Although any culture and civilization serves the satisfaction of high level human needs, too much food so to speak is not digestible even for a tragically hungry person.But, an opposite case is also imaginable. Namely when it is the therapist who regularly make the patients ill and it is life, which cures him/her. Recall the famous novel by Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg, where the medical doctors behave in a too market economy way see this concept later! finding prematurely the hero: Hans Castorp ill. Hans Castorp was in fact a part of Thomas Manns soul and cured himself at the end of the story via returning to the challenges of life. Here, the diagnosis and therapy were the sources of illness and the life outside the sanatorium reestablished the Mann-Castorps soundness spontaneously. One of the most frequent methods of making somebody ill is to accustom him or her to the medicaments. E.g. if a medical doctor finds a high blood pressure in somebodys case, medicaments for pushing blood pressure down can easily turn this person into a real patient even if the measured high blood pressure was in fact a mere chance occurrence. The cause of this outcome is that after a certain period of using the above-mentioned medicaments no one can maintain a normal level of blood pressure without this kind of drugs. There exist some methods for creating patients consumers of medicaments from healthy people and we can rightly call these methods as special examples of economic behavior by therapists.For the sake of completeness let us mention two more possibilities. Some people are cured by therapists and at the same time get iatrogenic diseases because of the procedures used by the same therapists. If this process proves to be a long and repeated one, the victims of therapy become socialized to the world of hospitals and sanatoriums and will not be able to lead a normal life outside the walls of these institutions. The fourth and final in this framework possibility is when someone is made ill by certain adverse real life events, but it is again the real life, which makes him or her healthy. What sorts of phenomena can return our health and maintain it firmly? Friendship, love, emotional catharsis, reading, listening to good music and so on. The second and fourth forms of therapy outlined above I shall call spontaneous therapy. Let us summarize all these in the next matrix:curing illness By life By therapistscreating illness By life A cases B cases Spontaneous illnessBy therapists C cases D cases Artificial illness Spontaneous therapy Professional therapy It seems to me that professional therapy is based someway on the spontaneous therapy although this state of affairs is seldom if at all mentioned in the professional literature and professional therapy on the other hand assists the spontaneous therapy. What was presented above is an absolutely normal condition in contemporary societies no matter what is the meaning of the term “professional”. E.g. the practice of confession in the Catholic Church is to a certain extent a kind of professional therapy. However, the question can also be raised in statistical terminology as well. That is, we can ask: What types of illnesses and therapies exist today and to what degree? And we shall soon find that the assumed proportions between the A, B, C and D cases of the matrix can well characterize the society.It seems to me that spontaneous therapy occupies a smaller part in todays societies. People do not read enough, the sort of music they prefer to listen to is far from being the best, we seldom have good friends, sports are practiced as professional jobs, holidays are spent in a drug-like manner: as a method of escape from reality. To express ourselves in terms of economic anthropology, the shortage of generalized reciprocal altruism in todays societies is one of the most powerful reasons of the above-mentioned problems. I call this kind of reciprocal altruism a generalized one, because it does not require direct, interpersonal relationships. For example, in the process of reading we are able to establish excellent friendships with virtual heroes of novels, who can support and develop our ego. We on the other hand support and develop the publishers business by buying the books on the market of printed matters. Naturally, the generalized reciprocal altruism does not exclude the non-virtual forms of reciprocal altruism and contains them as its another special cases.What happened in fact? The decline of culture vis-vis the civilization is perhaps the most prominent feature of our days. If we define culture as the way of order negative entropy creation first within personality, which subsequently determines the order negative entropy outside the personality: in society and the Nature, whereas civilization as the way of order negative entropy creation first outside the personality: in society and the Nature, which subsequently determines the order negative entropy within the personality, then it becomes clear that our age is first of all the age of civilization. This historical period can be characterized by the abundance of material wealth distributed extremely unevenly and by the shortage of mental and moral wealth. However, human beings need first and foremost the culture. In the course of anthropogenesis, we lost a large part of our genetic programs, thus the original, post-animal human nature is a kind of inner entropy. To reach a status of a high level self-regulated system, mankind had to develop itself in an artificial way (Magyari Beck, 2000). We call this way culture. In the process of acculturation people acquire their identity, their essence. Man is the only living system, in which nature and essence are two different, even contradictory entities. While our nature is paradoxically the absence of our original biological essence, our essence is on the other hand an acquired, artificial social nature. The latter requires a lot of work on the part of every human being. Without a well elaborated identity no one can be healthy. This is why a Hungarian philosopher Dr. Olga Szcs is perfectly right when saying that culture as such has a therapeutic effect, whereas the mere civilization is a source of diseases (Szcs, 2002). Let us go a little bit further in outlining the notion of psychological health. Today, under the influence of classical and neoclassical economics, the rationality is identified with psychological soundness. But, according to the psychoanalytical literature, there can be more than one type of rationality. In Sndor Ferenczis works the authors train of thought approximates the term of the biological organs intelligence (Ferenczi, 1928). That is every biological organ has its own intelligence. The background of this belief is that every organ is a self-regulating sub-system within the organism. Then, is it not the case that what we call intelligence today is only the intelligence of one of our organs, namely that of the neo-cortex? Many times, people cannot reconcile all the forms and types of their rationality. Either the frequent alternation of their dominant sub-personalities or the long-lasting oppression of their weaker intelligences is the outcome in these cases. No wonder that the subconscious is full of contradictions and behaves not according to the basic laws of Aristotelian logic (e.g. not in the spirit of “tertium non datur”). A dynamic equilibrium between the parts and dimensions is inevitable so as to maintain the richness of personality. The lack of dynamic equilibrium leads to the reduction of any complex system to some of its parts and/or dimensions. This is why the concept of equilibrium is so important in sciences, which study high level complexity like psychology and economics. The Freudian libido mentioned frequently in this context is a kind of energy, which can hold together the parts and dimensions of personality. The philosophical and theological roots of this concept underlie in Empedocles theory of general love, which became later the Newtonian gravity on one hand and the Freudian libido on the other one.The hypothesis of the present author is that today it is the artificial therapy which plays the role of culture. Another way is the drug. While therapy was designed as a means for re-establishment of the patients contact with reality, drugs be they chemical or spiritual (Magyari-Beck, 1993) serve as the means for escaping from real life challenges. Unfortunately, sometimes the clear-cut borderline between the therapy and drug use is disappearing. E.g. when physicians cure insomnia only by sleeping pills, instead of persuading the patients to cope with their life problems. But let us concentrate in this paper on the therapy alone. It follows from the above-said that the less culture and the more civilization the more therapy. Culture and therapy run in opposite directions. Civilization and therapy grow together and decline together. If a culture is strong and well developed, therapy does not have a large market. However, by the development of civilization at the expense of culture, the demand for therapy is also growing. Thus, therapy is one of the by- products of civilization. I think, it was not by mere chance that psychotherapy started its great historical career when the European culture began declining and the European civilization occupied its place step by step. In the cultures outside Europe and its Western and Eastern followers both civilization and psychotherapy play an almost negligible role. This was also the case in Europe before the victory of European civilization over the European culture. Here, the story was as follows. In Europe and the cultures rooted in Europe, civilization that is preference of things and institutions to inner psychological life and order oppressed culture at a certain point of its historical career. But the oppressed culture returned in the form of a special profession of psychotherapy. In a market economy the paid therapy and its spread indicates to a certain extent the demand for and monetary value of culture. Patients have to pay for the therapy. Thus, it is understandable that this profession finds comfortable for it circumstances within the framework of civilizations. What are the differences between the culture “at large” and the culture closed in the “boxes” of therapy? Culture “at large” is a self-regulating process, whereas therapy is regulated from outside on the basis of mainly two ends. One of them is a reduced goal of health care. Soundness is defined professionally by psychology and medical science. In this conception, culture has only therapeutic functions and should be designed first of all for the ill or the so called ill people. Another significance of culture connected with the improvement of the healthy and their quality of life has already been totally forgotten. The awful fault accompanying this worldview is that the merely civilized people are all mentally healthy and the final result of any psychotherapy should be to make patients civilized.Another force which regulates culture in the forms of therapy is that of the market. The leading question in this respect is the demand for culture as a sort of commodity and its supply. Civilization by creating a lot of mentally ill people actually creates a great demand for therapy as a substitute for culture. The fact that culture is closed in consulting-rooms of psychologists and psychiatrists has been reflected adequately by the economic definition of culture. This definition is extremely narrow. Tibor Scitovsky an American economist, a Hungarian by birth defined culture as a set of enjoyable stimulating goods only for consumption, which has nothing to do with the skills of production (Scitovsky, 1976). Scitovskys work on this subject matter was found among the first one hundred books having the greatest impact on the educated public after the Second World War. The survey was made and published by the Times Literary Supplement in 1995 (Scitovsky, 1997). We have all the reasons to believe that the economic definition of culture is still so narrow. Especially because the largest part of economic science in its present form is the religion of civilization.The last question of this paper is: Can a civilization survive with the aid of a culture bounded and controlled in the above outlined way? Can therapy substitute culture? Can a bounded and controlled culture fulfill the role of culture in its broad sense? This question has originally been formulated by Erzsbet Hsz in a little bit different form. She spoke of the appearance of scientific psychology as a result of the collapse of a widely accepted general religious worldview at the beginning of new, modern times (Hsz, 1998). The opinion of the present author is that neither the basic beliefs, axioms and paradigms of any cultures, nor their systems of inferred and inferable norms and theses can be pushed into any kind of cells be