PSYCHOTHERAPY: PURPOSE, PROCESS AND PRACTICE

According to A Course in Miracles, the purpose of psychotherapy is to change the self-concept, from one directed by the ego hence seeing itself as vulnerable to one directed by the Holy Spirit and Christ hence seeing itself as strong. A weak self sees attacks, defends itself, and thinks that defenses make it strong (ego defenses make one weak), but a strong self sees attacks on itself and is defenseless and knows that in its defenselessness is its strength. Defenselessness is strength, defensiveness is weakness.

Consider. Somebody puts you down and you feel angry at him and defend yourself. The best defense is offense, so you unleash on that person a verbal onslaught telling him what a nasty person he is. In so doing you fancy that you are strong but to him, you are weak because you cannot control your temper.

If you were strong you would not say anything to what the other guy said; indeed, you may not even be angered by what he said (anger response is based on an interpretation of your perception that you are hurt and you need to protect yourself…but are you hurt by what the other person said?).

I can say more about the twenty-four-page pamphlet called Psychotherapy, Purpose, Process, and Practice by Dr. Helen Schucman, but that would be harping on the non-essential part of the pamphlet. I have articulated what its goal is, to get us to give up our separated self-concepts and replace those with unifying self-concepts and eventually get to a non-conceptual state where we know that we share ourselves with all creation and with the creator.

An official psychotherapist is a person who temporarily has more understanding of the human psyche, Greek for the soul, and knows that our mental disorders emanate from our existential separation from our source, God, and is himself working on regaining the awareness of union with God; he sees his patient's mental health issues as rooted in his separation from God.

The Holy Spirit is the official psychotherapist in us; he teaches us to forgive those who wronged our egos because they wronged them in dreams and what was done in dreams had not been done.

The therapist collaborates with the Holy Spirit in teaching the patient to forgive all to regain the awareness of his unified mind and thus become healed.

The pamphlet and its writer, Dr. Helen Schucman deliberately did not focus on specific mental disorders that take people to psychotherapists. The typical patient goes to therapy because of anxiety issues, depression issues, mania issues, schizophrenia issues, delusion issues, personality disorder issues, and, of course, interpersonal relationship issues.

Since the pamphlet did not focus on them, I am not going to focus on them in this brief review of what the pamphlet said regarding therapy.

I agree with Dr. Schucman that a healed mind accepts his real self and accepts all people’s real selves and loves all people as he loves himself. I do not think that forgiveness is the most therapeutic aspect of psychotherapy. We should not forgive murderers, rapists, thieves, and other criminals; we must try to rehabilitate them and make them prosocial; we do not have to play the ostrich and hide our heads in the sand and pretend that there are no evil people on earth.

There are antisocial personalities who can cut off your head and feel neither good nor bad from doing so because they have no social conscience, do not have a sense of remorse, and do not feel guilt or shame, etc.

Should patients pay their psychotherapists? Dr. Schucman does not think that payment should be a concern in therapy. Nevertheless, therapists have offices and bills to pay and, therefore, must be paid for their services.

Community mental health centers charge their clients based on their ability to pay but that is largely because they are also subsidized by governments. In an ideal world, psychotherapy should be provided free, as I have done in this piece.

CONCLUSION

This pamphlet sees people who are separated from each other and feel lonely; it wants to join them with each other and with their creator, God. It sees forgiveness as the chief means of joining people together. In some instances, forgiveness heals people, but in others, we must correct evil or else it festers.

Whereas spiritual psychology that harps on joining people is useful, there are people with serious psychoses who need medications to get them calmed down to listen to talk on spirituality.

Dr. Schucman was a clinical psychologist and overemphasized the need to talk to people, but people are also biological creatures and sometimes something goes out of order with their bodies, and they need medical treatment, not just talk-based therapy.

Combining talk-based therapy, spiritual therapy, and medical therapy is the best way to heal people in our over-stressed extant world.

Finally, a word on the language of the pamphlet. It is written in poetic form, a kind of Shakespearean verse; it is lovely language but convoluted and hifalutin; it is wordy; the entire twenty-four pages could have been written in less than ten pages of good prose. Nevertheless, the booklet managed to express the spiritual psychology that Professor Schucman devoted twelve hundred pages to in her Magnus Opus, A Course in Miracles.