The Taproot Podcast - The Illusion of Progress: How Psychotherapy Lost its Way

Episode Date: June 25, 2024

The Crisis in Psychotherapy: Reclaiming Its Soul in the Age of Neoliberalism" Summary: Explore the identity crisis facing psychotherapy in today's market-driven healthcare system. Learn how neoliberal capitalism and consumerism have shaped our understanding of self and mental health. Discover why mainstream therapy often reinforces individualistic self-constructions and how digital technologies risk reducing therapy to scripted interactions. Understand the need for psychotherapy to reimagine its approach, addressing social and political contexts of suffering. Join us as we examine the urgent call for a psychotherapy of liberation to combat the mental health toll of late capitalism and build a more just, caring world. Hashtags: #PsychotherapyCrisis #MentalHealthReform #NeoliberalismAndTherapy #TherapyRevolution #SocialJusticeInMentalHealth #CriticalPsychology #HolisticHealing #TherapeuticLiberation #ConsumerismAndMentalHealth #PsychotherapyFuture #CapitalismAndMentalHealth #DeepTherapy #TherapyAndSocialChange #MentalHealthActivism #PsychologicalEmancipation   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirmingham Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]   Key Points: Psychotherapy is facing an identity and purpose crisis in the era of market-driven healthcare, as depth, nuance, and the therapeutic relationship are being displaced by cost containment, standardization, and mass-reproducibility. This crisis stems from a shift in notions of the self and therapy’s aims, shaped by the rise of neoliberal capitalism and consumerism. The “empty self” plagued by inner lack pursues fulfillment through goods, experiences, and attainments. Mainstream psychotherapy largely reinforces this alienated, individualistic self-construction. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and manualized treatments focus narrowly on “maladaptive” thoughts and behaviors without examining broader contexts. The biomedical model’s hegemony views psychological struggles as brain diseases treated pharmacologically, individualizing and medicalizing distress despite research linking it to life pains like poverty, unemployment, trauma, and isolation. Digital technologies further the trend towards disembodied, technocratic mental healthcare, risking reducing therapy to scripted interactions and gamified inputs. The neoliberal transformation of psychotherapy in the 1970s, examined by sociologist Samuel Binkley, aligned the dominant therapeutic model centered on personal growth and self-actualization with a neoliberal agenda that cast individuals as enterprising consumers responsible for their own fulfillment. To reclaim its emancipatory potential, psychotherapy must reimagine its understanding of the self and psychological distress, moving beyond an intrapsychic focus to grapple with the social, political, and existential contexts of suffering. This transformation requires fostering critical consciousness, relational vitality, collective empowerment, and aligning with movements for social justice and systemic change. The struggle to reimagine therapy is inseparable from the struggle to build a more just, caring, and sustainable world. A psychotherapy of liberation is urgently needed to address the mental health toll of late capitalism. The neoliberal restructuring of healthcare and academia marginalized psychotherapy’s humanistic foundations, subordinating mental health services to market logic and elevating reductive, manualized approaches. Psychotherapy’s capitulation to market forces reflects a broader disenchantment of politics by economics, reducing the complexities of mental distress to quantifiable, medicalized entities and eviscerating human subjectivity. While intuitive and phenomenological approaches are celebrated in other scientific fields like linguistics and physics, they are often dismissed in mainstream psychology, reflecting an aversion to knowledge that resists quantification. Psychotherapy should expand its understanding of meaningful evidence, making room for intuitive insights, subjective experiences, and phenomenological explorations alongside quantitative data. Academic psychology’s hostility towards Jungian concepts, even as neurology revalidates them under different names, reflects hypocrisy and a commitment to familiar but ineffective models. To reclaim its relevance, psychotherapy must reconnect with its philosophical and anthropological roots, reintegrating broader frameworks to develop a more holistic understanding of mental health beyond symptom management. How Market Forces are Shaping the Practice and Future of Psychotherapy The field of psychotherapy faces an identity and purpose crisis in the era of market-driven healthcare. As managed care, pharmaceutical dominance, and the biomedical model reshape mental health treatment, psychotherapy’s traditional foundations – depth, nuance, the therapeutic relationship – are being displaced by the imperatives of cost containment, standardization, and mass-reproducibility. This shift reflects the ascendancy of a neoliberal cultural ideology reducing the complexity of human suffering to decontextualized symptoms to be efficiently eliminated, not a meaningful experience to be explored and transformed. In “Constructing the Self, Constructing America,” cultural historian Philip Cushman argues this psychotherapy crisis stems from a shift in notions of the self and therapy’s aims. Individual identity and psychological health are shaped by cultural, economic and political forces, not universal. The rise of neoliberal capitalism and consumerism birthed the “empty self” plagued by inner lack, pursuing fulfillment through goods, experiences, and attainments – insecure, inadequate, fearing to fall behind in life’s competitive race. Mainstream psychotherapy largely reinforces this alienated, individualistic self-construction. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and manualized treatment focus narrowly on “maladaptive” thoughts and behaviors without examining social, political, existential contexts. Packaging therapy into standardized modules strips away relational essence for managed care’s needs. Therapists become technicians reinforcing a decontextualized view locating problems solely in the individual, overlooking unjust social conditions shaping lives and psyches. Central is the biomedical model’s hegemony, viewing psychological struggles as brain diseases treated pharmacologically – a seductive but illusory promise. Antidepressant use has massively grown despite efficacy and safety doubts, driven by pharma marketing casting everyday distress as a medical condition, not deeper malaise. The model individualizes and medicalizes distress despite research linking depression to life pains like poverty, unemployment, trauma, isolation. Digital technologies further the trend towards disembodied, technocratic mental healthcare. Online therapy platforms and apps expand access but risk reducing therapy to scripted interactions and gamified inputs, not genuine, embodied attunement and meaning-making. In his book “Getting Loose: Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s,” sociologist Samuel Binkley examines how the social transformations of the 1970s, driven by the rise of neoliberalism and consumer culture, profoundly reshaped notions of selfhood and the goals of therapeutic practice. Binkley argues that the dominant therapeutic model that emerged during this period – one centered on the pursuit of personal growth, self-actualization, and the “loosening” of the self from traditional constraints – unwittingly aligned itself with a neoliberal agenda that cast individuals as enterprising consumers responsible for their own fulfillment and well-being. While ostensibly liberatory, this “getting loose” ethos, Binkley contends, ultimately reinforced the atomization and alienation of the self under late capitalism. By locating the source of and solution to psychological distress solely within the individual psyche, it obscured the broader social, economic, and political forces shaping mental health. In doing so, it inadvertently contributed to the very conditions of “getting loose” – the pervasive sense of being unmoored, fragmented, and adrift – that it sought to alleviate. Binkley’s analysis offers a powerful lens for understanding the current crisis of psychotherapy. It suggests that the field’s increasing embrace of decontextualized, technocratic approaches to treatment is not merely a capitulation to market pressures, but a logical extension of a therapeutic paradigm that has long been complicit with the individualizing logic of neoliberalism. If psychotherapy is to reclaim its emancipatory potential, it must fundamentally reimagine its understanding of the self and the nature of psychological distress. This reimagining requires a move beyond the intrapsychic focus of traditional therapy to one that grapples with the social, political, and existential contexts of suffering. It means working to foster critical consciousness, relational vitality, and collective empowerment – helping individuals to deconstruct the oppressive narratives and power structures that constrain their lives, and to tap into alternative sources of identity, belonging, and purpose. Such a transformation is not just a matter of therapeutic technique, but of political and ethical commitment. It demands that therapists reimagine their work not merely as a means of alleviating individual symptoms, but as a form of social and political action aimed at nurturing personal and collective liberation. This means cultivating spaces of collective healing and visioning, and aligning ourselves with the movements for social justice and systemic change. At stake is nothing less than the survival of psychotherapy as a healing art. If current trends persist, our field will devolve into a caricature of itself, a hollow simulacrum of the ‘branded, efficient, quality-controlled’ treatment packages hocked by managed care. Therapists will be relegated to the role of glorified skills coaches and symptom-suppression specialists, while the deep psychic wounds and social pathologies underlying the epidemic of mental distress will metastasize unchecked. The choice before us is stark: Do we collude with a system that offers only the veneer of care while perpetuating the conditions of collective madness? Or do we commit ourselves anew to the still-revolutionary praxis of tending psyche, dialoguing with the unconscious, and ‘giving a soul to psychiatry’ (Hillman, 1992)? Ultimately, the struggle to reimagine therapy is inseparable from the struggle to build a more just, caring, and sustainable world. As the mental health toll of late capitalism continues to mount, the need for a psychotherapy of liberation has never been more urgent. By rising to this challenge, we open up new possibilities for resilience, regeneration, and revolutionary love – and begin to create the world we long for, even as we heal the world we have. The Neoliberal Transformation of Psychotherapy The shift in psychotherapy’s identity and purpose can be traced to the broader socioeconomic transformations of the late 20th century, particularly the rise of neoliberalism under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Neoliberal ideology, with its emphasis on privatization, deregulation, and the supremacy of market forces, profoundly reshaped the landscapes of healthcare and academia in which psychotherapy is embedded. As healthcare became increasingly privatized and profit-driven, the provision of mental health services was subordinated to the logic of the market. The ascendancy of managed care organizations and private insurance companies created powerful new stakeholders who saw psychotherapy not as a healing art, but as a commodity to be standardized, packaged, and sold. Under this market-driven system, the value of therapy was reduced to its cost-effectiveness and its capacity to produce swift, measurable outcomes. Depth, nuance, and the exploration of meaning – the traditional heart of the therapeutic enterprise – were casualties of this shift. Concurrent with these changes in healthcare, the neoliberal restructuring of academia further marginalized psychotherapy’s humanistic foundations. As universities increasingly embraced a corporate model, they became beholden to the same market imperatives of efficiency, standardization, and quantification. In this milieu, the kind of research and training that could sustain a rich, multi-faceted understanding of the therapeutic process was devalued in favor of reductive, manualized approaches more amenable to the demands of the market. This academic climate elevated a narrow caste of specialists – often far removed from clinical practice – who were empowered to define the parameters of legitimate knowledge and practice in the field. Beholden to the interests of managed care, the pharmaceutical industry, and the biomedical establishment, these “experts” played a key role in cementing the hegemony of the medical model and sidelining alternative therapeutic paradigms. Psychotherapy training increasingly reflected these distorted priorities, producing generations of therapists versed in the language of symptom management and behavioral intervention, but often lacking a deeper understanding of the human condition. As researcher William Davies has argued, this neoliberal transformation of psychotherapy reflects a broader “disenchantment of politics by economics.” By reducing the complexities of mental distress to quantifiable, medicalized entities, the field has become complicit in the evisceration of human subjectivity under late capitalism. In place of a situated, meaning-making self, we are left with the hollow figure of “homo economicus” – a rational, self-interested actor shorn of deeper psychological and spiritual moorings. Tragically, the public discourse around mental health has largely been corralled into this narrow, market-friendly mold. Discussions of “chemical imbalances,” “evidence-based treatments,” and “quick fixes” abound, while more searching explorations of the psychospiritual malaise of our times are relegated to the margins. The result is a flattened, impoverished understanding of both the nature of psychological distress and the possibilities of therapeutic transformation. Psychotherapy’s capitulation to market forces is thus not merely an abdication of its healing potential, but a betrayal of its emancipatory promise. By uncritically aligning itself with the dominant ideology of our age, the field has become an instrument of social control rather than a catalyst for individual and collective liberation. If therapy is to reclaim its soul, it must begin by confronting this history and imagining alternative futures beyond the neoliberal horizon. Intuition in Other Scientific Fields Noam Chomsky’s groundbreaking work in linguistics and cognitive science has long been accepted as scientific canon, despite its heavy reliance on intuition and introspective phenomenology. His theories of deep grammatical structures and an innate language acquisition device in the human mind emerged not from controlled experiments or quantitative data analysis, but from a deep, intuitive engagement with the patterns of human language and thought. Yet while Chomsky’s ideas are celebrated for their revolutionary implications, similar approaches in the field of psychotherapy are often met with skepticism or outright dismissal. The work of Carl Jung, for instance, which posits the existence of a collective unconscious and universal archetypes shaping human experience, is often relegated to the realm of pseudoscience or mysticism by the mainstream psychological establishment. This double standard reflects a deep-seated insecurity within academic and medical psychology about engaging with phenomena that resist easy quantification or empirical verification. There is a pervasive fear of straying too far from the narrow confines of what can be measured, controlled, and reduced to standardized formulas. Ironically, this insecurity persists even as cutting-edge research in fields like neuroscience and cognitive psychology increasingly validates many of Jung’s once-marginalized ideas. Concepts like “implicit memory,” “event-related potentials,” and “predictive processing” bear striking resemblances to Jungian notions of the unconscious mind, while advanced brain imaging techniques confirm the neurological basis of personality frameworks like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). Yet rather than acknowledging the pioneering nature of Jung’s insights, the psychological establishment often repackages these ideas in more palatable, “scientific” terminology. This aversion to intuition and subjective experience is hardly unique to psychotherapy. Across the sciences, there is a widespread mistrust of knowledge that cannot be reduced to quantifiable data points and mathematical models. However, some of the most transformative scientific advances have emerged from precisely this kind of intuitive, imaginative thinking. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, for instance, emerged not from empirical data, but from a thought experiment – an act of pure imagination. The physicist David Bohm’s innovative theories about the implicate order of the universe were rooted in a profoundly intuitive understanding of reality. And the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan attributed his brilliant insights to visions from a Hindu goddess – a claim that might be dismissed as delusional in a clinical context, but is celebrated as an expression of his unique genius. Psychotherapy should not abandon empirical rigor or the scientific method, but rather expand its understanding of what constitutes meaningful evidence. By making room for intuitive insights, subjective experiences, and phenomenological explorations alongside quantitative data and experimental findings, the field can develop a richer, more multidimensional understanding of the human mind and the process of psychological transformation. This expansive, integrative approach is necessary for psychotherapy to rise to the challenges of our time – the crisis of meaning and authenticity in an increasingly fragmented world, the epidemic of mental illness and addiction, and the collective traumas of social oppression and ecological devastation. Only by honoring the full spectrum of human knowledge and experience can we hope to catalyze the kind of deep, lasting change that our world so desperately needs. It is a particular vexation of mine that academic psychology is so hostile to the vague but perennial ideas about the unconscious that Jung and others posited. Now neurology is re-validating Jungian concepts under different names like “implicit memory”, “event-related potentials”, and “secondary and tertiary consciousness”, while qEEG brain maps are validating the underlying assumptions of the Jungian-derived MBTI. Yet the academy still cannot admit they were wrong and Jung was right, even as they publish papers in “premiere” academic journals like The Lancet that denounce Jung as pseudoscience while repurposing his ideas. This is another example of hypocrisy. Academia seems to believe its publications have innate efficacy and ethics as long as the proper rituals of psychological research are enacted. If you cite your sources, review recent literature in your echo chamber, disclose financial interests, and profess ignorance of your profession’s history and the unethical systems funding your existence, then you are doing research correctly. But the systems paying for your work and existence are not mere “financial interests” – that’s just business! This is considered perfectly rational, as long as one doesn’t think too deeply about it. Claiming “I don’t get into that stuff” or “I do academic/medical psychology” has become a way to defend oneself from not having a basic understanding of how humans and cultures are traumatized or motivated, even while running universities and hospitals. The attitude seems to be: “Let’s just keep handing out CBT and drugs for another 50 years, ‘rationally’ and ‘evidence-based’ of course, and see how much worse things get in mental health.” No wonder outcomes and the replication crisis worsen every year, even as healthcare is ostensibly guided by rational, empirical forces. Academia has created a model of reality called science, applied so single-mindedly that they no longer care if the outcomes mirror those of the real world science was meant to serve! Academic and medical psychology have created a copy of the world they interact with, pretending it reflects reality while it fundamentally cannot, due to the material incentives driving it. We’ve created a scientific model meant to reflect reality, but mistake it for reality itself. We reach in vain to move objects in the mirror instead of putting the mirror away and engaging with what’s actually there. How do we not see that hyper-rationalism is just another form of religion, even as we tried to replace religion with it? This conception of psychology is not only an imaginary model, but actively at war with the real, cutting us off from truly logical, evidence-based pathways we could pursue. It wars with objective reality because both demand our total allegiance. We must choose entirely between the object and its reflection, god and idol. We must decide if we want the uncertainty of real science or the imaginary sandbox we pretend is science. Adherence to this simulacrum in search of effective trauma and mental illness treatments has itself become a cultural trauma response – an addiction to the familiar and broken over the effective and frightening. This is no different than a cult or conspiracy theory. A major pillar of our civilization would rather perpetuate what is familiar and broken than dare to change. Such methodological fundamentalism is indistinguishable from religious devotion. We have a group so committed to their notion of the rational that they’ve decided reason and empiricism should no longer be beholden to reality. How is our approach to clinical psychology research any different than a belief in magic? The deflections of those controlling mainstream psychology should sound familiar – they are the same ego defenses we’d identify in a traumatized therapy patient. Academic psychology’s reasoning is starting to resemble what it would diagnose as a personality disorder: “It’s not me doing it wrong, even though I’m not getting the results I want! It’s the world that’s wrong by not enabling my preferred approach. Effective practitioners must be cheating or deluded. Those who do it like me are right, though none of us get good results. We’d better keep doing it our way, but harder.” As noted in my Healing the Modern Soul series, I believe that since part of psychology’s role is to functionally define the “self”, clinical psychology is inherently political. Material forces will always seek to define and control what psychology can be. Most healthy definitions of self threaten baseless tradition, hierarchy, fascism, capital hoarding, and the co-opting of culture to manipulate consumption. Our culture is sick, and thus resistant to a psychology that would challenge its unhealthy games with a coherent sense of self. Like any patient, our culture wants to deflect and fears the first step of healing: admitting you have a problem. That sickness strokes the right egos and lines the right pockets, a societal-scale version of Berne’s interpersonal games. Our current psychological paradigm requires a hierarchy with one group playing sick, emotional child to the other’s hyper-rational, all-knowing parent. The relationship is inherently transactional, and we need to make it more authentic and collaborative. I have argued before  that one of the key challenges facing psychotherapy today is the fragmentation and complexity of modern identity. In a globalized, digitally-connected world, we are constantly navigating a myriad of roles, relationships, and cultural contexts, each with its own set of expectations and demands. Even though most people would agree that our system is bad the fragmentary nature of the postmodern has left us looking through a kaleidoscope. We are unable to agree on hero, villain, cause, solution, framework or label. This fragmentation leads to a sense of disconnection and confusion, a feeling that we are not living an authentic or integrated life. The task of psychotherapy, in this context, is to help individuals develop a more coherent and resilient sense of self, one that can withstand the centrifugal forces of modern existence. Psychotherapy can become a new mirror to cancel out the confusing reflections of the kaleidoscope. We need a new better functioning understanding of self in psychology for society to see the self and for the self to see clearly our society. The Fragmentation of Psychotherapy: Reconnecting with Philosophy and Anthropology To reclaim its soul and relevance, psychotherapy must reconnect with its philosophical and anthropological roots. These disciplines offer essential perspectives on the nature of human existence, the formation of meaning and identity, and the cultural contexts that shape our psychological realities. By reintegrating these broader frameworks, we can develop a more holistic and nuanced understanding of mental health that goes beyond the narrow confines of symptom management. Many of the most influential figures in the history of psychotherapy have argued for this more integrative approach. Irvin Yalom, for instance, has long championed an existential orientation to therapy that grapples with the fundamental questions of human existence – death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness. Erik Erikson’s psychosocial theory of development explicitly situated psychological growth within a broader cultural and historical context. Peter Levine’s work on trauma healing draws heavily from anthropological insights into the body’s innate capacity for self-regulation and resilience. Carl Jung, perhaps more than any other figure, insisted on the inseparability of psychology from broader humanistic inquiry. His concepts of the collective unconscious and archetypes were rooted in a deep engagement with mythology, anthropology, and comparative religion. Jung understood that individual psychological struggles often reflect larger cultural and spiritual crises, and that healing must address both personal and collective dimensions of experience. Despite the profound insights offered by these thinkers, mainstream psychotherapy has largely ignored their calls for a more integrative approach. The field’s increasing alignment with the medical model and its pursuit of “evidence-based” treatments has led to a narrow focus on standardized interventions that can be easily quantified and replicated. While this approach has its merits, it often comes at the cost of deeper engagement with the philosophical and cultural dimensions of psychological experience. The relationship between psychology, philosophy, and anthropology is not merely a matter of academic interest – it is essential to the practice of effective and meaningful therapy. Philosophy provides the conceptual tools to grapple with questions of meaning, ethics, and the nature of consciousness that are often at the heart of psychological distress. Anthropology offers crucial insights into the cultural shaping of identity, the diversity of human experience, and the social contexts that give rise to mental health challenges. By reconnecting with these disciplines, psychotherapy can develop a more nuanced and culturally informed approach to healing. This might involve: Incorporating philosophical inquiry into the therapeutic process, helping clients explore questions of meaning, purpose, and values. Drawing on anthropological insights to understand how cultural norms and social structures shape psychological experience and expressions of distress. Developing more holistic models of mental health that account for the interconnectedness of mind, body, culture, and environment. Fostering dialogue between psychotherapists, philosophers, and anthropologists to enrich our understanding of human experience and suffering. Training therapists in a broader range of humanistic disciplines to cultivate a more integrative and culturally sensitive approach to healing. The reintegration of philosophy and anthropology into psychotherapy is not merely an academic exercise – it is essential for addressing the complex psychological challenges of our time. As we grapple with global crises like climate change, political polarization, and the erosion of traditional sources of meaning, we need a psychology that can engage with the big questions of human existence and the cultural forces shaping our collective psyche. By reclaiming its connections to philosophy and anthropology, psychotherapy can move beyond its current crisis and reclaim its role as a vital force for individual and collective healing. In doing so, it can offer not just symptom relief, but a deeper engagement with the fundamental questions of what it means to be human in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. References: Binkley, S. (2007). Getting loose: Lifestyle consumption in the 1970s. Duke University Press. Cipriani, A., Furukawa, T. A., Salanti, G., Chaimani, A., Atkinson, L. Z., Ogawa, Y., … & Geddes, J. R. (2018). Comparative efficacy and acceptability of 21 antidepressant drugs for the acute treatment of adults with major depressive disorder: a systematic review and network meta-analysis. The Lancet, 391(10128), 1357-1366. Cushman, P. (1995). Constructing the self, constructing America: A cultural history of psychotherapy. Boston: Addison-Wesley. Davies, W. (2014). The limits of neoliberalism: Authority, sovereignty and the logic of competition. Sage. Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative?. John Hunt Publishing. Hillman, J. (1992). The thought of the heart and the soul of the world. Spring Publications. Kirsch, I. (2010). The emperor’s new drugs: Exploding the antidepressant myth. Basic Books. Layton, L. (2009). Who’s responsible? Our mutual implication in each other’s suffering. Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 19(2), 105-120. Penny, L. (2015). Self-care isn’t enough. We need community care to thrive. Open Democracy. Retrieved from https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/selfcare-isnt-enough-we-need-community-care-to-thrive/ Rose, N. (2019). Our psychiatric future: The politics of mental health. John Wiley & Sons. Samuels, A. (2014). Politics on the couch: Citizenship and the internal life. Karnac Books. Shedler, J. (2018). Where is the evidence for “evidence-based” therapy?. Psychiatric Clinics, 41(2), 319-329. Sugarman, J. (2015). Neoliberalism and psychological ethics. Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, 35(2), 103. Watkins, M., & Shulman, H. (2008). Toward psychologies of liberation. Palgrave Macmillan. Whitaker, R. (2010). Anatomy of an epidemic: Magic bullets, psychiatric drugs, and the astonishing rise of mental illness in America. Broadway Books. Winerman, L. (2017). By the numbers: Antidepressant use on the rise. Monitor on Psychology, 48(10), 120. Suggested further reading: Bordo, S. (2004). Unbearable weight: Feminism, Western culture, and the body. University of California Press. Cacioppo, J. T., & Patrick, W. (2008). Loneliness: Human nature and the need for social connection. WW Norton & Company. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1988). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Publishing. Fanon, F. (2007). The wretched of the earth. Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Foucault, M. (1988). Madness and civilization: A history of insanity in the age of reason. Vintage. Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury publishing USA. Fromm, E. (1955). The sane society. Routledge. Hari, J. (2018). Lost connections: Uncovering the real causes of depression–and the unexpected solutions. Bloomsbury Publishing USA. Herman, J. L. (2015). Trauma and recovery: The aftermath of violence–from domestic abuse to political terror. Hachette UK. hooks, b. (2014). Teaching to transgress. Routledge. Illouz, E. (2008). Saving the modern soul: Therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. Univ of California Press. Laing, R. D. (1960). The divided self: An existential study in sanity and madness. Penguin UK. Martín-Baró, I. (1996). Writings for a liberation psychology. Harvard University Press. McKenzie, K., & Bhui, K. (Eds.). (2020). Institutional racism in psychiatry and clinical psychology: Race matters in mental health. Springer Nature. Metzl, J. M. (2010). The protest psychosis: How schizophrenia became a black disease. Beacon Press. Orr, J. (2006). Panic diaries: A genealogy of panic disorder. Duke University Press. Scaer, R. (2014). The body bears the burden: Trauma, dissociation, and disease. Routledge. Szasz, T. S. (1997). The manufacture of madness: A comparative study of the inquisition and the mental health movement. Syracuse University Press. Taylor, C. (2012). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge University Press. Teo, T. (2015). Critical psychology: A geography of intellectual engagement and resistance. American Psychologist, 70(3), 243. Tolleson, J. (2011). Saving the world one patient at a time: Psychoanalysis and social critique. Psychotherapy and Politics International, 9(2), 160-170.

Wounded in similar ways Wounded in similar ways It sounds like something that a hippie would say But the truth is we're wounded in similar ways Hey guys, it's Joel And I've had a couple questions where someone wanted me to explain why I said something kind of a quick article to kind of summarize some of those things neatly so that you didn't have to go back and listen to two years or read two years worth of stuff. So this article is called The Illusion of Progress, How Psychotherapy Lost Its

Way. How market forces are shaping the practice and the future of psychotherapy. The field of psychotherapy faces an identity and a purpose crisis in the era of market-driven healthcare. As managed care, pharmaceutical dominance, and the biomedical model reshape mental health treatment, psychotherapy's traditional foundations, which are depth, nuance, and the therapeutic relationship are being displaced by the imperatives of cost and containment, standardization, and mass reproducibility. And this shift reflects the ascendancy of a neoliberal cultural ideology reducing the complexity of human suffering to decontextualize symptoms to be efficiently eliminated, not a meaningful experience to be explored and transformed. The symptom is the separate thing that we can just get rid of, but it doesn't link back

to a piece of a larger self or a piece of a larger society that needs to be examined and brought back into equilibrium. In Constructing the Self, Constructing America, cultural historian Philip Cushman argues that this psychotherapy crisis stems from a shift in notions of the self and therapy's aims. Individual identity and psychological health are shaped by cultural and economic and political forces, not a universal ideal. The rise of neoliberal capitalism and consumerism birthed an empty self plagued by this inner lack, pursuing fulfillment through goods and experiences and attainments, and insecurity about an inadequacy about falling behind in life's competitive race, a focus on appearances instead of internalized development. Mainstream

psychotherapy largely reinforces this alienated individualistic and self-construction. Cognitive behavioral therapy and manualized treatment focus narrowly on maladaptive thoughts and behaviors without examining social, political, and existential contexts. Packaging therapy into standardized modules strips away relational essence for managed care's needs. Therapists become technicians, reinforcing a decontextualized view locating problems solely in the individual, overlooking unjust social conditions shaping the lives and the psyche of the individual. And central is the biomedical model's hegemony, viewing psychological structure as brain diseases treated pharmacologically, a seductive but

illusory promise. And we've had a big re-examining of all of the research that got us there as being something that was kind of a faulty foundation. Look up the STAR-D study if you're not familiar. The antidepressant use has massively grown despite the efficacy and the doubts about safety. And I'm not against all psychopharm. Don't send me an email. I don't think it's where you start. I think it's where you get to when you have an endogenous depression that will not change even after you have changed the environment. And this model of psychopharm and the biomedical model, it individualizes and medicalizes distress despite research that links depression to life pain, like poverty and unemployment and trauma and isolation and things that we could fix, arguably for a lot less money than we spend to have profit-seeking streams where drugs are developed or drugs are pushed. Digital technology furthers the need towards this disembodied technocratic mental health care to be

the norm. Online therapy platforms and apps expand access, but they risk reducing therapy to scripted interactions and gamified inputs, not a genuine embodied attitude at meaning making. In his book Getting Loose, Lifestyle Consumption in the 1970s, sociologist Sam Binkley examines how the social transformations of the 1970s, driven by the rise of neoliberalism and consumer culture, profoundly reshaped notions of selfhood and the goals of therapeutic practice. Binkley argues that the dominant therapeutic model that emerged during this period, one that was centered on the purist, the pursuit of personal growth, self-actualization, and the loosening of the self from traditional constraints, you know, mainly aesthetic ones like, you know,

marriage or the suburbs, unwittingly aligned itself with a neoliberal agenda that cast individuals as enterprising consumers responsible for their own fulfillment and well-being. So that hippie idea of being your own person and breaking the mold, Binkley's hypothesizing that that lined up really well with the neoliberal consumption idea that you are what you buy. And so instead of really changing themselves, they learned to express themselves through consumption dependent on the same couple monopolies. And so the movement was sort of hollow. So while ostensibly, and liberatory, this getting loose ethos ultimately reinforced atomization and alienation of the self under late capitalism. And by locating the source and the solution to psychological distress solely

within the individual psyche, it obscured the broader social, economic, and political forces shaping mental health. So in doing so, it inadvertently contributed to the very conditions of getting loose. This pervasive sense of being unmoored, fragmented, adrift, that initially the idea of getting loose or, you know, tuning in, turning on, dropping out, getting out of the societal consumption was supposed to solve, ultimately it made them worse and hurt our ability to connect and have community and meaning. So Binkley's analysis, it offers a powerful lens for understanding the current crisis of psychotherapy. It suggests that the field increasingly embraces decontextualized technocratic approaches to treatment, not nearly not only like to

capitulate to market pressures but just as a logical extension of a therapeutic paradigm that has for a long time been complicit with the individualizing logic of neoliberalism um that your symptom is your symptom it is something that comes from something that you did, not, you know, a societal phenomenon or an expression of a greater pain or a process of something inside of your psyche that is out of relationship, just a symptom to be medicated and removed in a way that I would argue is not always possible as much of the time as the biomedical model tries to make it possible. So this imagining, reimagining, requires a move beyond the intrapsychic forces of traditional therapy to one that grapples with the social,

political, and existential contexts of suffering. It means working to foster critical consciousness, relational vitality, and collective empowerment. Helping individuals to deconstruct the oppressive narratives and power structures that constrain their lives, and to tap into alternative sources of identity, belonging, and purpose. Such a transformation is not just a matter of therapeutic technique, but of a political and ethical commitment. It demands that therapists reimagine their work not merely as an alleviation of individual symptoms, but as a form of social and political action aiming at nurturing personal and collective liberation. And this means that

cultivating spaces of collective healing and visioning and aligning ourselves with movements for social justice and systemic change. At stake is nothing less than the survival of the psychotherapy art itself. If current trends persist, our field will devolve into a character of itself, a hollow simulacrum of branded, efficient, quality-controlled treatment packages hawked by managed care. Therapists will be relegated to the role of glorified skills coaches and symptom suppression specialists, while the deep psychic wounds and social pathologies underlying the epidemic of mental distress will metastasize unchecked. And the choice before us is stark. Do we collude with a system that offers only the veneer of care while perpetuating the conditions of collective madness, or do we commit ourselves anew to the still revolutionary praxis of tending psyche,

dialoguing with the unconscious, and giving a soul to psychotherapy? That was James Hillman in 1992 who said that. Ultimately, the struggle to reimagine therapy is inseparable from the struggle to build a more just, caring, and sustainable world. As the mental health toll of late capitalism continues to mount, the need for psychotherapy of liberation has never been more urgent. By rising to this challenge, we open up new possibilities for resilience, regeneration, and revolutionary love and beginning to create the world that we long for, even as we heal the world that we have. The shift in psychotherapy's identity and purpose can be traced back to broader

socioeconomic transformations of the late 20th century, particularly the rise of neoliberalism under the Reagan and Thatcher administrations. Neoliberal ideology, with its emphasis on privatization, deregulation, and the supremacy of market forces, profoundly shaped the landscape of healthcare and academia in which psychotherapy is embedded. As healthcare became increasingly privatized and profit-driven, the provision of mental health services was subordinate to the logic of the market, and so the ascendancy of managed care organizations and private insurance companies created powerful new stakeholders who saw psychotherapy not as a healing art, but as a commodity to be standardized, packaged, and sold. Under this market-driven system, the value of therapy was reduced to its cost-effectiveness

and its capacity to produce swift, measurable outcomes. Depth, nuance, and the exploration of meaning at the traditional heart of the therapeutic enterprise were casualties of this shift, and concurrent with these changes in healthcare and neoliberal restructuring of academia further marginalized psychotherapy's humanistic foundations. As universities increasingly embraced a corporate model, they became beholden to the same market imperatives of efficiency, standardization, and quantification. In this milieu, the kind of research and training that could sustain a rich, multifaceted understanding of the therapeutic process was devalued in favor

of reductive, manualized approaches more amenable to the demands of the market. And the academic climate elevated a narrow cast of specialists, who often are pretty far removed from any sort of clinical practice, and no, working at the student counseling center one day a week as a supervisor is not a form of clinical practice that I mean, who were empowered to define the parameters of legitimate knowledge and practice in the field, beholden to the interest of managed care, the pharmaceutical industry and the biomedical establishment, you know, used these experts to cement hegemony of the medical model and sign-line any kind of alternative therapeutic paradigm. Even, especially

through sidelining research of anything that wouldn't be paid for by a drug company or wouldn't ultimately benefit the bottom line of somebody who could afford to do the millions of dollars of research. So when you tie psychotherapy to research, that's unethical unless you're going to research everything equally. When you're only going to research things that a certain group has a vested interest in, you can't call that an ethical study because that isn't the way that I understand ethics and psychology to function. Researcher William Davies has argued that this neoliberal transformation of psychotherapy reflects a broader disenchantment of politics by economics. By reducing the complexities of mental distress

to quantifiable medical-wise entities, the field has become more complicit in the evisceration of human subjectivity under late capitalism. In place of a situated meaning-making self, we are left with a hollow figure of the homo economicus, you know, the rational, self-interested actor shorn of deeper psychological spiritual mooring. That is the economic man, which was one of the ways that people made fun of John Stuart Mill's theories later. The idea that the sole motivation that you could use to study economy was just that human beings were pleasure-seeking creatures that made rational market decisions to increase their financial power and that you could build an economic

system that relied on that because that's true and that was all that we were. And when you follow that as an extension of economy to a politics or a psychology that is beholden to that kind of economy and political economy, you start to see those assumptions showing up in psychology in a way that is very scary and very anti-psychological and anti-empirical. Tragically, the public discourse around mental health has largely been corralled into this narrow market-friendly mold. Discussions of chemical imbalances, evidence-based treatment, and quick fixes abound, while more searching explorations of the psychospiritual malaise of our time are relegated to the margins. The result is a flattened and impoverished understanding of both the nature of psychological distress and the possibilities of therapeutic transformation. Psychotherapy's capitulation to market forces is thus not merely

an abdication of its healing potential, but a betrayal of its emancipatory promise, the original promise of why we go to therapy, why therapy was created. By uncritically aligning yourself with the dominant ideology of the age, the field has become an instrument of social control rather than a catalyst for individual and collective liberation. If therapy is to reclaim its soul, it must begin by confronting this history and imagining alternatives beyond what the neoliberals can imagine. When you look at other scientific fields, like somebody like Noam Chomsky, you know, he does some political science stuff, but also he's a groundbreaking linguist in the cognitive sciences. And his work in the cognitive sciences has been accepted as canon, essentially.

There's not very many people who think that it's wrong, even though there's a limited extent to which it can be empirically proven. It becomes the operating assumption of people just because it works when you plug it into the model and because intuitively they can rely on it to be a consistent phenomenon, even though we can't exactly prove his really big concepts, like the language acquisition device just has too many soft spots for it to be run through a randomized controlled trial, but it's still something that we think is real in that world of empiricism. Now, his theories of this deep grammatical structure and, you know, the way that we acquire language, those didn't come out of, you know, experiments or quantitative data analysis, but from deep intuitive engagement with the pattern of human language and thought, and then the empiricism of that subjectivity. Yet, while Chomsky's ideas are celebrated for their revolutionary implications,

similar approaches in the field of psychotherapy are often met with skepticism or outright dismissal. The work of Carl Jung, for example, which posits the existence of a collective unconscious and universal archetypes shaping human experience is often relegated to the realm of pseudoscience or mysticism by the mainstream psychological establishment. And this double standard reflects a deep-seated insecurity within the academic and medical psychology about engaging with phenomena that resist easy quantification or empirical verification. There is a pervasive fear of straying too far from the narrow confines of what can be measured, controlled, and reduced

to a standardized formula. And ironically, this insecurity persists even as cutting-edge research in fields like neuroscience and cognitive psychology increasingly validate many of Jung's once-marginalized ideas. Concepts like implicit memory, event-related potentials, predictive processing, they bear a striking resemblance to Jung's ideas of the unconscious mind, almost like somebody took all of the work that other people did with those theories and then said that's pseudoscience and came up with a new name for an empirical part, observable part, of the truth of those theories without being able to connect the dots. And here's the thing, man, I don't think they did it to enrich themselves. I don't know that anyone becomes a PhD scientist to enrich themselves, which to me is scarier. What are they getting out of this, you know?

An ego stroke? I mean, that's sadder than if you were laughing all the way to the bank so you know things like the myers-briggs and i've got an article about this if you want more detail but things like the mbti that you know yung didn't make the mbti but he made the assumptions that made the first three letters and then myers and briggs made up the last two but he did the groundwork for that and rather than acknowledge you know where these new theories about thought type and preference and you know diametrically opposed types of cognition you know that we can now see on qeg despite talking about how those overlap with these things, that we're finally having technologies

caught up for us to have the empirical ability to validate a lot of the things that we used to only have to hypothesize about intuitively, you know, the way science has always worked. Now that's rejected, you know. The psychological establishment repackages these ideas in more palatable scientific terminology, but they don't give credit. They don't cite their sources. And a lot of the time, it's because they don't know the history well enough to understand what their sources are, which again, I'm not, this may sound conspiratorial, it's not supposed to be. The fact that it is done out of ignorance instead of malice, I think is scarier and should scare

you more. They don't know the history of the profession, and they don't know the history of the flow of ideas within it. This aversion to intuition and subjective experience is hardly unique to psychotherapy. Across the sciences, there's a widespread mistrust of knowledge that cannot be reduced to quantifiable data points and mathematical models. You know, however, some of the most transformative scientific advancements have emerged from precisely this kind of intuitive imaginative thinking. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, for instance, emerged not from empirical data, but from a thought experiment, an act of imagination. The physicist David Bohm's innovative theories about the implicate order of the universe

were rooted in a profoundly intuitive understanding of reality. And the mathematician Ramunja attributed his brilliant insights to visions from a hindu goddess um a claim that might be dismissed as delusional in a clinical context but it's celebrated as an expression of his unique genius and a lot of times it's because these mystical or spiritual experience function as unconscious semi-conscious maybe conscious metaphors you know there are containers there are the way that language contains the part of the brain that we cannot directly experience. That is what the unconscious is, and that's why to pretend that it doesn't exist is so silly, because for anyone who gets that, you're going to see those containers everywhere.

Psychotherapy should not abandon empirical rigor or the scientific method, but rather it should expand its understanding of what constitutes meaningful evidence. By making room for insights, subjective experiences, and phenomenological explorations alongside quantitative data and experimental findings, the field can develop a richer, more multidimensional understanding of the human mind in the process of psychological transformation. This expansive and integrative approach is necessary for psychotherapy to rise to the challenges of our time. The crisis of meaning and authenticity in an increasingly fragmented world, the epidemic of mental health, mental, you know, illness and addiction, and the collective traumas of social oppression and ecological devastation. Only by

honoring the full spectrum of human knowledge and experience can we hope to catalyze the kind of deep lasting change that our world so desperately needs. And I view, you know, psychotherapy as a path to get there. I view the healing of trauma collectively as a way that we must get where we need to go. And it's a particular vexation of mine that the academic psychology is so hostile to the vague but perennial ideas about the unconscious that Jung and others posited. You know, now neurology is revalidating Jungian concepts under different names. While the QEG brain maps, you know, I had mentioned are also, a whole lot of evidence, if you have the eyes to see it, that a lot of Jungian phenomenology wasn't wrong. But they still can't admit that, even when they repackage the same ideas and publish them in things like The Lancet, you'll still find things about Jungian ideas about dreams or something being pseudoscience, even though they explain these realities, that are now verifiable. Academia seems to believe that its publications have innate

efficacy and ethics as long as the proper rituals of psychological research are enacted. If you cite your sources, review recent literature in your echo chamber, disclose your financial interests, and then profess ignorance of your profession's history and the unethical systems funding your existence, then you're doing research correctly. But the system that is paying for your entire existence, like that isn't a conflict of interest. That's just the way the business works, right? And why are you pointing this out to me? I didn't even know that, so it's not my fault, you know, say the people working in that system. This is considered perfectly rational as long as we don't think too deeply about it. A lot of the people who have either sent me an email or who have asked me

what I think about this at a conference or something and I've talked to them, what they'll say is like, I don't get into any of that because I do academic psychology or I do medical psychology. Well, I think that understanding how humans and cultures are uniquely traumatized and motivated is part of your job, even if you're just going to run a university or just going to make decisions for a hospital or an insurance company about how an entire state gets to practice healthcare. Yeah, those are relevant details that you should know as a part of psychology. So I guess I don't know what academic or medical psychology means in this context, other than I publish papers for a living. And the attitude seems to be, let's just keep handing out CBT and drugs for another 50 years that are rational and evidence-based, of course, and we'll see how much

worse things get then. We can go back and we can see when we started to do these things. We can see what mental health outcomes were after we started to do them. So why can't we see what we are doing? You know, no wonder outcomes in the replication crisis from all of these studies, like the STAR-D study, again, look that one up, worsen every year. And even as healthcare is ostensibly more rational and more empirical and more evidence-based than it has ever been, outcomes are worse. So why? And my answer, again, is not conspiracies and science isn't real. It's that what you're doing is not science. You're just calling it that. And you've got little props

that you hold up to pretend that it is. You know, academia has created a model of reality called science, and they've applied it so single-mindedly that they no longer care if the outcomes mirror those of the real world. That science was meant to serve. It was meant to be an extrapolation of the real in order to divine its realities with a study. You know, academic and medical psychology have created a copy of the world, and they interact with it pretending it reflects reality while it fundamentally cannot due to the material incentives that drive their system. And what they don't want to see about how those material incentives drive our reality, economically and politically. We've created a scientific model that was meant to reflect reality, but then we have mistaken it

for reality itself. And we are reaching in vain to try and move something that's on the other side of a mirror instead of engaging with what's actually real. How do we not see that hyper-rationalism is just another form of religion, even as we tried to replace religion with it? This concept of psychology is not only an imaginary model. The academic and the medical, biomedical conception of psychology is not only an imaginary model. The academic and the medical biomedical conception of psychology is not only just not real, it's at war with the real because it cuts us off from truly logical evidence-based pathways that we could pursue. One of the things that I heard all the time in the hospital was, yeah, what you're doing works and that's a good idea and it sounds right,

but it isn't evidence-based. Well, didn't I just start a study there? Didn't I just do something 50 times and it worked? I mean, do you know the scientific method? We must choose entirely between the object and its reflection, the god and the idol. We must decide if we want the uncertainty of real science or the certainty of the imaginary sandbox that we pretend is science now. Adherence to the simulacrum in search of effective trauma and mental illness treatment, it has

become a cultural trauma response that we even bother to adhere to it at all. It is an addiction to the familiar and the broken, over the effective but the frightening. This is no different than a cult or a conspiracy theory. A major pillar of our civilization would whether perpetuate what is familiar and broken, then dare to change, and such methodological fundamentalism is indistinguishable from religious devotion. We have a group so committed to their notion of the rational that they've decided reason and empiricism should no longer be beholden to reality. How is our approach to clinical psychology research any different than a belief in magic at this point? The deflections of those controlling mainstream psychology sound,

they should sound familiar. They are the same ego defenses that you would identify in a traumatized therapy patient. Academic psychology's reasoning is starting to resemble what it would diagnose if it came in as a patient to itself as a personality disorder. It's not me doing it wrong, even though I'm just not getting the results that I want every time I do the thing. It's the world that's wrong because it's not enabling my preferred approach. Effective practitioners must be cheating or deluded. The people who are getting good results out there, outside of the hospital, they must be crazy.

Those who do it like me are right, though none of us get any good results. Our results are bad, but our methods are right, and the methods are right because they yield the good results, except the methods that are right aren't getting us the good results, so we better just keep doing it our way harder. You know, anyone who's talking out of their mouth in both directions like that, you would have no issue slapping with some kind of diagnosis and therapy, but when it's them doing it collectively at a conference, it's like, oh, a big issue. That's a great point. And we need to take a long look in the mirror and have a long conversation about that. Anyone who's ever said, take a long look in the mirror, or we all just need to sit down as a society and have a long conversation,

they don't want to solve a problem. Because when you're saying that, what you're looking at is the most obvious problem and the most obvious solution in the world, and you don't want to see it. So you want to muddy the water to pretend that it's deep. And I guarantee you, if you talk to people in that world about this, that's what you'll get, is that if it was so simple, it would have been fixed already. So let's make it worse by making it more complicated. Now, when I did that Healing the Modern Soul series, you know, I said that I believe that psychology's role is part of its job is to have a functional and coherent definition of self, what self means when we're talking to another person, what we think that person is.

And because of that, clinical psychology is always going to be inherently political. So, you know, material forces will always seek to define and control what psychology can be. So if you're saying, well, it can't be political or research isn't political, then you just don't understand how it works, because it is. It's like the people who, and you know, I don't really get into politics much on here, but it was like, I don't go to football games either, I'm just not a football fan. I'm not a football guy. But when you had somebody kneeling to protest what they wanted on a football game, and then people were yelling on my LinkedIn, like, football is not political. Keep your politics out of my football. Well, I mean, one of the last three times I went to a football game, they had American flag fireworks and jets flying over the stadium and a salute to the troops. And

I'm not saying that that's wrong or I disagree with it. I'm saying that is politics. So if you're saying you don't want football to be political, then I think you just don't notice where politics are when you like them. And when people say that psychology is not political, or they say that psychology doesn't have anything to do with economy or these other things. Well, I'm not an expert in that. I just want to study this little thing. What they're saying is, I don't want to see it. They're not making a case that it's not there. And if you want to hang out in this profession, and you also want to make a case that you don't see the forces that move it, then I think that you should get out. Because

what are you doing? You're not in it anyway. You're just saying you want to play. And some of this drive to ignore these things is because people want to play. They want to have a little sandbox that they get to pretend is doing something real and none of the controls are hooked up to anything because it's a toy. And I think that when you look at why a lot of these things got worse, I mean, yeah, there's shareholders and people laughing all the way to the bank. Generally, those people are not the psychologists. Sometimes they are, but a lot of the time, it's these highly academic people that have had any sort of agency withheld from them for so long. You have to jump through so many hoops. You have to have so much debt. You have to shave all the ideas off your vision. You have to do what

your advisor wants. You have to do something that's being researched right now. You can't do your own. And then finally, you get to do it, and there's this sunk cost fallacy of I have to defend this system that's broken by just being like, well, I don't know anything about all of that. I just have been waiting for 15 years for the ability to teach in this hospital and be seen as the expert who knows everything. So please don't bring up things that I don't know. You know, there's like that attitude, which to me is just sadder. But end of the day, the culture is very sick and it's going to be resistant to a psychology that would challenge its unhealthy games with a coherent sense of self, because like any patient, our culture wants to deflect unhealthy games with a coherent sense of self, because like any patient, our culture wants to deflect and it fears the first step of healing, which is admitting you have a problem. And that sickness strokes the right egos and it lines the right pockets of a societal scale version of, you know, you go look at Eric Burns, the games we play, those interpersonal games that he brings up in that book. Our current psychological paradigm requires a hierarchy with one group playing sick emotional

child who gets talked down to, and then the other hyper-rational all-knowing parent that's going to tell you what to do. And that may be inevitable in some medical settings, you know, when people have different levels of functioning or different levels of training are required to do the thing, you're going to have never a completely equal relationship. But it's too transactional. And us making it more transactional is making other people more money. And so that has been encouraged in a way that is at war with the authentic and the collaborative elements that psychotherapy should have. And I've argued before that one of the key challenges facing psychotherapy today is the, you know, fragmentation and the complex study of just modern identity. Because, you know,

when I say it in these kind of words, it's really to get a lot of people on the same side, because usually people who wouldn't normally agree with each other will hear me say something like this, or they'll read an article, and they'll say, oh my god, that's right, I've worked somewhere and what we did was stupid and it didn't make any sense. But then when we get into diagnosing it and explaining what a solution would be, they would say, oh no, that's communism, or oh no, that's right-wing, or oh no, that's, you know, there's an association that they have with any of the language. And I think language being that divisive is part of the postmodern. I mean, that we have this globalized digitally connected world where we're constantly navigating a myriad of roles, relationships, and cultural contexts that each have their own expectations and demands. I mean,

you have to play two roles. You may have to play one thing when you're talking to your boss, another thing when you're talking to a customer, and then hopefully you remember who you are when you get home. We wear a lot of persona, and the reality of the digital world and the modern world means that we have to wear a whole lot more, which makes remembering, you know, defining something like a itself a lot harder than it used to be. And it's arguably one of the hardest parts of our humanity, I would say. So even though most people would agree that our system is bad, the fragmentary nature of the postmodern has left us looking through a kaleidoscope and we're unable to agree on hero or villain, cause or solution, you know, framework

or label, and this fragmentation leads to a sense of disconnection and confusion, a feeling that we're not living an authentic or integrated life. And the task of psychotherapy in this context is to help individuals develop a more coherent and resilient sense of self, you know, one that can withstand the centrifugal forces of modern existence. And psychotherapy can become a new mirror to cancel out those confusing reflections of the kaleidoscope. Because remember, in the kaleidoscope, you're not really seeing something that looks crazy. What makes it look crazy is the fact that it's being reflected at you from 15 different angles, which is something that we can cancel out. We need a new, better

functioning understanding of self and psychotherapy for society to see the self and for the self to see clearly our society and the interrelationship between those things. And I think to reclaim the soul and relevance, psychotherapy must reconnect with its philosophical and anthropological roots. You know, these disciplines offer perspectives on the nature of human existence, the formation and meaning of identity, and the cultural contexts that shape our psychological realities in a way that can be very individual. You know, I can teach you how to do this without making you believe the same thing that I believe, which is something that I think psychotherapy has to do. I'm not trying to make you, as a supervisor of therapists, the same therapist as me. I'm not trying to make you, as a patient, similar to me. I'm not even trying to make you get better in the same way I got better. I'm supposed to know the history and the breadth and the context of those

doors, some of which I may have gone through, some of which I may not, but I'm holding space for you to be able to do that in a way that may not be something that I even understand. Many of these, you know, the most influential figures in history of therapy have argued for this. You know, Yalom is a big one. Eric Erickson is a big one. Peter Levin's work, I think, can be read that way. Carl Jung is, you know, Yalom is a big one. Eric Erickson is a big one. Peter Levin's work, I think, can be read that way. Carl Jung is, you know, one that I like and talk about a lot, but him pulling people back into mythology and anthropology, a lot of times a modern myth, a modern anthro. to get them to reflect on the history of meaning making and the history of being human and the history of finding self and soul and the history of healing symptoms to make that something that the patient had some, not just say in how it was done, but ability to do themselves. I think modern therapy has to be teaching people how to be more resilient,

not labeling the resilient patients and the not resilient patients, and then delivering a treatment outcome. It has to find a way to teach people to find an inner strength and an inner ability to heal themselves that I would argue lies dormant in everyone. Whether or not you choose to reconnect with it, it's there. And that's something that a lot of this medical and empirical language has made us forget. So, you know, despite all these profound, a lot of times, still influential tomes that these guys wrote, I mean, yeah, Jung has largely been written off except by people like me, but Yalom wrote the book on two giant chunks of therapy that are still practiced. I mean, if you go out there and you have a textbook about group psychotherapy, it's going to be citing Yalom 90% of the time, and most of it is just going to be

paraphrasing his book. I mean, there wasn't even another one. No one else said, no, that's actually wrong. This is how you do group therapy. They got any traction. But we won't listen to the ideas where they conflict with the market, which is the problem. So all of these guys, despite their success and their wonderful writing, they weren't listened to, they weren't heard. These ideas aren't mine. A ton of the time people are like, oh, you think you're so smart, you made this podcast. No, I think that I'm really stupid, but I also think that I'm smart enough to be able to read people who are smarter than me and not carry water for things that I was told to believe that I can see are false, you know? You don't really have to be very bright to do that.

You don't really have to be very educated. I certainly am not. But what I am is I'm curious and I'm not ashamed. You're not going to make me stop wanting to learn and you're also not going to make me feel bad about myself. And if you can have that ability, you can synthesize a lot of information in a way that is pretty profound. The relationship between psychology, philosophy, and anthropology is not a matter of academic interest. It's essential to the practice and the effective completion of therapy that has anything to do with meaning. You know, philosophy provides the conceptual tools to grapple with the questions of meaning, ethics, and the nature of consciousness that are often at the heart of psychological distress. Anthropology offers crucial insights into the shaping of identity, the diversity of human experience, and the social context that give rise to, you know, mental health challenges. By reconnecting with these disciplines, you know, psychotherapy can develop a more nuanced and culturally informed approach to healing. And things like this might involve philosophical inquiry, you know, you having like a dialect with a therapist when no one is in control and they're not telling you what to believe, but they're testing your reality so that you have to build your thesis about who and why you are what you are in a way that isn't just intellectual, that is reflectively spiritual some of the time.

Maybe draw on some of the anthropological insights, you know, cultural norms and social structures that shape psychology. Develop more holistic models of mental health for sure that talk about mind and body as one, or culture and environment as reflection. Self and environment and self and culture as reflections of one another, deep reflections. We participate in both, you know, with each part of our identity. Fostering, you know, therapists being trained in broader humanistic disciplines. I mean, how many of the colleges, like if you're a therapist, how many of your college classes where you played with baby toys or researched something would have been better off if you had just learned, you know, social anthropology? You know, our best guesses

about what was happening in the Neolithic period and the things that really move society, really move humanity. I mean, one of the things that was the most moving to me as a therapist, as far as not emotionally moving, but moving my understanding of human nature was when I was studying anthropology and they were telling me that, you know, we think in a techno, from a technological, you know, highly specialized society lens that people built cities because it made them more productive. That if we went to cities, then we would have more food, maybe more sex, maybe more kids, better clothing, better quality of life, you know, we could share fuel for heat, all that. That wasn't true. That's what happens post-industrial revolution and sort of post-specialization of like the medieval period. But for the very beginning, that's not what it did. For the very beginning, the reason that we went to cities was because we're building

some sort of personal and religious project that makes us congregate and build more and more order and structure. But quality of life went down, access to food went down, health went down. Because when you're coming out of the Stone Age, it doesn't actually make practical, scientific, empirical sense to live in a city. And yet, we congregate because we want to collaborate with knowledge and culture and projects in this way that we're aware that a single person by themself is not as whole as multiple people together. We're not as whole in knowledge. We're not as whole in scientific pursuits. We're not as whole in artistic and

religious pursuits as when all of our creativity is aware of a history that is, at that point, only able to be built through proximity, through oral dissemination of knowledge or very limited writing. And then also, we aren't really as whole spiritually because we're called to build some project that is bigger than us. And when you think about that, and then you say, oh, homo economicus, we're all just these atomized, lonely little things that are completely different from each other, that can be completely disconnected from each other without any sort of negative consequence or problem. I'm an economist. I think that's really scary. And when you say, oh, I believe this about economics and I'm a psychologist, but I don't really want to think about the connection between those things because, I don't know, like the free market just makes you more free and that's why research is good. Or why do you think the Shah of Iran flies here if we don't have the best

healthcare in the world? If you can say things like that, you're not doing psychology anyway. So just leave. So as we move out of the postmodern into the metamodern, I think this idea of reconnecting psychology to these two things that are so intrinsic to its scope, you can't disconnect them anyway. Anthropology and philosophy. Trying to find those to build something that can make people not more dependent on the therapist, but more confidently able to depend on themselves. And to make sense of the mess of this world and just the pace of it,

to find some sense of connectedness in a deeply disconnected, yet at the same time, atomizationally interconnected world, those are the places where our head needs to be as we try and figure out how to get back to something better

than where we are right now.