Philosophy and Therapy

Gary Borjesson came to therapy from philosophy. He used to teach philosophy, but gave it all up to become a therapist. 

I know more than a few people who have followed the same path, and I wish Borjesson much success. When you examine his understanding of philosophy, you are likely to conclude, with me, that he is better off doing therapy. His sense of philosophy is superficial and uninteresting.

As a side note, in Paris, over the last several decades, more and more philosophy students and professors have transformed themselves into psychoanalysts. Training in that city, as I can attest, is long on philosophy and short on medicine.

That Borjesson does not seem to know about this strikes me as near inexcusable.

Soi, Borjesson promotes the notion that therapy provides meaning; it gives people a sense of their whole self; it helps them to understand who they really, really are.

It sounds like a secular religion. That is because it is a secular religion.

In the world of psychoanalysis people undergo so-called treatment as an initiation ritual. Finish the initiation and you become a member of a cult.

It requires you to absorb and affirm a certain set of beliefs. In some corners of the psychoanalytic world, those beliefs count as dogmas. 

The cults have leaders who function as human idols. Their word is law.

Now, Borjesson does not seem to belong to such a cult, though he did manage to throw away his tenure in order to join a new monastic order.

In his view philosophy and therapy are developmental journeys. In truth, this does not apply to all philosophy, but why quibble. This journey ought to provide something like self-awareness and self-understanding, as though you have nothing else to do with your time and energy.

One can only wonder whether this journey of self-discovery tells you something beyond the fact that you belong to a certain family, have certain roles within that family, follow certain rules of comportment and deportment, and assume certain duties and obligations.

Understanding theory will not tell you very much about any of this. And yet, if you want to join a therapy cult you will need to understand the theory, down to the minutiae and particulars.

Borjesson does not really explain what he means when he says that therapy will provide understanding and awareness. He ought to have said that it involves narratives. 

From the beginning Freud posited that we are playing out roles in narratives, unbeknownst to ourselves. Family and social relations involved enacting theatrical performances. You can play it well or poorly. You might even try to rewrite the script. At the least, you are a character caught in a narrative. Congratulations if that makes you feel better.

Borjesson offers his version of therapy:

That said, if therapy is to encourage deeper self-exploration, it needs to go beyond symptoms to the whole person suffering them. Thus “psychotherapy” as I mean it here is curious about the patient’s history, about who they are and want to be; about their gifts, passions, loves, hopes, fears, and aspirations. We typically call these depth therapies. The depth comes from deliberate attention to early childhood experience, unconscious processes, and larger questions of meaning and significance. Psychoanalysis and Jungian analytic psychology are prominent examples.

Obviously, this collection of banalities does not really tell you anything about yourself. 

In principle, you have better things to do with your time than to excavate your childhood memories. In truth, and in fact, the more time you spend obsessing about your upbringing, the less time and attention you will have to learn how to deal with everyday conundra.

If you are competing in a chess game, you are not going to improve your ability to play the game by trying to understand your infantile attachment issues or your family dynamic. You will be distracted from the game and will end up with weak performance.

Now, Borjesson introduces a patient who declares that he wants to figure out what he wants out of life and what it takes to be a good human being. In truth, the first question is vapid. As I have noted, it reduces treatment to a line from a pop song: Tell me what you want, what you really, really want.

The same patient declares that he wants to discover what it means to be a good person. The question is not philosophical. It is vapid. But it does have an element of truth in it.

The problem is that the term “person” is meaningless. It derives from a Latin word, persona, that means theatrical mask. You do not want to know how better to play whatever role you imagine you have been cast in. You do want to know the right thing to do for someone who is a mother or a father, an aunt or an uncle, a son or a daughter. Not to mention, an officer, an executive and so on.

Borjesson considers this an existential question. In fact, it’s an ethical question. It tells us why he gave up teaching philosophy for a field where he could more safely bullshit.

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