Psychology
Human beings always have been keen on explanation, if only to say there might not be an explanation—life lay in the hands of Fate, God, or Krishna, among other Large Entities. Such explanations were a carpet that covered a broad psychic area. Specific attempts to explain human behavior have varied from the notions of humors that stud Shakespeare’s plays to supernatural possession, which also figures in his plays. With the rise of psychology in modern times, explanations became a near-scientific domain unto themselves. Such explanations contained considerable finesse while delving into every moment of waking and non-waking life. They addressed the anxiety that went with being human, that state which admits it does not know what is going to happen next. We can predict but we cannot know. The predictable soothes us but cannot enlighten us.
As much as any human endeavor, psychology has been the minister to modern times. However various its notions and cures have been—and they have been very various, from Skinner to Jung, for instance—there has been a commitment to helping the individual find his or her way into something more normal, more fulfilling, less arduous and frightening. Psychology has been part of the ameliorative aura that has hung like a beckoning haze over modern times. Behaviors can be understood and changed—a noble belief.
People in modern times felt that no one had to be resigned to anything. The short hard lives of serfs and slaves were done with. Possibly, the delusions and manias that disfigured people also were done with. The mental suffering people caused one another also could be done with, or at least alleviated. A great wave of talking about suffering began. So did a great wave of pill-taking, as science variously answered the mind’s maladies.
If you told someone from another era, that you spent money to talk to a stranger about your problems, that person might have been skeptical about a couple of things: to begin with, the money, the stranger, and the nature of the problems. How could money enter the equation of talking about being a human being? What authority did a stranger have? What did the stranger know? And how solvable were broken hearts, fears, regrets, and frustrations? Human beings were not problems but beings, chock full of impulses and inclinations. Was this stranger some sort of priest or shaman? Did the stranger grasp the inexplicable mystery of existence, our inability to explain what exactly we are doing here on this planet? And how much could talk penetrate the recesses of feeling? Weren’t words usually more formulaic if not downright platitudinous? Their imprecision was notorious.
Such questions indicate how easy it can be for one era to swallow what might stick in another era’s craw. Particularly in the United States, where psychology took off like a plane into the empyrean of self-improvement, the need for such learned handlers made sense. The unsettled, restless, transient nature of American life along with the inherent uncertainty of what anyone meant to anyone else in such a vast, heterogeneous nation along with the atomizing effect of economic pressure along with the obligation of each person to pursue happiness made for more than enough personal woe. There was also what might be called the solutionism of modern times—got a problem, here’s an answer. The problem might not be a problem so much as a feeling about how one felt about one’s self (not good) to say nothing of endless character traits, but the premise of solving a problem was hardly limited to psychology. Freud’s sense of being “normally unhappy” was too pessimistic for the modern temperament which, as it thrived on advertised desires, was ever filling up the empty vessel of the lone life.
Psychology attempted the considerable feat of making the individual feel recognized while trying to make the individual face reality. However much quiet and not-so-quiet repression occurred, there was no point in resignation or fatalism. The individual needed to partake of the dynamism that modern times trumpeted, hence the belief in change as a value in its own right. An enormous weight of adjustment descended on the mere, unadorned individual. The old-fashioned sense of someone as a certain sort of personality—Jacques the Shy or Jill the Witty—gave way to something more amorphous. How Jacques or Jill fit into the vast fantasy of modernity was impossible to foretell. The individual was a bundle of inner forces that conditioned and in some sense created the person. If the person could understand those forces, self-mastery might result. At the least, the person might own, so to speak, an identifiable pathology.
How to face up to anguish is a question that has not gone away for the human race. One wonders in that regard where the words that have been spoken between the client and the psychologist have gone. The therapeutic betterment that psychology is predicated on, compounded as it is of faith, modest insight, and chemical knowledge, seems a slim reed amid the buffeting winds of economic distress, war, poverty, systematic hatred, environmental trepidation, and public lies to say nothing of personal heartbreak and ill treatment. Psychology asks the individual to accept temporal, socialized identity as a sort of ultimatum. The timeless aspects of being human—how any moment is fraught with more feeling than any of us will ever know what to do with but which nonetheless informs us—is not part of the equation. Transcendence never fit into a fifty-minute appointment. Meanwhile betterment was always looking over its shoulder. The very word signified the importance of measurement. Yet what was the yardstick?
I have friends who talked to therapists for decades. They feel it helped them and I do not doubt them. It feels good to have someone listen, be concerned and say something pertinent. They wrote out many checks, said their good-byes, stepped into the hallway of whatever building and descended onto whatever street. There the modern world greeted them: you are something and you are nothing. They strode forward to whatever purpose was next.
Psychology
Baron, your essay on psychology is thought provoking. Since Thai is my profession these many years I was particularly interested in your take. At nineteen in the throes of a suicidal depression, psychotherapy 3 times a week saved my life without meds. It’s true it doesn’t solve the big problems like climate change or the meaning of life, but it’s come a long way in being able to help people. I’d say transcendence often occurs in my sessions with patients. I always find your thoughts refreshing and interesting. Sarah