The Link #25 - Psychotherapy and Wholeness

Wolfgang Siegel is a psychotherapist practicing in Dortmund, Germany. He has been interested in Krishnamurti’s teachings for several years and participated in the 2005 Saanen Gathering, joining a panel of psychotherapists and also giving a workshop on the nature of fear.

Krishnamurti looks at life as a whole. He draws our attention to the fact that thinking can only deal in fragments because it itself is made up of fragments. This fragmented thinking causes human conflict, with all its consequences, such as fear, hostility, grief, etc. He speaks over and over again about the fragmentation and division of mankind brought about bynationalism, ideologies and religions, a process that leads to war and hatred. He also mentions that we are fragmented by our professions. But he recognizes that technical knowledge is useful and necessary. Since no single person can have all the existent technical knowledge, specialists, such as surgeons, are obviously necessary.

How do these necessary specializations, with their professional thinking, bring about fragmentation? The problem arises because the ‘I’ identifies itself with the profession. This thinking ‘I’, in its struggles to expand and to overcome its limitations, which it experiences as painful, tries to subject all aspects of life to its control. The ‘I’ tries to exploit for its own interest the specific professional knowledge that that human being has acquired, and therefore separates this specific knowledge from its source, i.e. from the life that generates all knowledge. But how do we actually live, how do we treat each other or deal with each other in therapy as well as in other areas of life?

As a psychotherapist, I was trained to ‘help’ other people. I am trained to use my knowledge about what is called the psyche to tell the patient what he has to do to get rid of his problems, or I analyze him, which he can’t do himself, in order that he understand himself better through my explanations and so become happier and healthier. This relationship, in which I know and the patient does not know, is based on authority. And this means that there is not a real relationship, because from the therapist’s accumulated specialized knowledge he constructs an image of the patient and treats this image, not the patient. The patient also constructs an image of the therapist, i.e. the therapist as a specialist that, thanks to his special knowledge, helps him to solve his problems. And so there is no shared movement in which to explore the life and the thinking that have created the psychological problems of the patient. The two people talk with their self-made images of the other and in these fixed roles they talk past each other. The therapist concludes that the patient is psychologically ill; he makes a diagnosis and thereby makes it clear that he believes himself to be psychologically healthy. The patient is happy that there is someone who seems to understand his problems and that he can depend upon. Thus he identifies with the diagnosis that he is psychologically ill and that he needs the assistance of an authority figure to become well again.

This ‘therapeutic relationship’ in reality is no relationship because both sides are caught in their fragmentary thinking. The special knowledge of the therapist, which is a fragment of the whole, directs and dominates the therapeutic process and looks for its confirmation, like all selfcentered thinking. Such professional knowledge is therefore not simply a tool that is being used in the common learning process, but, because it becomes the authority, determines the process and prevents real relationship. A real relationship only exists when there is a shared seeing and understanding of the outer and inner realities. Every therapist and patient can have such moments, moments of different duration and frequency. And those are the moments that have therapeutic efficacy and from which the patient benefits. The fundamental solution of his problems, however, is possible only if, at such moments of awakened intelligence, the patient finds out that the light is in him. Each form of therapeutic authority, each classification of the patient as suffering from a specific psychological illness, prevents self-understanding – even if this understanding, in spite of everything, occurs on occasion, as when the authority drops away for a moment.

As can be seen in the increasing proliferation of psychological literature, the egos of the psychological specialists, who claim to know the soul of man, are expanding. With this egotistic expansion, people’s psychological problems also increase, as people’s self-confidence diminishes and there is a search for salvation via the psychologist. The psychological specialists have come in as replacements or as partners of the declining organized religions; they apportion the territory among themselves and, once again, proceed to tell people how they must live. Like the religions, they deepen people’s fears and make a profitable career out of it. The price for this is imprisonment in their own fragmentation and fear of the unacknowledged limitation of their specialized knowledge. This fear is, overtly or covertly, always present whenever there is a ‘therapeutic’ action that is guided by the authority of specialized knowledge and not by shared learning. This ‘professionalism’ uses the patient as a means to earn money and ensure its own continued existence, and helps, if at all, only in a partial way. Very little research has been done into the damage caused by psychotherapy as a limitation to the patient’s own intelligence, just as little research has gone into assessing the damage that is frequently caused by psychotropic drugs.

What would happen if the therapist did not ‘help’ or ‘analyze’ any longer? What if both therapist and patient learned to discover together the inner light and to free themselves from the confused thinking that makes us all ‘sick’? What specialized knowledge and diagnosis would then still be necessary?

Is it possible for a psychotherapist to see through his own thinking ego and to discover complete awareness in conversation with his patient? Can psychotherapy be a tool for a common awakening of intelligence and therefore make itself superfluous, redundant? Can this professional fragmentation end and a real relationship be established out of a deep interest in people and their problems, instead of using specialized knowledge to further our self-interest? If in our practice we developed a greater interest in the whole of life rather than in our theories, our reputation and our purse, wouldn’t we bring about a different quality of relationship, a different society, a sane mind?

Wolfgang Siegel, 2004