On Friday, Dr. Helen Smith wrote a troubling post at Pajama's Media, Narcissism, Power, Fear of Death, and Liberalism, in which she discussed Jeffrey Kottler’s On Being a Therapist. I have not read the book in question and cannot comment on some of the details, but Dr. Helen offers enough to alarm:
I often get books on psychology sent to me by publishers, and the other day I received Jeffrey Kottler’s On Being a Therapist. The book is now in its fourth edition, and this latest edition “puts the spotlight on the therapist’s role and responsibility to promote issues of diversity, social justice, human rights, and systemic changes within the community and the world at large.”
Whoa: I thought the therapist’s role was to increase the client’s well-being and treat mental illness.
...
Kottler touches often on the narcissism of therapists in the book and has a section on the topic. He talks about his own struggle with self-worth and measures his own success by looking at all the good he has done, the people he has helped. He discusses how therapists often feel they are frauds. The author talks about his deep need to influence others, and he mentions a treatise on narcissism that describes it as such:
A lack of feeling, the need to project an image, the desire to help others in order to exercise power, and arrogance are all familiar symptoms.
He then states that he has long felt he holds super powers:
After all, it seems at times (to others, if not to myself) that I can read minds, predict the future, and hear, see, feel, and sense things beyond the powers of mere mortal beings.
In the author’s defense, he does struggle with this and acknowledge it can be a problem. I have talked to therapists who feel they are superhuman yet see it as an asset.
An arrogant psychology PhD student at an APA convention told me that all psychologists go into the field because they want to be omnipotent, himself included. Really? Because when I got my training in New York City, I was taught that therapists were to be humble and work hard to achieve self-knowledge so that they can help their clients make the right decisions for themselves, not for the therapist. The client is not an extension of the therapist, but rather an independent, autonomous person with his or her own thoughts, feelings, and life.
Part of any successful analysis, especially a training analysis undertaken for the express purpose of developing oneself into a better therapist, is the necessity of analyzing one's own omnipotent and grandiose fantasies, which typically derive from our unconscious narcissism. Even well analyzed therapists have been known to commit egregious boundary violations with their patients. It is all too easy for a well meaning therapist to be not only unaware of his own blind spots but to unconsciously assume that his needs and desires and the patient's needs and desires are the same.
[I have written many times about the tendency of the Narcissist to assume that the mind of the other is a mirror reflection of his own mind. The true Narcissist does not see the "other" as an independent person, complete with agency and desire of his own.]
Dr. Helen wonders whether the Liberal's desire to control others may stem from a similar font as Dr. Kottler's:
I’ve noticed that psychology programs around the country have shifted from an emphasis on individual mental health to an emphasis on “promoting social justice.” In practice, this always means liberal politics.
And maybe there’s a connection there. Could it be that for liberals and certain therapists endowed with self-importance but without religion, influencing others is all they have? Forcing others to do as they wish fends off their fear of insignificance, which is why it is so urgent that others go along. It keeps their legacy alive. Notice how many times people bring up “Ted Kennedy’s legacy” of health care. Is this more about keeping Kennedy’s name immortal and his image alive than about real solutions to real-world problems?
The need to control others can stem from various unconscious psychological determinants. Many Liberals, and even more so for many on the far Left, are motivated by selfless idealism, in which they surrender part of their autonomy to a greater, usually Utopian, dream, and need to force others to follow along with them out of a conscious desire to save _____ (fill in the blank with the planet, the people, the volk, white racial purity, the poor, minorities, etc.) The motivation is often based on an idealization of their tenaciously held and narcissistically invested ideas.
[It has gone out of fashion to discuss the psychosexual component of control but it remains true that controlling people often derive a great deal of the powerful emotional investment in their need to control from their unconscious sadism, usually related to the anal phase. Orally derived sadism, in which the object must be controlled in order to prevent it from abandoning the infantile character, also adds its own imperative to the mix. The Narcissist's control over the object is characterized by less passion and an almost complete negation of the significance of the object except in so far as it serves the unconscious needs of the Narcissist.]
In March 2007, I noted the danger in pathologizing one's political opponents:
There is a more serious potential danger in this as well. Once political differences have become pathologized, we have entered a slippery slope that can lead to very dangerous outcomes. Those of us who are familiar with the mis-use of Psychiatry by totalitarian regimes like the USSR, which created a special diagnosis for dissidents are very sensitive to this kind of shifting of the frame of the debate.
["Slow Schizophrenia" was one of the diagnoses they used against dissidents. Obviously, anyone who publicly complained about the Worker’s Paradise was clearly psychiatrically disturbed and needed to be locked up and treated with powerful anti-psychotic medications.]
Recently the Chinese have taken a page out of the Soviet’s book on how to handle dissidents and has been locking up such psychiatrically disordered individuals at an accelerating pace. (See this and this.) The value, to the totalitarian, of diagnosing an opponent as Psychiatrically ill is that it obviates the need to actually address their arguments and avoids the messiness of a public debate on the merits of a particular policy.
[Apparently, according to Human Rights Watch, the Chinese have coined "evil-cult-induced-mental-disorder" for use against Falun Gong members. I suppose the diagnosis sounds more professional in Chinese.]
See also PsychBlogging and the Goldwater Rule which includes some historical perspective on the mis-use of Psychiatry in politics.
With the best of intentions, Therapists like Jeffrey Kottler and those who believe that their job description includes “promoting social justice" are leading American Psychotherapy in the direction of the Sovietization of Mental Health.
Psychiatry has struggled to define the proper limits of our discipline. Where once we were arbiters of normality, and pathologized a great deal of personal variation (Homosexuality used to be considered a diagnosable, deviant sexual orientation) we have long since abandoned the notion that we could define "normal." The current DSM defines most pathology in terms of its cost to the individual and his effect upon those who interact with him. We are now risking making the same mistake but simply with a different valance. Labeling someone who believes Homosexuality is a sin with "hate speech" is on a continuum with Homosexuality as disorder.
(I am using Homosexuality as an example because it exemplified how our blind spots led us to become agents of social engineering; this was as problematic on the Conservative end of the spectrum as it is now on the Liberal side of the ledger. The advantage of taking a more Libertarian approach in one's Therapy as it doesn't require any particular imperative to impose one's own weltanschauung on one's patients.)
The reason Psychoanalysis (the discipline from which all current Psychotherapies derive) has been considered dangerous to society by totalitarians from the Soviets to the Nazis to the current Chinese, is that the goal of Psychoanalysis is to enlarge and enhance the autonomous functions of the patient's ego. In other words, our goal is to minimize the resources that our patients must devote to their unconscious conflicts (which includes the resources the Narcissist must devote to maintaining his unconscious grandiosity) so that they have more psychic energy to devote to those choices they deem more positive and satisfying in their lives. Autonomous agents are always a threat to totalitarians.
When Psychotherapists adopt a political stance as part of their therapeutic weltanschauung, they have left the field of enhancing autonomy and entered the field, albeit with the very best of intentions, of social engineering; they are allowing themselves to become agents for enhancing soft totalitarianism. It would behoove any such therapist to undergo some self-analysis and determine from whence his need to control arises.
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