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To an organic philosopher and psychotherapist the world is his family, including those parts of it that require attention because they are disturbed, immersed in sorrow, or antagonized. Of course, not all relationships within one’s family are sweet and pleasant, but all require care and the ability to reach out emphatically, to identify with the troubles of another family member. This apparent utopia of counseling, which is so starkly opposed to the factual dystopia of commercialized and institutionalized “helping professions”, is only seemingly unrealistic: every successful therapy in the long term is organic and highly inclusive of effectivity. These qualities occur widely all around us, albeit often inadvertently,. Even the lucky and talented therapists who organicism in their work often hide their “private relationships” with their clients, in fact their true care for their clients, from their professional peers.
It seems inconceivable how to foster an organic relationship with anyone without that relationship becoming inclusive of some layer of intimacy or privacy.
If we are completely politically correct in our relationships, in terms of respecting each other’s privacy, we will never be able to truly help each other. The fact that our institutions perceive themselves in procedural terms, and not as institutional “friends” of the citizens, accounts for much that is lost in our democratic trust in those institutions and those who represent them. If there is no sense of caring, there will be no trust, especially when the relationship is unequal, such as that between citizens, on the one hand, and institutions, on the other, or the relationship between a person who is at the end of his abilities and resilience, disintegrating from stress, on the one hand, and his therapist or counselor, on the other.
There are built-in inequalities in our relationships, and the greater the institutional authority and ability to conduct actions on a patient that are contrary to the patient’s will, the greater the inequality. There is hardly a helping profession where there are greater inequalities between the therapist and the patient than psychiatry. This huge inequality must be amply compensated by the psychiatrist’s family-like approach, his integrative methodology, and above all, his caring for the patient. This caring is not merely a matter of professional duty; to be successful as a therapist, a psychiatrist must be a human being who authentically cares for those he works with. Not all, and not too many, psychiatrists satisfy this criterion.
There are strong and irreducible parallels between the private life of a therapist and his professional performance and approach. There is a Buddhist principle which roughly reads: “the way you do anything, you will do everything”. In some Pacific cultures there is a tradition that people to be wed spend a night together, with the specific goal to observe the other person while they sleep. Their belief is that in our sleep we reveal our deepest personality traits. In fact, the way we live in one segment of our lives is the same way we will likely live in all other aspects of our existence. Hence, to assess a psychiatrist, or any other helping professional, it is essential to observe their private lives.
For the above reason, I don’t think that people without families should conduct family therapy, exceptions granted. More generally, someone who is unable to manage their own life should not be a therapist for others. This does not mean that a therapist must not be unsuccessful in some aspects of their life pursuits,. What it means is that the way in which the therapist navigates those difficulties is likely the same way that he does other things in his life, and this hints at how he approaches and conducts therapy.
If the therapist deals with their own difficulties by confronting them directly (or “head-on”), by treating them as a passing crisis, or by using them as signs to address some more general societal or personal issues, then each of these ways is likely also the way that therapist will approach therapy.
A therapist who is disintegrated, erratic and unable to adopt any kind of effective strategy to one’s own private life and difficulties most likely uses his profession to try to build his own defenses against life’s challenges, which he would otherwise be unable to manage. That is not a good starting position to work with clients, because clients need a person who has a clear strategy to address their own life issues, and who actively uses the versatile therapeutic tools that one employs in one’s professional work to deal with one’s own life. Our approach and style in our helping professions are emanations of our own life strategies and personality traits. It is exactly those personal traits that serve as the primary anchors, or temporary signifiers, for the clients or patients in navigating their way to a better ideational and psychological situation.
The above is a key question for the perspective of effectivity, and it is closely connected with the question of whether anyone with training can be a helping professional, or whether there are certain personality traits and values which qualify a person to be a therapist more than any formalized knowledge one might have gained.
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