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" Within pathological schemes, the structure
governs the function
within physiological schemes, the function
governs the structure "

(thanks to Prof. Augusto Corsini, MD)

Note:
The thesis I am going to develop here is the result of both my own professional experience in the field and of a new dialectics-based logic. Therefore, the reader is unlikely to find any reference in the literature of traditional psychiatry and psychology, since no author in this field is likely to have even imagined of such a topic before (and they likely never will, according to Einstein's remark: "'You can't find a solution using the logic that created the problem"). You can but search for common evidence and confirmation from observation.

• Background
• Therapists and NCP
• Therapy vs. Prevention
• Psychotherapists' social function

Background

I started working as a neuropsychiatrist in 1965. I had a job in the neurology section of the Monselice Hospital, near Padova, Italy: the patients there (about 80) had no major mental sicknesses, only the symptoms of minor diseases and tensions, such as anxiety, stress, discomfort, depression, etc. However, their symptoms were important enough that they could not be cured at home because of the heavy tensions caused there.

With the passing of time, I came to realize that many of my patients suffered from social tension and disbalance: they felt somehow that there was something wrong, something affecting their daily existence in the society they lived in, but they had no cultural means, i.e. no proper language allowing them to acknowledge it and with which to face their problems. Very simply, they perceived the bad results of these tensions and disbalance as a physical symptom, so they brought their sufferings into hospital for treatment.

They felt unable, or in some way "disallowed", from realizing their personalities, especially according to the younger patients. In fact, they had weak personalities and were unable to fulfill themselves by participating successfully in society. Soon I came to realize that our human nature does not allow any individual to be incapable of self-fulfillment without that experience being painful in some way: indeed, the individual feels this lack in self-fulfillment as a deep existential malaise, albeit only a physical one, but its symptoms are brought to the hospital to be treated.

A lack in the individual's participation in society does not therefore turn itself exclusively into social damage -- as the supporters of Direct Democracy know so well. This lack in participation is also a cause of psychosomatic diseases for the individual, in so far as he/she is incapable of self-consciousness and autonomous critical thinking ("critical" against the social conservative establishment, of course). Such thinking is what I call "flexibility"; allowing each one of us as mature citizens to take upon ourselves the full responsibility of our own participation in society.

Two decades later, I described this social-individual malaise as "the Lessened Flexibility Syndrome". The paper was accepted for publication in two (!) international conferences I attended at the International Hippocratic Foundation of Kos, Greece, on 1995. You can read this, freely down-loadable, at:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/lfs_eng.htm

Consinstently I started to urge my patients towards more "flexibility" in terms of their behaviour at home and in their way of communicating - a move designed not to give rise to the tensions that made their family -- and/or societal! -- relationships become unbearable to the point of sickness. It was hard work convincing them to change some of their traditional behaviours and language patterns on their own. Actually, I wanted them to try new behavioural and communication solutions, possibly in a "trial and error" process, aiming at developing a new, more aware and responsible participation in their family and social environment; a change to their usual attitudes which would solve or at least diminish their relational tensions.

It was hard a work, I recall, because these patients had been accustomed or conditioned to endlessly repeating the same behaviours and language patterns. Nevertheless, I started to obtain some favourable results when suggesting they "think differently"... that was until my neuropsychiatrist colleagues at the hospital approached my patients saying: "never mind, don't take any notice of all of these difficult discourses proposed by doctor Rossin. Instead, I'll give you the right pill to solve your pain and your problems". Of course, the easier and quicker solution was Valium, Prozac -- and Ritalin.

My patients chose to accept the easy pills, instead of facing any difficult assumption of responsibility for making changes in their lives, and I was told to change my therapeutic approach to them if I wanted to survive as a psychiatrist at the hospital. I didn't, and consequently left the job of psychotherapist I had performed for ten years, and went to work as a family doctor in a far-away village. That was in 1974, and since then I started to think about the damaging role of traditional psychotherapists.

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Therapists and NCP

My opinion was that traditional psychotherapists effectively reduce an individual's tension such that it is understood and cared for merely as a symptom of individual sickness. Thereby, they institutionalize as "wrong" - i.e. as a symptom of individual sickness -- every existential tension which might otherwise lead the patient towards changing thier approach to interpersonal relationships and to society at large. By performing this institutional role, psychotherapists actually serve to defend the establishment against any individual's impulse for change - an impulse which the individual experiences as increased tension. In fact, institutional psychologists and psychotherapists reduce to the level of a mere symptom of sickness the patient's tension which may mask an underlying desire for autonomy, self-consciousness, direct and responsible participation in society. They thus serve as the wise servants of the establishment ensuring its conservation.

On the other hand, the patients tend to agree with the easy way-out -- the easy pill and other passive welfare -- that therapists offer them. Not surprisingly, therapists prescribe school pupils Ritalin as a rule, even from kindergarten age, to keep them quiet and submissive to authority according to the "No-Contradiction Principle" (NCP), also known as the "Principle of Authority".

So "the people" and their psychologists/therapists, seem institutionally addicted to NCP. Every transgression of this principle is felt as a source of tension and existential pain by the individual concerned, but is taken as a symtom of sickness by the institutional therapists as soon as the unlucky but faithful aspirant patient falls into their embrace. Of course, these psychologists may also speak of changes, or of Direct Democracy, but they do not accept that NCP, the "Principle of Authority", can be contradicted even by the patient -- whom they therefore reduce to living in a passive welfare relationship.

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Therapy vs. Prevention

Plainly, psychotherapists are a relief to patients suffering with pain, tension and anxiety and who have no other viable chance at their disposal to deal with it. For this, the social role of therapists appears commendable. But when I questioned many of them about prevention, all of them avoided the issue, not one of them wanting to analyze the relationship between the patient's illness and their educative addiction to the No-contradiction Principle from the time of their earliest learning of language. I was invited to a Psychoanalysts conference some years ago for which I prepared a paper. They accepted and published it, but not one of them picked up the topic. The paper is now freely down-loadable at:
http://www.flexible-learning.org/eng/psyco research.htm

In that paper, I quote some analysis of professor Aldo Carotenuto, the renowned Dean of the Italian Psychoanalysts/Therapists, suggesting it be extended from therapy to prevention. What I was sadly forced to realize was that they accepted the analysis for therapy purposes only, thus causing the patient to remain under institutional authority. But they do not accept the same analysis when it is aimed at prevention which would permit the individual to criticize and control the basic hierarchical relationship binding him/herself to institutional authority. In fact, no psychotherapist (professor Carotenuto included) has even considered my proposal for education based prevention.

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Psychotherapists' social function

There is, however, another characteristic of psychotherapists which deserves further attention. Therapists, because of their institutional job, become accustomed to judge as superior their own thinking compared to that of their patients' -- or anybody else's. That is, they formally perform the role of an institutional authority for healthy thinking. Consistently therefore, they tend to criticize and reduce to a mere sickness anyone else's "different thinking".

Indeed, they perform the over-arching institutionalized role of "always-right-thinking". Therefore, just by dint of their jobs in an institutional role, they serve to oppose any person's "different thinking" as it relates to the established authority or leadership and the "status quo" of the NCP-based social arrangement. And this in spite of any pretended support they may have for political change, or, most of all, any claims for Direct Participatory Democracy. Further, and even worse, by dint of their institutional job, and in accordance with NCP, they become institutionally impenetrable to any kind of self-criticism.

Finally, no social change towards individual autonomy and the individual's bottom-up, responsible participation in society seems likely under psychotherapists' present institutional role. Only a passive addiction to institutional welfare, it seems, can be expected.

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