Clarifying a Murky Field
KING, RICHARD H.
Clarifying a Murky Field A Complete Guide to Therapy: From Psychoanalysis to Behavior Modification By Joel Kovel Pantheon. 284 pp. $10.00. Reviewed by Richard H.King Assistant Professor of...
...The commentary on EST and Mysticotranscendent therapies lacks the ring of authority displayed elsewhere in the book...
...Examples from case histories or therapeutic experiences would have provided the specificity that is sorely needed, particularly in discussions of the lesser known areas...
...There is a valuable—if limited—role for drugs and directive therapies, i.e., sex therapy, hypnotherapy and other behaviorist modes...
...From this point of view, he can show that the Primal Scream, the Reichian and the Neo-Freudian approaches all edge toward a simple-minded causal relationship between frustration and neurosis, a view Freud rejected early on...
...He is also a radical politically, and Leftist views inform his more straightforward analysis of contemporary therapeutics...
...Kovel does not completely agree with Jung that everyone can find a therapy to suit his neurosis...
...One hopes Kovel will now turn to this complex area...
...author, "The Party of Eros" Freud's psychoanalytic theory has proven remarkably flexible and fertile...
...Despite (or Kovel would claim because of) his political radicalism, the author remains committed to the theoretical superiority of Freud...
...Similarly, Werner Erhard's EST may prove remarkably successful in torpedoing resistances that psychoanalysis would chip away at for months, yet the question remains whether EST graduates can continue working through formerly repressed material after they leave the training program...
...and the egregious claims of Arthur Janov's Primal Scream...
...but they should not be elevated from techniques to world views...
...not so the "talking cure" which has taken on a rigidity the master himself might question...
...Freudian thought is unequaled in range and depth: In it the individual and the social, the conscious and the unconscious, the body and the psyche are all related dialectically...
...Kovel particularly attacks Transactional Analysis, one of the group therapies, and its "banal concretiz-ations" that ratify a spurious "adult" definition of reality...
...There is no royal road to understanding, much less alleviating, psychic distress...
...Jungian analysis also has shortcomings...
...rather, the most one can hope for is to be able to deal with problems in a manner reflecting a certain hard-won yet precious autonomy...
...For instance, Jungian analysis seems to share as much with the "positive" approach of the Human Potential therapies as it does with the Analytic therapies...
...enemies of the split infinitive will find their teeth set on edge...
...On the other hand, he recognizes that when "radical" therapists attribute all personal disorders to the malefactions of monopoly capitalism or sexism, they fail to consider individual suffering seriously...
...it is merely to be helped...
...Reviewed by Richard H.King Assistant Professor of History and Philosophy, Federal City College...
...He has no use for those who see all political protest as "acting out" or, as was the wont of some critics of the New Left, unresolved Oedipal strivings...
...Rather than a put-down of our latest growth industry—the therapy business—he has produced a sophisticated yet accessible guide for those considering therapy who are befuddled by the flood of conflicting claims...
...The postulates of the other therapies are generally found wanting when he measures them against the rigorous standards of psychoanalysis...
...One wonders if those who have eagerly followed through the preceding welter of therapies will have much patience with this effort...
...And being "cured" does not necessarily mean living happily ever after...
...In A Complete Guide to Therapy Joel Kovel acknowledges and explores this disparity between the obvious power of the theory and its limited therapeutic effectiveness...
...The author calls himself a therapeutic conservative...
...In the meantime, A Complete Guide to Therapy remains indispensable for the clarifications and demystifications it provides—a radical accomplishment in its own right...
...But even when symptoms are pronounced there is no clear-cut formula for deciding whether or when to seek help...
...In concise overviews of each one he discusses theoretical principles and describes therapeutic procedures, noting strengths and weaknesses, sparingly offering practical advice rather than dogmatic assertions...
...Kovel cogently observes that psychoanalytic theory is primarily concerned with unconscious wish, not conscious need...
...The writer groups contemporary therapies into six categories: Analytic, Human Potential, Mystico-transcendent, Group, Family, and Behavioral-Directive...
...Although a lengthy psychoanalysis may ultimately cure sexual impotence, for example, in the short run it is notably less effective than sex therapy...
...the decision is a pragmatic one...
...Consequently, inner drives and the demands of reality are mediated by unconscious fantasy...
...Thus, although he is a psychiatrist with an admitted psychoanalytic bias, Kovel is willing to look toward other forms of treatment...
...its cosmic sweep tends to ignore aotual sufferings of patients...
...In general the author sees therapy as a provisional, limited way of dealing with individual distress...
...Neurosis must be distinguished from ordinary unhappiness, just as both these disturbances should be separated from the emotional stress of social alienation...
...Each therapy, he maintains, addresses neurosis at a different level...
...To undergo therapy is not to be converted to a religion or to be cured, as with organic diseases...
...It is unsatisfactory not because it is wrong, but because the relationship of individual neurosis and collective alienation, repression and oppression, therapeutic transference and obedience to authority—the Herculean task of those who hope to combine Freud and Marx—demands much more exploration than the book provides...
...And, though the volume is serviceably written, at times jargon clots the flow of prose...
...He draws the line when any approach "promises liberation, transcendence or the answer to the riddles of life...
...The former concentrates too much on the once faddish notions of R. D. Laing, while neglecting the serious theoretical disputes between existential analysis and psychoanalysis...
...That aside, the sections on the Existential approach and Gestalt therapy are the weakest...
...Psychoanalysis, Kovel readily admits, is too expensive and arduous for most people, and other approaches may be quicker and simpler...
...The treatment of Gestalt is so confusing I came away knowing less than before...
...indeed, the quality of the therapist is more important than the mode of therapy...
...Kovel's concluding chapter, attempting to relate the need for therapy to a general critique of American society, is both provocative and unsatisfactory...
...Both psychic and social alienation should be examined, he rightly insists, not explained away...
...In fact, analysis can make matters worse for a while...
...One could quarrel with Kovel's categories...
...Much more is involved in the etiology of neurosis than the lack of sexual fulfillment or parental love...
...encounter groups, since they tend to become emotional lynchings...
...Underlying Kovel's analysis is the notion that neurosis, his umbrella term for emotional disease, is manifested in the individual by a sense of having lost control and by patterns of destructive actions rendering normal life intolerable?repetitions" in Freud's term...
...Those having problems "relating" to others would do better by enrolling in a Gestalt workshop than learning to emit the Primal Scream...
Vol. 59 • October 1976 • No. 21
