Healing Personal Psychology

M.D.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful for the many people whose personal and professional lives intersected mine. My parents, brother, partners, friends, training psychologists and psychiatrists, Buddhist Masters and Dharma Masters, psychologist and psychiatrist colleagues, other professionals and patients all, in their own way, assisted me to move beyond my own illusions and false beliefs.

Dr. Robert Weltman, a New York psychologist, psychoanalyst, and supervisor for nine years, taught me to find goodness in all human beings, regardless of their actions.

Dr. Randy Stotland, a San Diego neuropsychologist, has been a constant friend, providing me with understanding, emotional, and intellectual support since we first met in our doctoral program in San Diego in 1973. I am grateful for his editorial assistance and the many stimulating discussions we have had regarding the advancement of human potential.

Dr. Garry Flint, a British Colombia and California psychologist, friend, and colleague for more than 30 years, provided helpful editorial and design suggestions.

Dr. Andrew Phelps, a Berkeley mathematician, academician and decades long mental health and civic activist, pointed me to an understanding and study of the clinical gaze through years of e-mail exchanges and contacts.

Preface

More than half a century ago, Rollo May, an existential psychoanalyst and major voice in the humanistic psychology movement described the two major problems affecting civilization: emptiness and apathy.¹,²

Emptiness and apathy continues into the 21st Century, albeit with a modern twist. Technological advances are thought to enhance just about anything they are applied to, including problems. Cell phone, internet instant messaging, and hand-held computers have enhanced emptiness and apathy in a way that could not have been foreseen by Rollo May, in the 1960’s.

In the beginning of the internet era, e-mail was thought to revive the almost forgotten art of personal letter writing. This hope soon yielded to the ease of instant messaging and cellphone talk. In one very real sense, human contact has regressed. Activities that previously involved travel across town for a visit, are now replaced with a tweet or slew of 180 characters of an instant message.

In the pre-tweet era of 1970’s, after a year of unsuccessfully looking for a job with a Masters degree in psychology, I was accepted in a clinical psychology doctoral program at U.S.I.U., in San Diego. After all, what is an insecure, broke and relatively educated person to do without the possibility of a job or family support? At that time, U.S.I.U. had achieved national recognition for its ability to draw prominent faculty in the humanistic psychology field, including Viktor Frankl, Carl Rogers, Ashley Montague, Rollo May, Harold Greenwald, Everett Shostrom, Herbert Blumer, and a host of other less well known, but equally significant figures, in this relatively new division of psychology.

Rollo May came to be one of my influential professors. I learned what he meant by those defining words characterizing the contactless-ness of our civilization. A major portion of his early career was devoted to working with people who had been labeled mentally ill. Similar to my teacher, I dedicated my career to working towards an understanding of the most disturbed individuals and their healing.

Now, after 39 years of study and experience, it is clear that functional mental illness is a direct reaction to the toxic style present in many social relationships, especially most intimate relationships of parents with children. Not, as the mainstream would have us believe, attributed to biochemical, neurological, or genetic causes. The term functional is used here to refer to approximately eighty five percent of those diagnosed with mental illness, where there is no evidence that their problems qualify for a sickness or illness. Only approximately fifteen percent of the people diagnosed as mentally ill are, in fact, ill. These fifteen percent have actual structural brain damage, physical, or metabolic problems misdiagnosed as mental illness. Misdiagnosis is a serious problem, given what we shall see is an archaic understanding of human consciousness, taught in institutions, universities, psychotherapy and biomedical training programs.

While child abuse is not a focus of this text, the extent of it in society needs to be mentioned as one component of toxic parenting that often leads to mental illness. Child abuse reportedly occurs with twenty two out of every thousand children. Thirty six percent of all prisoners have reported a history of child abuse. Of those in drug rehabilitation programs, sixty percent report being abused as children. About thirty percent of abused children will go on to abuse their children. Twenty seven percent of women and sixteen percent of men have experienced child sexual abuse. In various studies, up to ninety seven percent of all those with a diagnosis of schizophrenia have experienced physical, sexual, emotional, and/or psychological abuse as children.³

The ethics in the mental health professions are another matter. Given his existential focus on personal responsibility, Rollo May rarely, if ever, gave advice to us students. I clearly recall only one instance when he cautioned us to never lie to a patient. That stuck with me over the years.

Experience in the mental health system finds that few clinicians abide by Rollo May’s advice. As a consequence, many people who could have been helped by clinicians, did not respond because of lack of trust. The lack of trust was the clinician’s creation as a result of deceptive statements to the client, to the client’s relatives, and to the courts. Most mental health clients have experienced some form of deception by professionals.

I have always struggled with my own confusion about the truth and other’s dishonesty, disingenuousness, and lack of sincerity going back to my childhood. I felt dismayed on the not infrequent occasions when I saw a professional deceive or lie to a patient.

The general public perceives the fields of psychiatry and psychology as having specialized training to define what is normal or abnormal. These definitions, described in a diagnostic manual, are not based on science, as one would expect them to be. They are created from a conglomeration of moral and personal opinions, pretending to be science. Even when the manual’s authors point to the public fallacy that the manual classifies people, not merely the category of disorder their current behavior fits into, professionals will attest in court and amongst themselves in clinical meetings, that this or that person is a schizophrenic, a bipolar or other false sub-classification of our species.

A metanarrative is a fable, passed off as true, without exception. On rational inspection, most metanarratives are either partially true or totally false, e.g., a myth.

In the past century, with the rising tide of psychiatry and psychology, these professions came to be defined by the metanarrative of the clinical gaze. The clinical gaze, in essence, is the special ability attributed to doctors to see beyond the surface or to look inside other human beings, to determine problems.⁴

With the granting of unquestionable acceptance of the clinical gaze, psychologists and psychiatrists have increasingly distanced themselves from reality to the point where some even claim an ability to diagnose evil. It is easy to diagnose an evil deed. There are certain universal behavioral prohibitions. But for a human being to be medically diagnosed as evil, illustrates the moral imperative of the professions. The moral imperative is one of many issues presented in this book.

Understanding the process of the clinical gaze, is crucial to understanding how to avoid the repression it entails, to move away from it, and engage in responsible self-healing from problems-in-living.

Many practitioners within the mental health professions, seemed to have lost their way. Greed has become a motive for some. This was recently reaffirmed by the disclosures of drug company stipends for consultations by psychiatrists, brought to light in recent congressional investigations.⁵ The consultations, for the most part, were sales pitches to other physicians to prescribe the particular medication the company was selling. Some of the medications hawked were for unapproved use with children.

The consultation business is an effective advertising gimmick, used by the pharmaceutical industry, as well as a dodge for the professional to take the high ground when accepting large amounts of money to promote potentially harmful pharmaceutical company products, some for off-label use for adults and children.

Pharmaceutical companies have recently been fined multiple millions of dollars for false claims, damages to individuals or failure to report negative research about their product. Yet the millions are a mere pittance in the bottom line of most large companies. Profits override any loss from lawsuits or fines. Criminal prosecution against company officials, scientists, and medical professionals for fraudulent claims or failure to report all research needs to be sanctioned to end the practice. False claims and minimizing or withholding negative research about a product have significantly and negatively affected millions of lives. The companies are rewarded by huge profits, regardless of the lives their products negatively impact. Similar conditions exist in regulation of the food industry. This is one effect of the clinical gaze on society.

As you might suspect, the true function of arrogance is to keep others at arm’s length and prevent closeness.⁶ Keeping the public at arm’s length and in the dark with a system defined by arcane concepts, most of which are unproven theories, at a bare minimum, gives the appearance of institutional arrogance.

From the mid-1970’s, first in class and then in training and subsequent work, I ran into many people who had been assigned a psychiatric diagnosis, but who functioned in society like most of us, and only discussed strange and bizarre beliefs with an intimate, understanding friend, partner or therapist.⁷ Many were successful in specialized careers in communication, science, and business. These experiences led me to begin questioning the validity of a central component of the clinical gaze, the psychiatric diagnosis. Several recent articles clearly document the unreliability of psychiatric diagnostic categories.⁸, ⁹,¹⁰

When reliability studies of diagnostic categories were analyzed, the kappa statistic or statistic comparing one clinician’s assessment to others did not support the claims cited in the current DSM-IV TR version. The reliability of diagnoses ranged from poor to excellent, covering every range of variability.¹¹ This scientifically renders the diagnostic categories in the DSM-IV TR to be an unreliable indicator of the very psychological/psychopathological/personality problems it purports to diagnosis. The authors of the current DSM provide a general statement that it is supported by empirical evidence.¹² However, while there have been empirical studies, most of short duration, the empirical evidence from any of the studies is scientifically insufficient to justify the conclusions found in all of the published research papers pointing towards the theory that mental illness has a physical basis or is a mental disease. That concept remains an unproven theory, tantamount to a persisting cultural false belief promoted by the clinical gaze.

In other words, the DSM or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, can be described as a manual, misguidedly proclaiming to differentiate psychopathology. The claims are not supported by the field trials and other correlative evidence cited to justify them. This argument, existing since the 1960’s, is more relevant today with currently published research.¹³

A psychiatric diagnosis and institutionalization are used as political persuasion tools in many countries, including developed countries. In the U.S., for example, the psychiatric diagnosis of a child is often used by school systems to force harmful biochemical treatments of questionable effectiveness on a child, opposed by the child’s parents. In government run mental health clinics, subtle and not so subtle coercive threats to institutionalize are employed to force an individual to agree to unwanted treatments. In inpatient facilities, the unspoken threat of no discharge is subtly used to force a patient to take unwanted treatments. Some countries utilize psychiatrists to hospitalize citizens who question the policies of the state. Personal and clinical experience of this tyranny concurs with what has been repeatedly cited in the literature.¹⁴

Institutions are defined as either life-affirmative or life-negative, depending on the outcome of being confined in or served by one. Life-affirmative institutions like poverty programs, food and housing programs for the poor, alternative, non-medicalized mental health facilities, early child-hood education programs and success oriented education programs in impoverished inner city neighborhoods result in an improvement of the quality of life. For example, one successful life-affirmative program, the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, has a well established track record where 80% of enrollees graduate with a B.S.

Sadly, our society’s two largest institutions supposedly focused on rehabilitation, prison and mental health institutions, are clearly life-negative. Enter one or the other and the chance for a productive and pleasurable life will likely be ended.

The putative rehabilitation, in both institutions, especially mental health or psychiatric institutions, has remained stuck in an impasse existing since the time of Freud. The professional associations are directly responsible for this impasse. Both the psychologist’s A.P.A. and the psychiatrist’s A.P.A. confer high status on minimally effective or ineffective and damaging treatment approaches.

A direct result of those in positions of authority who fully embrace the clinical gaze, is that innovation and creativity, in the development of effective social and individual treatment approaches, remains mysteriously ethereal and deficient.

Learning Buddhism, as a lay practitioner, opened me to understand a profound aspect about life and its conflicts. Buddhism focuses on seeing reality for what it actually is, not the illusion that most of us are trained to believe it is. We live in a world of attachments to things and ideas. Many of the beliefs we hold dear are based on illusions. Some of the philosophical underpinnings and practices in Buddhism are not that different from the practices developed in the humanistic psychology movement of the 1960’s and 1970’s. Developing awareness of the self, feelings, and positive relationships with others are constructs shared by Buddhism and humanistic psychology.

Early in my educational journey, a Gestalt psychotherapy trainer introduced me to the works of Wilhelm Reich (1897-1957). Reich was an originally favored associate of Freud, until he disagreed with him. Frederick (Fritz) Perls (1893-1970), the refinder, as he said, of Gestalt Therapy, was an analysand of Reich.

Isadore From (1919-1994), an early Gestalt Therapy trainer and one of the first U.S. patients of Frederick and Laura Perls told me one night at dinner, after a workshop, that he prefers to use Perls’ formal name, Frederick, out of respect, rather than the popular Fritz. There are many stories in the Perls’ legend, castigating Fritz because of his rather direct approach, especially in personal matters. Unlike many, Perls practiced what he preached. Isadore, like others who knew him, was respectful of that. Becoming all that you are is a focus in Gestalt Therapy. Frederick Perls’ personality and therapy style provoked that.

Dr. Laura Perls, a psychologist (born, Lore Posner: 1905-1990) and Frederick both studied with Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), the neurologist/psychiatrist. They incorporated his organismic approach to functioning in their therapeutic styles. While Frederick was mostly influenced by his analyst, Reich, Laura was influenced by modern dance and movement. A critical element of the original Gestalt Therapy work is focused on the body and movement, to develop awareness of the character structure.

Gestalt therapy training includes personal psychotherapy of the trainee, as do most other psychoanalytic, depth psychology or neo-analytic approaches. Within institutions, clinics, and private practice we find very few professionals who are trained in anything, outside of their graduate school academic courses and practicums. Psychotherapy training for clinical psychologists or psychiatrists is not a requirement for licensure.

During these early years of my apprenticeship in psychotherapy, I developed a curiosity about the central nervous system. I set out to see, through the study of neuropsychology, if the system developed by Reich and his initial associates made any sense from a mechanistic medical perspective. I subsequently surveyed Reich’s work in my doctoral dissertation on cancer and personality.

The functional approach, referred to by Reich as orgonomic functionalism, does have its mechanistic medical correlates. However, the direction of the approach and the language utilized are different.

The functional approach relates behavior back to the function of the organism. It’s opposite, the mechanistic approach, attempts to relate the symptom to a problem with the internal structure of the organism. While it may not be immediately discernable, this difference has vast implications regarding practice and effectiveness.

Reich’s approach conceives of behavior and character as a function of the organism’s protective armamentarium. While both mechanistic and functional approaches can be perceived as falling within the margins of the clinical gaze, Reich’s approach is far more respectful and sensitive to the human being as an organism that has reacted to a toxic environment by developing character armor or a defense. The mechanistic approaches view the organism as broken, with little or no contribution from the environment or social contacts. The functional approach views the organism as naturally protecting itself from toxic, environmental influences.

Character serves a protective function, a direct reaction to the debilitating effect of the socialization process. Character is created, in large part, by our reaction to how parents and significant others related to us during early years. Some of the more toxic styles find parents yelling at children, demanding they conform to their wishes; lying to children; relating with anger and hostility; beating children with a belt or cat’n’nine tails; spanking; relating to children with emotional coldness or boredom. Most of these styles fall just outside the definition of legal abuse, with the exception of physical punishment. To beat a child with a belt or cat’n nine tails, legally falls within the definition of child abuse. Slapping also constitutes child abuse, but difficult to prove if there is no mark on the child. If accused, the adult will frequently present a rational sounding defense, denying the abuse. I have witnessed and personally experienced all of these aberrant practices. These relationship styles are clearly defined within the criminal procedure laws in most states. A beaten child is quite likely to also be subjected to psychological abuse. Other commonly unreported abusive styles include isolation of a small child in a locked closet, basement, attic or other room, threats of severe harm and withholding of nourishment or meals for punishment.

Most people do not realize how wide spread the child abuse problem actually is. One statistic is revealing. In the U.S., between 1995 and 2007 there was a 44 % rise in deaths, per day, due to child abuse and/or neglect.

The consequences of these parent-child relationships, excluding fatalities, are likely to be the formation of the neurotic character manifested in adulthood. The formation of the neurotic character is directly related to emotionally disconnected, self-centered, insensitive or subtly sadistic and/or angry authoritarian parenting. Some parents will attempt to live their own incomplete lives through their children or for their children, pushing them into activities or sports the child doesn’t prefer. The emotional needs of the children are subjugated to the parent’s own self-serving needs. Growing up in an environment like that, stunts emotional growth and diminishes the possibility of a healthy and pleasurable life.

When analyzing the family practices in current society, there is one profound learning lesson that stands out above all others. We are extremely fragile and sensitive organisms. Especially children, where the turn of a phrase from an insensitive parent or significant other can have a negative lifetime impact.

The traditional mechanistic medical or psychological approach views the organism as producing symptoms, resulting from a dysfunctional dynamic or something not working right, within the patient, This relegates the environment or social world to the background, and elevates the importance of the clinical gaze.

The functional approach points to a still healthy organism, as seen in the natural spontaneity of childhood, reacting to the characterologically unhealthy ways others relate to them, with authoritarian demands to change or suppress a natural reaction to an unhealthy interaction. These unhealthy demands, when persistent in childhood, provide the foundation for a character neurosis. The concept of character neurosis is a functional construct, not a mechanistic-medical construct as are the DSM categories.

Rather than genes, aberrant parenting is the basis for the intergenerational transmission of less desirable personality traits. This transmission occurs through the complicated process of family relations, passing from one generation to another.

The traditional medical/psychological approach, on the other hand, attempts to seek biochemical, genetic, bio-psycho-social or other internal causes.

Sigismund Schlomo Freud (his birth name), in an 1896 letter to his friend Wilhelm Fleiss posited a neurone theory to account for conscious perception and unconscious forces.¹⁵ This became the basis for more than 100 years of failed mechanistic brain research to determine the causes and cure of mental illness.

It cannot be overemphasized that mental illness, as a clinical disease, has never been substantiated by acceptable scientific research. Since the 1950’s, the control of mental health causal and treatment research has been chiefly under the auspices of the pharmaceutical industry, albeit hidden in the background. In university settings, if one proposes or develops research counter to pharmaceutical industry protocols, research funding sources soon dry up. What are referred to as family support programs for the mentally ill, often receive covert funds from the pharmaceutical industry to promote the false belief of mental illness as a disease. The general public is kept in the dark about these funding sources for support programs.

While progress has been made in further clarifying the nature of the central nervous system, attaining knowledge of the cause of mental illness, continues to be elusive. This begs the question: If some of the best minds in neuroscience and psychiatry have not discovered a solution to the research question (Is there an entity called mental illness?), in more than 100 years and billions of dollars of research funds, might they be barking up a wrong tree?

Rollo May’s prescient pronouncement in the 1950’s holds true to this day. There is little, if any disagreement with the perception that emptiness and apathy are the chief problems continuing into the present era.

We are ten years into the new millennium. Many people have filled their emptiness and apathy with superficial, deceitful, and meaningless relationships. Others, like myself, have arrived at the understanding that to transcend this millennium problem, a look within and a rejection of superficiality is required. Admittedly, this approach will drastically reduce one’s social relationships.

For thousands of years, Buddhist practice taught the lessening of attachments to material things as a path to healing. Buddhist philosophers and practitioners believe that reality, as we know it, is an illusion of mind. That attachments are the root of suffering is a principle of the ancient Buddhist Heart Sutra.¹⁶ Lessening attachments does not mean that one must forego wealth, nor does it mean that one has to embrace Buddhism. There are many lay Buddhist millionaires. There are many wealthy non-Buddhists with a similar understanding and ethic.

We constantly fool ourselves. What we see as a thing, a car, a ring, a big house, boat, a promotion, larger financial returns, personal and business engagements, electronic devices, money, and other things or people whom we are attracted to are actually illusions of ego. One very effective thing that ego does is emphasize that material things and appearances, especially the appearance of our significant other, are essential for survival, prestige, reputation, or our feeling a certain way.

Attachments to others, concepts or material things are just that: attachments onto the character structure, like sticky notes. We are deluded by the media and institutional thinking that these material things and people are needs we must have. We lose sight of the fact that we want some of these relationships and things, when we could just as easily turn away from them. When we don’t have them, we feel a void.

Voids are filled in a number of ways. One of the most frequent are with attachments to cheap illicit substances and alcohol. It was a UCLA psychopharmacologist and ethnobotanist who developed the researched-based thesis that most primates and hence, us humans, have an innate propensity to alter our consciousness with mind-altering substances or psychoactive drugs and plants.¹⁷ Why we do this is a much debated philosophical question, better left for another forum.

The attachment to tweeting and excessive internet usage, a 21st Century phenomena, appears to fill the void by creating an illusion of contact. Whether this newly emerging form of communication will prove effective in advancing human contact or become a subtle destructive force, remains to be seen. Initial experience points towards the latter as a likely outcome.

Many people assume that by communicating with hundreds or dozens of friends, mostly in short tweets, that they have great social relationships. They have a great social life, but a life only in tweets. Anything more complicated and intimate is missing. The numbing down of social consciousness is the result.

If the growth of this trend expands exponentially, as it appears to be doing, in a few years we may witness a devolution in social contact between people. People will retreat to their electronic caves, while convincing themselves that they have loads of friends, but actually no intimate friends. This is the proverbial Sartrerian bad faith, where one convinces oneself they are something that they are not. With technology, we risk the distinct possibility that live social communication will regress to a level where the feelings generated in a deep emotional contact, intimacy, and/or friendship become a vestige, like the appendix. We see a hint of this now, in contactless domestic relationships.

There are alternatives. The descent or ascent into creativity where we lose our sense of boundaries, focusing solely on what we are creating, is a way towards avoiding this regression.

While it may seem odd, the creative descent into the unconscious through the process of psychosis is a healing alternative. Many folks emerge from the experience of psychosis to function successfully in our world of deceit, lack of sincerity, and candor. They do so with a much deeper sense of themselves and sensitivity towards others. John Weir Perry, a Jungian analyst, addresses this issue in a description of a patient who was healed in psychotherapy. He reports that her peculiar ideas actually enhanced her wisdom and provided a foundation for her subsequent health.¹⁸

Healing Personal Psychology is both a road map, providing an understanding of the current mental health system and it’s practices, and a guide through twenty one change exercises that will hopefully and ultimately result in the elimination of fear, increased awareness, and wisdom.

Jasenn Zaejian

Huntington Beach, California

March 21, 2011

Introduction

Clinical psychology and psychiatry have lost an important central focus. Beginning in the 19th Century through most of the 20th Century, the focus was on development of creative healing strategies. Since the late 1970’s, its practitioners, in the mainstream, began a regression to earlier, ineffective practices, some of which were physically damaging. Creativity was lost in attempts to produce evidence-based practices, mostly behavioral and biochemical, most of which have been proven to be ineffective or, at best, marginal with significant problems.

Healing Personal Psychology is a tale of truth and a guide for both professionals and the public, leading towards solutions to this failure of the related professions to creatively heal emotional and personal problems. Most effective healing practices have been