PART -2
V. PSYCHOTHERAPIES
We can’t say that Counseling and Psychotherapies are entirely different in themselves. They are two phases of the same helping relationship. Many time they over lap, merge or complement in their goals and tasks. Counseling must have existed since the beginning of the human civilization.[66] We could categories the psychotherapies most of them into three basic categories such as psychodynamic, cognitive and behavioral and humanistic.
1. Psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy
Psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy is a general name for therapeutic approaches that try to enable the patients to bring to the surface his/her true feelings. According to psychodynamic therapies all behavior is influenced by unconscious motivations and conflicts.[67] Sigmund Freud considers human nature as basically deterministic in the sense our behavior is determined by irrational forces, unconscious motivations, and biological and instinctual drives as these evolves through key psychosexual stages in the first six years of life. One can liberate oneself from these determinants once the unconscious becomes conscious and blind habits are replaced by choice.[68] The functional or dynamic concept of human personality and structural or topographical conceptions are important concept along with ego defense mechanism.[69] The also propose psychosexual stages[70] and therapeutic techniques.[71]
Following Sigmund Freud, Carl Gestav Jung’s Analytical psychology, Erik H. Erikson’s psychosocial development, Alfred Adler’s Individual psychology and many other contemporary psychodynamic psychotherapies such as ego psychology, object relation psychology, Self psychology are some of the further development in the field of psychoanalytical psychotherapy.[72]
2. Cognitive and Behavioral therapy
Cognitive and Behavioral therapy is another major stream in the field of psychotherapy. The word ‘cognitive’ or ‘cognition’ means ‘to know’, or ‘to think’. Therefore, cognitive therapy is viewed as a psychological treatment of thoughts.[73] Cognitive therapy is a treatment designed to help people learn to identify and monitor negative ways of thinking, then to alter this tendency and think in a more realistic manner.[74] In 1950 Albert Ellis[75] developed ‘rational therapy,’ which he changed in rational- emotive therapy and again in 1993 changed the name and called it rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT).[76] "Your morality is that which you require of yourself, not because of what others will think, nor because of some external threat, but in the name of a particular conception of good and evil, of duty and proscription, of what is acceptable, of humanity and of yourself. In practical terms: morality is the sum of the rules to which you would submit, even were you invisible and invincible". [77] "To act ethically is, obviously, to be considerate of the interests of others, but 'unobserved by either gods or (wo)men', as Plato puts it; that is to say, without hope of reward or punishment, requiring no one but oneself to witness the act".[78] "The Ethics of Care expresses a moral responsibility to others, which is based on your ability to empathize - to imaginatively put yourself in other people's situations and view the world from their perspectives. This ability to empathize enables you to feel compassion and sympathy toward others, and serves as the foundation of all your healthy relationships". [79] REBT and behavioral approach also practice the ABC method[80] behavior modification, classical conditioning, reinforcement and operant conditioning technique etc. Berkmans Koyical’s[81] Homeostasis reality therapy (H.R.T), Brain Wave therapy[82] and NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)[83] are some other therapies having its root within the cognitive behavioral theoretical frame work.
3. Humanistic- Existential therapy
Humanistic psychotherapy is an approach that tries to do justice to the whole person and it includes mind, body and spirit. The totality of the person is taken into account and not just how we think or how we behave. Existential psychotherapy aims at enabling clients to find constructive ways to terms with the challenges of every day living. [84] At the beginning of the twentieth century a number of psychiatrists began applying the thinking of existentialist philosophers such as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger to their clinical work. Paul Tillich and Rollo May spread the approach in the United States.[85] Victor Frankl developed logo therapy, Carl R. Rogers developed Person Centered Counselling or Client Centered Counselling and Psychotherapy, Eric Berne developed Transitional Analysis, Frederick (Fritz) Perls developed Gestalt Therapy, are some of the examples for the humanistic approach to psychotherapy.[86]
There are basically four arguments against the thought patter of Derrida such as he had lack of philosophical clarity. Derrida has been generally ignored by the analytical philosophical[87] tradition. Partly because of the latter’s general antagonism towards Continental[88] Philosophy, and partly because of the idiosyncratic character of Derrida’s writing. Prominent among his critics were John Searle and W. V. Quine. Searle blamed Derrida’s work as displaying low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial.[89] Secondly the Intentional obfuscation where Noam Chomsky has expressed the view that Derrida uses "pretentious rhetoric" to obscure the simplicity of his ideas. He groups Derrida within a broader category of the Parisian intellectual community who act as an elite power structure for the well educated through "difficult writing" and obscurantism.[90] Foucault a contemporary of Derrida, comments Derrida’s method as that of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism).[91] The obscurantism makes it a difficult reading. Thirdly the Marxist Concerns. The Marxist critique blames that Derrida is a textualist who pays insignificant attention to the conditions of production of knowledge and none at all to the question of class relations.[92] However it appears as a misunderstanding of Derrida’s statement that ‘nothing exists outside text.’ According to Wolfreys, what Derrida meant by this statement is that ‘there is no thought, idea, concept which is not constructed out of, or contaminated by, groups of other thoughts, ideas, concepts. There is no idea which is not in fact textual thorough and thorough.’ It’s misunderstood to explain that there is nothing but texts and that there is no such thing as reality.[93] Lastly the concept is Nihilism. Some critics like Richard Wolin charge that the deconstructive project is "nihilistic". They claim Derrida's writing attempts to undermine the ethical and intellectual norms vital to the academy, if not Western civilization itself. Derrida is accused of creating a blend of extreme scepticism and solipsism that effectively denies the possibility of knowledge and meaning, which these critics believe is harmful. Derrida, however, felt that deconstruction was enlivening, productive, and affirmative, and that it does not "undermine" norms but rather places them within contexts that reveal their developmental and effective features.[94]
VII. RELEVANCE FOR POSTMODERN PSYCHOTHERAPIES
· The self constituted in terms of an ego, or conscious rational mind, a superego, or social conscience, and the unconscious, the source and repository of the symbolic working of the mind that functions with a different logic from reason.[95] In the Postmodern framework what we see is the deconstruction of the Freudian theory of id, ego and supper ego and the conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The dominating power or the supremacy of the counselor is also questioned with in the postmodern frame work. The question still remain unanswered can psychoanalysis be cleansed of its phallocentricism[96]?
· In the Cognitive and Behavioral therapy also we have the underlining principle that if the thinking or the perception is changed everything underneath will change particularly the behavior. Here also the binary opposite of mind and body dualism is visible.
· While the Humanistic- Existential therapy make the point of the existentialistic view and humanistic view goes in line with the postmodern frame work. It is very much relevant (Carl R. Rogers-Person Centered Counselling, Eric Berne-Transitional Analysis and Frederick (Fritz) Perls’s Gestalt Therapy) when Derrida is talking about the grammatology and logocentrism where the existing truth is questioned and challenged in order to make a relevant truth to the existing situation. In the TA language rewriting the script relevant to the client is dethroning the existing centers.
· The postmodern psychotherapies such as problem solving approach and different holistic healing technique are very much relevant to postmodern situations.
VIII. CONCLUSION
Jacques Derrida is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth Century. His writings, his lectures and his involvement in a number of political causes have transformed the way in which literature and cultural studies are taught, yet his work has often met with incomprehension, hostility and fear. To repeat my oversimplification, postmodernism is relativism. Postmodernism is a reaction against the logical truth structures of modern thought that gave us absolute propositions about nature, time, space, mathematics, knowability, repeatability of experimentation, predictability, etc. As modernism developed the sciences, technology, and medicine, it has helped to produce a comfortable and predictable society, wherein people tend to become complacent, comfortable, and predictable. Psychotherapies are also numerous and its relevance also is complex in its own framework.
IX. BIBLIOGRAPHY
Books
Antony, John. Psychotherapies in Counselling (Tamilnadu: Anugrapha Publications, 2003).
Aronowitz, Stanley and Henry Giroux, Postmodern Education (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
Barker, Chris. Making Sense of Cultural Studies, Central Problems and Critical debate (London: Sage Publications, 2002).
Carson, D. A. Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2005).
Chaffee, John. The Thinkers Way (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1998).
Chakravorty Spivak, Gayatri. ‘Translators Preface,’ Of Grammatology, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak ( Delhi: Motilal Banarsidas Publishers, 1994).
Chunkapura, Joan and M.J. Thomas. Hand Book of Counseling and Psychotherapies (kottayam: Sanjivani Publications, 1997).
Derrida, Jacques. Dissemination (London: The Athlone Press, 2000).
Derrida, Jacques. Of Hospitality Anne Dufourmantelle invites Jacques Derrida to respond, Translated by Rachel Bowlby, (California: Stanford University Press, 2000).
Derrida, Jacques. ‘Whom to Give to (knowing not to know).’ The Post Modern Bible Reader. Edited by David Jobling, Tina Pippin & Ronald Schleifer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 1989).
Hugh J. Silverman, ‘Jacques Derrida’, Postmodernism: The key figures, edited by Hans Bertens & Joseph Natoli (Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002).
Julian Wolfreys, Deconstruction ● Derrida (Hampshire: MacMillan, 1998).
Julian Wolfreys. Derrida A Guide for the Perplexed (New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2008.
Johnson, Barbara. ‘Translators Preface’, Dissemination, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Barbara Johnson (London: The Athlone Press, 1997,2000).
Lodge, ‘David. Introduction’ –Jacques Derrida, ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’’ in Criticism and Theory: A Reader, edited by David Lodge with Nigel Wood (Delhi: Pearson, 2003).
Powell, Jim. Derrida for Beginners (Chennai: Orient Longman, 2000)
Sharman, Adam. ‘Jacques Derrida.’ Contemporary Critical Theorists. Edited by Jon Simons. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
Sponville, Andre Comte. The Little Book of Philosophy (London, William Heinmann, 2004).
Dictionaries and Periodicals
Carol Nicholson, “Postmodernism, Feminism, and Education: The Need for Solidarity,” Educational Theory 40, no. 1 (1990): 43.
Propst, L. R.. “Rational-Emotive Psychotherapy”, Rodney J. Hunter General Editor, Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996) pp.1043- 45.
Stanley J. Grenz, “Postmodernism and the Future of Evangelical Theology: Star Trek and the Next Generation,” Evangelical Review of Theology. 18(January 1994), pp. 4[1]-48.
Webliography and Electronic materials
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
Britannica 2002 Deluxe Edition, CD.
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[18] Edmund Husserl was born on April 8, 1859, Prossnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire [now Prostejov, Czech Republic] and died April 27, 1938, Freiburg im Breisgau, Ger. He was a German philosopher, the founder of Phenomenology, a method for the description and analysis of consciousness through which philosophy attempts to gain the character of a strict science. The method reflects an effort to resolve the opposition between Empiricism, which stresses observation, and Rationalism, which stresses reason and theory, by indicating the origin of all philosophical and scientific systems and developments of theory in the interests and structures of the experiential life. Britannica 2002 Deluxe Edition, CD.
[24] Ferdinand de Saussure was the Swiss linguist whose structural linguistics formed the basis for structuralism in disciplines such as literature, semiotics, folklore, and anthropology. Saussure thought there is an abstract structure that determines all language’s concrete manifestations, like the rules of chess that determine all the concrete moves one can make in the game. Similarly, structure anthropologists believe there are abstract structures at the basis of cultural forms such as myth, kinship, etc. This lead to structural analyses of such various ‘texts’ as: striptease, boxing, myths, political campaigns, religious rituals, and even traffic signals.
[28] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
[31] Jacques Marie Émile Lacan a French psychoanalyst who gained an international reputation as an original interpreter of Sigmund Freud's work. Lacan earned a medical degree in 1932 and was a practicing psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in Paris for much of his career. He helped introduce Freudian theory into France in the 1930s, but he reached prominence only after he began conducting regular seminars at the University of Paris in 1953. Lacan emphasized the primacy of language as the mirror of the unconscious mind, and he tried to introduce the study of language (as practiced in modern linguistics, philosophy, and poetics) into psychoanalytic theory. His major achievement was his reinterpretation of Freud's work in terms of the structural linguistics developed by French writers in the second half of the 20th century. The influence he gained extended well beyond the field of psychoanalysis to make him one of the dominant figures in French cultural life during the 1970s. In his own psychoanalytic practice, Lacan was known for his unorthodox, and even eccentric, therapeutic methods.
[39] The opposition man/women is just one binary opposite. Others are spirit/matter, nature/culture, Caucasian/Black, Christian/pagan. According to Derrida we have no access to reality except through concepts, codes and categories, and the human mind functions by forming conceptual pairs such as three. You see how one member of the pair (here the left), is privileged. The right-hand term then becomes marginalized. Icons with Christ or Buddha or whatever in the center try to tell us that what is in the center is the only reality. All other views are repressed. Dreqing such an icon is an attempt to freeze the play of opposites between, for example, Christian/Jew or Christian/pagan. The Jew and the pagan are not even represented in such art.
[64] In Dissemination, Derrida undertakes a finely (dis)articulated meditation on the problematics of presentation and representation in the history of western philosophy and literature. The ‘pretexts’ for this enquiry are Plato’s Phaedrus, Mallarme’s Mimique, Philippe Sollers’ Nombres and an encyclopaedic array of prefaces and pseudonyms.
[65] In this work, Derrida focuses on the Greek tradition of friendship as the fundamental social relation and attempts to tease out the implications through a prolonged meditation on Aristotle's famous phrase, "Friends, there is no friend." This paradoxical greeting is productive grist to the Derridean mill. It is thus, from the start, deprived of an "origin" which Derrida would have to deconstruct. The book displays Derrida's astonishing interpretative powers to their fullest and he persuasively demonstrates how notions of friendship and enmity are crucial to any understanding of the social. In a final coup de theatre Derrida removes an accent from the Greek and, turning a vocative into a plural, makes Aristotle's enigmatic paradox into a statement that too many friends are the very antithesis of friendship cited in Collin MacCabee, A book Review on ‘Politics of Friendship,’ New Statesman, Oct. 17, 1997.
[69] Functional concept includes Id, Ego and Superego and structural conception includes conscious, preconscious and unconscious. The game or ego defense mechanism are repression, denial, Reaction formulation, Projection, Displacement, Rationalization, Sublimation, Fixation or Regression, Introjections, Identification and compensation etc.
[75] One of the best known cognitive therapies, in which irrational ideas are considered to be the cause of emotional disturbance. Originated by Albert Ellis, with other cognitive therapies the assumption that maladaptive feelings are often caused by maladaptive thoughts. However, RET helps individuals challenge the core of irrational ideas which all troubled individuals are assumed to hold, whereas other cognitive therapies focus on an individual’s idiosyncratic thought patterns. L. R. Propst. “Rational-Emotive Psychotherapy”, Rodney J. Hunter General Editor, Dictionary of Pastoral Care and Counseling (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996) p.1043.
[81] Dr. Berkmans Koyical hails from the state of Kerala. He is a Franciscan brother who has done post-gradate studies in Clinical psychology in the University of Baltimore, USA and has taken a doctorate thereafter. Besides his clinical practice he is offering professional course on Homeostasis Reality Therapy and Brain Wave Therapy for the people from different walks of life. H.R.T is a therapeutic technique of encoding and decoding memories of past and future thoughts with verbalization in the present. Healing or solving problem and it’s immediately experienced after encoding and verbalization of symptom expression.
[82] A live brain emits electrical impulses. When a person is psychologically ill, he/she will be having Delta and Theta waves while people who are experiencing psychological health will have Alpha Waves. Brain wave therapy claim to be the most effective electronic treatments to reduce psychic illness within shortest duration of time. John Antony. Psychotherapies in Counselling, p.186.
[83] John Grinder is a co-founder with Richard Bandler of the field of NLP. NLP is an artful technology for studying the structure of subjective experience, the process by which people construct their unique, distinctive map of the World. It is about how the brain works, how people think, feel, learn, motivate themselves, interact with others, make choices, and achieve goals. Neuro refers to the neuro chemical response creating the internal sensory response and its resulting behavioral modification. The word linguistic refers to the learned digitalization (word) that triggers off neuro- chemical response. Programming is the behavioral and thinking patterns we all go through. John Antony. Psychotherapies in Counselling, p.190.
[89] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
[90] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
[91] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
[94] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Derrida, 2/12/08, IST, 10.00 Am.
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