Psychotherapy East & West by Alan Watts

Author:Alan Watts [Watts, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: New World Library
Published: 2017-01-14T23:00:00+00:00

To have “seen and accepted himself as he is” appears, then, to be that essential quality of personality which, as Mora says, is more important for the therapist than his theory or school. Though it sounds simple, and not very heroic, its implications are tremendous and its difficulties extraordinary — for what constitutes “myself” and who is it that accepts me? This is no mere matter of bringing about a reconciliation between the ego and a number of repressed experiences, shameful or painful but always contents of one’s own subjectivity. It is the much larger problem of integrating the split which has come about between the individual and the world, and, as we have seen, this has little to do with adjusting him to society.

Speaking quite generally, this is the point at which psychotherapy falls short of being a way of liberation, even when it is recognized that therapy is far more than adjustment. The weakness lies not so much in the theoretical differences and confusions of the various schools as in certain tacit agreements — in particular the continued acceptance of the dualistic view of man: ego and unconscious, psyche and soma, subject and object, reality principle and pleasure principle, reason and instinct. Therapy is healing, making whole, and any system which leaves the individual upon one horn of the dualistic dilemma is at best the achievement of courageous despair. This is just what Freud himself came to; his later writings reflect the deep pessimism of a very brave man, for he felt that the conflict between the pleasure principle, Eros, and the demands of the reality principle, of the necessities of civilization, was irreconcilable. For its own survival Eros must be regulated, civilized, and repressed, but

. . . the repressed instinct never ceases to strive for complete satisfaction, which would consist in the repetition of a primary experience of satisfaction. No substitutive or reactive formations and no sublimations will suffice to remove the repressed instinct’s persisting tension.80

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