The Ten Deadly Sins of Psychotherapy

Abstract

The author considers a number of issues that are overlooked in psychotherapy, with the result that its identity and purpose are endangered. These are: 1. Authenticity, sincerity and honesty to oneself as the path to real life, rather than just the mere disappearance or alleviation of symptoms of mental illness. 2. The reduction of the human being and his illness to an organism defined in natural scientific terms instead of a concept of the human being based on the immediate authentic and unreduced experience of existence. 3. A failure to think the moral aspects of mental illness through. 4. The tendency to succumb to natural scientific paradigms and abstract generalisations instead of keeping to the exploration of the unique. 5. The alienation of the language of psychotherapy from immediate experience and so from communication in the vernacular speech of a given culture. 6. Interpretation as a deepening understanding addressed to and deriving from what discloses itself of itself, as against interpretation narrowed down to pre-established, final and closed theoretical systems. 7. The banalisation of psychotherapy by closed and artificial systems and its opposite, which is able to create the newness and freshness of an open relation to everyday reality. 8. An approach to human lives, events and moments that conceives these as merely the external expressions of something “behind” or “underneath”, i.e. forces, laws, or rules standing outside this reality, instead of seeing them in terms of the immediate and unclosed reality of being in the world, which is the proper source of anthropological diagnoses. 9. A failure to understand culture as the natural environment of man, which is instead seem as a “virgin” nature without human beings. 10. A tendency to forget the real roots of psychotherapy in the spiritual tradition of Western civilisation, and ungratefulness to the virtues and values that our ancestors discovered and introduced into everyday reality.