Ideas That Evolve Out of Feelings

  I was wondering how it came to be that psychotherapy became a thought therapy and that mental illness became a belief and perception disorder? So that psychosis became a thought affliction.  I was wondering how it came to be that psychotherapy became a thought therapy and that mental illness became a belief and perception disorder? So that psychosis became a thought affliction. So only a part of us seems to be going crazy. What about the rest?

So let me start at the beginning. There are levels of brain function which my friend Paul Maclean described fifty years ago in his Triune brain; and there are levels of the brain which I describe decades ago which largely coincide with Dr. Maclean. Only I learned about them through reliving those levels and the feelings, needs and pain that reside in them. It became the basis of my theory on the levels of consciousness and the neuronal chain of pain.

  So why didn’t Freud and his pals discover that? Because there were not the scientific tools we now have at our disposal.  Brain science in his time was in its infancy; that is how brain lobotomy could gain acceptance.  There was no “point de repère”, no scientific frame of reference to not accept it.    And it killed many.  So good old Dr. Freud did the best he could and he did want to target feelings but he believed the way to do it was to have patients talk their way into it.  Eventually they would run out of words and get into feelings. It could not happen neurologically but he did not know it.  And words and insights became “de rigueur”.  And the whole idea of psychoanalysis, which I practiced for 17 years, was to offer insights to the patient.  Knowledge would make him well, we thought.  All it did was have the patient internalize what we thought was inside of him.  And we had to be wrong because we were guessing.

  But the die was cast and we all thought mental affairs were only a matter of the verbal, conceptual brain. We now know that cancer can be a psychosis of the body with the exact same origins as the later development of cancer. We now know there is a body attached to that brain that must be accounted for. It is not mental illness; it is illness, period. That illness takes different forms as we mount the evolutionary ladder.  We cannot have mental psychosis until we are fully mental but our bodies can express all kinds of symptoms.  And when we get to attention deficit syndrome, we know that internal agitation has reached the thinking mind and disturbed it so that concentration and focus become impossible.  And in 1920 we did not know about imprinted and embedded memory, nor of how the three levels of the brain worked. So how could  they know where ADD came from?  Sadly, it is very true today where most therapists have no idea that inner cerebral agitation perturbs concentration and focus. I have read volumes on the subject and it nearly all avoids inner imprints.

And what do we get instead?  Behavioral therapy which avoids feelings altogether.  And all other cerebral approaches which are feelingless.  We want a therapy of feeling not only because it is nice to have but because it means the cure of  mental illness.  I mean, the cure of so much illness.