Let's Stop Psychologic Creationism

If we do not understand the evolution of the brain, we are little more than creationists, believing that the unconscious was installed in us by some force—God, nature or whatever—and there is nothing we can do about it.Therefore, we don’t touch it, and don’t go near it for fear of rattling the demons first put there by the religionists to keep parishioners in fear and therefore under control. “If you don’t behave and pray enough, those demons will get you.”

The Freudian twist is, “If you insist on going into the past, the demons will catch up with you and destroy your mind.” It is a turn on the old religious notion of the 1800s. That is one reason therapists stay away from it. But if they were ever to disregard that warning and let patients slip into their past, they would see what lies in the unconscious. What they would find is nothing more than our history, laid out in order from the present to the most remote, including birth and womb-life. And it would not be approximate; it would be precise, with memories lying in storage waiting their turn to be connected to conscious awareness.

And while we are on the subject of awareness, allow me to say that one central difference between the Primal and other insight approaches is the matter of consciousness. They reason that the unconscious did not result from specific events in our lives but from some genetic source that is never too specific. Yes, there are genetic forces, but let us not confuse nine critical months of life in the womb with genetic forces. Without a ground in evolution, we can never comprehend how neurosis evolves, and how a proper psychotherapy is neurosis in reverse, addressing the painful imprints in the reverse order in which they were laid down—not just addressing pain from our childhood, but also from infancy and most importantly, from our womb-life. And it’s not just addressing those events from the adult standpoint, but far more importantly, reliving those events with the brain that was the highest level of neural organization at the time. We had a brain in the womb that was capable of registering noxious events such as pain, coding and imprinting them, and keeping them for a lifetime. And those events direct our lives decades later.

Once we have a firm grasp on history and its evolution, we will know that addressing mental illness is not a matter of just understanding it but being immersed in it, submerged in our history, in its feelings, ceding to its power until words will no longer suffice. Words will simply not do the job; in fact, words are the antithesis of cure, inimical to any therapeutic progress,as odd as that sounds. Therein lies the rub. For it means flouting the Freudian warning about plunging patients into the deep unconscious, an unconscious, Freudians say, that will irrevocably disturb the psyche. And it is this caveat, along with many other equally wrong ones, that have kept the practice of psychotherapy in the dark ages, believing there are dark forces that propel us here and there beyond our control. It takes one to know one;

I practiced Freudian-oriented psychotherapy for many years. One key reason I did so was that there was relatively no other avenue for the practice of dynamic psychotherapy. At least Freud posited an unconscious, and were he alive today, I am sure he would not be a Freudian. I have said that we can only heal where we were wounded. We know now that emotional wounds lie deep in the brain outside of conscious/awareness. They are impressed low into the brain system long before we have words to describe them. We can heal those wounds if we can address them directly and not have to travel through a labyrinth of words. Theories have an evolution. Let us not stay “stuck in the past” to a theory frozen in time that has not basically changed or advanced. Freudian theory has seen very little change in 100 years. The attempt to take a current theory and attach it to a past frame of reference is taking a new science and attach-ing it to an old theory that is not longer valid. That is not progress. As I said earlier, if Freud were alive today, I doubt if he would be a Freudian. Can we imagine any other branch of medicine still in the grips of the science of the 1920s? Freud wrote his major, Interpretation of Dreams, at the beginning of the last century. Surely there has been a bit of progress since then.