In the Airtight Grasp of the Intellectuals

We are in the grasp of the cognitive/insighters who think neurosis and pain is all in our head, because they are in their heads, those unassailable, sacrosanct souls who have lost touch with their depths of feeling and have raised intellectuality to the level of an ineluctable principle. They believe that all we have to do is change our head, our ideas and attitudes, and everything will be dandy. The insighters are no less at fault. I know. I was one of them for seventeen years. They too apotheosize the present, the here-and-now; beliefs become the linchpin of their approach. They move away from the one thing that is curative — the patient’s history. We are historic beings, after all, imprinted neuro-physiologically with our past. Any proper treatment must address that history. And that key history is not on top of the brain; it is deeper. They are talking to the wrong brain! And they expect the right answer when that brain has no answers; the answers lie below the usual canards. They are joined to origins, the generating sources; it is the only place we can find answers to profound questions: What is wrong with me? How can I get well?

The high-ranking brain prevents any hope of a cure for emotional illness. Talking to the brain that talks was fine a century ago and is good when dealing with current problems, but now we know so much more about the brain and what it contains; and we know that the damage done to us is imprinted on lower levels of consciousness — far below where words live. We need to learn a new language — that of the unconscious — a language that has no words, just feelings and sensations; in order to communicate with that brain we need to understand emotional tone, body language and non-linguistic feelings - the physiological base of it all. I submit that psychotherapy has been in the grasp of intellectuals who went to school to learn about feelings, and that learning prevented any understanding of those feelings. All they had to do is take a trip to the other side of the brain—the right - and they would learn all they need to know about feelings and how to treat emotional illness. They need to learn how to improvise and get away from traditional learning. Improvise is how we get the right brain to light up. It has to do with independent thinking, not rote, not pure memory, not taking precise notes at lectures—just reflecting in a good way. The problems is you usually cannot get an advanced degree in that way, a degree that will allow you to get a license and practice. So we have the “feelers’ those free souls who practice with no degree, and who also have no scientific sense that will allow them to go slow, be methodical, under stand science and the scientific method, and not get too far ahead of facts; to stop short of booga booga. The usual shrink such as the Psychoanalyst, needs to undergo psychotherapy herself. And again, the problems is that they inevitably never cross the neural bridge to nirvana. Never develop profound understanding because that kind of understanding only comes with a plunge into the depths, the antipodes of the unconscious. So the professionals go to college, get a degree that allows the person to “heal” others; and with that diploma he is offered a pair of testicles and the lower brain attached, which says, “go and do to others as you never want done to you.”

To this day, and it is worse now, because we always believed that words could help us make profound change in our patients; after all, we call it “mental illness.” And Freud started this mess with his verbal free association, a so-called royal road to the unconscious. And, in fact, words often are the defense against delving into the unconscious. Our goal should be to produce feeling human beings, not mental giants because feeling is the essence of life; there is no life without it; not joy, no ecstasy no depths of sadness, no nothing; just a big emptiness.