Introduction
Introduction
Introduction
Radical therapy is just beginning. It's being developed all across the country. It can't be described in six easy rules or five techniques- that's good, because RT is a way of living, not another "new kind" of therapy that can take its place in the psychotherapy spectrum. RT starts from the awareness that therapy is a social and political event, and moves to the conviction that therapy systems-like many of this country's institutions-must be changed.
RT groups have begun in Berkeley, Cambridge, Chicago, New York, New Haven, and elsewhere. People have identified themselves as "radical therapists" and are working for change where they can. Some are working within the system- in community mental health centers, neighborhood clinics, hospitals, and training programs; others are starting alternatives outside the system-in rap centers, therapy collectives, communes and radical psychiatry groups. Many colleges now give at least one course in radical psychology.
People are determined to stop therapy's perpetuating and legitimizing oppression. We're developing a therapy that serves the people.
Wherever you look, therapy has failed. The only persons consistently helped are the therapists, whose lives are comfortable. State hospitals are collecting bins and processing plants; psychoanalysis serves a fancy elite group, and it's debatable if it helps even them. Other forms of therapy are hit-and-miss-the field is swollen with people selling their wares, but the wares are often shoddy and the marketplace is corrupt. Most therapists are men; most patients, women. Therapy, thus, reinforces and exemplifies the sexist practices of this society, making it hard for a woman to get real help. Most therapists are white and middle-class, thus making it hard for lower-class, black, brown, and red people to get counseling in a nonoppressive way. Family or group therapy may deal well with interpersonal dynamics, but it grapples less fully with the real social conditions under which people live. New touchy-feely encounter therapy helps people become freer in themselves, but ignores social or political change. A third of all therapy is commissioned by someone else-government, military, business, school; the therapists' main allegiance is to their bosses. And all this in a society that, as R. D. Laing points out, systematically drives people out of their minds from childhood on, a society that regards as "normal" a meshwork of dehumanized, mechanical, and rigid patterns of destructive behavior. Nero (therapist) fiddles while Rome (America) burns.
The therapist touts himself as a magician. But he doesn't follow through. Instead of aligning himself to the tradition of soul healing (witch, witch doctor, GP, priest), he aligns himself to the status quo-and bolsters it. He sells his skill like a vendor of fried chicken. He uses his prestige to discredit and slur social protest, youth, women's liberation, homosexuality, and any other different kind of behavior. Therapists' rewards come from helping the system creak on.
Claiming to be "detached and clinical," therapists never are. They can't be. Their words and acts demonstrate their bias. Current therapy's emphasis on the individual cools people out and/or puts them down. It cools them out by turning their focus from society that fucks them over to their own "hang-ups." It puts them down by making them "sick" people who need "treatment" rather than oppressed people who must be liberated.
Therapy is change, not adjustment. This means change-social, personal, and political. When people are fucked over, people should help them fight it, and then deal with their feelings. A "struggle for mental health" is bullshit unless it involves changing this society which turns us into machines, alienates us from one another and our work, and binds us into racist, sexist, and imperialist practices. To do good work, radical therapists will have to take risks-to organize therapists, clients, and hospital workers, and to attack precious, oppressive institutions: the nuclear family, the forty-hour work week, fee-for-service care, mental hospitals as they now are, treatment of children as parents' property, professionalism, and so on. This will be done.
Some people say radicals are against culture. That's nonsense. Yes, we want to root out the aspects of this culture that oppress us. But we want to preserve the rest-art, science, history- and make it freely available to everyone. Therapy, today, is treated like a dark secret-patients are kept mystified, they're not told what the therapist knows. We want to stop the mystification that sets therapists up as gods-words that confuse, medications that aren't discussed, theories that are bullshit, silences when people are asking questions. If there are ways of helping people with problems, let's say what they are and teach them to people.
There's a difference between skill and role. Therapy skills that have been developed are useful; so is the understanding of human behavior we've built up. These can be made available to everyone. On the other hand, therapist roles, which have made therapists privileged and unaccountable, can be abandoned. Roles oppress us; skills serve us. Abolishing mystification and professionalism is part of our task.
Not all therapists are pigs. Many are well-intentioned people who have been trapped, like the rest of us, in a lousy system, though in a less deadly way since they benefit materially from their "oppression." Those who still want to do valuable work can join us in the struggle for change. The others will fight us tooth and nail, calling us names, reading us out of their "professional" organizations, and so on. That kind of politics is nothing new.
Therapy today is a power relationship between people one up, one down; helper and helped. In a society built on individualism and competition, it embodies the problem, and thus can scarcely be seen as a solution for people who are fucked up. Current therapy offers "solutions" only to people who buy the system and want to maintain their place in it. Which is another way of saying current therapy serves the system.
That's why we need to develop alternatives. Two, three, many alternatives. Therapists and clients and people, joining together in a common effort.
This anthology is a beginning. It offers articles
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
from The Radical Therapist, and, hopefully, provides people with a place to take off from.