Couples Therapy: The Damage Philosophy Caused to Psychology (Part 1)

What is the secret of psychology's success in the 20th century? What is the secret of philosophy's failure in the 20th century? A philosophical treatment of psychological treatment, and finding the source of pain in the mouth - because barking philosophy doesn't bite. Therefore, there is a need for root treatment - in the philosophy of teeth - to heal the damages of the philosophy of language

Spiritual union: Mouth-to-mouth treatment (Source)

Why do couples therapies fail so often? Why is it so difficult and exhausting to treat two people (much more than treating one)? Is it because treating one is more effective (not really) or perhaps more genuine and deeper - in its delving into the single psyche - and therefore should be focused on? Or is it precisely treating two that encounters the real challenges of the real world in the therapy room, with both sides of the coin, which are easier to avoid in treatment as an isolated atom, with a one-sided view, than in treating a molecule? And if we compare this to treating sick intellectual fields - is it better to treat and delve into one field, and penetrate the depth of the problem, or perhaps in couples therapy, which examines the connection between two disciplines and treats it, we will discover the depth of the real problem, and get to the root of the neurosis? When the two fields are philosophy and psychology, it seems that this couple relationship should be sent for urgent therapy.

How did 20th-century philosophy, the century in which psychology grew, influence psychology? Is this influence inevitable, due to the very nature of psychology (which didn't grow in this century for nothing!), or is it merely coincidental, resulting from a historical combination of circumstances that created psychological treatment in its current form, and therefore one can imagine a completely different type of treatment? Do the psychological conceptions of couples and individual therapy stem from an unsuccessful coupling of psychology itself, which found itself with a domineering, and sometimes toxic, partner who deeply influenced its own personality, to the point of castration and self-negation? What is actually the conception of relationship that underlies couples therapy - and therapy in general, which includes therapist and patient - in the psychological world, and is another conception possible?

Not surprisingly for the 20th century, the century of the linguistic and communicative turn, linguistic psychologists conceptualized relationships as "connections" and couplehood as a "connection", and the secret of couplehood and relationships as "communication, communication, communication". The cure is through talking, storytelling and retelling, conceptualization and reconceptualization, and emotional expression - couples learn to talk to each other, express their needs, conduct constructive and positive communication, verbalize feelings, give different words (he's not angry, he's insecure), create secure attachment, build a new emotional language (don't say to the other "you're not..." and accuse, but say "I feel that..."), share endlessly, "tell the other that I just want you to hear me!" and so on - because the cure is, of course, in the image of the treatment, and the treatment is, after all, linguistic. Let's talk about it. All these belong to the paradigm of the psychology of language.

But what can be done when in practice, and as known to anyone not born yesterday, talk mostly doesn't help - which doesn't change the therapeutic example one bit. Who hasn't heard, known, and seen that talk is actually barely effective, that it gives advantage to the more verbal side (and often - the more manipulative), that people simply mislead, lie and talk nonsense (and the attempt to find meaning in them is meaningless, and therefore poor in intellectual value, like any attempt to find a signature in noise), that people's speech is very biased in their favor from the outset (the personal therapist only thinks he's getting some picture of reality, because he's only getting one side), and as a result, treatments take years (until the problem resolves itself, because time is a great healer, or the patient gives up - and then, what can be done, he left the treatment! It's his fault).

As always in cases of basic methodological failures, namely paradigmatic failures, any attempt to examine them within the paradigm will assume what is sought: in any case, only people who already believe in talk over actions and learning are drawn to therapy in the first place. And as for the results of the treatments themselves (which are ostensibly their justification), they have no natural endpoint - the treatment, in principle, continues forever (there is always an inverse relationship between treatment effectiveness and its duration). And the illusion of depth in treatment simply stems from time, that is, from the development (learning!) that time creates, and not from the linguistic treatment itself. But how attractive this illusion is to therapists and patients alike - who continue to walk together in the wake of (lost) time, and imagine that the treatment moved life, and not vice versa (and who will know? The placebo effect here is identical to the effect of non-causal correlation).

The same psychological "deepening", even if perhaps without result (and point), is often quoted as a "cultural" or "spiritual" argument for treatment. But unsurprisingly, at least to anyone who has read a little literature pretending to be deep (that is, a little of our contemporary "psychological" novels), there is nothing deep in "deep" talk, and the cultural and spiritual damage is even more severe than the therapeutic one, in turning the person himself into language. It is of course flattering to the patient to think that removing the shells through dealing with shells - in language - will reveal within his onion sparks from the infinite light, and his "deep" soul, as if secrets for the initiated are hidden within him. Because, "thanks to the treatment", he suddenly turned from "you're a person" into a divine chariot, and even more than that - into a sacred text (for they expound on him various interpretations, whether by way of hint or by way of secret, and suddenly there is meaning in him, requiring interpretation, and not just simple meaning). Psychological treatment is the (last?) place where a secular person can ensure that he will be worshipped, that is, that he will be treated (for payment) as a religious or artistic text. Hence the attraction to psychoanalysis: the "I" becomes literature. Man seeks meaning. All the worship of treatment confidentiality is designed to create a world of secret - in a world where there is no secret. Yes, there is a special secret in you (which is similar to, and at its root identical to, a million other secrets according to the theory - hence the obsession with theory: it is an industrial production line for secrets according to a template. It is the "deep" and "esoteric" language. Kabbalah for the masses).



Only a historical accident caused psychology to become fixed in its current linguistic form - which is not its natural form, and therefore not "correct": this is the psychology that was simply born in the wrong century. Couplehood is of course not a connection and not a conversation - the correct conceptualization of it is learning. Therefore, it is expressed in sex - because it is a medium of learning. Sex is not body language (or "non-verbal communication" - an oxymoron that expresses the poverty of the linguistic paradigm, in which even the action itself is perceived as a sign). It is not meant to convey "messages" (it's a very poor practice to convey messages to the other side through sexuality), just as (good) art has no "message". And therefore couplehood is also expressed in children - because they are a medium of learning. One who thinks that his children are a medium for conveying content, for example ideology or religion or morality or values or lessons for the future - is the linguistic parent. This is in contrast to the learning parent who understands that his role is to create a learning creature, that is, an innovator, that is, a person who is an innovation in the world, the like of which has never been. Not (another) one who lives within the language and framework (which is usually a social framework), and is trapped within it (there is no private language!), and skilled in using it for his needs (because use is meaning - let's think about the American slickness that speaks fluently), and knows how to operate the world through the linguistic medium (the manipulator, the politician of language), but one who innovates within the system - one who creates new meaning. Not one who lives according to the law of language (and the Wittgensteinian conception of language is a completely halakhic conception, as a system of meaning that derives from activity within it - a social form of life), but one who innovates in Torah.

Therefore, the sexual relations of the philosophy of language, which are medium and conversation ("deep", "emotional", "intimate") deteriorate and become boring - because there is no study hall without innovation, and in fact - depth is innovation, and intimacy is precisely creativity (as any Talmud learner will testify - intimacy is the ability to innovate without fear of the subject, and from a direct connection to the Torah, as a household member, within it). And therefore it is also boring and frustrating to raise children through language (do this, don't do that, stop fighting, be quiet, respect, eat, sleep) - because such a child has no goal and no purpose (but there is a lot of communication with him, without purpose, because after all we were told that communication is the key, what wonder that communication deteriorates into shouting, cursing and insolence: because there are only language actions). No one has ever planted in such a child the inner seed of the soul: the purpose of man is innovation. Instead of being a child of the rabbi's house - he is a child of mother. Psychology has created a whole generation of infants - with its emphasis on infancy as the most important period in a person's life (instead of knowing, and it is known in every culture with knowledge, that the most important period is old age, in which a person is supposed to reach the peak of his intellectual achievements, and therefore it is precisely then that he is obligated to teach the grandchildren: a basic grandfather who is basic to the soul no less than mother and father faces).



Anyone who believes in the existence of a "language of the soul", that subjugation of the soul to language, should ask himself whether he also believes in a "language of the spirit", or a "language of the soul". Why does "language of emotion" sound more logical to him than "language of intelligence", "language of attention", "language of fine motor skills", or "language of consciousness"? The idea that there is some mediating medium between two systems (for example, parts in the soul, or people in relationships, or the therapist and the patient), and the correction of this medium is the cure - is the basic idea of the psychology of language and communication. This psychology is based on a mutual illusion of the therapist and the patient, that the change in language is the cause of learning processes, while it is the product of them (and certainly not their important product). Trying to treat language is like political correction through political correctness - trying to fix the inside of a system through its external and visible boundary (its "language"). The result is a gap between the boundary and the inside, that is, hypocrisy, illusion (mainly self-illusion), inefficiency and inauthenticity. And depth of shell.

The inherent gap between "the language of the system" (for example, "political language"), and the way the system actually works and develops (that is, learns), always feeds a lot of verbal confrontations and "discussions" and talk shows and empty salon chatter, in which people talk about what they would do (if they were prime ministers...), and in psychology every such "discussion" costs 450 shekels. But it is not the soul that is treated on the couch - but the language. And as in politics, talk without responsibility is worth exactly as much as authority without responsibility. Seemingly, dealing with the language of the system is not very terrible, but the focus on language comes at the expense of focusing on learning, which does not deal with mediation and medium, but with the inside. The psychology of learning understands that even fluent, honest and intensive communication with your partner or child or yourself (deep psychological awareness, in its own eyes) does not guarantee learning success, and that sometimes the linguistic analysis succeeds - but the poem dies. The brainwashed people of psychology, just like the brainwashed people of any other ideology or discipline, speak like brainwashed scarecrows - but full of interiority, which is empty straw and chaff - in fluent psychology. They are "precise", identify "patterns", complex and aware and sensitive to the point of terror (to themselves) and therefore capable of analyzing themselves to the point of parody (and of course justifying any villainy or stupidity or laziness - that is: learning failures).

The psychologists themselves are of course the best at this - what wonder that often their personal lives look like the cobbler's painful and barefoot leg (ask a psychologist's child or partner what that's like sometime). In fact, the "moral" barrier that psychology created between the psychologist's life and the patient's life protects the psychologist even more than the patient, because if the patient knew the personal life of the average psychologist, and his actual mental abilities (and not in theory, in the treatment room, where it's easy to be "wise", when there's no connection between such "wisdom" and action), he would lose all authority and credibility and credibility (in general: people choose a profession not because they are good at it, but because it occupies them, and above all - deals with them. And people with psychological problems go to psychology. After you know a representative sample of therapists - you can never go to therapy again). But this famous barrier, which has become so self-evident, already causes any demand from psychology to work (yes, to work) in psychologists' lives to seem to us like an ad hominem attack. Does it work or doesn't it work?

The ridiculous idea that there is some professionalism of the soul - caused deep damage to the very idea of the soul, and to the very idea of depth (and it particularly harmed literature, which the psychology of language contaminated even more than the everyday clichés that walk among us, and pour out on "the treatment"). Only a complete misunderstanding of the learning essence of man - of his being a system of innovations, whose breath of life is innovation, creates thinking that there is such a thing as the human soul at all, with a certain and characteristic and timeless structure, which is not dependent on the period - that is, on learning development. The psychological type that coils up, who invests all his innovation ability in excuses and duplicated and stereotypical psychological insights (that is: templates that fit everything), is exactly the patient in whom the treatment succeeded the most (to become a brain parasite), but took out of him the soul in the soul: innovation. Language is not the right way to touch and treat the soul, because language's hand is too short to express the soul (great literature is needed to even try - not something accessible to the linguistic ability of the average therapist and patient). The language of speech is simply too crude and stereotypical a tool for deepening into a person. What cannot be spoken about - must be learned.



The innovative essence of man is what prevents brainwashing the next generations, and ending human learning with a final verdict, as certain ideologies, religions, and societies have tried. The rebellion of adolescence or adulthood is not caused by an Oedipal complication with the father, but by human nature that wants to innovate - in relation to any framework in which it grew (and if it's not possible to innovate within it, because it's too dogmatic - then against it). This is also exactly the reason why fashions and period changes exist, even in neutral areas like art or clothing, and this universal phenomenon does not skip any culture (including ancient ceramics). Fashion is created from the innovation drive even in areas where there is no progress but only change, where there are always pioneers and those who adopt the innovation (psychology is also such a fashion, which is already going out of style, despite its worship of narcissism). The drive for innovation is essential even in the phenomenon of migration, thanks to which the human species spread throughout the world and did not remain a local species like other species, contrary to the image of migration out of distress. But psychology will always present distress as justification, because it was born as a medical therapeutic field, meaning it needs to find the disease, and fix something that broke - while innovation is not a disease but a healthy learning tendency, and not a trauma in the past but an opportunity in the future. But the psychologist will always turn the gaze to the past, because he was educated on the doctrine of the original sin of the soul (which no woman-born escapes). Therefore his intervention, if it succeeds in sinking the patient in the past as well, will become anti-future and therefore anti-learning. It is not correction we lack - but creation.

And if psychology does create a mental creation, this creation will be infected with the disease of complexity and complication, meaning it will be inherently sterile. It's true that the lowest creations derive their development from a simple and simplistic template (for example ideology or kitsch - and this is the connection between these two tendencies), like for example a formulaic romantic novel. But even literary works built on complexity, and on it their glory, are almost never truly innovative, because they are built on complication, and on the collapse of the human brain in excess variables and data and nuances, until an illusion of depth is created (simply out of impossibility of perception: it's incomprehensible). Complexity too is a formula, which only seems more sophisticated and wise, but is usually just more pretentious and not really wisdom: give each character and each characterization an ambivalent/dialectical/opposite side with complex connections as a fabric and reversals (don't forget irony!) and on the other hand internal rhyming between elements and of course external rhyming with masterpieces (correspondences are cultural depth, aren't they?). Or be an impressionist and add to each color the opposite color in the color table, and more and more sub-shades, until you create an imaginary richness in painting or book. Imagery? Complex! Language? Complex! Rhyming? Complex! Choreography? Complex! Palette? Complex! Composition? Complex! And so on. The ability to weave a complex novel is not really the most important in literature (despite the majority of importance in which it perceives itself), and so is the ability to create complex philosophy, or complex psychology, and so on - and it stands precisely in polar opposition to the ability to innovate, which actually strives for maximum simplicity. One who truly innovates - does not complicate. Complication usually throws smoke in the reader's eyes, and hides from his eyes the lack of essential innovation, which is replaced by an innovation mechanism, that is, complication as an industry and a complexity machine, as a method. Therefore, the important is usually simple to the point of almost ridicule (how didn't I think of this before?), precisely because it is so basic (paradigm shift). While complication within the paradigm, which creates the illusory "volume" for the creation, is usually devoid of any real contribution and uninteresting in the long run. It is a variation - and not a new melody, and therefore it is a demonstration of mastery of past abilities and not creation of the future. And such a complication phenomenon is exactly psychology, and therefore creates creations in its image, which is of course called "psychological". Every creator knows that creating complexity is a lazy and uninspired action in relation to innovation. True innovation in an issue comes to give a very simple and principled explanation, and therefore abstract and deep, while a complicated explanation has little explanatory value, and only pretends to be deep. Complexity - which psychology has turned into a value (like the value of sensitivity and the value of communication, etc.) in psychological ideology - is ultimately uninteresting, and therefore we learn very little from it. What did reading the complicated novel contribute to us? What did we learn from it? That life is complicated? That man is complicated? That everything is complicated? These are actually not complicated insights at all, and as deep as the peel of nothing. While psychology sees the peak of depth - in the complex.

But apparently the greatest moral destruction caused by psychological ideology is not to aesthetics - but to morality. Perhaps the greatest damage psychology has done to the soul is turning hedonism into its self-evident (of course under the excuse of "reducing suffering", and less for the reason of "increasing pleasure", although in practice, in therapeutic praxis, it promotes absolute selfishness, and even narcissism - because it is committed only to the patient himself, after all he is the client, and not to social-systemic learning as a whole, and therefore "teaches" that this is how it should be). But reducing suffering as a goal in itself (or increasing satisfaction), are symptomatic treatments that harm the treatment of the disease itself, because suffering is only a symptom of lack of learning, like pain to the body, and satisfaction and pleasure and interest and meaning are only a symptom of learning. Just as certain drugs reduce learning by replacing dopamine in the brain, so psychology, if it succeeds in acting against the healthy soul, reduces learning by reducing and forgetting mental suffering. After all, suffering has a deep purpose - that you learn. And this purpose is built into you evolutionarily, exactly like pain for the body (suffering is the learning, that is, mental, equivalent of pain). Pleasure also has no meaning outside of learning (therefore - there is no pleasure without interest, even sexual pleasure, even food needs to be interesting! And not just nutritious, otherwise the human soul, unlike the animal soul, loathes it). Psychology confirms to the individual his individualism, from its very treatment of the human soul in the singular, and therefore flatters his pride (and not infrequently also his stupidity), without any demand from him for creative innovation in the world. All that matters is that he enjoys (mental-emotional pleasure of course, as if this is superior pleasure to physical bestiality) and does not suffer (again, mental suffering, pure and refined, Jesus on the cross of the soul!). But learning innovation is more important than any pleasure and any suffering - and in fact they are only tools, and it is the purpose. But this hedonistic stance of things, centered on pleasure and suffering, intensifies suffering - and reduces pleasure (because they are the important things - and there is no meaning outside of them). While that meaning, that of innovation and learning - is more basic than the soul itself and the emotion itself. It is the deepest motivation of the soul and the brain, and therefore also the deepest pleasure and suffering. There is nothing more terrible for a person than the loss of learning relevance, the loss of all innovation (this is actually prison! And therefore it is an effective punishment, because of the learning suffering, which is in being taken out of society and the learning system, for there is no other special suffering in it). And there is nothing good and uplifting for a person like innovation and learning - there is no pleasure like the pleasure of learning innovation (which is not the common trivial innovation, of chasing novelties and changes like chasing pleasures). But psychology, whose success is the creation of robots of happiness and "well being" and "mental health" and "emotional expression" (narcissistic to the extreme like immature poetry, and actually the great incubator of immature poetry) - this psychology is exactly what turns man into a happiness machine, and not a learning machine. It is the ideological prison of the soul, which has created countless people who see happiness (that is: pleasure) and not innovation as the great achievement of the soul. The literary analysis of the soul succeeded - and the patient died.



After all, even the most empathetic psychologist does not really act from a non-learning motive - the voyeurism into the patient's life is much more interesting (but denied. Because his sex life is important), so is the manipulation and aggressive power for "beneficial" influence (within which actually pulsates the creative drive, because after all in the clinic nothing is created, only maintained). Psychologists love so much to try to innovate in psychological language because they themselves are trapped in it (and therefore their innovations multiply and flourish like mutations in a tumor). After all, the psychologist is also human - and without innovation in his work, that soul mechanic will become completely bored. And what will he then say to the patient? You're boring me? After all, those who suffer from lack of care pay me for artificial care, and those who fail in a learning relationship try to create with me a verbal, alternative and artificial relationship. A relationship that has only conversation, only language - perhaps the ideal relationship from a psychological point of view, because it's all containment, emotional communication and mental confessions. It's all talk! And how much easier everything is when it's all talk. The therapist goes home and the patient is left with the mud, and this is what will replace his parents and fix their many flaws, they - who had to treat him outside the clinic, and outside private language, in a real learning and growth process. While the therapist is the one who specializes in managing inauthentic and one-way relationships, which harms first and foremost himself. Because an unequal stance where only one side is supposed to learn and the other is supposed to be the teacher - is anti-learning. Good learning is done in partnership, but your psychologist is not a real friend, because your psychologist is not your friend. And even if your friend is your psychologist - he is not a real friend. What turns a friend into a psychologist is exactly this: the one-sidedness. Therefore your partner cannot compete with the sensitivity of the psychologist, because this is two-sided, that is, real. Here you are really required to learn, and not just to dig.

And what about the development of psychology itself, maybe learning takes place there? Unfortunately, exactly what happened to academia in the humanities happened to psychology (hence the academization of psychological discourse): discourse took over it, instead of learning. Academia today is trapped in its language, in its sterile discourse (no longer need for the castrated), in "publications" and "citations" as the be-all and end-all, in its internal language (which has become jargon), in discussions to which one travels to discuss discussions that deal with discussions - that is, completely trapped in the philosophy of language - although its natural and fertile and sexual philosophy should have been learning. That's why it's so boring, because the distancing from learning and innovation is a distancing from interest. In academic language - it's almost impossible to say anything interesting, and therefore anyone who has something interesting to say flees from it. In general, it's almost impossible to innovate any significant innovation in a "language system" (like academia), because language is built precisely on lack of innovation, on obedience to norms - to the rule, as Wittgenstein explains. And after all, the rule is related to the general, hence the opposition to private language, but every innovation begins as a private language - everything essential said for the first time is exactly the birth of a private (that is, new) language, and therefore creativity in general language is necessarily conformist and not principled, that is "complicative". And this is exactly what happened to academia, that the philosophy of language was the worst thing for it, precisely because it is vulnerable to turning writing into language ideology, instead of learning ideology. So what do they actually learn in psychology today? The psychological language. All in all, they learn to speak in a certain language, and if you babble in it fluently (and don't dare to say something of value = to really innovate) - a psychologist is born. Just like an academic is born when he learns to babble bibliographically and in footnotes (that is, precisely in the most tedious and anal aspects of his language, in its grammar as poverty grammar). And therefore the intellectual (=learning) value of academic discussion tends to zero over time, because learning is subordinate to language (instead of the opposite). The reason for the death of philosophy is its academization, but in its death, like in a plague, it infected many other fields of knowledge with its disease: the mouth as hooves. Therefore, only a revival of philosophy outside academia will be able to inject new blood into the humanities - because philosophy is the heart of the world of spirit, and from the renewal of the heart the soul also draws.

To Part B