by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
Updated
What causes people to seek salvation from experts? How could their mental health be dispossessed?
In addition to the funeral service and the liquefied gas, the wooden train and the negative growth, East Westphalia, and the preliminary final result, it goes without saying that it certainly deserves a top position in a hit list of the strangest terms. Who actually understood what and how much? Hardly the one who thinks it is. To accept something as unquestionable and doubtless, as needing no justification, is not an understanding but replaces it. We tend to do this when we think that significant others have understood – people who have already asked and answered all the necessary questions dispelled all doubts. We build on their judgment.
Our modern healthcare system lives from such blind trust. In individual cases, a character emerges in the masses of the zeitgeist: “Characteristic of a person,” stated Kurt Tucholsky, “is what he takes for granted.” Anyone longer than a few days sick should see a doctor; If the illness is of a mental nature, then correspondingly specialized doctors are responsible: psychiatrists, in lighter cases also psychologists and psychotherapists, and in the most severe cases, a specialist clinic.
This supposed matter, of course, seems to result from other things: In addition to physical illnesses, there are also psychological ones, and these are present when emotional stress lasts for a while. Recognizing it as a disease, correctly diagnosing it, and treating it appropriately is a matter for experts. They draw on scientific knowledge for this purpose. On the other hand, laypeople can only draw on inferior everyday psychology full of knowledge deficits, prejudices, and short circuits.
This tacit, unquestioned agreement strengthens professional helpers in their arrogance, those seeking help in their confidence – and creates a taboo. The Austrian philosopher and writer Günther Anders (1902-1992) suspected that this would lead to a power relationship: “The more mute a command, the more natural our obedience.” (1)
For more than a century, educated people have used “psychology” to equate with “what academics do at our universities when they deal with those phenomena that we call ‘soul’ and’ spiritual.'” This activity follows natural science models: With objective observation, tests, experiments, and statistics, it imitates methods of gaining knowledge that have proven themselves in subjects such as physics, chemistry, and biology. To explain, predict and positively influence the psychological, we have to start from data and theories that result from applying these methods. Because the ending “-logie” comes from the Greek logos (“reason,” “sense”), it implies the claim that this approach is the only sensible and reasonable one.
It is not easy to object to this. Because it is challenging to defend possessions that are such a natural part of our lives that we hardly ever realize how much they belong to us. We secure our apartment door with padlocks, our gardens with motion detectors, and our cars with alarm systems. But we are not prepared for the fact that our decade-long partner could suddenly die, our child could be kidnapped, and our health could be lost. If it happens, we are moved by thunder; we fall into shock; we have no words.
For millennia, people did not expect that they would ever lose a special expert status: what they have regarding their inner soul and spirit and that of their neighbors. The attack on it, presented by academic psychologists, catches them unprepared. Instead of resolutely repelling it or even considering what they can do against it, most of them submit unopposed to the science on which the intruders rely upon. Because it seems their authority is inviolable, almost like once that of the Holy See.
But now, it just seems to be a matter of coming to terms with an overpowering fate and furnishing it as comfortably as possible: Those who devoutly listen to the true experts, make use of and honor their services, adopt their terms and theories, renounce their intuition and renounce Ignoring disrespectful, incompetent questions, he earns praise for his insight. Now, he has become a full member of a truly enlightened society in which science gives the shining light of objective knowledge and opens up fantastic new horizons.
Isn’t she doing that?
The rumor persists that psychological textbooks and specialist journals are full of revealed laws of all kinds, confirmed by tests and experiments. In truth, only two sub-areas can come up with this, namely psychophysiology and perceptual psychology, insofar as they deal with measurable reactions to simple stimuli. How are stimulus and experience intensity related or activation states such as excitement, tension, and exertion with physical processes? Where are the thresholds of awareness for optical and acoustic stimuli? As soon as psychology reaches beyond the level of elementary sensory impressions, bodily sensations, and involuntary behavior, it merely provides more or less pronounced probabilities.
Statistical results can be helpful when it comes to the frequency distributions of specific characteristics within larger groups, for example, among consumers, voters, taxpayers, tenants, and homeowners, genders, age groups, and denominations, the population as a whole. These are helpful guidelines for general information. They are useful when it comes to keeping the big picture in mind. They are useful whenever the rare, extraordinary, and unique can be neglected: for example, when making decisions in the transport sector, in the design of everyday objects, in urban and residential construction, in the organization of training institutions and companies, in tourism, in advertising, marketing, and political propaganda.
For all these purposes, it can be helpful to know what a greater or lesser percentage of people who display specific characteristics are likely to do and what motives are quite often behind it. Corresponding findings can put fundamental assessments on firmer ground, correct common prejudices, specify approximate expectations, and facilitate planning. To that extent, they are extremely valuable.
But they always leave open what happens in the individual case. Psychology, especially those who are supposed to apply their knowledge to concrete people in everyday life in concrete situations, ultimately never have to deal with statistical averages. They always meet individuals, with unique stories, in unrepeatable circumstances, with a unique perspective of experience.
Because that is the case, laypeople should be rebellious, stubborn, and unreasonable when it comes to individual fates – wherever they as individuals deal with scientific psychology, their claims to knowledge and recommendations for action: be it in the psychological counseling center, in psychotherapeutic practice, in the psychiatric clinic, in the courtroom, in the youth welfare office, in the personnel department during the aptitude test, at the editorial table, in the television studio. Hopefully, my series of Psychological Lies will encourage many to question a presumptuous authority persistently. When it comes to a particular subject they are familiar with; they could be better experts. Provided they dare to do it.
Why do very few people do it? How could what the American cultural critic Martin L. Gross called “the psychological society” and the Munich social psychologist Heiner Keupp called “psycho culture” come about: (2) a community in which it seems necessary to let experts tell you who you are, why you are like that and what you should do?
Two questions lead to the main reasons: Why did the rise of psycho-expertism only begin in the second half of the 20th century, not a hundred years earlier? “Today, psychotherapy has become a matter for almost everyone,” noted the philosopher Karl Jaspers in the mid-1950s. “It is true that she has grown up on medical grounds. But it has broken away from its origin.” (3). Why did this happen in Western Europe and the United States of all places, not in Africa, Asia, and Latin America?
On the way to the self
The starting point was a crisis of orientation triggered by the loss of importance of traditions and the decline in the authority of the Christian churches in Western industrialized countries. How they live and what they should strive for; increasingly large parts of the population there no longer allow themselves to be dictated by the religion of their ancestors. Nor did they want to bow to traditional values and fit into predetermined roles. Emancipated egos are eager for freedom and self-realization; they perceive cultural norms and models as unreasonable. With this, traditional obligations lost their weight, previous ties loosened, and purposes of existence evaporated.
What did not disappear, of course, is the basic human need for support and meaning. If it remains unsatisfied, chronic uncertainty and concern arise. After there was nothing definitive to find in heaven and on earth, the gaze turned inward, on oneself. The unleashed individual searches for the real self – if only they knew where and how. The identity crisis threatens to transform itself from a symptom of puberty into a permanent state of mind.
Modern psycho science promised to satisfy hunger: it promised new patterns of interpretation, daily aids, and life goals. To do this, she expanded her area of responsibility as much as possible: They are no longer just for madmen; for each of us, they are there.
Two steps prepared for this increase in importance. One consisted of the unconscious invention, the secular counterpart to the immortal soul, as an inner world shrouded in mystery that belongs to us but remains hidden from us. The other was the abolition of the normal: the line between mental health and illness blurred. The psychoanalytic revolution led us to believe that it was “not sharply drawn” (4). Normality is “an ideal fiction; every normal person is just average normal, his ego approaches that of the psychotic in one or the other piece, to a greater or lesser extent.” (5). There are “only quantitative and not qualitative differences between the normal and the neurotic” (6), and the “demarcation of the psychological norm from the abnormality” is “scientifically not feasible.” (7)
What was once considered unpleasant but natural Reactions to the usual ups and downs of life with all its unsightly twists of fate, blows in the neck, and times of crisis – be it sadness, despair, anger, bitterness, anger, restlessness, disappointment, exhaustion, fear or self-doubt – now became omnipresent “maladjustments.” So we lost the right to be normal and mentally burdened at the same time. Instead, we are all somehow mentally ill or on the verge of it. This finding is irritating; it makes people tense and anxious. As a mass phenomenon, it conjures up the most psychologically unstable culture in history.
Education and the constant flood of mass media ensured that the startling messages of modern psychology seeped deeper and deeper into public consciousness. They merged into the longed-for new formula of happiness that promises us a fulfilled present and a brilliant future – and realigns our urgent desire to achieve perfection. For centuries there was a promise of salvation which shifted the development goal to a post-death afterlife: “Perfect yourself by washing yourself away from sin and doing godly works.
Only in this way will you be worthy of eternal life in heaven, with which you will receive that true happiness that is denied you in this world. “In the psychological society, as well as in the” New Age “of the esoterically moved, the goal of this world can be reached: “Perfect yourself by recognizing what makes you unconscious, striving for psychological normality and being on the lookout for its constant threat. And this is the only way to achieve true happiness.” Instead of “psychological normality,” the esoteric wave emphasizes “spiritual development”- here and there, it is about self-discovery. The preferred image makes the main difference in this intangible self: is it primarily unconscious or divine? The promise applies to an ideal state that combines success, love, and freedom from fear in both cases. In the past, as now, people need expert assistance. The psychological expert takes on the role of the priest.
We have said goodbye to God as he may have turned away from us. However, we have not gotten rid of a deep longing: Someone who is almost as omniscient, reliable, and caring as our grandparents trusted him to take us by the hand and guide us safely when we feel unsuspecting, weak, and overwhelmed. Expertocracy thrives on the promise to satisfy cravings – at a high price. It is as funny as it is tragic: In striving to become truly free, and the view that this absolutely requires the higher insights of an elite, we put ourselves in their captivity, cheerfully and without resistance.
We nod off what seems right to you. We follow their expert advice. We implement your guidelines. We bow to what she declares to be constraints. We adopt your standards for experience, truth, and knowledge. And we distrust everything that she dismisses as unscientific. We measure ourselves against their performance standards. And we define ourselves through their image of ourselves. Meanwhile, the emancipation of the individual gradually turns into its opposite. In large groups, people fall back into that self-inflicted immaturity from which, in Immanuel Kant’s famous sentence, the modern Enlightenment should actually show them an exit.
Like the princess and the pea
The second reason why psychological society came into being: it is doing too well. In it, you feel sick or about to be sick precisely because you are so healthy. One suffers in living conditions which, on the whole, have never been more excellent in human history. At the end of the 19th century, the average life expectancy in the German Empire was 38.5 years for women and 35.6 years for men (8); they died of infectious diseases such as typhoid, cholera, tuberculosis, dysentery, smallpox, and pneumonia, of emaciation and other symptoms of deficiency. One in three of their children did not reach their first birthday. For more than three-quarters of the population, the main concern was bare survival, the hardships of the struggle for daily bread.
Although they toiled to the point of exhaustion, many went hungry, did not know how to feed their families, and suffered from disenfranchisement, exploitation, and wars. They froze when the supply of wood or coal ran out. They considered themselves lucky for clean water and a roof over their heads. Many people didn’t have a problem with where they could go because they didn’t have one. If they lost their job or their health, they were faced with extinction without health and pension insurance unless children, friends, neighbors, the pawnbroker, or a loan from the shopkeeper helped after meager savings had been used up. There was simply no leisure to do extensive health checks, indulge in emotional shocks, and devote increased attention to other people’s psychological lows.
Today we live far more comfortably and longer and in better health than ever before. Nevertheless, we make a fuss about our physical and mental well-being. Fears of health have never been more widespread, and people have never reacted more sensitively to the smallest ailments and behavioral problems. No generation has ever felt sick. As soon as the slightest deviation from the norm occurs, she appears as a harbinger of a severe illness. The philosopher Odo Marquard saw this zeitgeist phenomenon as applying the “law of increasing penetrance of negative remnants.” (9). You could also call it the “princess-on-the-pea syndrome”: the higher the quality of life, the louder the whining and wailing.
Prosperity researchers around the globe have confirmed that the less hardship and misery there is, the more annoying the “negative rest” presses: the pea under the thermoplastic, spine-friendly, point-elastic allergy mattress. It is as if we were lying sleepless in bed with ears pricked up: only when the noise no longer disturbs our night’s sleep does the ticking of the alarm clock, the humming of the refrigerator, the creaking of the slatted frame begin to annoy us. A benevolent assessment could be: It speaks for the level of development of our community that we have become sensitive to burdens that were previously carelessly and lovelessly ignored. But one could also say: All-round cared for and protected, we have become complacent hypersensitive. (10)
Clues for this finding can be found everywhere. In the spring of 2016, unknown vandals smeared the stairs, walls, and floors with election campaign slogans by the Republican Rumpelstiltskin Donald Trump one night at the venerable Emory University in Atlanta. Dozens of agitated students promptly gathered for the demonstration: they were terrified of this “racist microaggression”; From then on, they no longer felt safe at their university; they were “in pain.” As a result, the exemplary, empathetic university management immediately offered “psychological support” (11) – as if disgust and indignation would otherwise lead straight to post-traumatic stress disorder.
“How do you notice on the beach that you are too fat?” I joked during an event and immediately handed in the answer: “Greenpeace activists are trying to roll you back into the sea.” flippantly, what is said should hurt overweight people present very severely; that is definitely going too far.
Trying to get a smart introduction to the subject of “love,” I presented a short YouTube video another time that showed a little boy aged four or more trying hard and in vain to recruit an adored princess from the same age group. He repeatedly tried to press a kiss on her cheek, but each time it was violently pushed away so that it landed on its back several times on the bottom of the pants. Sensitive people also protested against this: Such a clip could “trigger” and “retraumatize” terrible memories in female viewers who fell victim to sexual abuse in their childhood.
The journalist Sebastian Herrmann reports on a five-year-old who accidentally touched a slug in kindergarten. He promptly reflected on the health hysteria of his parent’s house by declaring his disgust for this slimy, slippery thing to be a “snail allergy.” (12). If the same boy on the school desk that he will soon be attending cannot sit still for hours, he will become a crystal clear ADHD case. Rather reserved, pensive, and withdrawn, if he sinks for hours into activities that his peers quickly enough of, he has developed “autism.” If he is repeatedly sad and listless for a while, a “recurrent depressive disorder” has him under control. It can degenerate into a “bipolar” way if he is suddenly in the best of moods in between. As soon as he continues to feel exhausted and overwhelmed, a “burn-out” syndrome overtakes him.
The pea under the relatively comfortable mattress of our all-in-all safe, existential fear-free existence may not be eliminated or ignored. But it can’t hurt to remind yourself every now and then that it’s a pea. The most susceptible to the promise of salvation made by psycho-service providers are those with the faintest heart, who turn them into boulders like the preschool vaccine, the “yuck-bah” snail into an allergenic monster.
This text comes from the 10-volume series of works by Harald Wiesendanger: Psycholügen, Volume 1: Neue Heimat Psycholand – Where our trust in soul professionals comes from (2017).
Remarks
(1) Günther Anders: Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen, Band 2: Über die Zerstörung des Lebens im Zeitalter der dritten industriellen Revolution, München 1980.
(2) Martin L. Gross: Die psychologische Gesellschaft. Kritische Analyse der Psychiatrie, Psychotherapie, Psychoanalyse und der psychologischen Revolution, Frankfurt a. M. 1984; Or.: The Psychological Society (1978). Heiner Keupp: Riskante Chancen. Das Subjekt zwischen Psychokultur und Selbstorganisation, Heidelberg 188; ders. mit Helga Bilden (Hrsg.): Verunsicherungen. Das Subjekt im gesellschaftlichen Wandel, Göttingen 1989.
(3) Karl Jaspers: Wesen und Kritik der Psychotherapie, Frankfurt a. M. 1953.
(4) Sigmund Freud: „Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Revolution“, Gesammelte Werke, Nachdruck Frankfurt a. M. 1999, Band XVI, S. 233.
(5) ebda.
(6) Sigmund Freud in „Protokolle der Wiener Psychoanalytischen Vereinigung“, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. IV, S. 35.
(7) Sigmund Freud: „Abriss der Psychoanalyse“, Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XVII, S. 125.
(8) Nach Reinhard Spree: „„Gesundheitswesen“, in Thomas Rahlf (Hrsg.): Deutschland in Daten. Zeitreihen zur Historischen Statistik, Bonn 2015, S. 74-87.
(9) Zit. nach Gerwin Klinger: „Vom Restrisiko der Prinzessin ohne Erbse“, Der Tagesspiegel, 26.6.1998.
(10) Sebastian Herrmann: Der Krankheitswahn – Wir sind gesünder, als wir uns fühlen und die Industrie uns glauben lässt, Gütersloh 2015.
(11) Washington Post, 24.3.2016: “Someone wrote ‘Trump 2016’ on Emory’s campus in chalk. Some students said they no longer feel safe “; New York Times, 1.4.2016: “Pro-Trump Chalk Messages Cause Conflicts on College Campuses. “
(12) Der Journalist Sebastian Herrmann schildert diese Episode in seinem Essay „Leben auf der Erbse“, Süddeutsche Zeitung Nr. 151/2.7.2016, S. 49
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