by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
Background journalism instead of court reporting. Independent. Uncomfortable. Incorruptible.
Why do we trust professional soul helpers far more than ours? Why do we take for granted that psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists know and can do much more than we do when it comes to our inner life? Our belief in experts has three main reasons: an unsatisfied need for orientation after traditions have lost their importance; the hypersensitivity of the materially carefree in an affluent society, the “princess-and-the-pea” syndrome; and above all, the world-shaking power of the pharmaceutical industry: its marketing strategists have succeeded in enforcing an expanded definition of disease – and in fear of ever new “disorders.”
What do professional soul helpers know and can do better than us? How much do we trust psychologists, psychotherapists, and psychiatrists? In opinion polls, most of us, and even more so the professionals themselves, would agree with the following views:
“There are mental illnesses as well as physical ones. More and more people are affected. “
“Psycho professionals can reliably identify such disorders, treat them effectively, explain them plausibly and foresee them very precisely.”
“A university course provides the necessary skills.”
“Laypeople adhere to naive kitchen psychology. The scientific progress of knowledge will pass over them. “
Doubts about any of this unencumbered the first semesters of my psychology degree. Like most of my fellow students, I groaned under the intricacies of statistics and methodology. But wasn’t the ordeal the fair price to pay to finally break free from the thought traps of lay psychology by learning to tackle the riddles of mind and soul scientifically? Didn’t I take a huge step in my personal development that started phase two of my life on a higher intellectual level, an age of enlightenment within my biography? Wasn’t it great that when explaining and predicting how people behave, from now on, I could rely on systematic observation of objective facts, on high-quality knowledge methods such as tests and experiments, on theories derived from them? Wasn’t it fair, and there was no alternative that I limited myself to this in the future for an academically educated person?
That’s how I heard it from my professors; that’s how I read it in textbooks. And it made sense to me, especially since I now got to know a large number of exciting, informative studies based on the consistent application of scientific research rules. It is true that they hardly ever revealed psychological laws but merely more or less pronounced probabilities. But at least they refuted common prejudices. They were prepared for surprises that were by no means contrary to common sense. And they established expectations of how a multitude of people, or individual groups of people with specific characteristics, perceive, feel, think, and act under certain circumstances. Shouldn’t that be enough for a psychologist to be proud of himself and his subject – and to confidently assume that he knows and can do a lot more than an amateur far from university?
“Of course!” I would have replied emphatically to such questions after five years of study.
Only the four decades that followed moved me to rethink – especially experiences that I owe to a foundation called “Ausege” for the chronically ill, which I set up in 2005. By the end of 2021, I got to know hundreds of mentally distressed people in 34 therapy camps at this facility, whose trust in scientifically based psychotherapy and psychiatry had been bitterly disappointed – for years, in some cases for decades. Every fourth person looking for help brought a diagnosis of mental illness to the “Ausege” camps: from autism, ADHD, and other behavioral disorders to depression and phobias to compulsions. Fear-plagued, burned-out, and traumatized people found there, occasionally even presumed schizophrenics. And although the rest of the participants were mainly concerned with physical complaints, most of them also arrived severely mentally.
In the teams of up to 20 volunteers who took care of these people voluntarily, I met remarkable personalities who worked amazingly successfully in such cases: After seven and a half days of treatment, over 90 percent of the patients were mentally better than ever in the care of trained people Soul Healers. No psychotropic drugs of any kind were used. Amazingly often, the improvements achieved lasted. Is it absurd to assume that even more could have been achieved – and what had been achieved would have persisted in an even more stable manner – had the camp participants not had to be sent home after a week or more?
Almost without exception, the helpers were amateurs, without medical-psychological training, with learned professions such as lathe operator, tax assistant, medical assistant, German teacher, financial advisor, or industrial engineer. Even so, they evidently did more than any psycho professional before them.
How is that possible? What do the therapy camps of the Auswege foundation teach about how valuable and indispensable professional psychology is, how superior are their graduated users?
Today I would answer it: In the effort to be objective, science, psychology, and psychiatry have lost sight of subjects – people with consciousness, a unique perspective of experience, and a unique story, in always exceptional circumstances. The behavioral probabilities that journals, textbooks, and guidebooks are full of bringing us a little closer to people in general at best – but they do little to nothing to help them understand and help them. Whenever a single self is at stake, science proves essentially useless: be it for parents and teachers; for friends, partners and employers; for clerks in youth and social welfare offices; for prosecutors and judges, law enforcement officers and probation officers; for social workers and caregivers; for pastors, life coaches – and last but not least for psychotherapists. Anyone who expects more from her will overwhelm her. If she promises more, she lies.
Because science is a way of life that blinds the individual – and proud to despise them, where individuals meet, their approach fails, pitifully and inevitably. There are more appropriate and more productive ones, and laypeople often have more of these at their disposal: life experience, education, communicative competence, mindfulness, intuition, and above all, the ability to empathize with someone else.
In this respect, amateurs could afford to confront psycho professionals with a self-confidence that would be more than presumptuous compared to physicists, chemists, or biologists because they know nothing or too little. They know too much – though generally in a somewhat disorderly and seldom considered way – at least far more than scientifically minded psycho scientists can ever find out about them. As far as science is what creates knowledge, they could keep up because experts are weak experts as soon as the thing is not a mere thing. The understanding layman and the flying bumblebee have one thing in common: the expert proves impressively that it is impossible for them to do what they do anyway.
And so several KLARTEXT articles, based on individual fates from the therapy camps of my Foundation for a disrespectful, downright heretical point of view: It is time to end the expertocracy of academic psychologists, which permeates our health care system as is natural. Their questionable benefit is shown by the mutilating inefficiency of modern psychotherapy and psychiatry insofar as they are based on them. Let’s put an end to their lies. Let’s strengthen our resilience against temptations to piss them off.
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).
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