Letter #59: Good Therapist, Bad Therapist

The concept creep from the black lagoon.

Sigmund Dad,

Those therapists. They have a word for everything. And it seems like we describe everything with their words: Trauma. Co-dependency. Gaslighting. The observing self.

A term for this phenomenon was invented—surprise!—by a psychology professor. It’s “concept creep,” which sounds like the monster movie Universal Studios would make after they ran out of Dracula sequels.

And it does have a distinctly sinister vibe, as if the ambient dread of a neurotic mind is seeping into everyday life and turning the world into one big psychiatric ward. That would explain a lot! But it can’t be good to pathologize even basic human experiences like grief or anxiety. Not all sorrow is diseased.

In part, though, I think we default to therapy-speak because it’s the only acceptably secular way to talk about our souls. That’s what “psychotherapy” means, in Greek: “healing the soul.”

The word Freud chose to describe his practice was “psychoanalysis,” which could mean “setting the soul free.” But those same Greek roots could equally well mean “dissecting the soul,” breaking it down until there’s nothing left. And that’s the whole problem.

From the beginning, therapy was supposed to be a science of healing and liberating our inner lives. But the scientific way of thinking has always been a bit confounded by our inner lives. This tempts scientists to whittle down the spirit into a collection of biological events, attributing the stirrings of the heart to electro-chemical reactions that can be organized, measured, or even medicated away.

So is therapy supposed to heal the soul, or dispel it like the fog of ancient legend? The best therapists, like mom, know that they’re working with more than moving parts. In that case, what they’re really doing with terms like “the observing mind” is translating eternal wisdom into language that falls more gently on modern ears.

This “observing self” that lets us know our nature as a unity, winding like a golden thread through the tortured maze of our passing impulses and harebrained fancies—the ancients knew all about it. Aristotle described it as the awareness that transcends the five senses, gathering each of our perceptions into one consciousness. St. Jerome alluded to a scintilla conscientiae, a “spark of self-knowledge” that hovers like an eagle over the heart’s terrain.

Because it endures through time and binds our identity together, this sentinel of the watching mind completes the image in us of God, whose eternal gaze draws the universe into existence. But now I’ve given away the end of Baby Reindeer.

No no, in seriousness, I think you’re right that this is why the show left us cold. It’s the wrong kind of psychoanalysis, an acid bath of introspection without self-knowledge. It breaks experience down into a series of traumas with no moral context, no overarching order to bring meaning to the whole. Recovering that meaning—in art, in therapy, in life—is our task.

Love,
Spencer