What Is Psychotherapy?

The School of Life, Alain de Botton

• Publisher: The School of Life
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781999747176
• eBook ISBN: 9781999917982
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A fresh perspective on how psychotherapy can be universally effective.

Psychotherapy is one of the most valuable inventions of the last hundred years, with an exceptional power to raise our levels of emotional well-being, enhance our relationships, heal the wounds of the past, and help us mine our professional potential. But it is also profoundly misunderstood science.

Working with a therapist can make us less angry, improve our confidence, and, perhaps most importantly, make us more loving towards ourselves and others.

Through engaging historical analysis and relevant case studies, this book explains psychotherapy in depth: why we need it, how treatment works, and what the outcome of a therapeutic intervention looks like. The book argues that psychotherapy is the single greatest step any of us can take towards self-understanding and fulfillment.

This book attempts to explain psychotherapy: why it is needed by us all, how those needs are addressed by treatment and what the outcome of a therapeutic intervention could be. The book reflects a fundamental belief of The School of Life that psychotherapy is the single greatest step any of us can take towards self-understanding and fulfillment. A course of therapy stands to render us ever so slightly less angry, self-defeating, unconfident, lost and sad.

• PSYCHOTHERAPY EXPLAINED a demystifying guide to the purpose and meaning of psychotherapy.

• UNLOCK THE POWER OF THERAPY to improve self love, communication, trust, and honesty.

• EXPLORES POTENTIAL THERAPEUTIC OUTCOMES using case studies as examples.

• DEBUNKS COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS about the science of psychotherapy.

II
Why We Need Therapy

A primal wound

The origins of our need for psychotherapy lie deep in our pasts. No one intends for this to happen, but somewhere in childhood, our trajectory towards emotional maturity will almost certainly have been impeded. Even if we were sensitively cared for and lovingly handled, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some kind of deep psychological injury – what we can term a ‘primal wound’.

Childhood opens us up to emotional damage in part because, unlike all other living things, Homo sapiens have an inordinately long and structurally claustrophobic pupillage. A foal can stand up thirty minutes after it is born. By the age of eighteen, a human will have spent around 25,000 hours in the company of its parents. A female grouper mother will unsentimentally dump up to 100 million eggs a year in the sandy banks off the north Atlantic seaboard, then swim away without seeing a single one of her offspring again. Even the blue whale, the largest animal on the planet, is sexually mature and independent by the age of five.

But for our part, we dither and linger. It can be a year until we take our first steps and two before we can speak in whole sentences. It is close to two decades before we are categorised as adults. In the meantime, we are at the mercy of that highly peculiar and distorting institution we call home, and its even more distinctive overseers, our parents.

Across the long summers and winters of childhood, we are intimately shaped by the ways of the big people around us: we come to know their favourite expressions, their habits, how they respond to a delay, the way they address us when they’re cross. We know the atmosphere of home on a bright July morning and in the afternoon downpours of mid-April. We memorise the textures of the carpets and the smells of the clothes cupboards. As adults, we can still recall the taste of a particular biscuit we liked to eat after school and know intimately the tiny sounds a mother or father will make as they concentrate on an article in the newspaper. We can return to our original home for a holiday when we are parents ourselves and find – despite our car, responsibilities and lined faces – that we are eight again.

During our elongated gestation, we are at first, in a physical sense, completely at the mercy of our caregivers.

We are so frail, we could be tripped up by a twig; the family cat is a tiger. We need help crossing the road, putting on our coat, writing our name.

Our vulnerability is also emotional. We can’t begin to understand our strange circumstances: who we are; where our feelings come from; why we are sad or furious; how our parents fit into the wider scheme; why they behave as they do. We necessarily take what the big people around us say as an inviolable truth; we can’t help but exaggerate our parents’ role on the planet. We are condemned to be enmeshed in their attitudes, ambitions, fears and inclinations. Our upbringing is always particular and peculiar.

As children, we can brush off very little of this. We are without a skin. If a parent shouts at us, the foundations of the earth tremble. We cannot tell that some of the harsh words were not really meant, had their origins in a difficult day at work, or are the reverberations of the adult’s own childhood; it feels as if an all-powerful, all-knowing giant has decided, for good (if unknown) reasons, that we are to be annihilated.

Nor can we understand, when a parent goes away for the weekend, or relocates to another country, that they didn’t leave us because we did something wrong or because we are unworthy of their love, but because even adults aren’t always in control of their own destinies.

If parents are in the kitchen raising their voices, it can seem as though these two people must hate one another inordinately. To children, an overheard altercation (with a slammed door and swear words) may feel catastrophic, as though everything safe will disintegrate. There is no evidence in the child’s grasp that arguments are a normal part of relationships; that a couple may be committed to a life-long union and at the same time forcefully express a wish that the other go to hell.

Children are equally helpless before their parents’ idiosyncratic ideologies. They can’t understand that an insistence that they not mix with another family from school, or that they follow particular dress codes, or hate a given political party, or worry about dirt or being less than two hours early for a flight, represents a partial understanding of priorities and reality.

Children don’t have a job. They can’t go elsewhere. They have no extended social network. Even when things are going well, childhood is an open prison.

As a result of the peculiarities of the early years, we become distorted and unbalanced. Aspects within us start to develop in odd directions. We find that we can’t easily trust, or become unusually scared around people who raise their voices, or can’t tolerate being touched. No one needs to do anything particularly shocking, illegal, sinister or wicked to us for serious distortions to unfold. The causes of our primal wound are rarely outwardly dramatic, but their impact can often be momentous and long-lasting. Such is the fragility of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling need have happened to us for us to wind up profoundly scrambled.

We know this point from tragedy. In the tales of the Ancient Greeks, it is not enormous errors and slips that unleash drama; it is the tiniest, most innocent, errors. Terrible consequences unfurl from seemingly minor starting points. Our emotional lives are similarly tragic in structure. Everyone around us may have been trying to do their best with us as children, yet we have ended up now, as adults, nursing major hurts that ensure we are much less than we might have been.

We are
reluctant
historians
of our
emotional
pasts.

Imbalances

As a result of our childhoods, we are unbalanced; over most issues, we tend to list excessively, like a sailing yacht in high wind, in one direction or another. We are too timid or too assertive; too rigid or too accommodating; too focused on material success or maddeningly lackadaisical. We are obsessively eager around sex or painfully wary and nervous in the face of our own erotic impulses. We are dreamily naive or sourly down to earth; we recoil from risk or embrace it recklessly; we are determined never to rely on anyone or are desperate for another to complete us; we are overly intellectual or unduly resistant to ideas.

The encyclopedia of emotional imbalances is a volume without end. What is certain is that these imbalances come at vast cost, rendering us less able to exploit our talents and opportunities, less able to lead satisfying lives and a great deal less fun to be around.

Yet because we are reluctant historians of our emotional pasts, we easily assume that our imbalances are things we could never change; that they are innate. It is just how we are made. We simply are people who micromanage, or can’t get much pleasure out of sex, or scream when someone contradicts us, or run away from lovers who are too kind to us. It may not be easy, but nor is it alterable or up for enquiry.

The truth is likely to be more hopeful, although more challenging in the short term. Our imbalances are invariably responses to something that happened in the past. We are a certain way because a primal wound knocked us off a more fulfilling trajectory years ago. In the face of a viciously competitive parent, we took refuge in underachievement. Having lived around a parent disgusted by the body, sex became frightening. Surrounded by material unreliability, we had to overachieve around money and social prestige. Hurt by a dismissive parent, we fell into patterns of emotional avoidance. A volatile parent pushed us towards our present meekness and inability to make a fuss. Early overprotectiveness inspired timidity and, around any complex situation, panic. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for a personality marked by exhausting attention-seeking behaviour.

There is always a logic and always a history.

We can tell that our imbalances date from the past because they reflect the way of thinking and instincts of the children we once were. Without anything pejorative being meant by this, our way of being unbalanced tends towards a fundamental immaturity, bearing the marks of what was once a young person’s attempt to grapple with something beyond their capacities.

When they suffer at the hands of an adult, children almost invariably take what happens to them as a reflection of something that must be wrong with them. If someone humiliates, ignores or hurts them, it must be because they are imbecilic, repugnant and worth neglecting. It can take many years, and a lot of patient inner exploration, to reach an initially less plausible conclusion: that the hurt was undeserved and that there were many other things going on, off-stage, in the raging adult’s interior life for which the child was blameless.

Similarly, because children cannot easily leave a difficult situation, they are prey to powerful, limitless longings to fix the broken person they depend on. In the infantile imagination, it becomes the child’s responsibility to mend all the anger, addiction or sadness of the grown-up they adore. It may be the work of decades to develop a wiser power to feel sad about, rather than eternally responsible for, those we cannot change, and perhaps to move on.

Communication patterns are beset by comparable childhood legacies. When something is wrong, children have no innate capacity to explain their cause. They lack the confidence, poise and verbal dexterity to get their points across with the calm and authority required. They tend to dramatic overreactions instead: insisting, nagging, exploding, screaming. Or, conversely, to exc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• I Introduction
• II Why we need therapy
• III How therapy works
• IV Case studies
• V Conclusion