About ten years ago, I think, someone (I'm not sure if I want to name him now, mainly to protect the well-intended) -- from the Holy Mountain no less -- did a yeoman's job in comparing the work of the Hesychastic Fathers of Athos with the cognitive therapy theory of Beck and others, and found in his comparison a remarkable correspondence.
As a practitioner of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (and proud of it), I know for a fact that the practiced refutation of incorrect, maladaptive interpretation of experience remains the most robust treatment of the cognitive (i.e., "logistikon") dimension of "mental illness" (i.e., true psychopathology). When I read Vlachos' "Orthodox Psychotherapy" for the first time in the 90's, I was amazed by the almost miraculous and unwitting anticipation by Arnold Beck (and the crankier Albert Ellis) of the Spiritual Fathers in their emphasis upon reframing experience and reinterpretation of negative mindsets. The Spiritual Fathers called these negative interpretations "logismoi," and rightly blamed the demonic for their presence. Of course, the demonic nor any spiritual reality has any agency in CBT (or Behavioralism, or Freudianism, or Client-centered therapy, or Gestalt therapy, or Systems/Family-of-origin therapy or really anything else).
Oddly enough -- and please don't shoot me for saying this -- I really don't find much anywhere in psychotherapeutic theories for dealing with the unconscious, and pathologies lurking with the unconscious. Contrary to what we Orthodox therapists like to claim, neither CBT nor Orthodox psychotherapy contains much wisdom about what we call the "unconscious." And frankly, I think Freud (and his derivations) is just as impotent, because Freud is "mechanistic" in his view of the unconscious.
Jung is interesting, to say the least, in his explorations of the unconscious, but remains, let's just say, rather unsystematic and syncretistic.
My main point is this, though. CBT and the spiritual anti-logismoi practice is good for elementary psychopathology.
But (here is the main disjunction) it becomes powerless when the pathology proceeds from deeper layers of the "unconscious." Here is where we merely label patterns and habits as "passions" and prescribe some sort of virtuous habit to displace the respective passion. It seems that in the secular psychotherapeutic culture, too, there is this recognition of the limitations of CBT. Read this recent article in the Guardian, for a good instance.
This replacement is laudable and usually necessary. But all-too-frequently insufficient ... and egregiously insufficient.
At this point of impotency, Orthodox psychotherapy (and even some forms of secular therapy) recognizes the pathology as "demonic," and then resorts to some accepted practice of "exorcism."
I suspect that "exorcism" as understood and practiced today is inadequate. If it is effective (which may be debatable) at all, then it occurs miraculously in spite of the practitioner's understanding and practice. I oppose all practices (religious or otherwise) that are characterized by domination, drama, violence, or any cultic phenomena (e.g., interviewing demons and tying up victims). Such religious practice is nothing other than criminal abuse -- and I include in this the horrible stuff like the "re-birthing" exercises of "bonding therapy" for "unattachment disorder," where refractive disordered children were actually -- in certified secular therapeutic treatment providers, mind you -- rolled up in rugs, made to feel powerless to the point of crying out in panic, and "let out" to mimic the "birthing process" and then brought to the embrace of their parent-figure (whether birth parents or adoptive or therapeutic-foster parents) ... all of this somehow to insinuate the "attachment" experience of a newborn baby with his mother at her breast.
This is actually an example of secular exorcism that was practiced in the 1990's. If this is done today (and I hope it's not), it should be prosecuted as child abuse.
Again, if you recognize Freudianism gone quite amok here, you're spot on.
I wish we would all remember, in this age so addicted to the monster-movie grotesquerie, that in the age of the Great Church of Hagia Sophia, that the office of "exorcist" was conflated with the office of "catechist." The best exorcism is catechism: Sophia ever defeats the agency of the father of lies and the lord of the flies.
The "Orthodox psychotherapy" as outlined by Vlachos does not understand the unconscious and is ineffective in dealing with it. And it matters little that the practitioner is augmented (or said to be augmented) with clairvoyant powers of analysis or levels of authority that commands radical obedience.
I suggest that what is called the "unconscious" remains a terrible, frightening, uncharted terrain for us all, whether we are helpers or (and this applies to all of us) "experiencers." Identifying "logismoi" and "passions" is not at all sufficient in recognizing the presence of the "person," of of the person's "coming-to-be." On the other hand, that unconscious terrain, even though "there be monsters here," will turn out to be blindingly beautiful, and populated by gossamer angels.
I honor the Hesychastic Fathers, as I continue to be the "Orthodox CBT" practitioner that I am proud to be.
But for the longterm client who is often labeled as an "endogenous depressive," or an "existential sufferer" ... for the person who has dreams that are recurrent and demands some interpretation ... for the one who feels "trapped in a gilded cage" ... for these friends of mine (and future clients), I am sick and tired of trying to unbury undisclosed memories or sins, and then confronting clients with their bourgeois passions of unconcern for the poor or hidden racism or unforgiveness or long-hidden shames.
I utterly reject the unethical judgmental ascription of "first-world problem" that is the usual implicit scorn of second-rate theologian/psychotherapists like myself.
I think, in this time of collapsing institutional structures and a passage into a very different meta-culture, that we are called to a brave exploration of what we call the "unconscious," and its chthonic link with the cosmos and the Creator.
And the navigational tools, the compass, the astrolabe and the chronometer, will be found in sophiology. A wide-open, brave and winsome, mythopoeic sophiology, no less. A sophiology that is not limited in the by the framework of the Neo-Patristic Synthesis or the Neo-Palamite emphases. A sophiology that is willing to embark on stranger waters, brave enough to perceive -- without reductionistic analyses -- greater phenomena than "normal" epistemologies ...
... a sophiology worthy of Lady Wisdom, who calls with greater urgency than ever at the gates.
I beg you, counselors, to be adept in Counsel, for that is how you can treat your neighbor as the First Samaritan would.
In these last days.
... a sophiology worthy of Lady Wisdom, who calls with greater urgency than ever at the gates.
I beg you, counselors, to be adept in Counsel, for that is how you can treat your neighbor as the First Samaritan would.
In these last days.
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