SOME WORDS TO RECONSIDER PSYCHOTHERAPY AND SUPERVISION

Abstract

Psychotherapy is a field that expands with great success even in the emergent countries of the former East-Block. It is becoming a new trend that everyone who wants to be someone, has to have one’s own ‘shrink’–a slang for us as psychologists, psychotherapists or psychiatrists. In such a context a fresh perspective – coming from a more exterior philosophical position – can be at least interesting if not instrumental as well. What should be done in every new and emergent field, theoretical or practical, is a constant and continuous analyse of its directions and an assessment of its values. Every new field of knowledge must pass, sooner or later, through an ethical filter that evaluates its status, range of ideas or structural value of its main concepts. As such, we propose an insight in the complex domain of the psychology, detached and uninvolved in the inherent psychological or therapeutic daily aspects. We want to bring up a slight change of paradigm and abstract, different from the usual involvement with the concrete cases, and the unending stream of problems people can invoke to complain, lament, get attention, or just to get rid of stress, or the loads that everyday life puts on their shoulders. Instead, we want to concentrate on some anthropological and ethical interrogations addressed to the ‘games psychologists play’, in order to put a more convenient existential accent on life itself, life that encompasses therapy, supervising and every other aspect of the psychological profession. As such, we want to enlarge a perspective that becomes, as the professional involvement increases and the years go by, inevitably narrower without even being noticed. The concrete problems of life, its endless stream of petty difficulties, coupled with stress on all sides and angles, have a very powerful effect on people, even psychologists. They are not immune from emotional and un-detached involvement in the so tempting stream of life that eats, little by little, in to the so wondrous, generous and altruistic first commitment to psychology. Fortunately, there are things that can be done, and philosophy (the yesterdays ‘mother’ of psychology) can help detachment and self-disenchantment from a narrow and to direct approach of the human problematic.