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Psychotherapy uses words to change things. This is
quite a remarkable proposition, when stated bluntly. So,
why words?
In many ways, we readily admit that words change
emotions. For instance a Hollywood movie can leave the
audience in tears, or a politician's speech can inflame
a crowd to the madness of genocide. A man can say 'I
love you' and the woman can realise that he is the one.
But we have to be careful. While we cherish the third,
we know that the tears at a movie are a little fake, and
that the politician's words can be a danger. So then, it
seems that if words are to be used to change human
suffering the kind of language employed needs to be
considered.
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The first systematic
development of words to change things can be found in
the rhetorical schools of Ancient Greece in the 5th
Century BC. The idea was that by
speaking well, the rhetoritician could change the
opinion of the crowd. Psychotherapy is also about
speaking well.
You also have in those Greek writings an early theory of
'what is human suffering'.
For Plato, the people of Athens were depressed because
they had lost sight of what was good for them and were
alienated by the pointless life that they were leading.
For Plato the answer was to develop philosophers who
would be people who did know what was good for the
people.
The project would then involve the injection of those
good ideas into the citizen by means of words -
rhetoric.
The effect would be that the citizen would stop being
depressed as he energetically pursued the good-life.
Anxiety is when you don't know what you are doing, and
depression is when you are doing the wrong thing. |
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The modern equivalent is the Self-Help book, the talk-show and
some therapeutic programes that focus on the development of
ones control of things. These are all projects where someone
knows what is good, not just for themselves but for everybody,
and seeks by words to persuade the other person to give up an
opinion that is what is causing all the suffering in their life,
and to adopt as their own the more helpful opinion being peddled
to them.
Fortunately, this is not the only rhetorical game in town.
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