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I would like to re-instate an old-fashioned but apt term – ‘depth psychology’ – originally used to refer to those approaches that explored the deeper and less conscious parts of the psyche. Whilst differing in many ways, Freud and Jung and the traditions they spawned, were both to do with enquiry into deeper, hidden realms of mind and soul, beneath the social surface. They were inherently subversive – questioning and undermining the official discourse of conscious mind, establishment culture, and medical model. By contrast, what we find promoted at present is very much a surface psychology – a technology of thought reform woven within a medical model – promulgated as a treatment for diagnosed mental diseases, such as depression and anxiety.
Back in the 1950s, Hans Eysenck, one of the first clinical psychologists in Britain, launched an attack on psychoanalysis – and published his famous study that appeared to show that the results of psychoanalytic and other psychotherapies were no better than those of spontaneous remission. He concluded:
Until such facts as may be discovered in a process of rigorous analysis support the prevalent belief in therapeutic effectiveness of psychological treatment, it seems premature to insist on the inclusion of training in such treatment in the curriculum of the clinical psychologist. [1952 Journal of Consulting Psychology, 16, 319-324.]
He later promoted behaviour therapy, based on Pavlov’s dogs and the model of neurosis in terms of animal learning and classical conditioning. In the 1970s, the American psychoanalyst Aaron Beck developed cognitive therapy (based on his listening to his psychoanalytic clients’ free-associations[1]). This approach was subsequently joined with behaviour therapy to form CBT. Whilst Beck’s approach was rooted in psychoanalysis, subsequent developers of CBT have repudiated this link – and clinical psychologists have been attacking psychotherapy ever since. It is like the left hemisphere attacking the right hemisphere – denying the primary process creative communications of the unconscious mind. In CBT, in its more simplistic and vulgar variants, the left hemisphere of rational and logical thought is imposed on the right hemisphere. Neurosis is replaced by thought reform. A temporary band-aid of positive thinking, imbued with exhortations to ‘feel the fear and do it anyway’, is applied over the deeper wound.