Frank Tallis - The Act of Living: What the Great Psychologists Can Teach Us About Finding Fulfillment

There is only one meaning of life: the act of living itself.

Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom (1941)

T he average person has no difficulty naming five philosophers. Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Sartre appear so frequently in our general reading that they are familiar to many of us. However, if this same person were asked to name five famous psychotherapists, he or she would probably find it more difficultperhaps even impossible. Freud and Jung might spring to mind, but others would be slow to follow. Older respondents might remember R. D. Laing, who became something of a celebrity in the 1960s. That only brings the count to three. Most people have never even heard of figures like Fritz Perls, Wilhelm Reich, Donald Winnicott, or Albert Ellis. They certainly wouldnt be able to name any contemporary psychotherapists, such as Francine Shapiro or Steve Hayes.

Yet the major figures of psychotherapy have had much to say about the human condition. Viewed as a cohesive body of knowledge, psychotherapy is equal in ambition, scope, and utility to any other scholarly tradition. Even so, it is rarely perceived in this way. Instead, we think of it only in its narrowest sense: as a treatment for mental illness. Although the clinical provenance of psychotherapy is important, its intellectual legacy has much wider relevance. It can offer original perspectives on the big questions, the ones usually entrusted to philosophers and representatives of faith: Who am I? Why am I here? How should I live?

Although psychotherapy (in a limited sense) has existed for as long as doctors have been comforting and advising patients, it wasnt until the nineteenth century that cultural and scientific conditions favored the emergence of psychoanalysis, the first truly modern form of psychotherapy.

Sigmund Freud began his career studying nerve cells in a laboratory before becoming a neurologist and going on to develop psychoanalysis. Compared to his contemporaries, Freud wasperhaps with the single exception of the philosopher and psychologist Pierre Janetby far the most ambitious theorist. Freud amalgamated French psychopathology, German psychophysics, and sexology to craft a flexible model of the mind that possessed enormous explanatory power. In due course, the compass of psychoanalysis expanded beyond purely medical considerations. Freuds new science afforded fresh insights into art, speculative prehistory, and religion. In the 1920s, Freud asserted that psychoanalysis is not a medical specialty. He was concerned that psychoanalysis would be viewed only as a treatment method because he had become convinced that he had stumbled upon something closer to a worldview. His clinical work was merely an entry point, a way into the mind that would ultimately lead to important nonmedical discoveries. Psychoanalysis could explain much more than hysteria and neurosis. It could explain love, desire, dreams, ghosts, violence, literature, and the behavior of crowds. One could even use psychoanalysis to peer into the minds of long-dead creative geniuses, such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

Freud compared psychoanalysis to electricity. Electricity is used in hospitalsfor example, to make X-ray imagesbut electricity is not categorically medical. Electricity powers radios, trams, and streetlights. Powering hospitals is only one of its many uses. Freuds electricity analogy works not just for psychoanalysis, but for all of psychotherapy. Ideas generated by psychotherapists can be used to treat mental illness, but they can also be used to show how the mind functions, how minds relate to each other, and how minds operate within cultures. They can also be used to answer questions concerning ideal ways to live (the so-called good life, or eudaimonia) that have been debated since ancient times.

If psychotherapy is a tradition that can inform and instruct beyond medical settings, why dont we, as a society, consult the psychotherapy literature more often when grappling with the problems of living? After all, the problems of living are its core concern. The principal reason is that the interested layperson is immediately confronted with impenetrable language. What might we expect to gain by acquainting ourselves with the basic tenets of Gestalt therapy or logotherapy? We can easily guess what a specialty like heart surgery involves, because we all know what a heart is. But whats so primal about primal therapy, and what kind of transaction takes place in transactional analysis? The nomenclature of psychotherapy is so opaque it usually discourages further inquiry.

Even the word psychotherapy is frequently used in ways that breed confusion. In some hospitals, for example, the psychotherapy department offers treatments strongly associated with Freud and psychoanalysis. Psychological treatments unrelated to the Freudian tradition might be offered elsewhere in the same hospital. This gives the impression that some forms of psychological treatment are called psychotherapy and others arent; however, all forms of psychological (as opposed to pharmacological) treatment can be accurately described as psychotherapy.

Nearly all psychotherapies have conversation and a confiding relationship in common. They also share a common goal: reducing distress, even if this means facing up to difficult truths and realities in the short term. Techniques vary according to what theory is guiding the treatment process. Some approaches are exploratory, while others are directive; some seek to recover inaccessible memories, others aim to modify unhelpful beliefs; some encourage deeper self-understanding, some focus on the acquisition of coping skills. And so on. Freudian psychoanalysis is the most famous and established form of psychotherapy. We are all familiar with the clich: a bearded therapist sitting behind a reclining patient. But this popular image of Freudian psychotherapy is actually misguided. It suggests that psychoanalysis is unitary and fixed. In fact, Freud was constantly revising psychoanalysis and it continued to evolve after his death.