What Psychotherapy IsPsychotherapy comprises a body of knowledge about what goes wrong with human
beings, along with a set of practices designed to improve happiness and competence in
the face of life’s inevitable stresses. Lay people commonly assume that such work is the
province of psychologists, but the academic discipline of psychology has no compelling
claim on the practice of psychotherapy, and many ‘scientific’ psychologists eschew
psychotherapy except in extremely restricted forms. Psychiatry, because of its
association with mental illness, is the other profession most often associated with
psychotherapy, but once again, psychiatrists need not necessarily practice it.
Psychotherapy, which Freud called ‘the talking cure’, is best understood as something
which may be practised by nurses, social workers, family therapists, doctors, marriage
counsellors and occupational therapists, as well as by psychiatrists and psychologists.
In non-Western cultures, shamans and other traditional healers operate out of a totally
different conceptual framework from that employed by European psychotherapists, but
at a fundamental level satisfy the same needs in their troubled clientele—needs for
reassurance, meaning and healing confrontation. This makes it clear that there is no
universally ‘true’ system of psychotherapeutic theory, and that no single professional
guild in our own, or any other, culture, ‘owns’ psychotherapeutic practice.
The Co-Evolution of Story and ConsciousnessIn pre-literate cultures, narrative has always functioned in multiple ways, preserving
accumulated knowledge, articulating meaning, offering cathartic release and pleasure,
and promoting ‘healing’ in the broad sense of reassurance as to each listener’s place in
the scheme of things. A single myth or ceremony may embody all of these functions
simultaneously. We can reasonably assume that the prehistoric antecedents of our own
culture were similar. The earliest written versions of oral narratives that we possess
appear to have operated in much the same way as prime time television does today:
offering their audiences culturally central messages that confirmed listeners in their
existing understandings of what was right and wrong, acceptable and unacceptable,
heroic and ignoble.
In the European Middle Ages, where story-telling occurred—whether in church, or
around the hearth at night—it would probably have been experienced in the same
shared way, and with the same multiple dimensions, as myth and bardic epic. One
reason why it has been possible for scholars in our own century to ‘discover’ the
therapeutic potential of traditional folk tales (for example, Bettelheim 1976) is precisely
because it has always been there. Those tales formed part of a collective, oral culture
which spoke to a collective psyche, not a collection of individual psyches, and which
inevitably embodied messages of broad relevance to the community in general.
The coming of print to Western Europe, followed a few centuries later by the spread of
mass literacy, formed part of a process of gradual individualisation of consciousness.
Jaynes (1976) and Wilber (1986) have independently constructed speculative overviews
of the evolution of consciousness which differ in details, but agree on a shift from a
collective consciousness in which individuals were embedded in a ‘group mind’
(brilliantly simulated in William Golding’s The Inheritors (1955)) to the form of
628 BIBLIOTHERAPY AND PSYCHOLOGY