Human potential techniques were designed to loosen up inhibited
but basically healthy people, to help them understand and feel better
about themselves. It was never really intended to cure mental illness. This
little detail was quickly forgotten because the techniques were so much
fun and so easy to do.
Human potential therapy can make mental illnesses worse by
encouraging people to get out of their heads and go with their feelings
when they desperately need to learn to ignore their feelings and go with
their heads.
The human potential movement’s gift to the intellectual world was
the concept ofself-esteem, which was also borrowed from psychoanalysis,
and invested with near-magical properties. Every disorder known to
humanity can be caused by low self-esteem, and can be cured by raising
it. Conceit is merely low self-esteem when a person is in denial, another
Freudian term popularized by addiction treatment.
Today, human potential techniques are practiced mostly at the
fringes of psychology, often by people whose qualifications include being
in recovery from whatever they’re treating and by support group members
who have no qualifications at all.
All the competing approaches I’ve described are still in use for treating
explosive disorders. If there’s an explosive person close to you, you’ll prob-
ably hear all of the terms I’ve defined, often in the same sentence. Thesis
and antithesis are trying to combine to form a synthesis, but they haven’t
quite gotten there yet.
Though the language of psychotherapy is still recovering from the
great paradigm shift of the 1970s, the basic elements of psychotherapy vary
little from one approach to another. In 30 years, I’ve had the opportunity
to observe hundreds of talented therapists of virtually every theoretical
persuasion. What they dois remarkably similar, what they sayabout it
varies all over the place. Therapy itself is not a vague process, it only gets
confusing when you try to explain it. If you’re not too confused at this
point, we can proceed with describing the psychological treatment of
fear disorders.
Storming the Tower of Psychobabble ❧ 97