Crisis for Good A married lady in her early forties decided one day to take her husband to task by jokingly asking him: “Are you by any chance cheating on me?” And she was very offended when he told her, as if in spirit, everything that she had not even asked him about. Naturally, a scandal

Loneliness - evil or good? If no one is around, then it's time to get to know yourself. Some people want to get rid of loneliness or learn to fight and cope with it, because it is “unbearable, hopeless, difficult, dull and hopeless” (so many

Doctor of Philosophy Zolotukhina-Abolina Elena Vsevolodovna

There have always been people with an unbalanced inner world.

At all times, there have been stutterers and hysterics, those who suffered from phobias and depression, experienced constant anxiety, insecurity, became overly passionately attached to another person, or felt an unbridled thirst for dominance.

They existed just as there were madmen and cripples, lepers and syphilitics, freaks and the sick. Moreover, there were so many of these latter and they so clearly filled the cities, villages and roads that no one simply paid attention to those first ones. Phobias and depression were experienced quietly, because there was no one to go with them, well, perhaps to the parish priest, who could exhort with the help of the word of God. Not every holy father undertook to cast out demons. Those who were too overwhelmed by melancholy threw themselves into the pool headfirst. And a strong thirst for power was not at all considered a defect.

The physical and mental pathologies revealed to the world overshadowed the problems of the soul - a subtle and ephemeral phenomenon. These problems came to the fore in the 19th and 20th centuries, when humanity to some extent coped with mass physical and severe mental illnesses and established medical supervision. But now it’s the turn to pay attention to the world experience of the “average person,” and this world experience turned out to be also not very healthy and not very pleasant. The neurotic personality of our time is a mass phenomenon: not yet sick, no longer healthy, but in any case a suffering and inadequate person.

In addition, our era, which has finally broken the old traditions, destroyed the values ​​that have been developed over centuries, has put people before a constant, incessant choice and has charged everyone with full responsibility for every step taken. And this in itself is a great psychological burden and a serious test.

So, almost each of us, no matter where he lives, is faced with at least three traumatic factors:

Sociocultural circumstances.

The destructive impact of the media.

Difficulties of personal destiny.

The first factor that powerfully contributes to neuroticism is the competitive system of relations in a modern market society (sociocultural factor). The market, which permeates all social strata, turns life into continuous racing, into competition for wear and tear. And where fierce competition reigns, crowned with the tears of the loser and the triumph of the winner, steps and stands, intrigue and slander, lies and slander flourish.

It is widely known that in the prosperous United States it is impossible to work in peace, since work has been turned into a constant exam, where those who fail are rejected and other employees are put in their place. Therefore, everyone is forced to constantly tremble. This is great for the economy, but very harmful for people. Perhaps this is why psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are so thriving in the United States. Their success is also supported by the fact that people competing with each other will not be frank with each other and cry into each other's vests. They prefer to pay money to a specialist and tell him about their troubles, knowing that he will keep their secrets and will not reveal their weaknesses to their rivals.

In our country, the psychological health of the population is actively counteracted by the regime of constant social upheavals that plagued Russia throughout the 20th century. Life and semantic crises, the crushing of one value system and the violent imposition of another, the collapse of the conditions for the reproduction of large social groups, the change in the last ten years from a paternalistic state to a criminal-anarchist one - all this makes the inner world shaky and unsupported, people - confused and confused. They, perhaps, would run in droves to psychotherapists, but there are very few of these latter, they are often not professionals, and treatment is expensive in comparison with the salary, which, on top of everything else, is sometimes not paid for years. Domestic social conditions are no less, and perhaps more traumatic for the human soul than Western ones; chaos and confusion, inaction of the law are added to them, which means complete personal insecurity, which is expressed in anxiety, fears, and suicidal tendencies.

The second factor contributing to neuroticism in modern conditions is the work of the media. Here it is easier for us to appeal to domestic experience, although the activities of Russian television are nothing more than a copy of Western television.

In post-perestroika Russia, unfortunately, the tendencies of uncritical borrowing by television of the worst examples of work construction by Western media prevailed. The methods and techniques of influencing the audience, used by all channels of modern domestic television, are aimed at destabilizing and deharmonizing the already quite disharmonious and confused mass consciousness. Both informational and entertainment programs (primarily movies, represented by a large number of action films, horror films and films dedicated to paranormal phenomena) show a picture of a world where, in essence, there is no normal human life. It is replaced by “pathological everyday life,” in which the “pathology expert” (investigator, police officer, psychiatrist, psychic occultist, pathologist, commentator on the incident, or the victim herself) is the main and practically the only character.

Let's take a look at some models that are widely represented in both the informational and “artistic” parts of TV activities.

Model 1. The world is a disaster.

All television programs tell us that the world is a catastrophe, an accident, death and injury from early morning, because they begin the program not with generally significant facts of an economic, political and cultural order, but with a joyful story about fires and earthquakes that have happened in any part of the world , explosions and overturned cars.

These facts are obsessively repeated throughout the day, turning reality into a creepy and bloody “chronicle of incidents.” Having barely opened his eyes, the poor Russian citizen - you and I - receives a huge charge of negative emotions: he sees the torn bodies, shown in detail by the cameraman, hears the lamentations of the relatives of the dead, reacts with alarm to the number of new victims and, of course, willingly or unwillingly, figures out in his mind whether whether he himself will become another victim of unpredictable misfortune. Fate is seen as in a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky:

When fate followed us

Like a madman with a razor in his hand.

Model 2. The world is a crime.

The chronicle of everything bad that happened, as if by accident and without malicious intent, is complemented by the enthusiastic incessant story of television journalists about intentional acts: bloody maniacs, racketeers, international terrorists, rapist soldiers, etc. become television stars and main characters. And since disasters and crimes are interspersed on the television screen and complement each other, then the reality appears completely terrible to the already dejected Russian viewer. In it, in this monstrous reality, children are not born, houses are not built, discoveries are not made, bread does not grow. In it only threats are heard, mountains of corpses are piled up and rivers of blood flow. What a “bright future” this is! The main thing is not to be blown up, shot or stolen. Our television carefully sows fear. Neurotic deviations, depression and suicide are, to a large extent, the work of those whom people unkindly nicknamed “journalists.” These are quite infernal personalities, although in direct communication they can look like the nicest guys. The point is that the “nice guys” are doing a hell of a job: persistently and purposefully shaking the psyche of their fellow citizens.

Model 3. The world is an action-packed adventure.

Action-packed adventures, to which everyday life boils down, are presented on the screen not so much as information programs, but rather as films of a certain type. Moreover, “soap series”, despised by snobs, turn out to be the focus of humanity and realism among these films. The action movies that flood our screens reduce real human relationships to primitive desires, extreme actions (endless chases, shooting and killing), raw feelings (hatred, envy, vindictiveness) and bad manners (look at the screaming and swearing that accompanies every episode!). Generations of young Russians are growing up in full confidence that unbridled aggression is a normal human condition, not condemned by anyone and even highly commendable.

Aggression on one side implies hatred, fear and evil vindictiveness on the other. Pathology gives birth to pathology.

Model 4. The world is a cynical clownery.

We are invited to view the world as a cynical clownery by numerous political commentators who sarcastically mock the leaders of the opposing political group. Numerous “humorous programs” that have sadly fallen below the farcical level make their contribution to the desacralization of everything in the world. The mutual slaps of Bim and Bom seem, in comparison with “Gorodok,” simply the height of aestheticism and intellectuality. It is worth noting that today’s press is also extremely cynical, printing mocking and mocking headlines over articles about tragic events. The debunking of “all that is holy” is a typical feature of both electronic and conventional media.

Major positive changes in the development of modern Russia are not possible, in our opinion, without a radical reorientation of the work of television, radio, and newspapers. If the world is a catastrophe and a crime, if there is nothing in it except crude passions and evil mockery, then there is simply no point in living in it. And this “no need” weighs heavily on us today, resulting in mass child suicides, the degradation of adults and the horror of the elderly.

Modern television has only one clear advantage - you can always turn it off.

And yet at the beginning of the 21st century it is impossible to live without it. Therefore, the progressiveness of the government that is now emerging and being formed in Russia will be determined not only by the success of the economy and foreign policy, not only by relations with political elites within the country, but also by the extent to which this government can create a positive spiritual and psychological atmosphere, and by the extent to which it will encourage the media so that they return to us ordinary everyday life - with its joys, successes and simple human concerns.

The third factor in the neuroticization of modern man is the circumstances of his individual fate. Personal disasters, childhood shocks, sudden disappointments or collapse of life plans - all this unsettles a person, makes his life meaningless, and plunges him into a negative emotional state for a long time.

Often people spontaneously recover from severe emotional distress. Or they try to do it the best they can. F. Vasilyuk’s book “Psychology of Experience” describes four types of overcoming psychological crises that arose for various reasons. Following the main motives of this book, we will consider possible options for such an exit.

Hedonic experience.

Hedonistic, as we know, is pleasure-oriented, giving priority to the sensual. Hedonistic experience is characteristic of people with an infantile orientation toward the “pleasure principle.” This is a kind of defense against psychological suffering, based on ignoring the outside world. The person creates the illusion that no changes have occurred. So a girl whose mother was ill for a long time and died continues to look after her as if she were still alive. Or the boss who has been removed from his position continues to stubbornly go to his office.

As we see, the hedonistic experience of life's blow does not eliminate neurosis. Rather, it itself is a form of neurosis, where the defense against unbearable pain is the distortion of reality, reliance on a fantastic situation.

Realistic experience.

With realistic experience, a person submits to the dictates of circumstances, reckons with reality, trying to accept it as it is. The mechanism of patience is involved here, since the traumatic situation does not carry any pleasure, and any pleasure must be postponed; it is in an indefinite time frame. In an effort to get rid of the fear and despair that has taken hold of him, a person either relies on “maybe” or relies on hope. If he can do something in the current situation, then he makes efforts to achieve the goal. He strives to cope with difficult reality and overcome it.

However, patience, as F. Vasilyuk shows, is a temporary state. It is exhausted, and in order not to fall into the abyss of despair, the individual can use surrogates. This is well illustrated by the fairy tale parable about the Nile crocodile:

“The Nile crocodile feeds exclusively on pineapples. Always and only pineapples. But when there are no pineapples, he eats bananas. When there are no bananas, he eats carrots. When there are no carrots, he eats potatoes. When there are no potatoes, he buries himself three meters into the ground and cries crocodile tears.”

A surrogate, often used when patience is exhausted, is a complete change in the broken relationship with society. If the path to becoming an artist is closed to me, I will become a railway worker! I didn’t marry Masha, I’ll marry Dasha. Or something like that. This spontaneous way of experiencing presupposes the discreteness of life, the relative independence of its phases. Then past plans and dreams are swept aside and completely replaced by others. This is not always possible and does not completely bring peace, but it is a way to alleviate the situation.

Value experience.

The experience of value is possible only with the complexity and ambiguity of a person’s inner world, with his ability for reflection and choice.

A person can be seriously unsettled when his values ​​collide with the external world that contradicts them, or the values ​​themselves collide with each other.

If higher and lower values ​​collide with each other, then the lower ones can either be discarded (for example, giving up a personal career for the sake of protecting the homeland), or entered into relations with the higher ones and subordinated to them. Thus, the values ​​of delicious food can be subordinated in a certain way to the values ​​of piety, but not rejected. Sometimes the realization of lower values ​​is postponed “for later” (“I’ll raise children, then I’ll rest”).

The clash of equivalent values ​​(duty and love, political and religious beliefs, etc.) is always overcome dramatically. It is almost impossible to avoid suffering here.

People come out of situations in different ways when, as a result of a collision with reality, they lose the most valuable thing for themselves. And these losses can be completely different.

So, if a loved one, with whom all life plans were connected, dies, the person left behind can overcome melancholy and depression by aestheticizing his image. The memory of the deceased can become an impetus for future life and creativity.

However, it is not only a person who can be lost. You can lose your own beliefs, become disappointed in them, seeing their inconsistency; life can show us that we are wrong. Then it is necessary to look for a new value system, certainly forgiving yourself for the delusions and mistakes of the past.

However, the blows of life do not always force us to change our own beliefs. Sometimes these beliefs, for example, moral principles, are so deeply and firmly internalized by a person that he observes them, no matter what. He would rather sacrifice life itself than give up his beliefs and follows internal rules in almost any situation.

We do not undertake here to continue the description and analysis of crisis and severe psychological collisions, from which people emerge intuitively, carrying out an unconscious search for new positions if the old ones have been exhausted. Another thing is important: people solve the problems of their own inner world when they encounter them in the course of life. They, willingly or unwillingly, act as their own psychotherapists. They save themselves from inner darkness, pull themselves out of the swamp by their hair. It is worth taking a closer look at what helps them to be psychological assistants to themselves? What factors contribute to their self-care?

Let's name three such factors.

Sympathy and advice from loved ones.

Worldviews set by culture.

Popular psychotherapeutic literature that offers potential patients various techniques for working with their own consciousness, or more precisely, with the inner world.

The first factor is the most important psychological support for a person at all times and under all circumstances. A person is not only a friend, comrade and brother to another, but also a psychotherapist. It must be said that one of the outstanding psychologists and philosophers of the 20th century, A. Maslow, drew attention to this point. In his works, he emphasizes that life itself, filled with events, communication, and human interaction, contributes to the healing of mental wounds, overcoming internal problems, and untying tightened psychological knots.

A. Maslow writes: “Trees or mountains cannot be a source of security, love and respect; even communication with a dog cannot bring a person closer to the true satisfaction of basic needs. Only people can satisfy our need for love and respect, only to them we fully give love and respect. Basic satisfaction is the main thing that good friends, lovers, spouses, good parents and children, teachers and students give each other, it is what each of us is looking for when entering into one or another informal relationship, and it is precisely this that is a necessary prerequisite, a condition for sine qua pop in order for a person to gain health and come closer to the ideal of a good person. What, if not this, is the highest (if not the only) goal of psychotherapy?

This definition of psychotherapy has two extremely important consequences: 1) it allows us to view psychotherapy as a unique kind of interpersonal relationship, since some fundamental characteristics of the psychotherapeutic relationship are characteristic of all “good” human relationships, and 2) if psychotherapy is a type of interpersonal relationship, which, like any other relationship, can be both good and bad, then much more attention should be paid to this interpersonal aspect of psychotherapy than is currently being given” (Maslow A. Motivation and Personality. M., 1999. P. 329. 173) .

In Russia, to this day, communication with loved ones - family, friends - turns out to be the main psychotherapeutic tool. Usually a person himself chooses someone to whom he can open his soul, with whom he can fearlessly share his problems, on whose sympathy and support he can rely. Sometimes just agreeing to listen to a voluntary confession is enough to make your heart feel better.

In addition, loved ones can try to distract the sufferer from his painful questions, entertain him, switching his attention to something new, interesting, capable of awakening curiosity and cheerfulness. This is sometimes done with children, distracting them from pain, but this technique also works great in alleviating the psychological torment of an adult. It is the loved ones who are able to analyze the problem from a position of sympathy, bring those who found themselves in similar circumstances, and tell how they dealt with them. A variety of behavioral strategies may be proposed. In this case, an ordinary sympathetic interlocutor practically plays the role of a psychotherapist, since he creates a whole range of possibilities for his friend - the “patient” and discusses with him what will happen if this or that option of behavior and thinking is brought to life.

A person who has shared his inner worries with family or friends feels supported, feels that he is not alone, and this gives him the opportunity for a speedy mental restructuring. Although, of course, no one can do the main work of transforming his own consciousness and unconscious attitudes for him. But an experienced professional psychotherapist is ultimately an external observer and a “voice from the outside.” He cannot become an “inner leader” for the patient. Anyone who suffers from neurotic moments can only receive final healing himself, as a result of his own spiritual efforts.

The second factor successfully serves as a psychotherapeutic tool, as it provides individuals with certain guidelines for thinking and experiencing that can explain suffering and reduce its intensity. Any serious system of ideological views presupposes an arsenal of comforting and inspiring ideas that can mobilize strength, appeal to pathos or to a humble, dignified acceptance of events. Inner suffering, as well as the blows of fate, must have meaning, then a person will be able to overcome his own melancholy and dejection, anxiety and fear.

Let's take a short look at those interpretations of suffering, its causes and meaning, which are contained in a non-religious view of things, in Christianity and in ancient esoteric teachings that recognize karma and reincarnation.

Let us take as an example unrequited love, which has taken the form of passionate neurotic dependence. Such dependence on the object of love is real suffering. A lover, a dependent person (often a woman, although there are also men in this situation, as S. Maugham’s novel “The Burden of Human Passions” vividly tells us about), constantly strives for his chosen one, shows increased attention to him, claims intimacy, like physical and spiritual, but, as a rule, receives rejection (periodic or constant), building “distances” and various forms of manipulation-teasing.

Neuroticism lies in the fact that the person in love does not see the white side of the world, refuses all the joys of life, focuses on the fight for “her own happiness” and on this path always uses the same strategies - attack and retention. But this is precisely what meets the resistance of the “object of love,” who, as it were, does not break off the relationship completely, but also does not satisfy the desires of the “applicant.” There arises something like an endless cruel game of catch or hide and seek: the lover runs away or hides, and the lover catches up or searches, but never reaches the goal. Such a situation can last for years, completely exhausting and depressing, first of all, the “catching up” side.

How to interpret this position from different ideological positions?

Irreligious view.

The cause of suffering.

In a non-religious consciousness, no one is looking for higher transcendental causes or the impact of transcendental principles for the prevailing circumstances. In this case, the cause of suffering is simply an unfortunate choice: “I didn’t cling to my own (clung).” This is a mistake, the result of inexperience or delusion.

The second explanation is incorrect upbringing, an incorrectly formed inner world. A woman (or man) who displays fruitless persistence in pursuing a chosen being and suffers many blows from her lover appears as a person who does not have self-esteem or has lost it. Self-esteem is one of the leading values ​​of irreligious consciousness; self-respect is a fundamental moment for the life of an individual.

The meaning of suffering.

Neurotic suffering for a non-believer turns out to be completely meaningless and self-destructive. Essentially, no useful experience can be derived from it. Suffering itself should be eliminated as soon as possible, since it only drains the soul and takes away strength.

To solve this kind of problem, the irreligious person must be inspired by two wonderful ideas: the idea of ​​dignity and the idea of ​​independence. Of course, an unsuccessful choice can no longer be undone, but it is possible that it cannot be repeated or reproduced in other circumstances.

It is necessary to break the bondage, and this is possible if pride comes to the fore and opposes the desire to please another person and seek his favor. However, pride as an idea does not work well if a person does not overcome his own dependence. It is practically necessary, at least in a narrow sphere of life, to begin to manifest oneself as a self-sufficient, independent being, and this, step by step, will become the basis for getting rid of spiritual attachment. Love yourself. Take care of yourself. Develop your strengths and capabilities. Then another person will be able to appreciate your merits as a free, worthy person.

Christianity.

The cause of suffering.

According to Christianity, the cause of all human suffering is the sinfulness of human nature, disobedience to God. Man is initially guilty before God; it was because of sin that he acquired all forms of alienation in human relationships, just as he received death, illness and the need for hard work. Unhappy love is another expression of guilt and sin. With passionate attachment to another, a person turns away from God, whom he should love more than anything in the world, he creates an idol out of a mere mortal, hence the whole arsenal of suffering. Thus, neurotic attachment itself, which does not find an answer, is the result of an incorrect mental and life path, immersion in the earthly, limited and imperfect.

The meaning of suffering.

The meaning of suffering in this case is to remind a person of the depravity and dead end of the chosen direction. Guilt before the Lord should block and displace those ardent feelings that the neurotic has for his chosen one. Suffering signals that it is necessary to change the direction of love, to turn it to the eternal, and not to the temporal.

In addition, suffering can cleanse the soul from filth, from excessive egoism. A suffering person is able to be Christianly kind to others, he empathizes with the suffering of others, pitying other people.

And finally, mental suffering can be a kind of test. If you do not grumble and complain, curse the Almighty and the fate sent down by him, you are worthy of the highest mercy. If you follow the path of complaints and curses - don't blame me, suffering can multiply a thousandfold.

Solving a psychological problem.

The solution to this problem, like many others, lies through turning to God. Here, a dual pathos is possible: on the one hand, the pathos of humility, submission to a higher will, which instead of joy gives torment, on the other, the pathos of rejecting purely human passions and turning to the eternal source of love - Christ. When choosing the heavenly, and not the earthly, purely human problems will disappear by themselves, lose their meaning, and suffering will go away, giving way to bliss.

Esoteric view.

The cause of suffering.

Dead-end neurotic attachment, exhausting a person's strength for a long time, can be interpreted within the framework of an esoteric approach as a karmic knot. According to this view, in the past incarnation there were sharp, conflicting relationships between people - envy, jealousy, or, on the contrary, passionate love, but also one-sided. Perhaps the current lover was then an object of adoration, but rejected someone else's feeling, did it rudely, tactlessly, which led to a corresponding experience in a new life - the experience of suffering from rejected love. However, karma is accumulated all the time, we create a line of necessity in our destiny every day, with every free choice, so a karmic knot like a heavy neurotic connection could be tied in our present life. Such an interpretation brings the esoteric approach closer to the usual non-religious psychotherapeutic one in the spirit of E. Fromm and K. Horney.

The meaning of suffering.

The meaning of the suffering experienced in this case is that this suffering represents a lesson. Esotericism believes that all the difficulties, blows, trials, obstacles that spoil our lives are lessons designed to make us think: what are we doing wrong? Where do we violate the law of cosmic morality and spirituality, where do we deviate from the right path?

The lesson for a hopelessly in love may be different, and therefore the suffering may have different meanings. This lesson may be that one should not become too dependent on anyone, no matter how perfect that person may seem.

However, the lesson may also be that you should not persistently impose your desires and your will on another person, you must listen carefully to the answer, establish “feedback”, only then there is a chance of getting the desired harmony. If there is no reciprocity, the relationship should be abandoned, even if it seems like a “light in the window.” This is not light, but self-deception.

The third version of the lesson is the conclusion that rudely rejecting other people’s feelings, playing hide and seek with them and manipulating the soul of another is bad, and you should never do this yourself.

The esoteric reading of suffering as a lesson orients the restless soul to work on oneself, to a constructive position.

Solving a psychological problem.

The problem can find its solution along the path of internal restructuring that follows comprehension of the lesson. A lesson almost always contains two main guidelines: a guideline towards a flexible, contemplative, non-passionate attitude towards reality and a guideline towards benevolence and goodwill. In the specific case we have considered, the untying of the karmic knot and the disappearance of suffering also stems from the lover’s ability, firstly, to relate more easily to the situation, to weaken his own grip, and secondly, to let go of his voluntary or involuntary tormentor with benevolence and forgiveness. The pathos of forgiveness and letting go of any negative situations and people who gave rise to them, as well as forgiveness of oneself, is the main nerve of overcoming neurotic situations based on ancient esoteric knowledge.

I do not undertake to compare here different worldviews that contribute to psychotherapy, I will not evaluate them or highlight any of them. Personally, it seems to me that an attitude in which one can forgive oneself is better conducive to the recovery of a neurotic than an attitude that involves an increased sense of guilt before God. However, each person chooses here for himself. Christian attitudes can help a deeply religious Christian to the greatest extent. Inspired by them, he can overcome personal psychological difficulties and successfully overcome a crisis, depression, or impasse. At the same time, a person with different views will choose a different approach that is more consistent with his beliefs. The main thing is that the views we have listed, as well as other worldviews, are always present in culture, allowing the suffering soul to receive the necessary support.

The third factor offers potential patients different techniques for working with their own consciousness, or more precisely, with their own inner world. With its help, a person can self-heal, self-recover, and overcome anxiety and melancholy. A person can be his own psychotherapist for one simple reason, discovered in the 20th century by such a direction in the study of consciousness as phenomenology: he, the person, himself ascribes meaning to everything.

As phenomenology, with which many areas of modern psychotherapy are closely related, has shown, meaning is not equal to either a thing, or the image of a thing, or circumstances, or a photographic representation of these circumstances. Meaning is the meaning, the significance that we attribute to events, situations, words, other people's behavior or our own appearance. Meaning answers the questions “why?”, “for what?”, “in what context?” Of course, we don’t completely invent meanings ourselves, we don’t catch them out of the void; they are clearly and hiddenly present in the culture that allows our consciousness to live and develop. But we can only give meaning to something ourselves, by finding it in the sphere of consciousness and applying it to a specific case. By using meanings to build a situation in our minds, we interpret reality and understand it in our own way.

Any neurotic state is an emotional-semantic state. Anxiety, fear, suspicion, feeling lonely and dependent - these are, of course, experiences, but they have a powerful semantic component. In this case, a person’s attention is focused on the negative side of things, while the other side - positive emotions, trust, security, ample opportunities - is simply not noticed. Negatively interpreted reality, merged with anxious, depressing feelings, seems to be the only reality from which there is no way out. However, it is not.

Meanings and experiences change; this can be done of one’s own free will, with one’s own free conscious decision. And no psychotherapist can do this for a neurotic sufferer. It can only help the process of rethinking the world, contribute to the birth of new feelings. But it is the person himself who gives birth to a new, healthy beginning.

Using techniques developed by specialists, he is able to enter into a dialogue with his own unconscious, change his emotional worldview, and create a semantic picture that will give him cheerfulness and optimism.

There are many popular tools that can help anyone become their own therapist. These manuals teach a person to rebuild his own consciousness independently, so that no one else interferes in this delicate intimate process. Psychotherapeutic manuals contain techniques for giving events new meanings, cultivating good, benevolent feelings, and planning in your imagination positive rather than negative scenarios for the development of future events.

In order to take advantage of such help, a person only needs awareness of his problem and the will to correct the situation. A very interesting author is Louise Hay. It affirms our ability to transform both the space of our inner world and the circumstances of our lives:

"1. We take 100% responsibility for all our actions. 2. Our every thought creates our future. 3. The starting point of strength is always in the present moment. 6. Everything is in thought, and thought can be changed. 9. When we truly love ourselves, our life is wonderful... 10. We must free ourselves from the past and forgive everyone without exception. 12. Accepting ourselves and approving our actions is the key to lasting change” (Hey L.L. Heal your life, your body. The power is within us. Kaunas, 1996. P. 9.).

Louise Hay does not encourage her patient readers to use complex meditations or elements of self-hypnosis. She offers them a very simple remedy - so-called affirmations, positive statements that must be persistently repeated out loud or silently, gradually but steadily changing your own way of thinking and feeling.

Another author, Jeanette Rainwater, offers many simple but effective means for adjusting your inner world: talks about the role of introspection, explains how you can constructively use your own imagination, shows the psychotherapeutic role of a diary and writing an autobiography, gives advice on how to analyze dreams, work with simple meditations, living in the present moment, and not just dreams or memories (Rainwater J. It’s in your power. How to become your own psychotherapist. M., 1992.).

A whole series of books by X. Silva and B. Goldman has been published in Russian. They teach a person different ways of self-regulation and self-building, while resorting to the means of meditation and self-hypnosis.

The work of D. Burns “Feeling Good: New Mood Therapy” (M., 1995) is of a completely different plan. It is built on the principles of cognitive therapy, allowing a person to conduct a rational dialogue with himself, reflecting on the consequences of his actions and increasing self-esteem. Berne shows typical thinking errors that cause people to dramatize a situation.

Numerous publications on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), the methods of which, in principle, can also be adopted independently, are well known.

Both American and Russian popular publications on psychotherapy are often characterized by a fusion of the psychotherapeutic approach with the esoteric, which we can see in the books of A. Sviyash, V. Zhikarentsev, D. Verishchagin, as well as in the authors of the book “The Beginning Magician’s Course” V.A. . Gurangova and V.A. Dolokhova.

What inspires and gives hope for the best is the wide opportunity for the reader to choose exactly the method of self-therapy that suits him more than others. If you didn’t like the esotericism, turn to a rational dialogue with yourself, if the dialogue didn’t work, use NLP, and it’s not to your taste, try Louise Hay’s affirmations or self-hypnosis, as suggested by X. Silva. Something will certainly have a positive effect.

We are talking, of course, about those cases when there is no serious pathology, when a person depressed by life, without a good psychotherapist, must work with himself. However, even after completing a course of treatment, even with an excellent psychotherapist, he will still work with himself, because there is no escape from himself.

In addition to books on psychotherapy, in some cases philosophical literature is very helpful in restoring the inner world, but this applies mainly to lovers of intellectual entertainment. However, the main thing is that everyone can and should help themselves, and for this one must spare no time and attention to comprehend the “I”.

My soul is in my hands!

The new book by Fyodor Vasilyuk is a remarkable event in psychological and philosophical circles. You can even clarify - “as always, a remarkable event.” I have been familiar with this author’s first major and widely known work, “The Psychology of Experience,” since the 80s, and even recently, in my textbook on philosophical anthropology, I tried to consistently present for students his position regarding the experience of crisis semantic situations [1]. The result was a free retelling, probably not entirely accurately reproducing the ideas of Fyodor Efimovich. Obviously, this happened because in that previous book, not everything was clear to me, and as a result, I had to supplement the author’s vision with my own. The new book, unlike the previous one (although it has become almost a classic!), is written absolutely clearly and transparently, intelligibly and logically - this is the work of a mature master who simultaneously builds a clear system of his ideas and points the reader to new horizons.

Introduction

MAN AS A MORAL BEING

Dear readers!

This book is dedicated to examining person like mereal being.

To reveal such a complex and ambiguous phenomenon as Homo moralis, it is necessary to dwell at least briefly on the generic characteristics of a person, which allow him not only to be known as, but also to actually be a subject of moral behavior. In addition, it is necessary to find out what morality is, give it a definition, and only then can we proceed to the most important and interesting thing - the analysis of those ethical concepts that are designed to express all the richness and inconsistency of everyday moral life.

Of course, moral issues are not limited to the topics that form the basis of my lecture course. It is inexhaustible, just as human experience is inexhaustible. However, I tried to choose for you those moral stories that are relevant at any time and run through the entire human history. Themes of good and evil, freedom and responsibility, duty and conscience, the meaning of life are as important and relevant today as they were a thousand years ago. I hope, my readers, that they will not leave you indifferent.

So, let us turn to the specifics of a person, which determines his ability to be moral. For the first

Look, man is one of the varieties of numerous animal species living on Earth. According to the ancient Greek thinker Aristotle, “matter has an appetite for form,” and in nature we see many animals and birds, fish and insects that are not similar to each other, endowed with different appearances, colors and dispositions. All of them are concrete sensory, empirical, carnal creatures, connected into an integral unity by environmental laws. Man also consists of flesh and bones, also wants to eat, strives to reproduce and submits in his development to the dictates of the genetic code. In some ways he is very similar to his “smaller brothers” - he suffers the same way and dies the same way. And yet, man is something fundamentally different, for biological laws are only the foundation on which the edifice of human existence is built, only a prerequisite for the development of the world of culture, which gives man the opportunity to have self-awareness, freedom and morality.

The presence of these special characteristics of a person has always sharply distinguished him from his animal environment, making him a qualitatively different, strange alien, as if a guest from another dimension.

Culture is a way of survival and development, in which a person passively adapts to kind, but, on the contrary, he adapts nature to himself. Biologically, a person is weaker than other living beings - he does not have powerful claws and fangs, he has a long childhood, when a child needs the help of others, and finally, a person is a “naked monkey”, not covered with fur from winds and frosts. But culture - objective-practical activity, work - allowed man to become the most powerful creature on the planet, because he created tools and tools - the continuation and strengthening of his potential. With their help, he sowed fields, built houses and created machines - laid the foundation for the whole world of modern civilization. At the same time, man no longer acted according to only a narrow genetically specified biological program.

gram. He broke out beyond the limits of purely natural laws into the “suprabiological” and was able to create not only according to the “standards of his species,” but according to the standards of any species, universally, including “according to the laws of beauty” (K. Marx). Culture is the emergence of fundamentally new relationships between “individuals”, who are now no longer just “members of the pack”, but people. Members of a monkey troop communicate exclusively about their natural needs, their natural interest does not extend further, and the subject of human communication becomes joint activity, which is only indirectly linked to the satisfaction of physical needs. Human communication itself emerges, subject to tradition and moral laws. A person is born as moral being. Not blind biological impulses, but morality now becomes the force that organizes actions, passions and thoughts.

Morality or morality (which in our conversation will be the same thing) is a set of norms, values, ideals, attitudes that regulate human behavior and are the most important components of culture. The peculiarity of morality is that for its successful action it must be deeply internalized by man com, must “enter his soul”, become part of his inner world. A person is moral only when moral behavior becomes organic to him, and he does not need an overseer who checks and urges. Since any human actions and relationships have a moral aspect (except for purely technical ones), in any area of ​​life we ​​are faced with morality as the “inner voice” of a person, which helps him behave morally in a variety of situations.

Moral regulation is evaluative-imperative character, this means that morality always evaluates and commands. She tells you to act according to good and prohibits following evil, encourages good, fair behavior and bright, benevolent thoughts, and condemns atrocities and evil, dark passions.

At the center of morality is the relationship between what should be and what is go. Morality always shows us the essentially necessary order of things, the ideal state of affairs, what we must strive for. Animals do not know ideals, they follow a given stereotype, and man is an open, unclosed being, and he is always striving for culturally recognized models and ideals, constantly relating himself to them, often realizing his actual imperfection. “I’m not what I need to be, but I will become like that!” - only a representative of the genus Homo sapiens can say this.

Morality turns out to be possible because a person living in a culture and communicating with his own kind has self-awareness. He separates himself from the world, has a sense of “I,” and experiences himself as a whole, distinct from everything else. Only such a sovereign subject is capable of relating to his actions, feelings and thoughts in a certain way, evaluating them, and taking responsibility for what he has done. Self-awareness gives people an understanding of their mortality, finitude, and this also contributes to moral reflection, because conscious death is that boundary in the future, before crossing which one must have time to take the path of good. Death has a binding meaning - it obliges us to constant moral effort for the sake of other people, for the sake of improving our own soul and for the sake of the triumph of higher principles in the world.

A person's morality is closely related to his ability to free choice. It is expressed primarily in people’s ability to distance themselves from selfish material and physiological needs in order to subordinate their actions to moral rules and principles. People are given the ability not only to “experience” an experience, but also to have a moral attitude towards their experience, for example, to suppress their fear and encourage courage. Free choice is a choice freed from the inevitable influence of external and internal circumstances; it is an act of personal decision, an expression of the individuality of the subject. Cro-

Moreover, freedom of choice is an important aspect of moral behavior itself. Of course, a truly moral person has established moral habits and moral intuition can work - something that acts as if automatically. But non-rational forms of morality are not always suitable. In difficult situations, when equivalent values ​​collide (duty and love, friendship and truthfulness, etc.), we are forced to think, reflect, weigh the pros and cons. It is here that our ability to freely choose and express our moral will is realized.

Man as a moral being lives, of course, in the real world, full of contradictions and imperfections. He submits to the type of morality and the relationships that are accepted among his people, in his community or state. And morals in the history of mankind are often extremely cruel: not only the Huns and barbarians, but also modern “enlightened peoples” are often aggressive and guided by severe intolerance towards everything that is not in their own honor. However, within almost any specific historical moral system there are seeds, sparks of “high morality.”

“High morality” is a set of universal human such attitudes towards a selfless, fair and benevolent attitude towards any human being. Even if it is despised or hated from the point of view of the “here” and “today’s” set of morals. “High morality” is the heart of all true morality; it is the best that humanity has developed in its moral history. Therefore, in real life we ​​are always faced with the interaction of at least three components that determine human behavior: firstly, the action of simple biological and material needs that push the individual along a grossly selfish path; secondly, this is a combination of specific historical traditions and moral institutions that in one way or another orient individuals toward the priority of group interests, and thirdly, these are commands of high

morality, speaking on behalf of humanity as a whole and often on behalf of God. The complex dynamics of these three components determines the appearance of moral behavior and the inner world of specific people. The practical morality of each of us depends on what exactly prevails.

Speaking about a person as a moral being, we must not forget that moral guidelines do not hang in the air, they are closely intertwined with human psychology and are realized in behavior through psychological mechanisms. People do not just fulfill moral laws or not fulfill them, they hope and believe, strive and doubt, rejoice and get angry, find or do not find the strength to move towards a moral ideal. That is why here I am talking not just about the “categories of ethics” that have crystallized in theory, but about how the most important moral themes are involved in people’s lives.

Moral being Man goes through his life path, lives his destiny, constantly coming into contact with good and evil, freedom and responsibility, honesty and justice, he takes care of his dignity, seeks love, and raises children. Let us turn to this wealth of our life, full of passions and

Lecture 1THE WAYS OF GOOD AND EVIL

Zolotukhina-Abolina Elena Vsevolodovna graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of Rostov State University in 1975.

Currently he is a Doctor of Philosophy (since 1990), professor at the Department of History of Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology, Faculty of Philosophy, Russian State University. Academician of the Academy of Humanities.

Elena Vsevolodovna works in line with philosophical anthropology, ethics, and existential problems of philosophy. She is currently very interested in the topic of consciousness. It was precisely the existential-ethical issues and questions about working with human consciousness that led her to the subject of psychotherapy.

When some time ago I was offered to take part in writing a book on psychotherapy, I doubted and thought about it.

Indeed, I am not a psychotherapist and not his patient, therefore, I am not in that complex interaction from within which it is most natural to discuss the topic of therapy.

Moreover, in relation to psychotherapy, I have neither passionate love nor active rejection, which would allow me, waving an intellectual weapon, to defend a specific position: either “Hurray!” psychotherapists, or “Atu!” their.

I am a philosopher, that is, a being in some way detached, reflexive-critical, the same one who, squinting his eye, evaluates: “On the one hand, it is, of course, so, but, on the other, it, apparently, like that..."

Having thought in this way, I realized that my practical weaknesses (lack of predilections and personal experience of communicating with psychotherapists), perhaps, oddly enough, would only benefit the work proposed to me. Even without me, there will be people who, with all the fervor of their hearts, will glorify psychotherapy or accuse it of worthlessness. My task is to try to be an “arbiter”, to look at psychotherapy through the eyes of a philosopher, to take into account all the pros and cons, to identify the conditions and limitations under which working with the human soul produces grain and not chaff.

Is psychotherapy good? The good one is good, and the bad one is very bad. It is only important to distinguish the first from the second. But it is precisely this question that often remains unclear.

It is also worth deciding on the following questions:

Who really needs professional help from a therapist?

From what condition and to what state do people come (should come) as a result of treatment?

What, in theory, should a psychotherapist be like in order for him to help a person and not harm him?

Are all current and generally accepted methods good for different human characters?

What worldview concepts are especially “psychotherapeutic”?

How do modern press and television affect our psychological health?

Can a person act as a psychotherapist for himself and how can specialists help him with this?

The following discussion is devoted to the discussion of these subjects. Of course, there are no final answers to the questions posed, and there cannot be, but I will consider my task completed if I at least draw the contours of possible solutions.

According to the generally accepted point of view, neurotic people come to see a psychotherapist. The word "neurotic", born along with psychoanalysis and closely associated with psychotherapy, has become widely known throughout the world in recent decades. Jokes like “daily neuroticism depletes the body” are very popular in intellectual circles, where a considerable part of the public half-jokingly asks: “Who among us is not like that?”

A neurotic person is usually represented as a nervous, anxious subject, sometimes gloomy, sometimes hysterical, wringing his hands, conflicting with others, drowning in inappropriate reactions, sometimes suspicious, sometimes clinging to others like a leech. In general, a rather unpleasant person. Although suffering.

At the same time, neuroticism is considered a kind of symptom of originality and subtlety of perception. “Artists are neurotic... Scientists? - Yes, crazy, by golly... And politicians... - all as one “with greetings”! Just look: that one twirls and twists his little hands, and this one drinks at night - he solves internal conflicts, and the most famous one, you’ve heard, has an Oedipus complex!”

However, don’t be arrogant! The domestic working class, together with the former collective farm peasantry, is also not devoid of neuroticism these days. Because they feel bad, disgusting, disgusting, and very often they don’t want to live...

We can say that the word “neurotic”, which arose in foreign lands, became in the “damned days” of the turn of the millennium an everyday characteristic not only of the “average Western person”, but also of our person, who previously seemed whole and mentally pure. But was he ever pure and whole? Maybe this is nothing more than a myth... One has only to open our favorite novels by Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, and a whole psychoneurological sanatorium will appear, a series of illustrations for the later works of S. Freud, E. Berne, K. Horney. Ambivalent passions, groundless fears, manic aspirations, overvalued ideas, satanic pride and sacrificial love - we fully find all this in the classic of Russian literature. And let us note that for the most part we are not talking about clinical cases at all, but about ordinary people from ordinary Russian cities - about philistines, nobles, commoners... The modern neurotic is just as diverse and many-sided, he can be found in all social strata, and, as and before, when he was still nameless, he sheds his tears, sometimes visible, sometimes invisible to the world.

So, neurotics are, in the minds of the mass consciousness, a whole army of variegated people who suffer mentally and, willingly or unwillingly, turn their lives and the lives of their loved ones into a good rehearsal for the underworld.

It is worth noting that we are not talking about those people who suffered a one-time blow in life, a personal catastrophe or an everyday shock. Even non-professionals, who are very far from psychotherapeutic problems, perceive the difference between the grief that befalls a person, which must be overcome with courage, and the creeping internal infection, drop by drop, poisoning a seemingly normal and successful person’s days and nights, hours of work and rest. Neuroticism is a long-term condition, difficult to overcome; it is a chronic psychological illness, often having its source in long-forgotten impressions of a not-so-rosy childhood. We can say that in ordinary consciousness, a neurotic is a person who is somehow psychologically flawed, broken, internally dysfunctional. And, of course, he needs help. Another question is where and how he can get it.

The Western neurotic has been carefully paying money for a century, visiting his psychoanalyst or psychotherapist, and undergoing training in support or development groups. Our native Russian visits the few specialists less often, he confesses to friends and relatives, drinks vodka and reads books, hoping to find in them the answer to his painful questions. But one way or another, everyone is looking to alleviate their internal discomfort, because it is difficult to live with pain in the soul and problems in fate.

Having sketched in a few strokes the portrait of a neurotic as he has developed in the eyes of the unenlightened public, let’s try in more detail and taking into account the opinions of professionals to understand which people really need psychotherapeutic help and why. Let us conditionally divide them into three groups.

The first group is people who are experiencing an internal crisis in one form or another. (For example, war, disaster, terrorist attack, loss of loved ones, being in captivity or in a concentration camp, enduring great suffering.) They are not neurotic, but they may well become one if they do not receive psychological help in time.

Unfortunately, we know too well that almost everyone who fought in Afghanistan and Chechnya needs professional psychotherapy, restoration of psychological balance, and new strategies for adapting to life.

This is a sacred and necessary matter. I know that these days a psychotherapist goes to identify the bodies of the dead along with the parents looking for their sons. And the same psychotherapist works with young soldiers who returned from combat zones wounded and shell-shocked. He helps them recover quickly so that they can either return to the front line or be able to build a new life “in civilian life.”

Of course, one can object to this that in past wars, which humanity has endured a lot, there were no psychotherapists, and they survived and coped with nothing. We managed, of course. But at what cost? The question of price is very important here. And then, who counted the number of those who “couldn’t cope”: they became drunk, became depressed, went crazy, and suffered a nervous breakdown for the rest of their lives? The image of a gloomy, wounded warrior, furious, fitful, truly “half-man” runs through many literary works.

In fact, some people cope with both injuries and illnesses on their own and survive no matter what. However, this does not mean that there is no need to treat or care for anyone.

In addition, in the old days, “psychotherapeutic work” with people in crisis was partly carried out by priests. But this was possible only with a sufficiently widespread and deep religiosity, which has long been absent in our days.

The second group is people who have been spared by wars, earthquakes and disasters. Their psychological crisis is personal in nature and may seem almost groundless to the outside eye. This is unhappy love, broken hopes, life plans collapsed due to some circumstances. This is disappointment in yourself - your abilities and capabilities. Once upon a time there lived a man, everything went according to his mind, the line of fate was woven without any particular problems, and suddenly it turned out that he was not able to realize his plans, that his dreams were unrealistic, his efforts were in vain. And the person “goes into a tailspin,” becomes depressed, loses self-confidence, and sees the world in black.

It must be said that crises of this kind are often actually resolved by the “course of life” itself, without the intervention of specialists. But only in those cases when they are not too deep and do not undermine the very foundations of personality. Then gradually, with the tactful support of loved ones, the victim restores an optimistic worldview, lost self-esteem, begins to acquire new hopes and make new plans. What if the trauma was too deep? Then mental wounds must be carefully treated by a specialist doctor who will help the patient avoid such possible desperate decisions as suicide, self-harm, attempt on someone else’s life, passion for the idea of ​​\u200b\u200brevenge, or, on the contrary, will give the opportunity to overcome the constraining apathy.

The third group is people with possible crises, such as the transition from childhood to adolescence or the onset of old age (and, first of all, social old age, when a person moves away from usual activities). However, we will not dwell in detail on this issue, which is widely discussed in books devoted to human age.

The second group of people are neurotics themselves, the very people with whose research and treatment 3. Freud began his work. Perhaps neurotics once suffered a crisis situation or simply a separate private shock. Perhaps they were influenced by events in early childhood or the general course of life. But be that as it may, these are people suffering primarily from functional disorders that have no apparent somatic causes.

A person may stutter, lie in paralysis, suffer from facial tics or hysterical vomiting, and may have numerous “creeping” disorders of various organs for which ordinary doctors cannot find any explanation. The patient seems to be healthy, but at the same time sick. The psychotherapist looks for the hidden causes of the disease in the patient’s unconscious, reveals the latent connection between psychology and physiology, reveals and presents to consciousness those pathological connections that once formed between emotions and the functioning of different body systems. Thus, a person who was frightened by a dog in early childhood may then faint throughout his life at any sound reminiscent of barking. Or an internal protest against the need to do an unloved job - teaching at school - makes the would-be teacher completely lose his voice all the time. And no matter how many times the poor fellow goes to the otolaryngologist, he will not get rid of aphonia until he changes the nature of his activity.

Psychosomatic disorders, fears, phobias that prevent a person from leading a normal life are the most important field of activity of psychotherapy, which operates here using a whole arsenal of various techniques - from classical psychoanalysis with its free flow of associations to bodily therapy and neurolinguistic programming. It is quite obvious that this kind of problem cannot be solved by “life itself,” by friends, acquaintances and relatives. We are no longer talking about bandaging mental wounds. Received a long time ago, they seemed to have healed, but left scars and adhesions, ugly scars that deform a person’s emotions and will. The whole point is that without the help of a specialist, a neurotic sufferer will never understand the causes of his own ailments, the illnesses that plague him, behavioral disruptions, and sudden panic. And if he doesn’t understand, he won’t be able to influence the reason that is giving rise to his troubles with excellent stability.

We know very well that if our friend has a fear of heights, and already on the third floor he begins to break out in cold sweat and tremble, it is absurd to repeat to him a hundred and fifty times: “Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid.” It is also absurd to ridicule or tease him; words lose their meaning in these cases. There are known situations where people with similar phobias tried to overcome them by “going for it,” for example, going on a mountaineering trip despite their fear. Such experiences, as a rule, end in tears, because the owner of the phobia not only falls into the abyss himself, but also pulls others along with him.

Real long-term neurotic disorders, rooted in the darkness of past years, can only be cured by specialists.

The third group - and this is the largest group - cannot establish relations with the world and fate, suffering desperately from this. It is they who constitute in the mass consciousness the image of the “neurotic personality of our time” (K. Horney’s term).

We can say that now these are the main visitors of psychotherapists, although specialists do not always call them neurotics. They talk about "neurotic behavior." A person with neurotic behavior turns into a real neurotic when the painful principle begins to dominate undividedly, crushing every sensible decision and life itself.

Based on the opinion of Western psychotherapists and psychoanalytic theorists (E. Fromm, K. Horney, E. Bern, etc.), we can derive a number of external symptoms of a neurotic state that indicate to us the need for professional correction of the individual’s inner world:

Hidden and obvious anxiety and fear towards the world and towards people, a deep-seated lack of self-confidence, taking various compensatory forms, “basic mistrust”, inability to fully enjoy life. This inability to enjoy real, open, living relationships causes neurotics to derive dubious pleasure from the negative reactions of other people.

This type of relationship is perfectly described by E. Berne in his books about the “games” that poison human communication. I would add that neurotic joys are subject to the principle: “In the absence of toilet paper, we use sandpaper.”

Self-alienation: long-term and stable rejection of oneself or complete uncritical self-justification and self-aggrandizement (identifying oneself with an ideal).

Here we are talking about cruel “samoyeds”, always cursing their own imperfections, and narcissistic Narcissists, believing that they are always “comme il faut”. And if society often openly condemns the latter or questions their pride, the former are sometimes poeticized, especially here in Russia, where they love “eternal dissatisfaction with oneself,” ignoring its openly neurotic character.

Inability to love, inability to build more or less harmonious relationships, the desire for complete possession of another person or for complete submission to him. Painful attachments or rapid destruction of any human union.

There is a lot of “unhappy love” all around us. This may be unrequited love for another person who has rejected the lover (more often the lover). However, the lover does not deviate from her goal and pursues the poor “victim of love” even to the North Pole... The neurotic nature of such “passion” is obvious.

This can be love-dominance and love-slavery, when an outwardly peaceful married life is in fact a hidden copy of the relationship between a prisoner and a jailer.

Endless mutual insults, mania for betrayal, irrepressible suspicion - all these are features of hidden neurosis, as well as inveterate coldness and panicky fear of attachments.

Lack of flexible strategies in behavior. Blindness, rigidity in pursuing one behavioral line. A neurotic is one who repeatedly, with unenviable persistence in this case, “steps on the same rake.”

One neurotic always strives to dominate, without knowing who he is dealing with. The other constantly suppresses himself in the name of other people's interests. The third invariably suspects others of aggression and hides his “I”, even where it is completely unnecessary and only interferes with contact: in friendship, love, relationships that cannot exist without trust. The motto of a neurotic is: “What can you do, that’s how I am!”

The manic monotony of strategy and tactics leads to the fact that traumatic situations are repeated all the time, leading to increasing melancholy and depression. So, some neurotics always quarrel with their superiors, regardless of the latter’s character, others always marry alcoholics or marry prostitutes, someone countless times finds themselves in the position of “scapegoat”. As E. Bern shows, people are often guided by “neurotic scenarios” that fetter their freedom. Where a “normal person” quickly takes non-trivial steps, the neurotic will stubbornly break through the same wall with his forehead.

However, at some point, realizing the dead end of the chosen path, he may try to use a different strategy. However, this will not give him peace of mind and a soft solution to the problem: the two strategies will collide like rams on a narrow bridge, knocking sparks out of each other’s horns. In this case, a person constantly experiences a feeling of guilt due to “betrayal of himself” and inconsistently rushes from one type of behavior to another, which completely confuses his communication partners. Today I love and repent for no reason, tomorrow I fall into aggression for no reason... And so all the time. An extremely tedious form of communication.

It should be noted that neurotic behavior is a contagious thing in the literal sense of the word. If there is a severe neurotic next to you, who sincerely shivers every day from one strategy to another, you will soon find that you begin to be drawn into the “logic” of his behavior. You will begin to put up barriers to protect yourself from another injury, etc. Your own behavior will cease to be calm, open and friendly, no matter how much you like your neurotic friend. Neurotic relationships develop that can involve both two participants and larger groups of people.

A dramatic feature of the neurotic state, which usually complicates the recognition of neurosis and its overcoming, is the truly satanic pride of neurotics and their idealization of their own image of “I”. A neurotic thinks of himself as perfect, corresponding to the ideal, godlike, and considers it impossible, unbearable, and shameful to deviate from the ideal image. Hence his hatred of his real existence, full of imperfection.

“...The ideal image of a neurotic,” writes K. Horney, “not only creates in him a false belief in his value and his significance; he is rather like Frankenstein's monster, which over time devours all the best forces of its creator. In the end, it takes away both a person’s attraction to development and his desire to realize his capabilities. This means that the person is no longer interested in approaching his problems realistically or outgrowing them and revealing what lies within him; he is now tied to the actualization of his ideal “Own Self” (Horney K. Neurosis and Personal Growth. St. Petersburg, 1997. P. 306.).

The loss of the joy of life and the loss of its meaning.

The topic of “noogenic neuroses” was actively studied in the 20th century by Viktor Frankl, the founder of the field of logotherapy or, in other words, meaning therapy. It was he who drew attention to a special type of neurosis in people who are sufficiently well-fed, rich and well-established - a loss of the meaning of life, the experience of meaninglessness, leading from depression of moderate severity to crimes and suicides.

Of course, an ordinary healthy person is not always in a rosy mood. It is known that the one who is always clear is most likely just stupid. However, a normal individual, having become sad and bored, soon returns to his usual cheerful business mood, his desire to live, achieve goals, and enjoy the world and people awakens again. A neurotic person falls into a quagmire of melancholy and meaninglessness for an indefinitely long period of time and is unable to get out of it. We need special help, a guiding thread, by grasping which you can return to the light and joy of life.

It is worth noting that all three categories of neurotic conditions, including their mildest and most common forms, more similar to character traits, are corrected using two well-known methods, based, relatively speaking, on the “deep” and “apex” (V. Frankl’s term) psychology. A specialist psychotherapist must be able to access the recesses of the unconscious, descend into the bottomless mine of dreams, forgotten impressions, secret desires (depth psychology) and rise to the heights of the patient’s highest meanings, his main goals and values ​​(apex psychology).

How do psychologists, philosophers and psychotherapists explain the large number of neurotics and neurotic relationships in modern society?

Most of them emphasize that a sick person and a sick society are the essence of unity. E. Fromm and A. Maslow talk about this; we can find similar thoughts in other authors. However, within the framework of our topic, we cannot go into the question of social diseases, which, in essence, accompany the entire history of mankind (it’s probably not for nothing that K. Marx called it just prehistory). Now we are interested in the main character - a modern neurotic, a patient of a psychotherapist, very close to you and me (We will continue to use the term “neurotic”, although the conversation will mainly focus on the third category of psychotherapist’s visitors.).

What are the roots of neuroses, especially the third group we have identified? What must happen to an individual - to you, to me, to someone else - so that a healthy, integral, dynamically developing relationship with the world turns into a bunch of spasms and problems?

A. Maslow answers these questions in a certain way. He believes that a normal healthy person has a group of basic needs, those without the satisfaction of which he could not exist and develop. This:

1. Physiological needs (the need to eat, drink, move, realize the sexual instinct, be protected from cold and heat, rest, etc.).

2. The need for security (to be protected from attacks on life and health, to feel supported by some order, law, to have guarantees).

3. The need for belonging and love (essentially, this is the need for communication, but communication with a “plus” sign: to have a social circle, acquaintances, friends, loving people).

4. The need for recognition (the desire to assert oneself in achieving goals, to be confident, independent, free, to have status, the attention of others, to be recognized and known).

5. The need for self-actualization (engage in activities, work, create, develop oneself, learn and invent new things, receive aesthetic joys, influence the development of other people, win in sports, etc.).

According to Maslow, these needs form a hierarchy, where physiology and vital aspects are at the core, and creativity and self-realization are the “top floor”. “The upper” does not stand without the “lower”: before creating and asserting oneself, one must at least not die of hunger or cold.

However, a significant defect in satisfying any group of needs leads to neuroticism of the individual. “...I declare with all directness and sharpness,” writes A. Maslow, “that we must consider a person unsatisfied in any of the basic needs as a sick or at least “subhuman” person. Nothing stops us when we call people sick who suffer from a lack of vitamins and microelements. But who said that a lack of love is less harmful to the body than a lack of vitamins? (Maslow A. Motivation and personality. M., 1999. P. 104.)

Hunger and poverty, lack of security, the position of an outcast in a group or society, mental loneliness, contempt of others, lack of field for self-affirmation and self-realization make a person neurotic.

In addition, the “technology” of satisfying basic needs may be deformed or disrupted for some specific reason.

The need impulses that a person experiences are in this case suppressed, misdirected, confused with each other, or chosen the wrong means.

Thus, the need for human intimacy and love under the influence of cultural attitudes can be suppressed and turned into a fanatical love for God while ignoring real people (Christian Europe at one time gave many similar examples of “religious neurosis”).

The need for self-actualization often receives a distorted direction, turning into a need for power over other people and pushing them around.

The need to aggressively attack others camouflages fear of life and the desire for maximum security, and the lack of respect and acceptance from others is compensated by neurotic gluttony or buying hysteria. In this latter case, they try to plug the “hole” that has arisen in the soul due to the lack of truly human relationships with material values ​​or prestigious symbols.

In fact, what psychologists call neurotic needs is formed. They are obsessive (compulsive) and dictate inflexible, one-sided and conflicting strategies to the individual.

A person has an imperious need to humiliate himself or humiliate others, to always dominate or always submit, to flee from reality under various pretexts or to aggressively bite into it, regardless of real circumstances. Irrational demonstrativeness and hoarding, as well as the desire to constantly please one’s own “I” at the expense of “psychological gains,” become a powerful need. Often “psychological gains” are gained through self-humiliation if you manage to make your communication partner feel guilty.

The problem is that most people with neurotic behavior are not even aware that they are neurotic and that their needs are unhealthy. They simply feel irritated and unhappy, suffer from communication difficulties, quarrel with loved ones, get divorced, make scandals and believe that the “imperfections of the world” are to blame for all this. However, sometimes they claim that they themselves are to blame for everything, but without analyzing the nature of the guilt, such statements also turn out to be nothing more than a form of masochistic neurosis.

We can say that people often come to a psychotherapist not because they really want to change themselves, but because they are waiting for tips on how to better cope with this stubborn life: how to influence others, expand their capabilities, perhaps learn to manipulate others - partners in business, bosses, subordinates, friends... They come to a psychotherapist in the same way as to a witch or fortune teller: cast a spell, open your eyes, tell me what will happen... They feel bad, and they are looking for, in the words of E. Berne, a “magical deliverer” , they want a miracle.

But this is precisely the special mission of the psychotherapist: to show the patient how to understand and change himself. And for this he needs the patient’s help and cooperation.

A psychotherapist is not a magician, not a sorcerer, and not a “magical deliverer”; he cannot wave a magic wand so that today or tomorrow all the troubles of our suffering neurotic will be resolved. But he not only helps to cope with a one-time, even difficult problem (although he also has techniques and methods for this case), but also gives a person an arsenal of means to influence his own character, habits and attitudes, transform his attitude and experience of the world. A patient who has undergone successful therapy should think and feel differently - better, more productive, more harmonious.

At the same time, the psychotherapist does not indulge in soul-saving conversations, which we heard enough from teachers at school, but skillfully guides his ward through the difficult roads of his personal experience. This includes travel to the past, and analysis of current current experiences, and peeking into plans and dreams. Just as Horace led Dante along the paths of hellish and heavenly spaces, allowing him to personally experience and feel all the tragic and happy encounters, so the psychotherapist leads the patient along the paths of the conscious and unconscious. This can be an individual or group trip, but the standard result of such excursions is a healthy and happy person.

So, we tried to answer the question of who needs psychotherapy. However, another problem arises: what should be understood by a “normal, healthy person”? What do psychological norms and health mean?

It is not so easy to answer this question briefly. And here we must again turn for help to philosophizing psychologists and psychotherapists - E. Fromm, A. Maslow, K. Horney.

In almost all of these authors we find the idea that the usual meaning of the term “normal” should be reconsidered. Typically, “normal” means “average” or “common.” But in modern society we can often meet twitchy, embittered, inconsistent people. It seems that in our turbulent times, pathology has begun to take the place of the norm, but this does not make it any easier for the suffering people themselves.

Another meaning of the word “normal” is tradition, established stereotypes of behavior that are considered normal. From the point of view of society, it is normal to obey public opinion, even if it is essentially wrong, it is normal to act according to a pattern, it is normal to show aggression, to suffer from a guilt complex, and to do a lot of other things that bring a person nothing but personal degradation.

Both senses of the word “normal” do not indicate a healthy, happy person. They tell us nothing at all about the qualities and capabilities of a person, about the characteristics of his nature. In contrast, humanistic psychology, raising the question of a “normal, healthy person,” speaks about his nature.

Human nature is characterized here as open to development and self-improvement, to realizing all the best inclinations and abilities. For A. Maslow, human health presupposes self-actualization, K. Horney calls it self-realization, E. Fromm calls it productivity.

Healthy and normal turns out to be only those who are not closed in on themselves, who do not run away from life, who are not swaddled in a network of fears and anxieties that force them to cling to others or to their illusory refuge. A healthy person is open to the world, communication, and self-understanding. Only he is completely normal who, while remaining himself, nevertheless is not afraid of change, boldly looks into the eyes of time, lives fully and joyfully and builds, if possible, good and harmonious relationships with the people around him. Power does not make his head spin, self-humiliation does not attract him, he has no desire to torment others or suffer himself. A truly healthy normal person easily acts according to the situation, freely changes strategies, but at the same time is benevolent and selfless in his attitude towards the world, that is, he is quite moral.

In a psychologically healthy individual, which, in theory, any neurotic who wants to improve his life can become, at least three pairs of points must be balanced.

Self-preservation is development.

Self-preservation is the most important task of a person; without fulfilling it, he simply cannot live. Feelings such as fear, anxiety, apprehension, proactive aggression, various strategies for self-protection from possible physical and mental injuries are normal mechanisms that ensure the ability to survive.

However, if experiences and attitudes related to self-preservation become dominant, a person stops developing. He spends all his strength either on deep defense or on an attack, the object of which becomes the intended enemy. No less than self-preservation, a person needs development: improvement of one’s strengths, which is impossible without interaction with others, risk when encountering new events and circumstances, moments of self-test. Development occurs only in overcoming, and any overcoming - be it a mountaineering trip, defending new scientific ideas or political activity - requires courage, flexibility and the desire to understand partners. New love or friendship also carries risks - you may not be accepted! - but without such new relationships, life becomes meager and poor.

Only a fluid balance of the desire for self-preservation and the desire for development ensures psychological health.

Adaptation is self-actualization.

It would be stupid to say that a person does not need to adapt to the world. A person must, in a certain sense, “go with the flow” so that the mighty stream of life and social events does not sweep him away. All the sages of the past - from the Taoists to Spinoza and Hegel - tell us that we must submit to the great Necessity, which is expressed, among other things, in the real structure of society, culture, in its laws, norms and values. In the words of K. Marx, a person cannot live in society and be free from society. He is simply forced to reckon with objective conditions that dictate to him a number of strict behavioral prohibitions and moral and psychological commands.

That is why traditional psychology considered the individual who is well adapted to social life to be normal. Such a person does not “fall out of line”; she is functional and does not create unnecessary problems. True, a person’s internal well-being turns out to be not very significant in this case. Break yourself, but adapt! Waste your talents, but do not contradict your surroundings! Treating a neurotic meant “bringing him to a common denominator” with other people. But is this enough for health and happiness?

Obviously not, as E. Fromm and A. Maslow drew attention to. The adaptation itself only hews the individual according to a socially given standard, a rigid matrix, and this matrix is ​​not at all perfect. At all times, society has been cruel, authoritarian, and full of vices. Even today it suppresses talents and supports mediocrity, approves of lies and servility, often trampling on independence and honesty. That is why a person should not stop only at the adaptation phase. If possible, without entering into acute conflict with the environment, he, nevertheless, should strive to develop all the best potentialities inherent in him. Self-actualization is the second side of the coin, without which each of us risks remaining just a faceless puppet of other people's opinions and manipulative actions.

Self-actualization - the manifestation of individual, unique abilities - gives the individual the opportunity to vividly perceive reality and establish his own, and therefore comfortable, relationships with it. Getting out from under a pile of rigid external norms, a person becomes natural and spontaneous, he acquires internal autonomy and freedom, looks at things with a fresh look, and turns out to be capable of high mystical experiences and true democracy in communication. He is moral, but tolerant and does not lose his sense of humor. A self-actualized person is not afraid to be original, not afraid to be himself.

The harmonious relationship between freedom and dependence, respect for cultural institutions and our own potentials ultimately gives us a healthy and joyful being, capable of realizing our unique traits and talents without conflict. Realism is the ability to be creative. Undoubtedly, a healthy person should look at life realistically, without self-deception, empty dreams and illusions caused by the desire to escape from reality. A healthy person will not intoxicate himself with alcohol and drugs, run into the ghostly world of endless meditations, or go into fantasies about the non-existent. He lives in empirical reality, obeys the laws of the everyday world, slightly enlightened by science, and is guided by practical goals, which he achieves with passion and tenacity.

However, human realism should not be photographic naturalism, a flat and boring recording of everyday worries. “Too much realism” leads to futility, routine, and then to deep boredom and depression. Therefore, a healthy normal person needs not only a sober view of life, but also a poetic, fantasy, dreamer view. The moment of creativity, penetrating into all layers of everyday life - from simple communication to the creation of new works of art and new discoveries - truly makes a person human, gives him wings, opens up new perspectives for him, sets before him previously unknown goals.

A skillfully maintained balance between “realism” and “creativity” makes us truly happy.

So, in order for us to be healthy and happy, quite a lot is needed. Psychotherapists are ready to introduce us to something.

However, will they always be able to correctly assess the patient’s problem and give him the right clue? Doesn't the sufferer receive in return some problems - others that are no better than the previous ones?

Among the visitors to psychotherapists, a large percentage are “Lovely women,” that is, women aged thirty-five years and older. Among them are many who are single, divorced, or who are faced with conflicts in their families and at work that they are unable to resolve on their own. Many of them can be called, using the figurative language of psychotherapist E. Berne, “frogs”, since they consider themselves losers, although they rebel against this state of affairs.

Such women feel that they cannot influence circumstances, since their own character greatly prevents them from doing so. They seem to attract unfavorable situations, are constantly in a state of depression, uncertainty, rushing about like teenagers, not being able to find support in anything. At some particularly acute moment, friends suggest to such a nervous and exhausted friend: “You should go to a psychotherapist...” And she goes to find confidence and peace, to find a better “I” and harmonize the world around her. However, on this path - a path associated with changing life attitudes and reshaping consciousness - serious dangers await her.

To make the difficulties of a middle-aged woman who wished to find a new “I” in such mature years more obvious to us, let us turn to the experience of a certain “Nice woman” with problems. On the advice of friends, she came to save herself from herself in the psychotherapeutic group of Professor N, hereafter referred to simply as Professor and received among his colleagues the nickname of the Furious Interpreter (of course, of psychoanalytic ideas). This “dear woman” recently celebrated her fortieth anniversary. She is really sweet, intelligent and like two peas in a pod to any of the heroines of Victoria Tokareva’s stories. That is, this is our dear Russian woman, who got married very late and divorced very early, is raising a child alone, adapting to commercial structures, where she is still regularly bullied, reads thick literary magazines that are still not extinct, and dreams of being in her forties. about a prince on a white horse. The prince, of course, is not going. Not enough money. My son is being beaten by everyone in kindergarten. And mom and dad help, but not enough, because they live on the other side of the city. And so she goes to a psychotherapist so that the world would not be so impossibly black and so that she could survive without a prince.

She goes and agrees to pay, even if she regularly borrows and repays debts, just to get out of chronic depression, which is completely impossible to come to terms with.

What does the doctor tell her? What does the psychotherapy group she is in tell her? Not necessarily directly, but in the language of metaphors, views, the whole atmosphere of the lesson? They tell her: “We will make you the way you need. The devil himself will not be your brother. You will become free from all the chains that your past life has hung on you. And if everyone else doesn’t understand you, then it doesn’t matter. The main thing is that we understand each other here! We are dedicated. We live correctly, but they are all there on the street - incorrectly. You are now ours. You will learn scientific truth." This manipulation, which, like any manipulation, begins with the assertion of the “unique truth” and bullying of the uninitiated (or, on the contrary, an attempt to convert them to one’s faith).

The first step that needs to be taken is to admit that your entire previous life was lived incorrectly. “I didn’t live like that. I had the wrong view of the world." This is an act characteristic of any conversion to a new faith. Reject the self of yesterday, cross out the past experience that just seemed unshakable and the only possible one. “I must learn to live in a new way, give up old illusions, loosen the old clamps, untie those Gordian knots that it seemed could only be cut,” make a new psychological birth, come into the world without blinders that have grown over decades, see reality in the radiance of its pristine purity. In itself, such a task does not contain anything bad. It is humanistic, purifying. However, how many wonderful tasks were not realized due to the clumsiness of the performers, their excessive pragmatism or “holy simplicity”!

So, the cancellation of past experience and its value rethinking can be different. Obviously, first of all, the task is to see the roots of one’s negative impressions of the world, to understand the source of suffering, to which, of course, the entire previous life did not come down.

Re-evaluating the personal past requires building a bridge between the past and the future, which is conceived as a radical renewal. But the pathos of negativity can be very strong, the thirst for liberation from a difficult condition forces a person to become an extremist in relation to his own past, and if the psychotherapist is not attentive enough, not subtle enough, then he gets a patient who has crossed out himself. A person who sees only blackness in his yesterday, and becomes harsh and unfair. He does not recover because he continues to suffer. The very admission that you “wasted most of your life” can cause the darkest melancholy. But the question is immediately raised (very characteristic of our national thought!): “Who is to blame?” It cannot be that recognizing one’s own consciousness as a “distorting mirror” would do without searching for the culprit. And psychoanalytic theory finds it. According to the concept of E. Bern, this is an ugly life “script” that is given to a growing child by his parents.

“The “script,” writes E. Bern, “are artificial systems that limit spontaneous creative human aspirations... The script is like a “matte screen” that many parents place between the child and the outside world (and himself) and which the child grows up , protects, keeps safe and sound... “The Martian” (as E. Berne calls a person capable of an “unblinded look.” - Author) is able to wipe the foggy windows and therefore sees a little better" (E. Berne. People who play in games. M., 1988. P. 337. 107). Berne lists a number of unfavorable life “scenarios”. He gives them names: “Pink Riding Hood, or the Dowry Girl,” “Sisyphus, or Start Over,” “Little Miss Betty, or You Can’t Scare Me!” etc. All these are “scenarios of losers, dooming their carriers to severe ordeals, drunkenness, suicide, and an unsettled life. In addition to typical “scenarios,” Bern gives many examples of specific parental prohibitions and instructions that disfigured the lives of children and determined their life path until old age. Thus, the blame for the unsuccessful lives of children is one way or another attributed to the parents. Willingly or unwittingly, they turn out to be the “fate” of their offspring, since the “scenario”, according to Berne, is a thing difficult to overcome, even if you start to behave “the other way around”, you will still dance from your “scenario”, like from a stove or rush between “script” and “anti-script”. E. Bern's theory and his “scenario analysis” are now very popular in the psychotherapeutic environment and are widely used.

The “dear woman” who comes to the Professor thus very soon learns that, firstly, she has never really lived, and secondly, that her parents are to blame for this. How does she behave in this situation? First, he plunges even deeper into the abyss of his own troubles and desperately denigrates all the days of his childhood, youth and youth. All this was “untrue.” She could never relax, she was always squeezed, there was not a single bright ray in her past. They fed her tastelessly, gave her bad gifts, and restricted her freedom in everything. It is possible that something similar sometimes happened, but now, in memory, past discomfort takes on a universal scale and begins to obscure the horizon. They changed her diapers the wrong way and introduced complexes into her head with strict instructions. Gradually, the “Sweet Woman” becomes ferocious and moves from self-pity to rage at her parents’ argument. Since her parents are alive and well, it is quite possible to express to them your “boiling” feelings. And a little earlier or a little later this will certainly happen. Now the older generation is receiving a solid portion of reproaches and accusations of “wrong upbringing” (and now you are also disfiguring my son, yes, yes, yes!!!). Accordingly, the grandmother goes to bed with a heart attack, the grandfather shouts the sacramental phrase: “She gave birth herself, raise her herself!”, the child crawls under the sofa and howls offended from there. After that, everyone sulks for a long time, walking around with their lips pursed. “Dear woman” is finally confirmed in the opinion that “all my troubles are from them.” Evil begets evil.

Here is one of the scenes playing out in a family, where the pointing finger of a smug Professor penetrated, not bothering himself with details and nuances.

It’s good if you started reading “Dear Woman” yourself. True, now she devotes almost all her free time to this, playing with herself the game “Psychiatry” described by the same E. Bern. She compares her childhood impressions with what is described in smart books, delves into her past this way and that, looks for complexes in all her relatives down to the seventh generation, and spends hours poring over diagrams depicting her own “subpersonalities” (to the strange magical terms “victim” and “deliverer” is something everyone we know is already used to). However, when reading books, she reads into them what was poorly conveyed to her by the intellectual guru. In addition, reading various literature helps to think for oneself, which, in general, is not provided for by “group pressure” therapy.

So, reading and thinking, you can find that parental programming is still not such an all-consuming thing as it is presented by E. Berne. Explaining all the failures of your adult existence with parental instructions laid down in childhood is simply running away from responsibility to yourself, trying to shift your share of the blame onto someone else. J.-P. Sartre believed that the unconscious, hysterical attacks, unbridled passions are just a big joke, where we put on a performance in front of ourselves and in front of others in order to abandon the freedom that weighs us down. It is likely that Sartre is too radical, and the person deserves softer and more lenient treatment. However, another author, psychiatrist and psychotherapist Viktor Frankl, whose humanism there is no reason to doubt, emphasizes our fundamental freedom in relation to circumstances: “As for the environment, here too it turns out that it does not define a person. The influence of the environment depends more on what a person makes of it, how he relates to it.<…>Man is least of all a product of heredity and environment: man ultimately decides for himself!”

That is why a forty-year-old woman looks wild, bitterly blaming her own mother for the “incorrect “scenario” laid down before the age of five.” And you, my dear, what did you do for the next thirty-five?

But the point is not only that the individual himself is free to start working on himself at any moment and change those life guidelines that become obstacles to his development. Even if we assume that due to lack of reflexivity, lack of volitional qualities, or out of ignorance, a person has never worked on his inner “I”, he still, having realized the childhood origins of grievances, should not reproach anyone. Reproach is continued suffering. The same “generating evil” that we have already talked about. Recovery is about forgiving. This idea is developed in detail in the psychotherapeutic teachings of Louise Hay. Following the arguments expressed by her in favor of forgiveness, our domestic doctor, representative of the direction of integral psychotherapy E. Tsvetkov writes: “We scold and punish ourselves in the same way as our parents scolded and punished us. We love ourselves in the same way we were loved when we were children. However, I don't blame my parents for this. We are all victims of victims, and they (our parents) could not teach us what they themselves did not know. Ask your parents about their childhood and you will understand them better, and if you listen with compassion you will understand the origin of their fear and their attitude towards life. The people who 'made you suffer' were just as scared as you are now."

"Scenario analysis", if it is done, obviously should be designed in such a way that it immediately teaches forgiveness (although this is very, very difficult). Parents - living or already gone - must be accepted by a person, despite all the "negativity" that they may have brought with their educational efforts. Accepted and forgiven. And at the same time, all that good and good that certainly was in our past has been rehabilitated and re-illuminated. This is the only way out of the darkness.

The second bastion after parental programming, which the Furious Interpreter wished to attack, is the collectivist attitudes of consciousness associated with the concept of duty. By the way, it is they who often form the core of the parental “program”, under which the impressionable soul bends. Freedom from them is the key to success. “You are too dependent on others! They are putting pressure on you! You serve others and forget about yourself! Don't be society's toy! Don't be a family puppet! Be yourself!"

Oh, if only, if only you knew exactly what it is to be yourself? I bow to those who truly know their true, genuine, authentic "I"!

The idea of ​​the true “I” and the intrinsic value of free independent manifestation is the central point of psychoanalysis. It is especially clearly represented in the works of E. Fromm. Fromm shows how people fear freedom and how they run away from it, because it brings with it loneliness and fear. At the same time, freedom for Fromm is the highest value. In isolation from others, an adult solves all his problems with the power of his own mind and feelings. In my opinion, Fromm’s panegyric to freedom at some moments generally takes us beyond the boundaries of human relations. Something over-, superhuman shines in an individual who is capable of absolute steadfastness in relation to the world, of the ability not to rely his soul on anyone other than himself. It is this rationalistic, romantic ideal of the free “I”, choosing its free path from available alternatives, that forms the basis for specific work with the consciousness of specific people. It is not surprising that in the course of various interpretations, it (like other trends intersecting with it in the course of practice) undergoes vulgarization and acquires such readings that the author himself would undoubtedly object to.

Let's consider a number of theses that the “Dear Woman” made from the lectures of the respected Professor. Due to some circumstances, she never fully realized them, while her unfortunate friends progressed much further in this, which did not always have a happy ending.

The Professor’s first thesis was: “Love yourself.” But how? In theory, there are different, sometimes diametrically opposed, opinions on this matter. So, for example, M.M. Bakhtin sincerely believed that it is impossible to love oneself in the same way as another. Simply because I am not different. I am given to myself from within, and he is given from without. I am given to myself open, he is given complete. I see his whole body, but I never see mine, only in the mirror. That’s why you won’t hug and kiss yourself.

Fromm approaches the issue from a different position. For him, love is an active desire for development and happiness for any living being, including oneself. It is also self-knowledge, self-care. Selfishness, from Fromm’s point of view, is a lack of self-love, a manifestation of hidden hostility towards one’s own “I”. True self-love is connected with an equally strong love for others: with the desire for their happiness. Louise Hay speaks in approximately the same spirit. She believes that many of our troubles and physical illnesses come from lack of love for oneself. You need to accept yourself, love, praise and forgive. You need to create conditions for the deployment of all your strengths and qualities; such self-attitude will be rewarded a hundredfold.

To be honest, it still seems to me that when using the term “love,” both Fromm and L. Hay are talking about benevolence, benevolence, self-acceptance and dignity, but not at all about love. At least in Russian, the term “love” has an intense connotation; it speaks of a deep and passionate experience, of an irresistible attraction to another, always to another, to something that is not myself. “Self-love” in Russian can also be expressed by the word “self-love,” but here the negative meaning can be traced quite clearly. That is why, when a psychotherapist in a group calls to “love yourself,” then, wittingly or unwittingly, at some unconscious cultural level it looks like “don’t give a damn about others.”

“I will love myself,” the “Dear Woman” decides and from the next day she simply begins to behave like an inveterate egoist. Perhaps the desire to “not give a damn about anyone” was already latently ripening in her, perhaps she was really tired of worries and tired of fulfilling her duty - parental, maternal, professional, but now she has received the official right not to fulfill it. High science informed our poor patient that it is possible and necessary to live without bothering oneself with worries about others, because the sense of duty burdens, frustrates the nerves and takes up time. Our “Dear Woman” repeats like a mantra morning and evening: “I don’t owe anyone anything.” The psychotherapist said that if this formula is successfully introduced into the subconscious, then there will be no hardships. For we ourselves create our lives with our thoughts: when you think that you don’t owe anyone anything, then problems disappear as if by magic. You become free, like the wind, and literally walk on your own.

The magical formula “I love myself and don’t owe anyone anything” creates in a person the illusion of autonomy and freedom in relation to everything and everyone with which he has been associated so far. I emphasize that it is an illusion, and a very dangerous one, like any inadequacy. For by giving an imaginary and temporary picture of well-being, it gives rise to new collisions and conflicts that exist completely objectively or, if you like, intersubjectively, which in this case is the same thing.

The trusting patient (who can hardly be called so sweet anymore!) strictly follows the instructions of her guru. She no longer cleans the apartment, cooks dinner, or helps her child learn to read. She doesn’t buy her mom medicine, she lets her friends down every now and then, and she doesn’t try too hard at work. To all the reproaches (which, of course, begin to pour in as if from a cornucopia), she becomes numb and answers: “I don’t owe anyone anything. Don't stop me from looking for myself. You are restricting my freedom." Her decision to “not give in” in relation to “debt” is based on the belief that it was “duty” that was programmed by her parents and ruined her entire previous life, instilling eternal anxiety and concern in her soul. (However, is it worth blaming the parents, if even Heidegger named Care as the main “existential” of human existence?)

The sweet woman is now constantly immersed in intense introspection, goes to the sauna, the pool and shaping, regularly visits the Professor, fueled by his confidence that she is right, and at first she almost does not notice how tragically all her ties with her closest people are being severed. With those few who really love her and are ready to help her silently, treating her as if she were sick and praying to God for recovery from “searching for herself.”

But if the process of “active self-love” drags on too long, explanations, scenes and scandals, mutual accusations and breakups are inevitable. The already not too large “field of love”, the one that keeps us in existence, is decreasing. Do you agree that it’s creepy to communicate with a person who regularly tells you that he doesn’t owe you anything?

Thus, what the group regularly sings to the patient, either explicitly or implicitly, comes true: now no one really understands her except those attending the Professor’s group classes. Parents, children, friends became strangers. Everyone wants something from her, a free woman, everyone rapes her personality with their claims. Only there, in the group, she is a person, there are her like-minded people, the same free and independent individuals who know how to properly love themselves. And therefore, attachment to the Professor and the group becomes painful, addiction develops, lectures and trainings act like a drug. The group is the only segment of “true reality”. Finding “freedom from debt” turns into “freedom from human relationships,” “freedom from the freedom to live and act independently.”

The worst marriage of psychotherapy is the pathologically dependent patient.

The reader may ask me a question: so why not love yourself? Do you need to torment yourself with an exorbitant load of responsibilities? Not seeing the white light and ruining your own health? Of course not! A person must take care of himself and take care of himself. But this does not exclude, but presupposes caring for others. Actually, it is not the “sense of duty” that should be corrected, but its pathological form, when concern becomes painful and destructive. When it completely does not correspond to the real situation and acts as a useless torment for anyone. It is this “emotional fuss” that should, in theory, be leveled out by therapy. In his book How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, Dale Carnegie gives a whole series of sound, practical advice on this topic: don't let the little things get you down; reckon with the inevitable; set a limit on your anxiety; do not try to saw sawdust; don't settle scores; Make lemonade out of every lemon. Carnegie is a thorough practitioner; he understands perfectly well that you cannot fail to fulfill your internal and external responsibilities, you just need to learn to do it without hysteria. A person who stops delving into the lives of loved ones and participating in it saws the branch on which he sits and falls miserably. The pain will be real. Unfortunately, rollicking psychotherapy too often crosses the line between relieving unnecessary tension in the course of doing things that are natural for any person and the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthose deep-seated beliefs on which all meaningful life is built. It is not the “painful part of our Self” that is subject to correction, but the fundamental emotional and moral structures, the necessity and legitimacy of which has been proven by the entire historical development of mankind and justified by world philosophy.

Rocking the emotional and psychological “boat” and destroying debt as an internal attitude of consciousness results in sad practical consequences. And if our heroine - “Dear Woman”, having gone through a period of “search egocentrism”, nevertheless returned to the balance of the egoistic and altruistic principles, then the other visitors of the Professor, breaking with “outdated moral principles”, successfully destroyed the social microenvironment with which they were closest connected in a way. One broke her own family by losing her husband. Another broke up with her parents and doomed them to a lonely old age. The third, carried away by the search for inner comfort, abandoned her daughter, giving her the opportunity from the age of fourteen to “live independently” and slide down an inclined plane.

All of them caused pain to loved ones, all showed unreasonable cruelty and indifference. The indifference they were taught. In exchange for this, “freedom” was acquired: without love, without friendship, without responsibility, without complicity. A blessing as illusory as the pleasures obtained as a result of continuous drunkenness or drug injections. A hopeless, meaningless freedom, deprived, in the language of V. Frankl, of “transcendence,” access to others, which is impossible without interconnection and interdependence.

The Professor’s second thesis is closely related to the first: “Nobody owes you anything.”

It must be said that this thesis is applied in practice with much more difficulty than the thesis “I don’t owe anyone anything.” When “I don’t owe anything,” everything is clear, but when others turn away... It’s easy to fall out of that self-satisfied euphoria that selfish delight creates. And they fall out. And not only from euphoria, but also from life too. Some of the Professor's visitors (fortunately, there were few of them) unexpectedly committed suicide or attempted suicide. It can be assumed that, along with other factors, a significant role was played here by the failure of values ​​that they suffered while trying to implement the theory of “independence from others” in their own lives. They simply could not cope with the titanic and demonic role they had taken on: to surpass ordinary human standards of relationships, to rise above the pettiness of grievances, experiences, common but real ideas about justice.

An ascetic, a hermit, an initiate, whose soul is completely turned towards the Absolute, may be able to be “independent of others.” This is the quality of the especially chosen ones, moreover, trained over the years and animated by faith in the higher dimensions of existence. Only a saint can relate to other people without any offense, without desires and demands, without expectations of anything “for himself.” He's already surpassed that. He rose above the “need” for another and himself became only a “gift” that is given to everyone else unconditionally.

The idea of ​​calmly accepting that “nobody owes us anything” may be capable of serving as a kind of horizon, a regulatory principle of moral aspiration, but it is absolutely inapplicable in real life for solving practical psychological conflicts. It makes exorbitant demands on a person, actually insisting on complete loneliness, which must be accepted as an unconditional fact. In essence, this contradicts the social, communicative nature of man.

Absolute selfless divine benevolence is simply impossible for the “average patient” who turns to a psychotherapist. If it is accepted as a “guide to action,” then it immediately turns into an untenable claim, which makes a person feel even more disadvantaged:

“I am not capable of independence. I am not capable of independence. To live without needing anything else.”

But it is precisely this “disappointment in oneself” that psychotherapy often pushes a person towards, calling on him to abandon human standards of interdependence and the expectations that are associated with this dependence. This is especially evident in the recommendations given by psychotherapists to patients who are unable to cope with grievances against their loved ones and therefore experience severe discomfort. For example, the famous psychotherapist Yu. Orlov believes that our touchiness is an infantile reaction to our environment; it feeds on the energy of magical consciousness. If we look at the world realistically, we understand that the behavior of another does not have to meet our expectations (the other does not owe you anything!). Yu. Orlov considers our expectations in relation to others to be infantile egocentrism. About expressions like: “The good should be good, the bad should be bad. There is justice in the world, but he acts unfairly. Children should be grateful to their parents,” he responds like this: “A bunch of well-intentioned nonsense that flatters the primitive consciousness, which is repeated in a race by writers, both famous and small, and prevents us from thinking sanogenically.” To think “sanogenically”, you need to “perform the act of accepting another as he is, forgiving, recognizing his freedom to choose any line of behavior, even one that offends you. To accept another means to consider him a free person who is not obliged to love you. For the well-known proverb says: “You can’t be nice by force!”

Let us leave on the conscience of Yu. Orlov the accusation of stupidity of all who believe that parents should be respected and believe in the existence of justice. I think that the concepts of justice and gratitude do not need my defense, since they speak for themselves - human society is impossible without them and has never existed. However, the utopianism and inconsistency with reality in the very formulation of the question are astonishing. What does “other as he is” mean? Is this really some kind of absolute self-enclosed reality, independent of any human standards and not subject to them? And is this really something unchangeable, something that no one and nothing affects? Of course no. Another person is most often included in the same system of values ​​and guidelines as you and I. He may not love you (love is impossible without his will), but at the same time he not only can, but is also obliged to comply with many standards of human behavior and treatment, which are designed to help minimally hurt the other, mitigate conflicts, and resolve contradictions. Society has established ideas about decency and dishonesty, politeness and rudeness, worthy and unworthy behavior. Resentment is not infantilism, but a natural reaction to completely legitimate expectations regarding a certain type of behavior.

The studies carried out in the first half of the century by Alfred Schutz, now widely known in our country, showed that the world of everyday life, in which we are all immersed, is a world of matrices and stereotypes, schemes and standards that apply to both consciousness and behavior. We cannot understand or evaluate anything or anyone without resorting to this system of intersubjectively given measures. Therefore, everyday life is imbued with expectations. Well, in fact, how will you react if, instead of giving you a product, the seller dances a crazy jig for you, and in return for your help and friendship, they pour mud on you? In the first case, you will be surprised and indignant. In the second - of course, you will be offended. Schutz specifically introduces the term "background expectations", thus emphasizing the all-pervasive nature of our attitudes, the readiness to perceive the world in a certain way, as it is given to us by our culture. Of course, you can be creative about culture, but you can’t jump out of it completely and evaluate your neighbor without relating him to anything. Why give people the advice “Don't expect anything from anyone”, knowing that such advice is obviously impossible to implement?

The expression “Fight resentment by perceiving the other as he is” can have another meaning: do not try to remake the other by singing the song “Become the way I want.” It is quite possible to agree with the statement that breaking the nature and character of another is a hopeless and cruel matter. However, this does not at all negate the fact that we continuously shape each other. We educate. Any age. And my resentment, if, of course, it has a serious basis, can force another to reflect and change. Even if he doesn’t love me, but only respects me and wants to maintain a normal relationship with me.

“If... the other is not capable of experiencing guilt, resentment becomes useless, dysfunctional,” writes Yu. Orlov. I completely agree with him. But not everything in our inner world is pragmatic and functional. Resentment (especially if the other leaves you) does not give any external results, but it measures you against a certain value scale of relationships, shows that you are a person, and not God, who can do without anyone.

My goal is not to sing the glory of offense. I also believe that constant touchiness exhausts a person and destroys him, especially when the offense occurs over trifles. But I absolutely cannot accept the thesis “Nobody owes you anything.” We all owe each other, we owe love and work, goodwill and care. Must! And this is exactly what we need to take calmly. Without this - it’s bad, terrible, without this - death in spiritual loneliness and without hope. But grievances can be overcome in other ways. There are different methods. In one case, they diligently develop indifference to the personality of the offender, in another - condescension towards other people's vices, in the third - they mentally shrink the offender until he turns into a dot and disappears on the horizon, in the fourth - they simply feel sorry for him, they see in him a creature offended life. I believe that it is quite possible to deal with grievances without fencing yourself off from humanity with an icy wall of judgment: “I don’t need you, and I can manage without you.” Because everyone is deeply connected, and true freedom lies not in monadic solitude, but in successful interaction.

It should be noted that concepts related to the idea of ​​maximum autonomy of a person from other people, emphasizing the value of individuality, were created mainly in the West, in countries that have passed the path of classical capitalism and absorbed the pathos of atomization from the economy. Unfortunately, I am not familiar with the psychotherapeutic works that are typical for modern Japan, China, and other Asian countries, but I dare to assume that they do not include the requirements of “active self-love” and ignoring the attitudes of internal duty: both one’s own and someone else’s. . Orientation towards a holistic and logical world order, towards the inscription of every “I” into the circle of “We”, into a single socio-cultural order cannot be considered “sanogenic”, inspiring and saving the path of abandoning the values ​​of unity and unity. Russia, which has stood between the West and the East from time immemorial, in terms of its worldview gravitates more toward the East, toward conciliarity in religion and collectivist, post-communal values ​​in everyday life. Perhaps that is why it is so difficult for us to learn "reasonable egoism", the desire for complete stoic spiritual independence ends in a dramatic loss of meaning.

Perhaps psychotherapeutic practice, which recently came to our soil, requires the creation of both a unique theoretical base and actually “Russian” methods, different from those developed in regions with a different culture, different traditions, and a different type of mentality.

The third thesis, closely related to the previous two and proposed by the Professor to his listeners, says: “Be natural and spontaneous.” At first glance, this call does not carry any “negativity” and can be joyfully accepted for fulfillment by any person who feels the oppressive weight of our numerous conventions. We are really constrained and complex, we are slowed down by fears, apprehensions and prejudices invisible to the world. Therefore, we perceive the call for spontaneity as a call for freedom, for throwing off a burden, for the opportunity to be harmonious.

Before talking about practical interpretations of the concept of spontaneity, it should still be noted that its theoretical meaning is not entirely clear. Very often freedom and spontaneity are identified. But spontaneity, spontaneity, and unreflected development of activity exclude the possibility of consciously enumerating options, choosing from alternatives the path that seems best. The absence of choice, a conscious decision made by the subject himself, brings spontaneity closer to necessity, only this necessity turns out to be not external, but internal. I am natural and spontaneous when I obey a series of internal impulses, and not external, socially created institutions. I then act “on my own impulses,” although I do not lead or control these impulses (internal control - internalized social prohibitions and instructions). It seems that spontaneity understood in this way can hardly be identified with freedom. However, one more clarification is necessary: ​​spontaneous behavior is often called even an action according to internal command (after all, it can be a projection of the same cultural norms), namely, an action guided by a direct momentary impulse, desire, whim, desire for immediate internal convenience. It is from this understanding of spontaneity that our Furious Interpreter proceeds, inviting his patients to radically change the way they communicate with the world.

The second concept he uses - “naturalness” - is closely related to the Freudian concept of culture as a repressive principle that negatively affects the human psyche. Culture is historically formed as a powerful and cunning power, penetrating the individual from within and setting up observation towers of the Super-Ego in the soul. It is thanks to the Super-Ego that the shadow world is formed - the basements of the unconscious, where all desires and passions are loaded, the spontaneous realization of which is blocked. “It was discovered,” Freud wrote in his work “The Discontents of Culture,” “that a person becomes neurotic because he cannot bear the whole mass of restrictions imposed on him by society in the name of its cultural ideals.” And although 3. Freud generally highly valued culture as a great means of protection from the suffering that threatens us, psychoanalytic criticism of it gives interpreters grounds to contrast “naturalness” with all normative cultural manifestations.

So, natural and spontaneous behavior should replace, from the Professor's point of view, the behavior of a moralized, restrained person, accustomed to follow etiquette and politeness.

The Professor's most ardent students follow his rules completely. Now they don’t say hello or goodbye, don’t ask others how they are, and generally don’t pay attention to these “others.” They do what is convenient for them, at any time of the day or night. For example, they may come to visit you when you didn’t invite them; not asking if you have time to talk; climb into your refrigerator without asking permission, eat without inviting the owner to share the meal; after which you can get up and leave at any time. This is “naturalness”. Why unnecessary ceremonies? Why be a slave to constraining cultural norms? Individual freedom is above all! Spontaneity without boundaries. I wanted to eat - I ate. If I wanted to sleep, I slept. And if you are uncomfortable, then this is purely your personal problem. True, lovers of this kind of “naturalness” are lucky so far. They all the time come across cultured people who, being slaves to the norms of politeness, do not push them around, following a completely natural and spontaneous impulse in this case. They are holding back. But how long will patience last?

“Individual freedom,” wrote Z. Freud, “is not a cultural good. It was the maximum of any culture, although at that time it did not have any special value, since the individual was not able to protect it.” Based on this position, the Professor teaches his neurotic charges to be “free, like animals.” Follow the principle set out in the “philosopher” of one famous poet: “It’s good to be a kitty, it’s good to be a dog, where I want I’ll pee, where I want I’ll poop.” The only pity is that this teaching does not correspond to the real state of affairs, because not only the Professor is mistaken, but also Freud, whom he repeats. Modern zoological scientists have proven that animals are by no means free. In any “animal community” there are very strict prohibitions, for violation of which the offender is subject to severe punishment in the form of bites, goring, beating with hooves and other unpleasant things. So animals know their “discipline” much better than people, it’s just different in content. “Animal freedom” for a person will certainly turn into animal prohibitions, an animal form of reprisal. Is it worth returning to what has long been passed and relics of which still suffice in our lives today?

So that culture does not dominate us and does not cause discrepancies between desires and norms, it is necessary, the Professor believes, to eliminate morality as a set of certain rules and commandments external to us. Moral teaching should not have an independent verbal expression, which, as a thesis, is introduced into the brains of a growing child and gets stuck there like a thorn, causing pain if we do not conform to the model. “There is no greater tyrant than the quiet voice of conscience,” stated the great philosopher. Down with tyrants! But what to do? After all, the need for social regulation of behavior does not disappear?

It is necessary, the follower of Freud believes, for moral behavior to be beneficial. A person sees real benefits from a certain type of actions (being kind is more useful than being evil, being honest is more useful than being deceitful) and, pragmatically following his own benefit, behaves like a good boy. And there are no thorns in the head, and success on all fronts.

There is no doubt that it is good when moral principles are confirmed by personal experience. But the whole point is that morality was not formed for the benefit of an individual. It is a means of survival of the race, of humanity, and therefore very, very often it is completely inapplicable utilitarianly. "Thou shalt not kill!" But sometimes it is more profitable to kill. And sometimes stealing is more profitable. And the evil one often feels more cheerful and confident than the kind one. Therefore, it is impossible to make a person moral without introducing into him generalized examples of what is proper. Good is not “what is”, it is what “should be”, it is a value, even if we do not find it directly next to us. Moreover, moral norms are valuable in themselves; they are associated with our dignity, self-respect, and with things that do not have direct empirical verification.

“Everything is fine,” a reader may tell me, “but we’re talking about psychotherapy!” What should I do if I suffer from moral demands that weigh on me? What if my conscience gnaws at me? If I get nervous over trifles, breaking the slightest rule instilled in me? And here, I will answer, is a specific question. Any moral norm in real life is “extensible” and has an “area of ​​relaxation,” especially in the modern changing world. Where in your value system is the norm that you are violating? Is it commensurate with other requirements? Who will suffer and how if it is violated? What motivates your anxiety, other than the pressure of the norm itself? Etc., etc. All these issues can be resolved without “abolishing morality” and without creating the illusion that it can be abolished at all. It is necessary to be “natural and spontaneous” (here I completely agree with the Professor), but these human properties can actually be realized only within the moving framework of culture, morality, and human etiquette. Within the limits of humanity. Only then will the freedom given by psychotherapy be true and not imaginary, real and not illusory, sustainable and not fleeting.

We are finishing our conversation about “Nice Woman” and about the fantastic Professor N and cannot help but ask another question that directly follows from everything that has been said: what traits should a psychotherapist have, and what in no case should he have, in order for the patient’s healing to actually take place and so that the “bitter horseradish” of selfishness does not replace the “tart radish” of suffering?

The success of psychotherapy depends, first of all, on the specialist who gets down to business.

Of course, positive progress is also associated with the patient’s personality, his desire or reluctance to make changes in himself. It also depends on the methods used, those techniques developed in theory and practice that should help a person get out of the quagmire of problems. And yet, the psychotherapist plays a decisive role here, even if the patient has a “disease of will” or a “disease of fate.”

The patient comes to the psychotherapist with the hope of receiving the keys to the doors of peace, well-being, cheerfulness, and to be deceived in such hopes is another serious injury. Therefore, the responsibility of a specialist is great. He can play the role of both a good angel - a guide to heaven, and an evil demon, plunging his charges to the very bottom of hell.

At the same time, this is an ordinary person who, like all of us, can get irritated, show likes and dislikes, get tired, be busy with his own affairs or thoughts, and be internally distracted by his own problems. Just like a teacher at school, who, in theory, is obliged to be a model of virtue, but extremely rarely corresponds to this bright image in reality. We all remember the shrill “teachers” - angry, vindictive and domineering, those who take out their own life troubles and character defects on our children. You can’t run away from them, because you need to get an education... And you can change your therapist. This in itself is a blessing. Although, of course, it is better to fall into the arms of an angel rather than a demon.

However, psychotherapeutic “demonism,” like teacher tyranny, is often the result not only of personality defects, but also of ordinary unprofessionalism. Everyone can have passions, but a psychotherapist (like a real teacher) does not allow his emotions and subjective preferences to run wild. He introduces them into a strict framework, trains his “I”, constantly and in detail analyzes himself, tracking the line of relationship with the patient and not for a moment forgetting about the main thing - his mission in relation to the person who came for help.

A psychotherapist, figuratively speaking, must be mentally pure. As a specialist, he does not have the right to enter into a “hot” relationship with his ward - be it ardent affection or active disgust. It is unprofessional to project one's own expectations, aspirations and ambitions onto the patient. Bad work would be work in which the doctor begins to reflect the patient, mirroring his unhealthy worldview. If he feels bored while talking to a patient and wonders whether he should go get a cup of coffee and call a friend, he has “dropped out of the process.” If, while conducting group classes, he simply “practices a routine”, like a trained dog in the arena, repeating long-worn phrases and techniques, he works extremely poorly.

Being a psychotherapist (genuine, not fake, fake) is difficult, because it requires dedication. Essentially, psychotherapy is a service to which you must subordinate your entire life. This is a creative activity, possible only with high attention to everything you do, great sensitivity and tireless self-reflection. It is not for nothing that in the United States, psychotherapists are often professional psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts are trained for many years before they are allowed to begin practice. An applicant for conducting analysis must repeatedly go through psychoanalysis himself: to identify his own unconscious complexes, clarify them with the light of reason, and realize his secret desires and aspirations. And this truly harsh approach applies not only to psychoanalysts, who make up only a part of psychotherapists. Those leading the “therapy of the human soul” are taken into account, and the public monitors the quality of their work.

E. Berne writes on this subject: “Psychologists who are properly trained to provide psychotherapy are listed as such in the directory of the American Psychiatric Association. In addition, many states have a Bureau of Professional Standards that sets guidelines for psychologists who wish to practice psychotherapy. Persons who do not meet these requirements do not have the right to call themselves psychotherapists.<…>... The annual list of members and fellows of the American Psychiatric Association contains the names of all physicians affiliated with this association, which almost exhausts all physicians in this country with psychiatric training, indicating whether they are certified by the American College of Psychiatry and Neuropathology. The Association maintains a file of the professional qualifications of all its members, which is under the supervision of the secretary-administrator. Besides. The American Psychiatric Association publishes, at intervals of several years, a biographical directory containing complete information about the education and professional training of all its members” (Bern E. Introduction to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis for the Uninitiated. St. Petersburg, 1991. pp. 357–358.).

The situation in our country is completely different. Almost no one trains psychotherapists as such. They arise spontaneously, and it is a great blessing if their ranks are replenished with psychiatrists or professional psychologists. Philosophers are also not the worst case. But psychotherapists often become failed teachers and failed economists, physicists and lyricists, random people and, accordingly, insufficiently prepared. Enthusiasm is wonderful, but an enthusiast who wants to heal others must first cope with himself - with his own rudeness, absurdity, ambition, fear of life.

This, however, also applies to those who have received special training. They “know what to do with others,” but in the vast majority of cases they have no idea what to do with themselves. So “psychotherapists” (even certified doctors) appear with faces contorted with severe irritation, with the ferocity of a rhinoceros, with tearful pity for their own underestimated person. I just want to say the sacramental: “Healer, heal yourself!” And if in other branches of medicine it is excusable for a doctor to get sick himself, then in psychotherapy the imbalance of the healer himself results in a deliberate professional defect.

The matter is further complicated by the fact that people with serious internal problems are drawn to practical psychotherapy.

Well, really, if a person is always cheerful and healthy, if all his compensatory mechanisms are on automatic, and he has more than enough optimism, then why would he suddenly start thinking about other people’s depression? Yes, he does not believe in these depressions at all! It seems to him that the people are not sad, but are simply pretending to fool their heads.

"What problems? Tired - rest! Longing - go to bed, the morning is wiser than the evening! Has a loved one died? Cry, that's what tears are for. If you cry, move on with your life. The law is this: God gave - God took. Do not hold on to the feet of the dead! You say you're not beautiful? A well-known case, do not be born beautiful, but be born happy. And in general, we ourselves are the blacksmiths of our own happiness! This is natural self-support without any knowledge, relying only on folk wisdom.

A cheerful optimist, a smart guy, a sociable and cheerful person, as a rule, does not engage in psychotherapy. Of course, this happens, but rarely. And a broken, nervous, depressed subject goes to “dig into the soul.” He needs to solve his problem. He reads books to cope with his own “inner dogs” that chase the poor fellow day and night. And such a dejected gentleman, after taking some short-term courses or even graduating from medical school, gets into the hands of patients for whom he acts as a Teacher. He must teach them to live and feel.

What a field of activity! What a basis for self-affirmation! What power! And so our imperfect psychotherapist takes someone else's soul and tries to open it like a tin can. What's it like?

R-r-r-time! Knife her. But she doesn’t give in. Resists, resists. One more time, another attack.

“Why are you stopping me from working?” Angry (read: they don’t allow you to assert yourself!). And how this is reminiscent of the famous Russian saying, characteristic of saleswomen in a stall: “There are many of you, but I am alone!”

And the patient does not want to be an object. The patient does not give in to harsh pressure, objects to the quick and unfair trial, the peremptory decision.

The psychotherapist rages: “Leave and don’t come! I won’t accept you!”

My God, but now he won’t come himself! Never to anyone. He will drink vodka with friends and criticize “rotten science.” To remember the psychotherapist-Herod with obscene words. That's what psychotherapy is all about...

Having described this situation, we have already actually identified one of the types of demon psychotherapists, a type that can be called a rude psychotherapist. This definition is very similar to “round square” or “soft-boiled boots,” but nothing can be done, in life such things don’t happen. It must be said that, at least in Russia, one more definition can be added to this type. Our dubious hero of the psychotherapeutic front is not only a rude person, but, as a rule, also a money-grubber. He takes money for treatment, but does not treat, placing all the blame on the patient for the failed therapeutic contact.

The second demonic type that can be found among psychotherapists is the “sadistic investigator.” This type, as a rule, grows on the basis of classical psychoanalysis and a number of its modern varieties. The “sadistic investigator” takes pleasure in telling the trembling patient incredible, vile secrets about his, the patient’s, inner world.

For example, a patient comes to such an investigator and talks about a difficult relationship with her sister, to whom she is passionately attached. The therapist conducts an analysis session, according to the technique, he catches every association and every sigh that escapes the patient’s lips, and then the most interesting thing begins - he interprets these words and sighs, that is, he gives them meaning.

The meanings given by the “sadistic investigator” are, as a rule, negative. As a result, the patient is explained in detail that she does not feel any warm feelings for her sister, but only hatred, envy and a desire to annoy. The poor woman, of course, is horrified, does not believe and resists. Then they explain to her that she does not know herself, that in various ways it is beneficial for her to hide hatred under the guise of love, and, most importantly, what she needs to do is honestly admit to herself her own meanness and malice. And as soon as she says “yes, it’s so!”, she will immediately feel better. Look, your back will stop hurting, and there will be no heartbeats. But all it takes is to admit that you are not a moral person, but an immoral one, not kind, but cruel and vindictive. Well, admit it quickly, relief will come!

A serious argument in this psychological hammering out of confessions and self-accusations is that “there are no perfect people.” The idea is generally correct, but it depends in what context and for what purposes it is used. If you see yourself as a generally good person, then you have a “God complex”, and therefore you pretend to be like a god. This is pretentious! And you will plunge into your familiar, into “human, all too human.” Admit that your place, as they say in prison, is “near the bucket.”

In an effort to be fair, I want to point out that there are indeed many people who idealize themselves (which is typical of neuroticism) or hide severe irritation under a veil of love and caring. But even to them, their inner duality should not be presented in a straightforward, accusatory form. The point is not at all to twist the patient’s arms and wrest from him the actual denial of the value of his own “I” (and the denial of one’s positive properties is self-crossing out). The point is different: how to soften the position of a person who, voluntarily or unwittingly, causes conflicts around him and suffers from these conflicts? How can I help him, without destroying the core of his own personality, rebuild his relationships with others without unnecessary losses, reconsidering his own view of things? Severe self-recrimination and disappointment in oneself have never helped anyone. It only creates a feeling of guilt, which is very difficult to fight.

However, the investigative fervor of our dashing psychotherapist sometimes takes him very far. He begins to see “chernukha” and demand confessions even where there were no negative aspects at all. Simple attribution begins. As soon as someone reports that he has a problem, he is advised to look into his soul and make sure that all the dirt is there: everyone is bad, but are you better? Look what...

This is similar to another “therapeutic trick” where a person who is outraged by someone’s behavior is told: “What you don’t like about others is your own vice. Your dissatisfaction with others is a mirror reflecting your own shortcomings”; or, to use psychoanalytic jargon: “You project your Shadow onto others.” What happens? If someone doesn't like someone else's untidiness, is it because he himself is dirty? And if not? Life observations show that it is clean people who do not like sluts.

Of course, it happens that others reflect our shortcomings, but this is not always the case. Such an approach cannot be made a rule, categorically extended to everyone, or thoughtlessly applied in any case. Sometimes we project “our Shadow” onto another, but more often we are simply outraged by the real shortcomings or vices of others. If a murderer angers us, this does not mean that everyone secretly cherishes the dream of stabbing a neighbor to death in the night.

But the “sadistic investigator” operates on the principle: “Make a fool pray to God, he’ll break his forehead.” In any case, he applies his schemes and gets great pleasure from it. In the language of E. Bern, he plays the game “Spot” with patients. No matter how the poor patient spins, he still ends up tainted, and the therapist smugly receives his psychological gain - a feeling of superiority. The psychotherapist skillfully manipulates the mood of others for the very ignoble purpose of personal self-affirmation.

The mention of rigid schematics leads us successively to another “demonic healer of souls”: to the dogmatic psychotherapist. He may not be so insidious and sadistic, but, alas, he is dull. His mind is inflexible, he has well learned a certain healing canon and the special language corresponding to it, but he is unable to see anything beyond that. Such a psychotherapist speaks to the patient in a completely esoteric therapeutic dialect, which a normal person cannot understand, and tries to fit any situation into the Procrustean bed of the only ideas known to him.

Doctor, I have insomnia at night... and a fear of heights.

This, my friend, is your Oedipus complex...

And I, doctor, imagine, have an obsessive desire to write poetry.

Sublimate, my dear, sublimate...

And I’ve been dreaming about sausages and mustard for three days.

You, dear, urgently need a man.

Doctor, why with mustard?...

A dogmatic psychotherapist sincerely believes that all the psychotherapeutic concepts that he uses when talking with people are nothing more than characteristics of reality itself, of existence itself. In philosophical terms, they have an ontological status for him. Therefore, it cannot be expressed in any other terms and no other approaches have the right to exist. If Freud says “Oedipus complex”, then this is the ultimate truth, and to doubt its presence is a betrayal of science. Everyone has a complex and has universal explanatory power. Anyone who denies Freud's methodology is a charlatan, and any theoretical alliances undermine the purity of the method.

A dogmatist from psychotherapy is not necessarily a Freudian. This could be a supporter of Assagioli, a follower of E. Berne, an adept of Gestalt therapy, or anyone in general. What is important is that the dogmatist not only passionately defends one single way of seeing. He most often monstrously vulgarizes this method itself, which deals a powerful blow to both the patient and the authority of the method he has adopted.

We already talked about this in the previous section, when we emphasized that the attitude “I don’t owe anyone anything,” designed to extract an individual from psychological slavery to others, can, with a crudely simplified approach, turn a generally normal, albeit somewhat depressed person into a ferocious one. egocentric. Other examples can be cited.

Thus, the technique presented, in particular, in the books of M. Litvak and called “psychological aikido” by him, is widely known. Its essence is that conflict is avoided through tactical retreat and gentle agreement with the accusation.

Ivan Ivanovich, you are a fool!

Well, what can you do, you fool... (Instead of “How dare you! You’re a fool yourself!”)

The “aggressor” remains with his mouth open, no confrontation occurs.

However, this technique, like others, requires a very detailed explanation, indicating its possible limits, limiting factors, specific situations, even explaining how many times it can be applied and when to stop.

If a dogmatic psychotherapist suggests using such a technique as a panacea without any explanation, obedient patients can get into trouble.

Firstly, the constant repetition of such a technique will soon be clearly assessed by the opposite side as bullying, and will still cause a new surge of aggression, even more powerful than the previous one. Secondly, if you always agree that you are a fool, you will soon believe it yourself, and this already undermines your self-esteem.

The situation is similar with other useful psychological tips. So, in one translated American book on how to win men, I read the following: “If you want to unobtrusively get to know a man, notice to him, for example, what an unusual accent he has.” For the United States, such advice may be good, but imagine a similar situation here... A man’s reaction may be unpredictable.

That is why the job of a psychotherapist is to be as flexible and specific as possible, to be able to explain subtle nuances, which, of course, our dogmatist cannot.

The fourth and final type we have identified here is the half-educated psychotherapist. We have already talked about where dropouts come from a little higher. The half-educated psychotherapist simply does not know what to do with the patient. Since subtle dialogue techniques or bodily practices are unfamiliar to him or very vaguely familiar, he does the simplest thing: he stuffs the patient with pills “which are cooler.” Sedative? Sedative! Antidepressants? Antidepressants! And more please. The patient, who already has complete confusion in his head, becomes completely dull from the pills, his consciousness becomes clouded, and he is simply unable to ask the doctor for this.

Another signature trick of a half-educated psychotherapist is carefully picking apart someone else's inner world, after which this inner world is left as it is - opened and torn apart. As in the old joke:

Dad, I took apart the alarm clock myself!

Why didn't you put it back?

And there are a lot of extra details left!

An incompetent psychotherapist leaves a lot of “extra details”: he leads the patient into confusion, introduces doubts into his mental world, but is not able to restore its integrity, show the path to finding vigor and peace - exactly what people turn to psychotherapy for. And he does this not out of malice, but out of general illiteracy, although external aplomb may be beyond all measure.

But enough about the demons of psychotherapy! (Perhaps “demons” are even too pompous here. Thus, unpresentable demons...) It is worth turning to what a good psychotherapist is and should be, that same kind angel who lends a helping hand and makes it possible to overcome both character difficulties and difficulties of fate.

Let's start with the fact that a talented psychotherapist is as valuable and rare as a truly talented artist or poet, a gifted researcher or an outstanding organizer. Famous Western psychotherapists such as K. Jung, V. Satir, E. Berne, K. Horney, F. Perle, A. Lowen, M. Erickson, undoubtedly, truly have a gift from God, that special property of nature that gives them the opportunity to exert a beneficial effect by one's very presence. These are people who are simply good to be around; they instill in the patient peace of mind and an attitude of hope for the best. The techniques used by gifted psychotherapists, of course, play a role in their work, but do not constitute the main thing. This main and defining thing is the “magic of personality,” direct contact. Psychotherapists of this level can change, improve, simplify their methods of work, borrow other people’s techniques, develop and change, but their beneficial effect on someone else’s consciousness invariably remains powerful. Such an effect cannot be improvised by any other person, cannot be copied and mechanically borrowed. Like any talent, it is integral to a given individuality and belongs to it as an attribute.

However, you can learn from outstanding, brilliant psychotherapists. You can track the forms and methods of their behavior, their system of self-control and self-tuning to work, their attitude towards patients. Most often, they lead entire theoretical and practical directions, giving their students, readers and admirers the opportunity to learn the method that they have developed and which leads to success.

The most important achievement in the creation of effective methods that can be learned by many specialist psychotherapists is the development of a number of humanistic attitudes characteristic of the second half of the 20th century. They are especially pronounced in such psychotherapeutic areas as problem-oriented psychotherapy and procedural psychotherapy. Let's name some of them.

Patient focus.

A good psychotherapist is not concerned with his own self-affirmation, but with the interests of the person who came to him with his trouble, so he does not use a directive style and authoritarian pressure. Rudeness, teasing, causticism, theatrical drama, as well as indifference, remain behind the doors of the doctor’s office.

At the same time, a kind psychotherapeutic angel, using various psychological techniques, strives to protect the patient from excessive attachment to constant help. He gently reminds that as a result of the work, the patient must “walk on his own feet”, cope with psychological conflicts himself, and not be in slavish dependence on his spiritual mentor.

“Psychotherapy is aimed primarily at improving the patient’s ability to solve his problems. This should allow him to become his own psychotherapist at the end of psychotherapy” (Blaser A., ​​Heim E., Ringer X., Tommen N. Problem-oriented psychotherapy. Integrative approach. M., 1998. P. 31.).

Back at the beginning of the 20th century, K. Jaspers, a psychiatrist and philosopher, noted the fact that no person, even a mentally ill person, can be simply an object of study. Classical psychoanalysis was not accepted by Jaspers, who said that Freud masters the soul in the same way as Edison masters dead nature. With this approach, the most important thing remains in the shadows - the patient’s personality. It is the personality that the doctor encounters as a border or a wall. Existence - the core of personality, possessing freedom - can never receive objective, material forms. Therefore, the psychotherapist is only able to enter into dialogue with someone else’s “I”, not literally cognizing the inner world of the other, but clarifying it for himself.

Such clarification requires an initial equality, respect and consideration for the one who asked for help. The psychotherapist has no deliberate superiority over the patient; he does not act either in the role of God or in the role of an omnipotent magician. He only has professionalism on his side, which he must use to provide the help he needs.

But if the dialogue is not conducted by a mighty Teacher and a timid Student, but by partners, the patient should be given the initiative. He can not only complain and talk about his worries, but also put forward versions of his own problems: how they arose, what are the mechanisms for their deployment, how one can try to cope with them. No matter how amateurish these judgments may be, they make it possible to understand the logic of human thinking and discern its leading points. All this helps the psychotherapist offer the patient a strategy for solving the problem that will not cause him psychological rejection and will be accepted.

Focus on flexible, evolving contact with the patient.

The psychotherapist’s initial feelings with which he comes into therapeutic contact are: 1) empathy - the ability to understand other people’s feelings and adequately respond to them; 2) attitude towards cooperation.

In addition, a number of researchers emphasize that at the beginning of work there should be personal sympathy (you don’t want to help an unpleasant person), professional interest, as well as the feeling that, as a professional psychotherapist, you can help the patient. If at least one of these factors is missing, it is better to transfer the patient to another specialist who will be either more sympathetic or more curious and competent than you.

However, the relationship between a psychotherapist and a patient, sometimes quite long, is far from being limited to the experiences that accompany the first meeting. Like any human relationship, they develop, change, and encounter pitfalls and reefs. They differ from ordinary “spontaneous” relationships only in that one of the communicating parties is a specialist in the field of psychology and psychotherapy, and has the skills not only to think about the other, but also to self-reflect.

A good psychotherapist continuously monitors his own state in communication with the patient. He must be able to accurately correct the nature of the emerging contact, directing it to solve the problem at hand. Here you need subtle intuition and sensitivity, since following the schemes, it is not always possible to determine where you can “let yourself go” and be quite natural, following your emotions, and where you should strengthen control over yourself in order to put communication in the right direction.

Swiss psychotherapist Amy Mindell, a representative of the direction of processual psychotherapy, calls the psychotherapist’s ability to work; with your own inner world and metaskills. “And yet, why metaskills? she writes. - They can also be called spirit skills. The prefix “meta” implies a view from the outside, with the help of which you can see the experiences and feelings that are mastering us at the moment. Therefore, the term “meta-skills” refers not so much to the feelings that arise during work, but to the awareness of these feelings. Meta-skill assumes that we, in addition to being aware of feeling positions, study them and collect their energy, applying our feelings and attitudes to the benefit of the client. In other words, metaskill does not simply refer to the therapist's feelings and attitudes, but emphasizes the conscious use of them in practice. This requires the therapist to carefully explore his feelings in order to notice and learn to manage the various feeling qualities that arise in the process of work. Now he can usefully bring these sensory qualities into his therapeutic interactions and note the changes and feedback that occur” (Mindell E. Psychotherapy as a spiritual practice. M., 1997. P. 30.).

Mastering metaskills is an essential aspect of the work of a good psychotherapist.

In addition, where the leading form of work with the patient is dialogue, the psychotherapist must:

1. Be able to listen empathetically to the patient. This means that he sympathizes with the patient, but at the same time maintains a certain distance, without identifying with him. The psychotherapist is all attention, responding with remarks to the story. Periodically, he paraphrases what he heard to check whether he understood the narrator correctly.

2. Maintain inner peace. If the therapist is too emotional, he will not be able to correctly understand his visitor, much less develop the right conversation tactics. Patients may be tearful, grumpy, hysterical or, on the contrary, inhibited; they may behave demonstratively and aggressively. Inner peace allows the therapist to objectively look at the case presented to him, to describe it for himself without judgment, without falling into either an accusatory or justificatory-encouraging tone.

3. Be sincere.

Don't fake it, don't pretend. Although sincerity is not the same as “cutting the truth”, saying things that are fair, but hurtful or insulting to the patient. The therapist's sincerity and truthfulness must correspond to the Eastern idea that the truth is only the truth, and not an evil slander, when it is presented in a sufficiently pleasant, acceptable form for the listener.

The sincerity of the psychotherapist should inspire the patient's trust in him.

Focus on the patient's leading problem.

The experience of classical psychoanalysis has shown that analytical sessions can last indefinitely, giving very moderate results. The patient becomes attached to the analyst, goes to him for years, regularly pays money, this becomes something of a habitual pastime, but the problem with which the patient came is not solved. Modern psychotherapy, taking into account the disadvantages of the “classical forms”, focuses the psychotherapeutic process on the main problem with which the patient came. It is important not to “spread your thoughts all over the tree,” not to get bogged down in details, not to shy away from the main topic, which can be unpleasant and frightening, but to “aim right at the bull’s-eye.” Work with a patient should range from 6 to 25 sessions, which are usually held twice a week.

To achieve success within the specified time frame, a competent psychotherapist uses a specific conversation strategy. He asks the visitor in detail what exactly his problem is, how exactly it is experienced. At the same time, he tries to clarify all the details of the difficulties, including the images that arise, somatic symptoms such as “my breath is taken away” or “my hands are cold,” as well as those thoughts that accompany the negative experience.

Then he finds out how often and for how long the problem makes itself felt. Perhaps it manifests itself cyclically, is associated with specific circumstances, has been bothering the patient since childhood, or has appeared only in the last period.

It is also necessary to clarify when and where the problem bothers the patient: at home, at work, in the company, during the day or at night.

The next step is to identify what thoughts accompany the negative state and what real consequences the difficulties have for a person’s life: his communication, work affairs, family relationships, opportunities and plans. At the same time, the psychotherapist clarifies what kind of consequences we are talking about: immediate or long-term.

Based on these and other questions, the psychotherapist determines together with the patient the most accurate formulation of the problem and sets a psychotherapeutic goal based on it.

The goal should be specific, realistic and one that could soon give a person at least small but visible success. It does not include tasks such as “always” and “never”. If the problem, for example, concerns personal relationships, then the person suffering from personal dependence will not be told “always show yourself independently,” but will be given specific tasks in specific cases to decisively express their position, insist on their own, do at least one thing, but the real thing is at your own discretion, etc. Even a small success gives you inspiration and allows the healing process to proceed more effectively. The psychotherapist provides constant support to the patient in this, encourages him, and points out positive changes.

When planning the course of psychotherapeutic sessions, the good angel psychotherapist does not insist on implementing exclusively his own ideas about how the process of change should proceed in the conscious and unconscious of the patient. Real psychological movement, transformation of the soul sometimes occurs spasmodically, with retreats and circles, contrary to the usual logic, thought out by a specialist in the silence of the office. That is why you need to carefully follow the natural course of the process, adapt to it and rebuild along with it, which is what a good specialist does with brilliance.

Application of various theories and techniques.

A modern creative professional psychotherapist is not inclined to dwell dogmatically on one theory or technique. He strives to integrate techniques developed within different theoretical approaches into the therapeutic process. This can be called pragmatic eclecticism, synthetic, integrative or process-oriented approach. The point, however, is that each facet of the patient's problem can be resolved in forms and techniques that are suitable for it, although created by different psychotherapists with different theoretical beliefs.

Constructive dialogue with the patient may include, for example, elements of classical psychoanalysis, transactional analysis according to E. Berne, aspects of rational-emotive psychotherapy or neurolinguistic programming (NLP). And if classical psychoanalysis is designed to identify the roots of the problem in childhood (if any), then transactional analysis will indicate today’s difficulties, and NLP will help, through the patient’s work with his own subconscious, to get rid of obsessive states and phobias that interfere with life.

Amy Mindell writes about the multiple principles and approaches that process psychotherapy draws on: “Process work is based on the principles of Taoism, the Zen philosophy of alchemy, the work of C.G. Jung, shamanism, indigenous American traditions and modern physics." And she goes on to emphasize how widely applicable this synthetic approach is: “Process work is common throughout the world and is applicable to people of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Process work centers have now been established in many countries, including Australia. Russia, Poland, Japan, England” (Mindell E. Psychotherapy as a spiritual practice. M., 1997. P. 44.).

Psychotherapy today includes both individual and group work with patients. Since the 30s of the 20th century, there have been many psychotherapeutic groups in Western countries: training groups, meeting groups, gestalt groups, psychodrama groups, body therapy groups, dance therapy groups, art therapy groups, skills training groups (See about this: Rudestam K. Group psychotherapy. M., 1993.) etc.

Of particular interest are the methods and techniques practiced in body therapy groups and related to touch. Psychotherapy sometimes cannot solve a patient’s problems solely through verbal conversation or dialogue, since changes in psychology and character have reached the psychosomatic level. For example, a patient experiences severe emotional experiences that are associated with tension in certain muscle groups, but he does not control these muscles. They have been clamped for so long that a person does not realize the abnormality of the situation, but only feels constant emotional discomfort. In bodywork therapy this is called “muscle armor.” To remove the “muscle armor,” body psychotherapist A. Lowen used a number of methods and exercises.

Another psychosomatic problem is “lack of ground under one’s feet,” when the patient is unsure of himself due to the fact that he has “lost connection with the earth.” Restoring the “connection with the earth” means gaining confidence and relying on the principle of reality, and for this it is necessary to resort to a number of exercises that are not only physical, but also bioenergetic in nature.

Arnold Mindell's procedural psychotherapy is based not only on the idea of ​​the “body”, but on a whole complex of esoteric ideas and the concept of “subtle bodies”. A. Mindell calls the information-energy structures that mediate the spiritual monad and gross material flesh the “dream body” and believes that working with this body - the source of vitality and movement - can proceed using a variety of methods, the main thing is that the result is healing, harmonizing effect. D. McNeely writes about this: “Psychologists who have sufficient skill and flexibility to follow the individual processes of the dream body will find that terms such as analysis, psychotherapy and body work must be expanded to such an extent as to allow the person to come into contact with any known theory and practice. The dream body may begin to "speak" in the style of Gestalt, psychodrama, or active imagination, or it may ask to be "trolfed" (Special massage created by therapist Ida Rolf.) through deep massage. At other times or under other circumstances, the body may spontaneously assume unfamiliar poses, such as Hatha Yoga asanas, or enter deep states of meditation characteristic of Zen... A Western psychotherapist working with the entire bodily spectrum must understand and accept the forms of the psyche and mental behavior, completely normal for a yogi, shaman or acupuncturist” (McNeelyD. Touch. M., 1999. pp. 65–66.).

It is very important to note that different patients require different methods, techniques and types of psychotherapy. People who are confident, young and ambitious require a different approach to themselves and different treatment methods than old, sick and depressed people. Introverts and extroverts, men and women, teenagers and adults - all these significantly different individuals require the doctor to adapt to them, to search for special approaches and means of influence. At the same time, if a psychotherapist encounters a case of overt psychosis, a borderline state, or symptoms of organic disorders, he should not undertake treatment, but must refer his patient to the appropriate specialist who has the right to make a diagnosis and prescribe medications in this situation.

The last point that needs to be noted when talking about the conditions under which psychotherapy turns out to be a blessing and not an evil is the conclusion, as in the West, of a psychotherapeutic contract. The contract stipulates the nature and approximate terms of treatment, payment and organizational issues: rescheduling sessions, failure to appear due to illness, etc. The contract is a document that actually approves the rights and obligations of both parties, which guarantees the participants against arbitrariness on the part of the psychotherapist , and from the patient.

Of course, it may seem strange that a legal document is being concluded with a “guardian angel,” but this is quite normal.

There have always been people with an unbalanced inner world.

At all times, there have been stutterers and hysterics, those who suffered from phobias and depression, experienced constant anxiety, insecurity, became overly passionately attached to another person, or felt an unbridled thirst for dominance.

They existed just as there were madmen and cripples, lepers and syphilitics, freaks and the sick. Moreover, there were so many of these latter and they so clearly filled the cities, villages and roads that no one simply paid attention to those first ones. Phobias and depression were experienced quietly, because there was no one to go with them, well, perhaps to the parish priest, who could exhort with the help of the word of God. Not every holy father undertook to cast out demons. Those who were too overwhelmed by melancholy threw themselves into the pool headfirst. And a strong thirst for power was not at all considered a defect.

The physical and mental pathologies revealed to the world overshadowed the problems of the soul - a subtle and ephemeral phenomenon. These problems came to the fore in the 19th and 20th centuries, when humanity to some extent coped with mass physical and severe mental illnesses and established medical supervision. But now it’s the turn to pay attention to the world experience of the “average person,” and this world experience turned out to be also not very healthy and not very pleasant. The neurotic personality of our time is a mass phenomenon: not yet sick, no longer healthy, but in any case a suffering and inadequate person.

In addition, our era, which has finally broken the old traditions, destroyed the values ​​that have been developed over centuries, has put people before a constant, incessant choice and has charged everyone with full responsibility for every step taken. And this in itself is a great psychological burden and a serious test.

So, almost each of us, no matter where he lives, is faced with at least three traumatic factors:

Sociocultural circumstances.

The destructive impact of the media.

Difficulties of personal destiny.

The first factor that powerfully contributes to neuroticism is the competitive system of relations in a modern market society (sociocultural factor). The market, which permeates all social strata, turns life into continuous racing, into competition for wear and tear. And where fierce competition reigns, crowned with the tears of the loser and the triumph of the winner, steps and stands, intrigue and slander, lies and slander flourish.

It is widely known that in the prosperous United States it is impossible to work in peace, since work has been turned into a constant exam, where those who fail are rejected and other employees are put in their place. Therefore, everyone is forced to constantly tremble. This is great for the economy, but very harmful for people. Perhaps this is why psychotherapy and psychoanalysis are so thriving in the United States. Their success is also supported by the fact that people competing with each other will not be frank with each other and cry into each other's vests. They prefer to pay money to a specialist and tell him about their troubles, knowing that he will keep their secrets and will not reveal their weaknesses to their rivals.

In our country, the psychological health of the population is actively counteracted by the regime of constant social upheavals that plagued Russia throughout the 20th century. Life and semantic crises, the crushing of one value system and the violent imposition of another, the collapse of the conditions for the reproduction of large social groups, the change in the last ten years from a paternalistic state to a criminal-anarchist one - all this makes the inner world shaky and unsupported, people - confused and confused. They, perhaps, would run in droves to psychotherapists, but there are very few of these latter, they are often not professionals, and treatment is expensive in comparison with the salary, which, on top of everything else, is sometimes not paid for years. Domestic social conditions are no less, and perhaps more traumatic for the human soul than Western ones; chaos and confusion, inaction of the law are added to them, which means complete personal insecurity, which is expressed in anxiety, fears, and suicidal tendencies.

The second factor contributing to neuroticism in modern conditions is the work of the media. Here it is easier for us to appeal to domestic experience, although the activities of Russian television are nothing more than a copy of Western television.

In post-perestroika Russia, unfortunately, the tendencies of uncritical borrowing by television of the worst examples of work construction by Western media prevailed. The methods and techniques of influencing the audience, used by all channels of modern domestic television, are aimed at destabilizing and deharmonizing the already quite disharmonious and confused mass consciousness. Both informational and entertainment programs (primarily movies, represented by a large number of action films, horror films and films dedicated to paranormal phenomena) show a picture of a world where, in essence, there is no normal human life. It is replaced by “pathological everyday life,” in which the “pathology expert” (investigator, police officer, psychiatrist, psychic occultist, pathologist, commentator on the incident, or the victim herself) is the main and practically the only character.

Let's take a look at some models that are widely represented in both the informational and “artistic” parts of TV activities.

Model 1. The world is a disaster.

All television programs tell us that the world is a catastrophe, an accident, death and injury from early morning, because they begin the program not with generally significant facts of an economic, political and cultural order, but with a joyful story about fires and earthquakes that have happened in any part of the world , explosions and overturned cars.

These facts are obsessively repeated throughout the day, turning reality into a creepy and bloody “chronicle of incidents.” Having barely opened his eyes, the poor Russian citizen - you and me - receives a huge charge of negative emotions: he sees the torn bodies, shown in detail by the cameraman, hears the lamentations of the relatives of the dead, reacts with alarm to the number of new victims and, of course, willingly or unwillingly, figures out in his mind whether whether he himself will become another victim of unpredictable misfortune. Fate is seen as in a poem by Arseny Tarkovsky:

When fate followed us

Like a madman with a razor in his hand.

Model 2. The world is a crime.

The chronicle of everything bad that happened, as if by accident and without malicious intent, is complemented by the enthusiastic incessant story of television journalists about intentional acts: bloody maniacs, racketeers, international terrorists, rapist soldiers, etc. become television stars and main characters. And since disasters and crimes are interspersed on the television screen and complement each other, then the reality appears completely terrible to the already dejected Russian viewer. In it, in this monstrous reality, children are not born, houses are not built, discoveries are not made, bread does not grow. In it only threats are heard, mountains of corpses are piled up and rivers of blood flow. What a “bright future” this is! The main thing is not to be blown up, shot or stolen. Our television carefully sows fear. Neurotic deviations, depression and suicide are, to a large extent, the work of those whom people unkindly nicknamed “journalists.” These are quite infernal personalities, although in direct communication they can look like the nicest guys. The point is that the “nice guys” are doing a hell of a job: persistently and purposefully shaking the psyche of their fellow citizens.

Model 3. The world is an action-packed adventure.

Action-packed adventures, to which everyday life boils down, are presented on the screen not so much as information programs, but rather as films of a certain type. Moreover, “soap series”, despised by snobs, turn out to be the focus of humanity and realism among these films. The action movies that flood our screens reduce real human relationships to primitive desires, extreme actions (endless chases, shooting and killing), raw feelings (hatred, envy, vindictiveness) and bad manners (look at the screaming and swearing that accompanies every episode!). Generations of young Russians are growing up in full confidence that unbridled aggression is a normal human condition, not condemned by anyone and even highly commendable.

Aggression on one side implies hatred, fear and evil vindictiveness on the other. Pathology gives birth to pathology.

Model 4. The world is a cynical clownery.

We are invited to view the world as a cynical clownery by numerous political commentators who sarcastically mock the leaders of the opposing political group. Numerous “humorous programs” that have sadly fallen below the farcical level make their contribution to the desacralization of everything in the world. The mutual slaps of Bim and Bom seem, in comparison with “Gorodok,” simply the height of aestheticism and intellectuality. It is worth noting that today’s press is also extremely cynical, printing mocking and mocking headlines over articles about tragic events. The debunking of “all that is holy” is a typical feature of both electronic and conventional media.

Major positive changes in the development of modern Russia are not possible, in our opinion, without a radical reorientation of the work of television, radio, and newspapers. If the world is a catastrophe and a crime, if there is nothing in it except crude passions and evil mockery, then there is simply no point in living in it. And this “no need” weighs heavily on us today, resulting in mass child suicides, the degradation of adults and the horror of the elderly.

Modern television has only one clear advantage - you can always turn it off.

And yet at the beginning of the 21st century it is impossible to live without it. Therefore, the progressiveness of the government that is now emerging and being formed in Russia will be determined not only by the success of the economy and foreign policy, not only by relations with political elites within the country, but also by the extent to which this government can create a positive spiritual and psychological atmosphere, and by the extent to which it will encourage the media so that they return to us ordinary everyday life - with its joys, successes and simple human concerns.

The third factor in the neuroticization of modern man is the circumstances of his individual fate. Personal disasters, childhood shocks, sudden disappointments or collapse of life plans - all this unsettles a person, makes his life meaningless, and plunges him into a negative emotional state for a long time.

Often people spontaneously recover from severe emotional distress. Or they try to do it the best they can. F. Vasilyuk’s book “Psychology of Experience” describes four types of overcoming psychological crises that arose for various reasons. Following the main motives of this book, we will consider possible options for such an exit.

Hedonic experience.

Hedonistic, as we know, is pleasure-oriented, giving priority to the sensual. Hedonistic experience is characteristic of people with an infantile orientation toward the “pleasure principle.” This is a kind of defense against psychological suffering, based on ignoring the outside world. The person creates the illusion that no changes have occurred. So a girl whose mother was ill for a long time and died continues to look after her as if she were still alive. Or the boss who has been removed from his position continues to stubbornly go to his office.

As we see, the hedonistic experience of life's blow does not eliminate neurosis. Rather, it itself is a form of neurosis, where the defense against unbearable pain is the distortion of reality, reliance on a fantastic situation.

Realistic experience.

With realistic experience, a person submits to the dictates of circumstances, reckons with reality, trying to accept it as it is. The mechanism of patience is involved here, since the traumatic situation does not carry any pleasure, and any pleasure must be postponed; it is in an indefinite time frame. In an effort to get rid of the fear and despair that has taken hold of him, a person either relies on “maybe” or relies on hope. If he can do something in the current situation, then he makes efforts to achieve the goal. He strives to cope with difficult reality and overcome it.

However, patience, as F. Vasilyuk shows, is a temporary state. It is exhausted, and in order not to fall into the abyss of despair, the individual can use surrogates. This is well illustrated by the fairy tale parable about the Nile crocodile:

“The Nile crocodile feeds exclusively on pineapples. Always and only pineapples. But when there are no pineapples, he eats bananas. When there are no bananas, he eats carrots. When there are no carrots, he eats potatoes. When there are no potatoes, he buries himself three meters into the ground and cries crocodile tears.”

A surrogate, often used when patience is exhausted, is a complete change in the broken relationship with society. If the path to becoming an artist is closed to me, I will become a railway worker! If I didn’t marry Masha, I’ll marry Dasha. Or something like that. This spontaneous way of experiencing presupposes the discreteness of life, the relative independence of its phases. Then past plans and dreams are swept aside and completely replaced by others. This is not always possible and does not completely bring peace, but it is a way to alleviate the situation.

Value experience.

The experience of value is possible only with the complexity and ambiguity of a person’s inner world, with his ability for reflection and choice.

A person can be seriously unsettled when his values ​​collide with the external world that contradicts them, or the values ​​themselves collide with each other.

If higher and lower values ​​collide with each other, then the lower ones can either be discarded (for example, giving up a personal career for the sake of protecting the homeland), or entered into relations with the higher ones and subordinated to them. Thus, the values ​​of delicious food can be subordinated in a certain way to the values ​​of piety, but not rejected. Sometimes the realization of lower values ​​is postponed “for later” (“I’ll raise children, then I’ll rest”).

The clash of equivalent values ​​(duty and love, political and religious beliefs, etc.) is always overcome dramatically. It is almost impossible to avoid suffering here.

People come out of situations in different ways when, as a result of a collision with reality, they lose the most valuable thing for themselves. And these losses can be completely different.

So, if a loved one, with whom all life plans were connected, dies, the person left behind can overcome melancholy and depression by aestheticizing his image. The memory of the deceased can become an impetus for future life and creativity.

However, it is not only a person who can be lost. You can lose your own beliefs, become disappointed in them, seeing their inconsistency; life can show us that we are wrong. Then it is necessary to look for a new value system, certainly forgiving yourself for the delusions and mistakes of the past.

However, the blows of life do not always force us to change our own beliefs. Sometimes these beliefs, for example, moral principles, are so deeply and firmly internalized by a person that he observes them, no matter what. He would rather sacrifice life itself than give up his beliefs and follows internal rules in almost any situation.

We do not undertake here to continue the description and analysis of crisis and severe psychological collisions, from which people emerge intuitively, carrying out an unconscious search for new positions if the old ones have been exhausted. Another thing is important: people solve the problems of their own inner world when they encounter them in the course of life. They, willingly or unwillingly, act as their own psychotherapists. They save themselves from inner darkness, pull themselves out of the swamp by their hair. It is worth taking a closer look at what helps them to be psychological assistants to themselves? What factors contribute to their self-care?

Let's name three such factors.

Sympathy and advice from loved ones.

Worldviews set by culture.

Popular psychotherapeutic literature that offers potential patients various techniques for working with their own consciousness, or more precisely, with the inner world.

The first factor is the most important psychological support for a person at all times and under all circumstances. A person is not only a friend, comrade and brother to another, but also a psychotherapist. It must be said that one of the outstanding psychologists and philosophers of the 20th century, A. Maslow, drew attention to this point. In his works, he emphasizes that life itself, filled with events, communication, and human interaction, contributes to the healing of mental wounds, overcoming internal problems, and untying tightened psychological knots.

A. Maslow writes: “Trees or mountains cannot be a source of security, love and respect; even communication with a dog cannot bring a person closer to the true satisfaction of basic needs. Only people can satisfy our need for love and respect, only to them we fully give love and respect. Basic satisfaction is the main thing that good friends, lovers, spouses, good parents and children, teachers and students give each other, it is what each of us is looking for when entering into one or another informal relationship, and it is precisely this that is a necessary prerequisite, a condition for sine qua pop in order for a person to gain health and come closer to the ideal of a good person. What, if not this, is the highest (if not the only) goal of psychotherapy?

This definition of psychotherapy has two extremely important consequences: 1) it allows us to view psychotherapy as a unique kind of interpersonal relationship, since some fundamental characteristics of the psychotherapeutic relationship are characteristic of all “good” human relationships, and 2) if psychotherapy is a type of interpersonal relationship, which, like any other relationship, can be both good and bad, then much more attention should be paid to this interpersonal aspect of psychotherapy than is currently being given” (Maslow A. Motivation and Personality. M., 1999. P. 329. 173) .

In Russia, to this day, communication with loved ones - family, friends - turns out to be the main psychotherapeutic tool. Usually a person himself chooses someone to whom he can open his soul, with whom he can fearlessly share his problems, on whose sympathy and support he can rely. Sometimes just agreeing to listen to a voluntary confession is enough to make your heart feel better.

In addition, loved ones can try to distract the sufferer from his painful questions, entertain him, switching his attention to something new, interesting, capable of awakening curiosity and cheerfulness. This is sometimes done with children, distracting them from pain, but this technique also works great in alleviating the psychological torment of an adult. It is the loved ones who are able to analyze the problem from a position of sympathy, bring those who found themselves in similar circumstances, and tell how they dealt with them. A variety of behavioral strategies may be proposed. In this case, an ordinary sympathetic interlocutor practically plays the role of a psychotherapist, since he creates a whole range of possibilities for the “patient” friend and discusses with him what will happen if this or that option of behavior and thinking is brought to life.

A person who has shared his inner worries with family or friends feels supported, feels that he is not alone, and this gives him the opportunity for a speedy mental restructuring. Although, of course, no one can do the main work of transforming his own consciousness and unconscious attitudes for him. But an experienced professional psychotherapist is ultimately an external observer and a “voice from the outside.” He cannot become an “inner leader” for the patient. Anyone who suffers from neurotic moments can only receive final healing himself, as a result of his own spiritual efforts.

The second factor successfully serves as a psychotherapeutic tool, as it provides individuals with certain guidelines for thinking and experiencing that can explain suffering and reduce its intensity. Any serious system of ideological views presupposes an arsenal of comforting and inspiring ideas that can mobilize strength, appeal to pathos or to a humble, dignified acceptance of events. Inner suffering, as well as the blows of fate, must have meaning, then a person will be able to overcome his own melancholy and dejection, anxiety and fear.

Let's take a short look at those interpretations of suffering, its causes and meaning, which are contained in a non-religious view of things, in Christianity and in ancient esoteric teachings that recognize karma and reincarnation.

Let us take as an example unrequited love, which has taken the form of passionate neurotic dependence. Such dependence on the object of love is real suffering. A lover, a dependent person (often a woman, although there are also men in this situation, as S. Maugham’s novel “The Burden of Human Passions” vividly tells us about), constantly strives for his chosen one, shows increased attention to him, claims intimacy, like physical and spiritual, but, as a rule, receives rejection (periodic or constant), building “distances” and various forms of manipulation-teasing.

Neuroticism lies in the fact that the person in love does not see the white side of the world, refuses all the joys of life, focuses on the struggle for “her own happiness” and on this path always uses the same strategies - attack and retention. But this is precisely what meets the resistance of the “object of love,” who, as it were, does not break off the relationship completely, but also does not satisfy the desires of the “applicant.” There arises something like an endless cruel game of catch or hide and seek: the lover runs away or hides, and the lover catches up or searches, but never reaches the goal. Such a situation can last for years, completely exhausting and depressing, first of all, the “catching up” side.

How to interpret this position from different ideological positions?

Irreligious view.

The cause of suffering.

In a non-religious consciousness, no one is looking for higher transcendental causes or the impact of transcendental principles for the prevailing circumstances. In this case, the cause of suffering is simply an unfortunate choice: “I didn’t cling to my own (clung).” This is a mistake, the result of inexperience or delusion.

The second explanation is incorrect upbringing, an incorrectly formed inner world. A woman (or man) who displays fruitless persistence in pursuing a chosen being and suffers many blows from her lover appears as a person who does not have self-esteem or has lost it. Self-esteem is one of the leading values ​​of irreligious consciousness; self-respect is a fundamental moment for the life of an individual.

The meaning of suffering.

Neurotic suffering for a non-believer turns out to be completely meaningless and self-destructive. Essentially, no useful experience can be derived from it. Suffering itself should be eliminated as soon as possible, since it only drains the soul and takes away strength.

To solve this kind of problem, the irreligious person must be inspired by two wonderful ideas: the idea of ​​dignity and the idea of ​​independence. Of course, an unsuccessful choice can no longer be undone, but it is possible that it cannot be repeated or reproduced in other circumstances.

It is necessary to break the bondage, and this is possible if pride comes to the fore and opposes the desire to please another person and seek his favor. However, pride as an idea does not work well if a person does not overcome his own dependence. It is practically necessary, at least in a narrow sphere of life, to begin to manifest oneself as a self-sufficient, independent being, and this, step by step, will become the basis for getting rid of spiritual attachment. Love yourself. Take care of yourself. Develop your strengths and capabilities. Then another person will be able to appreciate your merits as a free, worthy person.

Christianity.

The cause of suffering.

According to Christianity, the cause of all human suffering is the sinfulness of human nature, disobedience to God. Man is initially guilty before God; it was because of sin that he acquired all forms of alienation in human relationships, just as he received death, illness and the need for hard work. Unhappy love is another expression of guilt and sin. With passionate attachment to another, a person turns away from God, whom he should love more than anything in the world, he creates an idol out of a mere mortal, hence the whole arsenal of suffering. Thus, neurotic attachment itself, which does not find an answer, is the result of an incorrect mental and life path, immersion in the earthly, limited and imperfect.

The meaning of suffering.

The meaning of suffering in this case is to remind a person of the depravity and dead end of the chosen direction. Guilt before the Lord should block and displace those ardent feelings that the neurotic has for his chosen one. Suffering signals that it is necessary to change the direction of love, to turn it to the eternal, and not to the temporal.

In addition, suffering can cleanse the soul from filth, from excessive egoism. A suffering person is able to be Christianly kind to others, he empathizes with the suffering of others, pitying other people.

And finally, mental suffering can be a kind of test. If you do not grumble and complain, curse the Almighty and the fate sent down by him, you are worthy of the highest mercy. If you follow the path of complaints and curses, do not judge, suffering can multiply a thousandfold.

Solving a psychological problem.

The solution to this problem, like many others, lies through turning to God. A dual pathos is possible here: on the one hand, the pathos of humility, submission to a higher will, which instead of joy gives torment, on the other hand, the pathos of rejection of purely human passions and turning to the eternal source of love - Christ. When choosing the heavenly, and not the earthly, purely human problems will disappear by themselves, lose their meaning, and suffering will go away, giving way to bliss.

Esoteric view.

The cause of suffering.

Dead-end neurotic attachment, exhausting a person's strength for a long time, can be interpreted within the framework of an esoteric approach as a karmic knot. According to this view, in the past incarnation there were sharp, conflicting relationships between people - envy, jealousy, or, on the contrary, passionate love, but also one-sided. Perhaps the current lover was then the object of adoration, but he rejected someone else’s feeling and did it rudely, tactlessly, which led to a corresponding experience in his new life - the experience of suffering from rejected love. However, karma is accumulated all the time, we create a line of necessity in our destiny every day, with every free choice, so a karmic knot like a heavy neurotic connection could be tied in our present life. Such an interpretation brings the esoteric approach closer to the usual non-religious psychotherapeutic one in the spirit of E. Fromm and K. Horney.

The meaning of suffering.

The meaning of the suffering experienced in this case is that this suffering represents a lesson. Esotericism believes that all the difficulties, blows, trials, obstacles that spoil our lives are lessons designed to make us think: what are we doing wrong? Where do we violate the law of cosmic morality and spirituality, where do we deviate from the right path?

The lesson for a hopelessly in love may be different, and therefore the suffering may have different meanings. This lesson may be that one should not become too dependent on anyone, no matter how perfect that person may seem.

However, the lesson may also be that you should not persistently impose your desires and your will on another person, you must listen carefully to the answer, establish “feedback”, only then there is a chance of getting the desired harmony. If there is no reciprocity, the relationship should be abandoned, even if it seems like a “light in the window.” This is not light, but self-deception.

The third version of the lesson is the conclusion that rudely rejecting other people's feelings, playing hide and seek with them and manipulating the soul of another is bad, and you should never do this yourself.

The esoteric reading of suffering as a lesson orients the restless soul to work on oneself, to a constructive position.

Solving a psychological problem.

The problem can find its solution along the path of internal restructuring that follows comprehension of the lesson. A lesson almost always contains two main guidelines: a guideline towards a flexible, contemplative, non-passionate attitude towards reality and a guideline towards benevolence and goodwill. In the specific case we have considered, the untying of the karmic knot and the disappearance of suffering also stems from the lover’s ability, firstly, to relate more easily to the situation, to weaken his own grip, and secondly, to let go of his voluntary or involuntary tormentor with benevolence and forgiveness. The pathos of forgiveness and letting go of any negative situations and people who gave rise to them, as well as forgiveness of oneself, is the main nerve of overcoming neurotic situations built on ancient esoteric knowledge.

I do not undertake to compare here different worldviews that contribute to psychotherapy, I will not evaluate them or highlight any of them. Personally, it seems to me that an attitude in which one can forgive oneself is better conducive to the recovery of a neurotic than an attitude that involves an increased sense of guilt before God. However, each person chooses here for himself. Christian attitudes can help a deeply religious Christian to the greatest extent. Inspired by them, he can overcome personal psychological difficulties and successfully overcome a crisis, depression, or impasse. At the same time, a person with different views will choose a different approach that is more consistent with his beliefs. The main thing is that the views we have listed, as well as other worldviews, are always present in culture, allowing the suffering soul to receive the necessary support.

The third factor offers potential patients different techniques for working with their own consciousness, or more precisely, with their own inner world. With its help, a person can self-heal, self-recover, and overcome anxiety and melancholy. A person can be his own psychotherapist for one simple reason, discovered in the 20th century by such a direction in the study of consciousness as phenomenology: he, the person, himself ascribes meaning to everything.

As phenomenology, with which many areas of modern psychotherapy are closely related, has shown, meaning is not equal to either a thing, or the image of a thing, or circumstances, or a photographic representation of these circumstances. Meaning is the meaning, the significance that we attribute to events, situations, words, other people's behavior or our own appearance. Meaning answers the questions “why?”, “for what?”, “in what context?” Of course, we don’t completely invent meanings ourselves, we don’t catch them out of the void; they are clearly and hiddenly present in the culture that allows our consciousness to live and develop. But we can only give meaning to something ourselves, by finding it in the sphere of consciousness and applying it to a specific case. By using meanings to build a situation in our minds, we interpret reality and understand it in our own way.

Any neurotic state is an emotional-semantic state. Anxiety, fear, suspicion, feeling lonely and dependent - these are, of course, experiences, but they have a powerful semantic component. In this case, a person’s attention is focused on the negative side of things, while the other side - positive emotions, trust, security, ample opportunities - is simply not noticed. Negatively interpreted reality, merged with anxious, depressing feelings, seems to be the only reality from which there is no way out. However, it is not.

Meanings and experiences change; this can be done of one’s own free will, with one’s own free conscious decision. And no psychotherapist can do this for a neurotic sufferer. It can only help the process of rethinking the world, contribute to the birth of new feelings. But it is the person himself who gives birth to a new, healthy beginning.

Using techniques developed by specialists, he is able to enter into a dialogue with his own unconscious, change his emotional worldview, and create a semantic picture that will give him cheerfulness and optimism.

There are many popular tools that can help anyone become their own therapist. These manuals teach a person to rebuild his own consciousness independently, so that no one else interferes in this delicate intimate process. Psychotherapeutic manuals contain techniques for giving events new meanings, cultivating good, benevolent feelings, and planning in your imagination positive rather than negative scenarios for the development of future events.

In order to take advantage of such help, a person only needs awareness of his problem and the will to correct the situation.

"1. We take 100% responsibility for all our actions. 2. Our every thought creates our future. 3. The starting point of strength is always in the present moment.<…>6. Everything is in thought, and thought can be changed.<„.>9. When we truly love ourselves, our life is wonderful... 10. We must free ourselves from the past and forgive everyone without exception.<…>12. Self-acceptance and approval of your actions is the key to lasting change" ( Hay L.L. Heal your life, your body. The power is within us. Kaunas, 1996. P. 9. ).

Louise Hay does not encourage her patient readers to use complex meditations or elements of self-hypnosis. She offers them a very simple remedy - so-called affirmations, positive statements that must be persistently repeated out loud or silently, gradually but steadily changing your own way of thinking and feeling.

Another author, Jeanette Rainwater, offers many simple but effective means for adjusting your inner world: talks about the role of introspection, explains how you can constructively use your own imagination, shows the psychotherapeutic role of a diary and writing an autobiography, gives advice on how to analyze dreams, work with simple meditations, living in the present moment, and not just dreams or memories (Rainwater J. It’s in your power. How to become your own psychotherapist. M., 1992.).

A whole series of books by X. Silva and B. Goldman has been published in Russian. They teach a person different ways of self-regulation and self-building, while resorting to the means of meditation and self-hypnosis.

The work of D. Burns “Feeling Good: New Mood Therapy” (M., 1995) is of a completely different plan. It is built on the principles of cognitive therapy, allowing a person to conduct a rational dialogue with himself, reflecting on the consequences of his actions and increasing self-esteem. Berne shows typical thinking errors that cause people to dramatize a situation.

Numerous publications on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), the methods of which, in principle, can also be adopted independently, are well known.

Both American and Russian popular publications on psychotherapy are often characterized by a fusion of the psychotherapeutic approach with the esoteric, which we can see in the books of A. Sviyash, V. Zhikarentsev, D. Verishchagin, as well as in the authors of the book “The Beginning Magician’s Course” V.A. . Gurangova and V.A. Dolokhova.

What inspires and gives hope for the best is the wide opportunity for the reader to choose exactly the method of self-therapy that suits him more than others. If you didn’t like the esotericism, turn to a rational dialogue with yourself, if the dialogue didn’t work, use NLP, and it’s not to your taste - try affirmations according to Louise Hay or self-hypnosis, as suggested by X. Silva. Something will certainly have a positive effect.

We are talking, of course, about those cases when there is no serious pathology, when a person depressed by life, without a good psychotherapist, must work with himself. However, even after completing a course of treatment, even with an excellent psychotherapist, he will still work with himself, because there is no escape from himself.

In addition to books on psychotherapy, in some cases philosophical literature is very helpful in restoring the inner world, but this applies mainly to lovers of intellectual entertainment. However, the main thing is that everyone can and should help themselves, and for this one must spare no time and attention to comprehend the “I”.

My soul is in my hands!