😱Suffering Without Screaming: Healing The Modern Soul Part 3

Healing the Modern Soul is a series about how clinical psychology will haave to change and confront its past if it is to remain relevant in the future. Part 1    Part 2    Part 3     Part 4      Healing the Modern Soul Appendix 

 

The Role of Psychotherapy as a Third Space and Meaning-Making System

 

Psychotherapy can be seen as a third space that exists outside of the dogmas of both science and religion, serving as a bridge between our medical and spiritual needs. In this space, therapists and clients engage in a process of meaning-making that allows the inner world and understanding of the self to better reflect the reality of the outer world.

 

This process of meaning-making occurs through both conscious thought, which is aware of time and language, and implicit memory, which is only aware of our somatic and deep emotional cues that can only partially be known by the conscious mind. In this way, psychotherapy itself can be considered a kind of simulacra, a symbol that does not point to an original source of meaning, but rather serves as a guide to help individuals navigate their own unique experiences and challenges.

 

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Suffering Without Screaming

In the first part of this series, we explored the concept of the modern world as a simulacrum, a copy without an original, and how this phenomenon is related to the increasing emphasis on hyper-rationality and objectivity in our culture. We also discussed how the work of philosophers and psychologists, as observed by Friedrich Nietzsche, can reveal their own fears and insecurities through their insistence on perfect logic and objectivity. In the second part of the series we discussed the need for a coherent sense of self in new therapy models and a dialectical relationship between the self and the world.

William Gibson,  Memory Palace

When we were only several hundred-thousand years old, we built stone circles, water clocks. Later, someone forged an iron spring. Set clockwork running. Imagined grid-lines on a globe. Cathedrals are like machines to finding the soul; bells of clock towers stitch the sleeper’s dreams together. You see; so we’ve always been on our way to this new place—that is no place, really—but it is real. It’s our nature to represent: we’re the animal that represents, the sole and only maker of maps. And if our weakness has been to confuse the bright and bloody colors of our calendars with the true weather of days, and the parchment’s territory of our maps with the land spread out before us—never mind. We have always been on our way to this new place—that is no place, really—but it is real.

The Simulacra Effect and the Disconnect from Felt Experience

The simulacra effect, as described by Jean Baudrillard, is a result of our culture's increasing emphasis on hyper-rationality and objectivity. As we prioritize logical and rational thinking over subjective experiences and emotions, we create a world that feels hyper-real, yet simultaneously disconnected from our authentic selves.

Nietzsche recognized this phenomenon in the work of philosophers and psychologists who claimed to have discovered objective t