Screenworld - Page 10


In the first decades of psychotherapy, people considered therapists mysterious, obscure, and even comical, precisely because they were doing something professionally that nobody else was doing—which made psychotherapy, by definition, a revolutionary endeavor, a revolution in self-awareness. It was such a revolutionary project that it had to invent its own language.

Now the language of psychotherapy has been assimilated into the culture and made commonplace, impositions of commerce have intruded upon and in many cases limited the practice, and "the talking cure" has become a quaint phrase for a now seemingly old-fashioned worldview. Yet if psychotherapy still saw itself as a movement (as it once did), and if that movement were starting now instead of a century ago, in the context of Screenworld, it would be nothing less than revolutionary, because of its quiet, its intimacy, its demand for face-to-face frankness, its worldview, and its purpose—not information, but meaning; not entertainment, but understanding; not passivity, but engagement.

It would be nothing less than revolutionary because it's everything that Screenworld isn't; and because the consulting room, by its nature, is one of the few places where the values of Screenworld are seriously questioned and alternatives seriously investigated, not in any abstract sense, but for your particular life.

Is it too much to say that if psychotherapy were a movement starting today, pitting its face-to-face ways and values against an omnipresent and ultimately impersonal Screenworld, the project of psychotherapy might be seen as heroic?

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