File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 119


Date: Tue, 13 Jul 1999 16:04:23 -0700
From: Lois Shawver <rathbone-AT-california.com>
Subject: Re: reality check (was Das Capital)


Brent and Colin,

The field of therapy theory is a big, broad field, and unless you have
studied it you just can't imagine how many different ways people "do
therapy."  Psychoanalysis is just as broad.  It's just endless, it
seems.  Feminist psychoanalysis, for example, is hardly the therapy that
Freud did.  Therapy done by Queer therapists for Queers is hardly the
therapy of Glasser's Reality Therapy.  It goes on and on.

There have been sooooo many therapy theories that therapists are,
themselves, becoming incredulous that anyone therapy has it all. In
place of a therapy theory, with its keys to a metaphysical (i.e.,
foundational) truth is what is widely called "eclecticism."  Eclecticism
is each "practitioner's" own mix of ideas in continuous revision.

Is there anything common among the things that all these people do? I
would argue (like Eric did after Wittgenstein) that what we have here is
a family of concepts that call themselves by the same name. There is a
resemblance between the different concepts, but no single thread of
continuity between them all, and some are completely different from
others.

But therapy is a langauge game that has been set up. It has captured a
place in the community around you.  People go to therapists for various
reasons, and sometimes therapists feel that they have ways to help. 
However, how they help is not legitimated by science (except in the most
awful sense of that term).  So they are devising new moves in langauge
games.  Maybe they are useful and maybe not.  Each person must decide
for herself.

But therapists tend to be a bit intellectual and they want to theorize
about what they do, to compare notes, to create rationales even if they
are local and provisional, to learn from each other, to feel more
capable of meeting problems that seem ominious.  

That's what I'm up to.  Our conversations about therapy are, in one way
another, something many of us consider "paralogical." They are
discussions, but they are discussions with a purpose of figuring out how
to assist not great groups of people, but the people who see us.

I think Lyotard was out of his element when he started thinking about
psychoanalysis.  He should have read Deleuze and Guattari more
carefully.

..Lois Shawver

   

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