Re: Freud Lives!

[Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hari Kumar wrote:
>
>  I can tell you
> buckets, & oodles of luvverly $$$$$$$$ are charged to Ontario Health
> Insurance (OHIP - forget what the frigging P is all about - ?Plan) for
> 'pschyotherapy' otherwise known in the rough trade as hitting the wallet
> HARD.

"Psychotherapy" is not equivalent to psychoanalysis; few
psychotherapists (who usually have either an MA or a Ph.D. in clinical
psychology) are psychoanalysts and no psychoanalysts would ever
self-identify as a psychotherapist. I have heard of therapists whose
practice implicitly assumes various psychoanalytic theories, but in the
U.S. no one can call him/herself a psychoanalyst who is not a
psychiatrist, and psychiatrists are all MDs.

Simply having someone to talk to who isn't too stupid can help with many
mental illnesses, and reasonably intelligent ones will have a stock of
information and gimmicks that may help more. E.g., it was useful to me
to find out that the lead ball in one's stomach that often accompanies
depression or anxiety can be cleared up with deep breathing -- it is
brought about by an accumulation of carbon dioxide in the lower lung.
And this is not as trivial, if Damasio's theories are correct, as it
sounds. Damasio first of all differentiates emotions and feelings,
describes emotions as a bodily state, and feelings as the mental
perception of emotions. (Don't agree or disagree with this on the basis
of my description: read Damasio.) I don't doubt that there have been
suicides that could have been stopped by the patient doing some deep
breathing. My own perception (for what its worth) of sudden onslaughts
of deep depression was that the lead in the belly came first, followed
quickly by a deep (feeling of) depression. It was my reporting this to
the therapist that elicited the information re breathing deep.

Carrol



> Cheers, H