Are not all out attempts, then, toward adjusting, helping, curing in the last analysis born of a deep-seated fear that our security may be upset by a rebellion of people who cannot or do not want to adjust to our social system?

Somewhere over the past decade it became clear to me, mandatory in fact, to focus less on changing individuals and more on changing our systems of living

Life revolts against the dominance of intelligence… and the collective ideologies of the specific period of civilization determine the individual efforts to develop beyond himself or create something.

These collective ideologies are rarely rational, considered agendas and policies – they rise up from the irrational, instinctive intensely reactive and compensatory unconscious of the collective.

People, though they may think and talk rationally – and even behave so – yet live irrationally… How many times do we hear nowadays the expression “I cannot understand what is going on?”

Individual psychology fails to examine our collective irrationality

There is a natural, irrational (I would probably say non-rational or a-rational) world and an illusory, “civilized” and  willful world that we have created full cloth out of our belief that we know exactly who we are and who we mean to be.

The more we suppress these irrational needs, the more likely it swells like a tidal wave, explodes like a volcano, collapses like a sinkhole and swallows us all.

Man is born beyond psychology and he dies beyond it.

Psychotherapy focuses primarily on strengthening  self-hood, shoring up autonomy, and encourages individual evolution within acceptable parameters. The goals of most individual psychology are focused on adjusting deviations toward norms, increasing personal happiness, and on the development of the individual.

It fails us utterly at understanding mass movements. It fails us at tracking, observing, and withstanding irrational collective forces that move through communities, cultures and nations.

The white European men who attempted to forge psychology into a science, imagined they were establishing objective and universal schemas that would not only heal the sick and suffering, but free the larger global culture from becoming possessed by unreason.

The colonizing, white supremacy baked into our psychologies pretends that these are essential universal human truths that transcend location and time. As psychoanalyst Beverly Stoute asserts that psychotherapy has a white mind, Otto Rank reminds us that it is also has a man’s mind.

Healing a culture meant becoming a supremely reasonable culture, and that began with healing individual irrationality the psychological forefathers asserted, just as the American “founding fathers” imagined that the individual pursuit of happiness was the central premise for a healthy nation.

But none of this was fact. These were wishes, hunches, desires, fears, folding into psychological, theological and political theories, exactly as afactual as all other intricate philosophies and theologies.

And as such, psychological theories “easily become substitutes for religious beliefs”

Psychotherapeutic failure, to fail to become more reasonable and pleasant and content within accepted cultural parameters, to fail to earn more money or secure more pleasure, or organize a stable nuclear family was a failure that in many ways was considered less forgivable, less redeemable than notions of religious sin.

How does individual psychotherapy help us in the face of a morbid civilization? …..