Being a graduate from 3 years of studying psych and with an active experience of mental illness, I can say that no amount of studying theory and doing therapy+ taking meds for years helped me realize the root of my problems and my worth as a human. more than Marxist analysis. I live to be a part of the revolution, and as long as psychotherapy reinforces the client to believe in themselves and to accept the realities of it is what it is, it will never achieve its job of liberating the person. There is a need for psychology to gain a Marxist perspective, more so from modern day leftists in the mental health field.
I have talked about this with my psychologist, and with friends of mine who are psychologists, and we have arrived the same conclusion. There’s no amount of psychoanalysis that can cure a trauma caused by the material reality of a patient. You can give them coping skills, you can make them understand certain aspects of their psyche, but cannot advance any further without improving the material existence and this is something that is negated in psychoanalysis, basically. Psychology has divorced from the political realm, it needs to be reclaimed and be integrated into the framework of dialectical materialism.
Exactly. This should be a repeated opening statement for anyone getting into therapy whether as a giver or receiver. Too often it’s treated as some mystical “science” whereby all of the patient’s ills can be therapized away with just enough inner effort (and money!). I’ve had many traumas to deal with and at the end of it all the singular thing that helped me the most was solving my basic material needs. Thankfully I came to the same realization as your statement on my own (after much introspection) before getting pathologized and needlessly medicated. I reailze there are people who may need the medication and all, but I’d wager that they are not the majority of people who end up there.