What Therapy Hides About Healing

Insanity, I believe, is not simply a medical condition but a feeling deeply tied to a preception we have understood to alter meaning within reality in a non-contextual fashion in the eyes of our peers. The crisis of meaning we face today, and which many generations may have shared in other frameworks, began in the late Romantic period, when the Christian idea of love began to fade and the formalization of industry entrenched alienation.

From there, the question of sanity became less about metaphysics and more about institutions: to the point that today, the only ontological arbiter of sanity is the court system.

Psychology is a paradox. It can be a profound blessing for individuals, offering comfort, exploration, and personal insights and a disaster for civilized and cultured life - where therapy becomes a model not for reason but for adjustment.

Classical therapy after all is a mimicing of the self in the world within a verbal statistically-based environment. It is not a formal model of thought, but a reflective exercise which offers observations on experience based on a mixture of concepts, reasoning, and stats.

The danger lies in mistaking this for objective treatment, confusing this with cure of pain.

This is a trap - cure from pain is lucky to appear with a method that uses normativity and statistics. One must find a creative helper who may ALSO learned those numbers and concepts, but who can forget them when talking to a subject.

Therapies may normalize individual cases to be adjusted rather than seeing the subject as a being to be freed from himself.

Why should a psychologist be more fitting than a rabbi? Both can offer guidance. In fact, many who seek therapy may suffer from the same existential struggles as their therapists. Sartre’s insight, hell is other people, captures the failure to heal suffering from the other, or to give and receive love. Freud reduced health to the ability to work and to love. Therapy can explore these questions, yes, but can it cure? Can it relieve pain at the root, or does it simply rename symptoms and dress them in clinical language.

Pain as the Core Issue If psychology cannot address pain, the real root cause of illness, then its conceptual frameworks risk being nothing more than band-aids. The Hippocratic oath says, first, do no harm. If we are not treating pain directly, then the entire enterprise may be more about normalization than healing. Language and concepts can heal, yes, but ultimately, each person creates their own methodology of healing through failure and triumph.

There is, I believe, a war between psychology and literature. Psychology seeks to normalize and stabilize man, whereas literature seeks the wild, the divine, and the unique. One became enslaved to the law, while the other sought God, or the idea of God. True healing, especially for the Übermensch, can only come from the latter: from the wildness of literature, the freedom of ideas, the divine spark, not from normativity.

Clinical psychology is not an empirical science in the strict sense. It uses scientific tools, yes, but it is not deductive, empirical, or falsifiable in the Popperian sense. Patients are not isolated objects of study but works in progress, defined by actions, meanings, sensations, and stories. Psychology, therefore, becomes a form of social philosophy with its own internal logic, but at its core, it remains bound by normativity and statistics. What truly matters are the feelings, sensations, dreams, and passions, things that resist quantification. That is why thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Irvin Yalom ultimately forged their own paths.

Psychology remains a work in progress. Its patients are works in progress. Its value lies not in objective science but in the lived exploration of meaning and pain. And yet, the danger remains: in trying to heal, psychology risks becoming a tool for normalization, while literature preserves the possibility of the wild, the divine, the loving, and the truly human.

Which leads us to the insight that sometimes the patient must go mad in order to heal.