Frank and Frank concluded that the outcomes of therapy are generally better than being on the waiting list, but outcomes from different schools of psychotherapy are remarkably similar, despite professed differences in the theories and techniques. In their summary of the proceedings of a conference on research in psychotherapy, Rubinstein and Parloff offered the following facetious characterization of the status of the field of psychotherapy: “Psychotherapy is an undefined technique applied to unspecified problems, with unpredictable outcome. For this technique, we recommend rigorous training.” (Rubinstein and Parloff 1959) Given this disconcerting lack of agreement on the theory and practice of psychotherapy, a client with an emotional or psychosomatic disorder might just as well choose a psychotherapeutic school by flipping a coin. With each school comes a different explanation of the problem he or she brought into therapy and a different technique is offered as the method of choice to overcome it. Similarly, when a beginning therapist seeking training chooses a particular therapeutic school, that choice says more about the personality of the applicant than the value of the school. The problem with many of the psychotherapeutic schools is that they correctly describe the dynamics on a certain level of the psyche but lack the understanding of the phenomena from other levels and try to interpret them in terms of their own limited conceptual framework. For example, Freud’s system was limited to postnatal biography and the individual unconscious. He was not aware of the paramount importance of birth, except for a short period when he thought birth anxiety might be the template for all future anxieties (Freud 1959). Freud also did not accept the existence of the collective unconscious and tried to interpret archetypal/mythological and parapsychological phenomena in terms of his narrow biological/biographical model. Otto Rank, who discovered the psychological importance of the trauma of birth, offered explanations of mythological and spiritual/religious motifs that described them as derivatives of perinatal dynamics. C. G. Jung, who discovered and described the vast domains of the historical and archetypal collective unconscious, was unable to see the psychological importance of the birth trauma. In an interview with Dr. Richard I. Evans, he laughingly dismissed Otto Rank’s theory: “Oh, birth is not a trauma, it is a fact; everybody is born.” (Jung 1957a) An effective psychotherapeutic system has to recognize and respect all levels of the psyche. The content that is explored and processed, as it unfolds from session to session, is determined by the client’s own psychological process and unconscious dynamics. The therapist must have a broad enough conceptual framework to be able to accompany clients to any level of their unconscious psyche – biographical, perinatal, and/or transpersonal and support their respective experiences (Vaughan 1993). Therapy using the healing potential of holotropic states of consciousness can help us avoid the problem that plagues verbal techniques of psychotherapy: to determine what in the client’s narrative is relevant and choose Spirituality Studies 1 (1) Spring 2015 23 (21)
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