O que os terapeutas e os clientes falam quando eles não conseguem explicar os comportamentos? Como Carl Jung inventou teorias para evitar analisar o ambientes de uma cliente

Abstract

This paper first argues for three points: (1) that the shapers of what we call mental health issues are ‘hidden’; (2) that language use is currently the dominant therapy to change people’s behaviours but this has reached its limits; and (3) that when we are asked to explain our own behaviours but are unable, we use other common strategies of discourse to cover this gap: mentalisms, abstractions, replying with questions, personifications, the use of ‘emotive’ language, and distractions. These three points are then used to recreate how the history of therapy has led therapists to use these strategies of discourse. From the time of Freud and Jung, as therapy itself was developed, western society changed so that the forces now shaping people’s behaviour moved from family to ubiquitous contact with strangers, bureaucracies, and ‘generalized others’. Because people could not easily observe or speak about these new amorphous societal shapers, therapists and clients resorted to those everyday discursive strategies. This is illustrated through re-contextualizing one of Jung’s case studies to show that the client’s ‘issues’ were in her external situations (patriarchy) and not ‘in her head’ or an ‘archetype in the ‘collective unconscious’, which was one of the abstract metaphors Jung invented to cover his inability to also articulate the new forms of societal shaping of his client. Adding more analyses of hidden societal and social contingencies into the exciting new behaviour therapies will produce new ways of going beyond the sole use of language to help clients change their worlds. To analyse and change the hidden societal influences from patriarchy, economics, politics, and bureaucracy, therapists must either learn to recognize and analyse these new forces on a person’s life and then work with them outside the therapy setting, or inside using language, to change their worlds, as already happens in some of the new behaviour therapies and feminist therapies.