Psychotherapy is the oldest type of medical practice. Any administration of a placebo is a form of psychotherapy; and almost all of medical practice, until very recent years, has consisted mainly in the administration of placebos or, what is worse, harmful (iatrogenic) treatments (73, 153). However, when the concern was with "aberrant" behavior, as opposed to some obvious physical condition, then a form of psychofraud was usually used to change the aberrant behavior.

The anthropological evidence indicates that throughout most of his history, man used various forms of sympathetic magic for coping with this behavior (44). During recorded history the most common theory explaining aberrant behavior was possession by demons. Even nondestructive, but highly creative, behavior led to the suspicion that the person was in league with the devil or some other demons, e.g., the Faust legend. The Bible, New Testament and Old, is full of formulae for coping with possession by devils. The resurgence of psychofraud has brought about a new popular concern with Satanism and demonology (146).

During the Middle Ages and as late as the eighteenth century, everything from witchcraft to homosexuality came under the heading of "unnatural acts" caused by demonic possession or alliance (153, 154). The Inquisition would burn at the stake protestants, witches, and homosexuals with equal aplomb. All were considered heretics. The theory was that in order to drive the demon(s) out, the heretic must be forced to confess his sins, by torture if necessary, in order that his soul might be saved. It was better that the body perish in order that the immoral soul might live in heaven forever. Although this practice continued on a wide scale until the eighteenth century, the age of reason finally caught up with mental illness.

In 1716, there was published in England a modern rational attempt to explain mental aberrations. The rational theory propounded at this time, which was to survive more than two hundred years as an orthodox teaching, was that insanity was caused not by supernatural demons, an obvious "superstition," but by masturbation. In time, virtually all aberrant behavior was to be explained by the masturbatory hypothesis. Benjamin Rush, "The Father of American Psychiatry," and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, was a full-fledged proponent of the concept of masturbatory insanity. Even so eminent a psychiatrist as Ernest Jones, the pupil and biographer of Sigmund Freud, could state in 1918 that "true neurasthenia . . . will be found to depend on excessive onanism or involuntary seminal emission" (153).

During the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, it was a common medical practice among "progressive" circles to cauterize with red-hot irons or amputate the clitoris of girls found masturbating "to excess" (153). It was argued that it was better to lose a clitoris than to become insane. Boys who masturbated "to excess" had the dorsal nerves of the penis removed. This might make them impotent, but supposedly it saved them from the insane asylum. Although the classical Freudians regarded masturbation as abnormal, they did not, with the exception of Ernest Jones, consider it the major cause of mental illness, but rather as a contributing factor or side effect of improper sexual development. They still thought the major source of mental illness to be of a sexual nature, but they did not advocate clitorectomies. Psychoanalysis was a less drastic placebo for preventing insanity. It formed the basis of most modern forms of psychotherapy and psychofraud. However, the Freudians were not the end to the gross physical mutilation of human beings to prevent aberrant behavior.

In 1938, Egas Moniz, a Portuguese physician, developed the operation known as a lobotomy to deal with aberrant behavior. This operation, in which the nerves to the frontal lobes of the brain are destroyed, was so effective in calming persons, removing anxiety and making them docile, that it became the "in" operation of cafe' society. Physicians were performing this operation in their offices. One physician alone did 1500 of them (153). Yet when lobotomies were subjected to scientific analysis, they were shown to provide no lasting benefits (153). They calmed persons down at the cost of destroying their imagination and turning them into vegetables. Still Egas Moniz was awarded the 1955 Nobel Prize in medicine for his "great" discovery. Today, there is a resurgence of psychosurgery after the eclipse brought about by tranquilizing drugs.

Tranquilizers are in many ways chemical lobotomies, apparently without the permanent deleterious side effects of surgical lobotomies. In a recent experiment in Massachusetts (108), it was shown that the only effective form of treatment for chronic schizophrenics was the use of tranquilizers and other drugs. None of the traditional forms of psychotherapy, even when applied by some of the most "illustrious" psychiatrists in Massachusetts, seemed to have any differential effect.

Clearly drugs have an effect on the central nervous system which can produce behavioral changes. Drug therapy, however, is no longer generally considered a form of psychotherapy. Psychotherapy has come to refer primarily to a change in the information content of the central nervous system and not necessarily to a direct change in its physiology or biochemical structure.

There is no precise definition of psychotherapy; however, the following are commonly used:

• a technique for bringing about mental changes that reduce anxiety and increase a person's ability to cope with life.
• the art and science of psychic healing.
• the technique of remedying or alleviating mental disorders.
• the science for modifying and correcting aberrant behavior.

The above definitions, while having some intuitive appeal, could include everything from Christian Science to astrology. We must have more objective, precise definitions, if we are to make meaningful comparisons between different forms of psychotherapy. The best way to begin is to discuss mental health, neuroses and psychoses.

 

Mental Health

It is ironic that with the notable exception of Maslow and a few others (26, 89, 90), leading psychotherapists have concentrated on describing mental disease without first describing mental health. If any process is to be able to treat disease effectively, we should have a clear notion of what the end goal is. This end goal, a healthy person, should be the common goal of all therapy, mental or physical.

Let us assume that we are medical students in some school of the future. We are given two persons to examine. We are told that one is healthier than the other. We must find out which one this is. To simplify the problem, let us assume that our patients are identical twins.

First we give our patients a complete physical examination —height, weight, blood tests, urine analysis, electrocardiograms, electroencephalograms, skin tests, etc. When we have finished these tests, we find that both patients are identical in every measurement. We must then conclude, if we trust our physical examination techniques, that it is in mental, and not physical, health that the patients differ. Therefore, we give them a whole battery of so-called mental tests which allegedly measure personality and intellectual differences. Again, we find that the two patients have identical responses.

Being sophisticated about mental tests, we do not take them as seriously as the physical tests. We guess that our patients might have been coached by our examiners in how to respond to these tests in order to make the problem more difficult for us. However, we have been given an extended amount of time in which to finish our examination. Since the twins share a house and they are at our mercy in everything except having to tell us the truth, we decide to move in with them and observe their everyday behavior.

We find that both twins have identical educations, received identical grades in school, and hold identical jobs as engineers at separate branches of a large corporation. When we check the personnel records of the corporation we find that twin A has received several bonuses for having designed new machines. He is almost never ill. Twin B. while doing a satisfactory job, has not invented anything and has only received a conventional cost-of-living and seniority increase. He has had four colds during the last year which caused him to be absent from work. When we interview the co-workers of the twins, we find that the co-workers of twin A have considerable affection and respect for him; while the co-workers of twin B do not particularly like or dislike him, they merely find him tolerable.

After living with the twins for a week, we see that twin A is engaged to an intelligent, charming and beautiful woman. He often gets telephone calls from female and male friends. He is very good at sports and practices them to stay fit. Twin B. on the other hand, has no friends of either sex, and spends much of his non-working time watching television and reading pornographic magazines. He does not engage in physical activity. He tries to meet women, but he seems to have trouble getting dates. At this time, we might begin to suspect that twin A is the healthier of the two. Why is this?

A first intuitive reason is that with identical intellectual and physical equipment, twin A is better able to cope with his environment than twin B. Twin A is more creative in his work and his social relationships. Twin B seems to engage in a more escapist, uncreative activity. We might be wrong, but our guess is that twin A is healthier because he can better predict and control his total environment — physical, biological and psychosocial.

Twin A shows his superior ability to predict and control his (1) physical environment through his engineering innovations, (2) biological environment through freedom from illness and athletic prowess, and (3) psychosocial environment through successful social relationships with members of both sexes. Our basic criterion for health is, therefore, the ability to predict and control the total environment — physical, biological and psychosocial.

In actual practice we may not find such clear-cut distinctions between persons. Those who are highly capable in the physical environment might be deficient in the psychosocial environment and vice-versa. Therefore, the concept of health is a weighted measure in which the ability to predict and control in each main dimension of the environment must be weighed relative to the ability to predict and control in the other two dimensions.

As will be shown in Part Two and is shown elsewhere (50), the healthiest person can predict, control and, above all, create equally well in all dimensions of the total environment. He never becomes highly proficient in one dimension while remaining totally incapable in the other dimensions.

 

Mental Illness

If health is measured by a person's ability to predict and control his total environment and his creativity, then illness is anything that decreases either our ability to predict and control any aspect of our environment or to create. This agrees with many of our intuitive notions of illness. For example, colds, cancer, and syphilis are, intuitively speaking, diseases. They also decrease our ability to predict, control and create. Other more controversial mental and physical states, such as homosexuality, mental deficiency and racial prejudice, would also be classified as illness under our criterion because they decrease our ability to predict and control; homosexuality, by reducing our ability to bear and raise children; mental deficiency, by reducing our ability to learn and cope with nature in general. Other things being equal, the more intelligent a person, the healthier he is. We define intelligence as "the ability to predict and control the total environment — physical, biological and psychosocial."

Racial prejudice is a mental state not usually considered a disease, but by our criterion of mental health, it is, because it diminishes our ability to learn and cooperate with those races toward whom we are antagonistic. We lose the capacity to evaluate each person on the basis of his individual merit, and this decreases our ability to predict and control our psychosocial environment.

The prediction and control criteria for health apply equally well whether we are speaking of purely mental or purely physical health. A person who has lost a leg will, by and large, have his ability to predict and control his total environment diminished, though not necessarily equally in all dimensions. This is obvious in the physical and biological environment. In the psychosocial environment the effect will be more subtle and will result from the fact that many persons tend to treat amputees as less than complete human beings. This is a result of neuroses on their part, not that of the amputee. However, it will still tend to diminish the amputee's ability to predict and control his psychosocial environment.

If a person has a purely mental problem, such as a paranoidal obsession that every human being is a plotting, treacherous cheat who wishes to swindle him and cause him harm, this will decrease his ability to predict and control his total environment. He will be defensive and uncreative in his social relationships because he cannot trust or work with anyone. He will be ineffective in the biological environment because he will regard medical personnel as persons who only wish to take his money without providing any real service; this will cause his health to suffer. He will diminish his effectiveness and creativity in the physical environment by spending more of his time seeking to protect himself from the evil intentions of others than in trying to learn as much science and technology as he can.

These are, of course, extreme examples to illustrate a point. However, the same type of analysis applies to any type of physical or mental disorder. When mental disorders are serious, they are called "psychoses." When they are less serious, they are called "neuroses."

 

Psychoses

A common definition of psychoses is the following:

A person is psychotic when he cannot distinguish between imagined stimuli and real stimuli.

We can all imagine a poisonous scorpion climbing up our leg. Our response to this imagined scorpion is quite different than that to a real scorpion. To a psychotic, the imaginary and the real scorpion are regarded as equally real, and he responds accordingly.

A more common and in some ways more dangerous type of psychosis exists when one imagines that certain real stimuli do not exist. In this case, if a real scorpion is crawling up his leg, because the reality is so horrible, he imagines that it is not there and does nothing to avoid the danger. Similar types of psychoses are induced by severe trauma, e.g., "shell shock" in battle. They may also be socially contagious, as when a whole nation ignores an obvious danger to itself. Clearly, all forms of psychoses are self-imposed cases of psychofraud. One might call this "autopsychofraud."

These extreme cases of autopsychofraud are usually due to organic causes, such as acute alcoholism, LSD, vitamin B deficiency, and brain damage. There is considerable evidence that many cases of extreme psychotic behavior have a genetic origin and owe little or nothing to environmental circumstances (117). That is to say, some persons are born with some biochemical or physiological disorder that predisposes them to psychotic behavior. For example, there is a clear hereditary pattern in schizophrenia, which is the most common form of psychosis (117).

The clearly organic factors involved in psychoses are also demonstrated by the measurable differences in the blood biochemistry of schizophrenics. It seems that some schizophrenics possess an active substance in their blood similar in its biochemistry and physiological effects to LSD. When this substance is isolated and injected into normal persons, it can produce psychotic symptoms (11, 7S, 125, 127, 139, 140). Other forms of schizophrenia seem to be quite amenable to treatment with massive doses of vitamins. It has been shown that some schizophrenics can assimilate up to 1000 times the normal vitamin C dose.

Psychosis, as might be expected, is highly resistant to treatment by psychotherapy or psychofraud. Placebos do not seem to work very well, although there can be some placebo effect. Modern psychogenic drugs, such as tranquilizers, seem to have definite effects in controlling psychotic behavior (73, 108). However, they do not seem to have creative effects. That is to say, psychotics can be made to stop their most destructive behavior through the use of drugs, but they cannot significantly increase their ability to predict and control the total environment. Conditioning techniques, such as those practiced by the behaviorists, can also slightly improve schizophrenic behavior. But, like drugs, those treatments do not seem to increase creativity.

In non-psychotic persons, drugs such as alcohol, LSD and marijuana can create the illusion that persons have increased their ability to predict and control. There is no objective evidence that this is truly the case. There is considerable evidence indicating the opposite case (177). There have been several cases of persons who, while under the influence of LSD, thought they could fly and jumped to their deaths from high buildings. The so-called mind-expanding drugs are therefore a particularly pernicious form of psychofraud, which induce psychotic or neurotic symptoms.

 

Neuroses

The differences between psychoses and neuroses are primarily quantitative, not qualitative. Neurosis is commonly defined as follows:

A person is neurotic if he has anxieties and emotions which interfere with his ability to accomplish his purposes.

Clearly all psychotics fit the definition of a neurotic. Indeed, virtually all human beings are or have been neurotic by this definition. In our concept of mental health, psychoses and neuroses are on a continuum. At one end of this continuum is the extreme psychotic, who has so distorted reality that his behavior could quickly cause him to die or kill others on impulse if he is left unattended. At the other extreme is the mild neurotic, who may make occasional errors in judgment because of emotional factors which decrease his ability to predict and control. In the previous example, twin B appeared more neurotic than twin A, although both may have been neurotic by our definition.

Another distinction that can be made is that while psychotic behavior seems to be due primarily to organic causes and cannot be significantly altered by non-organic means, neurotic behavior seems to be almost entirely learned and is susceptible to modification by any type of psychofraud whether placebos, religion, political ideology, or astrology. For our purposes we will make the following definition of all maladaptive (neurotic) behavior:

Neurosis (neurotic behavior) is any learned pattern of behavior which decreases a person's ability to predict and control his total environment.

The fact that neurotic behavior is learned does not preclude there being an organic predisposition in some persons which makes them more susceptible to neuroses than others. Under this classification, psychotics have a very strong organic predisposition caused by heredity, drugs, or physical trauma which makes them highly susceptible to learning neurotic behavior. In fact, they can learn little else. Any person can eventually be made neurotic if he is exposed to the proper learning experiences. However, unlearned experiences, such as physical or chemical brain damage, which decrease our ability to predict and control are not neuroses, but merely illnesses. It will be shown in Part Two that only persons who have successfully undergone Ethical Therapy are totally devoid of neuroses and cannot be made neurotic except possibly by the forced administration of drugs or psychosurgery.

 

Psychotherapy Defined

Psychotherapy is any technique which corrects neurotic patterns of behavior. That is to say, psychotherapy is a technique for replacing old learned patterns of neurotic behavior with newly learned patterns of behavior which increase a person's ability to predict and control his total environment—physical, biological and psychosocial. Psychotherapy is a special kind of education.

Education is any process which teaches us new ways of better predicting and controlling our total environment. What makes psychotherapy special is that it replaces a learned neurotic pattern of behavior with a new un-neurotic pattern. Psychotherapy does not merely add new information to our psyches, it replaces or corrects misinformation which was decreasing our ability to predict and control. A racially prejudiced person is, by definition, neurotic, since he incorporates misleading information. If through education he learns to accept persons on the basis of their individual merit, he has undergone psychotherapy, either formally or informally. He will, as a consequence, be better able to predict and control his environment.

The preceding tells us what psychotherapy is supposed to be and what many of its practitioners, including Ethical Therapists, in one way or another, claim it is. However, as we examine the history of psychotherapy, we will see that it has consisted mainly of psychofraud.

 

Ancient History

Psychotherapy is probably as old as man, since in a simple sense it involves replacing bad habits with good habits. Aristotle, for example, had the preceding view of treating mental illness. Any parent who tried to eliminate bad habits and teach good ones to his children was, in a sense, practicing psychotherapy. The criteria of what is "good" and what is "bad," of course, vary from place to place and time to time. The only common denominator seems to be that activities which increase our ability to predict and control are generally considered "good" and activities which diminish it are generally considered "bad." Even when we look in retrospect at what we know were bad activities, such as the burning of heretics by the Inquisition, we can see that the leaders of the Church actually thought that they were increasing the collective ability of mankind to predict and control.

The hierarchy of the Church thought that the most important part of the environment was the soul. The most important thing to predict and control was whether the soul went to heaven or hell when we died. Their prediction was that the souls of heretics all went to hell and that through their evil influence the heretics could drag others to hell with them. Therefore, they exercised control over their environment by burning the heretics so that they would not decrease the ability of the faithful to predict and control the future lives of their souls. From the point of view of the Church hierarchy, the Inquisition was good and increased the collective ability to predict and control. Burning heretics was a type of public psychotherapy. The evil the Church did resulted not from bad intentions, but from psychofraud. It should be noted that when the Protestants had political power, they were just as zealous in burning heretics as were the Catholics. No one has ever had a monopoly on psychofraud.

Psychofraud becomes highly destructive and reaches the malignant proportions of the Inquisition when it becomes incorporated as a tenet of a political system. In our own day this destructive psychofraud occurred in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, where the leaders used tactics by which even the Inquisition pales — all in an effort to increase their ability to predict and control.

Throughout human history psychotherapy has been practiced not so much by professional therapists and ideologues as by parents in raising their children. Parents intuitively have used conditioning techniques of psychotherapy by punishing their children when they were "bad" and rewarding them when they were "good." Long before Pavlov, Watson, and Skinner advocated conditioning techniques for shaping behavior, parents used these techniques to eliminate "bad" habits and create "good" habits in their children. Furthermore, these techniques of control worked; otherwise human evolution could not have continued (50).

Although this informal family-based type of psychotherapy is the one most extensively used and by all accounts the most successful, it is largely ignored by professional psychotherapists except in its negative aspects. That family-based conditioning therapy can have deleterious effects is evidenced by the existence of highly neurotic adults whose anxieties and emotions prevent them from predicting and controlling their environment at anywhere near their organic potential. Some of these neurotic adults are produced by neurotic parents who conditioned them to accept "bad" habits as "good" and "good" habits as "bad." This is one way in which neuroses can be inherited non-genetically.

From now on we will call a habit, i.e., behavior pattern, "good" if and only if it increases our ability to predict and control the total environment. Similarly, we call a habit "bad" if and only if it decreases our ability to predict and control the total environment. That most persons throughout history have learned more good than bad habits is evidenced by the fact that the collective ability of the human race to predict and control its total environment has steadily increased for thousands of years and has increased spectacularly in the last three hundred years. This is evidenced not only by our increase in numbers, which is the main objective biological criterion for the success of a species, but also by our ability to predict and control our physical environment, ranging from eclipses and weather to space travel and nuclear energy.

Today we better predict and control our biological environment through scientific agriculture and by understanding the causes of disease, thereby developing inoculation techniques, antibiotics and even genetic engineering. In the physical and biological environment, our ability to predict and control has grown spectacularly. This is obviously the case, even if we are on the brink of self-destruction through nuclear and ecological disaster. These disasters are imminent not because we cannot predict and control the physical and biological environment adequately, but because we cannot predict and control ourselves.

 

Predicting and Controlling Behavior

To predict and control the psychosocial environment is to be able to predict and control human behavior, including our own. It is the purpose of social "science" in general and psychotherapy in particular to do this. In accordance with our criteria of "good" and "bad," what we wish to do is to increase creative behavior and decrease destructive behavior.

To be creative is to organize the environment into new patterns which increase the net ability of the human race to predict and control the total environment. If we have done no more than increased our own ability and not decreased anyone else's ability, then we have been creative. The more creative we are, the more we increase the ability of others and ourselves to predict and control.

To be destructive, on the other hand, is to decrease the ability of others and ourselves to predict and control. To cause physical injury to a human being is destructive because it decreases his ability to predict and control, as was shown in the section on health. To teach a human being something new and true is to be creative, because we have then organized part of the environment, i.e., the person's mind, into a new pattern which increases his ability to predict and control. Creativity is the highest form of intelligence.

Traditionally, psychotherapy has put its emphasis on increasing a person's ability to predict and control his own emotions. It was not so much creative ability that psychotherapy sought to increase, as the elimination of destructive emotion. The reason for this was pragmatic. Persons did not usually go to a psychotherapist to learn how to better build bridges, perform higher mathematics, breed animals, avoid infectious disease, paint pictures or compose symphonies (28, 29, 43, 71, 146). If they were interested in these subjects, they went to an expert in the particular subject. However, if they found they were so full of anxiety that they could not create or even perform routine functions, they saw a psychotherapist (43, 71). If they were so overcome with jealousy, hate or fear that they could not concentrate on their studies or work, they saw a psychotherapist (43, 71). If they were so depressed that death seemed a better alternative than life, they saw a psychotherapist. Psychotherapy, therefore, developed as a technique for dealing with the immediate problems of neurotics and not as a technique for making persons creative. Although some therapies claim to increase creativity, there is no objective evidence that they actually do so (6, 7, 38, 91, 147, 148, 172, 183).

 

Religion and Therapy

The early professional therapists were almost all religious priests of some kind. When a devout Catholic unburdens his soul to his confessor, he is assured that the slate has been wiped clear and he need feel no more anxiety or guilt after doing proper penance. This is analogous to the highly effective psychofraud of selling one's warts to another. For a devout Catholic, his religion in general and confession in particular take care of all important mental problems. Once he has confessed, he is assured of eternal bliss in heaven, if he should die before having committed new "mortal sins."

This is powerful medicine. It is psychofraud. It may eliminate anxiety, but there is no evidence that it increases creativity. Indeed, it may decrease creativity by deluding the believer into thinking that all important questions are answered and that he need not achieve in this world but merely prepare himself for the really good life in the next. It is probably more than a coincidence that the most creative regions in Europe before the Reformation, Italy and Iberia (Spain and Portugal), remained the most Catholic afterward and have undergone a drastic decrease in creativity since then relative to the Protestant countries of Northern Europe. Between Catholic Ireland and Protestant Scotland, we see a similar contrast in creativity under more controlled conditions. Therefore, even when conventional psychotherapy accomplishes its stated purpose of relieving destructive emotion, it is not necessarily a good thing, if it does not increase and, in fact, decreases creativity.

Modern psychotherapy developed as a secular alternative to Catholic confession. Modern psychotherapy was developed mainly by Jews, e.g., Freud, Adler, Rank, Reich, Perls, Fromm, and Maslow, and to a much lesser extent Protestants, e.g., Jung and Rogers. Catholics, perhaps because of their low creativity, but most of all because they already had a highly effective form of psychofraud, did not participate to any notable extent in the creation of modern psychotherapy. It should be noted that Freud and his circle were mostly Jews living in a largely Catholic country. Jung was the son of a Protestant minister. In our own time, the highly popular psychotherapist, Rollo May, was originally trained as a Protestant minister. The connection between psychotherapy and religion is very close (29, 54, 84, 88, 165). The psychiatrist, E. F. Torrey, in his 1972 book, The Mind Game, quite candidly admits that witch doctors and psychotherapists use many of the same techniques and are effective for similar reasons. However, he sees this as indicative of the value of witch doctors and not of the disvalue of psychotherapists.

The effectiveness of the Catholic religion in relieving emotional stress is objectively evidenced by the much lower rate of suicide and demand for psychotherapy in most Catholic countries (40,44,87,178). The ratio is about twenty to one in favor of the Catholic countries. For the most part, it is the "fallen" Catholics who seem to feel great emotional stress until they find some new kind of psychofraud. In European communist countries, where the political ideology preempts all other forms of psychofraud, the therapeutic confession is almost totally lacking, and the suicide rates are climbing dramatically. Hungary, a traditionally Catholic country now under communist control, now has the highest rate in the world (178).

Virtually all persons (over 90 percent) who undergo psychotherapy claim it brings them emotional relief and that it has enabled them to better cope with life (42,43, 91, 146). It makes little difference whether the therapy is Roman Catholic, Freudian, Christian Science, Adlerian, Jungian, Rogerian, Reichian, "humanistic" or "dianetic" — the results seem to be about the same (42,43). Anxiety is reduced and creativity is at best unaffected; at worst it may be decreased, as was shown to be the case for Roman Catholic therapy and has been repeatedly documented (24, 148, 152, 153, 154, 183).

With the exception of behavior therapy, which is a modern version of the age-old custom of psychological conditioning, modern systems of psychotherapy have no significant objective criteria for measuring their effectiveness. The expressed subjective feelings of the patient are considered the best indication of the success of the treatment. Behavior therapy is different from most of the modern forms of psychotherapy in its aim and in its effects. It will be discussed separately.

From now on, when we refer to modern psychotherapy, we refer to all systems other than behavior therapy and Ethical Therapy. It will be shown that both Ethical and Behavior Therapy share a certain objectivity and scientific approach with each other but not with other forms of modern therapy. They differ in that behavior therapy is symptom oriented and does not increase or even seek to increase creativity, while Ethical Therapy is oriented entirely toward increasing the total creativity of the person.

 

Rationalistic Therapy

All modern forms of psychotherapy are derived from the teachings of Freud. They assume that there are unconscious processes operating in human beings and that most neurotic behavior is a response to unconscious desires and needs. Depending on the system in question, it is assumed that all behavior is learned except for certain innate drives or needs.

 

Freudianism

Freud thought that there were only two innate needs, the life drive (ergs) and the death wish (thanathos). The life drive manifested itself in our sexual desires, love, and our instinct for self-preservation. The death wish manifested itself in all our destructive behavior, e.g., aggression and suicide. Freud's therapy, psychoanalysis, consisted in helping the patient become aware of his basic unconscious needs, which had been repressed by certain unconscious mechanisms of the mind, which found these primal needs unacceptable. According to Freud, the primary source of mental illness stemmed from improper sexual development, particularly the Oedipus complex, by means of which children repressed their sexual desires for their parents. Freud thought the Oedipus complex universal. Once the mechanisms by which the patient repressed his basic thoughts became clear to the patient through insight, the patient's neuroses vanished. It is to the credit of Freud that at the core of his therapy was the belief that "the truth will make you free." The problem stemmed from his lack of scientific rigor and the acceptance of subjective truth in lieu of objective truth. Ethical Therapy is based entirely on objective truth. There is no scientific evidence whatever that psychoanalysis, as a theory, has any validity other than in its basic assumption about the existence of unconscious states. In other words, it simply does not seem to work except as a placebo (33, 38, 48, 73, 91, 116, 123, 148, 152, 183). These and hundreds of controlled experiments in which psychoanalyzed patients were compared to various control groups show that psychoanalysis is of little or no medical value, although the psychotherapeutic confession, which can occur independently of psychoanalytic theory, may have some nonspecific emotional value.

 

Adlerism

Alfred Adler, a student and colleague of Freud, believed that there was only one basic need, the will-to-power. All of human activity was seen as a means of acquiring power. When the drive to power is thwarted by environmental forces beyond one's control, then neuroses set in. These manifest themselves in ways of deceiving one's self about one's own dependency or impotence, e.g., an inferiority complex. However, Adler saw a healthy person using his power to help his fellowmen in open friendship and not exploiting them. The willful domination of one person by another was seen as a form of neurosis and as a compensation for feelings of inferiority. Adlerian psychotherapy, individual psychology, consisted in helping persons recognize their own basic need for power and channeling it into creative activity as well as recognizing the mechanisms which were used to compensate for feelings for inferiority. The scientific validity of Adlerism is at the same stage as Freudianism. However, because Adler assumed less than Freud, he had less about which he could be wrong. All things being equal, simple models are preferable to more complex models.

 

Reichianism

Wilhelm Reich, another pupil of Freud, thought that the basis of all neuroses resulted from the inability to achieve full orgasm. There was a substance in the universe called "orgone energy" which a person tapped when he had a good orgasm or sat in a special box Reich invented called an "orgone accumulator." Orgone therapy consisted mostly in sitting in the orgone accumulator and then having a good orgasm. Patients who did not have a sexual partner were encouraged to masturbate — the reverse of the old masturbatory hypothesis. Reich claimed that orgone therapy not only cured neuroses but virtually every other disease as well, including cancer. He claimed that he could even create life within his orgone accumulators, i.e., synthesize protozoa from matter and energy. Furthermore, he documented all his results with sufficient detail so that anyone who wished it could duplicate his "experiments." Although his theories are among the most fantastic, they are also among the most scientific in claiming a controlled experimental basis. The fact that Reich's experiments have never been duplicated by any independent scientist makes it highly likely that orgone therapy is also psychofraud.

Although orgone therapy may be psychofraud, it is a most effective placebo. Many faithful adherents of orgone treatment claim wonders for it, even after all other forms of psychotherapy and medical treatment had failed (112). There is a growing cult of true believers around Reich's Orgone Institute even as Freud's, Adler's, and the other rationalistic therapists' orthodox followers diminish (112). Reich himself is widely considered to have been insane by the more orthodox therapists. Objectively, he seems at least as successful as his rivals in predicting and controlling human behavior in terms of his documented cures and the dedication of his followers.

Reich, Adler, and Freud, as well as many other schools of psychotherapy derived from Freudianism, share a common rationalistic approach. This rationalism appeals to the non-mystical, but it is unscientific, because the theories are not based on objectively verifiable experiments. The experiments that Reich did were apparently elaborate forms of self deception. Furthermore, Reich's theory made many predictions about purely physical facts which are untrue, e.g., he claimed that the blueness of the oceans and the skies was due to orgone energy and not to light diffraction. This can easily be shown to be false. Still Reich's psychofraud is among the most effective placebos because it has an aura of magic and complex mechanistic science about it, which the more traditional forms of psychotherapy lack. It is the magical ingredient which makes psychofraud most effective (42, 43). It is the synthesis between psychotherapy and mysticism which is growing and threatens to destroy Western Civilization, even as it destroyed the great civilizations of the East.

 

Mystical Therapy

Mystical therapy differs from rationalistic therapy in calling into play alleged supernatural powers with which to produce its effects. Faith healers, who claim to have special powers given to them by an all-powerful god or gods, range from witch doctors to Christian ministers. When persons believe the faith healer, the placebo effect of this belief is overwhelming and can overshadow any pseudoscientific placebo, such as sugar pills, orgone boxes or psychoanalysis. For this reason witch doctors can kill their enemies with sympathetic magic. For this reason the blind can be made to see and the cripple to walk. When the faith healing cannot overcome a completely organic disorder, such as missing organs or limbs, the faith healer need only say that the patient was not cured because of his lack of faith, that if he had truly believed he would have been cured.

 

Christian Science

The first modern attempt to bring about a synthesis between therapy and mysticism was made by Mary Baker Eddy in the nineteenth century, when she founded Christian Science. Mark Twain referred to her as "the most remarkable woman who ever lived." As an organizational genius she has had few peers. She puts Freud and all his intellectual descendants to shame.

Mary Baker was born to rigid Calvinists in 1821. She was a sickly girl, but she managed to acquire three husbands during her lifetime. She apparently suffered from a wide variety of psychosomatic and hysterical diseases. Her second husband, Dr. Patterson, a dentist, after being unsuccessful in curing her symptoms, sent her to a famous Mesmerist, Phineas Quimby, who had combined hypnotic suggestion with primitive Christian faith healing. He apparently had a profound effect on the then Mrs. Mary Baker Glover Patterson. After a few sessions with Quimby, she is reputed to have glowed with health for the first time in her life.

She had for many years been attracted to mysticism, occultism and spiritualism. After her experience with Quimby, she was certain that she had found ultimate truth. She out-Quimbied Quimby and denied the effects of suggestion and hypnosis. Indeed, with almost uncanny clairvoyance, she preceded modern physics by denying the existence of matter altogether. Mind was the ultimate reality, and matter was merely an evil manifestation of the mind. Since there was no matter, there was no body. All disease could then be cured by mystical Christian exercises, and cure disease she did.

Probably no form of psychofraud can produce as many "documented" cures as can Christian Science (35). It is unreasonable to assume that Christian Science became a powerful, wealthy, world-wide movement with millions of adherents merely because of wishful thinking. It grew and prospered because it worked. It was one of the most powerful placebos ever created. Its only limitation was that it would not work on persons who were not orthodox Christians. For them another type of mystical placebo with scientific overtones was necessary. It was to be created by Carl Gustav Jung.

 

Jungianism

Jung had been Freud's favorite associate and his heir apparent. However, Jung's Calvinistic background and mystical nature did not permit him to accept Freud's purely mechanistic concepts of the mind or the importance of the sex "drive" in human development. Jung believed in the "collective unconscious" by means of which the human race shares a common memory. Religious belief and practice was a symbolic expression of collective unconscious knowledge. Freud was antagonistic toward religion, whereas Jung encouraged his patients to practice the religion in which they felt most comfortable. The hierarchy of the Catholic Church was most antagonistic toward Freud but quite friendly toward Jung. Several Catholic priests have been Jungian therapists. For obvious reasons, the Nazis were antagonistic toward Freud, but they embraced Jung as he embraced them.

To Jung the basis of all neuroses lay in unresolved, unconscious conflicts. He saw all persons as basically introverted or extroverted. Furthermore, irrespective of which basic type they were, they could be oriented toward sensation, intuition, feeling or thinking. Each person would emphasize one or another of these ways of being. However, within each person there was another hidden part, "the shadow," which longed to express itself. Therefore, a thinking introvert unconsciously longed to be an intuitive, sensual or feeling extrovert, or some other combination of the eight basic categories of personalities. Furthermore, there were in each person ideas and thoughts which had not yet "ripened" and would eventually have to express themselves.

Psychotherapy consisted in helping the patient recognize this "shadow" self and express these unconscious desires. Sex was merely one of many unconscious desires that a person might have suppressed.

So far, this approach is not too different from Freud. The main difference is on emphasis. Jung also felt that many emotional problems arose from aimlessness and purposelessness in one's life. For this reason religion was encouraged as a means of giving purpose to existence. What is unique to Jung and those he has influenced is the concept of the "collective unconscious."

The notion of a collective unconscious can exist without any mystical assumptions. For example, we merely note that all memories correspond to some physical state in the brain and that some initial memories, i.e., brain states, are synthesized by the genes. However, the Jungians seem to feel, in a rather nebulous way, that the experiences of each person somehow affect the unconscious memories of all persons, and that some of these memories are inherited in a way that is neither Lamarkian or Darwinian. Lamarkianism, also called Michurinism and Lysenkoism, assumes that acquired characteristics, such as a sunburned skin, are passed on by heredity from parent to child. Darwinism assumes that only physical changes in the genes influence heredity and that any gross changes in the body of a parent will not be inherited. All scientific evidence supports Darwinism. This is the mystical part of Jung which makes the mind more akin to a soul and sets the ground for the immortality of the ego as a possibility.

For this reason Jungian analysis, which is called analytic psychology, is very appealing to religious and mystical persons. Older persons who begin to be concerned about death also find considerable comfort in Jung's theories. Artists and creative persons in general are attracted by the possibility of increasing their creativity through (1) helping their "unripened ideas" emerge from their unconscious and (2) tapping the collective unconscious which is alleged to be the major source of creativity. Analytic psychology claims to facilitate this process. There is absolutely no scientific evidence that any theories peculiar to Jung are valid (33, 38, 48, 73, 91, 113, 116, 123, 148, 152, 183).

 

The Revolt Against Reason

The spirit of rationalism which manifested itself in logical positivism and dialectic materialism during the first half of the twentieth century was unfavorable to Jung. Freud fared much better, although he was just as unscientific as Jung and less imaginative. However, the "revolt against reason" which has been an undercurrent in human thought since the time of Rousseau, has gathered new strength in recent years.

This strength comes mainly from the reaction to modern science and its manifestations in the materialistic civilization of the United States, Western Europe and the Soviet Bloc. These societies, which claim to have embraced modern science, have produced a new generation of alienated, affluent youth who seek spiritual values. They see "heroic materialism" leading the world toward human degradation, pollution and annihilation. Therefore, they reject reason, which they sometimes call "linear thinking," and, above all, science as a means to a better life. Among the post-atomic generation, primitive Christianity, Hare Krishna, Jungianism and other forms of mystical therapy are in great vogue. However, the leading edge of this movement is represented by humanistic psychology.

 

Humanistic Psychology

Humanistic psychology is the culmination of all types of psychofraud. It might be called "eclectic psychofraud." All the forces of mysticism, scientism and anti-scientific thinking have come together under a single militant banner. The central belief of the humanistic psychologists is that ultimate reality is subjective, not objective. It is our thoughts and emotions that count, not whether these thoughts and emotions lead to any objectively verifiable ability to predict and control the external environment. The emphasis is on doing one's own thing and accepting any behavior, no matter how bizarre, as normal and natural. Indeed, the more peculiar and entertaining the behavior, the more liberated the person is. The only ethical constraints are "be happy" and "do not make others unhappy" (179).

The "scientific" basis of humanistic psychology is found in the writings of Abraham Maslow. Maslow believed that human beings were born with a biologically predetermined hierarchy of needs. If "lower" needs were left "unsatisfied," "higher" needs would not manifest themselves. Briefly, the major classes of needs in the hierarchy are as follows: (1) security (includes basic instincts of self-preservation and hunger), (2) love (includes the sex drive, affection, kindness, altruism, etc.), (3) self-esteem (includes being highly regarded by one's self and others), and (4) self-actualization (includes the need to be free, creative and self-directing).

Any creative scientist or artist may be self-actualizing. However, persons such as Stalin and Hitler also fall into the self-actualizing category. Each did his own thing. They displayed considerable imagination and resourcefulness in accomplishing tasks they set for themselves. They did not merely cater to other persons' expectations and seek to please. Therefore, a person may be self-actualizing and still highly neurotic, by our definition. However, in Maslow's scheme neuroses stem from having unfulfilled lower needs which prevent a person from becoming self-actualizing. Once a person has become self-actualizing, he is considered "healthy."

In all fairness to Maslow it should be pointed out that he was much more rational and hardheaded than those who have incorporated his teachings into humanistic psychology. He was unscientific but not antiscientific. He was very much in the tradition of the speculative, rationalistic psychotherapists, such as Freud, Adler, and the Gestalt therapists. However, there is no scientific evidence to support Maslow's theories. Their uncritical acceptance by the humanistic psychologists brings them into the realm of psychofraud, even if some of these theories, such as the quite plausible hierarchy of needs, should later be shown to be partially true.

Therapy in humanistic psychology consists in helping persons recognize and fulfill their alleged basic needs. If a person is lacking love, he will be at a fairly primitive level of development. Therefore, a humanistic psychotherapist should help the patient recognize and fulfill his needs for love.

Some humanistic psychologists treat their patients through sexual intercourse, thereby satisfying the patient's need for "love." Most of the therapists who practice this type of sex therapy are heterosexual males. However, there have been reports of this "therapy" applied to persons of both sexes by the "therapist" (24, 132). A few female therapists also claim to practice it selectively (132). There is one report of a massive group sex-therapy session where many sex therapists and their patients had a party and engaged in "patient swapping" (132). The sex therapists have not clarified whether they use sexual intercourse as a form of therapy for all their sexually deprived patients or only for those they find attractive. However, sex therapy is one of the more banal variants of humanistic psychology.

Paul Bindrim, the originator of "nude-marathon group therapy," where neurotics sit nude in a group, "interact," and discuss their problems for long periods of time, announced a dramatic "breakthrough" in psychotherapy which was highly praised by Maslow himself shortly before his death. Maslow claimed that after exposure to a nude therapy group, "people would go away more spontaneous, less guarded, less defensive, not only about the shape of their behinds, but freer and more innocent about their minds too" (74). Bindrim theorized that the major focus of anatomical anxiety centered around the crotch. If persons could rid themselves of crotch anxiety, they might be able to take a giant step toward mental health and self-actualization. Therefore, he has modified his "nude therapy" into "crotch therapy" (74).

In crotch therapy all the members of the nude-marathon therapy group are successively spread-eagled before all the other members who then proceed to stare at the patient's crotch until their and the patient's crotch anxiety is "extinguished," in the parlance of the behaviorists. In extinguishing their crotch anxiety, presumably their other anxieties will also be extinguished. After all of the patients have stared for prolonged periods at each others crotches, according to Bindrim, they report an enormous psychic "boost."

Humanistic psychology has recently become respectable and is now classified as "the thirty-second area of psychology" (179).

The following excerpt of items from The Whole-Soul Catalogue of Humanistic Psychology will give a flavor of the sorts of things humanistic psychologists value.

Acid
Aikido
Astrology
Bio-Energetics
Bio-Feedback Devices
Chanting
Dreams
Fasting
Gay Liberation
Group Basic Encounter
Hare Krishna
Human-Potential Expanders
I Ching
International Transcendental Meditation Society
Meditation
Natural Foods
Nude Research
Open Encounter
Optokinetic Perceptual Learning Device
Paranormal Research
Parapsychology
Psychodrama
Psychosynthesis
Subud
The Tarot
Tibetan Buddhism
Transpersonal Association
Witchcraft
Jesus People Yoga
Massage Zen

Humanistic psychology incorporates every conceivable form of psychofraud. In many ways it seeks to make psychotic behavior, as defined here, the norm. The current work of J. C. Lilly bears this out (83). Therefore, it seems inevitable that humanistic psychology will, in time, preempt all other forms of psychofraud. In so doing, it will have the same effects that psychofraud has had through the ages—it will make people happy. But will it increase creativity?

 

Effectiveness of Psychotherapy

The effectiveness of psychofraud in giving people peace of mind, emotional tranquility, and relief from physical and psychoneurotic illness has been amply demonstrated by thousands of case histories and even a few controlled experiments (6, 7, 38, 73, 91, 147, 148, 172, 183). What seems to have been missed by most exponents of psychofraud is that its effectiveness depends mainly on the faith of the patient and is independent of the theory on which it is based.

An experiment showed that psychotherapists of different schools eventually ended by giving identical treatments to all their patients (91). An analysis of their conversations with their patients showed that shortly after finishing their psychotherapeutic training they used language and took an approach which was characteristic of their schools, Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian, Gestalt, etc. However, after they had been in practice for several years there seemed to be no discernable difference between the treatment given by the therapists from the different schools (42, 43). Furthermore, they seemed to have become more effective therapists with time. What is the explanation?

The only explanations which make sense in this context are the following: (1) merely talking over one's problems with intelligent, sympathetic listeners with whom one is not too emotionally involved is occasionally an effective form of therapy for some non-biological illnesses; (2) a person can become a better listener and more effective therapist with practice; and (3) believing that some experience will cure and control anxiety is enough to make it work. In other words, almost all the years spent in learning various theories explaining psychotic and neurotic behavior and how to treat it are irrelevant. What counts is merely being a good listener and exuding confidence. The more confidence he exudes the more effective a placebo the therapist becomes. The patient is treated by psychofraud; but the major victim of psychofraud has been the therapist, who, with the best of intentions, has wasted a large portion of his life learning useless theories.

In 1973 a Ph.D. candidate in counseling and psychotherapy did a well-controlled experiment as part of her doctoral dissertation, to evaluate the relative effectiveness of short-term and long-term eclectic psychotherapy. With considerable difficulty she was persuaded to include in her study a control group which would not be given any kind of treatment. The experimental and control subjects were all students from the same school who had sought psychotherapeutic help at the university counseling center. The students were assigned randomly to three groups: short term (I), long term (II) and control (III). The control group was merely placed on the waiting list and was not treated, although for experimental purposes this was a type of "treatment." All the students were given batteries of validated, standardized psychological tests to determine their mental health before and after treatment. It was discovered after treatment that there were no significant differences between the psychological states of the three groups as measured by any of the objective tests. In this case there was not even a discernible placebo effect. Any psychological changes were due to time, biology and external causes.

This is not too surprising in view of the preceding discussions. What was surprising was the response of the experimenter who could not believe her own experimental data and tried desperately to find a psychotherapeutic effect when there was none. She could not accept the fact that after spending four hard years in studying to be a psychotherapist she had learned little more than psychofraud. However, her experiment was well conceived and performed, and she was awarded the Ph.D. She now is teaching the same psychofraud which her own experiment showed to be ineffective at a large university. She continues to see patients and to practice psychofraud (175).

The lesson to be drawn from this example is that the victims of psychofraud find it difficult to face reality even when it comes from direct personal experience. The emotional and sometimes financial investment made in psychofraud blinds its victims to reality. Thousands of similar, well-controlled experiments have been done which expose psychofraud for what it is; yet its practitioners and victims remain true believers. They will grasp at any straw which supports their belief and reject a mountain of evidence which contradicts it.

Part of the problem is that there are thousands of case histories and poorly controlled experiments which tend to support the position of conventional psychotherapy. Any time a person undergoing psychotherapy shows improvement, it is assumed to be due to the treatment and not to any external or biological causes. Unsuccessful cases are usually ignored. Any positive evidence is uncritically accepted and the hard negative evidence is categorically rejected. The need to believe comforting illusions is often greater than the need for objective truth.

When psychotherapists claim that there is evidence both ways regarding psychotherapy, i.e., (1) evidence tending to support the validity of psychotherapy and (2) evidence tending to contradict it, they are really saying in effect that the well-controlled experiments tend to contradict the claims of psychotherapy and the poorly controlled experiments tend to support it. It is relatively easy to do well-controlled experiments; yet they are rarely done in psychotherapy or in any branch of social "science," for that matter. The investment in the established social science ideologies is too great. The question remaining is, Are there any benefits to be derived from a formal study of any of the conventional forms of psychotherapy?

It may be argued that if the therapist had not gone through the ritual of studying psychofraud in a formal setting, he would not have had enough confidence or credentials to be an effective placebo to his patient. However, we know through thousands of documented cases that many faith healers and hypnotists seem to achieve results as good as or better than some certified psychotherapists (23, 59, 62, 73, 91, 92, 95). Therefore, what is real and sometimes works in psychotherapy is suggestion and catharsis through conversation and other forms of communication (42, 43). It matters not so much how the patient has come to believe that he can understand, control and predict his psychic environment as that he in fact does believe. This will occasionally eliminate emotional problems, but it will not necessarily make persons more creative.

A survey of the literature and the current state of affairs leads one to suspect that there are four, and only four elements of value in psychotherapy. These are as follows:

• 1. Discussing one's problems with intelligent, sympathetic listeners, irrespective of their psychotherapeutic training, fulfills some basic human needs. This can relieve anxiety and help persons see themselves in a more rational framework. People need friends, even paid friends.
• 2. Suggestion, whether through placebos or hypnosis, can alter a person's mental and physical state. A self-confident psychotherapist with impressive (to the patient) credentials can be a most effective placebo or hypnotist. The patient might be more prone to suggestion from him than from a "layman."
• 3. Conditioning, Pavlovian and operant, can change simple behavior and cure simple neuroses such as phobias and compulsions. This is extensively discussed in the next chapter.
• 4. Learning how to cope scientifically with as much of the physical, biological, and psychosocial environment as possible in an integrated way can relieve anxiety and reduce neuroses. This approach is discussed at length in Part Two and is an integral part of Ethical Therapy.

The rationalistic school of psychiatry led by J. D. Frank at Johns Hopkins has independently reached similar conclusions, as have other therapists (42, 43).

Of course, drugs and surgery can also modify behavior. But we have by definition excluded these approaches from psychotherapy, although they can be part of ethical medical treatment.

Some forms of psychofraud, such as religion and humanistic psychology, are so much out of tune with reality that although they provide enormous emotional comfort, they delude persons into believing that all aspects of nature can be controlled by the same type of magic. Persons so convinced will eventually succumb to such non-psychic phenomena as bacterial or viral infections, crop failures, floods, earthquakes and other natural disasters, which they have tried to control through purely magical means, such as prayer or "transcendental meditation." Although most modern forms of psychotherapy do not pretend to have any relevance outside of human emotions and behavior, some, such as Christian Science, orgonomy and humanistic psychology, have been extrapolated to explain many forms of natural phenomena. Christian Science denies the existence of the material universe altogether. Orgone theory explains the blueness of nature and the origins of life. It claims to cure cancer. Humanistic psychology explains many forms of complex social behavior, such as war, in terms of its form of psychofraud. It induces persons to believe that drug-generated psychotic states or self-delusion represent a higher reality (83, 179). It induces persons into accepting food fads and astrology as means of predicting and controlling their biological and physical environment. It makes them reject scientific method as a means of copying with reality.

The antiscientific aspect of psychofraud in general and humanistic psychology in particular is the most pernicious. The rejection of scientific method bodes almost certain disaster for the human race. This is the case because the most serious human problems arise from having created a world in which science and technology have radically altered the physical and biological environment while the psychosocial environment is still controlled by psychofraud. It will not be until the same criteria of objective verifiability are used to determine the truth or falsity of psychosocial theories that the total environment will again be brought into proper balance. This is the purpose of Ethical Therapy. It is also the stated purpose of behaviorism.