COMMENTS BY ANDREW FELDMAR

THE FOLLOWING IS A PIECE WRITTEN BY PSYCHOTHERAPIST ANDREW FELDMAR, I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH THE SENTIMENTS EXPRESSED THEREIN.
-Dan L. Edmunds, Ed.D.


I have been listening to people and conversing with them under the pretext of psychotherapy for over 45,000 hours by now. The theater of therapy requires preofessionalism, science, technique, illness, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment plan and evaluation. The reality of therapy consists of two people meeting. There is a space, a time and two people participating in each other’s lives. For better or worse. For Freud, analysis has no other aim than to allow two human beings to meet, in privacy and in truth. Truth is not fact. To tell the truth requires courage, because truth is always personal. We lie because we are afraid. Afraid that our own truths are not good enough. If I am concerned with my manner of living and what’s right or wrong with it, whom do I invite to critique my life? Therapy is based on the premise that it’s better to know where we stand than to avoid reality, however painful that reality is. If I had no secrets that I deny exist, deny even to myself, then perhaps I wouldn’t need another to help me disclose the secrets I’ve been hiding from awareness. In a new book, M. Guy Thompson states succinctly, “the things we hide come back to haunt us in indirect ways. We eventually suffer from the secrets we harbor, the same secrets that alert us to the things we fear about reality. This secrets contain a truth, not because they necessarily reveal the nature of reality, but because the things we conceal seem too real to accept”. The issues referred to above are ethical and political, not scientific, medical or psychological.