36. May your journey be long.

I know I have not posted on this blog for quite a while, and in fact I think I will be laying it to rest quite shortly. There is a new one in the offing.

I quit my PsyD in Clinical Psychology last summer. I transferred to an MA in Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology at Saybrook University. From the outside, and from a careerist perspective, that might seem like a knight's step sideways and backwards. However, from my point of view, it has turned out to be a great move.

Saybrook University used to be called The Humanistic Psychology Institute. The administrative offices are in San Francisco, although the university itself operates primarily by distance learning. That suits me very well. In fact, it reminds me of my undergraduate degree - I download a reading list, do the readings, then write a few essays which I email to my professors all round the country. If you are interested in a subject, and sufficiently disciplined to do the work, then it's great. I don't need to waste any more time sitting in tedious classrooms with second rate professors droning on, as at Alliant. I really think that distance learning is ideal for postgraduate degrees. The undergraduate/campus experience is great to have, and an interesting learning process in itself, but you only need to do it once.

Furthermore, Humanistic and Transpersonal Psychology is a fascinating area. I have completed papers in the Psychology of Shamanism, Eastern Psychology, the Psychology of Conflict Resolution (actually that was not so illuminating), and Existential Psychotherapies. What I particularly appreciate about the Humanistic/Transpersonal perspective is:

1. The interest in human potential. Clinical Psychology only concentrates on the negative - on mental illness and on what happens when things go wrong. I concede that is part of the definition of 'clinical', but I don't think you can have a robust concept of mental illness without also investigating mental health. For my money, mental health is not just the absence of mental illness; that is a depressingly negative way of looking at it. Rather, mental health is something to be achieved, something that can constantly be improved. To me, it signifies the realization of an individual's potential, 'self-actualization', the capacity to find satisfaction in work, the ability to love, to find meaning in life, to 'flow', to transcend our 'skin-encapsulated egos', perhaps even to engage with a spiritual dimension (however you choose to define that).

In the West, I think we grow up with the belief that we reach our mental and cognitive peak in our late teens, and that the most we can hope for after that is to maintain a plateau until the inevitable decline into mindless senility. But I now believe that a healthy person should continue to learn and to develop and to grow in depth and understanding and wisdom throughout life. That view is much more prevalent in Eastern cultures/religions/psychologies/philosophies (the distinctions are often blurred), and it is a tragedy that many people in the west are still unaware of the concept of their own human potential.

I don't want to sound trite or predictable, but the developed, civilized world can seem a depressing place. Material and commercial values are inescapable. The fascination with celebrity is ubiquitous. Our dreams have become so tawdry - frequently they consist of no more than the furtive snatching of frotted pleasure between enseamed sheets, and even that leaves us cold. What passes for entertainment is, in most cases, an insult to the meanest intelligence. We drink and drug ourselves to anaesthetise ourselves to the groundlessness and the emptiness. I increasingly find myself in agreement with the prescient analyst R D Laing; he argued that psychopathology was a sane response to an insane world. Humanistic psychology may not have all the answers, but at least it addresses these questions.

2. I also like Humanistic Psychology because it doesn't endlessly try to keep up the tiresome pretense of being a strict science. In fact, it believes that any method of accessing human experience is worthy of serious investigation. Humanistic psychology is interested in literature, art, philosophy, biography, mythology, anthropology, meditation and altered states of consciousness, shamanism, parapsychology, phenomenology...anything that sheds some light on the experience of being human. It doesn't restrict itself to experimental data in the way that clinical psychology would like to (yawn).

Anyway, I think I needed to go through two years of Clinical Psychology at Alliant in order to come to these personal realisations. At times it was hard - it was not pleasant to feel myself in the role of the nay-sayer, the disbeliever, the doubting Thomas, especially when many of my peers seemed to be such zealous believers. I don't think that I even want to be a therapist anymore - at least not right now - despite the fact that in Existential Psychotherapy I have finally found the modality that truly resonates with my most fundamental convictions. But maybe it's about the journey rather than the destination.

In 1911, the Greek poet Constantine Cavafy wrote the poem Ithaca, about Odysseus' return home. But Cavafy does not urge haste. Quite the opposite, he tells Odysseus to take his time and hopes that his journey will be a long one:

Πάντα στον νου σου νάχεις την Ιθάκη.
Το φθάσιμον εκεί είν' ο προορισμός σου.
Αλλά μη βιάζεις το ταξίδι διόλου.
Καλλίτερα χρόνια πολλά να διαρκέσει·
και γέρος πια ν' αράξεις στο νησί,
πλούσιος με όσα κέρδισες στον δρόμο,
μη προσδοκώντας πλούτη να σε δώσει η Ιθάκη.


Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your final destination.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better for it to last many years,
and when old to rest in the island,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to offer you wealth.