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Oh wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
The wish expressed here by Robert Burns is one that psychoanalysts might well embrace, as James Davies (a British-trained psychotherapist and anthropologist) points out in his book. The mirror he holds up to us is not a complimentary one. Davies points out that psychoanalytic education is a “heavily circumscribed affair” (p. 15). In seminars and supervision, the discourse is more “affirmative” of our own established beliefs than “critical” of them, more “sectarian” than “academic” (p. 13). The interface between our profession and other intellectual disciplines and social institutions is rarely studied.
These are only some of the ways in which Davies shows us that psychoanalytic and psychotherapy training programs—by virtue of their special language, hierarchical nature, appeal to a prestigious past, and limited intellectual engagement—shape trainees and perpetuate their particular ways of thinking. This is evidenced by the failure of many institutes to vigorously promote psychoanalytic research or to carefully examine and discuss the research of others who question the efficacy of what we do (p. 4).
Davies goes on to explore what he and other anthropologists feel is the mythic structure of psychoanalytic thought. They describe myth as a “system of interlinking symbols and theoretical ideas whose composite provides an orientation” (p. 63) through which the origin and nature of the patient's problem can be framed and understood. Healing occurs when the patient becomes attached to this mythic system and learns to articulate his or her “private world” in terms provided by the treatment. The efficacy of treatment is based not on its veridical truth, but on its experiential truth for its users and their belief in the explanations of suffering