 Cover of the first edition | |
| Authors | Margaret Singer Janja Lalich |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Psychotherapy |
| Publisher | Jossey-Bass |
Publication date | 1996 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 263 |
| ISBN | 0-7879-0278-0 |
| OCLC | 34699480 |
| 616.89/14 20 | |
| LC Class | RC480.515 .S56 1996 |
"Crazy" Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? is a book by the psychologist Margaret Singer and the sociologist Janja Lalich. It was published by Jossey-Bass in 1996.
Singer and Lalich's intended audience is psychiatric and psychotherapy patients. They discuss a list of severe warning signs that psychotherapy patients should pay attention to, regardless of the psychotherapist's credentials or reputation. They discuss these in detail and quantify them into ten classic behaviour patterns. These include potential sexual abuse; asking the patient to perform menial chores; discussing the psychotherapist's own problems in detail; asking the patient to cut off relations with friends and family; diagnosing the patient's condition before thoroughly discussing the issue; claiming the patient must be hypnotized in order to sort through past memories; treating patients as if they all have the same psychological root cause of illness; claiming to have a magical miracle technique; utilizing a checklist to find out if the patient suffers from an illness that the psychotherapist specializes in; and finally, demanding that the patient accept certain religious, metaphysical or pseudoscientific beliefs in order to continue psychotherapy. Specific therapies include those that espouse beliefs in "possession by spirit entities, past-life regression, alien abduction, Primal therapy and other unverified cathartic therapies, reparenting, rebirthing, neurolinguistic programming (NLP), facilitated communication (FC), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Neural Organization Technique (NOT) and a host of other unscientific notions". [1]
According to Singer and Lalich (1997:167), "crazy therapies" are promoted using several techniques. "One is to start a certification program soon after conjuring up a new procedure" and "another is to seduce customers with rash promises and endorsements from acolytes and sycophants." Singer and Lalich (1997:195) advise that if a therapist is saying "I don't understand it but it sure does work", that could be a red flag. "Or if he's answering your questions with a lot of jargon you don't understand, insist on straightforward explanations. Or if he's telling you that it's tried and true, do some independent research and find out what the critics are saying". "In many cases such fad therapies are promoted by people who are (1) imposing an agenda that may not fit your needs and (2) abandoning testing and science. Well meaning as they may be, remember, its your emotions and your pocketbook that are being played with". [2]
The book was reviewed by Philip Zimbardo, who wrote in Behavioral Interventions that the book revealed situations in which therapists can become "persuasive agents of destructive influence". [3]
Carroll stated that the book describes "surreal pseudoscience at its worst". He added that Singer and Lalich had helped to expose "some of the worst psychotherapy has to offer". [1]
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior, increase happiness, and overcome problems. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Numerous types of psychotherapy have been designed either for individual adults, families, or children and adolescents. Certain types of psychotherapy are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders; other types have been criticized as pseudoscience.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a pseudoscientific approach to communication, personal development and psychotherapy, that first appeared in Richard Bandler and John Grinder's 1975 book The Structure of Magic I. NLP asserts that there is a connection between neurological processes (neuro-), language (linguistic) and acquired behavioral patterns (programming), and that these can be changed to achieve specific goals in life. According to Bandler and Grinder, NLP can treat problems such as phobias, depression, tic disorders, psychosomatic illnesses, near-sightedness, allergy, the common cold, and learning disorders, often in a single session. They also claim that NLP can "model" the skills of exceptional people, allowing anyone to acquire them.
The term large-group awareness training (LGAT) refers to activities - usually offered by groups with links to the human potential movement - which claim to increase self-awareness and to bring about desirable transformations in individuals' personal lives. LGATs are unconventional; they often take place over several days, and may compromise participants' mental wellbeing.
Primal therapy is a trauma-based psychotherapy created by Arthur Janov, who argued that neurosis is caused by the repressed pain of childhood trauma. Janov argued that repressed pain can be sequentially brought to conscious awareness for resolution through re-experiencing specific incidents and fully expressing the resulting pain during therapy. Primal therapy was developed as a means of eliciting the repressed pain; the term Pain is capitalized in discussions of primal therapy when referring to any repressed emotional distress and its purported long-lasting psychological effects. Janov believed that talking therapies deal primarily with the cerebral cortex and higher-reasoning areas and do not access the source of Pain within the more basic parts of the central nervous system.
Gestalt Theoretical Psychotherapy(GTP) is a method of psychotherapy based strictly on Gestalt psychology. Its origins go back to the 1920s when Gestalt psychology founder Max Wertheimer, Kurt Lewin and their colleagues and students started to apply the holistic and systems theoretical Gestalt psychology concepts in the field of psychopathology and clinical psychology. Through holism, "a person's thinking, feeling, actions, perceptions, attitudes and logical operations" are seen as one unity. Many developments in psychotherapy in the following decades drew from these early beginnings, like e.g. group psychoanalysis (S. Foulkes), Gestalt therapy (Laura Perls, Fritz Perls, Goodman, and others), or Katathym-imaginative Psychotherapy (Hanscarl Leuner).
Gestalt therapy is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility and focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation. It was developed by Fritz Perls, Laura Perls and Paul Goodman in the 1940s and 1950s, and was first described in the 1951 book Gestalt Therapy.
Focusing is an internally oriented psychotherapeutic process developed by psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin. It can be used in any kind of therapeutic situation, including peer-to-peer sessions. It involves holding a specific kind of open, non-judging attention to an internal knowing which is experienced but is not yet in words. Focusing can, among other things, be used to become clear on what one feels or wants, to obtain new insights about one's situation, and to stimulate change or healing of the situation. Focusing is set apart from other methods of inner awareness by three qualities: something called the "felt sense", a quality of engaged accepting attention, and a researched-based technique that facilitates change.
The Hakomi Method is a form of mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy developed by Ron Kurtz in the 1970s.
Breathwork is a term for various breathing practices in which the conscious control of breathing is said to influence a person's mental, emotional, or physical state, with a therapeutic effect. Breathwork may be helpful for relaxation and stress in a similar way to meditation. Although there are claims that breathwork may provide other health benefits, no other health benefits have been proven. During a breathwork session, individuals will typically lie down and be instructed to breathe using particular methods, depending on the sub-type of breathwork. In addition to a practitioner, breathwork sessions will often have "sitters" present. Sitters are individuals who provide emotional or physical support to those practicing breathwork. Most breathwork sessions last around an hour. Breathwork practitioners believe that an individual's particular pattern of passive breathing can lead to insights about their unconscious mind.
Intensive short-term dynamic psychotherapy (ISTDP) is a form of short-term psychotherapy developed through empirical, video-recorded research by Habib Davanloo.
David Huntingford Malan was a British psychoanalytic psychotherapy practitioner and researcher recognized for his contribution to the development of psychotherapy. He promoted scientific spirit of inquiry, openness, and simplicity within the field. He is also noted for his development of the Malan triangles, which became a rubric in which therapists can reflect upon what they are doing and where they are in relational space at any given moment.
Jesse Stephen Miller was a psychologist and psychodynamic psychotherapist.
Attack therapy was one of several pseudo-therapeutic methods described in the book Crazy Therapies. It involves highly confrontational interaction between the patient and a therapist, or between the patient and fellow patients during group therapy, in which the patient may be verbally abused, denounced, or humiliated by the therapist or other members of the group.
Supportive psychotherapy is a psychotherapeutic approach that integrates various therapeutic schools such as psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral, as well as interpersonal conceptual models and techniques.
YAVIS is an acronym that stands for "young, attractive, verbal, intelligent, and successful." It describes a group of patients that are said to be preferred by mental health professionals. It is based on the perception that this group is characteristically and without external intervention able to form a more positive therapeutic relationship.
Future-oriented therapy (FOT) and future-directed therapy (FDT) are approaches to psychotherapy that place greater emphasis on the future than on the past or present.
Cloé Madanes is a teacher in family therapy and brief therapy. She has teamed up with Tony Robbins since 2002 to train strategic interventionists for finding solutions to interpersonal conflicts, preventing violence, and contributing to the creation of a more cohesive and civil community.
Robert Joseph Langs was a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, and psychoanalyst. He was the author, co-author, or editor of more than forty books on psychotherapy and human psychology. Over the course of more than fifty years, Langs developed a revised version of psychoanalytic psychotherapy, currently known as the "adaptive paradigm". This is a distinctive model of the mind, and particularly of the mind's unconscious component, significantly different from other forms of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic psychotherapy.
Eclectic psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy in which the clinician uses more than one theoretical approach, or multiple sets of techniques, to help with clients' needs. The use of different therapeutic approaches will be based on the effectiveness in resolving the patient's problems, rather than the theory behind each therapy.
Psychology Gone Wrong: The Dark Sides of Science and Therapy is a 2015 book written by Tomasz Witkowski and Maciej Zatonski.