Intellectualization
I frequently have patients and clients tell me that they struggle with intellectualizing their problems. What they mean by this is that they’ve read some books, analyzed their lives and thoughts to death, and all the while they believed that if they could just understand their struggles, they would evaporate.
I suspect this is why psychobabble is so popular on social media. It feels powerful when you hear someone say, “10 Signs Your Ex Is Borderline,” you listen to the 10, you think, “My god! ALL my exes were borderline! Now I just have to figure out why I’m attracted to these kinds of people, and that will lead to peace and happiness.” Cue years of reading and therapy, and at the end of it you’re thinking, “Shit. Now my actual WIFE has a borderline personality. How did that happen?”
And yeah, it may have partially been because you were intellectualizing. It’s certainly the case that reading Susskind and Aristotle won’t necessarily teach you how to love humans and enjoy being alive. And yes, there are those who try to escape the wildly complicated and confusing realities of human relationships by plunging themselves into books, computers, intellectualism, and even meditation.
But blaming the intellect itself feels off to me. For one thing, you’re sort of . . . doing a bad job at being an intellectual if you fail to ask yourself, “Why am I so lonely?” If you are unhappy, and it seems to be part of a larger life pattern, you’re not intellectualizing very well if you keep circling around your two or three favorite answers to problems, repeating them to yourself over and over, never asking the question: what if I’m wrong?
Which is all to say, when people say they intellectualize or over-intellectualize, I want to say that they’re actually using the intellect poorly.
What does philosophy have to do with psychology?
Honestly, it’s not hard to spot when the intellect is getting in the way in psychotherapy. When a patient offers a crystal clear, erudite, calm account of their failings and how “this all goes back to my mom/dad/dead cat/blah, blah, blah,” that’s the intellect trying to run the show. I look for ways to make them productively uncomfortable, and I don’t let up until they either fire me or see improvement. Simple.
Before I wanted to become a therapist, I wanted to be a midwife. The initial inspiration came when I learned that Socrates’s mother was a midwife. I was so fed up with Socrates and Plato’s misogyny, I could think of no better revenge than to follow in Phaenarete’s footsteps.
Then I discovered I hate medical monitoring machines (apparently those are a big deal in medicine these days?), and suddenly I was in love with psychology.
Over the years I’ve realized that my approach to psychotherapy is very similar to Socrates and Plato’s approach to philosophy, at least in the early dialogues. The gist of it was to ask a person what their interpretation was of a situation, poke holes in their interpretation, make them uncomfortable, and then . . . well, leave them that way.
The benefit for the therapist, then, of thinking about philosophy is not to offer grist for debate in therapy sessions. Thinking philosophically is good for the therapist. Donna Orange puts it this way:
“[R]eading philosophy teaches us to read and listen differently and to notice what we might miss if we read only the theoretical formulations of our own tradition. Above all, we may notice the anomalies in our own clinical experience. Why does saying and doing what I have been taught seem not to work in this situation?”
Why philosophy is central to my work
A philosophical approach to psychology is, for example, why I approach the discourse around neurodiversity the way I do. On the one hand, I’m not one for bandwagons, and everyone on the Left is enthusiastically jumping on the neurodiversity bandwagon. This gives me pause in how I listen to and metabolize the discourse. On the other hand, I am shocked by how narrow the band for “normal” keeps getting, even within my lifetime. This prompts me to examine the definition of “normal” itself. The benefit of thinking philosophically is, to some extent, that I am made uncomfortable. Philosophy denies me the easy comfort of fitting in with any one ideological group. Intellectual rigor demands that I take seriously many of the lived experiences of ADHDers and Autistic folks, as well as the research being done on neurodiversity. It also demands that I take seriously the role of social media, and trends in devaluing expertise.
Other examples include how I think about and use Internal Family Systems and EMDR. Philosophy also helps me work through how to do therapy with people who are in polarized positions: e.g., one session may be with a woo-woo, I-heal-myself-through-communion-with-angels type, while the next is with an MD. For me, it’s a huge challenge to move between these folks, and I find philosophy indispensable in helping my intellect and my emotions talk to each other.
To return to Donna Orange’s point, this is why I say on my website that “it’s important to me that I avoid hitting everyone over the head with ‘what worked for me,’ or even what worked for previous patients.” I see my task as a persistent, almost obsessive, digging into what is not like me. What is not intuitive. What doesn’t feel obvious to me.
To be clear, this is not easy. For one thing, I have my own moral, political, and spiritual values. And I notice that it’s tiring to always be open to looking at things a new way; I frequently feel exhausted by my job, and I often think it’s just from having spent eight solid hours telling myself over and over again, “Okay, that’s your knee-jerk response. What are some other possibilities?” But the fatigue of it doesn’t make it not the right way to go about psychotherapy. And I can’t imagine trying to do therapy any way that doesn’t include philosophical inquiry.