Healing …What Love has to do with it!

Love is a coping mechanism which helps you overcome fear …and with fear. Healing is not necessary!!! Love you!!! ⭕❌❌

Essential Secrets of Psychotherapy:

What’s Love Got to Do With It?

How psychotherapy helps with “intimacy inhibition” and “love phobia.”

Sigmund Freud died in London on September 23, 1939 at the age of 83. The final year of Freud’s life was a time of upheaval and struggles with illness. He had spent most of his life living and working in Vienna, but all this changed when the Nazi’s annexed Austria in 1938. In addition to being Jewish, Freud’s fame as the founder of psychoanalysis made him a target. Both Sigmund Freud and daughter Anna were interrogated by the Gestapo, and many of his books were burned. In his final interview with the Gestapo, Freud was forced to sign a statement saying that he had not been mistreated. Freud sarcastically commented, “I can most highly recommend the Gestapo to everyone.”

While talking became painful and difficult due the the cancer, he recorded a brief message for the BBC on December 7, 1938, which you can listen to here. Freud was 81 years old at the time and the message…. is the only known recording …. of his voice in existence. On September 21, 1939, Freud asked his doctor …. to administer a fatal dose of morphine into him. Freud’s doctor later wrote, “When he was again in agony, I gave him a hypodermic of two centigrams of morphine. He soon felt relief and fell into a peaceful sleep.

The expression of pain and suffering was gone. I repeated this dose after about 12 hours. Freud was obviously so close to the end of his reserves that he lapsed into a coma and did not wake up again.” Freud died on the morning of September 23, 1939. Three days later, his body was cremated and his ashes placed in an ancient Greek urn originally gifted to him by his friend Marie Bonaparte.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/

Sigmund Freud himself identified love and work as the two supporting pillars of life. Another of Freud’s students, Theodor Reik, wrote: “Work and love; these are the basics. Without them there is neurosis.” The clear implication is that healing neurosis (and possibly psychosis) requires restoring the patient’s capacity for both love and work. Yet this too seems overly simplistic. There is more to life than love and work. For what happens when one cannot find satisfactory companionship or employment?

neu·ro·sis

n(y)o͝oˈrōsəs/

noun

Medicine

noun: neurosis; plural noun: neuroses

a relatively mild mental illness that is not caused by organic disease, involving symptoms of stress (depression, anxiety, obsessive behavior, hypochondria) but not a radical loss of touch with reality. Compare with psychosis.

synonyms:

mental illness, mental disorder, psychological disorder; More

psychoneurosis, psychopathy;

obsession, phobia, fixation;

neuroticism

“has he been diagnosed with an actual neurosis?”

(in nontechnical use) excessive and irrational anxiety or obsession.

“apprehension over mounting debt has created a collective neurosis in the business world”

Today, almost 10% of people in America are out of work, and many millions more are underemployed. Or unable to work. Many Americans are single, divorced or widowed and without a significant other. Of course, loss of work or love can be emotionally devastating, wreaking havoc with one’s sense of identity, security and self-esteem. Yet somehow most survive, and some even thrive. What enables them to do so? Something beyond the “work and love” which, in Freud’s psychology, provide life’s sole meaning. Something underlying or perhaps transcending these vital capacities and activities. Some alternate pathway to finding or creating meaning. How about the power of religion or spirituality, for instance? Or of creativity itself ?

In the deepest sense, psychotherapy (and life) is not, as Freud, Fromm, Reik and most modern psychotherapists assume, mainly about intimate relationships. Nor the capacity for work per se. For, in most cases, these are but secondary benefits. Consequences rather than causes. Neurosis can, and commonly does, run rampant in both the work and love life. Having work and relationships cannot protect us fully from the existential facts of life. Nor does it inoculate us against suffering.

Moreover, such exclusive emphasis on the outer rather than inner life–what we do out in the world and with whom we do it — stems in part from a more extraverted rather than introverted perspective, and may not be fitting for all patients. For instance, in some cases, relationships or work serve the compulsive purpose of escaping from one’s self, and one’s existential aloneness, anxiety, and the fact of one’s mortality. So, existentially speaking, these cannot be considered the sine qua non of mental health, nor of therapeutic treatment.

Psychotherapy is more soundly focused on what C.G. Jung termed individuation: the unpredictable, lengthy, labyrinthine process of becoming more whole. Psychotherapy is about finding and fulfilling our destiny: While for most this may include romantic love, marriage, parenthood, career, et cetera., there are others for whom fate or destiny has something quite different in store. (See prior post on the difference between fate and destiny.)
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Psychotherapy is about creativity: courageously claiming the personal freedom to express ourselves constructively in the world to our fullest potential. Finally, psychotherapy is fundamentally about acceptance: learning to accept ourselves and others, our fate, our responsibility, our existential aloneness, the unconscious, evil, the daimonic, and life on its own terms. (See prior post.) Surely, this is a sort of love. Love of reality. Love of the world as it is. Love of all humanity. Love even of the dark and tragic, seemingly sometimes senseless side of life. And this is, for want of a better term, a spiritual love.
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Psychotherapy is, for these reasons, an essentially spiritual process. But it is precisely this reawakening, rekindling or stirring of spiritual love, this gradual opening up, this growing willingness to tolerate ambiguity and loneliness, this deepening receptivity to life, oneself and others during the psychotherapy process that can ready us for interpersonal love and intimacy, and which–when lacking, undeveloped or resisted–resides at the root of most mental disorders.
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For existential analyst Ludwig Binswanger, this is “the fundamental power that makes any therapy work–the power to liberate a person from the blind isolation, the idios kosmos of Heraclitus, from a mere vegetating in his body, his dreams, his private wishes, his conceit and his presumptions, and to ready him for a life of koinonia, of genuine community.”

And what exactly is the mysterious, potent, transformative power that serves to awaken this newfound or renewed capacity to love in the psychotherapy patient? Freud, Jung and others since observed that the alchemical catalyst occurs in the dynamic and uniquely intimate relationship between patient and therapist, and very much resembles–yes, you guessed it–love.
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As psychotherapists, we try to provide some of what was missed out on during childhood, in the form of an accepting, supportive, attuned, nurturing, caring, consistent relationship upon which the patient can temporarily depend and draw sustenance, self-esteem and strength from. However, but even that falls short of substituting for what was withheld or unavailable during infancy, childhood and adolescence by one’s parents or primary caretakers.
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Psychotherapy can’t erase the painful reality of past deprivations. But it can provide the encouragement, compassion and, yes, love needed by the patient to accept the past without destructive embitterment. And to learn or re-learn to give real love to one’s self and others now. But a broader discussion of this clinical utilization–and inexcusable occasional misuse–of the healing power of love in psychotherapy.

Preview YOU CAN HEAL YOURSELF AND THOSE YOU LOVE!

With Universal Intelligence.