Are Psychologists And Psychotherapists Happy?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

“According to surveys, psychologists and psychotherapists are, on average, happier than representatives of other professions. But can they become an example to follow? Their knowledge, practice, ability to penetrate the secrets of the psyche - does all this make them happier? There is nothing more controversial. psychologists like to tell stories from life, which rather testify to the opposite. One great psychoanalyst reproaches himself that he could not prevent the suicide of his wife. Another therapist, a bachelor, suffers from the fact that all his love stories end in scandals. The child psychiatrist never there were no children. Let us also recall the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, whose humor hid a tendency to depression. Do psychologists confirm the saying about a shoemaker without boots? And what qualities do they acquire through the profession?

History shows that the path to psychotherapy often begins with a deep spiritual wound, which future specialists are trying to heal, heal, studying and testing the method they practice. We can say for sure that many psychologists began to study this very science, because they suffer or have suffered themselves. The famous American psychotherapist Irwin Yalom had an unhappy childhood and was the victim of an anti-Semitic atmosphere at school. Viktor Frankl spent almost three painful years in a concentration camp. Freud's pupil, writer and psychotherapist Lou Salomé became the femme fatale (femme fatale) of the Western intellectual elite in her early youth. She knew how to be for men both a unique intellectual partner and a "vague object of desire." Lou Salomé was not particularly concerned with the ethical requirements of her time. Her sex life began only at the age of 35 - after experiences of friendly and creative cohabitation with men and many years of marriage. As the philosopher Larisa Garmash writes, "her whole life was a kind of unique experiment - she seemed to be testing the elasticity of the border between masculine and feminine principles: how much" masculine "she is able to absorb without prejudice to her femininity." We do not know whether Lou Salome is happy, but she was definitely free and knew how to free her patients. Psychiatrist and psychotherapist Christophe Andre suffered from anxiety and depression, and for many years was powerless to defeat them. The founder of Soviet experimental pathopsychology, Bluma Zeigarnik, already a famous scientist, experienced family dramas, the arrest and death of her husband, and the persecution of "cosmopolitanism." After a prosperous youth, her life until the age of 60 was full of hardships and losses. But “she knew how at the right moment to launch a mechanism that created a sense of serenity for her,” recalls her grandson, photographer Andrei Zeigarnik. “As if she knew for sure that under all the storms of life there is some kind of smooth surface in her, with which she never loses touch.”

Many legendary psychotherapists were not doing well. Recently, my colleagues and I discussed our own suffering. And we came to the conclusion that thanks to this we can more sensitively feel our client, we have a common space of experience with him. Psychologists and psychotherapists are no more protected from trauma and the vicissitudes of fate than others. But some of them manage, thanks to their profession, to find their own way to cope with adversity, and they can share this experience with people."