Repetition, Reflection, and the Search for Meaning

Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Why Medication Isn't Enough NOT Becoming Conscious In An Unconscious World
by Elio Frattaroli, M.D.

We would all like a quick fix for our problems, a simple pill to take away our anxiety and lift us out of our depression. But there is no quick fix for the soul, and anxiety and depression may be signals of the soul's unmet needs. In this landmark work, Dr. Elio Frattaroli challenges our fixation on psychiatry's "Medical Model," which treats mental illness solely with drugs instead of seeking a deeper understanding of our problems - in other words, treating symptoms rather than people.

Combining a Renaissance humanism with a sophisticated understanding of modern science, he makes an impassioned, persuasive case for "listening to the soul" - paying attention to the inner life of the emotions, both in psychotherapy and in our everyday lives. Drawing upon philosophy, literature, psychology, and riveting case histories from his own life and practice, Frattaroli explores what has happened to a culture that has been "listening to Prozac" and hearing nothing else.

Chapter 18

More and more, we are all becoming aware that our lives are being lived for us by influences that, however numerous they appear, are in fact only so many reflections of one kind of movement in the life of man, a movement toward externals, toward needs and gratifications that, however justified in their own right, become destructive when they pretend to represent the whole meaning of human life.

— Jacob Needleman, The Way of the Physician

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.

— William Wordsworth

Author's Message

Throughout this book, I have tried to convey a sense of the process of healing the soul-the inward journey of self-discovery and self-actualization-as I have experienced it in the psychotherapeutic process. My hope in doing so was to help individual readers to gain a greater appreciation of their own personal quest, especially of the ways in which their symptoms and other kinds of falling down are an integral part of the healing process. That is what I do for a living: as a psychotherapist, I work with individuals, helping them "in their becoming." But I probably would never have thought to write a book about this if my work with individuals was not being threatened by larger cultural forces: the popular craze for psychiatric drugs, the greed of the managed care industry, and a deeper problem of which these are merely symptoms-the dehumanizing materialism that pervades our culture at every level.

We are so consumed by the pursuit of physical appearances, material possessions, creature comforts, and addictive pleasures that we have lost touch with the deeper needs and values of the soul. We then rationalize the emptiness of our materialistic values by invoking another kind of materialism-that of positivistic science, which gives credence only to what can be seen and measured and which believes that only the physical is real. Any anxiety we might feel about the lack of meaning in our lives we can then dismiss as a chemical imbalance, transformable into a state of contented normalcy simply by taking a pill.

The dehumanizing influence of this shallow scientific worldview reinforces a dehumanizing impulse that is already present in human nature. We find it easy to ignore the inner voice of the soul in our pursuit of external tokens of happiness-not only because we are seduced by our culture's materialistic values but also because we are driven from within by our own materialistic passions and by our addictive need for quick, painless fixes for anything disturbing in our lives.

I have written this book in the strong belief that all of us-not just psychiatric patients-have a deep spiritual need for healing the soul, a need that cannot be satisfied with a quick pharmacologic fix. But unless we make a special point of listening to the soul, it becomes all too easy to ignore this vital need, and with it any sense of a larger meaning and purpose in our lives. The problem is, we are all tempted to do exactly that! We all fear consciousness-the knowledge of good and evil within ourselves-and so we would prefer to deny or dismiss the inner voice that calls us to the quest and content ourselves with the swimming-pool comforts of the quick fix.

The Cultural Problem

As a result, the tendency to short-circuit our higher consciousness and awareness of our deepest values in the shortsighted pursuit of the quick fix has become the dominating trend of modern life in the Age of the Brain. The quick fix is our prevailing cultural value, and we can see it operating at every level of society: from politicians who don't look beyond winning the next election, to CEOs who can't see beyond the next quarterly report, to news media clambering after sound bites and Nielsen ratings, to scientists doing only short-term, high-profile research (because that's what the businesspeople and politicians will fund and the media will publicize), to doctors who defer to the values of politicians, businesspeople, media, and scientists, and lose track of their inner calling.

In such a world, it is hardly surprising that addiction-the compulsive pursuit of quick fixes-has rapidly become our most pervasive societal problem. We are addicted to substances-drugs (both legal and illegal), alcohol, cigarettes, food. We are addicted to people-rock musicians, sports heroes, movie stars, TV evangelists, pop gurus, psychics, New Age healers, talk-show hosts. And we are addicted to activities-gambling, collecting, pornography, investing, shopping, dieting, exercising, spectator sports, video games, chat rooms, the World Wide Web. Some of us are even addicted to reading self-help books with inspirational titles. In every area of our lives, it seems, we are looking for external fixes and saviors to rescue (i.e., distract) us from the painful awareness of inner conflict-to give us a rush, a quick switch from feeling like a loser to feeling like a winner.

Unfortunately, the fact that our society and cultural values support and reinforce our addictions encourages us to rationalize the quick fix as "the American way" rather than to recognize it as an uneasy attempt to hide from our own higher values and deeper desires. One of the central lessons of dynamic psychotherapy is that people are always embarrassed and uneasy about their own deepest desires, and develop powerful mechanisms for remaining unaware of, and evading responsibility for, those desires. The pursuit of a quick fix, often manifesting itself as addictive behavior, is one of the most popular of these mechanisms, aptly captured in the well-known bumper-sticker slogan "The one who dies with the most toys wins!" The addictive pleasure never actually satisfies the deeper desire, but the endless pursuit of the next "toy" or "fix" serves to keep that deeper, more unsettling desire out of awareness. In this sense, the problem of addiction is a symptom of an underlying sickness in our society: a sickness of the soul, in which we are living on the surface, telling ourselves stories that somebody else has written about what we should be living for because we are afraid to listen to the sound of our own inner voice.

Does That Sound Too Preachy?

To those who may feel that I am being moralistic and judgmental here, I admit to making a moral judgment: that our current quick-fix culture is dehumanizing, destructive, and delusional. (We all know, after all, that the one who dies with the most toys doesn't win.) But I do not believe that making moral judgments is something we either can or should avoid. Having moral values and ideals-and making judgments based on them-is as intrinsic to human nature as breathing. Consciously or unconsciously, we are always making choices between the values of the swimming pool and the values of the quest, and every time we do that we are making an implicit moral judgment: falling down is bad or falling down is good.

I believe that our choice between two models of psychiatry is really a choice between two competing sets of moral values that will ultimately determine the kind of society we live in. One is the Psychotherapeutic Model's ideal of healing the soul with its values of self-awareness, autonomy, personal growth, an I-Thou spirit of love, respect, and compassion for others, and an acceptance of moral responsibility for our own egoistic impulses and emotions. The other is the Medical Model's ideal of the quick fix, with its swimming-pool values of stability and conformity, and an I-It orientation toward material success and other superficial addictive pleasures.

© 2001 Viking Press, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Elio Frattaroli, M.D., is a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice. He is on the faculty of the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia and is also an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. He studied Shakespeare at Harvard and trained with Bruno Bettelheim at the University of Chicago before turning to medicine. He has written and lectured on Shakespeare as well as on psychiatry and psychoanalysis. This is his first book.