Dr. Lionel Corbett, M.D.

PACIFICA GRADUATE INSTITUE

Psychotherapy based on Depth Psychology is a Superior Approach

Lionel Corbett , M.D. Certified Jungian Analyst, C.G. Jung Institute, Chicago

Psycotherapists who are interested in Depth Psychology are living in a professional world that´s
dominated by cognitive behavioral approaches and what are called empirically validated or
evidence-based therapy and most mainstream psychologists believe that these are the gold
standards of scientific psychotherapy. What I´d like to do now is to tell you the other side of the
story including its shadow side and explain why psychotherapy based on Depth Psychology is
often a superior approach.
If I had to summarize the situation, at the beginning I´d like to point out that everyone who
comes to psychotherapy is suffering and we can never fully understand human suffering using
quantitative scientific empirical methods because the human being is really too complicated for
a simplistic empirical approach. There is a good deal of empirical evidence for the value of
depth psychotherapy but it´s based on a different kind of evidence that we find in quantitative
methods.
A great deal of the so-called scientific psychology is actually never used by students once they
graduate because it becomes irrelevant to the kind of suffering that is the daily experience of the
psychotherapists. Many of the problems we see in psychotherapy, much of the suffering we try
to alleviate requires a response which can only emerge from the fundamental humanity of the
therapeutic couple, from the understanding of the complexities of the relationships and from an
appreciation of the depths of the soul – these are very complex uniquely individual matters and
they don´t lend themselves to the application of specific laws of learning or to some other
empirically derived approach that is set to apply to everyone. Human relationships are much
too complicated to be fully contained in the net of the empirical research. Measurement is
certainly not an appropriate approach to the unconscious. The unconscious is much too
slippery for quantitative methods and is certainly no use in the spiritual dimension which is the
dimension which Jungian psychology is concerned with.
It is important to remember that all theories of psychotherapy are based on a certain view of
human nature and a certain world view and I believe that practitioners who work within any
particular approach are making a commitment to the underlying philosophy of that approach
whether or not they are doing so consciously. So it is important to understand this otherwise
one is unwittingly committing oneself to a view of humanity that may not be in accord with one´s
real values.
Many approaches to psychotherapy which considers themselves to be scientific or

unconsciously assuming a materialistic or reductionist philosophy – I mean by that that they
assume that human behavior is nothing but the result of evolution genetic endowment brain
processes and culture. These approaches tend to ignore other important realms, the realm of
meaning, the domain of spirituality of the intellect and artistic concerns and self-awareness.
Much empirical psychology is based on what is called scientific physicalism - the doctrine that
reality is entirely based on the physical property of objects and also on naturalism, the doctrine
that science must confine itself to the study of natural causes which excludes anything which
might be called spiritual. A lot of psychology is based on positivism, which is a philosophy of
science now rather old-fashioned that asserts that only empirical information derived from
systematic observation and experiment provides valid knowledge. Positivism rejects intuitive or
in it respectively obtained knowledge but this we find a much too restrictive approach to human
knowledge. The humanities are literature, religion, mythology, all teaches a great deal about
the psyche and that is what depth psychotherapy takes into account; it´s also clear that our
intuitions may be correct even if they are unprovable. For example, our moral and intuitions
about right and wrong may be very hard to prove empirically but we could´nt live without them.
Personal meaning is very important to us but meaning is impossible to validate empirically, it´s
subjective. There are many important experiences like love which cannot be rigorously tested
even though they are very useful and important to us. There is often a gap between what we
can demonstrate scientifically and what we must actually do in the theraphy room in the
absence of any empirical data about what would be helpful. There is no scientific answer to
questions about whether to leave a marriage or change jobs or how to deal with a major loss or
how to deal with loneliness or alienation. So when these are issues that arise in psychotherapy
they demand the entire person of the therapist, everything that he or she has learned about
being a person from day to day life experience. The attempt to squeeze the practice of
psychotherapy into a scientific model is sometimes a defense against the difficulty of working
with severe emotional pain for which there is no obvious remediation. Painful life dilemmas
produce intense suffering and it´s naïve to believe that the therapist can always be helpful by
using empirically validated or positivist approaches to them. We need several approaches to
them, we need several types of observation to understand reality. Positivist, remember, cannot
prove that there are no principles beyond what we can observe so they cannot even prove their
own assertion.
Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher pointed out that if the positivists are correct, there is no
end to the verification process. We have to keep verifying the methods were used to verify each
proposition then verify that method ad infinitum; so there are no authoritative grounds for
insisting on empirical verification. Now, some psychologists believe in objectivism, the notion
that people and the world in general have objective meaning independent of the ways we think
about them so therefore a patient in distress is distorting the perception of a single objective
reality and the therapist has to help the patient to perceive more accurately. These kind of
approaches assume that there are empirical experimental methods which will lead to universal
truths or laws which are value free, but these kinds of approaches are not helpful when trying to
understand the complexities of personality. Some levels of personality are very hard to quantify
and simply not amenable to this kind of consideration. Think of compassion or other spiritual
dimension of the person. Positivism often ignores the issue of the subjective meeting of events
to a person. Human beings try to make sense of the world, they don´t just behave mechanically
according to universal laws of behavior so human behavior is often completely unpredictable; as
well, strictly empirical approach cannot decide between right and wrong except maybe
relatively or in terms of contemporary social standards. Traditional empiricism tells us that only
what is observable is real and cognitive behavioral therapy based on empiricism urges us to
think rationally about the world but our experience is that the world is both mysterious and often
non rational. Many psychotherapy training programs teach students reductive cognitive
behavioral or biological views of the person because these are recognizable scientific so they
make an unspoken philosophical commitment that this is the best approach to the person but in
the process, at least these training programs, gloss over some intractable philosophical
problems. For example, we often hear the phrase cognitive neuroscience – there is a very long
standing problem of the relationship of mind and brain and this problem appears to have been
solved just by joining these two words together. Now when this kind of terminology is the lingua
franca of the training program, the unsuspecting student is led to believe that brain processes
caused rather than correlate with mental events or even that brain processes and mental events
are not synonymous. The student may not be told that this is very controversial even a
metaphysical opinion and the question is by no means settled. The student may not be told that
the conceptual problems involved such as the nature of consciousness rather than the question
of how the brain produces consciousness cannot be solved by empirical means; the student
may not be told that the laws that govern neurological systems do not apply at the level of a
person´s psychology, a person psychology has new and emergent levels of complexity which
are not present at the level of the brain, so the psyche requires its own approaches. This does
´nt mean the brain isn´t important, but it does mean that an account of behavior and thoughts
and feeling only in terms of the brain leaves out the person who has the brain. It is far more
important to understand a person

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PACIFICA GRADUATE INSTITUE

Psychotherapy based on Depth Psychology is a Superior Approach

Many approaches to psychotherapy which considers themselves to be scientific or

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