Blogging as therapy

Some months ago, a Toronto organization called the Richmond Cultural Seminars sent me a video, "Out of the Fishbowl," that looks at the relationship between psychotherapy and so-called new media like the Internet.

The video examines its subject from the perspective of media thinker Marshall McLuhan, famous for writing that "the medium is the message." He has fascinated me since high school and was the subject of my freshman thesis at William and Mary. I also first encountered Carl Jung's psychology through McLuhan, who co-authored a little-known book about Jung.

But even more interesting was the video's speculation about the direction therapy will take because of our increasing habitation of cyberspace -- and I'm talking about something much deeper than the fashion of offering "online therapy." The video proposes something so radical that I don't think it can be accurately called psychotherapy.

That has been my own direction for years now. To my mind, psychotherapy has become so archaic, institutionalized, regulated and so misdirected by scientific pretensions that it is doomed to extinction. Eleven years of its study convinced me to find ways of applying psychology's insights outside the box of the consulting room. Many others in the culture have taken the same path and, like me, refuse to identify their work with psychotherapy.

The "Out of the Fishbowl" video theorizes that the burgeoning categories of psychological disorders describe the continued breakdown of the psyche in a culture still dominated by the written word. Writing categorizes phenomena and differentiates individuals from group membership -- even differentiates the conscious from the unconscious. The video compares such a culture to earlier oral ones in which these differentiations were nonexistent or much more fluid. In pre-literate culture, identity was not separate from group membership.

Now, though, the introduction of cyberspace offers the possibility of reinstating the traditions of pre-verbal culture. In cyberspace, the main value is "play," in the postmodern sense of giving up the sense of fixed, individual identity (contrarily, the "realization" of individual identity is the project of most psychotherapy). This shows up mainly in games where people assume different roles, but this also occurs in chat rooms where people -- usually not with approval -- assume different identities.

Any part-time Internet resident knows that even though identities may be "false," something "truer" often emerges in the game playing, authorized or not. My original doctoral dissertation proposal took this subject up, theorizing that the Internet has basically become the repository of the culture's unconscious. The game playing, the willful shifting of identity, brings the normally unconscious into greater view -- much as the image-based rituals of pre-verbal cultures did. People are, as "Fishbowl" puts it, consciously dreaming.

As it happens, when the video arrived I had actually begun directly experimenting with this in a small Tuesday night group I facilitate. Rather than confine our work to the consulting room, I had begun making direct assignments each week. These are always aesthetic in nature -- taking pictures, writing a poem or drawing something with a certain thought or question in mind but letting the images that arise direct their expression rather than the contrary. Then the clients upload their results onto a shared journal -- a blog.

True both to my personal speculation and the "Fishbowl" video's observation, the unconscious does reveal itself readily in this process and because it is directly represented in images, its contents cannot be as easily rationalized away, as often occurs in psychotherapy. Further, there is a clear sense, if only because of the direct expression of the unconscious, that identity is fluid -- only as fixed as the narratives we tell ourselves, and our affection for remaining unconscious and uncreative.

By focusing on play with identity instead of the narrative past that is the obsession of psychotherapy, clients have the potential to realize they can imagine themselves into different states of being despite their histories. I observe, too, that as a site of mutual, almost ritualized play, cyberspace accords freedom of expression that even the most congenial consulting room does not.

Such work renders the question of science and personal psychology irrelevant. If identity is truly fluid, pathology is lack of accommodation of this truth, and psychotherapy is enforced compliance to an archaic narrative. Where true play occurs, ordinary neurosis is a role, not fate.

Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology.

Check out the "Fishbowl" video and related projects at richmondculturalseminars.com. If only we had such an enterprise in Atlanta!