The wild river of psychoanalysis

Dear blogger -

There is an interesting idea I've been contemplating for a while and I think I have enough relevant insight into to discuss it in this forum.
The idea is the multiple perspectives of psychotherapy. Since the age of Freud psychotherapy has been organized by concepts that hailed from various groups of people, or schools. In each group or category certain members agreed (or disagreed) about the types of concepts they were looking for in the human personality, and with these concepts in mind they pursued psychotherapeutic treatment of a person. In other words, when you know what you are looking for you can find it. This, in fact, is a major criticism of all the analytic/psychodynamic therapies. That the influence of the therapist's training is too strong on the outcome of the therapy. And probably one of the major motivations towards a "non-clinical" or at least "non-clinician" oriented manual based therapy of the modern age.
The new world idea is to take everything we have learned from the therapists systemize it and create one uniform system that works unanimously. How beautiful! The tough part it - you only have to visit one local chain store or restaurant to know that the fanciful messages, displays, and other hoopla don't really mean that much when the employees are rushing around carelessly and delivering perfectly planned but often poorly executed service. In other words although our nation seems determined to systematize and regulate every little thing, there are many wonderful elements of human life that cannot be contained in this way.
The other alternative is to continuously educate oneself, to know one's background and biases, and to always seek to improve one's education and point of view. Perhaps because that is such a tasking process that many of us would rather rely on these "okay-enough" national chains to do our bidding. I would like to say that there is nothing inherently wrong with chain businesses - many great things come from well organized systems (google is one example). However, the everpresent challenge is the molding and flexibility of these systems with the surrounding environment. You can see this in nature in ubiquity. Every species has a determined (genetically) life pattern that is then adapted to the circumstances. Over time the system itself changes (if you believe in evolution).
Same in psychotherapy, all the points of view that we now know are biased, are actually useful, as long as we are willing to apply them conscientiously and with care. Trusting that we are doing our best to be flexible, understanding, and self-aware!

wow, that was a lot of writing =)