Rethink your Shrink!

September 5, 2006 7:30 PM

Here are some alternative therapies you may not have considered. Animal assisted therapy promotes the healing benefits of the animal-human bond. Biblical Therapy provides treatment based on biblical "truths" to strengthen your relationship with Jesus. Color therapy has nothing to do with Spike Lee, and everything to do with your favorite shirt. With Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) you can replace years of therapy with one 90 minute session where you learn to roll your eyes the right way. Feng Shui suggests maybe it's not you, it's your crummy crib. Or perhaps you simply don't get enough Orgone. Doesn't it make you want to scream?
posted by ubiquity (21 comments total)

Ah, Wilhelm Reich. What a lunatic.
posted by Falconetti at 7:49 PM on September 5, 2006

My mom actually does EMDR, and apparently it's not as nutty as it sounds.
posted by elf_baby at 7:50 PM on September 5, 2006

Hey, that color "therapy" site is just a badly-disguised attempt to sell me some cheesy photos of tacky looking people with paint on.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:06 PM on September 5, 2006

quite a few nursing homes and hospitals use animal assisted therapy ... it's actually beneficial to the patients
posted by pyramid termite at 8:21 PM on September 5, 2006

I believe that the Holy Bible is, in addition to many other things, the literal inspired word of God and as such, is the best Mental Health textbook on the face of the planet.

Maybe, but most Mental Health textbooks don't dwell quite so much on smiting, methinks.
posted by leftcoastbob at 8:21 PM on September 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

most Mental Health textbooks don't dwell quite so much on smiting

Right! That's why the Holy Bible is better!

What would you rather do -- have some sissy therapist hold your hand and let you cry or would you rather go out there and open up a jar o' whoop-ass?

I thought so.
posted by jason's_planet at 8:24 PM on September 5, 2006

... most Mental Health textbooks don't dwell quite so much on smiting, methinks.

True, they don't actually put it in the textbooks, but a fair amount of it goes on behind closed doors at certain Mental Health Institutions...
posted by flapjax at midnite at 8:26 PM on September 5, 2006

Seems that all of these therapies have one thing in common:
Healing by removing rubes from their money.
posted by spazzm at 8:40 PM on September 5, 2006

I had a friend who did EMDR for awhile. Dunno about her, but after seeing the effects, I think I learned how to roll my eyes in whole new ways.
posted by kalimac at 8:50 PM on September 5, 2006 [1 favorite]

Actually, a shrink once tried EMDR on me but we didn't get very far because apparently I didn't have a specific enough trauma. I am sure that all these therapies work for some people.
posted by ubiquity at 9:55 PM on September 5, 2006

Ah, Wilhelm Reich. What a lunatic.:FOUNDER OF SOMATIC PSYCHOLOGY.Wrote over 20 books and 450 articles. Brought the body into psychology."Body Language" -- the term is now commonplace. It wasn't always that way. With Freud and psychoanalysis everything was the mind. Reich was the first to bring the body into psychoanalysis, and to physically touch the client. also Reich was part of the "Freudian left" which included himself, Marcuse, Fromm, Adorno, Horkeimer, and the various other figures of "critical theory." He was one of the first political psychologists. Undertook a creative synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxist socialism. . Was kicked of both the psychoanalytic association and the Communist Party as a consequence of publishing The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). shamelessly copy pasted from this page We could use a few more lunatics of this caliber.
posted by hortense at 10:34 PM on September 5, 2006

I had to study Feng Shui for my interior design major. I lost faith after hearing that some had to move their bathrooms to another part of the house because the drains were in their wealth corner and that's why they were losing money. Um, I'm pretty certain that wasn't the way they were losing money.
posted by Holy foxy moxie batman! at 10:48 PM on September 5, 2006

I have this friend who's been pushing the totally laughable idea of--get this--funny, I know--ready?--"accountability therapy."

He posits that you may actually be unhappy due to life choices you've made. Fuckin' crazy.

Overweight? Your fault. Unhappy at work? Your fault. Depressed thinking about how your parents raised you? Your fault. Unable to wisely handle money? Your fault. To frightened to talk to girls? Your fault.

Fucking crazy I know. He'll never make any money at it. So off base all we can do is ridicule him from afar.
posted by sourwookie at 11:20 PM on September 5, 2006

Put up your hands and step away from that Orgone Accumulator, hortense.

We're with the FDA and we've come to confiscate it.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:06 AM on September 6, 2006

Fucking crazy I know. He'll never make any money at it.

I don't know about that, souwookie. Dr. Phil and his ilk appear to be doing just fine.
posted by PeterMcDermott at 1:10 AM on September 6, 2006

A photographer friend of mine was recently assigned to take pics of smackheads undergoing 'equine therapy', and went along assuming it was total bunk - turned out they had a ridiculously high success rate, and junkies with ten-year habits had been clean for a year just from hanging out with a few ponies. Certainly brings new meaning to the term 'doing horse'.
posted by jack_mo at 5:57 AM on September 6, 2006

I prefer to good-bye depression by constricting anus 100 times.
posted by Guy Smiley at 12:18 PM on September 6, 2006

We could use a few more lunatics of this caliber.

You should check out the Time Cube guy if you have that high of an opinion of Wilhelm Reich.
posted by Falconetti at 4:38 PM on September 6, 2006

"Fascism is the supreme expression of religious mysticism," states Wilhelm Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. "It transposes religion from the 'otherworldliness' of the philosophy of suffering to the 'this worldliness' of sadistic murder." 1933, a decade before the meltdown of the "Reich".
He also researched sex, ORGIASTIC POTENCY: Ability to surrender to the flow without any inhibition. Complete surrender to the sexual act. "This is always lacking in neurotic individuals." Few people mature with complete orgiastic potency. Full orgasm can only happen in 4 ways, held Reich:

1. If people love each other and can express this love
2. When both people are free of armor, then involuntary muscular movements occur before climax
3. Breathing should be deep, full, pleasurable
4. Shortly before orgasm both sexes should experience deep, delicious current-like sensations running up and down bodies. Armoriing cuts this off. Otherwise, climax in loins only. Not throughout body.

Reich saw ability to lose ourselves in sexual ecstasy as the ultimate measure of well being.*
now do you see why he was hated? the orgone stuff was just a prop for his therapy, to help people have better orgasms. Time Cube guy- lunatic. Reich-not.
posted by hortense at 9:19 PM on September 6, 2006

I meant for this link to be in there.
posted by hortense at 9:21 PM on September 6, 2006

Perhaps I was too glib (Reich was an influence on Foucault, although I don't necessarily hold that as a positive). But his "orgone energy" is about as valid as healing crystals and magnets. He thought orgone permeated the entire universe and one could harness it to cure cancer (which is caused by thanatos bacilii, whatever the fuck that is supposed to be). Orgone was also responsible for the weather (he developed a machine he claimed could cause rain using orgone energy bursts) and the galaxies. I could go on and on about his nutty psuedoscience. He took what might have some validity as a metaphorical construct to elucidate psychosexual problems and posited it as an actually existing, material component of the universe.

I do give him credit for renouncing communism way before other intellectuals did and I also think it is a travesty how he was treated at the end of his life by the federal government. Still, most of the guy's entire career was centered around his ideas about orgone, which are really fucking nutty.
posted by Falconetti at 9:43 PM on September 6, 2006