Role of therapy in post-postmodern context

Hello all: This is cross-posted from my blog this morning.  It is a first draft – but I hadn't posed in a while and wanted to put something out there.

What I want to write about this morning is what is the role and place of psychotherapy in a post postmodern context.

Presumably, there will be some role for psychotherapy in the post-postmodern world.  Psychotherapy is most generically defined as the intentional activity of one person attempting to improve the well-being of another person, through a deliberate process of some type of interpersonal engagement. 

At present, it seems that in the WIE worldview, there is no legitimate place for any kind of therapy.  I haven't heard this outright, but neither have I seen any attention given to therapy in the pages of the magazine.

Contrast this with AQAL journal, at present the lead publication of I-I, and you see nearly the opposite case: psychotherapy, followed closely by education, has received the most treatment. 

What is going on here?

My opinion is that WIE folks - Andrew Cohen - has thrown the baby of psychotherapy out with its postmodern bathwater.  This is an unfortunate state of affairs - and yet, the profession of psychotherapy does carry some culpability for this.

Ken Wilber, in a recent conference call, spoke about how “regression had replaced repression” as the most significant psycho-cultural issue in North American culture, in recent years.  If true, this is a statement that psychotherapists need to pay very close attention to.  Because in most or many psychotherapy circles, I see how the focus remains largely on undoing repression.  This puts psychotherapy behind the growth curve of the culture at large - and more importantly, means that psychotherapy becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

It seems that the development of coaching is one way that psychotherapy has tried to make itself relevant for the post-postmodern context.  However, coaching is often criticized by depth psychotherapists for being shallow and - the worse of all sins for depth psychotherapists - “cognitive”.

What then are the partial truths of coaching and depth psychotherapies, and how could they be brought together in an approach to psychotherapy that is relevant for the challenges the culture faces, where regression has replaced repression as the most significant psycho-cultural issue?  This seems to me to be a relevant topic for our consideration.

Re: Role of therapy in post-postmodern context

Hi Durwin, could you reroute my contributions to this discussion on this thread to save me writing all that stuff out again please? Life is too short for reiteration, I feel..

Re: Role of therapy in post-postmodern context

Off the top of my head, I'm not sure how to do that …I suppose I could cut and paste…there may be a way to link to it…
Durwin

Re: Role of therapy in post-postmodern context

Thanks, Durwin