Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…This is a tricky question, but you mentioned therapy. It does seem like what therapists do is they want to find a problem, and they can then just project the problem and then convince you the problem existed. So how do you know… Is therapy even an effective… It takes a very special therapist not to implant, right? A trauma that never happened or details that never happened to a trauma that did. It depends on the kind of therapy. So there’s a lot of therapy that is evidence-based and that is very much focused on tackling sort of feelings and reactions that you have right now. Then there is an area or a bunch of areas of therapy, including psychoanalysis, which are very focused on trying to find retroactively sources of mental illness in your personal past. And I am very critical of the kinds of… Well, both from an explanatory perspective, but also from a false memory perspective. I don’t think that we are the way we are because of individual incidents that happened to us. I think that is a wild thing to think about the brain. To be like you are the way you are because of this one interaction you had that one time is like… I mean, maybe this explains a tiny bit of you, but what about all the other life experiences you have every single day? And so I think that there’s sometimes an oversimplified searching for answers or sources of problems that we have that I don’t like. I don’t think it’s true. And I think that there can be an uncautious approach to memory, as you were saying, where you have someone who is saying things and your role as a therapist is to help them manage their emotions now and to feel better, and that’s the other thing is that they have a very different role than I do. A therapist is trying to manage the person’s well-being now. Whereas I am looking at the evidentiary quality. That is a complete… I’m almost not quite the other side, but I’m in a very different role. Well, you just want the truth.…

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