Psykoterapiasta humanismina ja mystiikkana: Perheterapian ja psykoanalyysin antirationalistisista ja antimedikaalisista ulottuvuuksista

Abstract

In this research, my aim is setting psychotherapies into the context of humanism and mysticism. By humanism, I refer to a philosophical point of view that departs from the medical context and interprets humanism as an alternative to theology, natural sciences and practical skills. By mysticism, I refer to the tradition of speculative mysticism. Wittgenstein’s reflections on the mystic and Heidegger’s concept of twofold thinking are modern examples of this tradition. Since the 1950´s, psychotherapy has been most commonly thought of in a medical context. This tendency, which arose around the beginning of the 20th century, has increasingly gained in strength ever since Hans Eysenck in 1952, 1961 and 1966 published his highly skeptical articles on the efficacy of psychotherapies. Although his results have frequently been proven invalid, research carried out following medical research strategies has become the dominant force in the discipline of psychotherapy research. It has also influenced how we tend to conceptualize and analyze psychotherapies. My goal in this dissertation has been to view psychotherapy from various alternative standpoints and to find out what dimensions of the phenomenon of psychotherapy are revealed and what are concealed if we do not look at psychotherapies solely from a medical point of view. In the first article, I show how the metaphor of a game has been crucial in family therapies and how it has aided understanding of the development of the systemic therapies. In the second article, I compared epistemological discussions in family therapy and in psychoanalysis. In both traditions these conversations led to similar conclusions. Ultimately, neither family therapy nor psychoanalysis proved able to solve the epistemological problems stemming from postmodern thought. Thus, family therapy returned to an interventionist model, and mainstream psychoanalysis started interpreting itself once again as a form of natural science. In the third and fourth articles, I interpreted psychotherapy from different philosophical perspectives. My starting points were the philosophies of Plato and Martin Heidegger. I succeeded, I believe, in showing that the totality of psychotherapy can only be understood in the light of both the natural scientific and antirationalistic philosophical and historical contexts that were dominant during the evolution of psychotherapies around the turn of the 20th century.