It would seem absurd to ask monks or rabbis to instruct others without having ever meditated or prayed, and yet, I’ve never once been asked to develop my own meditation practice before leading mindfulness exercises for patients. True collectivism may also upend today’s clinical norms; deep embeddedness within community is tricky in neoliberal frameworks of individualism, privacy, and fees for service. In the face of social crisis, spiritual leaders and their congregations often come together, making political use of their collective positionality; therapists—especially when trained to be neutral—sometimes struggle to articulate the place of their political convictions in their work, let alone their solidarities with one another in a shared goal of collective healing. Without more deeply engaging the sacredness of our work, psychotherapists risk becoming obsolete in the task of repairing the social and psychic wounds we are allegedly supposed to remedy.
A reevaluation of how we see mental illness is also necessary. Healing, as defined in typical clinical frameworks, often looks like productivity and compliance. Alternative definitions of thriving that emphasized spiritual rather than clinical modes would instead involve reducing alienation, increasing historical and political consciousness, and helping patients connect with sources of meaning that transcend shallow consumerist markers. This might include asking patients to consider questions about ancestry, the meanings of one’s life, and of course, community. It would likely include somatic therapies—largely siloed from psychology and psychiatry because of academic rigidity and the hegemony of the white, conservative American Psychiatric Association and its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—that help repair the toll that oppression takes on peoples’ bodies and nervous systems. And, as many radical therapists started to argue in the ’60s and ’70s, it would likely involve significant time in groups, learning from shared exchange and collaboration. Freud allegedly believed that if we all received analysis, eventually one’s friends would be able to take on the role of the analyst and we could analyze each other, much in the way observant Jews studying together in yeshiva could understand and lay claim to ancestral teachings as a community.
