Can Psychotherapy Defend Free Speech?

What can psychotherapy tell us about the importance of free speech? In this episode we explore how free speech promotes psychological health, and the parallels between the health of the individual and the health of wider society.

Audio-Essay by Dr. Alex Curmi. Dr. Curmi is a consultant General Adult Psychiatrist who completed his training in the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust. In addition to general adult psychiatry he has a special interest in psychotherapy and mindfulness meditation.

Intro Excerpt from: George Carlin - Doin' it Again (1990)

If you would like to enquire about an online psychotherapy appointment with Dr. Alex, you can email - alexcurmitherapy@gmail.com

Give feedback here - thinkingmindpodcast@gmail.com  
Follow us here: Twitter @thinkingmindpod Instagram @thinkingmindpodcast

Join Our Mailing List! - https://thinkingmindpod.aidaform.com/mailinglistsignup

SUPPORT THE PODCAST: buymeacoffee.com/thinkingmind

Transcript

 You have found the Thinking Mind podcast. 4s Welcome back to the Thinking Minds podcast. My name is Alex. I'm a consultant psychiatrist. Today will be making a psychotherapeutic arguments for free speech. In other words, what psychotherapy can tell us about how free speech is fundamental for our own health and the health of our society. 12s You rarely hear psychotherapy talked about in conjunction with a political issue like free speech. Free speech has been a hot topic of conversation in the public square for the past few years, and there seems to be a tension between the political left and the right on this issue. This is interesting because the question of free speech is not strictly aligned with any one political ideology, and both political left and right have advocated for and against free speech at various times in different contexts. Right now in the West, it appears that the left is advocating for more limits to free speech, while the right is advocating the opposite. For example, in Canada, which has a liberal left leaning government under Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Radio television and Telecommunications Commission announced that online streaming and podcasting services operating in Canada with $10 million or more per year in revenue will have to register with it before November 28th and start providing information about their content. And there's debate as to whether or not this will lead to further regulations down the line. Another example of limits to free speech are the hate speech laws in the United Kingdom, which forbid any communication which is threatening or abusive or intended to harass, alarm, or distress anyone. But of course, there's frequent debates about when speech crosses the line from expressing dislike or criticism, or trying to create discussion into hate speech where they have a criminal charge. Ultimately, it's the police and the Crown Prosecution Service that need to decide if something qualifies as a hate crime or a hate incident. And frequently, when people are arrested for hate speech, the cases are not prosecuted. And when people are convicted, these convictions are often overturned, suggesting there's quite a lot of subjectivity in these decisions. There's a lot psychotherapy has to say about free speech. The argument I'll make in this podcast is that a huge part of why and how psychotherapy works comes down to unrestricted speech. And I think this is the case regardless of what type of psychotherapy is being employed. Although it's particularly true when it comes to psychoanalytic or psychodynamic therapy, Gestalt psychotherapy, and person centered therapy, it can also be applied to other modalities like family therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, or cognitive behavior therapy. You can draw parallels between what can produce good psychological health in an individual, and what can produce good psychological health in a society or a collective. This makes sense when you think about how an individual is a collection of different psychological forces or sub personalities and insights, which psychoanalytic thought first brought to our attention that were not really one being, but a community of drives, instincts, desires, and impulses, including instinctual drives or basic biological drives for warmth, sex, food, etcetera drives we internalized from our parents, caregivers, and society about what we think we should do, what we ought to do, what's correct to do. This is what Freud called the superego, or what Carl Rogers called conditions of worth. And then, of course, there's our egoic desires, which is usually thought of as a compromise between our basic biological drives and our superego. It's what we feel we want very consciously like status, material possessions. There's also what you could call higher drives, more elevated drives. One's derived from our value system, what we really care about. These include drives towards self-actualization and altruism. As a result of having all these drives, we are in essence, a community. So how do you manage this in an individual, especially given how these drives and instincts often conflict with each other? And a lot of what psychotherapy exposes is just how much internal conflict we have, and how that internal conflict is a huge cause of our suffering. 1s Imagine someone trying to stop smoking. Part of him wants to stop another part of him which might be more unconscious, identifies with smoking, and for that part of him, cigarettes symbolize independence, rebelliousness, non-conformity, etcetera. So in this case, you have a conscious drive in conflict with an unconscious drove. As long as this person is unconscious of this conflict, his a not really going to be able to stop smoking. B the conflict itself will cause its own amount of suffering. A phrase you can use to describe this as cognitive dissonance. When one of our beliefs and or behaviors is in conflict with another one of our beliefs and or behaviors. So what might this person encounter in a therapeutic situation? The whole way therapy is set up is to be an open space, a warm space where as much as possible, the therapist wants to empathize with you, which means they want to embody your position as closely as possible and they want the best for you, and they will tend to take a non-judgmental approach. This is very rare in life. We don't tend to have situations in life where someone will sit and listen to us. Non-judgmental, trying always to come from a position of wanting the best for us. And you might say, my family relationships are like that, or my friendships are like that, or my relationship with my partner is like that. And this may be difficult to hear, but our social relationships generally don't have that simplicity because our social relationships are importantly different in that they are negotiated relationships which, even in the ideal situation, results in mutual benefit for both people across time. And that being the case, these relationships are a lot more complicated, and inevitably they require a great deal of compromise of limits or boundaries. In social relationships, both people are much more vulnerable to each other's dark sides and unresolved psychological issues. Ego needs, insecurities. And this is normal. This is a part of life. This is not something you want to be in resistance to. Life is messy and complicated. But in psychotherapy we're trying to achieve something different. The therapist, through their training, has hopefully done their best to at least become aware of and manage their dark side, to minimize its impact on their client and to make their ego needs and insecurities less felt in the room. To try and make the relationship as uncomplicated as possible in order to facilitate the growth of the client. And this is why therapists don't tend to disclose too much about themselves when they're seeing a client. It's why they should undergo a lengthy training program. It's why most therapists undergo some kind of therapy of their own during their training. It's all to create the safe, non-judgmental environment where the best can be done for the client's progress. So once that facilitative environment is set up in most forms of therapy, the therapist is going to try and encourage the client to speak in a spontaneous, unrestricted, often free associative manner. This means that the client doesn't have to speak to conform to any particular agenda, and may not even have to talk about a specific problem or how they intend to solve that problem. Although that kind of thing may be discussed during the initial assessment, you would often start a session by asking a client just to speak about what's on their mind and to go from there. Why is that the case? Again, there is generally not a space in life where people can speak in such a free way. Generally, life we need to conform to the rules of specific situations. If you're interacting with a shopkeeper, for instance, there's a specific range of things that a person would allow themselves to do and say, and the same is true for work. The same is even true for our friendships and romantic relationships. We don't always realize this, but very quickly when we meet and interact and form relationships with people. Precedents are set and dynamics are established. And usually once a dynamic is established in a relationship, it's quite hard to break out with. Some relationships have a wider range of acceptable expression, of course, but there is still generally a limit, and the restriction on expression will generally lead to a restriction on thinking and behavior, and this can become a problem when we want to discover new parts of ourselves, to try and see the world differently, or to try and live our lives differently. In therapy, you're doing the opposite. You want your client to open up and become more at ease, saying whatever comes to their mind and to learn to continue going with the flow of thought and feeling. And doing so tends to allow a person to open up the new ways of thinking, feeling and behaving to make associations that they weren't previously aware of, to discover aspects of themselves which they were not previously conscious of. This is the process that would allow our client to want to stop smoking, to become aware that he has an unconscious drive to smoke because it helps him feel rebellious, independent, or non-conformist. 1s Once he's become conscious of this, he's moved from a place of compulsion to a place of choice. Because if you're unaware of a force that's driving you, then that force has a lot of power. But as soon as you become aware of that force that's driving you, all of a sudden you now have a choice. Now, that choice may be a difficult one. It could be a dilemma. And there's all sorts of reasons why this person may still find stopping smoking difficult, but at least now the cards are on the table, or at least more of the cards are on the table, and he's in a position to exert some element of will on his predicament, and it gives him more agency. This is really the point of psychotherapeutic work. It's to get underneath whatever the apparent problem is, to get a wider perspective on that person's situation and to give that person more choices in how to act. A lot of the problems that people come to psychotherapy with are coping mechanisms that have now stopped working, or perhaps coping mechanisms where their dysfunction has exceeded their usefulness. 1s Smoking can help someone deal with stress, or at least give them the impression that they're doing so. Alcohol can be a self-medication for social anxiety. Having an avoidant attachment style can be a defense against taking the very real emotional risks that come with getting into a close relationship. And free speech in a non-judgmental environment is one of the major regulatory mechanisms that allows a person to get a more three dimensional view on their predicament. Importantly, free speech does not mean that everything that is said would be virtuous and pristine pleasant. In fact, a lot of what gets said in psychotherapy is difficult and dark and ugly. Often, psychotherapy is a process where we learn things about ourselves that we don't really want to know, and we learn about our dark side and other people's dark sides. This is what Clarion calls the shadow aboard the shadow calling said, quote, everyone carries a shadow, and unless it is embodied in that individual's conscious life, the blacker and denser it is at all counts. It forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions, unquote. 1s You can think about the shadow as that hidden part of ourselves that contains our unacknowledged desires, weaknesses, and instincts. And the idea is that to become whole, we must confront and integrate these aspects of our psyche. The shadow is not something to be just tolerated, but exploited to actually pursue what we want in life. Everybody needs to be able to harness aggressive impulses in one form or another. The archetypal example of someone who does not do this is the people pleaser, that person everybody knows who just tries to be nice in every interaction, never saying what they want, how they feel, never having boundaries. And very typically that person builds up resentments until they either become explosively angry or they implode, becoming depressed, anxious, or morbidly dependent. Free speech in therapy also does not always mean that everything he say is going to be correct or truthful. And yet the search for truth in oneself in one psychology would be very difficult, if not impossible, without this kind of free associative process. Now, can what we're saying about free speech for an individual apply it to free speech for a society? Free speech is generally thought of as a political issue, but psychology is ultimately a more fundamental force underlying politics in both individuals and societies. Our psychology greatly influences how we see the world, our values, what we care about, and therefore our political inclinations. Just like within an individual. As we've discussed, having a functional society is also about coordinating disparate and conflicting forces into a community that is integrated and hopefully all pulling in the same direction. 2s And the society is similar to an individual in that it also has a lot of dark and ugly forces operating within it. And when attempts are made to clamp down on free speech, the argument that's often made is that the sheer ugliness and offensiveness of such forces is too much to tolerate. If it's true that the psychology of a society has a similar dynamic to the psychology of an individual, then you can make the argument that just like a person needs to integrate their dark side, so must a society integrated dark side, and that the suppression of free speech and truth in a society will lead to terrible outcomes for that society, just like it would for an individual. One of the clearest historical examples of this is the Soviet Union, where the lack of free speech and open debate hindered the ability of Soviet leaders to identify and address economic inefficiencies. Their economy was centrally planned, and they struggled to allocate resources effectively and meet the needs of the population. As a result, the Soviet economy stagnated and living conditions for many citizens declined, and they experienced several famines, and this was one of the major reasons that the Soviet Union eventually collapsed. So I would make the argument that free speech is of benefit to society, much in the same way as it's no benefit to the individual person. It allows for emotional expression, allowing people to feel heard and reducing feelings of alienation and frustration, and it prevents people from feeling disenfranchised. This also means there's going to be less pent up tension and resentment within the society, and resentment really is something that's toxic to individuals, toxic to relationships, and toxic to the collective. It allows for the society to become fundamentally more conscious, more aware of the darker problems within it. So those problems can be faced with deliberateness and intentionality by the society, rather than having a society which is more disintegrated where the darker aspects of the society are operating in a more covert and secretive manner. It allows for conflicting parties to resolve their conflicts through dialogue rather than through violence. It allows for diverse problems to be faced with diverse solutions, since everyone has different perspectives on the same problem, free speech allows for terrifying new problems we face to be dealt with in innovative ways and allow society to change course when things are going wrong, which is, of course, one of the main weaknesses of authoritarian regimes like the Soviet Union, as we've already described. What are some caveats and counterarguments to the case I've made today? Even if you accept the idea that free speech should be allowed legally from the political perspective, it doesn't mean that free speech shouldn't be taken seriously. And that speech doesn't come with a huge amount of responsibility from a moral perspective. Even though speech is not the same thing as violence, that doesn't mean that speech can't do harm to people. And we know, especially towards young people, that emotional and verbal abuse is a very real thing. So just because we tolerate free speech from a legal perspective, that doesn't mean someone shouldn't be responsible with their speech. And society should create a culture and an ethic whereby people take the words they say very seriously because of their potential impacts on other people. Another caveat is being able to open up about dark thoughts and empires, as you have is not the same thing as approving of them or giving into them. Being honest about what you're experiencing psychologically is not an argument for being carried away by those experiences. But funnily enough, opening up about these forces does make it less likely that this will happen because a heightened awareness does bring with it choice and agency as we've described. And lastly, you can look at historical examples where totally unrestricted free speech was not a good thing, such as the Rwandan genocide in 1994, in the lead up to which hate speech and incitement to violence were spread through radio broadcasts and the print media, these messages fuelled ethnic tensions and played a significant role in the violence that followed. That being the case, there'll always be some form of limits to free speech, such as incitement of violence, defamation, among others, which you can see even in countries who are the most permissive of free speech, such as the United States. So I hope this podcast gave you a bit of insight into how free speech really is one of the most important drivers of good psychotherapeutic work and of psychological health, and the lessons we can extrapolate from that and apply it to our wider societies and to our politics. Lastly, I would suggest if you have a problem that's bothering you. See if you can apply free speech to that problem. Try writing about it for five minutes without censoring yourself. Record yourself on your phone, speaking about it for a few minutes, or try talking to a non-judgmental friend about it and see what happens next. See if that improves your view on the problem or what you could do about it. This is the Thinking Mind Podcast podcast all about psychiatry, psychotherapy, self-development, and related topics. There are many ways you can support it. You can share it with a friend. You can follow us on Spotify, Apple or wherever you listen. Give us a rating or if you want to support us further, you can check out the Buy Me a Coffee link in the description. Thanks for listening.