We are a social species. Maybe our therapy should start looking like it.

Q: How come the rents are so high in New York City?

A: Because of all the people who want to live there.

We are here in NYC because of all of the people, the  jobs, the opportunities to date and build friendships, to experience culture. And yet for most people in NYC their therapy seems not to have noticed.

Our sociality is so fundamental to who we are as to be beyond question. Consider whatever it is you last ate. Whether it was a dish at a restaurant or a packaged meal from the supermarket, literally thousands of people worked to bring the various components together, design the packaging, market the product or restaurant, deliver the ingredients.

Consider your emotional life. Think about the last time you were overcome with joy. Or the last time you were devastated by a sad event. Who else was there? Chances are you were surrounded with other people who were much more than incidental to the significance of those events.

Now consider this: Do a quick Google image search for the word psychology. What you see is a page filled almost entirely with colorful images of brains.

It's not a subtle image

The statement is pretty clear: Psychology is about YOU, the solitary individual. Sure, we're interested in other people and social relationships, but only from the vantage point of how they effect and interact with you, your mind, your brain.

"It's what's inside that counts"

Or so we're told. You've heard that a million times before. You've heard it in therapy, you've heard it on TV. But give it a second glance. Doesn't that sound pretty... selfish? Doesn't that notion seem at odds with who we actually are as human beings?

Maybe what's on the outside counts, too

Other people are on the "outside." In fact, so very much of what matters is on the outside. Or...

...maybe the whole inside/ outside thing needs another look

If we take a pile of all the component parts that make up your computer, you'd have an interesting assortment of technology, but you wouldn't have a computer. The parts matter, to be sure. They're essential to what makes a computer a computer, but it's equally essential how those parts are put together. Or, more simply, that those parts are put together.

It's just as much the case for us as humans. We can't be understood separate from our relationships with one another. To do so quite literally distorts who we are, in just the same way that trying to understand a computer without taking in the ways the various parts are put together distorts what it is to be a computer.

What are the implications for therapy?

The inside/ outside dichotomy, commonly referred to by philosophers and social scientists as dualism, is one of the central tenets of modernism. Descartes more or less kicked this tradition off with his Meditations on First Philosophy, which was first published in...

...1641.

In Latin!

It's old, people.

Freud is of this modernist tradition. As are the behaviorists such as Skinner and Pavlov. The two sub-divisions of psychology that these camps represent (psychoanalysis in the case of Freud, behaviorism in the case of Skinner and Pavlov) have informed almost all of the therapy you're likely to encounter in NYC.

We've done some great philosophy since 1641. And there have been profound conceptual transformations in the field of psychology as well. Most of these are of the sort that challenge the idea of there being an internal you that relates to an external other. The field of post-modern psychology is thriving. Around the world are pockets of innovators who are working to create therapies based on a we rather than on an me/you paradigm.

Updating your therapy

Great therapy accepts that we live our lives in the we. The emotional pain you experience, whether it's related to depression, or and anxiety, or takes some other shape can't be understood as a phenomenon that's merely happening to you. That pain, and those emotional experiences that you bring into the therapy office, must be understood as existing within the various relationships you have in your life--to your friends and loved ones, with your coworkers, and with the world.

Breaking boundaries

One of the principles of the practice of therapy is the notion of boundaries. The idea is that the patient and the therapist must stay very separate. Having "good boundaries" in therapy means that the therapist never talks about herlelf and that she keeps her affective responses to her patients' to a minimum. The subject of the work, as implied by this practice, is the patient as discrete individual. The relationship with the therapist, insomuch as it's a topic of the work at all, casts the therapist as a "blank slate," a neutral party on which the patient "projects" his or her internal states.

If we recast our understanding of human life, and update our therapy to match this recasting, then the institution of boundaries must break in favor of a therapeutic relationship that is a real relationship.

So, group therapy?

Yep. But here's a twist: Even so-called "individual therapy," if upgraded to include an appreciation of just how social a species we are, can be seen as group therapy--i.e. a small group of two. At TriBeCa Therapy we love group therapy because it brings so many relationships into the therapy room. In a sense, by bringing more people together the therapy becomes even more social.

If you're looking to start therapy, or considering making a change, consider this question: Where's the we?