The Genghis Khan of Psychotherapy: One Origin and Critical Perspective of Behavioral Therapy (BT) and
its Reformation - Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)

This essay is adapted and reprinted with permission from The Great Evidenced-Based, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Self-Help and Government Merger: Monopolistic Cultural Infusions of Pharmacological & Behavioral Whack-a-Mole; Or Psychological Trauma — Cope or Cure?! by Jesse W. Collins II. Additional and significant description from other chapters in that book have been included into this special online presentation of the original essay.

Importantly, disclaimers provide (in that other work) support for both life-coping and -building efforts. Behavioral and Cognitive Behavioral activities, as opposed to clinical therapies in this reference, produced great individual and social deeds. There is a good place in our lives for each; people like, from time to time, to learn how to do important tasks, and to even hear opinions about how they think and why they behave as they do, and then use them to do what they can to get by, and to even make things better.

Power and politics change things, convoluting different peoples' motives, and making for destructive times. That has happened here and with these otherwise supposed-to-only-be-helping activities. So this essay highlights where those two modalities' mis- or over-use, particularly when incorporated into social (organizational) human management devices, hurts us individually, and as a people, community, and even civilization.

Lastly, there's a happy adage, or laziness-inducing one, that all religions, or all mental health-helping treatment options, are in their samenesses, OK. And that notion, itself, has been given a form: eclecticism. In either of the cases, they are not (always OK). Some are even extremely harmful, regardless of implementationer credentials; and then some, again, can be worse than that — they prevent good otherwise being established by additional or different helping agents/activities/efforts from prevailing. Learning which is what can be tricky business, and not only waste lots of individual, not to mention the world's, problem-solving time and energy, but more demonstrably, can squandor opportunities for living a remarkable life, and sometimes even living at all, whether seemingly remarkable or not.

Having said those nice things . . .

Informing the patient of what he does not know because he has repressed it is only one of the necessary preliminaries to the treatment. If knowledge about the unconscious were as important for the patient as people inexperienced in psychoanalysis imagine, listening to lectures or reading books would be enough to cure him. Such measures, however, have as much influence on the symptoms of nervous illness as a distribution of menu-cards in a time of famine has upon hunger." Sigmund Freud (1910)

How did this mess called Behavioral, and then euphemized ─ a little later when it was drawing too much scientific flack and public ridicule as missing something ─ as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy happen in a once-upon-a-time world of logic and serious thought? Here’s the more ethereal view of how. The disaster was a consequence of its beginning, that then rolled like an avalanche across the continent on the other side of the Atlantic. The calamitous story is synthesized in and highlighted for humankind in just one expression: “Has anybody seen any of my friends?”

That was Ivan Pavlov, the 1904 Nobel Laureate from the pre Russian Revolution days, who in this later time of that expression’s currency (1934) did some other good and spin off work also dealing with the digestive system in dogs. He founded Behaviorism with his habituation and sensitization model (in the process reinforcing Thorndike’s work with cats) for calling dogs to dinner. It is noteworthy that with the exception of the Soviet government's banning publication of Freud's work (an individualism-supporting contradiction to Marxist/Leninist/Stallinist collective-based notions pertaining to the nature of human consciousness-functioning) starting a few years earlier in 1929, and which declarative was still extant by 1989, everything seemed pretty reasonable and on the up and up on the surface with his experiments, publication and thesis. Then came this one, albeit rarely considered — but nevertheless material — item.

It's the seventy-five year and extant catch. His greater laboratory was skewed to determine the focus of dog consciousness as fit the parameters of the lab’s bosses (in the end being Soviet Politburo leadership) for the definition of the human thought processing constitution (but in this instance using dogs as stand-ins). After the terrorism model for traumatizing the masses (which made them more amicable to manipulation by a few Russian archetypical Ivan the Terrible strong fatherly types) was implemented by the new Bolsheviks between 1905 and 1907, Lenin followed through ten years later with the super control and strong paternal model. As the late Daryl Royal, Head Coach of the University of Texas, used to say before the biggest “national” football games, “We’re going to dance with who brung us.”

And that Lenin did. After planning with his operational statistician the forced early extinction-through-murder of just under fifteen millions of prospectively non-Bolshevik-styled-Socialism-supportive Russian citizens, he decided to skip a couple of Marx’s stages on the world’s march toward socialism. That put Vladimir into a hurry; so he simply outlawed by decree those idiosyncrasies like individual human ontology (individual humanness) that would get in his way. Things like music and grief, which otherwise are the windows, doors and other gateways to the ruling influence and ontologically-based facilitator of decision-making locused in identity were illegalized by statute; he was planning to replace those naturally individual identities in mass with bigger thinking ones: social conscience and justice types. Softy things like music, love of one’s home and family, and emotional processing that fit individual nuances of identity provided too much comfort for certain members of the downtrodden, whom he needed to adapt wholesale his notion of how human beings should be and become uplifted: (using only) the social conscience and justice-focused replacement identities and progressive thinking constructs. Sounds a little like CBT's pillar of strength, Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) applied a little earlier ─ circa 1917-34 ─ doesn’t it?

Keep one’s and thus the masses’ eyes on the big abstract ─ the social utopia to come ─ was the polity-thought-control strategy. Any concept that focused on individual ontology was declared counter-revolutionary and dismissed along with the person who thought it up all the way to death or prison, whichever seemed most appropriate at the time. Thereafter, Stalin, inventing the new Soviet Man’s name (Homo Sovieticus ─ bet that old Mongol slave descendant from Georgia, the country, was drunk and laughing hard when he made that nomenclature up for the believing followers: that is, anybody who was still alive) with the murder and Gulagization of a couple of more dozen million citizens, some of them accidentally, maybe, even being individually thinking and ethically minded academes and scientists, set the stage between 1917 and 1934 for building the first Behaviorism-to-be home, Pavlov’s dog-study lab originally housed at St. Petersburg-, then changing the name for a little while to Petrograd-, then Leningrad-, then back again to St. Petersburg-U after the Big Thinkers were gone (1991). Poor college town.

If you notice in Pavlov’s notes, he doesn’t attempt to discuss with the dogs their feelings and attitudes about being stuck in the gums with electrodes just so they can eat dinner. Horse and Dog Whispering languages had yet to be invented. But even if they had, such questions would have brought an inquiry into dog ontology and what role it played in the sensory-based neurons and synapses as they interrelated with the motor ones. And that of course would have steered for time immemorial the subsequent followers in both the new fields of Behavioral Psychology and molecular neurobiology to focus on the hippocampus, which is where the anatomic leadership of all that ontological molecular stuff is supposed to be going on. Such an unbiased or otherwise more complete focus would have taken the hallowed objective inquiry a little deeper than just the sensory-to-motor electro-chemical interactions that considered only “When’s dinner?”, or “Come to dinner!”, to include instead something like “What’s for dinner?” and ‘Do I feel like beef tonight?” But, then, maybe dogs don’t have an ontology. They probably don’t think at all, or most likely not very deeply, as in the new Lenin designed Borg-only-Soviet-Man world, anyway. If people couldn’t be allowed to think, why should dogs be accorded such delusory-based luxury?

Had Pavlov conducted those experiments about learning and so forth by posing those other questions regarding dog ontology, which reiterating for emphasis were against the law to even contemplate in humans much less the lower animal forms, he would have not been himself much longer, physically that is. I doubt he would have made it to the 1930s to get published again. So like all good Double Thinkers born out of those kind of managerial population control models, he sent us a Double Think turned into Double Talk secret coded message to alert us to what was wrong with his experiments and conclusions, being the ethical fellow he was prior to the mind-controllers’ takeover.

With all the new fame from his dog salivating and bell ringing studies again elevating his status, as in part being one of the only guys left at the university who started out with it before the controllers got there, he sent a letter to Stalin’s program implementers at the Central Committee, ever expanding Comintern, or wherever. With great daring, he finally asked, and apparently at the peril of his own life, again for emphasis and noting the importance of love in the expression of human ontology even in scientists

“Has anybody seen any of my friends?”

What a brave man! Because they were either underground, literally - as in forever, or studying the permafrost in deep Siberia, helping to advance the lifestyle of non-ontologically-focused nearly Arctic animals, and to study some more of the once Russian-colonizing Mongol descendants to determine the origins of that old thirteenth century aggressiveness, and then to figure out not just where it came from, but where it went.

Skinner, however, the American protégé of Pavlov’s work, failed to get the Double Think and Talk secret coded “watch out ─ something may be wrong here!” communique. So he introduced the experiment with extensions to the soft headed elements of American academics who were trying to add strength to their own inner selves, advancing Pavlov’s model to include mice and even prescriptions for training persons in a box. And as always there are going to be some mental unfortunates who will believe anything.

And they also made the publishing decisions in the peer review journals as unfortunately Bruno Bettelheim would discover upon his early and very fortunate release from Dachau in 1940. His articles depicting his first-hand account of traumatic and post traumatic effects, first on identity of which he wrote eloquently was destroyed by the camp management model, and then later on the devastating life after-effects, behavioral and again identity in their locus. The point here is that his work was rejected by the peer review psychological journals because it was not objective, his being a camp prisoner and survivor and all. From the time he got out and presented his story to the scientists, another five million Jews were murdered before those targets of trauma by death were finally liberated, those who lived, that is.

Skinner would find his audience of sensitive college students and colleagues hiding out from the conflagration in psychological studies groups in academia. In those classrooms, all of a sudden no one had to worry about inner thinking or the otherwise identity elements of being human which Freud was opining about. This new approach particularly across the waters was changing former helpers into charismatic leaders whose new job was to teach the mass dummies how to behave and act.

Probably Freud lost his immediate influence because just prior to that period, he was being diverted from his mission; he had to get out of that intellectual-based but actually chameleon-configured deeper identity Vienna quick. Austria was being re-blended over a spring weekend with the German Fuhrer’s approach to defining humankind, or what he intended to remain of it, through the similar application of the culling method, which they ─ some of today’s fairly honest historians ─ say was taken from both Stalin and Islam’s thinking and experimental and application activities and other pogrom-program-conjuring efforts. The method for giving and following directions grew in and with great political strength during that Big Thinking (by scientists) with an emphasis on mostly acting forthrightly (assertiveness training-imbued) era.

So went the hand-me-down but now cumbersome period of Enlightenment that kept posing those interrogatories about who we really Are, and so forth. In other words and according to the new dog-based model blitzkrieging across western civilization: “We Are who the other guy tells us we are: “nothing,” for a large segment of that city’s (Vienna’s) population as soon as that 1938 spring weekend was over. And that little slice of higher intellectual life still hasn’t yet, that is, a full seventy-four years later, reconciled how that mass overnight hysterically delusional process for Europe’s elite erudites occurred. In fact, most of that lovely city’s residents still try to play like it didn’t.

That Behavioral control action idea and approach worked well in European academic environs while the big hitter in leadership in 1930s Europe was stealing Stalin’s gulagization model by transferring (with boxcars on trains) all the unlikeables and argued-to-be by some Christians, Islamics and the new philosophical secularites for the thousandth time causes of Europe’s miseries out to new laboratories, then called concentration, which for about thirteen million (that figure is supposed to include not just religious but ethnic, race and pretty much all disagreeables) of those poor folks was another euphemism for extermination, camps. The key to this capacity to get masses to not think was to strip all human beings of the concept of ontology and the questions that surround it, turning the unfortunates not just into non-citizens, which came first, but then something a little more convenient to and for expedient management thinking constructs. Behaviorism or science became as in Zen one with mass denial where people could play like their once thought-to-be constituents didn’t have any ontologies at all, thus could be murdered in mass (and while stealing their property ─ to include not just their homes, businesses, bank accounts, clothing, shoes, suitcases and other personal effects, but their hair and the gold in their teeth as well ─ in concert with the train rides and destination rendezvous) for lack of current popularity or lack of proof that they were human beings. And unlike dogs, they could even speak some kind of language that apparently had been understandable, at least for some ethnicities the previous thirty-eight hundred years. All those European academes needed was a little philosophy with some dog-science to back it up, and they were free to join the hystericallity-brigade and just follow orders ─ no ontologies or consciences holding those power driven cortexes down or just getting in the way.

“Well. How in the world could they get away with THAT?!!” said somebody recently who never heard of Dr. Zhivago or Boris Pasternak. Eastern academia thought quickly and came up with “Cause you cain’t see it (speaking of human ontology or the essence of being) which makes it unscientific to even contemplate! If you can’t observe it as in objectively, then it ain’t there!” A brilliant model for science; “Temujin, Lenin, Pavlov, Stalin, The Messenger, Uncles Mao, Po and Ho and the Fuhrer must have been and still be right. Don’t you think? Or if you don’t, we’ll kill you!” “Got it!” said and say always the masses in Europe. And depression era American academes followed up with “Well, if they said it in Europe,” or in later twentieth century adaptations by someone from out of state, or who teaches at a technical university in Massachusettes, or who like Walter Durante spoke on 1930s radio, or on less economically depressed TV today with Oprah or some other leading talk show masses expert communicator, “it’s gotta be true!”

For all of that we have to thank both the Mongols and some dedicated Islamists for conquering large segments of those dumb Russians’ empire. They became the adapters of the twentieth century imposed “just-kill-them-if-you-can’t-get-them-to-do-right” management model for being human, always and ever known intellectually as founded in or founder of Behaviorism. Russians were thought of as responding affably to rough and tough leadership constructs. And Behaviorism gave them the logical right to do so; the logic of terror. Do what I say and salivate when directed, or I’m going to shock you in the ass (or was that the salt water snail, cats and mice a little later?) or send your family and entire race to oblivion; or worse, call in Dr. Mengele for some serious testing and thought provoking ethics-envelope-pushing inquiry: who needs dogs anymore with his modality? I guess it’s a good thing that we (meaning Americans still believing in the individual human spirit, consciousness or ontology) won that war. Otherwise we’d be rationalizing open brain pain experiments on the least popular groupings of the decree-declared-lessers-liked here in America, instead of just mice, dogs, cats, monkeys and Vietnam veterans.

Jack Nicholson (playing a patient suffering Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in the movie "As Good as it Gets") complains about something to his psychiatrist or psychologist, who then answers with a rational explanation of the situation and condition. Nicholson, in asking back if he (the shrink) couldn't do any better than that, exclaims:

"We're drowning here. And you're describing the water!"

That's the gist of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). It's really didactic psycho-interpretive education about clinical process as perceived by Behaviorists. And, they of course, like their founder, Ivan Pavlov, are lost souls wondering where their Nosotropic-narrative-deviating (leadershippers who deviate from the new focus-on-symptoms norm) friends, probably now in the GULAG of mental health professional exile and storage, went. In this aberration of psychotherapy and faux social management approach, the resulting locus of the problem-solving component is first placed by the how-to-think education into, and then is supposed to remain within, the abstract of consciousness (Cortex functionings). The idea: become aware of one's own (and others' too) behavioral abnormalities (including thought patterns gone uncontrolled), and decide/choose to do better/differently every time you figure one of the bizarrenesses out. And then thanks to the new interpretation/direction, just also change a few of life's perspectives — like adopt some new philosophies from somewhere or somebody (for just this eventuality, CBTers keep tons of them hidden in their pockets for quick draw application) — and everything will be alright.

No. Not really, I'm afraid.

That would be nice if that were all there was to it: getting over psychopathology. But it's not. That get-over-it (or change) through-conscious-decision-making is tied, much of the time it happens, to something maybe unseen, and likely untoward, which is not only NOT being addressed with the, albeit stalwart, wishful-thinking remedy, but quashed by it as well. The CBT or BT models declare for the responsibility of decision making to be the everything, which it is — of course when controlled or interfered-with by something unseen — also NOT.

Thus, the CBT-adherent problem-solving effort skips — like springy tiptoeing across lily pads on a densely alligator-inhabited pond — over the more perplexing, painful and as well incapcitatingly crumbled and usually less conscious existential identity matters that underlie the new abstractions, making the remedial effort superficial, at best. That is, the cognitive (conscious awareness) understanding and attendant behavioral-change mechanism may last only a few minutes, or maybe days, no matter that the program comes replete with reinforcing and ever-tightening rules from support organizations (where self helpers invite/importune/admonish members at the end of meetings to "keep coming back!"), professional-produced and -presented educational materials (books, video and talk show TV) that cajole followers to keep the faith, and now even can-do computer programs for holding the new thinking/awareness-development and choosing approaches on target.

Adding worseness to the approach, once that pseudo-introspective-behavioral-control apparatus incorporates into the individual or, more dangerous, collective psych, it becomes a part of the base pathognomony otherwise wanting to be overcome; people chase their aberrancies with currency-approved cliche-driven guesswork about causation. That remedy, then, looks like a hyper-suped-erudited long-tailed varmint vigorously pursuing its ending, always vowing and trying to intellectually annihilate it, and at increasingly ever-higher speeds. And that circle of rabidness makes further, or let's say REAL — perdurably congruent and profound — progress for the complete or total human, impossible. 

Another way of saying the same thing, no matter how hard you bang on aberrants' frontal lobes (a primary cognition-based brain manager), your didactic-based-text-messaging-level therapy likely won't stick, particularly because those aspects of folks causing all the concerns are marching to a deeper, more determined-to-be-in-charge, drummer residing in the lymbic system and its brain relationals, or somewhere like that. Nobody really knows. For example, the Amygdala for production of emotion is involved; the mossy fibers of the Hippocampus (where the trauma of short term loss is established) also plays a part; and those elements are all naturally, i.e., protectively, facilitated between conscious and unconsciousness by the defly operating claustrum. That facilitation of the unconscious-to-conscious (and back) interplay is necessary because we'd otherwise all come to a screeching functional standstill if the trauma/loss-induced extinction to reality being undergone in identity, and which is brought about by big change, were always visible, or otherwise available to be experienced. Thank God in the twentieth century for compartmentalization of brain-psycho activity during trying times, letting our goal-achieving more task-oriented can-doers move on to less dismalness; a little more readily, anyway.

And, we've even yet to describe the biological and time requirements of HAPA-facilitated synaptic morphalogical (where you are stored) change ongoing in the existential elements of identity/being. You can find that discussion in the greatest (and only) book ever written (by me) on brain trauma etiology and its fix (cure/resolution). See, if you have lots of time and endurance, Neurobiology of Psychological Trauma Etiology and Its Reversal with Etiotropic Trauma Management; 1992; Jesse W. Collins II. Before the CBT-controlled and so called peer review journal gatekeepers got online and brought the curtain down on expression of such things, that Etiotropic explanation of trauma etiology was THE most downloaded (last half of the 1990s) piece of work from within the entire neurobiological investigators' once open, but now closed in the twenty-first century,  competition.

Despite those idiosyncratics, CBT still sounds good to some, at least on the surface for a little while, which is the cornerstone of CBT's mistaken design epistomology: it is embedded (not very far) into, and then works out of the surface of human thought, feeling, and experience, and then stays there with a little, or lot of, help from the social system. That surrounding interactive, then, has to be reconfigured as well, building political hegemony into what are supposed to only be applications of assistance to individuals gone control-kaput.

The rub for this frivolous, and latently in the beginning, then all-out social application during maturity — which inevitably takes the form of an aggressive person-control movement — the human consciousness (in total) doesn't work that way: as wished for by both Behaviorists and CBTers, who are the people doing the conjuring of and for the how-and-what-to-think standards. When done right, behavior of the masses is thought will more easily follow right along. Although sometimes it does, again, it mostly lasts  only for a little while. Worse, the forced or imposed change establishes additional contradiction to the already pulverized deeper internals, which pretty much guarantees future (and more) conflict not just for those masses, but their managers as well. Chaotically hysterical and convoluted conglomerations of intellectual decision making at individual, systemic and management stratifications.

The referenced aberrants are initiated from roots going deep down into both biology and unconscious memory. Moreover, they rigorously defend themselves, longterm, against conscious awareness and decision making, and especially against superficial attempts, no matter how apparently intellectually-configured-to-overcome the otherwise disrupting influences (Behavioral symptoms) upon conscious controls. Identify one symptom, bang it down, and, because the roots and their inceptions have gone unattended, quickly like in the game Wackomole another one (symptom represented by strange thinking or behavior) pops up. Until the underlyings are addressed, instead of just the superficials, the play goes on forever.

Focusing problem analysis, decision making and implementation about people management on thought behavioral abnormalities as symptoms, and then their change, can be more of a problem than that encountered due to the Whackomole effect. Here are three more impediments to symptom-focused and -reduction's being turned into the managerial everything by CBT.

Symptoms:

1. 1. can go dormant — i.e., they may be delayed or not present at all — for eons. For example, thought/behavioral symptoms stemming from post-traumatic-stress disorder routinely don't start showing up (for third party objective evaluation) in some cases for thirty to forty years after combat, or say sexual child abuse.
   2. present simultaneously and similarly with and from other health influences, convoluting abberant behaviors into a kaleidoscope of confusion for both the suffering individuals, those close to them, and the management community. To give this fact an example, co occurring instances of combat trauma and Substance Use Disorder (once Chemical Dependency) can produce identical symptoms, making professionals (clinicians) think up great hysterical and frenzied theories about which-causes-which and worse, what-causes-what, and then what to do if they can even figure it all out.
   3. because of their harsh contradictions (causing loss and emotional pain) to the surrounding loved ones or associates, (symptoms) can be obfuscated by that social network. Familial or systemic denial/delusion attends that phenomenon, sending problem address for some almost into the afterlife —  the problems don't even get reported by the indirectly, or at least less directly affected, until something really bad happens: job loss; divorce; familial estrangement; prison; death.

CBT's popularity also derives from its ease of adaptation, from laymen to talk show hosts. Working its way into the fuller polity, non psychotherapists (e.g., educators, government officials, some biology-only-side-healthcare people, a few lawyers, couple of journalists, and new collegiates) learn and implement the model without a clue regarding its shortcomings, making that group believe, falaciously, that they are pushing the envelope of erudited management, mostly not of themselves, however, but of their lessers informed (managees).

In the last half of the recent century, that abstraction/problem solver has morphed into a social way of being, presenting itself as an elite approach to being human, i.e., thinking and knowing what's going on. And unhappily for social-thinking-problem-solvers in a hurry, it takes a while for adapters to get over or past the model's life influence, again and principally, superficiality — particularly error-proned. A smart helping manager/psychotherapist/television personality can use the model for decades, and not realize that his or her life has been given over to carrying on just the latest currency, somewhat as swarms of fish follow each other: turning on a plankton trail to instantly follow any new direction, or any instigation for change.

And, any change will do, almost, to mean except that which solves the problems at their base, for this non-thinking morass of CBT led and imbued unfortunates. No matter, swarming CBT has become, because of its fashionability, aggressiveness, arrogance and hard-headed belief in itself by Brothers, the replacement for more serious (more difficult to administer and adapt) approaches, once called Person Centered, analytical and other such psychodynamic (taking a demonstrative look at the human interior)  therapies, etc. Although "psychodynamically" configured efforts, too have their problems (administrators and end-users alike wander around in the exploration of self for long, even indefinite periods), when that more ethereal approach engages the psych being assisted, the engineering places the remedy within ontology and under its — thus under the person's-being-helped — control.**

**Parenthetically, although attuned toward the psychodynamic orientation, as a manager of individual and systemic problem solving I've not been inclined toward the "wandering" aspects of that concept and methodology; and, mostly, have been a competitor to the use of public funds for Phd-unemployment-based-make-work funding programs, whether they are paying for the wandering or CBT so called evidence-based approaches. I just don't like fake-get-well people-savers whose costing is primarily oriented to shoring up that group of professionals' business models. See Part V in this series and the Whackomole book for the specific differences between structured/strategic psychodynamic philosophy and methodology (which I made up nearly forty years ago), unstructured wanderers' more generalized personal growth-seeking approaches, and how to get people well plus save the civilization with a combination of focused caring- and good old capitalism- (to mean fee-for-service as opposed to block grant-styled funding) -oriented methods.

Moreover, that control with and by that (psychodynamic) remedy remains there with considerable and constant deference from and for that essence. Control of personhood never cedes its existance or other make up, composition or ontology to a force outside of itself, as it does when engaged by BT and CBT, and their civilian correlates. If that kind of process DOES occur for an individual, the selection for that new life or merger with something or someone else instantiates epiphanologically from within that ontology, not imposed by exogenous influences nor particularly from encumbering correlations to a behavioral standard simultaneously being ratified by community concurrence. And, getting there requires diligent and rigorous — anything but superficial — work.

The best thing about superficial therapy is that it is primarily for superficial thinking-, not to mention LLD-suffering- (Latent Laziness Disorder), -professionals, who otherwise would like to get their programs, thus their houses in suburbia and BMWs, funded by the voting naïveté. It's cheap,  claiming and pretending to get people well quickly. Tell them how to think correctly, that is, how to regain control of their lives through proper Behaviorally-based self (what symptom fits which previous offense) analysis and decision making, and they, following directions, will do so.

It's sort of like Lucy in "Peanuts" selling psychiatric advice for five cents. At least, though, her clinical helping price was and still is, even with inflation indexing, right.

But selling government and the poor publics a faux, but accepted, human management device is not the only reason for adaptation of CBT by public/professional managers. It also aids such folks to keep from having to address their own internals resulting from similarly affecting causes of disruption. For example, misdirecting an otherwise human need to confront and then reconcile depth of pain can be more readily done by identifying and giving advice about how and what to correct in others — the maneuver expedites and strengthens professional delusion. Giving CBT kinds of advice to the apparently deranged is, aside from doing drugs like alcohol, prescription meds, cocaine, opiates and marijuana, one of the very best means of avoiding the address of similar pain within one's self. Put those methods together, and cracking through delusions that protect professionals from their own difficulties mostly fails. To borrow the cliche used by Eric Kandel (Nobel Laureat in Neuroscience) to describe his value (or not) when he was the supervisor of psychiatric training at Harvard Medical School in 1961, professional CBT-supported delusion can become (with sympathies to any offendeds) the old trope: "The blind leading the blind."

Research intended to support the symptom-fixing-based advice-givers' claims is both risible and prolific. Thus, like the locusts invading The Great Salt Lake's population in the nineteenth century, CBT has spread fast since its inception in 1959. A culminate: therapy is not perceived as a truly viable problem-solver within the society. The public holds the industry in disdain. And, because of CBT, I opine rightfully so.

Nicholson's character (in the referenced movie) and I are not the only complainers about the model. Britain's Eisenstat (fact check name for sp) weighed in with some usual, for him, non politically correct abruptness. "CBT", he exclaimed, is what the government's purveyors of its ideology consider to be "second class therapy for second class citizens."

Sounds like a lighter-weight world consideration, an argument from the periphery between different kinds of thinkers, but is not. It is more: a deep matter which eventually will (have to) be more broadly conjured, confronted and then reconciled by Western civ's managers (everyone who is allowed to vote), or we will periodically continue to lose innocents by the hundreds of millions, and then keep playing like it never happened.

When a civilization builds shallowness-combined-with-obfuscation-of-pain into its official thinking doctrines, times get demonstrably rugged for the ever-more-centrist-managed polity. That is to mean, Behavioral "Therapy", and thus Cognitive Behavioral "Therapy", albeit unstated in either of their packagings or social franchising applications albeit still being built into the managerial thinking infrastructure, require that the helping mechanism be applied first and primarily for the benefit of the ideology-managers and more so than the individual being smoozthed and reformatted. That peculiarity strengthens the capacity, method, means and environment through which centrists-centric takeover artists do their best work. To avoid, circumvent, or undermine it, free people (and those who would like to remain that way) require a serious pain-processing model to remain in so called "touch" with themselves during hysterical times otherwise frenzily whipped up by a few polity-thinking-and-feelings-exploiting leaders.

Inevitably, teaching targets just HOW to think does not provide enough controls to the new controllers. Plus, it gets boring. WHAT-to-think takes shape and the form of a naturally transitional add-on, as the clinical tips on living strengthen acting into becoming (being). Simultaneously, managers become philosophers, a skill required to juggle all the new and glossing-over-of-differing perceptions, and a sure sign of deeper brewing troubles to come in the social management arena. One form, but wider social and beginning implementation of that application, with an emphasis on those pushing their views about who we are, or at least ought to be, etc., is called at the beginning of the twenty-first century, political correctness.

"Well, that would be alright, don't you think?" would say some clueless CBTers. Except that somebody somewhere has to think up these new guidons for living. We certainly don't want to leave any responsibility to the masses for thinking things up, especially if those how-to-do things come from some religious artifact like an old scroll or book — excepting nobel savages living on an island or lost continent somewhere. They are sure to know what they are doing because they are out of projection range of the CBTers, thus not as vulnerably susceptible to the quick-changers. Maybe we could find an expert on living to lead us with a little steady congruity, too. An academe-oriented fuhrer, or the like. Or maybe somebody who's in charge and on TV.

That is, it takes a something or someone to do the telling of everyone how and what to be. That new leadership has the responsibility to make up, explain and then establish the standards, not just for behaving, but for this new way of thinking, an idea once contemplated to be inviolate: abhorrent to the notion that thinking, which includes how and what to think, surmise, analyse, concentrate, even meditate, and then decide, belongs(ed) to the biology once sanctified as the individual. Cutting it short for this essay, the locus of this new CBT-styled imposed individual existence is really the collective's both wisdom and General Will (Rousseau and the follow up of his theoretical works in practical application: the eighteenth century "French Reign of Terror"). And even nice, well-meaning, self-imposed ethics upon the new conveyors of this wisdom won't stop the coming downturns.

Within that group influence, not only is CBT decliningly superficial, but most assuredly dynamically unstable. It changes with the currency of the times and newnesses, which are determined sometimes by political power innervation rather than rationality derived from the pursuit of truth, and then when sometimes found, its representative logic. Collectives can and do become hellbent-for-destruction mobs (Hugo and Le Bon; see Part III: (conclusion) The Good Rebel in Most of Us; Distinguishing Good from Bad Rebels). The twentieth century, for example. See also the epitomy of twentieth century clinical influence on the contribution and maintenance of those collective management disasters Beyond Invisible Walls: The Psychological Legacy of Soviet Trauma, East European Therapists and Their Patients (Series in Trauma and Loss); 2001; Jacob Lindy and Robert Lifton.

Individualism, and what's residing down in those particular unconsciousnesses — Abe Lincoln's "mystic cords of memory" — get in the way of all that slippery-slope-downhill-to-downtrodden guaranteed stuff: groups going and already gone wrong, or bad. The "cords" are pylons sunk deep into the polity that defend against superficiality — changing reality by changing near-term perspective just to get past the currently presenting pain — and thus easily manipulatable frivolousness. Mystic cords represent the ancestral histories of the constituency, their experiences, epiphanies, traumas from hardship, loves, and most profound meanings of the whole. But they are stored in the both conscious and unconscious memories of individual brains, our brains.

They then become, with all their remembrances and even imperfections at times, reflected in some of our icons, sporting and school mascots for example. And, that's one of the most important reasons why I think the conflict over and then dissolution of the Westbury Rebel depicting the American Civil War veteran was and is still, so important (see the oped in this series: "The Westbury Rebel: Texas Legend." 

When the new CBTers come to town and exclaim, "Let's change that mascot because of one of its imperfections, say for example, it hurts my feelings as it collides with my sensibilities, being from (either) the Sahara, Norway, Indonesia, China, Uzbekistan and all." then that idiosyncracy confronts Lincoln's mystic cords. The quick-identity-change superficiality-based CBT artist/scientist clamors, because of his perception of the undeserving worthlessness of the targeted population (in need of ontological change), for a makeover, not just in this period for a mascot in some far-off corner of this country, but over the whole Western civ complex, and particularly in this easy-going and mostly kindly tolerant America. Easy pickens for thought-invaders, until the mystic cords catch on to the otherwise hegemonous (again see Part III: (conclusion) The Good Rebel in Most of Us; Distinguishing Good from Bad Rebels) modality, and then get riled.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and its old Soviet Union-born Behavioral Therapy predecessor provide the impression of credibility in one body politic's attempt to shift the core or epistemology of definition of the individual from a person who is taught, and even required (if intending to survive), to rely upon his or her self for initiation of thinking and being human to a person whose definition of that self is formed within a new and Borg-like social fabric, the new mainstay of conscious thought and person. CBT and BT, as the latter did in the 1930s for the USSR's management, not to mention that of the German National Socialist and Italian Facsists management approaches, provide not just authoritative credentialling for the change and the new way of defining one's self — You are, first, who and what the other guys (or Party) say that you are — but a thought mechanism that engages, is then embraced, and finally installed with mechinations for application (and which are analygous to the electrical grids that power our lives and landscapes) by these new managers of the society. They consist not just of psychotherapists, psychiatrists or counselors, but educators, healthcare professionals and their paras, legals, journalists, a lot of preachers trying to merge the models with conversion doctrine, all the self help promoters and their organizations, grant funders, government bureaucrats, and a few voters.

Should this invasion be completed, which I have worked to prevent from happening, Stalin's earlier referenced Homo Sovieticus man can be easily (seamlessly?) slipped right on in to the bowels of our own managment efforts, once defined in the period leading up to the Declaration of Independence and ratification of the Bill of Rights (within the US Constitution). Their jobs were to protect that earlier, albeit currently challenged, definition of the individual, but which is now encumbered by a mechanism that supports attempts to demonstrably alter that definition. The alteration's goal: emulate the European and eastern Asia/Russian conceptualizations of individual and systemic identity. When, or if, done, to mean if I am not successful in preventing it from happening, I guess we could call this new person who takes his identity cues from the collective, the once-human- or Wasism-Individualist-Americanius.

Thanks then again to Pavlov's search for his friends, and the inevitable characterization of the encumbering process (he was trying to overcome, but ironically supported with his scientific achievements), which in today's terms is called Orwellianism. Too bad that he died so soon — one of the first anti-Stalin/-Bolshevik Russian leaders to go at the start of The Great Terror (the murderous purges of 1936-1938), albeit only of pneumonia — before he could mollify what would become his legacy. Behavioral and Cognitive Behavioral philosophies and therapies  are the prerequisit beliefs, that is, the philosophical and methodological thought models/systems, otherwise axiomatically required in this post Lenin-, Mao-, and Stalin-ism public-/peoples-management era, for attaining historic Tocqueville's, but now new and current, "tyranny of the majority."

Compounding the ideological and methodological problems, the CBT movement’s leadership, following its heritage’s dictates and once getting off the ground, does not advance their cause through caring, empathy, openness, logic and reason ─ the basic ontologically-focused tenets of helping that once came out of the post reformation Enlightenment imbued and old pre Lenin, Stalin, Mao and of course much earlier post Khan schools of erudition ─ as the existential psychodynamic western professionals did during their turn for a little while to lead the field near the ending of modernity. In that sixty years of the mid twentieth century, being aggressive within the ranks of ontologically thinking therapists was seen for a while as psychopathology, even while the Behaviorism mind-control revolution was building steam.

But that niceness-based concept is gone today, trashed by demands for upbeatedness, money making, and cutbacks. Exploitively, CBTer’s then impose not unlike the original Genghis Khan did during the thirteenth century and the Islamists a couple hundred years before that. I’m not speaking of the positive attributes of that Asian leadership’s establishment of the Mongolian dynasty ─ where everybody not yet killed off were taught how to pull together ─ by the Khan and his sons, but alternatively of the greed for ideological expansion and control and the resulting deficits forced upon our populations back then as CBT is pounded today into the unaware collective consciousnesses of traumatized people by equally unaware CBT implementers of the old Khan’s and his followers’ modality.

And given the really big view, the monopolistic anticompetitive practices of the CBT EB government merger (see The Great Evidenced-Based, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Self-Help and Government Merger: Monopolistic Cultural Infusions of Pharmacological & Behavioral Whack-a-Mole; Or Psychological Trauma — Cope or Cure?!) is just another firefight on the battlefront that has existed between the ever usurping imposter therapists ─ Behaviorists, and their helping caring-existential-based antitheses (the real therapists) ─ only since Pavlov and Skinner told the poor human race about their proving-up-the-obvious Behavioral experiments (living things learn from repetition), but to include the periods when the scientists destroyed the once believed-to-be wise Sophists in the times of pre Plato and Socrates in Greece; the established Behavioral-focused disorder killed the caring- love-imbuing Jesus in 33AD; since Uncle Po (Pol Pot) enforced Lenin’s music policies by killing off all the traditional Cambodian musicians because their old tunes and tones supported the delusions of the masses where the ancient melodies lifted them up, and he needed them down; since the copycat leader Mao made grief illegal while killing seventy million Chinese so they wouldn’t know that something was wrong with the Red’s management thesis; and all the way back to when Islam started wiping out the thought competition in 622AD and is still following the same directions today, depending on to whom from their camp you listen. Now there’s a fine CBT, with a leaning toward the “B” component, SUD (Substance Use Disorder) treatment program if ever there was one!

Allah’s Messenger laid out the three step CBT-based – Islamic approach to Alcoholism treatment and recovery in the Al Hadith.

1^st Step: “If a man gets drunk, tell him not to do so.”

2^nd Step: “If the man gets drunk again, tell him a second time not to.”

Last Step: “If he gets drunk a third time, kill him.”

Although that model didn’t have profound epiphanological kinds of intrapsychic effects on the users (those getting drunk three times or more) ─ as understandably they were already dead ─ systemic implications were thought to be meaningful. No one really did any long-term follow up cultural or empirical studies on that outcome; but the program is extant just fourteen-hundred years later, which is saying something empirically. Or wouldn’t you think?

These seemingly irreconcilable conflicts continue even with science’s backing when people rely primarily, if not only, on the cerebral learning - behavioral control components of their human capacities, and in the process condescend to their ontological-based ones ─ creativity, feelings, states of experience, intuition and love. They are unconscious checks against conscious Cortex-(cognitive-) -housed over-belief in one’s self carried-awayism. “Oh? We don’t do that! We are all for full out humanness!” say the new Behaviorists, now called CBTers.

No you’re not. You incorporated within the CBT compendium of confusion as its driving, but most pathological determining force, nothing less than Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) as your basic controller of ontology. You impose upon the culture’s learning and decision making model the false notion that human emotion can be gotten on top of with a few cerebral or layered Cortex tricks. That model then denies loss at its most profound levels of experience and human understanding, therefore assuring learning failure for not just the affected individual, but every thing and one who interrelates with that soul. That means that those following the RET constructs are walking around interpreting every Hippocampus-locused loss that comes near them in and to the abstract which is located in some component way off in one of the far reaches of the Cortex’s myriad layers, thus without standard morphological synaptic processing goings on where needed, inspiring, then, a completely phony notion regarding the organization of the brain’s, and consequently civilization’s, integrative faculties and capacities to solve its problems, whatever they may be at any given moment.

“But we’ve adapted,” they say, “to the Khan’s and Lenin’s epistemological hole by recently allowing back into our thesis some Interpersonal kinds of therapies that tolerate things like grief. And now, people can even play music off of the Internet if they want, at least in America. That means that we are becoming not only Mossy-Fibers-Hippocampus-sensitive, but maybe even less critical of that old primal hanger-oner, the Amygdala. We even concur that Lenin, Stalin, Pavlov, Skinner, PP (Pol Pot) and Mao may have missed a couple of things. And we try not to even discuss the Fuhrer, anymore.” Those guys certainly had their impacts on clinical thinking, experimental doctrine, and academe rationalizations about the scope and functioning of the human consciousness goings-on, didn’t they?

Here is an example of the neo-adaption from that Behavioral legacy thought construct, the new and improved, more human oriented CBTer on the scene of tragedy.

A man stands outside the remnants of his home as it burns to the ground, taking with it all his family members: wife, three children and two pets. First responders are everywhere and a blanket has been placed around his shoulders. The CBT led trauma counselor presents into the nearing aftermath, embracing the victim with care attending the model’s new and more eclectic understandings of the human consciousness. “Listen, Mister. This is so sad. But we’re from the government and here to help you. Here’s the plan. First, you’ve got to get your mourning done cause you’re in grief. So do it. Our motto is ‘We are all responsible for doing our own grief!’ Second, because we don't want this experience to turn into pathological grief, or a grief disorder, you've got to get through it on schedule. But, not to worry, too much, cause we have a certain amount of time our wisests and brightests have planned with which to work with you before that worst case happens. Then, always remember, peasant, ‘TODAY,’ hmmm . . . , well maybe ‘TOMORROW’ is better in this case as this is gonna be pretty stressful for you tonight, even with medication, ‘IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!!!’ So we’ll see you in the morning at eleven AM where we’re going to do a TV documentary on your grief and show the public how you handled it. Hmmm . . . , again, I mean how WE handle it. Then I’ll,” said the twenty-five year old with a CBT emphasized Master’s Degree in counseling specializing in loss, grief and trauma disorders, “start teaching you how to rebuild yourself!!! Bring your insurance card to the session, please, if you still have your wallet. Try to be fifteen minutes early for sign in; and, because its going to be televised, makeup for the broadcasters need you thirty minutes before that. Then, we’ll start getting past this life’s little inner downer.

And, listen, uh . . . What-was-your-name, again? Have a GREAT DAY!!!

But our compassionate CBTer ─ Behaviorism reformers ─ have at least elevated their healthcare delivery in the American individual identity-based system over their counterparts, and even their predecessors who neither of which systems have been so encumbered. For example, Mao solved with some serious Behavioral- and Cognitive Behavioral-based policies and procedures his management problem with grief; it kept re popping up following his murder of seventy million of the oriental socialist republic’s citizens who, probably because some of them were descendants of the Khan’s children – they didn’t like anybody ─ didn’t know how to get along with the new management construct. That twentieth century wise man – manager remedied the ontologically-based problem with grief by simply, like his forerunners from Georgia (the country), outlawing it. And like that perspicacious people-watcher and problem-solver Muhammad’s address of chemical dependency, Mao said to the Chinese and a couple of new Mongols “Grieve and we’ll kill you.”

That put an end to that, as testified by Shirley McClain and others on their visits to Mao’s Behavioral management happiness factories, once called Potemkin Villages in Stalin’s new Soviet society. “These people are so imbued with their new living model that they seem blissful in the new creation. Nobody cries or feels badly or anything! What a wonderfully advanced place to live. If we could only have something like that in our nasty old unhappy country.” or something at least sorta like that, she is said to have said. The actual quotes are worse.

Whether Leninist, Islamists, Nazis-Fascist, or just some confused Socialist-Leftists, as long as those groups of elitists thinkers come out of the Behaviorists’ definitions of the human consciousness, that leadership and their followers must then project that system of mind control on to contiguous and different ideologies in order to keep the lifestyle and epistemological choice valid for themselves. “Project” as used here means to kill everything within a stone’s throw, arrow-shooter’s, spear-chunker’s, catapult fire-rock slinger’s, bomb-thrower’s or nitro-ball-bearing and rusty nails suicidal-homicidal body harness-wearer’s distance from the outer boundaries of the Behaviorist’s camp, National or Muslim lands, or other territories, always needing to be massively-hegemonically acquired to support the modality ─ keeping ontologically based management models at a substantial distance.

Muhammad finally figured all that thought model conflict out in his later years when changing his mind from his early Mecca days where he was being nice, existentialist-like, and open to other thought constructs ─ “There’s no compulsion in Religion.” He said at the beginning of his program when he was unsuccessfully trying to persuade those Pagans and obstinate Jews into converting to his psychosis. But he matured with his OJT-acquired organizational management learning process by figuring out toward the end of his life that rather than approaching the recalcitrants eclectically, it was easier just to kill them; particularly if they were Israelis, as their minds were not as bendable as were his fellow Bedouins and Meccans with whom he would shoot the breeze on those long camel train rides across the desert when he was making all his stuff up. And aside from that, the masses, as Machiavelli would a little later support the Messenger’s earlier work that naivetés responded more readily to fear, terror and horror attending slaughter than to the nuances provided by management via existential love. So Muhammad wisely created Dar al Islam – the world of Allah believers, and Dar al Harb – the disbelievers in Muhammad and Allah. And, never the twain should meet again, by the Perfect One’s directive, except as ordained through battle lines, still keeping everyone at war today. Thanks be to whomever for crystallizing the notion of management control for perfection in behavior, an adherence to living the modality which all CBTers in the year 2011 are still striving to emulate.

“Isn’t that overly harsh putting us saved and converted to new CBTismers in those horrible camps?” No. That is your thought model you use when you condescend to the ontological aspects of the human consciousness. You may not be shooting disagree-ers against the wall or gassing them, yet, but that process starts and is made possible to the hystericallity-brigade-of your model’s enforcers with the same condescending thought system. That condescension occurs when you tell people how to be, what to feel and how to think because you know best. And without those emotional pathfinders to existential elements of being made available to the system you’ve created, you have to always expand it to maintain that false reality for yourself and your followers, whether they work in the halls of the VA, hang out in the growth groups of the self-helpers, make up the terrorist intelligentsia for the Bolsheviks between 1905 and the thirty plus years of the aftermath of their 1917 revolution, or comprise the Ulema and much of the umma for Islam. If you didn’t stomp out the competition, like Uncles Joe, Mao, Ho and Po and the Messenger learned way before you adapted their / this approach, the Behavioral / Cognitive Behavioral construct would otherwise fall due to constant epiphanies resulting from exposure to more identity- or existential-focused concepts that are introduced, led and inspired by unfettered experience of human feelings, intuition and creativity that provide the path to empathic–based truths threateningly being conveyed to their followers. I mean,

♫"How're we gonna keep em down on the farm♪,
♯♫ after they've seen Chu Lai?♪"

as US Marine Gunnery Sergeant Gratton used to sing to the WWII classic song's melody about American soldiers fighting in Europe, but sardonically substituting for parody while washing his clothes in the monsoon rain and mud, Vietnam's Chu Lai for Pari′. Today, we can just as easily end the same stanza with Fallujah, Najaf, Mosul, or Kabul, except that Fallujah, although the best known (once), has too many syllables. Not exactly the same metropolises as Paris. And although the Gunny’s use of the song and lyrics poked fun at the other wars’ places for liberty, the point is the same. When one experiences other things, it is hard to remain in the Behaviorist’s fold, cult, or . . .

The rest of (conclusion to) this essay's reprint from the referenced original book ties the discussion (revised and reprinted here) into that overall theme, and which is reflected in its title: The Great Evidenced-Based, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Self-Help and Government Merger: Monopolistic Cultural Infusions of Pharmacological & Behavioral Whack-a-Mole; Or Psychological Trauma — Cope or Cure?!

This conflict over the ontology and management of the human consciousness was America's battle when developing its constitution and is still today's principal thought management struggle in this country. It is also then demonstrated in the interactions and ideological thus political conflicts ongoing in the implementations of our notions of crime and punishment influenced by extenuating circumstances pertaining to the effects of trauma on the human will. The Evidence-Basers have come squarely down on the behavior focused composition in the human services arena, but a little less squarely by at least calling the antagonist in this millennium a disorder instead of an irreparable fall from grace, but that they only can fix; or if not going that far, effect an improved outcome anyway. Clearly, this ambiguous and renewed attempt at reconciliation of its epistemological cracks was, without serious question or hyperbole, created as an interpretative accommodating reaction to Victor Hugo’s trying to solve the problem in nineteenth century France when made known to us late twentieth century illiterates in the adapted musical “Les Miserables,” with the finale suicide of its law enforcement focused Javer who didn’t know how to think anymore if caring and love were shown, as it was in that monumentally efficacious work, to be more valuable, or at least equally so, than methodologically correcting behavior, whether done by repeatedly slamming a rock breaking sledgehammer as demonstrated in the role of the protagonist – Val jean, or through attachment of a veteran’s chest and head to a biofeedback or virtual reality surround-o-drama machine as he is required to watch ever-enlightening depictions, in color, of real war carnage.

Well now, the Evidenced-Based modality as in a new code of law has been mistakenly, maladaptively, or idiosyncratically adopted by our governments as if the war over identification of the human being's consciousness, how it functions, and who manages it ─ whether ourselves individually, some church people, a couple of secular oriented government guys, or some deep and big picture thinkers from academia ─ has never existed. Remember peons, the EB system was put together, according to the Center for Excellencies’ brochure, by our “best thinkers!” Just like the National Socialist Party in 1934 Germany and across the Steps in the Soviet Union Stalin’s intellectuals brought their “best thinkers” together to plan how the world would turn out, more perfect in each instance.

Hence, this essay proposes to change that error in judgment or reverse any political hegemony instigated via the same old retarded Behaviorism philosophers by making a simple name change to its management approach. Remove the marketing charade embodied in their program’s identifier that usurps our otherwise country’s qualities of logic, reason and compliance with law; instead of “Evidenced”-, call it “Nosotropic”-Based and everything will be fine. No controversy needed. We strategic ontology followers and managers can list our already vetted services under an Etiotropic-Based heading, and then be on our way back out into the U.S. Constitution protected competitive arena controlled only by honor, ethics, recognition of and consideration for others' rights in concert with our own, intuition, consumer public image and patient satisfaction. No hand-me-down utopia development projects or comparable renaissance styled people-shaping help from the Khan, Lenin, Mao, Ho, Po or The Prophet (peace be upon them all) required.