Home Intro Theory Stages Stages(TOC) John's Case Other Cases Help Training/Courses Publications Download Links Contact Us

home -> publications -> Its Good To Think!

It' s Good To Think!
How Thinking Can Make You Happier.

by Antonia Macaro

'You need to stop rationalising and get in touch with your feelings !' How many people have heard well-meaning counsellors and therapists utter words to this effect?  Any attempt to argue for the validity of thinking and rational reflection is likely to confirm the original diagnosis and get the unfortunate individual into an even deeper hole.  This person, who had gone in the hope of getting some help with a problem, is likely to end up even more confused than before, wondering whether she really should 'get in touch with her feelings', what 'getting in touch with your feelings' really means, and perhaps slightly uncertain about where exactly the counsellor or therapist's authority on the wisdom of this comes from.   

The good news is that a relatively recent approach, aptly named philosophical counselling, actually values people' s thinking! Hard to believe, given the anti-intellectual atmosphere we have become used to.  However, signs of an opposite trend, a swelling tide of philosophy-based activities, have been steadily appearing and are well reported by the media, from Radio 4's  'Today' programme to several daily newspapers and even Harpers & Queen. Currently Channel 4 is running a series, presented by philosopher and novelist Alain de Botton, entitled Philosophy: a Guide to Happiness in which the insights of philosophers are shown to help us lead better lives. For instance the first programme on Seneca offered us advice for how to deal with anger. We often become angry, Seneca believed, because we unreasonably believe the world will conform to our expectations and feel frustrated and embittered when we are (regularly) disappointed. More careful thought about what the world is really like is the basis of Seneca's solution, rather than an emphasis on 'feeling' the anger or finding its origins in childhood experience. 

Philosophical counselling has attracted controversy, probably because it has threatened to encroach on other professionals' patches.  Unfortunately, the debate has been marred by the often naive characterisation of the admittedly complex  'therapy scene' , with  'psychiatry' ,   'psychology' and  'psychotherapy' (not to mention  'counselling' ) often used almost interchangeably. There has also been an unhelpful tendency to sensationalise the issue: 'The Way Forward is Plato, not Prozac' announced one article, neglecting to consider that both Plato and Prozac might point to different, but complementary, ways forward.

So what is the therapeutic reality?  Painting with a broad brush, we can say that people with a diagnosed psychiatric condition will tend to be treated by psychiatrists (primarily through medication) and clinical psychologists (primarily through cognitive-behaviour therapy).  People seeking help with 'mere' problems in living, on the other hand, are likely to end up in the consulting room of one of the scores of therapists and counsellors in private practice, who cover a whole spectrum of approaches from the psychodynamic to the humanistic, and where sentiments such as those outlined at the beginning are not in the least uncommon.  Generally speaking it is likely that the emphasis in these consulting rooms will be on feeling rather than thinking, perhaps on talking about one' s childhood and family, perhaps on working with transference (taking as material the relationship between therapist and client), perhaps on expressing emotion physically in some way (something like bashing a cushion). The expression of emotion will be valued and rewarded by the therapist or counsellor, rather than the rational analysis of the emotion and the situation that causes the emotion: questions such as  'yes, but what do you feel about that?' will be used to shift the focus to what the therapist/counsellor considers important.   

Becoming aware of our feelings is certainly important, as is talking about our family and childhood, and even venting emotions can no doubt help in some cases. Where the traditional therapeutic scene errs is on its almost exclusive emphasis on these areas. These techniques might help for some problems but are they really the best way of dealing with all the issues that life throws at us? Clearly how you feel about yourself and your life is important, but understanding and analysing your emotions, and the thoughts and values that they are linked to, is often more important, and more difficult, than simply expressing them. Suppose you are faced by any of the following issues: you might be confused about values in your life, say about the relative importance of work and family; you might be experiencing a crisis of faith, religious or non-religious, or a moral dilemma; you might have a difficult decision to make and want to talk it through; you might want to understand yourself better; or you might want to clarify your vision of how you should live. If these are the kind of issues that you are facing then the problem is amenable to philosophical discussion, and it is quite possible that you will not be well served by 'mainstream' counselling, which will be often looking in the wrong place for help with these difficulties.   

So how would philosophical counselling help you with these kinds of problems? Our way of thinking and living embodies, often implicit, views about the world and ourselves that can be reflected on and subjected to philosophical analysis.  It is possible therefore to clarify everyday problems by examining our concepts, presuppositions, inferences, inconsistencies, conflicting values and so on. In the same way that psychological counselling with not be a tutorial in psychological theory philosophical counselling will not be a philosophy tutorial but rather an examination of the issues that the client is facing, where the focus will constantly shift between abstract principles and the specifics of the situation.   Philosophical counselling is good news for people who wish to reflect on some problematic aspect of their lives, but it is hardly a cure for all problems! Of course conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are best treated with medication, and of course phobias and compulsions are best treated with cognitive-behaviour therapy. On the other hand, it has become more and more common for doctors to prescribe antidepressants, such as Prozac, to people who present with 'problems in living', and in these cases drugs may not be the entire answer or even an answer at all. What might be needed in some cases is for people to think about how they are living their lives, to see what beliefs they have about themselves and the world, and to hold up for examination what they feel and value. 

Philosophical counselling cannot claim to be entirely different from other forms of therapy/counselling: there is some overlap with other approaches such as both cognitive and existential therapy. If we wanted to be philosophical about it, we could say that it is a case of what the philosopher Wittgenstein called 'family resemblances'. Wittgenstein said that very often we get confused in our thinking because we hold the view that the words we use have single defining features: if we want to find out what happiness is, or madness, or illness we tend to look for what all cases of happiness, or madness, or illness have in common. However, he said, if you ask what all things we call 'games' have in common you will not find a single shared essence but rather what he called 'family resemblances' or 'overlapping characteristics'. Some, but not all, games will involve two competing sides, some, but not all, will use a ball, some but not all will have a fixed set of rules, and so on. Hunt as you will, Wittgenstein claimed, you will not find an essence to games (as an experimental test of this see if you can find some factor that all games have in common, but remember to look for counterexamples!). It seems unlikely that all activities that we call  'counselling' or  'therapy' have some kind of factor x in common, although clearly there will be overlapping shared characteristics.  Philosophical counselling can neither be uniquely praised for providing an alternative to the 'medical model' nor uniquely blamed for being outside the hierarchies of psychiatry or psychology, for this it shares with most other forms of counselling. What philosophical counselling does offer, though, is the chance to reflect on how you live your life, through examining the beliefs, values and, yes, feelings upon which you base your life.  

Socrates, one of the philosophers Alain de Botton thinks is able to guide us towards happiness, used to urge his fellow citizens to lead what he called 'the examined life'. In our era of moral and spiritual confusion, there is a greater need than ever for thinking for oneself. Remnants of religion, spiritual traditions from Aboriginal rituals to Zen meditation, self-help and new-age panaceas, not to mention science and psychology all recommend different solutions to our personal predicaments. Philosophical counselling offers us a way through this moral maze, not by offering yet another answer but by giving us the tools - analysing concepts, identifying assumptions, pointing out implications and suggesting relevant distinctions - to come to our own considered conclusions. John Stuart Mill, perhaps Britain's most distinguished philosopher of the nineteenth century, once asked whether it was better to be a happy pig or an unhappy Socrates. Philosophical counselling may appeal to those in the twenty-first century who aspire to being a happy Socrates.