Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation, and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis

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Summary: The person therapist,? The psychotherapy systems? Society?
Review: An important addition to critical psychotherapy thinking. Unfortunately the authors do not target the socio-political forces that permeate and contaminate the therapeutic relationship. There still is an urgent need for a systematic proposition of an egalitarian thrapeutic dyad. Readers may also find interest in my book: The Psychobiographic Approach to Psychothrapy: A Study of the Power Structure of Psychotherapy.

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Summary: There are many surprises in reading Gaslighting.
Review: In this work, Dorpat sets out to rescue psychoanalysis and psychotherapy from the temptation to take covert control over the patient's mental life. Most often, such domination enters the consulting room unrecognized. There are, of course, some psychotherapeutic systems, such as behavior modification, in which control and shaping behavior are not bad words, but avowed objects. However, in psychoanalytic therapies, freedom of thought is a most valued element. Yet even in the analytic therapies, Dorpat demonstrates how subtly, yet powerfully, covert control and indoctrination do occur - and how commonly. The author's deep conviction and concern are apparent in his writing, and the book delivers a caveat for even the most seasoned psychoanalysts. Part of his thesis is that the essence of psychoanalysis is its method. It is a beautiful method, making it possible for patients to have the freedom to discover and get to know their inner world of experience, so that they can understand how they construct their reality and who they really are. All methods of control and domination are antithetical to that essence. Moreover, the exercise of power and indoctrination is a violation of an individual's personal dignity and humanity, whether in psychotherapy or in everyday life. As such an exercise of power enters therapeutic work, the patient becomes compliant to being controlled and loses touch with the creativity of the dreaming mind. The first part of this book defines the field of inquiry; which is the covert influence on and control of other people's mental lives, often carried out unconsciously. This list includes gas lighting, which induces self-doubt through shame, guilt, and fear, and substitutes the views of the gas lighter for those of the victim; brainwashing, which is similar; and methods such as questioning, intimidation, confrontation, indoctrination, and behavior modification. Most of these techniques have the intended effect of gaining control over the patient's mind, Dorpat writes, and are abusive, antitherapeutic, and contrary to the spirit of psychoanalysis. His evidence makes it apparent just how commonplace and serious they are. In Chapter Two, Dorpat details the intrusion of gas lighting into psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, and its grave effects in restricting patients' capacity to think and in bringing about depresses moods and even suicidal depression. Dorpat introduces the reader to gas lighting in its sinister, deliberate forms, in cults and totalitarian regimes. Dorpat shows the parallel between the cult's brainwashing techniques on the one hand, and pressures too often imposed in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, on the other. He describes actual cults that have sprung up among therapists and analysts, groups known to have violated personal and sexual boundaries of patients and colleagues. The second section of the book contains its main thrust: the many ways that psychotherapy has succumbed. Dorpat's thorough review of relevant literature and of his own original studies sets the stage for the presentation of his evidence about brainwashing in the consulting room. His material is convincing, and it has the effect of making readers more conscious of pitfalls of control in their own practices and teaching of analysis. There are many surprises in reading Gas lighting. One discovers that there are a lot of opportunities to commit a breach of the patient's freedom of thought, even with the most constructive intentions. The elementary prototype of such a breach described by Dorpat is the analyst who offers interpretation, often on scanty evidence, and, if the patient does not accept it, regards the patient's objection as "resistance", after which the analyst spends the rest of the hour attempting to overcome this resistance. The methods of overcoming it are very often some form of gas lighting, i.e., getting such patients to doubt their ability to understand what is, after all, unconscious, so that they submit to the analyst's "insight", although that insight is often based on conjecture. Dorpat lovingly describes the heart of psychoanalytic work , as he conceptualized it, as fostering the analysand's freedom to know his or her own thoughts and have free association, with an emphasis on freedom. The author is able to demonstrate the immediate and long range effects of breaches of the patient's freedom of thought and of trust in the patient's own mental activity. The effect, which he demonstrates through vignettes, is that those breaches shut down the patient's creative thinking and bring about mechanical and depressed responses, which fail to advance the analysis. The very last chapter is especially noteworthy. Dorpat reminds the reader of the kind of give and take that makes up the psychoanalytic process. It is one in which openness and safety engenders the appearance of primary process derivatives or thoughts arising from the dreaming part of the mind as responses to interpretations. These expressions, when understood, inform the analytic couple of the deeper effects of an interpretation, regardless of what verbal statement the patient might have made upon hearing it. Dorpat suggests that this is a criterion for freedom rather than control; responses that are primary process derivatives provide evidence that psychoanalysis is taking place, rather that creation of a cul-de-sac caused by gas lighting. The author painstakingly and vividly portrays damage to the psychoanalytic method caused by covert control and indoctrination , especially gas lighting , which discredits the patient's mental capacities and constricts his or her ability to think freely. Yet such modalities are tempting because of the analyst's desire for security and effectiveness; and they are so easy to rationalize or overlook. Dorpat's work stands as a reminder of the vital importance to analytic work of a free and open channel of exploration into the deepest recesses of the psyche.

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Summary: A must read for anyone involved in therapy.
Review: This is the most insightful book on psychoanalytic theory I have ever read. There is a modern tragedy occurring in psychotherapeutic offices throughout the land. Many patients are being treated as sick and diseased human beings who are for all practical purposes irretrievably abnormal. The thesis of this work is that psychotherapy can only be successful when the patient is treated as an equal. This is a very profound statement.

Many patients enter treatment with the unconscious belief that they are flawed, that their perceptions are grossly distorted, and in fact the therapists are happy to confirm this by enforcing their rigid theories of the patients unconscious on the patient. The therapist claims access to a completely undistorted view of reality that the patient is lacking (thus "flawed").

Dorpat astutely recognizes the importance of Weiss proposal that "psychopathology stems from unconscious pathogenic beliefs of the dangers if the patient were to pursue certain important goals."

This is an amazing work that should be of central importance to anyone involved in any way with psychotherapy (students, teachers, therapists, patients, etc.).

The cover of the book touched me only after I had read it. A person on the cover is depicted as being choked by a hateful, angry person, and this is exactly what happens all too often in psychotherapy (though unconsciously).

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Summary: The book about lemon therapists.
Review: You would want to read this book if you are presently shopping for a therapist, and you would especially read it if you are not seeing a therapist because of a bad experience with one. Yes, believe it or not, mind control techniques are used by SOME therapists in therapy situations, and it is NOT therapy, and these are NOT good therapists!

This is an excellent book if you have any fears about what will happen if you try therapy because it will prepare you to recognize a therapist who will not be good for you. This is also an excellent book if you are recovering from a therapist who would not understand you and did not have the patience to hear your "truth" because he/she was rigidly following his/her own recipe. These therapists can make you dependent on their continuing treatment, incapacitating your own better judgement to find a better therapist ("You're in denial again."). This book exposes a bad therapist for what one is. A bad therapist is one who has expertise which does not cover your condition, but instead of referring you to another therapist, inappropriately shoehorns you into a wrong diagnosis at all costs!

I am in therapy now recovering from a therapist I saw for 14 years beginning in adolescence, who actually made my condition worse, broke down my own working good defenses at the time, and caused a temporary problem to mutate into a lifetime problem! I became trained to act normal on the outside, but I was an empty shell on the inside. When I finally decided to leave him because I had to move, he asked me if I was "cured"! This therapist's incompentence made me into his job security, and unfortunately the job security of my present therapist! Don't let that happen to you, and you will not if you read this book.

This book put to words perfectly my experience with the bad therapist. It put me weeks ahead in finding the language to explain to my present therapist what was going on with the old therapist - and it wasn't therapy! Dorpat examines two cases from Freud which are real horror stories of failed therapy. So Freud wasn't perfect. But Dorpat shows that the pattern of the failed therapy has been consistent from the beginning.

I consider this to be perhaps the most important book I have ever purchased.

That said, I found the book writing style well flowing, reasonably well organized, and the book includes many references to other writers on the subject. There seems to be some repetition of ideas, but I found in this case it was actually good for understanding the concepts well and seeing the theme as a whole.