up next it's going to and today in the trial is the american the psychiatry urban young woman who gives his ear on questions like what makes people unhappy in modern society. every. therapy.

today is. one of the best known. truth in the contemporary world. born into a jewish family. university . teaching group psychotherapy and. taking up the central existential. problem finding meaning in life.

for important contributions to really. explain. welcome to the show thank you very much thank you for being with us as well the most popular school of treating psychological problems when the world probably is psychoanalysis the teaching of sigmund freud but as far as i know you don't cheer for his approach well i understand it's a big issue but can you explain why what makes you dissatisfied with the method was different in your approach you know personally as that question you really have to keep in mind freud didn't just invent psychoanalysis he invented psychotherapy and all forms of psychotherapy or a great deal to freud. and i use a lot of forty eight ideas in my in my approach but one of the main things is that

very early in my training i felt there was far too much attention paid to the very earliest years of one's life far too little attention paid to our ideas about the future about what would happen to us about ageing and the management and so i felt that there was too much emphasis on the first couple of years of life but as for ford's idea of the unconscious of how we might repress certain things the way we used dreams i used a lot of free and ideas in my in my thought i feel it's method of treatment though has been radically changed the idea of having a patient on a couch in the therapist behind the patients and not have a real relationship between the two that i certainly disagree with you there i mean . well speaking about technology but i have to lay the patient out of ways is it important oh yes yes i think is i think it's quite important in my work to relate

very authentically to the patient is one of the importance like the best psychotherapist for me is my mum she doesn't. over the phone right and i don't know whether whether she's lying or standing or if she dressed true or not right i mean i talked over the phone for fifteen minutes and it's fine but you know that she loves you and furthermore unlike any other person in the world she loves you unconditionally no matter what you do so i think that's one of the aspects the therapist has to do it has to be a certain unconditional positive regard and care for the patient so he or comes to the house to do that so that. you set a very interesting thing you know there's a joke maybe it's true that somebody asked. you know from what age should i try to teach my baby how to behave and and they said how old is he he said well he's three then you're three years late. isn't that true cording to you isn't

it true that by the age of five as they say the personality of a person is developed like ninety nine percent and what he learns later is just how to behave in different circumstances no i don't really know i don't think i think people can undergo substantial change you know as a result of experiences later on that was one of the big differences with what was called a. means a new for it in approach especially developed in the united states and in europe as well meaning that there was not only an emphasis on the first relationships the wife with the mother and the father but also more more of a relationship with other other people that you relate to throughout your life your best friends your chums we. school. already figures like like parents like like teachers professors that you have so these also figure into

what we call character or personality building so so i don't think it's shaped that early i see people may. unbelievable changes much later in their lives ok well i have a quote from yourself and it goes to live life fully one must accept that life most of us do not want to think about death but you assert that confronting death is the key to living a full authentic happy life and quote well could you describe what living a full life according to you you know first of all i do want to say i did say that but so did socrates and plato and a lot of other people. i don't they're exactly so i don't get i don't get full credit by that but what i mean by that is that if we if we

deny that it deny other things are going to happen to us that we may not live as fully as we can i feel there's some advantage to taking being aware of death and it will change your life sometimes i can tell you how this protest brought home to me is that i worked for many years ten years perhaps with people who are dying of cancer i had the people in groups and were working which was very helpful to them but i began to feel that a certain percentage of them with the third of these people began to say they were they were different they began to change the priorities in life what was important to them they began to say no to the things they didn't really want to do one of the forgotten this what a pity it was that i had to wait till now till my body was riddled with cancer to learn how to live so it's the idea of learning how to become wiser by

keeping the fact that this president was but when you say to live fully to live a full life what do you mean by that well well well well do you live a full. and of yourself what is it except thinking about death well people think about this sometimes but what's a full life for one of the ways to look at a full life is to leave as little unlived life inside of you you know i have i'm aware of my own private does that mean what for example i'm sorry for interrupting but those that mean sleeping with every beautiful woman i see. is that. driving every nice car. i see advertised all things like that or is something different i think that when you really take your mind you begin to see these really quite superficial issues you know they're just. sensual pleasures it means living so that you really have no regrets in your life you feel proud of what you've done you feel you've you've you've honored your life in a way so i would say you know there's

a term that i use and in my last book it's using the term awakening experiences and there are many characters are maybe one of the great examples of that might be dickens story of a christmas carol where you know old ebeneezer scrooge is living a very selfish mean life until he's visited by the angel of the future takes him into the future watches his funeral and then for the rest of story he is the terribly different man how do you deal with religion because for example the orthodox christian religion well actually they're very religious people with the they say that this life is nothing this life is actually getting ready to the real life which starts after you meet god. you must be happy that you have finally dying and. just you should be ready to meet god but most of the religion they say they teach that there's life after death yeah so how did you with that and in your

in your psychotherapy when they reversed that for a moment and say that i think the theory is the mother of every single religion i mean that's one of the reasons why religion sprang up in the first place to help us deal. with this so it's not explaining the unexplainable but the fear of death because i thought that. in the midst people believe that religion is. a originated in order to explain why the sun rises why oh why it's cold in winter why it's dark at night and things like that and it's risen to explain the deepest essential facts in our life which is the fact that we're going to grow old and we're going to be very frank and honest and frank and to people since the beginning of life if you look at the gyptian culture for example it's totally based around trying to deal with the afterlife or the great pyramids or are ways of denying that so i would say in my my own feeling that the sense of denial of death it's

a way of denial if i have a patient who's very religious i would not think of tampering at all with the religious beliefs in fact i will do what i can to strengthen the belief that if it's going to be helpful to the patient first priority that i have in therapy is the care of the patients is religion itself. is religion itself sort of to many people yes it is and so you should have more more more after this clients then religious people here who for some people it's a real experience many people become more secular it's not as relevant i want to get back to the to the issue of driving fancy cars and dating beautiful women well this consumerism and the modern ideology of most of the modern society which is and russia is pretty much hell with this thing. do you believe that it

makes people really unhappy when when when the ideology of the modern world is just consuming buying more and buying better and making more money to buy want to spend more and while the second home with a lot of possessions is that sooner or later. you don't have the possessions but they have you you know they're satisfying for a moment and suddenly want more and more and more this is one of the it is a choke and holler that we we have this we have this wants we have this need we fill it we have a moment maybe not too long of satiation of satisfaction if you're satisfied for a couple of moments hours a days as they want more and we want more and we want more so if you if you want to make a person really happy then maybe you'll teach him how to live without so many needs how to reduce his needs and many of the great philosophers have said that certainly spinoza was that of the central tenet of his ideas says irvin he along best selling us. will continue this interview in less than a minute after this short break so stay with us in order to dumb down.

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welcome back to spotlight i'm just a reminder that today our guest on the show is. a best selling us psychometrist. why why i started with the with a show of consumerism is that if we if we look at the statistics of suicides i think one of the highest rates in sweden is in sweden where the. level of living is one of the highest in the world so all these two things really connected the the. i mean amount of money and the consumer things people have and the number of sort of size can't say that for sure but i could tell you that it's probably got something to do with the limited amount of daylight. there is some evidence for that there's some evidence for becoming depressed at certain times of the year a lot of people have

a disorder that comes every winter and it can be treated fairly well with getting artificial light of the certain kind of intensity that yes same as russia something someone told me a couple of days ago by the way and he was the right person they said it wouldn't. like oranges on your on your breakfast table if you don't eat you look at them in the morning it makes you feel better. i don't know about that i think they'd be better off with a certain kind of light that they hear they read the morning paper with far every morning that's often a good treatment or to ward off depression ok well. let me just say in general. i think it's very hard to make generalizations about the what you know what i do is they see people in depth so i find that each person three or four people may say if you look deeply into the lives each of them has a totally unknown to us from the outside unknown set of circumstances that are

causing their despair. if somebody told me to become. it was good money what i would say no you know why because i think that what makes people unhappy is that they don't find the meaning in life and i can find the being a wife. teach people to find the meaning of life so it isn't a chicken and egg thing do you have to see a meaning in your life to teach people to do the same and to make them happy are these think that is there a meeting in on me in your life you know i think we invent meanings for ourselves and we should and i think that's one of the existential facts of life that were hurled into a universe that doesn't have any meaning and that we have to spend

a lot of time trying to invent a meaning for selves and also try to forget that it's really the meaning so we try to believe that we discover the meaning and then to me we have to invent a meaning that sturdy enough to support a life and there's really focus on that there's a therapist named victor frankl who built a whole school of therapy called therapy based on meaning of life and you know emphasize that a great deal in his own work too he used to say that a third of his patients came because of a crisis of lack of purpose in life i have read. many times that people. who've been psychotherapy and the united states and europe is that people in modern liberal democratic societies i generally more unhappy than their. moms and dads grandfathers grandmothers and so i want because the more

freedom the person the more choices the person has the. more happy is that true i think i think the more freedom you have the more choices you have. probably the more anxiety you often feel about this you get stressed i think so but the same time i think you're more him in that way you're more fully human you know you're not so infantilized you begin to exercise your your reason begin to look at life more objectively that way because one of the examples is russia like in the ninety's when russia was in transition from the. regime. to freedom to democracy and so on the rate of return with the rate of suicide the the the rates are going to happiness in society was was record low there's an example maybe an example it happens all the time that if we're faced with choices and we know that we faced with choices it causes

a lot of anxiety you know every single case of that i work with you ultimately get the idea that you have to make choices and that's very hard for some people it's very hard because making a choice or something means giving up something else every yes means a no to something we can't relinquish things so that's a central issue in therapy i think i think freedom is something the idea that we are the author of our own lives and we make the decisions we design or selves in a way it's something that's inherently anxiety provoking. people particularly lonely in big cities and mega poses where the millions of people are out why are the stories the people loved by millions of the most lonely people p.-p. people in the world is it a contradiction we're it's only natural as you say well this small community you know provides

a sense of continuity intimacy you see the same people every day people know you big cities they begin to lack the ways of meeting people that's where religion comes in for a lot of people a real. there are a lot of people who will join a religious organization or join a church as a way a billion social network for themselves they may not be religious themselves or may not believe what they say but nonetheless it provides a community for themselves and there is a lot of alienation and it's large communities where people move on now once the same no one knows you you become anonymous on the ground man and think does a great example of alienation and being cut off. internet internet really deprive people of communication does internet make millions of you people yeah that's a question we're going to be finding out much more about it in the future because

more and more people you know are building their friendship networks is even sex i mean everything i mean dating internet dating world whatever they never know i mean i joined facebook by my son got me on facebook about two weeks ago and so i wrote a little thing on facebook and within thirty seconds i was getting six eight ten responses from people and so people are spending their lives facebook and that's are connections but i think it's a lot better than no connections at all there are groups that are going on on the internet therapy groups groups for people with cancer for example i don't think it's as good as a face to face group but i think it's better than no group at all sometimes it's useful people living far away living in isolated areas they have a group of people they can share with people who may have the same life problems or the same disease that they do and they don't feel quite so isolated well here's

another point of view on this issue in the report. here in the. u.k. my space study of more than sixteen thousand social network uses choose. for the young teaching russian it's becoming easier to communicate with friends online than to do so in the real world around two cells of respondents between the ages of fourteen and twenty one confessed feeling ill at ease and then not logged on to cyberspace meanwhile the younger generation is the most vulnerable group in terms of the potential dangers of staying online one major issue. which can even lead to suicide as was the case with thirteen year old meghan mayer the teenager hand to self in two thousand and six as to being targeted through a fake my space account created by her friends model occurs to some social networking websites can however be a blessing for others psychologists say online friends can make the hosh process of

growing up easier those teenagers who feel left out in real life can successfully socialize on the internet all about balancing online life with the real world condition difficult task. so so so so so you think internet is good but but but a person. should find the right limit the. amount of internet i think the internet is good but face to face and relationships are far better. ships that go on life you know it because for example. for many years working on t.v. i was sure that television was something for only people but television is for somebody the prime time is seven o'clock on saturday seven pm but who the hell is watching television seven pm on saturday only lowly people who said it i watched nothing else they would watch television but. there's a good there's

a good ready for that don't have a t.v. in your bedroom don't have a t.v. in your kitchen in your living room have a special television room use it a cinema i mean go watch the news and come back to to realize that's it all the same with them to. i think that's true i think also it's an incredible distraction you know as a writer i know that i can't help being seduced by checking of email every twenty minutes or so there's actually a company now that was sponsoring you have a way of turning off your internet for four or five hours in a row for writers to help you write much more effectively that way i'm almost signing up for that because i find myself my attention span so much less you know five or ten minutes now find themselves cruising the net about some issue that i don't really have to know thank you thank you very much just to remind. show today was the famous american psycho therapist if you have.

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