Yeah, I knew about this. It echoes the training that spiritual teachers have to get before they themselves are given permission to teach (which can require a significantly longer period: it takes as long as it takes). Whether intentionally or no, there is some parallelism between the idea of a psychoanalyst and a guru, but IMO a huge chunk is missing if the primary driver isn't spiritual development, which might require a certain amount of preparatory psychological adjustment. Helping with the latter requires that the teacher is adequately developed spiritually: you can't very competently help people psychologically until you are spiritually developed. And as far as I can see, that's the thing that may be missing in formal psychoanalytic training. I'm not saying that some analysts might not have a degree of spiritual motivation: some might well have, and my working hypothesis would be that they'd have enhanced rates of success.
Interesting enquiries/questions, Michael, about spiritual development and the role someone else can play in that - whether it's a "guru", a priest, a therapist or a medium.
Just to make it clear again in case I get misinterpreted, I'm not here to defend formal psychoanalytic training (in the classical Freudian sense) - I don't see much value in it at all, myself.
Back to "spiritual development", though, I guess I myself am not sure what that means, or even if I would want to try to pin it down too precisely, personally!
That's not quite what I said, which was: Which brings me to the thought that modern psychotherapy is quite possibly not very effective when the therapist isn't led by the desire to help one spiritually. I was speaking of the primary motivation of the therapist. It's generally agreed, certainly in the Sufi tradition, that in the end, it is seekers who have to do the work: the teacher may give them a little nudge or set up an opportune circumstance, but trying to lead seekers by the nose doesn't work. How many times in your life has someone given you an opinion or a bit of advice that you didn't really take on board, but which, possibly years later in a certain situation, you suddenly realised the true worth of? Only then does the message really hit home and become internalised as part of your being. It can also work in reverse: you accept the advice of a respected person and consciously act on it for years before one day, in a certain situation, you realise it's poppycock.
IMO, psychological lessons are better learnt in real life situations, rather than in navel-gazing analysis. You don't need some schema that attempts to explain the how and the why: when something truly dawns, you know it without having to situate it within an arbitrary explanatory framework, be that Freudian or anything else. I think we all have this innate capacity to recognise when our behaviour is appropriate or inappropriate, but because we're all conditioned, we adopt a distorted model of the world. Much of our adult lives may be spent shaking off that conditioning, and allowing ourselves to be guided by the innate sense we've had all along, did we but know it..
Sorry for misunderstanding you a little bit, Michael. I completely agree with what you say regarding seekers and advice-giving. I myself am weary of trying to depend on someone externally for "spiritual development". Where I differ with you is that I guess I don't see a therapist's job as really having anything to do with that,
directly - if it happens, I think that is a by-product of working on your emotional wounds, etc., and whatever growth spontaneously occurs or resumes.
Also, good therapists of any school of thought, IMO, are not there to "provide advice" or to impose "schemas". Whatever new ways of understanding, of feeling about one's self or the world, of relating and acting, that result are a co-construction of the dialogue between therapist and client in trying to help the latter understand and help him or herself. I myself favor approaches that stay near the person's experience, always in their own words, and that don't try to reify and reduce their experience in abstract, intellectual terms or concepts (so Freudianism goes out the window!).
Re: psychological lessons and therapy. I think the great, great, great majority of people go to therapy (99.9% ?), of whatever kind, because their normal self-regulating methods are not working anymore, which can be a result of overwhelming changes and stresses, their current context/environment, deficiencies in the support that can be provided in their interpersonal network, or old psychological wounds and their consequences creating dysfunction. I also don't think people go to therapy, most of the time, because they don't know if their behavior is "appropriate" (i.e. "how can I be a better person?"), but because they're in distress, which is no longer tolerable and doesn't go away, and they either don't understand why or don't know how to fix it.