Dilemmas

I like the work at the psychology department of a high school, however I feel more comfortable as a career counselor in that environment. What is a psychologist supposed to do at a school? Many things and nothing, at the same time. I can’t conduct a therapy there and I don’t really know if I believe in the power of talking and listening. It surely is great to be able to talk and have someone to listen to us but, as a psychologist, I feel I should and I could help more. This takes me to another dilemma: more than the purpose of a psychologist at a school, what is the purpose of a psychologist?

The well-structured cognitive-behavioral therapy really suits me. It’s like a class: in short, you help patients (or clients) see what their lives are like and teach them coping strategies to get rid of their problems. You really give them something. You make their money worth. But do we people work as mechanically as that? There are lots of things people see as disfunctional in their personalities and they even have an idea of how to fix it, but they just can’t; deep down, it may even seem that they don’t want to. Maybe they are not being well oriented, maybe they are not being persistent enough. I don’t deny it, and I don’t disagree that we can use the knowledge on how the human mind works to change the way people think and act.

In my opinion, the cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most efficient kind of therapy – but this doesn’t prevent me from wondering if there is not a key, a finding of a reason or a cause that could be treated and make us change our behavior… like a virus that we could kill. This is what Freud (and the pychoanalytical crew) thought, and although some of their theories seem ridiculous, others may be true. Paying attention to what a person says and which words he or she picks up may tell a lot about the constitution of this person. Could we get to a “cure” by changing the way he/she looks at, and uses, language, not forgetting that language translates thoughts? We may have made some dysfunctional associations with words and symbols and images that we’re not even aware of. This is something that often comes to my mind when I take the time to listen to the students that get to me with their complaints at school, since I don’t feel I can do more than that in that place.

The dilemma, then, is: should we waste those particular and rich words that constitute each one of us as different individuals in order to follow a structured therapy? But, on the other hand, once finding out all those particularities and linking them to someone’s way of being, how could we make use of them to accurately treat a person?