Interview with a detransitioner

[CousinKrispy]

Hi, all. I don't post on here very often but have been learning from the discussions for years, thank you.

I thought you might find this podcast episode interesting as it has a lengthy interview with a young woman who identified as a trans man for some time and now has detransitioned:

https://thisjungianlife.com/shadowland-detransition-the-story-of-beth/

This is from a podcast that consists of 3 (USA based, apologies) Jungian analysts discussing current events/topics from a Jungian POV.

(I found the initial intro to the episode a little woo-woo sounding, it improves when the actual interview starts!)

The "Shadowland" subset of the podcast contains interviews with people who are "in the hidden places in our culture"--the previous episode was an interview with a young woman who works as a prostitute. I am unhappy with the push to normalize "sex work" but I appreciated their respectful, compassionate, and nonjudgmental approach to speaking with this woman.

I don't have any background knowledge about Jung's ideas (and some of it is a little far-fetched to me ;-)) but I've been enjoying this podcast for a few years now and find it thought-provoking, and it's nice to hear people discussing a topic without shallow sloganeering.

One of the analysts, Lisa Marchiano, is quoted in Abigail Shrier's Irreversible Damage and I believe is very concerned about how the affirmation only approach may fail clients who actually need to explore and question, rather than solely be affirmed, through the process of therapy. I have her new book about the psychological aspects of motherhood on my to-read list ...

cheers

This! Jung has a lot for us to learn from. I’ve never seen the problem either.

I'm sorry you were damaged by your analyst. There are a lot of people out there who shouldn't be practising. But you over-generalise.

Yes, Jung was very much influenced by other philosophers, but came into his own with the idea of complexes and the psychoid (the latter explained differently in Freud's Totem and Taboo), which are fascinating to study.

I'm a research psychologist and I am looking at cognitive development and sex based stereotypes. I don't have much time for non-evidence-based therapies I'm afraid!

I'm with you, Katie Alcock. I had four years with a 'feminist' therapist who I was referred to by a household name female therapist here in the UK. Turned out my therapist was a Jungian. In retrospect it was four years of highfalutin woo. A house deposit spent over those years. Her disappointment and anger when I decided to call it a day just underlined what a waste of time it had been for me.

After six sessions of CBT I left my therapist with a cheerful handshake on both sides, thinking a bit differently and armed with a toolkit I could call on at any time.

The problem with measuring "non-evidence based therapies" is that what goes on in each session is entirely confidential; it's an art form as well as a science; ... and current studies into the effectiveness of psychotherapy are based on NHS models where the average number of sessions is 7.5, which is a ridiculous number of sessions, and honestly will do more harm than good. So I'm not surprised outcomes are sketchy at best or shitty at worst because there is nothing worse than curtailing therapy that is designed to be effective over the medium-term.

Again, I'm really sorry you had a shit experience. My own Jungian therapist is entirely non-woo and comes from a particular training that emphasises object-relations, which is based on developmental psychology and attachment theory. In other words, there are shit ones and there are good ones. Unfortunately, Jungian thought lends itself to being widely misinterpreted and misrepresented because of the emphasis on dreamwork and symbolism, which has been co-opted by the New Age.

But many therapies are effective when carried out in brief courses; and if you say "but you have to stick with it for months or years" then that means you can never be sure if improvement would have happened anyway or if it's due to the placebo effect. These therapies are rarely subjected to RCTs and if they are, they are generally not effective. This applies even if you stick to the "you have to keep going till you have done at least six months" ideal.

I haven't over-generalised. You've made an over-generalising inference.

I was damaged by one and I now don't want to have anything to do with any of them. I didn't say why, and I don't have to.

You have no idea what it is that that person did that damaged me, or whether it's something that's more common with Jungian practitioners than others. You also have no idea whether the person who damaged me is a respected and influential practitioner in the Jungian field or not.

Frankly, even if every other Jungian in the world was absolutely lovely, evidence-based, compassionate, non-manipulative, non-woo and absolutely non-abusive, it would still be entirely reasonable for me to avoid them purely in case something about the way they do things reminds me of the Jungian who abused me. Jungian is not a protected characteristic and I'm not remotely bothered about being called a Jungophobe

No I don't, and I apologise.

Hey thanks! Sorry for the wall(s) of text

For me, it's down to horses for courses, @KatieAlcock

Some will benefit from CBT, and it seems well suited to treating certain disorders in particular, e.g. OCD, simple (as opposed to complex) PTSD, and addictive patterns. On the other hand, there are long-term, in-depth studies that show that the relapse rate for CBT is high. (A 10-year Swedish study found no long-term effectiveness at all for those with depression, for example.)

Some will benefit from psychotherapy (esp. complex/multiple psychological disorders), and that psychotherapy will necessarily need a longer-term intervention - and studies have found that this approach works (De Smet), though it is notoriously difficult to measure.

In other words, there is a place for both of them, depending on preference and presenting issues.