How do we express inner experience and the effect of social structures?

A reply to Kurt Greiner: «Psychotherapy as text medicine»

Abstract

In this response to an article by Kurt Greiner on «Psychotherapy as text medicine», two aspects are put up for discussion. The first is the question of whether, in the current developments in psychotherapy, which is strongly dominated by a medical-technical world view, the two word components «text» and «medicine» do not reinforce this view – also criticized by Greiner – and whether these two terms are therefore rather unfortunate choices (even if they are interpreted differently by Greiner). This raises the question of whether it is not necessary to differentiate more clearly between (a) psychotherapy as an object of science – which is thus located in the area of cultural-objective symbol systems – and (b) psychotherapy as a relationship-forming activity – which must first of all or at least also focus on bodily-pre-linguistic experience. The second aspect that is put up for discussion is the relationship between different scientific cultures. Greiner’s contrast between the humanities and the natural sciences is shared in terms of method, but questioned in terms of content, as the objects and principles of the phenomena treated by the natural sciences are ultimately also creations of the human mind, as emphasized, for example, in the Pauli-Jung dialogue.