The Memphis Flyer
Monday, July 22-28, 1999
Philosophical Counseler Helps Clients
With "Problems of Living"
Daniel Connolly
Is philosophy a tool that
can help people cope with real-world problems? Ross
Reed thinks so.
Reed, who holds a Ph.D. in
philosophy, counsels people who come to him with personal
problems. "The idea of philosophy helping people
- most people think that's a laughable proposition.
But I don't think it's funny," says Reed. "I
think that philosophy began with the Greeks by being
therapeutic, and it's been therapeutic for me and many
people I've known."
Philosophical counseling
began as a movement in the early 1980s in Germany, with
the central tenet that modern psychology doesn't solve
moral or existential issues - what philosophers call
"problems of living." The profession is still
growing and virtually unregulated in the U.S., but the
American Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA)
is attempting to certify members. Founding president
Lou Marinoff says his group has certified just 19 counselors
in the U.S., but Reed is currently not one of them because
he has not paid his dues recently.
Originally from Pennsylvania,
Reed worked in mental-health facilities while in graduate
school at Baylor University in Texas and at Loyola University
in Chicago. For more than 10 years he taught part-time
at four institutions in the Chicago area, where he began
to apply what he was teaching.
"[Students] might come
down to my office and say, 'Do you think I should have
an abortion?' ... I came to realize that with most of
those important questions, it's really hared for anyone
to find a place to go to discuss it. I mean, you could
go to a priest or a rabbi, but you pretty much know
what the answer's going to be."
Unable to find a full-time
teaching position in the competitive job market for
humanities Ph.D.'s, Reed followed his girlfriend to
Memphis when she took a job at Rhodes College. His business
got started last June, and he says that in the last
year he has seen more than 20 clients out of his home
near the University of Memphis. He charges up to $60
per hour on a sliding scale.
Clients come to Reed with
a variety of problems. When an evangelical Christian
came to him complaining of visions of angry "satanic
angels," Reed says that he drew heavily on ideas
from David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion
to help him.
"He finally admitted
he was angry at God," says Reed. "And for
a while we talked about what that would mean, and what
his concept of God is, and whether or not it would be
legitimate to get angry at God if you envision God in
that way." The man's hallucinations eventually
subsided, Reed says.
Clients with various sorts
of addiction visit Reed, and he shows a reporter his
doctoral dissertation, which he has given out as assigned
reading to a man with an unspecified addiction. It's
an existential theory of addiction, a small blue volume
titled "Love" and Addiction: The Ontological
Phenomenology of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Many might say that the hallucinations
and addictions of these clients are purely psychological
problems with roots in brain chemistry, but Reed says
that's not necessarily so. He points out that behaviors
such as compulsive gambling, which involve no substances,
are now sometimes labeled addictive. The important question
is why the person wishes to destroy his consciousness,
Reed says.
What's more, Reed says that
the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that delusions
sometimes result from a desire to avoid dealing with
concrete ethical problems. This turned out to be the
case of the second man described above, he says.
The APPA's code of ethics
requires that philosophical counselors not attempt to
treat people who problems are beyond their expertise.
This is a point that worries critics of philosophical
counseling.
Arthur Houts, a professor
of psychology at the University of Memphis, studies
philosophy as both an undergraduate and graduate. He's
concerned that those who seek help from alternative
sources doesn't realize that for many illnesses, psychologist
have gained empirical knowledge of what treatment works.
Houts particularly object
to the suggestion of Lou Marinoff's book Plato, Not
Prozac. "The idea that Plato is a substitute for
bona fide treatment for real depression is stupid and
dangerous," he says. "It's harmful for people."
However, Houts says that
if anyone is uncomfortable with organized religion,
tutorial work with a philosopher could help him or her
solve the moral and ethical problems that religion solves
for most. "To me that's part of education,"
he says. "It's not a substitute for real therapy
for real problems."
According to Reed, most of
his clients already see a psychiatrist and many of them
are on medication. "I would never say that any
one approach is sufficient," he says, and adds
that he would never tell people to stop taking their
medication.
But he still questions the
effectiveness of the medicated approach. "How much
understanding does it give you to take a pill?"
asks Reed. "You might feel a lot better. But what
I've heard many psychiatrists say is that you take medication
to take the edge off your pain so you can deal with
the real issues."
