Dr. Joaquin F. Sousa Poza
Who I am?
One more Galician who had to emigrate (North America) to survive, see the world and study a medical specialty (Psychiatry) that did not exist then in Spain -and the few that existed were very expensive.
But the key to my request to you is not so much my «decent» CV and positions I hold as the fact that my destiny (Christian-«a little Hindu and very Buddhist»-since, in my experience, the latter, they are the best “cartographers” of the mind.
I was born in Pontevedra in 1938. My father, born in Vigo, was a sailor in the Navy and my mother was from the controversial Republican family “Poza”, from Pontevedra. My maternal grandfather had the brilliant idea of publishing a local newspaper called «La Libertad» shortly before the Fascists won the Civil War.
When I was four years old someone knocked on the door (we lived in Ferrol), and a sailor gave my mother a note; I read it out loud: “I’m under arrest, don’t worry. Aveline”.
I realize what I really want to communicate to you is that when I “look back” in the rearview mirror of my life, what I see is that I was born to understand the human mind and I never had any doubt that I would become a doctor and then a psychiatrist-psychotherapist. I did all my studies with scholarships since the fascists took away all the means from my family, but in Canada and the United States they gave interns and residents a small salary.
And there I went. My older brother -and only one- had already left with my uncle and became a metallurgical engineer in the USA.
When I arrived at my first hospital from McGill University, a young man tried to say something to me in the lobby. I did not speak English or French. I didn’t even know anything about medicine; courtesy of my professors from the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Santiago. A Spanish resident translated for me:»He’s telling you that you’re on call at Surgery tonight.» Surgery? What is Surgery? Approaching a patient during my time was not a duty to be a doctor. It was a privilege for the well-connected…
Yes, my life was very difficult. I suffered a lot. My personal life, given the deep danyo that my «self» suffered, was very difficult and turbulent. But as Saint John of the Cross said: “Those who have not suffered, what do they know? What do they have to offer?” So when I got my BS in Psychiatry from McGill University in 1968 I was tremendously disappointed. Yes, they taught me to diagnose and prescribe… but what I learn from the human mind: Well, the very masculine doctrine of Freudianism!
And of science, of the rigors of the Scientific Method? Well NOTHING! Like us, men, including psychiatrists, we can believe that the ills of humanity can be cured just like toothpaste is sold: with another new, improved, more modern «ISM» that is going to cost millions more lives and another ϋber-narcissistic little god?
A mortal being who did not get to be the top general and needs to be: general-EXTREME -it does not matter that his DND is almost at the level of a pygmy chimance? And is that mind sane enough to lead a country, which already qualifies as macho-warlike due to its history? Given the non-sane state of the human mind and its cultures, incapable of generating children with a «sane-sane self» since the male-creed abhors his feelings as «female weaknesses» and the existence of the encoded information digitally contained in Emotional Self” did not appear in the literature [International Journal of Psychotherapy] until I published it Enough.
What I am looking for is a forum to tell my profession and people in general that:
1) We are not sane. Sanity is a faculty that the bloody history under the aegis of the masculine mind IS NOT POSSIBLE. Nor is it possible without cultivating and paying attention to the SELF-EMOTIONAL.
2) That they are not the aliens (which not-curiously) we paint as more brutal than us, the ones that will end the human race. NO! we ourselves are doing a superb «job» in this vital-existential arena
3) I’m sorry brother, your male-kingdom (power is your war cry, your highest aspiration). At all costs. Power not to do good on this glorious planet. If not to become an assassin. hitler? Stalin? Mussolini? Attila the Hun? Sexuality in the church that is called “of the Christ”?
The “self” is that body of information I -and others- call “me,” “Joaquin” -the protagonist of this lifetime script that is CALLED “life.”
We don’t know much about that entity and for good reasons. In ancient times it was of great interest and the “nosce te ipsum;” “Know Thyself”, was considered to be a high form of wisdom. It was deemed fundamental to be a human being. No longer! In 1968 I graduated from the Diploma Course in Psychiatry at McGill University without knowing an iota about who I was. What I had learned at home and in the streets was considered sufficient. And we, psychiatrists, felt comfortable with that junk-thank you!
Yes, I earned to make diagnostics and to prescribe medication and a lot of unbelievable Freudian jargon. It follows that, of the two branches of Psychiatry: the Psychological and the Biological the former was doomed to go the way of the dodo -that unfortunate bird of New Zeeland which having no enemies, its wings became atrophic and he could not fly. With our flippant lack of respect for any flesh which is not human, in no time we exterminated such an easy prey!
We are man of “action” that I would instead qualify by our behaviour, as “men of prey.”
The field of action of psychological psychiatry is mostly psychotherapy; -the understanding of the mind and alleviation of its suffering is its field of practice-. That of biological psychiatry is mostly medication and physical intervention upon the hardware, the brain or information processor itself.
But men are uniquely ill-qualified to understand and be interested in the mind for several reasons:
- Number one that would involve first and foremost to accept that we have feelings; and it was only until recently that the existence of an analogically coded emotional self appeared in the psychiatric literature (Sousa-Poza The Role of Emotional Trauma in Neurosis, Part 2: Method of Treatment). And the macho-man code strongly opposes such a proposition since feelings are equated to “weakness” sissy-female things. A real man “bites de bullet “preferably with “an stiff upper lip.”
- Thus, as to explore the emotional self we have of necessity to feel, (you will seldom see a man crying) the emotional self has been ditched aside and atrophying for centuries…and our field of inquiry has been relegated, almost uniquely to the digitally coded mental self (Sousa-Poza The Role of Emotional Trauma in Neurosis)
- The mental-self is a self of thinking and acting. Not of experiencing states of being via feeling. It perfectly suits the -action-no-feeling deformation of macho-man. Furthermore, you can make much more power and money on that mode than on the feeling-experiencing-mode. -Pity the art of being involves mostly experiencing! Pushing a bit further, we could say that to be is to experience. And that thinking is to being what the map is to the territory.
And finally; the information about the Separation
On my return from Los Angeles in 1980 to the University of Sherbrooke, as part of my continuing investigation of Prell.d’s trauma theory I established what was, to my knowledge, the first experimental clinic of anaclitic psychotherapy (the precursor to emotional trauma psychotherapy), as part of the Outpatient Department of Psychiatry. There, I conducted preliminary clinical work with several collaborators, as well as solitudinal research or. self experimentation. After about one year, I realized that the most severe risk associated with Primal Therapy was a repeated regression to the grieving of childhood emotional pain, which leads to substantial detachment from, but not dislodgement of, the dysfunctional parental Arthur Janov registered the term «Primal Therapy» as a service trademark.
introjects.5 Dislodgement of the dysfunctional introjects requires the deployment of the infantile anger provoked, but also suppressed, when the emotional aggression took place. Indeed, as explained later, anger is, in feeling (analogic) language, the equivalent of the verbal (digital) negation «no:·Thus the end product of Primal Therapy, if carried to term, is a self unsupported by attachment to the introjects, a destabilized self; it thus risks the dreadful proposition of precipitating an anaclitic state in an adult.
This excruciatingly painful and dangerous state, described as the late anaclitic syndrome
With the work I’ve done for decades on my own mind and Christian and Buddhist guides I don’t have many ties left with the world.