We would like to separate our conversation about the interaction of the soul and body from such authors as Louise Hay, Louise Burbo and others who are looking for deep-seated internal problems behind various psychosomatics. Louise Hay is convinced that a sore throat is a consequence of the fact that you are holding back from good words and feel unable to express yourself, hemorrhoids — fear of not meeting a certain time, anger in the past and fear of parting, venereal diseases — from feelings of guilt on sexual grounds, as self-punishment, and constipation — unwillingness to part with outdated thoughts and getting stuck in the past …
We understand that this is an ingenious business model that makes just a sick person also a client of a psychotherapist, but these fantasies have no scientific basis.
Louise Burbo considers Louise Hay her teacher and writes even more books of similar content. In her opinion, the flu is an emotional blockage, when the body says: “That’s it, it won’t go any further!”. So, for example, a secretary who can no longer work with her boss comes down with the flu in order to stay at home for a week. If we remember the theory of social psychoanalysis of emotions, then we see nothing surprising: the continuation of the childhood habit of getting sick when it is beneficial for us. However, when Bourbo immediately claims that the flu often affects a person who does not know how to express his desires and formulate his demands, and the flu is a bodily metaphor for emotional suffocation, we go beyond the limits of science.
It is not true that this does not happen: yes, some women of a hysteroid warehouse can create their own flu and in this way, it is not true that these descriptions of hysterical exoticism do not so much cure influenza in those who are ill, but create anxiety for their mental health in those who who before reading such literature was still healthy.
From the books of Louise Bourbo you will learn that teeth usually hurt indecisive people who do not know how to analyze life situations and cannot stand up for themselves. At the same time, if your teeth hurt on the right, you should change your attitude towards your father, show more tolerance towards him. But if you have a toothache on the left, you should improve relations with your mother.
For any disease, Louise Burbo will find a psychological problem, and since people from a certain age always have something that hurts, she created a queue of patients for herself. If you inspire people with diseases, there will always be someone who will believe in it.
It can be said that there is nothing terrible, that suspicious people will always find in themselves at least a bodily illness, at least a psychological problem, but is it right for practical psychologists to participate in such «entertainment»? It seems that such books, even if they contain a healthy grain, generally discredit the field of practical psychology. The essence of the claims to the passion for psychological methods of treatment is the same as the claims to treatment with the help of healers: the point is not that the operations of healers can directly harm the patient, but in a possible delay, or even exclusion of conventional treatment, which is fraught with fatal consequences. In the synton approach, there is a procedure for working with internal problems, according to which a specialist, before assuming deep psychological causes, is obliged to check the more probable causes, and when a client has a toothache, he will send the client not to a psychologist, but to a dentist.