To help a person, it is important to consider that we are not alone in this world – there are creatures nearby that influence us. Ethnotherapist Toby Nathan is convinced of this.
Psychologies: You are one of the leading specialists in ethnopsychotherapy. Tell us, please, what is its peculiarity?
Toby Nathan: We as ethnopsychotherapists seek to show that understanding and treating mental illness requires some degree of cultural and political consideration. Simply put: an African, Malay, Indian and European will get sick in different ways, and therapy will give a greater effect if it takes into account the peculiarities of their worldview, due to origin, religion, traditions. If the patient ascribes his trouble to witchcraft or an invisible spirit, we respect that explanation. Ultimately, there is an exchange here: the patient gives us his knowledge, and we introduce him to another type of knowledge. At the same time, a European can perfectly recover from a Chinese acupuncturist, and a Belgian psychoanalyst can help a Berber. When our ethnopsychotherapy counseling center first opened, we worked mainly with migrants: Africans, Asians. And gradually began to work with local natives.
Are spirits attacking us in Europe too? It is hard to believe…
T. N .: We see young people go into a trance at rave parties. What brings them into this state? Music? Alcohol? Or maybe it’s something completely different … We are all connected with some invisible forces that appear when we feel bad, each of us has our own superstitions, our own ghosts. By the way, in Europe there are almost as many healers as doctors. Of course, I do not want to say that you can trust them all. Let’s say I personally am a Jew who was born in Egypt, a descendant of rabbis who were engaged in healing… Perhaps that is why the Western approach to understanding mental disorders seems primitive to me. When we work only with the individual psyche, it cuts us off from life. In ethnopsychotherapy, on the contrary, life is in full swing at sessions, in which quite a lot of people sometimes participate: the patient, his relatives, an interpreter who speaks his native language, therapists …
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You studied psychoanalysis. What did you leave yourself with this knowledge?
T. N .: Psychoanalysis has fascinated me since my youth, but I never considered myself a psychoanalyst. I hate all kinds of camps and groups, so I do not aspire to psychoanalytic. Not to mention that I consider the Oedipus complex a delusion: children are not sexually interested in their parents, they are interested in their own kind. This is proven by the results of many surveys conducted in the Nordic countries. For example, children of both sexes aged 5–6 were asked who they would like to marry later. Most answered: “with a brother (sister)”, “with a classmate” or even “with my dog”. Only 7% expressed a desire to marry their father or mother! And if patients talk so much about mom and dad during the sessions, this is due to the fact that the subject of the conversation is predetermined: they know perfectly well what is expected of them. Nor am I ready to agree that Freud, with his theory of the unconscious, created a special mythology for Westerners. After all, mythology is always the fruit of collective creativity. And Freud preferred to formulate a law that we all should only obey. While with creatures of a mythical nature, you can cheat, bargain, negotiate.
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His way
Toby Nathan was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1948. He received his higher education in France, defended his Ph.D. thesis in psychology under the guidance of Georges Devereux, the founder of ethnopsychoanalysis. Toby Nathan founded the first ethnopsychotherapy consulting center in France at the Avicenna Hospital in Paris. He worked as an adviser to the French Embassy in Israel and Guinea. He is the author of nine books, the latest being Ethno-roman (Grasset, 2012).
As a European, how did you get acquainted with traditional healing practices?
T. N .: I went to these therapists to understand how they work. I remember a Malian healer to whom the psychiatric hospital in Bamako sent patients. The nurses regularly came to them to give injections of antipsychotics, and he took them to work in the field and treated them at the same time. I asked, “What are you doing to heal the sick?” “I fight with genies, with spirits. And you?” – “I also!” To which the healer replied: “It must be much more difficult for you. There are many more in Paris.” He was right! These creatures breed profusely in large cities where people from radically different worlds live together.
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And how do you know that the city genies are somewhere nearby?
T. N .: They are revealed by their manifestations – in particular, by the diseases they cause in humans. And also, for example, there are rustles and creaks in an empty apartment, things moved from their places … If a person always says “no” to everything, you can be almost sure that an evil spirit has settled in him. In Egypt, these were considered the cause of the whirlpools on the Nile. They live in domestic sewer pipes, on ruins, in rivers. Near us, but where we ourselves do not live. They remind us that we are not alone in the world. With invisible creatures, it is necessary to act specifically, to follow a special “protocol”. In the culture to which I belong by origin, aromas are used in such rituals, but colors, religious texts can be used. When I treat the sick, I do not address them directly, but to those inhuman creatures that torment them. I put the patient in a situation in which it will be easier for him to heal, because he will never hear from me: “You yourself are responsible for what happened to you.”
Psychoanalysis, on the other hand, seeks to bring the patient into greater responsibility in order to help him out of his victim position.
T. N .: This is another absurd idea from Freud. For me, healing and responsibility are incompatible things. I tell the patient: “You have an enemy, we will find him together and see how to defeat him.” It may be a spirit, or it may be a person who does not even know himself that he is harming you. He doesn’t like you, he has a grudge against you. But he does not know what effect his anger has on you. Most often, this is a close person, relative or, for example, a work colleague. Today, by the way, people pick up most of the diseases at work. Because workers, in order to keep it, are often forced to remain silent. Because they are pestered by all sorts of bosses. Because there is often a tough rivalry. And I believe that ethnopsychotherapy is more capable of resolving conflicts at work than traditional therapy, which tells you: “Your conflict with your boss is a repetition of the situation that you experienced in your relationship with your father (or mother).” After all, it increases your tension even more! In Israel, I have seen how rabbis have treated people with obsessive-compulsive disorders with amazing results, “prescribing” them special healing actions, rituals – this is a bit like what modern methods of cognitive and behavioral therapy do. In general, this idea of dialogue with non-human worlds seems to me especially suitable for today’s world, in which countless forces are at work that kindle human passions.
How would you, an ethnopsychotherapist, comment on the state of general anxiety in the modern European world?
T. N .: It seems to me that we, with our ideas about the world and our own identity – with nations, states, borders – have reached the extreme point, beyond which the meaning is already lost. I think the future belongs to peoples who are capable of natural migration. Look at the Chinese: they have their original core, China, but they are scattered all over the world. The secret of the Asian economic miracle lies mainly in this ability to disperse everywhere while remaining connected to its center. The European crisis shows how difficult it is for the old continent to adapt to these new mobility-demanding conditions. Take, for example, the French: out of a population of 60 million, only two million citizens live outside national borders … This is very little.