There are few songs

The last song on Phil Ochs’ final album, 1970, is No More Songs. “Once I knew a saint who sang upon a stage / He told me about the world, his lover / A ghost without a name / Stands ragged in the rain / And it seems that there are no more songs.” It may have been an early suicide note: A few years later, Ochs hanged himself. Or possibly, a related epitaph: Disenchanted that his beloved 1960s peace-and-crusades movement was fading from rainbows to dust, slipping into a workaday world, he could no longer write.
 

Similarly, but without the moribund factor, I’ve lately been thinking there is no more psychology. Human existence has its two spheres: our living of it and our detachment from it, traveling and adventuring versus introspection and insularity. We are blind to our inner workings and believe everything is on the same life plane: happiness and suffering, successes and mistakes, wayward dramas and peaceful endings, passion and indifference. That way we may fly, or flail and spin in circles or crash and burn, but it all seems like the juicy stuff of life. Or – we stop, turn inward and realize there is a genuine conflicting force, a malevolent force, the anti-life. We are not just interesting or eccentric or moody, we are sick. Our lost love is not melancholy, is not a “story,” it is sabotage planted by our parents thirty years earlier. Our personality is not our self, it is scar tissue over injury. Seeing this, we are no longer traveling, adventuring. We are in the prison of consciousness, no windows out, wondering about causes.

Some of us live in one of these places, some in the other. I think most people are probably eighty-twenty: not too aware, just going about on their surface. Therapy messes everything up by making the mirrored prison necessary and respectable, when it is the worst of the two ways.

In twenty years I’ve taken around sixty “continuing education” workshops. Not one of them has had the slightest value but for some facts about professional ethics. Beyond that, I sink deeper into a unity or nihilism. I don’t see diagnostic categories anymore. A person is depressed. What does that really mean? Look for where in his deep past the life force got buried. A woman is anxious and depressed, one state. In what scenes did that chemistry happen? The prodigal son in a celebrity family binges, like a vortex, on dough, sweets, junk, alcohol, speed. What did his parents deprive him of? A woman hears command voices day and night. What was the slow boil that caused her to leave reality? In fact, people have no labels. My client feels all sorts of emotions but has no sense of agency or identity. A woman can’t identify what exists inside, other than feeling naïve, but she continually moves into needy men’s homes. There are no labels. One can’t paint the ocean.

Psychology, I’d say, is just holism. Mind and body and time and never-healed injury, all one. To “heal” is to change. One might doctor a seed with chemistry, an embryo with stem cells, graft parts of two saplings together, and the end product will be a new life form. But people, a sort of balanced holism, can’t change significantly with all the coaching or tampering or purging in the world. We are already alive.

There is little psychology.