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Originally Posted by wolfgang  She must have a disclaimer somewhere that it's for entertainment purposes, as many do. |
Hmmm. Anyone know the answer to that?
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It's like the LoA when you keep badgering psychics with the same questions of "issues" that is the focus and generates the same state from the universe. Although, sometimes I think I needed all those readings to vent a bunch of junk I was going through - but maybe should have been talking to a therapist instead. That could be part of the trap, people unknowingly using psychics are therapists, when they aren't. but if that psychic business wasn't there, I probably would have let go and started trusting myself sooner.
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As an ex-therapist, I can tell you that the question of dependence on therapists and how to avoid clients giving their power away are big ones at the moment. The Person Centred Approach is intended to put the emphasis on listening, and many PC Therapists would refuse to give any advice at all, just trying to help clients identify and work through issues in their own way. Even so, there is great controversy about how able we are to do this, since we tend to give away our hopes and wishes for the client in subtle ways, like when we ask a question, what questions we might ask, and whether we let issues just slide or react to them and follow those lines of thinking. A psychic seems almost like the opposite - almost everything they say I would expect would be a statement, mostly directive or at least suggesting directions, decisions and so on, though I have to admit to little experience of them personally.
I could also speak in favour of them if their statements were taken without trust and were vague enough, since we as clients can do the same thing (this is our part in cold reading) - choose how we are going to interpret a statement and whether we're going to follow that line of thought. If a reader says "You're really quite creative, but you don't seem to be making the most of your creativity at the moment", it can be very helpful practically. It is vague enough to fit most people, and the client might well say "Yeah, I've often thought I should do some more painting". That can improve their life. They could also ignore it if they're not at all bothered about being creative or any more creative than they already are, and wait for something else. I guarantee that absolutely random statements taken from a list (preferably fairly positive and vague) could help believers and non-believers alike. I've used the 'random selection' process myself with clients in purely therapeutic ways: someone is stuck for what they need to talk about or how they want to change. "Say a word at random", I say, and in 5 minutes they're off, using a relatively random seed to grow ideas from. They could of course be deeply unconscious messages, but I'm pretty sure that's not the operative point.
So I don't have any problem with psychic readings often being useful to people, it's just that there are other problems, as you point out. The OP link demonstrates that there are seriously dangerous problems. If that girl's life had not been monitored audibly, the random statement (in this case very negative, an allegation of child abuse of a person whose name began with V) could have been elaborated to who knows what lengths.
I would be happy for a psychic to advertise her/his services as therapy, rather than entertainment, if they also said that they
could just be making their ideas up, hitting upon them at random or with a certain amount of cues from the client, and genuinely helped the client to recognise their own responsibility for how they use those ideas (which also depends on a reasonable assessment of their autonomy generally*). Of course, they don't. Most of them, I imagine, believe that they are psychic and are obtaining valid information from 'other realms' or 'spirit guides' or whatever. Since there is no evidence whatsoever of other realms or spirits, perhaps as modern societies we should put more legal requirements on faith healers, psychic readers and the like. After all, in the USA, your therapists have had to be accredited for a long time, and have to abide by codes of ethics. Are there any for psychics and mediums?
*In my experience, I have had many clients who nodded in all the right places when I talked about their autonomy and making their own decisions, carefully pointing out that my observations were just that, designed to help them think and discuss issues, not advice, pronouncements, etc., but still amazed me by how they absorbed my view of them and modeled themselves on it. It is not uncommon for a therapist to go through a session in this careful way, the client apparently making their own decisions, only to have them return the next week to say something like "Well, I tried what you suggested and it didn't work at all/ worked wonders!"