radical vs conservative 2026.03.11
I consider myself a radical, liberal, and intellectual person — so how strange it is that what I’ve been advocating lately is “Conservative Psychotherapy.”
I felt considerable internal resistance to this. I was supposed to be radical, liberal, intellectual — and yet here I am, arriving at Conservative. Still, my conviction that this word is the right one has not changed.
We should be cautious about writing large amounts of text in a short period of time. In a brief span, a person may come up with any number of seeds of ideas. But when it comes to analyzing, synthesizing, and articulating them, I suspect we inevitably end up performing a kind of latent internal isomorphism — replaying the same underlying patterns without realizing it.
When I read my old writing years later, I almost always feel that I was foolish, or immature. The passion I felt at the time was genuine. But when I evaluate what remains, the most I can say is: ah, so this is the direction I was thinking in during that period. When I wrote it, I believed that if it was true, it would endure. Now, I read it in light of the circumstances I was in then, and interpret my thoughts and feelings of that time accordingly. The conclusion is always the same: I had passion, but I was immature. It will probably always be this way. My past self is, to me, perpetually young and embarrassing.
One dimension of human existence is the question of how far we can trust and realize reason and rationality. Consider the various phases of the French Revolution — there was genuine passion for realizing rationalism. The result, I think, was that something other than reason flooded in in enormous quantities. Edmund Burke criticized this, and I believe his criticism was correct. There are aspects of Burke’s thinking that touch on Conservative Psychotherapy.
Consider Soviet-style socialism as well. Despite its vast impurities, it can also be read as an experiment in how far rationalism could be realized. And it too was defeated. Of course, rationalism survives in transformed forms — as welfare statism and the like. The lesson that history, society, and human beings do not follow rational blueprints has been learned at great cost.
My personal clinical experience points in the same direction: the dead end of rationalism. Even when I arrive at something theoretically sound, reality does not follow. This is perhaps what led me to think less in terms of pure rational realization — the Kantian a priori reason — and more in terms of error-correcting intelligence.
There is no choice but to adapt to the patient in front of you. Fitting the patient to your reason does not heal them. Fitting your thinking to the patient — that is error-correcting intelligence. I had no option but to revise my brain’s internal model of the world.
Of course, there are global trends in psychiatry, and I agree with half of them. But the other half I resist. More often than not, I end up misunderstood or misrepresented. I am not good at asserting myself. I cannot bring someone who understands nothing to understand from the ground up. If they understand only superficially, it doesn’t especially trouble me.
Still, I often regret that I lack the ability to present ideas effectively. Even if I cannot reach my contemporaries, I hope to reach a few people in the distant future. That may be both arrogant and humble at the same time.
For me, wandering about on the horizontal plane of the world is tedious. I admire those who walk dynamically through life and savor its richness — but what matters more to me is leaping in the vertical direction.
When I try to break this feeling down into words, the feeling itself escapes. That, I suppose, is the limit of expressibility. With my own writing, I can sometimes reach a provisional understanding by reading context and circumstantial evidence together. But for others, that would be difficult. Even in my own past writing, the true intention is sometimes unclear to me.
Meaning is layered, so it is natural that it deepens or shallows depending on the reader. I sense that I’m smuggling in a value judgment with the words “deep” and “shallow.” Even so, I want to be understood deeply. I don’t know how to make that happen. I have largely given up, accepting it as nearly impossible.
There is also the possibility that I have nothing of substance inside me at all — that I am simply harboring an illusion. Grandiosity, or even short of that, the mechanism at work in paranoia more generally. I have made a kind of peace with that possibility too.
For example: I may love my own violin playing very much, while for everyone around me it is nothing but noise. Even there, an evolutionary error-correcting intelligence is at work.
Has the shift from faith in a priori reason to faith in error-correcting intelligence been a good thing?
Perhaps it is simply a habit of the brain — the inability to go without believing in something — and I have merely changed the object of belief. At times I think it might be more honest to leave that space empty, to let the air move freely through it. I have no religion, but from a background in comparative religious studies, I believe that the purification of the soul is my ultimate aim. To move toward precision — what exactly I mean by “soul,” what “purification” means in this context — the wall is quite high.
それはいいことなのか、が、good thing になってしまった。
