From its earliest forms, psychotherapy tended to conceptualise existential issues and psychological turmoil primarily in intrapsychic terms, namely conflicts within the mind, maladaptive cognitions, or dysregulated affect. Over the past several decades, there has been an undeniable shift toward understanding more human experience as embedded in relationships and culture. In contemporary practice, the social and cultural dimensions of human nature are no longer viewed as external influences acting upon an otherwise self-contained psyche, but as processes that actively shape identity, emotion, meaning, and symptom formation. In individual and couple therapy, therapists show a greater ability to attend to how social roles, early care-giving relationships, interpersonal contexts and culture structure the client’s experience. However, psychology and psychotherapy still have a very long way to go. They still fail to grasp many fundamental aspects of collective psychology. This greatly impacts and limits the range of interventions within the context of therapy and personal development. 

I will mention two major blind spots. The first one concerns the lack of understanding of western civilisation. The second one concerns a lack of insight about how the social-cultural dimension interfaces with the other two human dimensions, the physical and the personal. 

To illustrate the first point, I will give just one example, but it is quite powerful and very telling. The tendency to intellectualise, that is to think primarily in conceptual, rational and logical terms, is detrimental to a healthy and balanced way of being and living, as it expresses a disconnect with one's experiencing. One stops being grounded in one's experiencing of things. However, the intellectualising tendency can be seen as having different origins.

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In psychotherapy, intellectualisation is mostly understood as a common psychological defence, a way of managing emotional threat by shifting experience into abstract thought, analysis, theory, or explanation. Instead of feeling something directly — grief, fear, shame, anger — the person talks about it in conceptual, detached, or overly rational terms. The mind stays busy so the emotions don’t have to be fully lived and experienced. Different therapeutic schools conceptualise this slightly differently, but converge on the same core phenomenon. Psychodynamic therapy sees intellectualisation as a defence against anxiety and unconscious conflict, often paired with isolation of affect — the person knows what happened but doesn’t feel it. Humanistic and experiential therapies view it as a block to authentic emotional experiencing, keeping clients in their heads rather than in their bodies and feelings. CBT frames it as a form of experiential avoidance, where thinking replaces feeling in order to reduce distress in the short term. Trauma therapies frequently see it as a nervous-system strategy: when emotions were too intense in the past, the person learned to distance and control through cognition.

This approach to intellectualisation is missing something important. It overlooks the fact that the tendency to intellectualise is also, and maybe primarily, a cultural trait which characterises western civilisation and distinguishes it from all other civilisations on the planet. Eric Alfred Havelock (1903-1988), a philologist from the University of Toronto, is one of those who have stressed this fundamental aspect of western collective psychology, which he traced back to the ancient Greeks and their revolutionary and totally unique invention of alphabetic literacy. Havelock has demonstrated that, in the western world, while being a major technological achievement, alphabetic literacy has introduced a fracture between self and experience. The self has developed as a thinker, which accounts for the apparition and success of science and philosophy in our civilisation.

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The tendency to intellectualise being a common feature of western civilisation, it is natural that therapists should find that their clients frequently reflect this tendency. However, this happens regardless of their idiosyncrasies and personal states of mind. If some individuals resort to intellectualisations as a means of distancing themselves from painful and distressing experiences, this happens on the background of a widespread tendency to intellectualise as a result of cultural conditioning and participation in western society. Recognising this has important implications for therapy and personal development, as it implies that the task of the therapist does not merely, nor primarily, entail challenging a strategy of self-protection (which does not mean that this does not play a part in some cases) but facilitating a process of re-education to support a deeper engagement with one's experiencing, a very different task indeed.

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With this example, we touch another important but neglected aspect of psychotherapy, which is that psychological issues and troubles are not just individual afflictions susceptible to have cultural aspects but also, frequently, sheer facts of civilisation or phenomena which are closely associated with them. Although the therapist is only working with individuals and couples, their work entails excelling at both personal and collective psychologies at the civilisational level. Historically, both psychology and psychotherapy have been very poor at taking into account the civilisational aspect of our psychological life. This is a major shortcoming which I endeavour to overcome both in my theoretical and my practical work. 

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I will briefly talk about the issue concerning the interfacing between the social-cultural dimension and the other two human dimensions, the physical and the personal, in the section below.