New Realities recorded on September 12, 2020
Summary
In this episode of New Realities, host Alan Steinfeld interviews his uncle, Dr. George Steinfeld, about his 50-year career as a psychotherapist. Dr. Steinfeld discusses his new book, ‘Bullshit in Psychotherapy,’ in which he critiques traditional psychoanalytic models for fostering resistance rather than genuine change. He recounts his transition from traditional methods to incorporating cognitive therapy, energy healing (like EFT/tapping), and Eastern spiritual principles, influenced heavily by Ram Dass. He advocates for a shift from an ego-driven therapeutic model to a soul-driven approach focused on compassion, awareness, and taking personal responsibility for change.
Transcript
Alan Steinfeld
Welcome to New Realities with Alan Steinfeld. This program is about the evolution of our consciousness, how we are moving into a new time, and accessing different faculties of the mind. How the paradigm is changing, how we thought certain things were working and now they’re not, and how we need a whole shift in the way we approach each other, institutions, and especially psychology. That’s why I have one of my favorite people on the show. Someone who’s been a big influence on me and the direction of my studies and research. And someone who’s still doing his own work in the field. I have on the line tonight my uncle, George Steinfeld, Dr. George Steinfeld. George, welcome.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Hi Alan, how are you? It’s nice being with you again.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s great to be with you. I got a lot of great feedback from the last show we did, that audio interview. But really, what you want to talk about is this new book that you’ve written called… what’s the title?
Dr. George Steinfeld
It’s called “Bullshit in Psychotherapy.”
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. Let’s start with this. You have been a practicing psychotherapist ever since I can remember.
Dr. George Steinfeld
For about 50 years.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s about as long as I remember. Actually, I do remember you giving me and my younger brother an IQ test. I think you were still in college.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. When I was learning how to do diagnostic testing.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s right. You were trained in a pretty traditional… actually, I remember you even had a little beard. You looked like Freud, you had a little Freudian thing going on for a while.
Dr. George Steinfeld
I would try to emulate those people when I was insecure enough to know what the hell was going on. I thought if I looked the part, I’d be able to convince people that I knew what I was talking about.
Alan Steinfeld
But tracing your history as a psychotherapist, and of course, I’m also doing these interviews in association with the ASP, Association for Spirituality and Psychotherapy. This interview will be on the website because I’ve been a member of ASP. If you could trace your historical development and then what led to your dissatisfaction, and that kind of movement in your mind.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Let me tell you, if I can. Ever since I was in graduate school, I started to sense that things weren’t what they appeared to be. Now, your father and I would talk about these things even as adolescents. In the darkness of our bedroom.
Alan Steinfeld
What kind of things?
Dr. George Steinfeld
We would talk about what people were really feeling and thinking, and what we were thinking and feeling, our relationship with our parents. We were very close, as you know. I was always very interested in this field, but I didn’t know what to do until your father told me… when I asked him when I was totally confused, I said, “Natie, what should I do?” And your father said, “Become a psychologist.” So I said, “Okay.”
Alan Steinfeld
Otherwise, you would have been a construction worker or something.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah, I didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with my life. I worked with your father for a couple of years, then I went into the army. I came back. I tell this story in the book, actually, about how when I came back from the army, my mother, and I had the GI Bill of Rights… and so, we were poor, as you know. My mother was only interested in earning a living. So I had the GI Bill of Rights, and Brooklyn College wouldn’t have cost me anything, and I would give them the money that I got from the GI Bill. But my mother said, “College schmollege. You don’t have to go to college. Just get a job and do what your brothers did.” And so my oldest got a job, your father got a job, he went to school eight years at night. And I wanted to go to school during the day. My mother said, “You can’t go to college.” And even at 22, I didn’t have the guts to buck her, to buck her servant mentality as I call it. She couldn’t believe…
Alan Steinfeld
She was a European, I remember her, heavy Eastern European accent. She never went to college herself, she probably never even graduated high school.
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, she came to this country as a kid, and married my father and went to school a little bit. So she had no… she had lost her mother when she was four. She was shuffled around from family member to family member before she came to America. And that’s a great story and your father interviewed our mother, it’s a great videotape about her life. So I get home from the army and discover that my room that I left is now taken over by my aunt. No one ever told me about this. I come home to the apartment in Flatbush, even though we were raised in Williamsburg. I come home, I say, “Well, what happened?” I said, “Well, your Aunt Fanny came to live with us because Mama promised her father that she would take care of the sister, my grandfather’s sister.” So when she couldn’t work anymore, she came to live with us. And so where was I going to be? I said, “Well, we set up a cot for you in the kitchen.” So I come up from the army… I got no bedroom. I now sleep in the kitchen. But I still… I want to go to college and my mother says no. So I call your father and I call Moishe, our older brother, and they come in and they say, “Ma, Georgie has to go to college.” So that’s how I went to college. If I didn’t have…
Alan Steinfeld
That was a nice thing they did for you.
Dr. George Steinfeld
They saved my life, essentially. Because I didn’t have the guts to buck the program that I grew up with. And the program was that education wasn’t important, unlike most Jewish families. My mother and father didn’t think education was important. And added to that was the perception in my family that I was an absolute moron. Not only did they not value education, but me specifically, I was so dumb I couldn’t even ask a question. That was my role in the family. We know that your father was the smart one. And of course, he was the smart one. Anyway, I go to college.
Alan Steinfeld
He was a very smart person. I think he told you to go and be a psychotherapist because, of course, that’s what he probably would have liked to do.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. He wanted it, but he was working and got into a career in business, etc. But he eventually, you know what your father did, he eventually became very interested in psychotherapy and spirituality and we would spend hours talking about that. So even though he wasn’t formally…
Alan Steinfeld
Just to let you know, because my father did get into spirituality, gave me a sort of open door permission to pursue spirituality in the way that I’ve done. And I have to thank my father because without him, we probably wouldn’t be doing this interview. I probably wouldn’t be doing any of this. And so he was a free thinker, an intelligent person, someone who was willing to explore, and also had that other side of him where he felt really secure if he made money. So those two sides… And you didn’t care about making money because you already grew up in the middle class. I had money. I wanted to do the exploration. So here we are today talking.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Of course, of course. So anyway, I finally go to Brooklyn College. I meet Jean, because I meet her in school. And I take graduate courses at night because I know you can’t do anything with a BA in psychology. So I graduate, we get married. You were the page boy at our wedding.
Alan Steinfeld
I remember being the page boy at your wedding.
Dr. George Steinfeld
You were the ring bearer, I think.
Alan Steinfeld
I think I was. You’ve been married over 50 years then, haven’t you?
Dr. George Steinfeld
We’ve been married for almost 55 years almost.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow.
Dr. George Steinfeld
55 years. I’ve been my whole life I’ve been married. What?
Alan Steinfeld
You know, I’m just laughing. So that’s it, you’ve been married… okay, you’ve been married. And then what happened?
Dr. George Steinfeld
So I get a job. This is very interesting. I get a job, but I take courses at night at Brooklyn College because it wasn’t very expensive. I got my BA in psychology, but I knew that wouldn’t do me anything. So I kept taking courses at night at Brooklyn College. And one day, and I’m very depressed. I’m depressed because the job is so bad that I don’t want to even go to work anymore.
Alan Steinfeld
What kind of job?
Dr. George Steinfeld
I was an interviewer for the state. I couldn’t get people jobs. There were no jobs. It was a terrible job. And so I’m getting more and more depressed. And just taking these courses. And I bump into a guy. You know him. Bernie Starr. You know Bernie Starr? He’s part of the…
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, I just saw Bernie… you knew Bernie Starr back then?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, he was a turning point in my life.
Alan Steinfeld
Bernie was? I did not know that. I just saw Bernie today. He was one of the presidents of ASP. So you met Bernie Starr…
Dr. George Steinfeld
I knew Bernie in college. I knew Bernie in college. And so I’m taking courses and he graduates before me. So I’m going to night school and I go to the library one day. And I bump into Bernie. I say, “Hey Bernie, what the hell are you doing?” He says, “Well, I’m going to Yeshiva University.” To which I say, “Where the hell is that?” I never heard of it. He says, “Well, they started… they have a new program. And they’re starting a new program taking the professors from the New School for Social Research. And Yeshiva is starting a new program. And they’re different than other programs. Why don’t you apply?” So, if I turned left instead of right, I wouldn’t have met Bernie and my whole life would have been different. Very interesting.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s incredible. It’s so strange. I ran into Bernie today.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah. So, and we would go out with Bernie later on. But anyway, at that time… so they say the program is a little different. And so I decide to apply to a lot of schools. My grades were very bad. So they give me an interview. Yeshiva University gives me an interview. And I’m interviewed by a guy named Irvin Rock. R-O-C-K. He interviews me, looks at my record, and he says this to me. “You have a shitty record.” He’s doing the interview. He says, “You have a shitty record.” So I said, “I’m a dead person. I’m never going to go to school. All the other schools had rejected me.” And so he said, “However, I notice that you took these graduate courses with very good professors.” Moore and Rab. I know them, they’re very tough professors. And you got A’s. So I’m going to assume that that’s your potential.
Alan Steinfeld
Ah. That was very nice. I didn’t know this. I had no idea it was such a struggle. I just thought boom, you were a psychotherapist and you got in. Okay, I’m happy to hear this story.
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, no. He was… he was… so he accepts me on the basis of my potential. He had confidence that I could do it when I didn’t have confidence that I could do anything. So he accepts me. I start my graduate school. And I talk about this in the book about my first taste of bullshit came in two varieties. One was a story told by the future president of APA who I took courses with at Brooklyn College. Max… what was Max’s name? I forget Max’s… Max Siegel. He eventually became president for APA, but he was teaching abnormal psychology and he told this story. This story was, he would send people for psychological evaluations. And invariably, the evaluation would indicate that the patient was gay or homosexual. Until he discovered that the evaluator was gay or homosexual. So he told me this story, which stayed in my brain all of these years, right? Which is really the essential basis for my Buddhist philosophy and my cognitive philosophy and everything else. Because as you’ll see, as I talk about it, you’ll see what I’m talking about. Anyway, so that was my first sense that things aren’t the way they are supposed to be.
Alan Steinfeld
I mean, that gave you a hint that we only see in the world what we are.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Exactly. Yes. But I didn’t know anything about what you’re saying then. I knew something was off, but I had no structure, I had no philosophy, I had no theory that would account for that other than your own feeling that something isn’t right.
Alan Steinfeld
But that’s pretty good, but that’s pretty good that something sparked in your brain that kind of was a significant moment to be noticed. I mean, other people… yeah, I get it. Okay.
Dr. George Steinfeld
So I noticed that and then so we start taking our courses the first year. And the first year… it was the first experimental psychology group at that university. They wanted to start out not doing clinical, just doing basic hard-nosed research stuff. So it was a very tough program. The first year we were taught learning and perception and the social psychologist, a very big… I won’t mention his name, I don’t mention his name. And the kids in my program, there were 25 of us that were accepted, and they were very bright. I knew they were bright because as I was listening to the professor discuss theory and research, they would be arguing with the professor, while I was still trying to figure out which way the mouse went in the maze. I mean, I was so far behind these people in my ability to think… so I said, I’ll never get through this program. Well, what really happened is only four of us went on internship. And I was one of the four because I worked my ass off. And not only did I work my ass off, and past my… and I go into this. But my second year, Dr. Rock gave me a research assistantship. And so we started to do research. And when I started to really do research with Dr. Rock, even publishing some papers with him, my mind started to expand. I started to not think I was dumb.
Alan Steinfeld
What was that moment where you realized that you could comprehend this stuff?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, one of the moments was, one of the moments was that Irv Rock told the students that if we could solve one of the theoretical problems that he had… he developed a theory of one-trial learning. It was a big theory back then based on research with humans. But the criticism of Rock’s work was that he never did work with animals. Because most of the researchers in learning theory were based on animal research. But out of the cognitive school, they never did research with animals. So we got animals, we… very funny stories about trying to raise mice, we didn’t know anything about that, but anyway, I’m thinking about trying to solve this theoretical issue to prove Rock’s theory. And so I’m sitting in Jean’s parents’ house, and I come up with this idea, and I’m so excited that I can’t wait to get into school and tell Irv, Dr. Rock, about this new experiment that would prove one way or another the validity of his theory. So I get in, I take the train up to the city, I meet with Irv. I said, “Irv, I think we got it.” Okay? I outline the experiment and this is what he says to me. “That’s a very interesting study, George. We did that two years ago. It doesn’t work.” So I felt deflated for a brief second, and then he says, “But that was a very creative idea that you came up with.” So he supported the creative mind that I had and I didn’t know I had.
Alan Steinfeld
And then you started to believe in yourself because you solved the problem.
Dr. George Steinfeld
I started to believe in myself, and I did research with him, and I finally did solve that problem with another experiment he gave me first authorship, which is another thing that many professors don’t do. Irv Rock… if you worked on his research, he would site you in the publication. Many professors don’t do that.
Alan Steinfeld
What was the experiment? I’m just curious. Your creative experiment that proved you were trying to…
Dr. George Steinfeld
It was an experiment that controlled for certain factors which when they were controlled for, established the validity of one-trial learning in the verbal learning field, not in the animal research, but in the verbal learning field. So one-trial learning was controversial back then, because theoretically, it opposed some of the traditional behavioral learning theories. So it was a big issue back then in the early 60s. And so I figured out an experiment, we did it, it worked, we published it, and he gave me first authorship. So imagine getting first authorship in graduate school. It’s like, it pumps you up very, you know, very much. And the confidence was building and building. So through the three years of graduate school, my confidence was building. Okay? And come internship, only four of us went. All of the other ones had dropped out because they didn’t put in the work. It’s one of the other things I discovered, is that you have to work very hard to get what you want. And then you have to have luck, and you have to have mentors. And Rock was my mentor, he became my dissertation advisor. And so he supported me all the way through.
Alan Steinfeld
And he liked you. I mean, he was a good guy. He saw that potential. So it’s great that you had him as a mentor to…
Dr. George Steinfeld
I had it. Yes. He really supported me and I worked very hard. I wanted to prove to him that I was a worthy student, which I was. And so we stayed friends even afterwards. And, you know, he died and I saw him just a day or so before he died. It was a very moving period of my life. He went out to California, Jean and I were out there. And I saw him just a little while before he died. And you know, I honored him. Every time I saw him, I would tell him how much I appreciated him and loved him for what he gave to me. He gave me my whole career.
Alan Steinfeld
Well, he gave you a chance. That is amazing. I didn’t know this story at all, but he really is the one that gave you this career.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes, yes. So that was… that was wonderful. Okay. And so this this book that I wrote, which is really subtitled, “A Professional Autobiography In Search of Truth.” Subtitled, “From an Ego to a Soul-Driven Society.” That’s some of the titles that I give it. And so I got a little taste of bullshit in graduate school. But when I went to work at the hospital, it really started to become very clear to me that the way in which we were treating patients, okay, and what we were trying to do to cure patients was not working. Okay?
Alan Steinfeld
But let me just ask you, the kind of studies that you did in graduate school, were that Freudian-based or Jungian? What was…
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, it was basically just basic learning theory. Perceptual learning theory. So there was no psychology about ego psychology. It wasn’t Freudian. No. My dissertation was pure perception. How things looked, which set the stage for later work, that I write about later on. But this was early research on the way things looked phenomenally. And we talked about this in the interview.
Alan Steinfeld
Yes, and I think that’s what I’m really fascinated with because I think that is still a much needed topic to discuss. That kind of perception.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. It’s a very big topic and so I revisited that in the paper I told you I wrote recently for the Association of Spiritual Psychology. I cite that paper as “Old Wine in New Bottles” because recent research in the new…
Alan Steinfeld
After graduate school, is that when you went into the Danbury Prison to work? That was later?
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, no. The sequence was, I worked at the hospital. I started to see a lot of bullshit in the hospital. We got involved in the patient’s rights movement.
Alan Steinfeld
You were working in the psychiatric ward at the hospital?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, the hospital had many psychiatric wards. It was in the 60s. And things started to happen in the 60s. There was “Titicut Follies”, which was an expose of a hospital. There was “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, the film by Michael Douglas. And so we started to become aware that patients weren’t being treated in the way we felt were the ideal mental health principles. So three of us got involved in a patient’s rights movement. And got rid of… after two or three years, we finally got an independent study. This is… and we got rid of the superintendent. And it was a very exciting period of my life, okay. Because…
Alan Steinfeld
But how were the patients… what were you seeing? I mean, how were patients being treated?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Patients were not being treated with dignity, okay? And so they didn’t have lawyers, there were no patients rights, they couldn’t… they did not have a voice. Okay? To express what…
Alan Steinfeld
Were they being given medication?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes, only medication. We were doing psychotherapy and no one believed that psychotherapy was useful except the psychologist, of course. The psychiatrists who didn’t, who probably knew less than we did, would just give them medication. But no one would get out of the hospital. Because we never trained people how to live in the real world. Okay? We would just… so the therapy was useless. So after a couple of years of this, I started to read different books. Okay? And the four books that changed my life, I’ll tell you the books. One book was called “Asylums”. It’s a book about total institutions. I had been given this book by a social psychology professor, Hershkowitz. When I read it the first time, I said, “This has nothing to do with me. I’m going to be a therapist.” A few years later, I’m devouring this book like this guy Goffman, who wrote the book, is a god. He knew everything about total institutions and we were living it. So that was one book. Another book was written by Jay Haley, a very famous family therapist. He became a very famous family therapist. Thomas Szasz, who wrote “The Myth of Mental Illness”. So that opened up a whole world for us. And of course, reality therapy, and we started to practice a different form of therapy. This is before behavior therapy, this is before cognitive behavior therapy. This is before any of that was emerging, we started to do reality-based therapy. Ward government, giving patients more power, okay? And of course, the staff hated us, okay? And we were ostracized…
Alan Steinfeld
You were doing this in the hospital? You were running these groups?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. And so we were ostracized. We were cut off, we were threatened with being fired. We went to the newspapers, a whole investigation took place. We had been documenting all of what we thought were the bad treatments. We were vindicated, we were given the Mental Health Bell Award from the state for the work that we did. We developed a patient’s bill of rights.
Alan Steinfeld
Which hospital was this?
Dr. George Steinfeld
This is Fairfield Hills Hospital in Connecticut. It no longer exists.
Alan Steinfeld
You did a great thing, you stood up for your patients. You actually tried something different.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah. And that that part of me, which I never thought I had in me. But looking out for the underdog kind of thing. That I think came from your grandmother. My mother. Yeah. She was that kind of person. And so I think I got some of that because I wasn’t an activist. I didn’t even… we were scared most of the time about what was going to happen to us. And at the end of the investigation, they wanted us to stay. And I said enough is enough. So I wanted to leave, I couldn’t get a job because you know what happens to whistleblowers. You can’t work any place. No one wants to hire you. So I contacted a colleague of mine that I interned with, Marty Rossmarin, a very close friend of mine, recently deceased. I’ll tell you about him, but it’s in the book anyway. So Marty…
Alan Steinfeld
Before you get there, what was reality therapy that you were… what did that mean?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Reality therapy was when we started to hold patients responsible for their behavior. We no longer saw them as patients, we saw them as people with problems and they could do something about it. They needed support. And so that’s what we did. So the story that I tell about this is that my friend Lenny and I started to do reality therapy with a group of 30 backward women patients. Okay, 30 women come into a room, 20 or 30, and we’re supposed to do therapy with these people. And so we changed our total approach from what we were previously doing, just listening and interpreting, to reality therapy, holding patients responsible for their behavior. So at the start of each group, this this patient, Alberta, would go into the middle of the group, do a pirouette, and fall to the floor. And previously, everybody would jump to Alberta. “Oh, Alberta, what’s the matter? What’s the matter?” Okay. And so, at this time, when she did the same thing, we said, “Everybody back in your chair. Alberta got herself on the floor, she’ll get herself off the floor.” Which exactly what she did. So we started to hold patients responsible while yet also being supportive of them.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s huge. That’s a huge advancement probably.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah. And so we started ward government where patients would have a say in how they wanted to organize their wards, which is alien to the system at that time. Of course, the staff didn’t like it because they don’t want patients to have any say. They just want to medicate them, okay? And so they can push them around, okay? So that was the beginning of my interest in therapeutic communities. And the power of community. But I couldn’t get a job. So I couldn’t get a job, my friend Marty gets me a job at the Clifford Beers Clinic, as a clinical researcher. And some more… so there was bullshit at the hospital, there was a little bullshit at the clinic, and I’ll talk about that because they were behind the times, they weren’t doing family therapy, they weren’t doing behavior therapy. They were still stuck in the old psychoanalytic model where parents could not be seen with their children. Because the parents were perceived to contaminate the therapy. This is the old psychoanalytic bullshit model. Okay?
Alan Steinfeld
Are you saying if you were seeing a young person for therapy, their parents couldn’t be there because it would influence their psychology?
Dr. George Steinfeld
They would negatively influence, according to the therapist and the psychoanalytic model, it would negatively influence the therapy if parents were there. This is before the family therapy movement. The family therapy movement started in the late 60s at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto. There was the New York Institute, there was the Yale Institute. So, but very few people were doing family therapy at that time.
Alan Steinfeld
But you thought there was something wrong with this. You thought maybe it would be okay for parents to be there with the child.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Of course it was okay because we had a behavioral point of view. We said parents are probably reinforcing inappropriate behavior. They and so they needed to learn how to parent. So you needed to go in, in the therapy, to try to understand the parents if we wanted to understand the child. You couldn’t isolate the child from the family system.
Alan Steinfeld
Because it’s not necessarily the child that is the problem, it’s the dynamics of the relationship that’s the problem.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s exactly right. And that’s why family therapy is probably more important than individual therapy, right?
Alan Steinfeld
That’s right. In many cases. That’s true. Okay. Now, but family because families are essentially crazy places. Okay. They can drive people crazy. Families can drive people crazy. In fact, I wrote a paper called “Parallels Between the Pathological Family and a Mental Hospital”, which was published in Psychiatry. Okay? Because…
Alan Steinfeld
You’re saying the family, the nuclear family has a parallel between a psychiatric ward.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. They can drive people nuts.
Alan Steinfeld
Because what’s the dynamic of that? Is that because within a family people feel they have permission to act out any extreme behavior they want?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, no parents, because of the way parents were raised, they have certain attitudes, okay, towards their children. Okay, so when a kid starts to act a certain way, the parents just respond to them like they would respond to, and sometimes some of these parents really do dysfunctional things to their children. As I have done to my children, okay? I haven’t always been the best parent. I have not always reacted in the best ways to my kids, okay?
Alan Steinfeld
But I’m not seeing a solution. I mean, that’s just how parents and children are. I mean, you know.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah, but you see if you reinforce inappropriate behavior and parents do that inadvertently, parents do not know how to communicate to their children, they don’t know how to listen to their children. They don’t know how to reinforce positive behavior, they’re more interested in focusing on the negatives rather than the positives. So what family therapy addresses are all of these issues. It addresses triangles, the power struggles between the parents that are acted out on the kids. There’s a whole host of issues.
Alan Steinfeld
Do you think it would be better if we didn’t have just the family, that we lived in communities? Would you think that’s a more appropriate, more human way of living?
Dr. George Steinfeld
It depends on the kind of community. So I will tell you about the community that I felt was useful. Which I get to. So after about a year or so, I tell a lot of stories that, you know, these these… I worked at the Clifford Beers Clinic which spoke to the issue of bullshit and the craziness of psychoanalytic therapy, okay. But then after a year or so, maybe a year and a half, I still wanted to get back into the therapeutic community idea, okay. And there were no therapeutic communities out there except being run by Daytop. Daytop is a therapeutic community for drug addicts. Okay? And one was being run at the Federal Correctional Prison in Danbury, where we were living.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh, I see. Yes, I remember you living in Danbury.
Dr. George Steinfeld
We lived in Danbury. And so the prison, the federal prison was in Danbury. They had a therapeutic community for drug addicts. And there was an opening. Okay? So I applied for that job. I didn’t think I would get it. This was in 1970, 71. I didn’t think I would get it because it was during the Vietnamese War, you know, situation. And I would attend anti-war rallies. And I probably was filmed by the FBI or something. So I never thought I would get the job because I was a resister, in a sense. Right. But I was hired. And during that time in the early 70s, the prison held various groups of people. They had all of these drug addicts, they had war resisters, like the Berrigan brothers. I don’t know if you remember the Berrigan brothers.
Alan Steinfeld
I do remember them. They were radical priests.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah. So they were housed there, and organized crime. Those were the large groups of that kind of people.
Alan Steinfeld
They weren’t like murderers. There weren’t any murderers there. It wasn’t like a…
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, it was a medium… a medium security prison. A medium security prison with open wards, essentially. Okay? And so in my community of 50 men, okay. And I tell all sorts of stories about what went on in that community. My first day working as the head of that community, I was confronted by an 18-year-old drug addict for my stupidity and my ignorance and I should basically shut the fuck up because I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about.
Alan Steinfeld
This 18-year-old kid said this to you.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yeah, because he was already part of the community and this was my first day, I didn’t know how it all worked. It took me six months or so not to wake up with nightmares. It was so intense. It was… everybody was confronted every day with bullshit. If you bullshitted, if you weren’t straight, if you tried to triangulate, if you didn’t… weren’t honest with your feelings, you would be dealt with severely. And that included me. Okay.
Alan Steinfeld
So you had to be honest and raw because then people would call you on it.
Dr. George Steinfeld
They called you on everything. They called me on everything.
Alan Steinfeld
The inmates would call you out.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. And they did. They called me out, and they called everybody else out. Because the rules…
Alan Steinfeld
In those moments… in those moments where they called you out, you had to say, yeah, I wasn’t being honest, I wasn’t being…
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. The basic aspect of the community was to tell the truth. Okay? Tell the truth. There were several rules. In my five or almost six years there with these drug addicts on the street, I wouldn’t trust them one minute. Cause some of them were violent also. There was no… there was only one incident of a mild violent episode in the six years I was there. You know why?
Alan Steinfeld
Why?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Because the rules were very clear. People took responsibility for themselves and each other. Okay? There was a… the rules were no violence. There were even no threats of violence. And you couldn’t even look at someone with violent eyes or else you would be dealt with severely. Okay? You’d be kicked out of the family. There was no drugs, of course, because urines were taken. And there was psychological safety. In other words, at any moment in time, any member of the group, including me, could call a group if we were upset. We were always available to one another 24/7. And you could not talk about each other outside the family. It was called the family.
Alan Steinfeld
Let me see if I get an idea of what you’re saying. So you were assigned 50 men and formed a community, and you were sort of the therapist. But it was a sort of bonding experience for this community, would you say?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes, it was very… it was very bonding. You developed a very intense, close relationship with these guys. Because you know everything about them. We would have groups. I was in 15 groups a week with these guys.
Alan Steinfeld
And then did you see an effect of that? I mean, you weren’t doing psychotherapy. You were mostly listening, but what happened?
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, no. We were doing confrontational therapy.
Alan Steinfeld
Which means what?
Dr. George Steinfeld
We confronted… if someone… let… here’s what we would do. Someone would get a feeling about another person. Here’s the way it worked. Okay? Now, these were run… it was run by inmates. Inmates, residents, would start off cleaning up the toilets. And depending upon their… how responsible they were, they would move up the hierarchy so they became coordinators in the therapeutic community, working very closely with the staff. The staff and residents worked very closely together, with consultants from the Daytop therapeutic community on the outside. So we had people from the outside coming in. We had the residents and we had staff. Staff were me, social workers, and trained counselors, who were previously custodial. They were trained to become counselors. Now, if I had feelings about you, at the beginning of the day, I would go to the coordinator and drop a slip. I would put a slip in saying I have feelings about Steinfeld. Right?
Alan Steinfeld
What do you mean by feelings? You don’t like me or…
Dr. George Steinfeld
I’m upset with… I’m upset with… about something, okay? And the groups would then be structured. So the person who had the indictment, and the indictee, would be in the same group. Okay? The groups were organized around these confrontational meetings. Okay? And so at the beginning of the group, the leader… could be me, it could be anybody. They would say… “who has feelings?” So a guy would raise his hand and the leader would say, “Alright, get your feelings off.” And so it could last an hour, it could last 15 minutes, the guy would yell and scream at that person about how he hated him and how he would want to rip his heart out. And violent, explosive language, okay? About how angry he was at this guy for various reasons. It didn’t matter what it was, okay? Then… after that, after everybody got finished expressing their feelings, we would now try to tease that apart. What was really bothering you about this person? Why are you so…
Alan Steinfeld
You would lead… that would be your job, to sort of lead that?
Dr. George Steinfeld
It would be everybody’s job. Not only my job, it’d be everybody’s job. Because the residents had been trained how to do this too. Okay. So what’s really going on, Harry? Why are you so pissed off at Dr. Steinfeld, right? Well, he’s Jewish, he’s a psychologist, he thinks he’s better than us. He didn’t do what he said he was going to do. Whatever. They would be upset about anything that I did or other people. And so that’s the way some of the groups ran. These were called encounter groups. There were also, if people screwed up, they would be given learning experiences. They might have to sit in a crib wearing a dunce cap, because he acted like an idiot, so they put a dunce cap on him.
Alan Steinfeld
Was this influenced by what Fritz Perls was doing on the West Coast with his encounter groups?
Dr. George Steinfeld
You know, Fritz Perls… Gestalt therapy. Yeah, I know Fritz Perls, but I don’t know if I don’t know if Fritz Perls was running his encounter groups like we were running our encounter groups. Maybe not. Okay. But anyway, so we would do if a person really screwed up, he would be given these learning experiences, he might be given a silent treatment, no one could talk to him. Okay. So to to let him know that he’s not an isolated person, okay, people care, but you fucked up, right? And you have to do something about it. You have to change your behavior. Okay?
Alan Steinfeld
Would you find that people were more caring towards each other after these encounters?
Dr. George Steinfeld
People loved each other. People… when people left, you know, after three, two or three years, when they left, we would have these huge going away send-off experiences, where everybody in the family would give a message to the guy who was going out into the community about what they meant to him or what he meant to them. I mean, the community of men. Is that what you’re saying?
Alan Steinfeld
The community of men. They would be in tears and crying and “what you did for me” and “you go out there and do your thing”. You know, supportive statements and you know, just very… very involved because you got to know people very closely. Not only through…
Alan Steinfeld
That was refreshing. That was not the bullshit, that was the good, that was the real stuff there.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That was the real… that was the most honest environment I’ve ever been in. That’s what I say in my book. The most honest environment I’ve ever been in was that prison. The therapeutic community.
Alan Steinfeld
Now, in that prison, didn’t you also start the Ram Dass prison ashram program?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. In the prison I got exposed to several things. In addition to this way of doing work in a therapeutic community. I got exposed to transactional analysis, which I was a member of for about 40 years. The work of Eric Berne, Games People Play, etc. You know, went to their conferences. And then, of course, I got exposed to Ram Dass in about 1972, ’73. This story is a great… another person who came like Bernie Starr came into my life… Joe was an inmate. Joe was an inmate and he says one day, “Hey doc, they’re taking us out on a field trip down to Danbury. Why don’t you and your wife come? I think you’ll find it interesting.” I said, “Why are they taking you out, Joe?” “Well, we’re going to see a guy named Swami Satchidananda.” To which I said, “Who the fuck is Swami Satchidananda?” I had never heard of yoga, Satchidananda, I knew nothing about all of this. But he looked me right in the eye, Joe, and says, “I think you’ll enjoy the experience.” Jean and I went down. It was a beautiful experience. He had just come from India. He started the Integral Yoga Institute in Danbury. It became a national yoga institute. He was a beautiful person. A month later or so, he says, “I’ve been in touch with a guy named Paul Rollins. He wants to start a yoga group in the prison.” So I meet with Paul. I click with him immediately. He is a student of Ram Dass. Ram Dass was teaching meditation in New York City. Paul was living in Danbury but going into the city to take the teachings with Ram Dass. Ram Dass was sending people into the prison ashram project. Okay? So Paul was going to be one of those people who came into our prison, right, to teach us yoga and meditation. Paul would come in once a week, lead us in a yoga group, bhastrika breathing, meditation. He brought in meditation teachers. The first person he brought in, one of the first, was Soma Krishna from New York. She to lead us in a meditation, and she says when she talks to us, “Ever since I’ve been meditating, I haven’t been anxious, angry, or depressed.” That’s what she says. And I say to myself, “Holy shit, I knew nothing. I never heard of meditation before that.” Right. I said, “This is the world in which we work with anger, depression, and anxiety. You mean you can get over anger, depression, and anxiety through meditation?” So that’s when we started to do… that’s when I first got interested in Ram Dass, attending all his meetings, got his tapes, and listening…
Alan Steinfeld
That was like your spiritual awakening.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. Yes. Before that, you thought religion was something you had to do, spirituality…
Dr. George Steinfeld
I had no spiritual… I had no religion. Judaism never took with me, it never felt right to have an angry God. Even when I was a kid, it never made sense to me. So I go to my rabbi anyway while I’m there because I want to see what my rabbi in Danbury, a big shot, actually, he was a big shot. Maybe he has something to tell me that gives me the same feeling that Eastern spirituality gives me, okay. But which I wasn’t exposed to. So I go to the rabbi, I said, “Rabbi, I’m getting… I need a spiritual connection. I don’t have it with my training. What can you tell me because I’m getting into Hinduism and Buddhism?” You know what he says to me? “Buddhism shmoodism.” You know what I said to him? “Thank you, Rabbi.” I left. Left. Yeah, nothing to tell me. That was the last time you saw a rabbi. Yeah, you know, because, and then I spoke to Ram Dass about it, he gave me some books to read. About Jewish spirituality.
Alan Steinfeld
So you actually met Ram Dass at that point in the 70s?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes, I met Ram Dass at some of the retreats I went to. Yeah. And what’s amazing about Ram Dass is he’s such a beautiful speaker and he knows how to communicate these spiritual concepts to a Western mind.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. And of course, he was a psychiatrist, a psychologist at Harvard. So he understood. And his basic teaching, listen to this. His basic teaching, when he decided to stay and take the teaching when he met Maharaj-ji, his guru. The first teaching he got was given to him by a person who didn’t speak. He just wrote it on a blackboard, right. And he said Ram Dass, meditate on this, this was, but he did it in Hindu, that was translated. “When a pickpocket meets a saint, all he sees are his pockets.”
Alan Steinfeld
Ah. That went back to that original idea that you had about the guy diagnosing homosexuals…
Dr. George Steinfeld
Exactly. Exactly. We only see what our mind tells us to see. Right. And the mind is conditioned by all… and this is what Ruiz talks about in the Four Agreements. This is what Ram Dass talks… this is what all spiritual people talk about. And this is what the neurosciences…
Alan Steinfeld
And in a way, it’s more of a cognitive thing than a spiritual thing, in a sense.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Exactly, it’s a cognitive… Buddha was the first cognitive therapist. Buddha said, “We create reality.” Okay. Our mind creates reality. Okay. And the mind is made up of all of the teachings and learnings that we’ve been exposed to. And so that’s what we see. We see what our mind tells us to see. And that issue is huge in cognitive psychology, it’s huge in spiritual work, and it’s huge in the neurosciences. Because if you look at the neuroscientists and their interest in implicit memory. Implicit memory are those memories which exist in us but we don’t know where they came from. It just seems as if it’s true.
Alan Steinfeld
Where do they come from those memories?
Dr. George Steinfeld
What? They come from our experiences but we don’t remember the experiences, we just pick them up as we go along about what reality is. And so we think reality is this.
Alan Steinfeld
Give me an example of that.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, all Jews are cheap. Oh. I see. Okay? You don’t have to… you don’t even have to have heard that. Right? Or all these over-generalizations, these belief systems that are implanted in us based on the people who raised us. We don’t even know how they came into us. Explicit memory are those memories that we remember when they were formed. I was riding a bike, my father was holding me, I remember that, that was a nice… these implicit memories are all of the learnings that are just part of our psyche unconsciously, right? And they just lead us to think that what we see is true.
Alan Steinfeld
But that’s not true.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s not true. And most of what we think is not true. Right?
Alan Steinfeld
So then how did that spiritual awakening influence your approach to people?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, since I know that what I believe generally is not true… I have to figure out what’s true. Okay? What is true? What is going to guide my behavior? So what’s going to guide my behavior, hopefully, if I’m in tune and awakened to some extent, are wisdom and compassion. Of the Buddha. To do right action. To do ethical work. To watch out for the seven deadly sins that exist in all of us. To watch out for greed and avarice and sloth and envy and all of those negative forces that exist in all of us because we’re all human, okay. And we have to watch out for them, okay, so we can transcend them.
Alan Steinfeld
But as you were working with your clients or your patients, how did you translate that into a therapy?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, I teach them cognitive therapy. You know, what you what you feel, the anxiety you feel, the depression that you feel, the anger that you feel, are really based on the thoughts that are running around in your mind. Are you aware of the thoughts that are running around when you get upset like you do? And most people say no. Okay. So… so now what I want you to do, as you go through the week, is when you feel any degree of upsetness, right, I want you to stop and ask a very simple question. What’s running through your mind at this point? And write it down. And we will go over this moment to moment to see if the thought you have is useful or not useful. Did that thought lead to a useful emotion and positive behavior? Or did that thought lead you to feel badly and then do things that you’re not feeling good about?
Alan Steinfeld
Are you able to point out that they have a choice in what they think?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. Yes, of course they have a choice. But you only have a choice if you know you have a choice. If you don’t know you have a choice, you don’t have a choice. And that’s what I teach them. I teach them right now you think that this perception of reality is true. But there is another way of viewing, there’s another perspective, which if you would able to think about, would change the way you experience this encounter, this reality. Are you willing to do that? Now, people say, and this is where this is what the book is really all about, okay. The book is all about resistance to change.
Alan Steinfeld
People don’t want to change, even though they say they want to change because if they change, they would have to do something different than what they’re doing.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Even though they say they don’t like it and it brings them misery.
Alan Steinfeld
They’re used to it.
Dr. George Steinfeld
My second part… the first part of the book is all my experiences. The second part deals with the resistances from a variety of perspectives, from Freud to current level. The problem with psychoanalytic therapy, they knew about resistance, but what Freud would do, would spend years analyzing resistance. He would analyze it. And act it out in therapy. So people would spend years in therapy analyzing their resistance, right? Which made the therapist a lot of money, and cost the patient a lot of money. So this is the collusion… one of the premises of the book is this collusion between the therapist and the client not to change.
Alan Steinfeld
Not to change. By talking about the resistance means you don’t have to change it.
Dr. George Steinfeld
You don’t have to change. Right. So you talk about it and you talk about it. As Woody Allen said, “I’ve been in therapy… I’m getting better… I’ve been in therapy for 12 years. I’m getting better, I can now eat without a bib.” So, I mean… and I know people and I tell stories about people being in therapy for years and years and there’s no change.
Alan Steinfeld
But they don’t want to change and the therapist doesn’t want them to change because they want to go for clients.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Exactly. Exactly.
Alan Steinfeld
So there’s just have like a friendly chat every week.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. And both people are happy.
Alan Steinfeld
That’s right. I can complain about my boss and my husband and my wife and my kids and my therapist can nod with sympathy and compassion. “Put the check in the box, please.” It’s a rip-off.
Dr. George Steinfeld
I’ll see you next week for some more complaints, right?
Alan Steinfeld
That’s right. Now I should say one thing. Look, I was in therapy the first time essentially… three years with Sam, a guy named Sam. I saw him twice a week. He may have said four things in three years. He listened, he was a very good listener. And I do think that listening to a patient who maybe never had anybody to talk to, is very important. That is important. But after that, the question becomes, you told me a lot of things about your life. I understand to some extent what you’ve been through. What is it that you want to change? That’s where it gets… that’s the rub. What is it that you want to change?
Alan Steinfeld
And did he say that to you?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Who, my therapist? No, my therapist never said that. He just listened. That’s what I did for the first few years until we started to change my approach. With cognitive therapy, behavior therapy, and most recently…
Alan Steinfeld
So people aren’t happy, but they really don’t want to change, but they do want to change because they’re not really happy. So how do you get people to change?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Ah. So here’s… now that’s very good. So now you say to people, “I’ve listened to your story, what is it that you would like to change? You seem to be feeling lousy. Your thinking is a little distorted, you make a lot of cognitive errors. You behave in ways that don’t bring you fulfillment. Do you want to change the way you think? Do you want to change the way you feel? Do you want to change what you do in order to bring you better outcomes? Let’s develop a contract. So we know when therapy ends.” If you don’t know when therapy ends, it never ends.
Alan Steinfeld
And you wanted to end. Most therapists don’t want it to end because…
Dr. George Steinfeld
They don’t want it to end. They don’t want it to end. That’s right. So since… so cognitive and behavior therapists knew about this for a long time and they approach it differently. From the analytic point of view, the cognitive point of view, they all have different approaches to helping people change. However, over the last 20 odd years, you know I’ve been interested in the energy healing techniques.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. The tapping technique. Yeah.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That is a cure for resistance.
Alan Steinfeld
But how does that work? I mean, you ask a person, do you want to change and he nods his head… “Yes or no” with the head…
Dr. George Steinfeld
You want to change. Yes, he goes “yes”. It’ll be good for me to change. Yes. I don’t deserve to change. Uh-oh.
Alan Steinfeld
What comes up when they say “I don’t deserve to change”? What happens?
Dr. George Steinfeld
They can’t say… if I ask them, “I deserve to change,” you might get “No.”
Alan Steinfeld
Ah.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Or, “I’m afraid to change.” You might get a “yes”. “Something bad is going to happen if I change,” right? So I have listed, through my research, about a hundred statements, all of which are potentially resistances to change. So now, if I get to the resistance… if you don’t get to the resistance, you never change. You never get better. No matter how much therapy you’re in, you will always sabotage it. So you have to get past the resistance before you solve the problem. You don’t solve the problem, because you’re going to sabotage it. We know that for depressives, we know that for addictive people, we know that people who are anxious all their lives, we know that people who are depressed for a long… they have an investment in not changing.
Alan Steinfeld
Right, because they’re used to being the way they are, and the people around them are used to it, and so there are consequences if you change. The people around you are going to change in relation to you.
Dr. George Steinfeld
So how do you break through that? So I tell them exactly what I’m telling you. I tell them what I’m telling you. That unless you overcome your resist… so I give them techniques to overcome their emotional distress, right? And we practice in the office. These tapping techniques, you know? And they work in the office. The person is anxious, we overcome their phobia or their anxiety in the office, right? I say, “Now go home, and whenever you feel a stressful moment coming on, I want you to do this procedure.” Do you know what happens?
Alan Steinfeld
What?
Dr. George Steinfeld
They don’t do it.
Alan Steinfeld
But why does the procedure work anyway? Even let’s say they did do it, why is that procedure so therapeutic for people?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Because it gets rid of your emotional distress very rapidly.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, but how does it work? You’re tapping on the ends of your acupuncture points. How does it actually work to shift people? I’m just curious in the science behind it.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, you’re asking a very good question because the theory, the theory is that your thoughts create a blockage in the energy meridian system. A perturbation. And when you tap, it sends a message through the energy systems that clears away the blockage. That’s the theory. I’m not sure the theory is true. But it works. Now, I think other things are at play here, okay, that still need to be investigated. And I talk about that too. But that’s the theory. The theory is the cause of all emotional distress is a blockage in the energy system. You tap on these energy spots and it clears those blockages away and you release all of those negative emotions. This began with a guy named Callahan. The Callahan tapping technique, now it’s called tapping. EFT, I think it’s another name for it.
Alan Steinfeld
I first got to know Callahan’s work, this was about 24 years ago, right? I first got to know Callahan’s work. He just died by the way in November.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Oh, he did?
Alan Steinfeld
He did. Brilliant. He came up with all of this. And Gary Craig studied with him and developed a simplified procedure out of the Callahan method, and everybody is using Gary Craig’s procedure throughout the world. And it was just approved, it was just approved by the American Psychological Association for trauma and anxiety states. And you know ABA.
Alan Steinfeld
Wow. I didn’t realize that. But going back to your point, when people get home and they have the option to do this procedure, they wouldn’t do it because they’re still stuck and they didn’t want to change.
Dr. George Steinfeld
No, they don’t tell… they give me all sorts of reasons why they don’t do it. I couldn’t think of it, I didn’t have time to think of it. They gave me all sorts of reasons. So then when they start giving me a lot of reasons, then I go, well, let’s take a closer look at maybe there’s some other reasons that you are not doing the work. Because therapy is not… therapy is not something that you do only in the sessions. You do therapy 24/7.
Alan Steinfeld
I see. Meaning that you’re always working with yourself if you want to change. Yes.
Dr. George Steinfeld
You’re always… you’re always working with yourself and Ram Dass, which is beautiful because Ram Dass says, at any moment in time, you have the potential for awakening and get free. And so I see these emotional freedom techniques as a way of getting free. Because it frees you up. In my view.
Alan Steinfeld
You have a whole chapter, and I know this personally too, that the people closest to you are not going to necessarily be the ones to help you. I wanted to talk about a couple parts. Is it true you can’t be a prophet in your own town? Does that hold true for you? You can’t counsel your own family?
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. Because the role of an uncle, the role of a father… you can’t be an uncle and be their therapist. You can’t be a father and be the therapist. Okay? People expect certain things from their father and from their uncle. And they don’t look at you as an expert. Plus, you probably… plus, a therapist shouldn’t have their own biases about how this child or a person should turn out. They should be neutral. Since an uncle has biases and parents have their own biases, they’re not really helpful.
Alan Steinfeld
Yeah, and well, what I found very helpful reading one of the chapters was your letter of apologies to family members that you felt you had wronged. Was it something part of your whole new insight?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, the insight I had was not only, of course, taking an inventory of what I did wrong or didn’t do with family. This goes for my colleagues as well because there were some people that I didn’t treat nicely at all because they were pissing me off because they weren’t going along with my program in my jobs. So, I took an inventory and decided when my heart opened up… see, as I grew more connected to what’s right, my heart opened up. And when it started opening up, it was clear that when you’re an arrogant ass like I was much of the time, I wasn’t an attractive person to be with. So, I would tell people, look, what to do. They didn’t want to know what to do from me. So…
Alan Steinfeld
Were you open to apologize? Most people aren’t. They just let things…
Dr. George Steinfeld
What do you say when you apologize to a family member? Did you say, “I’m sorry”? Does that do anything? That doesn’t do it. Oh, no. I said to them, I spelled out exactly what I did wrong. The way I behaved over the years in terms of specific behaviors, not necessarily just a feeling, I would say, look, whenever we had a conversation and you brought up an emotional topic, I tried to figure it out for you instead of listening. That was a big issue for me. I wanted to solve the problem for you rather than hearing your pain. And that was a mistake on my part. And people respond very nicely to that. Most people.
Alan Steinfeld
Because they realize that you hear them finally.
Dr. George Steinfeld
They finally realized that I got what they were trying to tell me. So, yeah. And I… that I tell my patients to do that too. If you’re really interested in growing up and freeing yourself, go make amends to the people that you feel you’ve hurt.
Alan Steinfeld
Oh. I see. Do they take that well? Most of the clients. Oh, yeah. Most of the clients…
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, they don’t do it. Oh, I see. Because they feel they don’t have to apologize. Let them apologize first. You know, you get into all these ego games.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. You also talk about the ego going from an ego-driven society to a soul-driven one. Because it seems like psychology was completely ego-based. And you’re basically introducing the soul factor here.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Exactly. Right. I talk about getting out of the ego into your soul. Because the soul really is, as I see it, is our connection to the divine. And the qualities of the divine are compassion, love, empathy, connection. So the soul is just a metaphor for these very, very deep connections. While the ego separates us from everybody. It makes us special. And that creates conflict. When everyone is in their ego, nobody really meets heart to heart. But… how long did it take you to figure that out? Why is it that most psychologists are still operating under the ego principle?
Dr. George Steinfeld
They’re still caught up in it. Look, psychoanalysis was the science of the ego. That’s all they studied. Okay? And they made the ego god. That’s what you had to strengthen. And they saw no possibility of transcending it. Transcending the ego to Freud meant you were psychotic or crazy.
Alan Steinfeld
So the soul was an illness to them.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. Oh, exactly. The soul was a projection. I mean, they explained away all of these spiritual experiences as pathology.
Alan Steinfeld
Because they only saw what was their own truth. Again, coming back to your quote.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s right. They were in this little box. So I talk a little bit about going to an ASP conference or transpersonal conferences, people like you and others, right, taking the ego and transcending it. Where do we put the ego? Because you still need an ego in this world. The question is who runs who. Does the soul run the ego or does the ego run the soul?
Alan Steinfeld
That’s the real shift in psychology that people have to realize. You know, the ego is a tool, not the master. It’s the servant.
Dr. George Steinfeld
It’s the tool. It’s a wonderful tool, but when it becomes the master, it destroys us. And that’s what’s happening to society. We are so ego-driven. People with power, with money, they control the world.
Alan Steinfeld
Right. I think if they saw their interconnection, it wouldn’t happen as much. I mean, we still… but that takes… I guess your techniques are somewhat breaking through the resistance of that isolated self to feel its connection to a larger…
Dr. George Steinfeld
Well, it does in a small way. I try to get them to recognize that they are not their ego. Because we tend to think that when the ego gets hurt, we are destroyed. Like, you take criticism. Your ego gets deflated. You feel less than. Well, what is that? That’s an illusion. You’re not less than. Your ego is an object. It’s a concept.
Alan Steinfeld
But isn’t that hard for the typical, average person who goes to a psychologist to change? They just want their problems to feel better. They don’t want to transcend the ego necessarily.
Dr. George Steinfeld
That’s why I only get so far with most of my clients. Let’s make you a healthy ego. Right. I try to give them some coping skills, some techniques to handle stress. But the real depth of this is not reachable to most of my clients.
Alan Steinfeld
Okay. I get that. So how do you find meaning in your work when you’re still seeing clients, when it only goes so deep?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Ah, that’s beautiful. Yes. How do I get meaning? I get meaning because I try to maintain an open heart with them even if they don’t get there. That’s my work. My work is not necessarily to fix them. My work is to stay present, loving, conscious, to send out that intention.
Alan Steinfeld
Like Ram Dass said. He didn’t want to fix anybody.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Right. He doesn’t want to fix anyone. And it was hard for me because the traditional medical model was to fix them. If I don’t fix them, then I’m a failure. See, that was my own ego involved. Once I transcend that and say I don’t really have to fix you, your problem is really none of my business. It’s yours. It’s hard. Sometimes I fall back. I still have to be aware of what I’m doing. It’s a daily, minute to minute practice.
Alan Steinfeld
It’s fantastic you’re still doing this, and with your experience, you must be a really good space for people who want this kind of help.
Dr. George Steinfeld
I hope I am. I try.
Alan Steinfeld
Where can people get the book? What is it, “Bullshit in Psychotherapy”?
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. “Bullshit in Psychotherapy.” It should be available on Amazon. Soon. We’ll get an exact date, and people can keep looking. Because this is really the essential manual, I would say, for what therapy should really be looking at. The real core, and cutting through all the crap that goes on.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Yes. It exposes the problems and also points a way forward. Towards the heart, the soul.
Alan Steinfeld
Great talking to you. We covered a lot of history, I never knew those things. Thank you for doing this. I really enjoyed it. Let’s talk again soon. For more information you can check out newrealities.com. Thank you, Uncle George, Dr. George Steinfeld. And we’ll sign off. Thanks everyone for listening.
Dr. George Steinfeld
Thank you, Alan. Bye-bye.
Alan Steinfeld
Bye-bye.