IJSP Number 4, 2022

52 Some of them want to abuse you Some of them want to be abused (Hold your head up – Keep your head up – MOVIN’ ON)” [2] 2. Reconsidering psychotherapy and supervision What is surprising and most amazing, in pretty much every social encounter (psychotherapists or psychologists included), is the fact that their psychological problematic level is taken as implicitly granted and actually never discussed openly. That seems to be the norm every time one goes to another person to ask, demand, search or appeal for understanding, treatment, or some sort of resolve or solution for insolvable life problems or complicated emotional issues. Which means that the game is set from the beginning: the asking part is or puts him/herself in a one-down position while ‘pushing ‘the other communication partner, the receiving part, onto the one-up level – imbued with authority, knowledge, (life) experience or having the (good) solution or the best advice at hand. Without even realizing it, the encounter is biased for both, from the beginning by the ‘asking person’, on the one hand, and by the waiting and receiving offer mad e by the ‘resolving person’, usually a psychologist or therapist, on the other. At the same time, this off-balancing of an otherwise normal interhuman relation, is endorsed by the receiving and resolving person by accepting the one-up position he or she was lured into and pushed onto. As such, it is a two-party game, a game people play very often without even realizing its widespread ramifications and sometime ominous contamination. And, there are not only those evident psychic and emotional ramifications, ones we tend to take for granted in every psychological encounter but, what we want to discuss here in more detail, are also the more profound existential issues which constitute the basis for the superficial level enhanced and studied in the books of scientific, cognitive-behavioural psychology. As an entire branch of psychological research and study has emphasized, underneath or beyond the usual considerations psychologists do, there is a deeper and more mysterious level to be found, a stratum that the founder of logotherapy, V. Frankl, named the noetic . From a strictly and scholarly psychological point of view, nous – Greek for spirit, intellect, mind – is irrelevant, unscientific and, consequently, out of discussion or at least situated somewhere at the m argins of no man’s land. We cannot forget that that strict psychological viewpoint is based on and is the base of the relatively recent science of psychology (its ‘ birth date ’ being 1860) and that since then it has stood under the powerful influence and constant pressure of the so called objective and scientific approach of reductionism, locationalism, associationism and last but not least, behaviourism coupled lately with the cognitive touch; all of which had no considerations what so ever regarding the human soul or psyche, let alone the spirit or the noetic. Behaviourism that had a very powerful influence between the two Worlds Wars was complemented and completed by the even more scientific approach of cognitive psychology - a branch of the larger domain of cognitive sciences. Once those orientations came to consider the human brain as machinery, some kind of hyper-complex computer, there was no room left for items like ‘soul’ or ‘spirit’. Even the concept of ‘mind’ is an issue that has raised