Emotional Investment

Emotional Investment: Transforming Psychotherapeutic Assumptions argues that most current psychotherapies tend to be objective or quasi-objective in their orientation, where "objective" means that mental health and mental illness are assumed to be objective realities that clinicians can access and impart to patients or clients and that patients or clients can learn (e.g. psychoanalysis, ego psychology, self psychology, behaviorism) and quasi-objective means that though lip service is given to relative realities, the actual assumptions are objective (e.g. cognitive therapy, reality therapy). As such, most psychotherapies today involve a power differential between therapist and client where the therapist, who supposedly has access to objective reality, has power over the client. Emotional Investment is offered as a new form of professional/non-professional interaction in the mental health field that equalizes the power between professional emotional investor (traditionally, the therapist) and the non- professional investor (NPI) (traditionally, the client or patient). It is based upon the philosophy of experientialism that maintains the experience, defined as a necessary combination of cognition, affect, behavior, sensation, environment, and the "I" is equal to reality. Such a way of defining experience relativizes traditional objective beliefs, forcing people to own or be responsible for their beliefs and the behavior that expresses those beliefs, and objectivizes the structure of experience itself, i.e. experience is structured the way it is regardless of what we might believe or say. If all beliefs are relative, then there exists no legitimate way to access 'objective' reality, objective assumptions inherent in most current forms of psychotherapy are nullified, and the ideological power differential between the therapist and the client is eliminated and equalized. Emotional Investment seeks to influence the direction of psychotherapy away from the oppression inherent in relationships based on power differentials and toward equality between participants in the mental health fields. ABOUT THE AUTHOR G. Michael Blahnik has earned a B.A. in Linguistics and Religion at California State University, Fullerton; an M.A. in Counseling at Xavier University; an M.A. in English at Xavier University; an M.A. in Philosophy at the University of Cincinnati, and a Ph.D. in Humanities at the Union Institute and University. He teaches Philosophy at Northern Kentucky University and Xavier University, English at University of Cincinnati and Thomas More College, and he has more than ten years experience in Mental Health, with positions ranging from social worker to psychiatric hospital program coordinator.