Our culture is increasingly influenced by the New Age values of individual expression and emotional candour. To “get in touch with your feelings” is a moral imperative; the creed of the New World Order.

As Christ’s army gets its marching orders from the populace, with an increasingly pick’n’mix attitude towards dogma and a decline in vocations, there is room for a new force to take its place. As the seminaries churn out fewer and fewer ministers each year, the counselling schools more than make up for them.

It won’t be a bolt from the blue for you to hear that I’m training as a counsellor in London. I’ve just finished the first year; in another two I’ll be qualified; and there’s another two years to go if I want to go deeper and qualify as a psychotherapist, and get an MA.

Strange as it may seem, as I face the prospect of becoming a New Age “priest” in the Millennium year, I don’t believe that this dawning Age of Aquarius will be any more or less enlightened than that which it is replacing. Institutionalised Christianity, as we know, has enormous problems with, among other issues, sexuality. The hypocrisy that results from this is breathtaking. It is a mistake, however, to believe that the morality that replaces it would be free of double standards.

The more people set themselves up as arbiters of morality, the more fallible they become. It’s human nature. It’s hard to reconcile the man who started off Christianity, the rebel with a cause, with the decrepit reactionary absolutist in Rome who’s currently supposed to be spreading his word. For the Church to have got this corrupt, at some stage, early on, there must have been someone who put its reputation as an institution first, ahead of individual conscience. Someone who believed that it was more important that the role he was playing was respected rather than to admit to failure, to sin, to being human. Once that decision was made, and his peers colluded with him in the cover-up, then the rot set in.

COWGIRL LESBIAN

The confessors of the modern age – those who describe themselves as counsellors, psychotherapists, psychoanalysts or psychiatrists – are faced with similar temptations to conceal their own fallibility, to uphold the authority of their own tradition or school. Homosexuality is a most useful litmus test.

For decades, homosexuality was an illness, numbered 402.0 in the World Health Organisation’s classification of diseases. There was not much to choose between religion and psychology in its condemnation for most of this century. Happily, this has changed; although you will be hard-pressed to find a Jungian or Freudian who is openly gay, so conservative are the training bodies to this day.

I chose to study a form of counselling called Psychosynthesis, started by a man called Assagioli in Italy. He was a respected psychoanalyst, a friend of Jung’s. I chose it not because of the clarity of the theory (which is eccentric to say the least – Assagioli didn’t write about childhood, for example) but because of a joke the facilitator made at the end of a week-long course I did there a few years ago.

We, the participants, were posing for a group photo, and she slipped in to the back row between me and a Texan cowgirl lesbian that I had befriended, muttering that she wanted to “stand with the perverts”. She was coming out to us. I fell about the place laughing with relief; because I felt that if a teacher could make such a risky joke about something that was pathologised not so many years ago, then I felt there would be room enough for me in that establishment.

Of course, there was more to my choice than that. A strong motivating factor was the “normality” of the people studying and teaching Psychosynthesis; as far as I can tell, they seem to be to exhibit most of the classic symptoms of being human. They seem nice people, with no bullshit about them. They may be a bit Low Church as psychotherapists go, but that seems to me to be all the healthier.

OPRAH CULTURE

I’ve met seriously fucked-up psychoanalysts, who see the world entirely in terms of pathology and woundedness and their capacity to heal, and haven’t got a life to speak of. In their way of working, they attempt to hide behind an impassive mask; you, the client, writhe around on the couch staring at the ceiling while they occasionally interject with a pithy “So?” or a withering “But?” They strive, as much as possible, to wipe out all traces of their personality in their work, so that you have a blank screen on which to project all your muck.

It’s a powerful process, but one with many pitfalls. In so many cases, a little empathy is all that a person needs; a sympathetic ear, an understanding face. So often, it is the lack of such empathy when younger that results in suffering later on. It doesn’t make sense to me to compound that damage by maintaining a deliberately cold relationship, and charging £30Stg. an hour for it to boot.

Who’s to say, however, that my way will be the right way to help anyone who comes to me for counselling? There’s no way of knowing. I’m bound to make mistakes, just like anyone else. At least the way I’m being taught, I’m more likely to admit them to my client – I won’t end up thinking I’m God’s gift to the counselling world and my client is not going to think that they’ve got it wrong again. But I can only speak for myself.

As counselling/psychotherapy increases its presence in our consciousness, as the Oprah culture takes over, there will be more and more people purporting to speak from a position of moral authority, pontificating on the mental health of others, just as their religious counterparts did before them. The more they become identified as arbiters of morality, the more likely it is that any personal indiscretions or failings will become embarrassing to them, for their authority will be undermined.

The mistake is to believe that counsellors are any less flawed than the rest of us; that they have discovered the secret to happiness, or the ethical life. It’s bullshit. I can say that with authority.

Perhaps in retrospect I made the mistake long ago of believing that priests were holier than the rest of us. Isn’t that a bizarre concept? I don’t know whatever possessed me.