“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Give us a moment … The complete physician would be a person who learned to understand the dynamics of being, the soul-body relationship — one who was healthy in his or her own body. Unhappy people cannot teach you to be happy. Sick ones cannot teach you to be well. Psychiatrists have a high suicide rate. Why do you think they can help you live happily, or add to your vitality? Physicians are not the healthiest of men by far.⁴ Why do you think they can cure you?

(With emphasis:) Now in your framework of beliefs the psychiatrists and the doctors are helpful. They know more than you do about the techniques upon which you all agree. While the society accepts these techniques, then you are to some extent dependent upon them, and you had better think twice before you let them go. But in greater, more vital issues, the sick doctor does not know as much about health as an “uneducated, untrained,” but healthy person — and I am speaking in quite practical terms. The person who is healthy understands the dynamics of health. In your framework it seems that his or her understanding can be of little practical value to you if you are, for instance, unhealthy. But a true medical profession would be, literally, a health profession. It would seek out people who were healthy and learn from them how to promote health, and not how to diagram disease.

4. Current statistics show that in the United States the suicide rate for psychiatrists, doctors, and dentists is three to four times higher than it is for the rest of the population. There’s much discussion now of the additional stresses and frustrations encountered by those in the medical disciplines, aside from personality traits or conflicts that can lead an individual to take his or her own life; the suicide of a doctor, for instance, may be triggered by his inability to fulfill the role society expects of him.

(It will be noticed that we received the psychiatrist’s letter about Feb. [...]

The exasperation comes because your good psychiatrist almost undermined the confidence that I managed to give Ruburt in our session with your friend Philip.

(“What do you have to say about the psychiatrist’s idea, that all this is merely Jane’s subconscious talking?”)

1. Volume 2 of “Unknown” Reality contains a number of references to Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist who lived from 1875–1961.

Many psychiatrists and psychologists now realize that a disturbed client (long pause) cannot be helped sufficiently unless the individual is considered along with his or her relationship to the family unit.

The landscape of the psyche is indeed revealed, bringing good data to the psychiatrist. [...]

[...] The spontaneity of such sessions do indeed seem to present psychiatrists and psychologists with a map of the psyche. [...]

[...] Ruburt’s idea of seeing your psychiatrist (Dr. Beahrs) is good in that regard. [...]

The psychiatrist may say, “Go along entirely with the experience. [...]

(Long pause.) I am aware that many psychologists and psychiatrists feel that they are charting the course of the psyche with these methods. [...]

[...] The psychiatrist’s letter (Dr. Beahrs) represents but one communication, but many others read the material and use it, and do not write you, any more than you write to other authors. [...]

(Last Thursday night our guest was John Beahrs, a psychiatrist from the Seattle, Washington area. [...]

(I’d been commenting on her call tonight to a psychiatrist—Dr. Beahrs—who’d written her recently from Washington state, and of his informing her that another doctor out there is also using the Seth material ideas in dealing with her patients. [...]

[...] But many people look to those outside themselves — psychics, doctors, psychiatrists, priests, ministers, friends — for the answers to overall life situations, and in so doing they deny their own abilities of self-understanding and growth.

[...] These “guys” then will be doctors, parapsychologists, psychiatrists, and members of other scientific disciplines.

(Joan Grant is evidently a well-known English medium, and her husband, Denys Kelsey, a practicing psychiatrist who tells of some remarkable successes in treating patients, while keeping in mind the role reincarnation can play in present “living” personality patterns.

Your young man gave you an excellent instance—a “case” that the most noteworthy psychologists or psychiatrists, if they had time, would find fascinating. [...]

[...] I favored a parapsychologist, Jane a psychiatrist. [...]

[...] Jane was wondering rather idly whether a psychiatrist or a scientist might get more out of the material when Seth came through again. [...]

[...] Very briefly, it concerns the behavior of a local psychiatrist and his wife—one of those continuing affairs that have been well known locally for some time, yet never getting into the newspaper.

(In the next session, the 28th, Seth discusses the reply a well-known psychiatrist sent us in answer to my letter of Friday,. [...]

[...] She said that she has been stewing about the problem of involvement since receiving the letter from the psychiatrist, but that the above material made her feel better.

[...] Another is my own longtime interest in the American psychologist and philosopher, William James [1842–1910]; he wrote the classic The Varieties of Religious Experience.³ A third is a letter received last week from a Jungian psychologist who had been inspired by Seth’s material on the Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung [1875–1961], in Chapter 13 of Seth Speaks. [...]