In an age in which, despite over 100 years of Western psychiatry, psychotherapy and counselling, mental illness rates continue to rise and health services are demoralised and crumbling under the impossible expectations people have of them, Michael Soth’s misrepresentation of the Human Givens (HG) approach to psychotherapy requires refutation.¹ As one of the originators of the organising idea behind the Human Givens approach and principal of MindFields College, which is driving a major attempt to bring common sense and greater objectivity to the field, I should like to submit the following corrective.

Soth says our approach is ‘a reinvention and re-combination of earlier ideas that we are oblivious of and consistently fail to acknowledge’. He also, rashly, declares that we ‘betray our own ignorance of our shared history as a field’. As our students know, we constantly refer to the study of innate emotional needs as having a truly ancient pedigree and over the years we have plumbed many eras and cultures for information and insight. For example we often refer to the great Persian polymath and physician, Al-Razi, (865-925) who first coined the term ‘psychotherapy’², and ‘rejected the mind-body dichotomy and pioneered the concept of mental health and self-esteem as being essential to a patient’s welfare. This “sound mind, healthy body” connection prompted him to frequently communicate with his patients on a friendly level, encouraging them to heed his advice as a path to their recovery.’³ We also dedicate enormous amounts of time to the art of telling stories that heal, a tradition that dates back to ancient Egypt and probably to Upper Paleolithic times.⁴ (Any story that heals only does so because in some way it addresses the innate needs of the listener.)

If Soth had read our book, Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking, he would have found the words ‘There is widespread agreement as to the nature of our emotional needs’ (page 93). We have never claimed that we are the originators of this idea. Our book contains over 20 pages of references, almost all to other people’s work.⁵ We cannot possibly include in our writings and references everyone who has been aware of innate needs over the last few centuries or even decades, and are happy to acknowledge that Soth mentions some we haven’t referred to in print: we never set out to write an all-inclusive encyclopaedia of all facts known about the topic.

I do wish to clarify, however, that for several years it has been stated on the Human Givens Institute website that: ‘In terms of the history of where our knowledge about human needs comes from, there has been a distinguished cast of contributors, going right back to ancient times. More recently, William James, Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler explored human needs, and there was an outstanding contribution by Abraham Maslow, the pioneer of humanistic psychology, who first talked about a hierarchy of needs. It was Abraham Maslow who introduced the idea that, until basic needs are met, people can’t engage with questions of meaning and spirituality – what he calls self-actualisation.

‘Another contributor was William Glasser, who put forward the idea that fulfilment of people’s needs for control, power, achievement and intimacy depends on their ability to behave responsibly and conscientiously; he argued vehemently that mental illness springs from these needs not being met. So the Human Givens approach belongs to no specific people … it belongs to the human species. We are just talking more precisely about what nature has gifted us, and there have been many great contributors down the millennia and the centuries, who have contributed to our understanding of the human givens.’⁶

Had Soth attended any MindFields College seminars or workshops (to date he has not) or Human Givens conferences, he would have heard it said, over and again, that all the less wacky schools of psychotherapy have fragments of real value at their heart. He would also know in what way our ideas are different from, and an advance on, Maslow’s, Glasser’s and others. But he would also know of our concern about the damage done by some models of therapy – including inducing false memories, keeping depressed or anxious people unnecessarily in therapy for months or even years, failing to detraumatise patients and being non directive with patients who are desperate for direction because they have become too emotional to help themselves etc.

Soth makes much of our claim to have put forward the first practical ‘bio-psycho-social’ form of psychotherapy. Of course there are thousands of references on the internet to the need for a ‘bio-psycho-social’ model. This has always been an ideal, but we believe that it is only through the HG formulation that it has become a practical possibility.⁷ Currently, apart from HG, there are no schools of psychotherapy that use the very latest biological, psychological and sociological knowledge and integrate it in a variety of practical ways. That is why our approach is used not only by psychotherapists but by teachers, social workers, medical doctors, physiotherapists, managers and even lawyers, among others: it takes into account a person’s whole life, which encompasses, among other things, housing, finances, physical health, relationships, career aspirations and job satisfaction, and addresses within such areas all the many hindrances to getting our innate emotional needs met – such as fear and insecurity, lack of life skills, debt, reliance on benefits, chronic pain and so forth. We regard it as vital that all these bio-psycho-social elements are addressed in any holistic model of therapy.

Psychotherapy, if it is to be taken seriously, has to be founded on a body of knowledge that all can agree upon. Our motive and stated intent has always been to unify the field since it is absurd to have so many different ‘models’. What has been needed for a long time has been a common lingua franca about mental health so therapists and patients, and anyone in the people caring professions, can think more clearly about what they are doing. And this is what the Human Givens approach brings to the field. Most people who study with us find the lack of psychobabble, our stress on experiential evidence and outcomes, and the profundity of our highly practical approach illuminating and refreshing in this age of gobbledegook. We have always readily acknowledged the positive contributions of other models of therapy and the fact that we subsume those ideas and techniques that have been shown to work under the HG organising idea. Therapists who have internalised this knowledge get results quickly with most patients, as you would expect from something that unifies the best of current practice.

As for Soth’s claim that Joe Griffin’s expectation fulfilment theory of dreams, one of the foundations of the success of Human Givens therapy, has ‘the same dynamic’ as Fritz Perls’ dream theory, is, with due respect, ludicrous. As Gestalt practitioners know, Perls believed that all elements of a dream are projections of parts of the personality of the dreamer that have been ignored, rejected or suppressed.⁸ No expert on dreaming has ever suggested that Perls’ ‘unfinished cycles’ theory is similar to Griffin’s. And why would they? It isn’t remotely like it. The expectation fulfilment theory, which is easily testable and consistent with neuroscientific and current sleep research findings, explains far more about how the brain deals with emotions than any previous dream theory. For example, it explains why mammals evolved to dream, why we dream in metaphor, why depressed people dream more intensely than non-depressed people and the connection between dreaming and psychosis, more than any other theory to date.^{9, 10}

Soth seems to have created a paper tiger purely from his own imaginings. Thoughtful readers are more likely to agree with the author of The Eternal Child, Dr Clive Bromhall, who wrote that Griffin’s theory, ‘exquisitely scythes through the Gordian knot created by past dream theories’.

Soth, in an act of supreme confidence, concludes by presuming to know what proponents of the Human Givens approach would ‘argue’. Here, then, is what we argue, in our words, not his:

Our innate physical and emotional needs are ‘human givens’.¹¹ When a person’s innate needs are met in the environment, he or she will flourish. This truth derives from the universal law of all life forms, that, to survive, each organism must continually maintain and rebuild itself by taking in sufficient and appropriate nourishment (physical and, in the case of higher mammals, emotional) from the environment. All life depends on this genetically-driven process. This is a fundamental truth everyone can agree on.

Nature also gives us resources to help us get those needs met, such as the ability to learn, remember and use imagination to solve problems. These are also human givens and, if they are damaged in some way, say through inappropriate conditioning or psychological trauma, they have to be repaired, and effective therapy can usually do this.

The human givens – our innate needs and resources – are inescapable. They are nature’s guidance system and tuning in to them helps us think clearly about how we live, raise children, work and are governed. It follows that psychotherapists and teachers especially need to understand them.

It is because we are driven by nature to get our emotional needs met that, if we can’t do so in healthy ways, we try and do so in less healthy ones. For example, we are social animals and have a need to belong to groups. So if the only community in a young person’s neighbourhood is a gang of antisocial, binge-drinking youths, he or she will be strongly inclined to join them. Hence the quality of the social world around children is critical.

Just as someone cannot be mentally ill if his or her emotional needs are being met in a balanced way, so an organisation can flourish only when the emotional needs of those in it are being met well and it is serving the wider community effectively.

There are three ways that people can be prevented from getting their innate emotional needs met and any one of them is sufficient to generate unhealthy levels of stress, with the real danger that anxiety or anger disorders will then develop, depression set in, or addictive behaviours take hold. The three factors are:

• The environment the person lives or works in is ‘sick’ and is preventing them from getting their needs met (as in having to endure an abusive, dysfunctional family, living in a threatening neighbourhood or working for a bully)
• The person doesn’t know how to operate their internal guidance system so as to get their needs met (as in learned helplessness, when someone is conditioned to have low expectations of themselves – or misuse their imagination, as in worrying instead of solving problems, which precipitates depression)
• The person’s innate guidance system is damaged in some way: perhaps through faulty transmission of genetic knowledge (as in autism and Asperger’s), poor diet (not getting proper nutriment to the brain), poisoning (drugs, alcohol etc), physical accidents to the brain, or psychological trauma (including PTSD).

Soth says, rather grandly, that he was ‘prompted to engage’ with Human Givens ‘more deeply’. I hope one day he will. In the meantime, I also hope that your readers will think and find out for themselves.

Ivan Tyrrell
Principal of MindFields College, Editorial Director of the Human Givens journal

1. Soth M. Boastful claims. Letters. Therapy Today. 2010; 21(1):39-41.
2. Peseschkian N. Oriental stories as tools in psychotherapy: The merchant and the parrot. Berlin: Springer-Verlag; 1986.
3. Stolyarov II H. Rhazes: The thinking Western physician. The rational argumentator. 2002; VI.
4. Parkinson R. Transforming tales: How stories can change people. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers; 2009.
5. Griffin J, Tyrrell I. Human Givens: A new approach to emotional health and clear thinking. Chalvington: HG Publishing; 2003.
6. www.hgi.org.uk/archive/dreamtoforget.htm
7. Caldwell I. The road to recovery. In Griffin J, Tyrrell I (eds) An idea in practice: Using the Human Givens approach. Chalvington: HG Publishing; 2007.
8. Coolidge FL. Dream interpretation as a psychotherapeutic technique. Oxford: Radcliffe Publishing; 2006.
9. Griffin J, Tyrrell I. Dreaming reality: How dreaming keeps us sane, or can drive us mad. Chalvington: HG Publishing; 2004.
10. www.why-we-dream.com
11. www.mindfields.org.uk