Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization: Theory, Interpretation, Therapy

It is shown in this book that dreams and the symptoms of primary mental disorders are automatic responses that seek to protect physical and especially mental health on the basis of the cerebral lateralization of functions. This understanding of the symptoms and dreams and the therapist's consequent cooperation with the patient's unconscious makes very fast and effective psychotherapy possible, which is self-applicable in many disorders such as migraine and tension headaches, for example. Many

The origin of my ideas
When I was a high school student, first my grandmother and then my elder brother were hospitalized at the Bakirkoy Mental Hospital in Istanbul, the largest in Turkey. My uncle was working there as a psychiatrist together with Mazhar Osman who was a legendary figure. I went to the hospital several times and observed the behaviors of many mental patients. I also listened to the explanations of my uncle but did not believe them, because especially my brother's symptoms looked to me like they were understandable defensive responses to some old events that had hurt him much. I did not dare to mention such petit events to my uncle who was expressing very clever views, which were mostly psychoanalytic as I later understood. Today I know that a response that looks inadequate in the current situation is most probably a response to an old event that had hurt the person very much, and that such responses serve, or at least seek, to prevent the harm that might be caused by the repetition of that old event. Freud too noticed this phenomenon and talked about it in his lecture The Etiology of Hysteria, which he delivered before he switched to the fantasy theory. He said that the symptoms of hysterical patients, who were sexually abused in childhood according to him, become "understandable" (meaning defensive and more or less rational) when the circumstances in which they were initially produced were discovered. Freud abandoned this line of thought after he switched to the fantasy theory.

Being motivated probably by the above-mentioned experiences, I read in the high school (Lycee de Galatasaray) books by Descartes, Kant, Pascal, Bergson, Rousseau, James, Dirac, Poincare, and others. I studied Freud, Jung and Adler much later because their books were not to be found in the school library. I later found time also to study Shakespeare and Hitchcock and wrote and produced films, because I consider the theater a psychology laboratory where the most instructive and expensive experiments of certain types can be performed. I found out that the processes that Freud described as taking place in the minds of neurotics occur in reality in some measure in the minds of healthy persons under certain conditions, and that this is especially true concerning the drama spectators.

I studied electrical engineering and received an MS degree because I wished an occupation that produced concrete, useful results and was also close to theory. I later studied physics in USA and received a second MS degree, because my theoretical curiosity was not satisfied. I learned automatic controls from electrical engineering and had much professional experience in this field working as engineer, project manager, and contractor. As a consequence of this work, I acquired the habit of seeing cybernetic systems everywhere. This helped me to understand the automatic self-protection responses of mental patients, which are called symptoms, having also in view the behaviors of my brother, grandmother, and film spectators and the ideas of Freud and Jung. From physics, I learned theory construction and the part it plays in the progress of science. The most recent result of all these chance occurrences has been my book Cognitive-Behavioral Cybernetics of Symptoms, Dreams, Lateralization, which contains The CBC Theory and a very effective and fast method of psychotherapy based on it. I cured more than 100 migraine and tension headache patients, some of whom presented also symptoms of other types of mental disorder.