by Asim Jalis
Here is the single Google link I found searching for the "fallacy
of goal-setting".
http://www.arespress.com/AresPages/Heal/Heal.html
It's interesting. Here are some excerpts:
Goals, especially the highest and finest, work like overvalued
ides, the roots of delusions that nourish great canopies of
sheltering paranoia, those spreading ideals of size and import
which characterize the positive goals of so many schools of
therapy today. We see enough of the disastrous effect of goals
in daily life, where the belief in an overriding idea about
one's purpose in life, what one has to do, the raison d'être
for one's existence turns out to be the very goal which blocks
the way. -Hillman, 1983, p. 105
And this:
The setting of a goal or planning of specific treatments for
specific ailments locks both patient and therapist into
specific ideas of problem and solution, ailment and remedy,
wound and healing, and prohibits the possibility of radical
shifts of imagination.
Clinical Psychology is expert at this kind of unimaginative
fixing due to its close association with the medical model. It
must entertain the fantasy of wound and healing, problem and
solution, because if it cannot show an observable linear
progress, the insurance companies which support it will not
pay. Indeed, these companies call themselves "health insurance"
and insure that we stay engaged with the fantasy of health.
Goals assume a kind of linear model of progress. I also like
their use of the word "fantasy". A fantasy fulfills a
psychological need.
'To be healed' is that goal which takes one into therapy, and
we are healed of that goal when we recognize it as a fiction.
Now the goal as fiction has become a psychic reality, become a
psychic reality itself, so that indeed the way did become the
goal. This deliteralized method of healing, so ironic,
slippery, paradoxical, that seems to fulfill and defeat our
striving at the same time (as if the two senses of 'want'
suddenly conjoin), bespeaks the mercurial consciousness of
Hermes, Guide of Souls, Guide of Ways. -Hillman, 1983, p. 105
