Question
What would the Rav say if a person has a lot of emotional problems and imbalances in his personality and he requires a lot of “therapy”, but, instead of going to a therapist (who uses secular approaches and reads all the goyish psychology books), he instead listens to the Rav’s shiurim for many hours of the day, in order to heal his soul and to learn how to balance out his soul?
It seems that there is more of a place for this kind of person to spend a lot of time analyzing his soul (for example, by listening to the Rav’s shiurim about the soul). And we know that just as a person needs to go to the doctor when he’s not feeling well and it’s not considered wasting time from Torah study, certainly when it comes to illnesses in our soul, such as when there are imbalances in one’s personality, it seems that a person would need to spend much more time learning about himself and doing “therapy” with himself for a longer amount of time, until he becomes emotionally healthy. There are probably many people like this, who have gone through all kinds of turbulence and rough situations and experiences in their life, and perhaps we can say that this is the situation of most people today (whether they are consciously aware of their issues or not).
So, it seems to me that even a man, whose main obligation is Torah study, would need to spend more time today in learning about his soul and how to balance himself out, by understanding about the 4 elements in his soul, and the 4 elements of his spouse, children, and parents, etc.
Answer
A man may spend a bit of his time of the day learning about the soul, but not most of his day. First of all, for most people, spending a lot of time learning about themselves would make them confused and they wouldn’t attain clarity anyway. Even more so, however [this would be an imbalanced approach, because] a person always needs a balance between his actions, words, character traits, and thinking, etc. For most people, this [spending so much time on learning about the soul] would not create a proper balance in their lives. Even for someone who has a much bigger need to learn about the soul and to balance out his personality, it would throw him off balance if he would spend too much time learning about his personal soul.
