Less Therapy, Please

One cannot pretend that our serious thinkers have been derelict. They have clearly seen and analyzed the story. In today’s America Western civilization, Judeo-Christianity, has been replaced by the religion of therapy. 

As Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel conceptualized it in their book, One Nation Under Therapy, we have made therapeutic culture a replacement for religion.

It began with Philip Rieff’s 1968 opus, The Triumph of the Therapeutic. And then, there was Frank Furedi’s book, Therapy Culture, published in 2003.

Dare I say that this blog, for the past fifteen years, has analyzed in detail the same problem. Be that as it may, Theodore Dalrymple has added to the mix. He just brought forth an article for the City Journal, entitled “The Therapeutic Turn.”

Dalrymple takes us back to the 1950s, to a time before we learned to complain about everything and before we learned that we did not earn whatever we have.

Whether coincidentally or not, psychologization occurred at a time when religious belief declined and Western society lost faith in itself, to the point at which shame about, rather than pride in, the past became the default attitude, imparted to young minds by almost every possible means. This takes the form not of reasoned argument but of indoctrination about the past.

In the old days, he opens, things were not so bad:

For example, we completed our education without an enormous burden of debt, a career path was more or less laid out for us, a lifetime of stable and reasonably well-paid employment beckoned, and we had no fear of having to work in a job that would not, in our estimation, reflect our educational level. Asset inflation had not yet turned rent into the largest item of personal expenditure by far, nor was buying a house without parental help beyond the bounds of possibility. Rising prosperity seemed almost a law of nature.

During those halcyon days, life was simpler, because we were not constantly berating ourselves for our own and our ancestor’s sins. Primary among them was the sin of bigotry.

Most importantly, he says, we lived in stable homes in cohesive communities:

Almost all of us came from two-parent households; one-parent households were infrequent and typically the result of death, not divorce. Family stability was the norm. I even remember when divorce was spoken of sotto voce, as discreditable. Stability was not the same as happiness, of course, but few people (including me) recognized its value independent of any happiness that it brought. There was much hypocrisy and deception, but it was hidden.

We have, as the saying goes, come a long way. The same applies to Great Britain:

 In England, a child has a greater chance of having a television in his bedroom than having a father who has lived at home throughout his or her childhood. It is said that a fifth of children do not eat with another member of their family (or household) more than once a fortnight. When I used to visit patients at home—things have probably deteriorated since—I would often find no evidence of cooking ever taking place in the house, with no place even given over to a dining table. In personal relations, as Marx put it in another context, all that is solid has melted into air. And children are now not even supposed to accept without question what sex they were born into. Life for them has become a great existential supermarket, without criteria of judgment.

But then, along came therapy. People who were living good lives were denounced as frauds. They were covering up horrors and monstrosities that no one could bear to consider. Seeking membership in the new culture, we sought to uncover our psychological problems. And we needed to accept that they were the meaning of our lives.

With the therapeutic turn, psychological problems were found likewise to be ubiquitous, and much of the world’s evil or misery attributed to them. The main difference was in the intellectual solidity of the bacteriological science, and the concrete good that it soon did. By contrast, the therapeutic turn was more like psychoanalysis in the estimation of the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus: the disease that it pretends to cure.

Why therapy? According to Dalrymple,therapy pretends to offer a scientific explanation of anomalous human behavior. And it promises that once we understand human psychology we will naturally live better lives:

Psychology continued its inexorable rise as the supposedly scientific explanation of human life, a rise of which the prestige of psychoanalysis was both a cause and a manifestation, though many other psychological theories soon entered the field. 

Explanation, however, held out as a corollary the possibility of a better, suffering-free life for everyone, once basic needs such as those for food and shelter were met, as they were, to an extent unprecedented in history.

Therapy taught people to introspect, to look inside their souls and to ignore the complexities of real life.

First, it encouraged people to examine their thoughts and emotions much as a hypochondriac takes his pulse or attends to the minor sensations in his abdomen, such that minor fluctuations took on major and often sinister significance; and second, that the difference between the major and the minor, the serious and the trivial, the banal and the significant in life was expunged.

And, also:

To talk endlessly about oneself to an audience (albeit here only of one, though social media have multiplied the audience by many times), in the expectation that the buried psychological treasure will one day emerge to solve all dissatisfactions with life at a stroke, is at the heart of much “psychological-mindedness.”

People who believe that they will improve their lives by gaining understanding are sacrificing moral agency on the bonfire of inanities. One recalls that Sommers and Satel identified this problem in their book, One Nation Under Therapy. 

While the psychologization of life increases the tendency of people to think about themselves, it also places a lens of theory between themselves and their experiences. They become objects to themselves rather than self-directed subjects. Not infrequently, one hears people talking of themselves as if they were neurochemicals, or at least the victims of their neurochemicals. This, as a corollary, places the onus of psychological well-being on those who supposedly know how to manipulate their neurochemicals to render life easier. Other theories offer similarly technical solutions to human problems.

The founding thesis of therapy has it that once you clean out your mental attic and come to understand why you are doing what you are doing, you will automatically do better. Of course, this is fatuous cant.

… the overall effect of psychologization is to induct them early into the idea that their problems have a technical solution, and that they are vulnerable and may well have been the victim of something external that explains their difficulties—and thereby that either minimizes or excuses their own contribution to these difficulties. Parents are often too willing to accept this because they believe it of themselves: we are now several generations into the reign of psychology as explanatory sovereign.

Dalrymple explains that therapy culture deprives people of moral agency. Rather than being responsible for their own behaviors, they have been taught that they are responsible for the planet.

With the psychologization of life, young people have ceased to become responsible for themselves; but in return, they have been made responsible for the state of the world.