Freud and Bad Therapy

Writing in UnHerd Mary Harrington emphasizes that bad therapy, as Abigail Shrier called it, was produced by a culture that is female dominant.

Most therapists today are women. And most of their clients are women. The field has marginalized men. To the point where therapists no longer treat many men. It has also succeeded in undermining male authority, to say nothing of respect for men-- and especially for fathers.

Now, Harrington believes that this represents a deviation from Freud. She seems to suggest that returning to Freud will solve some of these problems by re-establishing male authority.

I cannot say whether or not Shrier proposes this solution-- I have not yet read her book-- but clearly it is wrong. Aside from the simple fact that today’s therapy culture owes a great deal to the influence of one Benjamin Spock, a Freudian pediatrician whose child rearing manual produced the Boomer generation, the Freudian Oedipal legend does not affirm masculine or paternal authority. 

Oedipus was not a manly man. His father, Laios, was a sexual predator and a pedophile-- not a manly man. 

Marrying his mother did not grant Oedipus more manly authority. Any more than it did so for the current president of France. 

It is true that most psychoanalysts in Freud’s day were men, but that is because most doctors were men. The thrust of Freudian theory is opposed to authority.

If you miss the point you have missed Freud.

Today’s fathers are routinely caricatured as incipient or actual sexual predators. Their efforts to exercise authority are routinely derided. When you call a country authoritarian, you are dismissing it as a tyranny.

Shrier’s point about feminizing culture is correct. Rejecting masculine values, undermining all authority has been a calamity for American children. 

Harrington summarizes Shrier’s position:

The children and young people raised by boundary-negotiating, feeling-validating, trauma-exploring, “talk it out” parents and educators, marinaded in the therapeutic worldview are not, as hoped, happier, more confident, and more emotionally literate. They’re neurotic, anxious, and self-absorbed; alternately fearful of the outside world and adept at exploiting soft-authoritarian therapeutic institutions for personal advantage; above all, they are profoundly unhappy.

Oedipus did father children, but clearly he was not very paternal. His children did not turn out very well.

Anyway, the problem is fatherlessness:

Shrier doesn’t suggest a causal relationship between the retreat of men from therapy, and the emergence of therapeutic parenting. But both are clearly aspects of the same wider trend, toward a symbolically fatherless world. And this has left the field to a monolithically maternal style of child-rearing: one of nurture, understanding, care, and boundless empathy. 

Paradoxically, though, this has not empowered mothers but stripped them of agency too. For as Bad Therapy shows, the turn away from authority has not resulted in greater emotional literacy or even more kindness, but anxious, uncontained young people, and a ballooning field of increasingly intrusive therapeutic professionals.

Lacking authority figures in the home, today’s children are lost. They do not know their roles or even the rules. This makes for social anomie, a sense of not knowing who you are, where you belong, and what you should do.

The enemy, as I have often noted, is introspection. Therapy from the time of Freud has encouraged people to look inside, to plumb the depths of their psyches, to detach from social relations and other realities. The result, children become lost in anomie.

Shrier shows that this culture encourages children to forsake resilience for introspection at every turn. Emotional “check-ins” at the beginning of school days seem designed to yank children from an “action” mindset to a helpless, introspective one. Maths lessons have to crowbar in “social-emotional learning”. And kids barely into puberty are routinely subjected to questionnaires that invite criticism of their parents, encourage them to self-identify as mentally ill, and in some cases provide so much information about methods of self-harming or attempted suicide in the course of enquiry that, to a suggestible child, they might easily be confused for instructions. 

As happens in the culture at large, children who transgress, who break laws, are not held responsible. They are invited to explore their feelings. It resembles what J. J. Bachofen called the Mutterrecht, the mythic original matriarchy.

 In this authority-free regime, playground violence goes unpunished save through “restorative justice”, in which attacker and victim sit in a circle and talk about their feelings. The result, in extremis, is violent young people left at large, until sometimes — as in the case of the “Parkland shooter” — they kill.

Today’s children are being suffocated by a new tyranny, the tyranny of care. Psycho professionals are constantly intruding into their minds, through their mothers, but more importantly by institutions, beginning with school:

For, as Bad Therapy argues, it’s less that these unhappy children are tied to their literal mothers’ apron strings, than that they’re enveloped by the devouring mother of institutional “care”. Over time, it can end up displacing literal and symbolic parents of both sexes.

Crucially, she argues that the most obvious intervention of all for improved youth mental health is not more institutional devouring Mother, but an authoritative “no” by the symbolic Father: specifically, banning smartphones from schools.

So, the father represents the law. But, as happens in Freudian theory, the law merely says No to incest. 

Dare I say, this is an oversimplification. In Freudian theory the incest taboo produces an unquenchable desire for one’s mother. The theory is about producing desire, not about producing an ordered society.

So, like the Spice Girls so aptly put it, therapy wants you to tell us what you want, what you really, really want. And yet, finding out what you want, even based on an incest taboo, does not tell you how to function in society. It does not tell you the rules of the game and does not show you how to play the game. 

Knowing what not to do does not tell you what to do. Knowing that you should not be copulating with your mother does not tell you anything about your sex life. It leaves you with far too many options. It is the fatal flaw in Freudian theory. I mentioned it myself nearly three decades ago in my book, Saving Face.

In life you might imagine, based on Freud, that you should do what you want and that if you do not want to do it, you need not. 

And yet, you cannot make desire the basic principle behind your actions and still function socially. What you want is one thing. What you ought to do is something else. 

You follow the rules of social commerce because you belong to society. And you do so regardless of how badly you want or do not want to do so. 

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