One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance
John Dizard
One of the most irritating titles awarded by a group to itself is “the helping professions”. The implication is that people such as utility workers, software engineers, credit analysts and truck drivers aren’t helping anyone.
Lumped in this category with professionals such as doctors and nurses, who do actually help people, are the therapists, counsellors, facilitators and the rest of a farrago of ignorant, overpaid quacks. In one important sense, however, the soft end of the helping professions deserves the name: they’re helping themselves to a fairly easy living.
Sally Satel, a psychiatrist, and Christina Hoff Sommers, a philosopher and conservative feminist, have written a cutting attack on what they call the culture of “therapism”, which, they say, is eroding Americans’ individual and national character. Had they ventured across the Atlantic in the course of their research, they would have found that British society has once again adopted one of the worst exemplars of American culture.
There was a time when the American way of dealing with “stress” was to set the jaw determinedly and get on with settling the West or seizing Iwo Jima. No more. Now an army of the professionally sensitive, possibly not all of whom wear huge earrings and drive orange Volvos, is forcing the public to get in touch with its feelings.
What one notices, reading through the stories in One Nation Under Therapy, is how much the disciples of therapism depend on attracting their subjects through involuntary means. For example, anyone who has had contact with the US family court system will notice how often therapism, in the form of testing or treatment, is ordered by judges or brandished by lawyers. To show a normal scepticism about the unscientific methods involved would be, of course, proof of a hostile, anti-social, possibly criminal nature.
Satel and Sommers trace the origins of various therapeutic “disciplines”, including grief counselling, addiction treatment and the “humanistic psychology” that is at the core of most of these.
Self-indulgence is nothing new, but the contemporary therapy industry was created by a disaster that struck psychology and psychiatry: the development of an effective psychopharmacology in the 1960s and 1970s. Once the variants on the “talking cure” were rudely dethroned by drug treatments that were based on science and worked much of the time, there were a lot of potentially unemployed, unskilled therapists around. Fortunately, humanistic psychology, founded in part by Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers, came to the rescue, and the therapists were saved from having to find useful work.
ONE NATION UNDER
THERAPY:
How the Helping
Culture Is Eroding
Self-Reliance
by Christina Hoff Sommers
and Sally Satel
St Martin’s Press
310 pages
The epicentre of humanistic psychology was somewhere in or near Santa Barbara, California. The local politics were right, there were large houses that could be turned into self-actualisation centres and there was a deep pool of the necessary labour force: con artists who had learned the vocabulary of self-indulgence.
Therapism has developed far beyond a set of amusing California cults for those with too much time and too much money. Now it has wormed its way into the school system, the courts and even the military’s hospital system.
The seeming weakness of therapism as identified by Satel and Sommers — its lack of an empirical basis for its tenets — has been turned into a source of its strength.
Therapy is a jobs programme for people whose university education was a means to shed common sense while avoiding the adoption of the scientific method.
Over the course of an economic cycle, it is true that many people’s jobs get downsized and they have to figure out some other way to earn a living.
But for some professions, supplied by schools of education and departments of psychology, there is a cult of “niceness” that prevents tough questions from being asked about the quality of the product. Given a choice, Americans as individuals could take care of their own self-esteem, grief and actualisation, whatever that is. As Satel and Sommers document, however, they are frequently not being given that choice.
