The short version of this book is
that the American nation-state is under the sway of therapism and that
therapism is having important deleterious effects upon the U. S., particularly
by eroding the self-reliance of its citizens.  The authors’ description of
therapism is:  "…[therapism] … valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption
and the sharing of feelings … that vulnerability, rather than strength,
characterizes the American psyche; and that a diffident, anguished, and
emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, grief
counselors, workshoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it through the
trials of everyday life (5)."   In fact this definition is a good deal
narrower than their actual working concept of therapism.  Under the category of
therapism the authors oppose the ideas that:  an important goal of life is to
reach one’s own highest level of emotional fulfillment, self-esteem is the
foundation of such fulfillment, human problems and suffering are foreign to a happy
life and like medical diseases should be treated clinically, the venting of
feelings is effective at relieving emotional problems and repressing such
feelings is self-defeating, trauma victims are naturally prone to serious
long-term after-effects; hurt feelings are a very serious problem and thus are
to be prevented whenever possible, the correctness of moral values is relative
to cultures and/or individuals, antisocial behavior (for example child sexual
abuse) is pathological rather than morally reprehensible and thus as subject to
therapy.   

The book’s authors, a philosopher
and a psychiatrist, are scholars at the politically conservative American
Enterprise Institute, which has supported some excellent public intellectuals. 
Ben Wattenberg and Norman Ornstein come to mind.  And there are things to like
about the book, particularly its treatment of venting therapy and its
applications to grief and trauma.  Mainly though, the book is superficial,
politically slanted and in places contradictory.  It makes almost no attempt to
show that the silly abuses it chronicles have adversely affected America’s
citizenry and indeed it provides evidence to the contrary.

First the good stuff. 
The denouement of the film "Good Will Hunting" has the therapist
Robin Williams holding the sobbing boy-genius Matt Damon as the latter lets out
the repressed feelings of his battered childhood.  Could anyone resist the idea
that the hero has overcome an important barrier to his emotional health?  Our
authors could, and provide some good reasons for their seeming cold
heartedness.  The chapter "Emotional Correctness" tells a story that
deserves to be more widely known.  It contains a summary of good research
suggesting that "venting" is not always good for one’s mental
well-being and is sometimes harmful.  Of course the idea that repression can be
more than temporarily useful is pretty familiar but the existence of empirical
research supporting the idea is not widely known.  California students who
focused upon their emotional states suffered more anxiety and depression from
the effects of an earthquake than those who adopted a coping style of
distraction (120).  Israeli heart attack victims who repressed their feelings
enjoyed better emotional lives than their expressive counterparts both
immediately after the attack and seven months later (121).  Montreal heart
patients of the repressor variety who received monthly phone calls inquiring of
their emotional state were more likely to be prescribed tranquilizers and visit
emergency rooms than repressors who received no such calls (121).  Depressed
people who are encouraged to "ruminate" are more likely than their
depressed counterparts to interpret their experiences in terms of negative
memories.  So emotional ignorance, willed or otherwise, may after all be
bliss.  To the extent that therapism contains the idea that the venting of
feelings is always the treatment of choice (perhaps itself a straw man), the
authors have scored a point or two.  And they do a good job questioning the
motives and effectiveness of the grief trauma industry, its practitioners’ lack
of credentials, and the procedure of critical incident debriefing.  There is
material in these sections for a good, tightly-written small book.  But the
authors have other opponents to take on, some already pulverized by previous
assailants.

In discussing the origins
of therapism the authors focus in on "the sixties", a favorite bete
noir of American conservatives.  Robert Bork mined this territory in Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American
Decline as did Roger Kimball in The
Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America.  And of course Bill Bennett has made a career of sixties
bashing.  I must say that I have little respect for this genre of political
promotion resting as it does on no mention of the incredibly brave black
children who faced down police dogs in the south, northern college students who
filled busses to head south in voter registration projects, the million or so draftees
who sloshed the jungles of Vietnam because they were told that America needed
them there, and the hundreds of thousands of baby boomers who marched against
an unnecessary war that was killing their generation. 

In
our authors’ case the original villains turn out to be Abraham Maslow’s promotion
of self-esteem and peak experiences and Carl Rogers’ therapeutic ideas of total
patient acceptance and schools as centers for personal growth.  These gave rise
to individual experimentation (sex, drugs, …), the eminently bashable Esalen
Institute, and Timothy Leary’s experimentation with the therapeutic value of
LSD.  The authors conclude the chapter with the claim that the human potential
movement, " … lives on in the form of therapism" and promise to
show in the next what’s wrong with that movement’s request that we be,
"tolerant and ‘nice’" (76). 

Because of the bad
notions of Maslow and Rogers, victims of therapism have swallowed the ideas
that it is a rather simple matter to bruise another’s feelings, and to do so is
to create something close to calamity.  Our authors believe on the other hand
that people are far more resilient and that, in any case, sadness and hurt
should be accepted as a part of everyday life so people should just suck it
up.  This could be an interesting corrective to contemporary ideas, the
classically tragic ideal of the Greeks versus the perfectionist Christian
morality of suffering.  The authors could give a nod to Nietzsche and apply it
to contemporary culture.  But rather than this, they give us a superficial list
of innocuous stupidities and rely upon common understandings to appreciate
their foolishness.

Yes, there are schools that have
placed dodgeball in a "Hall of Shame" for its aggressiveness; and the
NEA has recommended a version of tag in which no one is ever "out" so
that no one will feel excluded; and there are ill-trained grief counselors who
want nothing more than to hug perfect strangers whose loved ones are newly dead
from airplane disasters; there are fire and police departments that foist
therapists upon their brave men and women who have seen their compatriots
killed; and yes, the school systems of Dallas and Phoenix adopted a
post-September 11 text called "9/11 as History" that emphasized the
exploration of feelings over lessons about the greatness of America; and
perhaps worst of all, Gwyneth Patrow really did describe a minor illness
following her Academy Award as, " … post-traumatic stress from the
adrenaline shock my system suffered (174)."  I wonder how the authors
missed the foolishness of the parents at Daniels Farm
Elementary School in Trumbull, Connecticut who rose up united against the use
of red ink for grading children’s work on the grounds that red is too stressful
a color?  None of these anecdotes is very noteworthy except for those of
us who receive hints of sweet pleasure at reading about the inanities of
others. 

On a deeper plane however the
philosopher-author at least has let us down and not just by remaining so
doggedly on the surface of things.  Philosophy began in the West with Socrates’
requirement that the power of reason be directed first in the service of truth,
including the whole truth, and that this epistemic demand must never be set
aside for politics or any other reason.  The philosopher Sommers fails this
test.  She objects to these practices because they rest upon an exaggerated
assumption of human vulnerability, that children and adults need to be
protected from practices that common sense tells us wouldn’t harm a fly.  Where
on our philosopher’s list is Dr. James Dobson’s campaign against SpongeBob as a
threat to our children’s sexual identity?  And where is the Reverend Joseph
Chambers’ objection that Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street live together and have
effeminate characteristics to boot?  Where is the same Reverend’s charge that
Barney is a tool of Satan?  Where is the moral majority’s Jerry Falwell’s
attack on the Teletubby named Tinky Winky for carrying a red pocket book?  And
where is an account of the Republican members of the House Committee that
oversees the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who objected to a potentially
new Sesame Street character with HIV?   If the authors really believe it silly
to think that danger lurks in dodgeball, why are they silent on the
indefensible idea that gay marriage is a threat to the very existence of the
American family, that the battle against gay marriage is, in the words of
Dobson, " … our D-Day, our Gettysburg, our Stalingrad."  Granted
it’s foolish of the overly sensitive crowd ("liberals", I suppose we
are to think) to try to stamp out hurt feelings but why do our authors give
right wing stupidity about bogus threats to America’s citizenry a pass?  To be
clear, no one should object to reason’s use in service of an agenda.  Socrates
surely had his.  The point here is to avoid sophistry in Plato’s sense of
putting greater value on the agenda than on the truth of the matter.

Two more examples.  Sommers and
Satel relate a story of a federal official who was approached sixteen months
before 9/11 by Mohammed Atta seeking a loan to purchase a crop duster.  When
confronted with the paperwork Atta became abusive and threatening while the
civil servant expressed only her sympathies.  He demanded she sell him her own
aerial photograph of Washington’s monuments and even asked how she would feel
if someone destroyed them.  Still she was calm.  The authors’ point? " …
her desire to understand Atta and attend to his inner needs rendered her
incapable of recognizing a wolf even when he was wearing wolf’s clothing
(78)."  Could the authors be insinuating that had it not been for
therapism the towers might still be standing?  Would it be unfair to insinuate
back that had it not been for rightwingism our authors might have caught the
irony of highlighting this woman’s missed long-shot while ignoring George
Bush’s paralysis just one month before 9/11 when his daily briefing titled
"Bin Ladin determined to strike in U. S." mentioned attacking
Washington, D. C. and hijacking aircraft?

The second example:  The authors
object to the idea that addiction should be conceptualized as a disease.  In
their arguments they actually veer in the direction of speaking ill of a
Republican.  But look what happens then.

President George W. Bush’s drug czar,
John Walters, has stated that "drug addiction is a disease of the
brain" (though in private Walters seems reluctant to use the vocabulary of
disease and is vigilant about detracting from personal responsibility) (100)

As women who accept that life is
suffering, Sommers and Satel like their men silent and strong.  No Jerry
Seinfelds for them.  Imagine then their horror at Tom Cruise’s version of the
paraplegic Vietnam vet Ron Kovic in "Born on the Fourth of July".  I
can’t dislodge the image of the two of them reciting in unison that all Kovic
needed was a good slap in the face from George C. Scott.  Our authors don’t
like the young men from Vietnam who made it home but wouldn’t shut up.  One
only has to be reminded of the Vietnam soldiers in July 4^th parades,
long-haired, disheveled and not quite marching, without wondering about the
horrors they endured.   And don’t we owe these warriors a special form of
respect for having fought so well in such an ill-formed, unnecessary and brutal
war?  In this context our authors exhibit something, perhaps it is courage,
though therapism-ists will call it insensitivity, in taking on the Vietnam era
phenomenon of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

They do not deny its
existence.  Who after all could claim that calamitous experiences don’t
sometimes lead to flashbacks, insomnia, depression and the like?  What
interests them, I think, is how to explain all the hoopla about post-Vietnam
PTSD.  After all, so many others have experienced similar calamities with
silent equanimity.  They list: only a handful of children in London during the
Battle of Britain experienced traumatic shock (141); Ugandans under the monster
Idi Amin met disaster with hopefulness and accepted it as a challenge; only
three of three-thousand Kosovo refugees in the U. S. needed psychiatric treatment
and each of these had prior histories of mental illness; Bosnian refugees used
mental health clinics largely for networking in preparation for their new lives
(165); Rwandan eyewitnesses to massacres reported positive attitudes about
their futures on researchers’ questionnaires; Cambodia teen refugees functioned
well despite symptoms of PTSD; the social functioning of Ugandan women who were
repeatedly raped did not correlate with scores on tests of psychological
symptomatology (166); a Russian woman who survived WW II stated, "I did
have nightmares … But what is this post-dramatic (sic) stress?" (167)  The
point is that many do not experience PTSD and many of those who do don’t let it
get them down.

Sommers and Satel have no
unified theory as to why there was so much fuss about post-Vietnam PTSD. 
Perhaps it was too widely diagnosed, and too many vets lied in order to get
full disabilities (they point out that only a small percentage of Vietnam era
soldiers were in combat units), and veterans’ magazines educated troops as to
how to claim the condition, and in any case there were not as many cases as
claimed by anti-war psychologists like Robert Jay Lifton.  But the real villain
in the authors’ minds is therapism for suggesting both that PTSD was nearly unavoidable
and that its symptoms were necessarily crippling.  Therapism rendered the upper
lips of our Vietnam warriors’ flabby, or so our authors think.  Even vets who
had PTSD should have been able to take it and move on in the manner of our
stoic, "post-dramatic" lady from Russia.

I noted above that there
is an inconsistency at the base of the authors’ treatment of therapism.  Put
simply, they oppose explaining away human sins and foibles by attributing them
to concocted syndromes and proceed to concoct the syndrome of therapism as a
way of explaining away a whole set of behaviors and beliefs.  Let’s take a
look. 

The Boston Archdiocese
has been devastated by the enormity of its priests’ child sexual abuse,
particularly during the tenure of Bernard Cardinal Law.  Law was the darling of
Roman Catholic conservatives and the Pope’s point man in cleaning up what had
become an overly liberal American episcopate.  But Law also averted his glance
while hundreds of young boys were molested and raped by Roman Catholic
priests.  He knew it was happening, he knew how it could be stopped, and he
allowed it to go on.  This should be a perfect example of performing evils
actions for which one accepts responsibility, a perfect example of what should
not be excused by a concocted syndrome.  Why did he do it?  To shield the
reputation of the Church — misplaced loyalty?  To shield his own reputation —
false pride?  To further the likelihood of becoming the first American Pope –
ambition?  We don’t know of course and neither do our authors.  Yet they are
convinced that he was led to a series of decisions that resulted in multiple
rapes of Catholic boys by the evil syndrome of therapism.  They note
approvingly that Law had come to admit "tragic mistakes", that he had
come to see that he had damaged the Church (the Church?).  What was this
mistake?  Therapism led him to think of the priest-monsters as ill rather than
evil, to think of their behaviors as symptom rather than sin.  "When sin
becomes syndrome, ethically inexcusable behavior is granted absolution …
(84)."  But of course, and without a hint of irony, the authors have
employed therapism to transubstantiate Law’s sin into syndrome, one that led
him inexorably to his "tragic mistakes".

Finally, I have noted
that the authors fail to show that therapism has had any serious social
effects.  The idea that Catholic children were molested and raped because of
therapism is ludicrous.  There is no showing that the exaggerations and
metaphorical extensions surrounding PTSD have resulted in serious social ills. 
There is no evidence that the grief counseling movement has killed, maimed or
driven anyone insane. To the contrary, Sommers and Satel provide us with good
reasons to think that mistakes engendered by therapism are without consequence. 
The chapter on the September 11 tragedy focuses upon the irrelevance of
therapism-ists’ preparations for psychological disaster.  There were some who
wrongly predicted post-9/11 PTSD in fire fighters.  It was a mistake to predict
a resurfacing of PTSD from 9/11 among Vietnam vets.  The Oklahoma bombings did
not produce widespread PTSD.  Let’s assume that these wrong predictions are the
result of therapism.  What’s the problem?  Doesn’t this show that therapism is
a syndrome without consequence (except of course that it excuses Cardinal
Law)?  And where is the "eroding [of] self-reliance" that the book’s
subtitle promises will be uncovered?  Do the authors believe that the men and
women fighting now in Iraq are weak in self-reliance?  The book’s index
contains "Gwyneth Paltrow" but there is no sign of
"self-reliance".

What bothers me most
about this book is that it’s a literary version of the thankfully defunct TV
show "Crossfire".  In television of that stripe, representatives of
the so-called "left and right" come to the table with no concerns
other than to convert one more person to their side.  They shout, talk over,
tell half stories, distort the table’s other side and create bogus straw men. 
Their intent is sophistry, the practice of " … making the weaker case
appear stronger."

 

© 2005 John D. Mullen

 

John D. Mullen is professor of Philosophy at Dowling College in Oakdale,
New York.  He has written a widely read text, Kierkegaard’s Philosophy:
Self-deception and cowardice in the present age, Hard Thinking: A
Reintroduction of logic to everyday life, and co-authored with Byron M.
Roth, Decision Making: Its logic and practice.

Categories: Ethics, General, Psychotherapy