Don’t Like It? Adapt!
There is a new book out by Frank Furedi, Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age, which sounds highly interesting in itself and which also resonates with a lot of cultural oddities we talk about here on B and W.
It is the society-wide belief that people cannot cope on their own that leads to the features of therapy culture that we are all too familiar with today: the burgeoning counselling industry, the relentless emphasis on boosting ‘self-esteem’, the expansion of categories such as ‘trauma’ to encompass more and more life events. What gave rise to this downbeat view of human agency, this ‘fatalistic epistemology’ that recasts people as victims?…The decisive reason, Furedi says, is a broader political and cultural shift – in particular, the collapse of the left, and of any project for social change.
That certainly sounds right to me. I just wrote a miniature jeremiad yesterday about the shift from wanting to change and reform X, to simply altering one’s attitude to X – which certainly does have the advantage of saving a lot of trouble and effort and possible hostility from people who don’t feel like allowing us to change X, but which also has the considerable drawback that it doesn’t in fact change X. If something is bad and unjust and harmful and a product of human decisions, the right thing to do is to alter it, not to persuade its victims that they’re all right really.
Having given up on the notion that human beings could change the world, the left focused instead on helping people to survive their circumstances. This shift, Furedi explains, was rapid, complete and – to him at least – unexpected…’In the 1970s, radicals were often scathing of psychology. Feminists, for example, used to protest bitterly against the medicalising of pregnancy and other aspects of women’s lives. The political culture of the time was suspicious of psychological explanations and solutions, and saw them as a way of imposing conformity. ‘Yet now, it is people from the cultural left who are the most insistent about the importance of medicalised explanations and therapeutic interventions’, he continues…In a time when social change is off the agenda, therapy culture unites conservatism and radicalism under an umbrella of survivalism. When it is accepted that there is nothing we can do about the circumstances that we live in, the big challenge of the new century becomes helping individuals merely adapt.
Exactly. The cultural left is a very odd variety of left, it begins to become clear. In many, many ways not even recognizable as a left at all.
OB – you wrote “If something is bad and unjust and harmful and a product of human decisions, the right thing to do is to alter it, not to persuade its victims that they’re all right really.” Well, actually, suicidal adolescent victims of paedophiles aren’t actually told to accept that paedophilia is ok when they go through therapy. Quite the opposite. They are helped in part to understand that they are not to blame for often many years of sexual tyranny, which most of them start out with. A lot of paedophiles occupy very high office and senior roles in all employment categories, which is partly why paedophilia – having penetrative sex with babies and children, remember – is impossible to irradiate. The kids that are victims of this awful abuse of power are helped in part via counselling and therapy; the ones who respond to therapy are tugged back from a wretched state of confused, self-harming terror and madness to being reasonably well-balanced individuals capable themselves of one day holding down a job or starting a family that they themselves will then manage not to go on to abuse. Some of course, are beyond the reach of psychotherapy, or any of the alternatives available within the ascendant medical model. But the practice has had a proven success record with some very – very – damaged individuals, and I didn’t expect this sort of reactionary knee-jerk stuff from someone of your calibre; it’s just lazy thinking.
Nick,
Eh? Where did I say or quote anything about suicidal adolescent victims of paedophiles? I didn’t say therapy was never useful under any circumstances, did I. I could riposte by accusing you of lazy reading.
Ophelia, fair cop; I was still smarting from the full-on dismissal of therapy conveyed in the exceptionally ill-informed and arrogant piece in Spiked. I lashed out at your piece almost as gulity through ascociation. The book is probably more thoughtful (as were your comments), although I feel the indulgences of neurotic middle classes are well-documented elsewhere and there is little need to trash a perfectly useful form of treatment and rehabilitation for the mentally poorly. The sheer lack of mettle in our culture is part of a far greater malaise, I fear. Apologies for the rant, nevertheless !
That’s all right, Nick!
Well I take your point. Therapy is of course useful for many people, so I do see that it can seem perverse or pointless or downright destructive to criticise it. But I really do agree with Furedi (and others who’ve commented on the phenomenon, Wendy Kaminer and Carol Tavris for instance) that it brings a lot of very harmful side effects along with it, some obvious enough but others quite subtle. So I do think it’s well worth pointing them out.
Indeed, and it depends on the type of therapy of course, it’s manner of administration and the reasons for it being dished out… thanks, and keep up the good work !