The Tyranny of Therapism and Some Surprising Roots

I've almost finished reading One Nation Under Therapy, a book I referred to here, here, and here. Last night I came across an essay by the authors, Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel, called "The Tyranny of Therapism." "Therapism" is a phrase they coined to describe the constellation of assumptions about human nature and well-being promoted and perpetuated by many helping professionals. (The book isn't a rant against mental health professions per se as Satel is a practicing psychiatrist.)


As they describe it, therapism:

....extols openness, emotional self-absorption, and the sharing of feelings. It encompasses the assumption that vulnerability rather than strength characterizes the American psyche and that suffering is a pathology in need of a cure. Therapism assumes that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors, work-shoppers, healers, and traumatologists to lead it though the trials of everyday life. Children, more than any group, are targeted for therapeutic improvement.

Hoffman and Satel state that therapism has many historical and ideological roots among which is the philosophy of Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Freudian psychoanalysis and the human potential movement popularized by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow are more recent contributing factors. Secularists don't bear the whole brunt of responsibility, however. The authors also claim that the current preoccupation with feelings "can be traced to nineteenth-century evangelical movements that offered nostrums for liberating their followers from negative emotions." Ouch!