main point
- Psychology in general and therapy in particular is more art than science.
- There are numerous roles that psychotherapists incarnate when we are in the office with a patient.
- Philip Rieff said, “The religious man is born to be saved, the psychological man is born to be happy”.
- A backlash is emerging against the commercialization of the therapy.
In 1986-1988 I studied with Philip Rieff, who wrote the ironically titled book twenty years earlier. Therapeutic Victory. His conflation of our culture with pre-modern times is correcting: “The religious man is born to be saved, the psychological man is born to be happy.”
This observation names the ever-elusive quest to satiate the hungry ghost of self-experience, self-management, self-expression and emotional satisfaction from moral formation and communal obligation as the new organizing principles of modern life. Professor Rieff’s “victory” is a Pyrrhic victory that results in self-absorption and alienation as well as life concern– Exciting and frustrating Loneliness.
The death of therapy
the death oftherapy” – as the older generation knows it – thus heralds the death of an old type of talk therapy, primarily based on established protocols Freudian Psychoanalysis – where patients arrive at the office with few (or no) predefined categories and diagnostic self-identification, without a plethora of impersonal acronymic albatrosses – ADHD, PTSD, OCD – and with a willingness to enter into a process that requires a greater commitment than one A.I Symptom search.
What Professor Rieff predicted was that therapeutic language would become the vocabulary through which our culture describes personal longings, hopes, despair, hopelessness, and loss. Younger generations now learn psychology in everyday life, not by stumbling upon it through unimaginable crises or misunderstandings. trauma; They use this vocabulary in school and on social media Platforms where therapeutic terminology now serve as a form of social currency.
The pandemic has normalized two-dimensional intimacy and folding therapy onto the same platform that hosts work meetings, social media, private text chains, as well as enables us to order food, plan trips, shop, find romance, get news, troll and be trolled, bank, enjoy criticism and gossip, and enjoy pornography.
I notice an emerging backlash against the commercialization of therapy online that needs discussion. As an insurance company provider, after my office expenses, I earn hourly as a manager at Trader Joe’s. It’s a race to the bottom with a focus on the corporate bottom-line rather than patient well-being.
A generation that embraces mental health diagnoses
A profound change may be Gen Z’s increasing identification with the diagnosis. Culture now rewards people for speaking fluently about themselves in therapeutic terms. Sometimes it produces real insights; Sometimes it’s just branding. A diagnosis can help people feel accepted, but it also risks becoming a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
Freudian psychoanalysis often takes several years per week; Individual therapy has a trust-building and relationship-building component (attachment) which is rarely discussed today when the emphasis is placed on benefits and outcomes. However, I believe that Freud also contributed to the current mess by positioning psychology and psychoanalysis as “scientific”. For me, psychology in general and therapy in particular is more art than science. Also, if you notice, most psychological studies that try to be scientific – representative of the general population (not just college volunteers), have a control group, replicable – fail or are debunked within ten years. Just look at the recent backlash against IFS Polyvagal Tattva – Two theories which are scientific like astrology.
For me, the benefits of therapy come from encounters. “mirror neuron “Don’t fire over text messages,” I wrote in my first book. 55 minutes of eye contact, deliberate facial affect mirroring and more to validate emotional experiences. body language Similar, plus pheromoneAlso of a smidge Transfer. AI can summarize and soothe intellectually, but it cannot attend to the moral and emotional depth of two human subjects struggling emotionally together in a safe space.
Long before other sociologists, Professor Reiff realized that therapy would become our culture’s dominant mode of self-understanding. He did not anticipate the speed at which AI would help create the therapeutic industrial complex.
Psychotherapists play a myriad of roles when we are in the office with a patient: we validate emotional experience, empathize, anchor presence, model the truthhold space for sadnessrelieve shameRestore agency, embrace uncertainty, awaken curiosity, shift fearFrustration processes, witnessing success, refining narratives, reframing perspectives, exploring blind spots, disclosure self deceptionGuess the challenge, point out disastrousResolve conflict, ease frustration, motivate transformation, moderate expectations, offer reality checks, note parapraxes, track patterns, set aimSupport ideals, propose solutions, share tools, reinforce wins, empower—and yes, diagnose—plus so much more.
We need to demystify what is currently happening in psychology and therapy and have an open discussion about the art of meaningful, satisfying relationships, rather than the current rise of a “science” of algorithmically created emotional band-aids.
reference
Philip Reiff, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic: The Use of Faith After Freud” (New York: Harper & Row, 1966).(1)(2)
James FT Bugental, “The Art of the Psychotherapist” (New York: WW Norton, 1992).
Gabor Maté and Daniel Maté, “The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture” (New York: Avery, 2022).
Previously published Psychology Today
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