IN THERAPY WE TRUST: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment

IN THERAPY WE TRUST: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment.

By Eva S. Moskowitz. Johns Hopkins Univ. Press. 358 pp. $34.95

To confess in public to personal weakness was once regarded as rather indiscreet, vulgar, or reprehensible. Nowadays, parading one’s vices is regarded as a sign of sincerity, maturity, willingness to change for the better, and fundamental goodness of heart. This is the natural culmination of an outlook that treats human existence as an elaborate form of psychotherapy, whose object is to procure for men and women the self-esteem and selffulfillment to which they believe themselves by birthright entitled. In Therapy We Trust, written in admirably plain prose uncluttered by academic jargon, traces the gradual rise of the therapeutic conception to our current apotheosis of self-centered triviality.

Moskowitz, a historian now serving on the New York City Council, does this by describing an apostolic succession of movements and ideas. She starts with the work of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, the New England quack who regarded all illness as the consequence of mistaken ideas, and who is remembered now principally as a formative influence on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. From Quimby we pass on to the reformers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries who saw antisocial acts as manifestations of psychological problems arising from a defective upbringing, and who therefore sought to have juvenile delinquents treated as ill rather than punished as wicked. In the 1930s, the psychological approach spread to the middle classes with the marriage counseling movement. During World War II, millions of soldiers were psychologically tested for combatworthiness and bombarded with professional advice about how to stay sane and happy while walking through the valley of the shadow of death.

After the war, the supposedly bored and dissatisfied American housewife was deemed to need psychological support to cope with the neuroses consequent upon suburban prosperity; then came the social unrest of the 1960s, which sought "liberation" not only from oppression but from all personal inhibition. With the Me Decade of the 1970s, it seemed as if some kind of nadir had been reached, but in the following decades millions of people discovered that they were "survivors" of trauma or addicted to something or other, from car theft to sex to shopping. Everyone is now a victim, for lack of selfcontrol is considered a bona fide illness, and thus the search for psychological self-fulfillment has come full circle: We are all, by virtue of drawing breath, in need of therapy. Whether this coherent story wholly corresponds to reality, it makes for a plausible and interesting read.

Moskowitz, who is generally hostile to these developments, does not dig very deeply into the reasons why American society should prove so susceptible to the therapeutic idea. Could it have something to do with the concept of inalienable human rights upon which the Republic was founded? The belief in such rights renders everyone equally important, and therefore raises expectations—which inevitably founder on the existential rock of human limitation. Many Americans are therefore beset by an unease at the contrast between life as they think it ought to be and life as it actually is, an unease that the therapeutic outlook falsely promises to assuage.

Likewise, the author does not explore very deeply the modern taste for victimhood, which is surely connected with the political cataclysms of the 20th century. Few people like to admit that they have led sheltered, privileged, or fortunate lives. They envy suffering, or rather the moral authority that suffering has given such figures as Primo Levi and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Consequently, they inflate the miseries of their own past.

This book is a suggestive rather than a definitive exploration of its theme, but it is a highly worthwhile contribution nevertheless.

—Theodore Dalrymple