There's a marvellous scene in the film Anger Management in which Adam Sandler's character politely asks for headphones during a flight, but his timid requests are interpreted as symptoms of uncontrolled anger. The more his behaviour is misconstrued as abusive, the angrier he gets, leading to a compulsory course of sessions with an anger management therapist. The first thing his therapist tells him, however, is that he doesn't get angry enough. He is denying his anger, and this, rather than its expression, is the source of his woes. The resulting hilarity illustrates many of the problems of what Frank Furedi calls "therapy culture". Emotions are seen as the authentic core of the self: we are told which emotions we can and can't have and which are appropriate. And, naturally, we need an expert to tell us this.
That this expert is a therapist suggests that the role of therapy is to exert a form of social control. Rather than promoting freedom and the resolution of problems, therapy aims at social integration and human management. That many large companies hire stress counsellors and even train managers in therapeutic skills is testimony to this complicity between therapy and the market place. And by continually emphasising the sick-victim role and undermining informal support networks of friends, relatives and colleagues, therapy promotes the idea of dependency on professional authority.
Rather than working against the ramifications of a "victim" culture, therapy, according to Furedi, does its best to perpetuate it. Life's many blows and disappointments are pathologised into illnesses. Therapists teach us that people lack the resilience to deal with feelings of isolation and failure, and hence all negative emotional responses are turned into therapeutic or medical problems.
For Furedi, the modern subject is not someone who does but someone who is done to. As life's uncertainties transmute into dangers, we increasingly see ourselves as survivors, forever at risk from injury by external agents. The media's obsession with threats to our well-being and health consolidate such fears. Furedi argues that this sense of vulnerability makes individuals feel ever less a sense of personal responsibility. Nothing is anyone's fault any longer, and therapy culture refashions the "sins" and "moral failings" of old as "addictions".
These changes play squarely into the hands of politicians and business because they shift attention from social to individual problems. Furedi makes much of the growth of counselling during the Thatcher years, and laments the way in which trade unions have become more interested in organising stress management courses than mobilising for collective action. Bullying in the workplace is deemed more acute a cause of stress than traditional variables such as poor conditions and bad pay. Social problems are recast as individual ones, and so the challenge of finding social solutions is neatly sidestepped.
What allowed this grim state of affairs to emerge? Like many reactionary social commentators, Furedi blames the progressive erosion of a "web of meaning" - the shared value systems that told people not only who they were but also how they related to others. With the loss of such a "web", we no longer have the transmitted knowledge to understand everyday encounters. Instead, we are forced to come up with individual systems of meaning, and to do so, we need experts. Hence the proliferation of all sorts of coaches and gurus to guide us through life. The new army of predatory health professionals accentuates the vulnerability of patients, prompting even greater reliance on therapists. For Furedi, this discourages healthy forms of dependency and reinforces the alienation and fragmentation that the experts were supposed to remedy.
Furedi's gloomy portrait of the contemporary psyche is both valuable and confused. He is interested only in what the shrinks have to say if it conforms to the stereotype of self-help culture, with its absurd but dangerous language of "addiction", "self-esteem" and "closure". Much of the ground he covers has already been charted by other social theorists. But Furedi's approach, rather like the political landscape he describes, is not informed by theory. He offers expositions of people's views but no proper analysis of human subjectivity or social bonds. Instead, there is much nostalgia, a lot of ranting against New Age imbecility and a curious lack of historical scrutiny.
Much of the book tells us that therapy culture has infiltrated just about everything. But if therapy has become "arguably the most important signifier of meaning for the everyday life of the individual", isn't this the same thing as a web of meaning, the loss of which he so bewails? Furedi seems to imply that in the past people just got on with life. But we have always been duped by belief systems and always will be. Therapy Culture may be documenting current therapeutic ideology, but this modern trend is a form of ideology all the same. There is nothing new about people turning to a belief system as a response to human distress. Furedi regrets that we now find such personal attributes as warmth and charisma more important in our politicians than ideas and strategy. But he does not recognise that this has always been the case. There may have been a golden age when people were inspired by ideals and values external to themselves, and sacrifices were made for a cause, but this is not to say that people were any less hypnotised by beliefs of one sort or another. Our sadness at the decline in social engagement should not stop us examining how people engage with each other in the first place.
Rather than analyse, Furedi falls back on a deeply conservative, "pull-your-socks-up" attitude. He argues that instead of consulting the experts, we ought to learn from experience: "Intuition and insight gained from personal experience are continually compromised by professional knowledge." But what about the knowledge gained from consulting experts and realising that they have something - or indeed nothing - to offer?
Furedi's naive view blinds him to many of the positive effects of therapy. "Alcoholism," he writes, "is no longer represented as a moral weakness, but as a disease and victims of this condition are treated or helped rather than condemned." Would he prefer society not to offer alcoholics any treatment? He rails against victims of crime being protected from aggressive questioning in court, and complains that mental anguish and pain have become legitimate grounds for compensation. And the section on Holocaust survivors is particularly questionable. Furedi makes an insensitive contrast between the "stoic, self-contained response of Holocaust victims" and their descendants' response to the past.
Furedi seems unaware of the thousands of publications by therapists who themselves contest the therapy culture he dissects; these might have helped him to understand why therapy-speak has become such a dominant cultural force. Part of the reason lies in the way psychoanalysis was jettisoned in favour of simplistic ideas, thereby making it compatible with the market place. Furedi treats therapy as a unified field, rather than one split by disagreement and diversity. For example, his argument that therapy is a form of social control could be directed at cognitive behavioural therapy but not at most forms of psychoanalysis.
He sees an anti-reasoning stance as essential to self-help culture, which takes emotions not only as a guide to what is most authentic, but as the only real source of authenticity. He is quite right to lambaste this privileging of the emotions, but fails to see that most therapy is about questioning the nature of feelings. Emotions, as Hume and Freud argued, lie. Therapy involves exploring how feelings deceive us and how they are governed by unconscious thought processes.
If the primary status of the self today is victimhood, as Furedi claims, it is mainly therapists who battle against this misconception. He not only ignores most of their studies, but fails to see how therapy aims to shift people away from a passive perspective and to make them subjects rather than objects of their destiny. He suggests that there is a therapist under every stone, but we should remember that therapy is still unavailable to much of the British population. Therapy Culture contains much that is valid, but Furedi should realise that the sort of self-help culture he targets is putting genuine therapists out of business. He wants to blame therapy, yet as he writes: "Blame-seeking is intolerant of complexity." But what can we expect from a writer - a professor of sociology - who suggests that good old "British courage" should replace therapy culture?
Darian Leader is a psychoanalyst and the author of Stealing the Mona Lisa: what art stops us from seeing (Faber & Faber)
