Therapy Culture

This is a long post. I started putting my notes together on 12/6, but distractions and pure procrastination intervened between then and now. For all I found interesting and quote below, here is more in Beyond the Therapeutic: Three new books aim to transcend the therapeutic mindset by Alexander Stern which may be pertinent to you. The subject interests me on at least two levels, the personal and the philosophical.

I have my doubts about the therapy culture for all the good I find in my therapist. For all that I am strongly attracted to the Orthodox Church's view of itself as a place of healing. Therein may be my resistance to the thereapeutic culture, that is seems more self-perpetuating for those profiting from it 

The worries about therapy-speak recall Philip Rieff’s criticisms of what he called “therapeutic culture” in his 1966 book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. For Rieff, a sociologist and conservative cultural critic, Freud was not only an analyst of the deep structure of the psyche; his work also offered the portrait of a new cultural type, which Rieff called “psychological man.” Psychological man was formed by the slow death of traditional authority, on the one hand, and the rise of democratic and consumer choice, on the other. Together, these cultural forces created subjects whose subordination to a higher authority, like traditional religion or philosophy, was replaced with an absorption in the self and its desires. For Freud—both prophet and, to some degree, father of psychological man—therapy is needed to help modern subjects understand and reconcile their desires with the real world of obligations, limitations, and unchosen attachments.

Where Freud, according to Rieff, tried to ease the mental anguish caused by cultural and familial repression—to “soften the collar” of the existing culture—his followers sought “to take it off.” The result is that they turned Freudianism into an “anti-culture” of atomizing “self-worship” that seeks to liberate modern subjects from the prohibitions that Rieff thought necessary for culture to flourish. For the rising therapeutic anti-culture, the “corporate identities and communal purposes” that once animated religious traditions could serve, at most, as “purely therapeutic devices” for deracinated individuals. As Rieff put it: “Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased.”

One doesn’t have to (indeed, one shouldn’t) adopt Rieff’s sometimes affected apocalypticism or his sometimes uncritical celebration of authority to concede that he was nonetheless on to something. Everywhere are unmistakable signs of suffering from a lack of communal ethical structure: not just rising rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression, addiction, and suicide, but also conspiratorial delusion, political extremism, and even religious fundamentalism. The inability to commit to something outside oneself is often punctuated by spasms of fanatical commitment.

 I see that fanatical commitment in my oldest sister. She has repeated several times that she is a conservative. I have no idea what she means by conservative, or what she is conserving. Likewise, her youngest son, probably proclaimed that he was not Socialist, meaning he was not a Democrat, and leaving me with the belief he had no idea what was a Socialist or a Democrat.  They utter words like the sorcerer's assistant, conjuring what they do not know. Only it gives them solace in this world.

I have written about CC and some of the Muncie crackheads. My recollection is that I have written about American drug policy. Sure we can invade Mexico and go after the drug cartels (which is, yes, wrong in many other ways but which can be summed up in one word: moronic). This will not change the problems that led to those people to their favorite drug addiction.

I grew up thinking the world was a rough place, the next world better, and to expect nothing from this world. I do not know anyone else with this same kind of thinking. Being pleased was a bonus, a fillip, to life, an achievement but not a feature given freely or easily. 

Here are the books being reviewed and their themese, just to make the record clear.

Three recent books attempt, with varying degrees of success, to sketch pathways out of this predicament. In Ars Vitae, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn surveys the resurgence of interest in ancient traditions and their modern analogs, including Gnosticism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Cynicism, and her favored solution, Platonism. In The Age of Guilt, Mark Edmundson, like Rieff, turns to Freud for diagnosis and treatment of an out-of-control superego that he finds at the root of many of our psychosocial problems. And in Happiness in Action, philosopher Adam Adatto Sandel offers an alternative to modern striving in Aristotle’s concept of self-possession.

I read Marcus Aurelius decades ago. So did my Aunt Mary Ellen. Stoicism seems to have an attraction to my family. One thing I got from the Bible after I crashed and burned was that God gives us nothing we cannot endure. Living through the embarrassment that I thought could not be endured I think proves this. That is the Stoicism I knew. The reviewer points to another aspect of Stoicism - to do good. Which is also, I think, the point of Christianity. We can are allowed ot endure to do good.

The basic insight of Stoicism, as Pierre Hadot explains in What is Ancient Philosophy? (1995), is the tragedy of fate. We seek happiness in contingent states like health, love, and wealth that are bound to remain beyond our reach or to reverse themselves in time. The Stoic solution is to focus on the one thing that is under our control: “The will to do good and act in conformity with reason.” This will to do good, Hadot writes, “is an unbreachable fortress which everyone can construct within themselves. It’s there that we can find freedom, independence, invulnerability, and that eminently Stoic value, coherence with ourselves.”

Lasch-Quinn believes that, in the translation of Stoicism to a modern therapeutic context, this moral component—“the will to do good”—goes missing. Where the Stoics assumed most things lay in the domain of fate and concentrated on the moral substance of what lay outside it, we find much more lying in the domain of freedom. This leads to a modern version of Stoicism fixated on the lesson that some things are out of our control and must be accepted as such. Lasch-Quinn writes:

    Stoicism was in antiquity more a system for figuring out what was good and what was not by determining whether it was relevant to one’s moral character, and thereby worth acting upon. Now the decision is about what can and cannot be controlled, or what is relevant to our psychological comfort or sense of power.

Like Gnosticism, modern Stoicism becomes a therapy for coping with feelings of chaos and powerlessness. At its worst, it excuses injustices as things simply “out of our control” and advocates for bare action independent of moral consequences. Stoic CEOs use the philosophy to justify brutal business practices, Lasch-Quinn writes. Meanwhile, edge-lord culture critics espouse a “knee-jerk” “hypermasculinity” that “lends itself to political reaction and social exclusion, hierarchy and domination.” Lasch-Quinn may be thinking here of figures such as Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate, who offer lost young men performative forms of discipline, propose simple id-driven solutions to complicated social problems, and associate emotion with feminine weakness and chaos. While this hardened form of Stoicism may seem like a reaction against therapeutic culture, Lasch-Quinn argues persuasively that it’s more of the same. The reaction against a “soft” culture excuses a similarly self-involved denial of human emotional connection and the development of a fetishized inner sanctum.

I watched Barbie last night - I found it both funny and subversive, often at the same time. In the end, it did away with a Manichean, either/or, view of gender roles. The world is too complicated for such solutions. In general, I think those proposing simplistic solutions are grifters, conning their listeners. What would be an exception? Choosing not to fight Hitler.

More explaining of Stoicism wherein I found something new:

But Sandel neglects the considerable effort the Stoics devote to distinguishing between human and cosmic Reason. While, for the Stoics, cosmic Reason or Fate determines what ultimately happens, human or “discursive reason,” as Hadot describes it, “has the power, in judgments…to give meaning to the events which Fate imposes upon it and the actions it produces.” The Stoics, far from ceding all agency to nature, sought to align their intentions and actions with a clear-eyed conception of the scope of human reason within a universe whose ultimate direction remains outside human control. Somehow Sandel arrives at the absurd conclusion that “Stoicism fails to conceive of human activity in terms of practical wisdom and the striving for wholeness.”

Oh, yeah, I thought the hand of fate was on me from a long time back, such as what I did to myself became a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

I have described my depression as nihilistic. Yes, I have read Nietzsche and Camus and a little of Sarte on this subject. Fatalism and nihilism fed each other and also fed my depression. I recognize myself in the following:

In The Age of Guilt, Edmundson picks up on exactly this line of reasoning—though, curiously, he does not mention Lasch, whom he’s criticized elsewhere. Still, like Lasch, he identifies a new superego that survives the decline of authoritative morality and becomes “toxic.” Picking up on Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism, Edmundson calls this superego an “angry, spiteful…ghost of God,” left over after God’s death and the rise of secularism. Edmundson finds this untethered cultural superego at the root of many contemporary ills, including Trumpism, misguided social-justice activism, and explosions in rates of depression and anxiety.

As Edmundson shows, Freud identified the authoritarian dangers that could accompany the decline of public authority. Without a clear sense of what to value, modern people are tormented by an untamed superego that imposes unreasonable and changeable demands that lack a coherent moral framework. Charismatic authoritarian leaders attract and then, as Freud puts it, “hypnotize” followers by way of an unshakeable sense of certainty. Hence, the infallibility claimed by mid-century fascism and totalitarian communism and, more recently, by right-wing populists like Trump. Followers put “the leader in the place of the super-ego,” freeing them of their moral confusion and, temporarily at least, stabilizing their senses of self.

It seems to me we lack the solitude Thoreau valued. We are lost in a  torrent - the demands to pay our debts, to make money, to fit in, to have things, and information coming in from all sides. Yes, I found that solitude in prison, I have it now. (Much to the consternation of my PO and CC, who share a bewilderment of me living in a motel room). Luckily for me, I also looked up old friends: David Hume and Aristotle and Nietzsche and Thoreau. I also found new friends in the Desert Fathers.

Edmundson offers similar diagnoses for resentful white working-class conservatives, identity-obsessed liberals, overtaxed college students curating their professional “brands,” those battling depression, and addicts of all kinds (alcohol, Adderall, beauty, exercise). According to Edmundson, all these groups are searching for some form of relief from an overbearing superego constantly telling them that they aren’t enough. At points, this analysis verges on overkill: every item in the extensive archive of social dysfunction becomes a nail for Edmundson to hammer with his thesis.

Still, Edmundson offers an appealingly deflationary interpretation of the superego, following the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein understood Freud’s system not as a science—the way Freud himself insisted he be read—but as a mythology, where the id and superego are more akin to the ancient Greeks’ Dionysian and Apollonian than to strict causal explanations. For Wittgenstein and Edmundson, “mythology” is not a pejorative term. Wittgenstein regarded psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic enterprise, where the analyst tries to persuade patients to see things in a particular way, not because it’s the “scientific” truth, but because seeing them in this way might positively influence their feelings and behavior....

Ooh, mythology is a word to conjure with. 

Having read Eastern Orthodox writers, I would say that Augustine might not have reconciled as much as he is given credit below. That may be a pedantic quibble. I think the thesis about reason and virtues is on the money.

Specifically, Lasch-Quinn turns to Neoplatonism and, unexpectedly, to Albert Camus’s seldom-read University of Algiers thesis on the role of inwardness in the Augustinian reconciliation of Greek and Christian thought. According to Lasch-Quinn and Camus exegete Ronald Srigley, Camus’s writing was deeply concerned with the competing accounts of the human place in the world found in ancient, Christian, and modern sources. It was in the Christian inheritance of the Greeks that Camus saw, as he wrote in his notebooks, “the true and only turning point in history,” and in Christianity that he saw, despite being unable to believe in God himself, “the only common hope and the only effective shield against the calamity of the Western world.”

For Camus, as Lasch-Quinn understands him, the Christian and Greek worldviews share an insistence on a connection between reason and virtue or, to put it another way, between humanity and God—one that is severed in modernity. But the ancient Greeks understood the connection differently than the Christians: for Greeks like Plato, the way that man is united to God (“the good” in Plato or “the One” in the terminology of the Neoplatonist Plotinus) is through knowledge. Plato’s reasoning, his “scale of ideas,” Camus writes, is intended to “bridge the gap” to God.

I am puzzled how David Hume would answer that last point about Plato. Hume with his emphasis on the passions. 

In the end, I think the problem is knowledge. I cannot imagine where I would be without what I knew of philosophy. My PO intends a new counselor for me. When I asked what therapeutic value it had, he said it was in my supervised order and it was to help me reintegrate into society. That answer seems to imply a box needs checked, even though no one in a position of knowledge has so far stated I need any particular therapy. No, what has helped me is having the time and the peace to reconnect with Hume and Aristotle, and find my way to a lucidity that will allow me to live in a civil society.

sch 12/17