A re-post from 2007 -
A quote from a piece by Shrinkwrapped entitled The Mental Health Industry's Dirty Little Secret, with which I entirely agree (my bold):
The primary misunderstanding of Freud and Psychoanalysis, a misunderstanding that continues to be propagated by the forces of Therapism, concerns the locus of responsibility for our behavior. Freud's greatest insight was that to a large extent our manifest behavior is the outcome of compromises among many impulses and inhibitions, most of them unconscious, which sum and move us to action. As such, the goal of Psychoanalysis has always been to make us more aware of our hitherto unconscious motivations so that we can take more responsibility for our behavior. Therapism does the exact opposite; it attempts to relieve us of responsibility by assigning motivation and blame to all sorts of agencies (parents, society, brain chemistry) which are by definition outside the realm of our moral agency.
It is a small step from such thinking to enabling and encouraging the government to tell people how to live, how to raise their children, and how to think. As Neuroscience enlarges our understanding of the biochemical and physiological underpinnings of behavior, those who have done so much to diminish moral responsibility will be in a powerful position to mandate proper thought. The dangers are real and growing.
He goes on to quote Christina Hoff Summer and Sally Satel's Therapy Nation:
We reject the presumption of fragility and challenge the dogma of self-revelation; it exposes the folly of replacing ethical judgment with psychological and medical diagnosis, save for instances where individuals are severely mentally ill. We believe, in other words, that human beings, including children, are best regarded as self-reliant, resilient, psychically sound moral agents responsible for their behavior. For, with few exceptions, that is what we are.
Read the whole thing. Also, good comments on that essay at Dr. X.
As for myself, I have grown weary of trying to explain how psychoanalytic theories have been misunderstood, and how superficial understandings of analytic theories have been misapplied. Yes, psychotherapy can be a very useful tool - sometimes a life-saving tool - but it is neither a religion nor a cure-all.
On the same topic, SC&A asks whether we are all nuts in discussing One nation, Under Therapy.
