One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance

Abstract

One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance. Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel. New York: St. Martins, 2005, 310 pp., $23.95. Those who have read Sommers' The War Against Boys and Satel's articles on the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal (in which One Nation Under Therapy has been reviewed [Beston, 2005]) will soon recognize the flavor of this book. The authors are angry and indignant, and the target of their wrath is "therapism," responsible for what they see as an ethical crisis in America's school-age youth. They note, "At the heart of therapism is the revolutionary idea that psychology can and should take the place of ethics and religion," also that therapism is at odds with the American creed, whose "paramount values are self-reliance, stoicism, courage in the face of adversity, and the valorization of excellence" (p. 218). In high school I was expected to memorize this creed, and what I remember of it did not seem to jibe with Sommers and Satel's version. Sure enough, the ushistory.org Web site (within which see "Documents of Freedom") contained the version that I had learned, and there was no mention in it of any of the values cited by the authors. Perhaps they were quoting from the Hollywood rendition. The book has, in addition to preface and conclusion, six chapters. Each covers a different arena in which therapism has had its alleged malignant effect. Some quotes from chapter 1: No one seems to know how to define (self esteem), how to measure it, or whether it can be taught. (p. 31) History education now requires teachers to be "sensitive to student emotions and feelings ... [Their] role is that of psychologist and problem solver as much as purveyor of knowledge and comprehension." (p. 39) After several decades of therapeutic relativism, many of our young people are unable to speak with confidence in support of the moral ideals that have made their own way of life possible. (p. 46) In chapter 2, Sommers and Satel expose Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, and the human potentiality movement to their ridicule. They focus on emotional intelligence, the more contemporaneous brainchild of Goleman (1995), and they quote: "'Know Thyself,' speaks to . . . awareness of one's own feelings as they occur. 'Know Yourself,' includes naming and communicating emotions" (p. 55). Unfortunately, Sommers and Satel limit their critique to the pragmatic. They say that "self-esteem is not the solution that Maslow and Rogers took it to be" (p. 76). But emotional intelligence suffers at a much more fundamental level. The above quotations by Goleman and his students are psychologism at its most simple-minded, and one feels sure that, if he and his adherents were aware, at even a most basic level, with Wittgenstein's discussion, echoed by Skinner (1953), on the impossibility of a private language, they would not offer such banalities. One cannot be aware of or name one's own feelings (or anyone else's, for that matter) because language is not a private affair; it is intensely public and shared with everyone else who speaks the same tongue. How then can the meanings of words like "anger," "hope," or "sadness" be agreed upon if no two people can agree on what is being spoken about? Sommers and Satel acknowledge (p. 74) that "Maslow and Rogers are no longer taken seriously in the world of academic psychology," and they add, "The Maslow-Rogers view of human nature has serious practical and conceptual failings, but it has a passionate and committed following among educators and mental health counselors ... (because) it appears to be deeply compassionate" (pp. 75-76) (emphasis and parenthesis added). But there may be another reason why this outdated philosophy lives on: very few educators and master's level counselors have been trained to recognize those practical and conceptual failings. Chapter 3 deals with criminal responsibility and the excuses that therapism makes available to dissolve it. …