The place of psychotherapy and counselling in a healthy European social order: A commentary on Tantam and Van Deurzen

Abstract

This commentary on Tantam and van Deurzen's vision for psychotherapy in Europe (this issue, pp. 228-235) interrogates their seeming modernity-driven, rights-obsessed convictions. Specifically, their uncritical advocacy of control-fixated political intrusions into the cultural-spiritual sphere is challenged; and critical reflections are offered on institutional professionalization; the authors' profession-centred, grandiose discourse; and therapy's alleged scientificity. Some dangers associated with individualised therapy's becoming a fetishized, institutionally sanctioned ‘regime of truth’ are voiced — one practicable antidote to which is the deliberate cultivation of an ongoingly deconstructive, ‘New Paradigm’ approach to therapy which, not least, mistrusts therapy's tendency towards delusory, self-interested exaggeration of its own cultural indispensability.