“The Triumph of the Therapeutic”
Volume 1, Issue 6
“What is the therapeutic term for holiness?”1
“Undergraduates stay after class to talk about personal struggles, but they describe them in medical, almost mechanical terms, as if the human condition were a symptomatic illness or a series of technical glitches.” It sometimes seems that my students have fallen “into the wreckage of post-modernity, where subjective assumptions and therapeutic language eschew moral claims altogether.”2
In the last issue of “The Yellow Pad” I argued that there is a biblical framework in place that frames us all. In short, the image of God resides in each of us, and no matter how marred it may become, it will find expression in every one of us. One way this happens is that the image of God provides a moral compass that often guides people, even if they refuse to see their moral convictions as anything more than ungrounded personal preferences. This God-given moral sensibility, furthermore, is in keeping with the grain of the universe as God has made it, so to the extent we live in accord with the image of God and the grain of the universe, we will enjoy the benefit. To the extent we help others do the same, whether as therapists or teachers, as parents or as friends, we will be serving their best interests as well. Whether we work in mental health professions or seek to serve in any number of other roles, we can do so with hope of doing genuine good.
We should not, however, be naïve about the cultural context in which we seek to serve. The biblical frame, on which we reflected two weeks ago, is only one of two frameworks that have us in their grasp. There is also a cultural/historical framework that has evolved over the past 400 years of modern history, and it frames us all. In weeks to come, we will reflect on various expressions of this modern framework, but today I want only to draw attention to the striking extent to which therapeutic discourse has replaced moral discourse and shaped religious discourse in significant ways.
Over the past century we have witnessed what Phillip Rieff prophetically described in 1966 as “The Triumph of the Therapeutic.”3 Rieff is not easy reading, but briefly stated, Rieff argues that culture includes both a “controlling symbolic,” which sets standards and expectations for a society, and a “releasing or remissive symbolic,” which resists the controlling symbolic. In the past century, Rieff argues, we have experienced a cultural revolution in which “the releasing or remissive symbolic [has grown] more compelling than the controlling” symbolic. The remissive symbolic has attacked “the failing cultural super-ego.” As a result, the former controlling symbolic of the ascetic ideal, which kept the larger community in view and rested on a sense of discipline and self-sacrifice, has been replaced by the “needy person,” who is permanently engaged in the task of achieving “self fulfillment.”
Furthermore, this move from the greater good of the community to the fulfilment of the self, Rieff asserts, involves the still deeper transition “from evaluative to expressive symbolisms.” In other words, as Alasdair MacIntyre has observed, over the course of modernity we have moved from the rationalist individualism, in which the story began, to an emotivist individualism and on to the expressivist individualism that now frames us all.
As a result, Rieff argues, therapy has largely displaced or redefined religion in therapeutic terms. Whereas religion once provided a metaphysical foundation for society’s ascetic symbolic, religion has been caught up in the therapeutic turn and now serves therapeutic aims. Quoting a leading therapist of his day, Rieff observes that religion has become passe except as a means of self-fulfillment. “Any religious exercise is justified only by being something men do for themselves, that is, for the enrichment of their own experience.” If Jesus has any place at all, it is as a therapist, not a savior. “People who center their lives on ritual, sacrament, and constant reference to some supposed plan underlying experience” are seen to be suffering from “paranoid fantasy-obsession.” As Freud observed, the psychoanalyst has replaced the priest as “secular spiritual guide”
“What, then, should churchmen do” in such a culture? “The answer returns clearly,” says the therapist. “Become, avowedly, therapists, administrating a therapeutic institution—under the justificatory mandate that Jesus himself was the first therapeutic.” Rieff continues, “Here speaks the therapeutic, calmly confident that community life no longer needs some supposed plan underlying experience.” Psychotherapy, Rieff concludes, now stands as “the chief among [the] arts, interpreting the deconversion experience of Western man to himself.” It allows for no “illusion […] beyond an intensely private sense of well-being.” Indeed, “a sense of well-being has become the end, rather than a by-product of striving after some superior communal end, [and it] announces a fundamental change of focus in the entire cast of our culture.” As a culture, we have become committed to "the gospel of self-fulfillment."
In the current issue of The Hedgehog Review, the sociologist, James Davison Hunter brings Rieff into our present moment. In a discussion of what has become of the very notion of “character,” Hunter argues that as our materialistic (or a-theistic) and utilitarian ethic evolved, it “ultimately took an expressive and therapeutic form […] oriented toward subjective well-being—happiness, positivity and self-esteem.” In striking and troubling ways, Hunter argues, therapeutic discourse has displaced moral language. We speak of school shooters as deeply disturbed young people demonstrating anti-social behavior but never as having bad character. Harvey Weinstein, Hunter observes, has an “addiction to sex,” George Santos has “dissociative identify disorder,” and so they seek help for dealing with their sicknesses. “The language of illness,” Hunter concludes, “is the only publicly legitimate language for talking about their ways of being and acting.”
Building on Rieff’s insights, Hunter observes that over the course of modernity, “the authority of a transcendent God was superseded by the laws of the natural order and [by] the scientific paradigms that sustained them” and were, in turn, “supplanted by the subjective experiences of sovereign individual selves.” In the effort to be inoffensive and inclusive, we have lifted moral formation out of “particular cultural and linguistic contexts,” and as a result, “the moral is reduced to the thinnest of platitudes.” Hunter continues, “Our programs of moral formation […] have stripped out the moral resources of any and all metaphysically coherent traditions. […] All that is left to ground and guide moral judgments in public and private life are the subjective needs and emotions of autonomous selves.”4
None of this should be taken to mean that we should abandon our attempts at therapy. Whether we are practitioners in mental health professions or grandparents wondering how best to love our grandchildren, however, we would do well to reflect on the ways that therapeutic discourse has replaced moral or spiritual discourse in our own lives and in the lives of those we love and serve. It is one thing to apply therapeutic skills to mental health concerns. It is quite another thing to allow the therapeutic to frame all of life in ways that actually displace or erase the moral and spiritual.
If I were to ask you: What do you most want for your children (or grandchildren), and if I had not just forced you to think about what-frames-what, how would you have responded to my question? Might you have answered by saying that you hope your children turn out to be “well adjusted, productive citizens?” In other words, might a therapeutic vocabulary, coupled with a vocabulary of industrial production, have come spontaneously to mind? Or would you have drawn on a vocabulary of good character, virtue, or even godliness?
Vocabularies matter. Our words entail not only specific meanings but also fundamental understandings of our humanity. Our fallback vocabularies say more about our deepest ways of seeing the world than we may want to admit. We do well, therefore, to listen to critics such as Rieff and Hunter and to let them at least provoke us to think about what place therapeutic discourse has come to play in our own lives. Before we think about how best to serve others, we do well to examine ourselves.
I do not know the implications of these issues for all of you who are mental health professionals, and I will not try to speculate, but I will ask all of us (therapists included) my usual question, which is:
What frames what?
Does therapeutic discourse do the work of framing for you? Or does therapy find its place within some larger framework?
In our current setting, a therapeutic vision of self fulfilment serves widely as the framework for understanding all of human experience. But Rieff’s and Hunter’s critiques make me question whether a therapeutic vision can serve satisfactorily as the ultimate framework for understanding our humanity. If the triumph of the therapeutic allows for no “illusion […] beyond an intensely private sense of well-being” so that “all that is left to ground and guide moral judgments in public and private life are the subjective needs and emotions of autonomous selves,” then I question whether such a framework is adequate to life.
In the end, I would argue, a therapeutic understanding of our humanity points beyond itself to a more adequate framework than therapy can provide. It points beyond itself to a rich moral vision, deeply rooted in the holiness of God, that frames all of life and gives our therapeutic practices their rightful place.
As we all know, twelve step programs typically include a step in which participants engage God. I find this fascinating, and I always see in it a source of hope, but I also wonder: What would it mean for God not simply to appear as a tool that serves the aims of therapeutic practice but for the “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob” to serve as the framework that gives therapy a place and puts therapeutic tools to work for human good?
Richard John Neuhaus, Founder and Editor of the journal First Things. From Freedom for Ministry, 1979.
Campbell F. Scribner, Associate Professor of Education, University of Maryland. From “Rediscovering the Transcendent Self with Philip H. Phenix” in "The Raised Hand," April 24, 2024.
Philip Rieff, the Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (Harper & Row, 1966). All quotations come from chapter eight, “The Triumph of the Therapeutic,” pp. 232-61.
James Davison Hunter, “The Denial of the Moral as Lived Experience,” in The Hedgehog Review: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Culture (Spring 2024), pp. 20-30.