Frank Furedi is worried that the message of what he calls therapy culture is a bleak one: love is dangerous, destructive and ultimately disappointing. We can overdose on it and it can lead us into the thicket of dependency. Better to retreat from the arena of relationships and opt for the solitary life. We could then lead a risk-free existence with only self-help books for company, hoping that no-one disturbs us with news of a new syndrome “self-sufficiency addiction”. Furedi’s picture of contemporary culture both reveals and obfuscates his subject.
To start with, his notion of “therapy culture” is a misnomer. What he means is “self-help culture” and he doesn’t seem to realise that most psychotherapists are critical of the language of self-help with its baggage of “addictions”, “issues” and “closure”. Rather than seeing a battlefield, Furedi sees a kind of united front where everyone speaks the same language and has the same daytime TV view of the world. To lump psychotherapists together with gurus, coaches and trainers is to adopt exactly this simplistic and ignorant perspective.
Furedi seems scandalised by the effort to turn every human passion into a psychological problem. A cultural history coach might cure him of his amnesia here. To avoid turning passions into problems would be to turn a blind eye to little less than the history of ideas. Thinkers from Aristotle to Aquinas, Dante to Spinoza and Hume to Freud have all considered passions to be serious problems — perhaps the central problems of humanity. And they have all come up with complex theories to make sense of them.
Seeing passions as perils is nothing new, but what is new is the assumption that by labelling them “addictions” no more explanation is required. Furedi is quite right to scoff at the multiplication of today’s “addictions”, but wrong to suggest that love has been singled out suddenly as a virulent danger. Passionate love has in fact been considered a sickness — albeit a common one — since antiquity, from ancient Greek medicine through to medieval theories of lovesickness and the Enlightenment debates on the relation between emotion and passion. So he shouldn’t be so surprised to find that passionate love has been represented in the past two decades as something “destructive and dangerous”. What else was it ever considered as? If Furedi opened any great novel, he would find depictions of love’s lethal chemistry from Longus to Prevost, from the Brontës to Flaubert, from Tolstoy to Toni Morrison. This recognition of danger is by no means a recent invention. Society has always pathologised passionate love for the simple reason that it threatens the existence of social bonds. Even in the minimal social organisation of a political cell, love is outlawed.
If people today are being advised not to trust the language of the heart, is this so different from the teachings of theologians, philosophers, writers and priests for centuries? Not that I want to suggest that a book such as Women Who Love Too Much should be put on the same level as Spinoza’s Ethics . . .
Guides to clarifying and controlling the passions have been around for a long time, and comparing them is a subject of great interest. But have they ever stopped anyone from being overwhelmed by a passion? I doubt it.
Furedi thinks that the suspicion with which passionate love is treated is symptomatic of therapy’s distrust of intimate relations. Therapy, he thinks, seeks to undermine any notion of dependency. But there is a difference between the policy of rejecting dependency and that of trying to analyse it.
When push comes to shove, analysing a dependent relationship may either weaken it or strengthen it. The same goes for intimacy, of which there are innumerable forms. No therapist that I’ve met is opposed to intimacy, but most of them are curious about it. Why do people’s versions of intimacy differ so widely? Why is the recipe for one person’s comfort, another’s pain? Therapists explore these questions, and in doing so they try to help their patients to free themselves from irrational forms of authority.
To claim, as Furedi does, that therapy is opposed to all forms of relations and suspicious of all feelings directed outside the self is just as misguided. There is a stark tension here between the forms of therapy based on psychoanalytic ideas and self-help orientations that market “self-esteem” and “love addiction”. These clichés are far removed from the realities of the consulting room.
Psychotherapists don’t assume, in general, that loyalty and responsibility are symptoms of “addiction”. They can be analysed, but adding a label proves nothing.
Therapy is not about weaning patients from relationships and subordinating them to the therapist. This is a definition of bad therapy, in the same way that Furedi’s historical perspective is an example of bad history. Take his claim that informal networks are disappearing or his worry that personal relations may become purely pragmatic. Hasn’t he heard of arranged marriages? And hasn’t he noticed the effects of the internet? Therapists are hardly the new thought police. They wage a daily battle against casting their profession as a service industry. Their patients no longer come to them with the reverence of 50 years ago, their place in society is not secure and they rarely go unchallenged. Therapy speak, in contrast, is doing very nicely, but this is because it has been hijacked by the self-helpers and those with no commitment to the realities of human nature.
This is the part of therapy that has been taken up by the marketplace.
Pseudo-scientific diagnoses multiply every year with treatment packages to match. Psychological problems are turned into commodities. That’s why everything is becoming an addiction.
Furedi is right to lament this medicalisation of the human condition. But contrary to what he thinks, it is mostly the therapists who struggle against this sad reduction of the parameters of human action. Therapy is about restoring a dignity to human speech in a culture that wants to reduce individuals to labels and stock diagnoses. It fights for particularity and against the medicalising tendencies of our time.
