IN THERAPY WE TRUST: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment - Brief Article

IF YOU ARE INTO EUPHORIMETERS, this book is for you. The Euphorimeter was developed in the 1930s by researchers at Duke University as a test of marriage compatibility for those seeking a mate. The person's level of happiness was measured in "Euphor" units, and the Euphorimeter's purpose was to select a mate with a similar level of such units. The test even promised to locate "the aspect of the personality from which unhappiness arises."

In Therapy. We Trust is full of interesting aspects of what the author calls "the therapeutic gospel." For example, in California there are Pet Loss Support Groups, which, in one instance recounted by the author, helped a man come to terms with the death of Fred, his pet boa constrictor. Outside of his support group, the man said, "no one understood what Fred had meant to me." Conversely, if your pet becomes depressed, you can give it Prozac, which now comes as a tablet shaped like a fish especially for cats.

Eva Moskowitz, an historian, has mined popular literature of the late 19th and 20th centuries to document how "Americans developed an intense preoccupation with psychological well-being" so that "today this obsession knows no bounds." She claims that "there are more than 260 [different kinds of] 12-step programs in America ... No other nation in the world puts so much faith in emotional well-being and self-help techniques." Happiness has become an obsession, and "the therapeutic gospel" preaches that "the psychological problems that underlie our failures and unhappiness are in fact treatable and that we can, indeed should, address these problems both individually and as a society." Flourish of trumpets; enter Oprah Winfrey and Ricki Lake.

The author is at her best in documenting America's increasing obsession with its own happiness. From Phineas P. Quimby and the New Thoughters of the 19th century, she resurrects a series of characters, many now almost forgotten, who played crucial roles. There is Paul Popenoe, who started the first "marriage clinics," and Ernest Groves, who introduced marriage counseling into college curriculums. From more recent times, Moskowitz describes mainstream happiness addicts, like Richard Price and Michael Murphy, who founded the Esalen Institute, as well as oddballs such as Arthur Janov ("primal scream therapy") and Jack Rosenberg, aka Werner Erhard. One of the most interesting sections of the book is the author's account of the rise of TV talk shows focusing on psychological problems, from Phil Donahue to Oprah Winfrey to their multitude of increasingly bizarre successors.

In Therapy We Trust is thus a solid historical account, so far as it goes. Its shortcoming--and it is a major one--is that it doesn't go far enough. It almost complete ignores the role of Sigmund Freud and the rise of psychodynamic thought in early 20th-century America in fostering the nation's obsession with psychological problems and happiness. Incredibly, Freud is barely mentioned. The author attempts to explain our obsession with self-fulfillment without any reference to Benjamin Spock or his psychoanalytically-derived ideas of childrearing. She also tries to explain "liberating the psyche" and the social protest movement of the 1960s without any reference to Herbert Marcuse, Paul Goodman, Norman O. Brown, and the other leaders of this movement whose ideas derived directly from Freud's writings.

What the author has done, essentially, is to describe the aftermath of a hurricane without mentioning that a hurricane actually occurred. The Euphorimeters and Werner Erhards of 20th-century America were washed up on its beaches by a massive psychodynamic storm, and it is not possible to truly understand their presence without also appreciating the Freudian wind and rain that brought them here.

The other shortcoming of In Therapy We Trust is the author's failure to address the question of "So what?" In the book's final pages, she briefly touches on the relationship of rising self-help to declining religious values. And on the very last page, she notes that "the other main problem with the therapeutic gospel is that the emphasis on individuals and mental healing often comes at the expense of considerations of the larger public good ... Starvation, illness, and warfare ravage the world while we obsess about anxiety, shyness, and denial." The consequences of "the therapeutic gospel" should have received much greater analysis, and my personal Euphorimeter would have registered much higher if the author had included a more extended discussion.

DR. E. FULLER TORREY is president of the Treatment Advocacy Center in Arlington, Va., and is also Executive Director of the Stanley Foundation Research Programs.

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