Therapeutic Reading
By Kelly Jane Torrance
Sigmund Freud’s daughter, Anna, ran nursery schools in London during the Blitz of World War II. Very few of her charges needed psychiatric help. As Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel relate in their new book, One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture is Eroding Self-Reliance (St. Martin's Press), Freud found that even children who remained with their parents and were bombed repeatedly showed “no signs of traumatic shock…little excitement and no undue disturbance.”
What a long way we’ve come. Today, grief counselors rush in at the first sign of a “tragedy”—as when they comforted librarians upset over ruined books when the Boston Public Library was flooded in 1998. Sommers and Satel detail this and many other excesses of therapy in their well-researched and provoking book. They even coined a word for these immoderations: “therapism.”
One Nation Under Therapy is just as incendiary as the authors’ (both resident scholars at the American Enterprise Institute) previous books. Philosopher Sommers wrote Who Stole Feminism? which helped herald a new era of individualist feminism. Practicing psychiatrist Satel is the author of PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine and is famous as a debunker of the idea that addiction is a brain disease.
Sommers and Satel spend some time in the book discussing addiction theory. “It is true that repeated drug use alters brain chemistry and function, at least temporarily. The question is whether these changes completely obliterate the addict’s capacity to make choices,” they write. They argue forcefully that this is not the case, with research to back it up: “But addicts spend only a fraction of their time in such states. A large percentage of them hold jobs, and all of them make scores of decisions throughout the day, influenced by what is at stake…Most addicts, furthermore, have episodes of clean time that last for weeks, months, or years.”
The idea that drug and other addicts have no control over their behavior is just one example of the over-medicalization of American society. Even “seemingly content and well-adjusted Americans—adults as well as children—are emotionally damaged,” according to professionals.
How educators and educators of educators view their task is one of the most alarming aspects of the book. Depression and suicide among the young is decreasing, and there has been a dramatic drop in juvenile crime. But therapists continue to push the idea that even normal children are one breakpoint away from bubbling over into crime and mayhem.
Their solution is a kinder, gentler childhood. Teachers are advised to get rid of games like tag and musical chairs that foster competition. Never mind that, as Sommers and Satel note, “Within the constraints of morality and law, competition is a powerfully creative and animating force that drives the advancement of knowledge, art, and invention.” Kids shouldn’t have to feel bad about themselves.
The self-esteem movement has been gathering steam for years. Sommers and Satel have some surprising arguments against it. “Unmerited self-esteem is known to be associated with antisocial behavior—even criminality,” they write. Studies have “found no significant connection between feelings of high self-worth and academic achievement, interpersonal relationships, or healthy lifestyles. On the contrary, high self-regard is very often found in people who are narcissistic and have an inflated sense of popularity and likeability.”
An academic environment that encourages children to focus on themselves rather than the wide world around them isn’t challenging intellectually, either. If one believes the anecdotes in this book, teachers spent more time on “feelings” after September 11 than they did seizing the opportunity to teach history and examine moral and political questions. In one program, kids were asked questions about their reactions to the terror attacks. “The answers the children give to these questions are listed on the chalkboard and serve as the basis for a class 'feelings collage.' The collage, in turn, is to serve as a catalyst for a 'feelings dance.' If time allows, the guides suggests a 'feelings book' and 'feelings masks.'” You couldn’t make this stuff up.
But the problem is not that therapists, educators, and other have become ridiculous. One Nation Under Therapy is a much more important book than just a catalogue of eccentricities in psychology. The new attitude toward therapy makes it harder for people who do have problems to get better. Children who truly have problems get lost in the crowd when it is assumed that every single child has something wrong with him. Addicts are not encouraged to clean up when everyone tells them their problems have nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with brain chemistry.
Most dangerous, perhaps, is that our children are being taught that people are not responsible for their actions. The result is that, increasingly, they no longer believe in moral responsibility. “One student defended Hitler as ‘a man of his own time. We cannot judge him by our different standards,’” Sommers and Satel write. “Robert Simon, a professor of philosophy at Hamilton College, finds increasing numbers of students telling him 'they accept the reality of the Holocaust, but they believe themselves unable morally to condemn it, or indeed to make any moral judgments whatsoever.'”
And while this example is a bit more of a stretch, Sommers and Satel even blame therapism for the Catholic sex abuse scandal. The notion that pedophilia is a disorder that can be cured led church leaders to continue to employ dangerous priests once the men went through therapy.
Despite some small exaggerations like that, Sommers and Satel have done an admirable job of warning us of the dangers of a society in which everyone is considered emotionally disturbed in some way. As they conclude, “only a society that treats its members as ethically responsible or personally accountable can achieve and sustain a democratic civil order.”
*****
One short story familiar to educators and students for decades is Kurt Vonnegut’s “Harrison Bergeron.” The satire takes place in the year 2081 when “everybody was finally equal.” The “United States Handicapper General” ensures equality by making the attractive wear repulsive masks and the smart wear distracting radios.
In what seems to be a novel brief, attorneys for the Shawnee Mission school district in Johnson County, Kansas, are familiarizing lawyers and judges with the story, too. The district is litigating in the Kansas Supreme Court in support of a state bill allowing municipalities to raise property taxes for education. As the Lawrence Journal-World reports, “Critics say…the local property tax options will widen the disparity between wealthy and poor districts.” School district attorneys believe the story is a good illustration of the nightmare of forced equality.
Of course, if these unnamed “critics” get their way, perhaps no student in Kansas will have even heard of Vonnegut’s story. The opposing attorney admits he hasn’t read it. He says that the new law is “not fair to poor districts that couldn't raise much in local taxes.”
Kelly Jane Torrance is TAEonline’s books columnist.
