Those of us not yet submerged in the flood of therapy culture describe it, with some wringing of the hands, as syndrome in place of sin, or psychology in place of morality. It is those things. Therapy culture is oppressively reductionistic, leaving us wide-eyed and shivering but passive nodes of emotion: brittle, defensive, entitled, and vulnerable. There is no succor: the therapeutic language we swim in is merely descriptive, and not explanatory. The underlying disease of therapy culture is exactly this positivism, this staying of the hand, so to speak, against ultimate explanations.
Science, we think, is the ultimate methodology for finding truth, but it isn’t, in fact it routinely stops short of explanation. A valid critique of science as truth-seeking mechanism is its functionalism. Functionalism is a word for recognizing that science merely describes material reality in a way that allows us to bend material things to our will functionally. It is description only, therefore, not explanation. We have no idea what gravity is! We know how it (whatever it is) affects material tings, even well enough to send men to the moon, but we can’t explain it. We use quantum mechanics in what are now everyday household electronics, but no one can go beyond describing it. It is inexplicable. You think someone must understand it, but no one does.
Maybe one day explanation will catch up to description, as it eventually does in some sub-domains of science, but in the meantime we tend to fold the hands over our fat little bellies and say “good enough for the next techno innovation, let’s go for it.” The fruit of scientific inquiry we regard as satisfactory unto itself. That is functionalism. And functionalism is a by-product of pragmatism and positivism. Positivism because empirical “scientific” management takes the place of ultimate explanation. Pragmatism because ends are swallowed up in means. We’re all expected to collectively feel our way towards some atheist socialist moral goal without pausing to ask what ideology drives us.
And so it is with therapy culture. It is functionalist, positivist, atheist, and pragmatist. We think there is mystery enough in the tumultuous id to sustain our ever-present thirst for mythos truth, but with no way to slake that thirst in ultimate explanation. Look at the therapy bible for proof: the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM—Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. It describes in an atheist, Freudian framework the acts and thoughts associated with various behaviors we for reasons unexplained regard as deviation from normal. But the psychology bible nowhere explains these “syndromes.” The entire project is descriptive only. It is functionalist at its core, a ceaseless categorizing that brings us no closer to explanation. It is theory about the unknowable subconscious—unknowable precisely because sub-conscious.
Therapy culture serves ideology for precisely this reason. Groping around in the dark basement of the subconscious is its own ideology, rendering us vulnerable to the manipulations of positivist ideological capture. Within the therapeutic paradigm, ideological movements in all their mutating temporal flows are the sole point of reference for discernment of reality. It’s all about how we feel.
For this reason the practice of psychotherapy is uniquely open to ideological abuse. It is an open-ended authority often overtly and unapologetically employed by ideologues. A quick look around at this dangerous exercise of false authority reveals its insidious inculcation of positivist drama in unsuspecting clients who showed up in the first place because of felt vulnerability. Ideology serves therapy which serves ideology, each accelerating the other.
Therapeutic ideology in this way serves other positivist (and, needless to say, atheist) ideologies: fascism, communism, feminism, queer theory, consensus “democracy,” open-society one-worldism, and the anti-semitism that seems so often to signal their advent. The underlying therapeutic paradigm truncates inconvenient human realities that don’t fit ideological function. We all swim in the waters of pragmatism without realizing it, going wherever the current takes us without considering why we’re in the water in the first place.
In this way, therapy culture blinds us to truth- and moral-realism. If we can describe good and evil, as we imagine it to be in the moment, and leave it at that (functionalism), we become incapable of even attempting an explanation for it. It becomes a habit of mind to accept description in place of explanation. So we can no longer accept the reality of a moral law, only a felt indignation and outrage over our prejudices du jour, our short-sighted following of whatever ideology has its bit in our mouth today. We all become the Mephistophelean Judge of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, ever picking up and categorizing the flotsam of material existence, fascinated with things-as-they-are but oblivious to ultimate explanation, the impelling Aristotelian final cause for anything.
What is just is, in our stunted postmodern imaginations.
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