---

Hooked on self-esteem
by Jennie Bristow

'There are no heroes in this drama.' With his new book Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability In An Uncertain Age, Frank Furedi, professor of sociology, prolific author and trenchant critic of the fears and fads of our times, can expect to attract as many new enemies as he can friends.

Like his previous books, Paranoid Parenting and Culture of Fear, Furedi's Therapy Culture - published in the UK today by Routledge - takes a contemporary theme close to people's hearts and knocks it on the head. With its criticisms of the 'growth industry' of counselling and the spread of concepts such as 'self-esteem', the book has received strong interest across the political spectrum in the UK, and will be welcomed on both sides of the Atlantic by people disturbed by aspects of our shrink society. But as Furedi says, 'even many people who kick against therapy culture are prepared to use it' - and Therapy Culture is rather more than just another anti-counselling critique.

Furedi has for some time been concerned about the rise of emotionalism in politics and culture. But the problem, he insists, is not only that today's society celebrates emotion above achievement and reason - it's that it has created a regime that 'praises some emotions and stigmatises others', creating an authoritarian and destructive dynamic.

And Therapy Culture does not focus simply on the charlatans and crackpot theories within the profession. 'Every movement has its parasites', says Furedi, but the real problem with therapy is not its aberrances, but the way it 'most systematically expresses cultural norms'. To put this in non-academic speak: today's society has made therapy into a way of life, and that's what needs to be challenged....

...One of the justifications often put forward for why therapeutic intervention is needed by modern society is the fact that we live in an increasingly atomised world, in which the bonds between communities and families are weaker than before, leaving individuals isolated and lonely. Yes, says Furedi, society is more atomised than 30 years ago - and for some years, he has been theorising about the causes and consequences of this process. But it is not inevitable that social change breeds atomisation - 'change can bring with it feelings of solidarity'.

And far from therapy providing the solution to atomisation, it only fuels this destructive trend, pushing people further away from their nearest and dearest. As he puts it: 'Therapy breeds mistrust, treating private life and relationships between people with suspicion, and making a virtue of estrangement.'

The extent to which therapy culture destroys informal relationships between people is a key concern of Furedi's book. By encouraging the focus on the individual, through propagating concepts such as self-esteem and emphasising the potential for abuse within relationships, the therapeutic dynamic encourages people to see others as a problem. By continually talking up the need for professional intervention to 'help' people with everything from the ins and outs of married life to how they raise their children, therapy culture weakens people's relationships of dependence upon each other, and encourages increasing dependence upon professionals.

Furedi's diagnosis of British and American society on the couch is stark, and sobering. He makes no attempt to sweeten the pill by positing an upside to emotional politics or strategies designed to boost self-esteem - to Furedi, therapy culture is unremittingly bad for individuals and society. So what can be done? Here, Furedi employs his own version of the counselling culture's pet phrase: Let's talk about it.

On a society-wide level, says Furedi, the way to counter therapy culture is to attempt to develop an alternative web of meaning, that gives us the ability to make sense of our lives based on an appreciation of people's strengths and potential, rather than an assumption about their weaknesses and vulnerability. No small task, clearly, but one that is surely preferable to accepting therapy's low-grade vision of humanity now and in the future. As for individuals - Furedi has a three-step plan of sorts. 'We can do what we can to kick against the medicalisation of life; to cultivate the informal way of doing things; and to put the helping professions in their place.'

Life doesn't make us ill, and friends are better than therapists. This may be shorthand: but it beats 'I blame my parents'. ...