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We need to pull ourselves together
Theodore Dalrymple reviews Therapy Culture by Frank Furedi

In a matter of only a few decades, counselling has replaced fortitude as our culturally approved way of confronting misfortune. A large number of my patients ascribe their current unhappiness to the fact that they were not offered counselling at the time of an unpleasant occurrence, such as a surgical operation or the death of a friend or relative. Every form of human suffering, it seems, is susceptible to the magical powers of therapy. It is the superstition of our age.

Frank Furedi, a professor of sociology, examines this curious, and by no means harmless, phenomenon in some detail. Only occasionally does he resort to the barbarous locutions of his academic trade, with words such as "problematise", but for the most part he writes in good plain English.

He argues, in my view convincingly, that the extension of belief in "therapy" is both symptomatic and productive of a profound change in human relations, and not for the better. It may also lead to an extension of the powers of the state over our lives. Therapeutic culture is therefore destructive - though the author fails to allow the possibility that many people may nevertheless benefit personally from the sympathetic ear and disinterested advice of third parties when they have no one else suitable to turn to. Nor do I agree with Furedi that state intervention is invariably a bad thing: in cases of domestic violence, for example, it is often a necessary duty.

Yet the bigger picture he presents is persuasive. He points out that in the not-so-distant past, people looked (at least in this country) to their relatives and friends to help them with their difficulties. They also turned to the consolations of religion, and believed in the virtue of stoicism. However, for a variety of cultural reasons many people have gradually come to consider the ups and downs of their emotional lives to be by far the most important aspect of their existence.

But self-absorption and an emphasis on self-realisation are divisive: to quote the cant phrase that makes my heart sink every time I hear it, people are no longer "there for one another". Thus they increasingly turn to professional third parties - alleged experts such as counsellors - for support and advice. In the process, perfectly normal, inescapable, human experiences - such as those of loss, conflict, ambivalence and anxiety - are turned into quasi-medical problems to be treated by quasi-medical means....