Who’d have thought it? Even before September 11, the American people were already more unified than we imagined. We have a bond that transcends the divides of liberal and conservative, black and white, believer and atheist. Eva S. Moskowitz pulls back the curtain in her new book, In Therapy We Trust: America’s Obsession with Self-Fulfillment (Johns Hopkins, 2001):

"We live in an age consumed by worship of the psyche. In a society plagued by divisions of race, class, and gender we are nonetheless bound together by a gospel of psychological happiness."

A generation ago most Americans lived their whole lives without ever confronting psychological concepts or being morbidly preoccupied with their self-esteem. Today we are soaked in therapeutic culture: it’s on TV, in the newspapers, in the book stores. It shapes our experience of one another and the world. How did we get to this point? In tracing the history of what she calls the "therapeutic gospel" she demonstrates how psychology moved from the fringes of American life into various sectors of society, eventually saturating our cultural lives.

In the wake of September 11, therapeutic language has been much in evidence on news reports, as the media talk of "healing" and "trauma" on a national rather than personal level. The aftermath of World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks is more support for Moskowitz’s already strong case that the therapeutic culture has come to serve a nearly religious function in contemporary society, even for those who already claim religious beliefs of their own.

Therapeutic dogma

Moskowitz names three central tenets of the therapeutic faith. "The first is that happiness should be our supreme goal. Wealth, public recognition, high moral character—each of these achievements is held valuable only to the extent that it makes us happy." The evidence that Americans value happiness as the psychological yardstick for all activity is so monumental it needs no further comment.

"The second tenet of our therapeutic faith," she says, "is the belief that our problems stem from psychological causes. Problems that were once considered political, economic, or educational are today found to be psychological." Again, this claim hardly needs further support. Social problems, criminality, poverty, learning disabilities—maybe even terrorism?—are increasingly blamed on lack of self-esteem, inferiority complexes, and other pop psychological explanations. Even the flip remark "You need therapy" commonly delivered in response to a complaint about some perceived problem testifies of the extent to which we presume our problems come from a damaged psyche. Our grandparents might have said, "You need a priest."

From the second tenet follows the third, which Moskowitz says

"is the most important, but it is so universally accepted, so seemingly self-evident, that we hardly notice its existence. This tenet is 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."

This is certainly the essence of the therapeutic gospel, and it is here that the foundation of therapeutic culture may be questioned. But Moskowitz is a historian, and while it is clear she is suspicious and even critical of therapeutic culture, she does not make a systematic critique of it. Almost no one today does, though the task might profitably be undertaken by a philosopher, a theologian, a novelist, or even a radical, thoughtful psychiatrist. Nevertheless, her historical survey of the rise of therapeutic culture is informative for any theoretical consideration of its nature and limits.

Quimby & Co.

Moskowitz begins her account with a largely unknown but, according to her historical examination, profoundly important American of the nineteenth century—Phineas Pankhurst Quimby, a clockmaker and erstwhile dabbler in "mind science." Remarkably, Quimby, and by extension the whole of American obsession with therapy, was inspired by the fringe pseudoscience practiced by Franz Anton Mesmer, the French hypnotist who claimed an ability to mentally cure disease. Mesmer himself has been largely debunked and forgotten, but his name survives in the term "mesmerizing." Mesmer enjoyed the same respect that present-day scientists might accord a UFO hunter; to many established thinkers he was nothing more than a quack and a crank, but Quimby was impressed when he saw one of Mesmer’s disciples lecture. Quimby later broke with mesmerism and went into business as a healer, dissociating himself from other popular movements of the day and offering up what he called "Spiritual Science."

According to newspaper accounts of the day, part of Quimby’s method consisted of "investigations in psychology." In order to heal, Quimby did not use hypnosis or spiritual influence but would instead "sit down beside [the patient] and put himself en rapport with him." Observers of this method claimed that "his power over disease arises from his subtle knowledge of the mind." At the time this was so outrageous that people "hardly dare believe there can be any truth in it," but as Moskowitz points out, "Quimby’s reliance upon psychology to diagnose and heal has become commonplace today."

Quimby was also the first, in his four-hundred-page Science of Health and Happiness, to condemn religion, medicine, and morality for insufficiently promoting health and happiness, at one point declaring religion and disease "synonymous." He saw no connection between self-denial and reward, a connection he thought religion in its more puritanical forms made. Spiritual science was the cure that ensured health and happiness, both of which he argued God had made attainable for all men. The seeds of the three tenets of the therapeutic gospel are clearly evident here.

If there is anything strange to modern ears about Quimby and the related teachings of the day, it is his insistence that psychology can cure physical as well as mental disorders. Bodily ailment was, according to the founders of the "mental hygiene" movement, caused by false ideas. It is no accident that Christian Science was born of Quimbyesque notions. Mary Baker Eddy founded Christian Science in 1881, and her followers to this day embrace a method of healing that operates through mental suggestion, teaching that suffering is curable through the eradication of false ideas. In that sense, Christian Science remains an anachronism, a holdover of nineteenth-century notions of mental hygiene and disease that in most other sectors of society developed into modern therapeutic culture.

Several sectors

The story of that development is the focus of Moskowitz’s work, and she does a fine job of tracing the influence of therapeutic thinking in marriage counseling, the crusade against poverty (a social problem often blamed by therapy-minded reformers on the maladjustment of the lower classes), and World War II, during which an unprecedented number of American citizens were subjected to therapy to alleviate combat-induced shock. After the war, therapy exploded in American society, as literally thousands of professionals trained in psychiatry for foreign service came home and hung shingles in private practice.

Two of the most interesting episodes in Moskowitz’s account are the alleged bombshell dropped by Betty Friedan with her feminist manifesto The Feminine Mystique and the landmark Supreme Court decision abolishing segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education. In the former, Moskowitz argues convincingly that Friedan’s book, far from being a shock to a previously complacent 1950s "Ozzie and Harriet" world of happy housewives and working husbands, was in fact completely consistent with the therapeutic articles commonly published in women’s magazines of the day. As Moskowitz points out, a large percentage of regular features published at the time in magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, Cosmopolitan, and McCall’s—with titles like "Can This Marriage Be Saved?," "Why Marriages Fail," and "Making Marriage Work"—were geared toward reassuring women that their unhappiness was not uncommon and even normal. In fact, these articles were so common that when McCall’s ran a Friedan article that served as the basis for The Feminine Mystique, reader response was overwhelmingly negative. Scores of women wrote in to protest the caricature of homemakers as chronically dissatisfied and incurably neurotic. Far from being a innovator, Friedan was just one of the more successful hawkers of a typical armchair therapy.

In the case of Brown vs. Board of Education, Moskowitz demonstrates the pivotal role therapy played in overturning the Court’s prior decision that "separate but equal" facilities in segregated classrooms was a sufficient constitutional standard. The litigators’ case rested entirely on the argument that segregation was damaging to the psyches of young African-American school children. This argument, while it may have some merit, is not based on legal precedent. Typically cases before the Supreme Court are built by invoking past decisions that are relevant to the present case and showing how they persuade the Court to act one way or the other. The Brown lawyers relied instead on testimony from experts in psychiatry and social scientists and skirted the issue of precedent.

Moskowitz, who serves on the New York City Council, doubtless would not have been elected if she actually supported segregation, and I’m sure she feels like most Americans that segregation is not a tolerable situation. Her point is simply that as of 1954, when the decision was handed down, therapeutic thinking was sufficiently powerful to convince the Supreme Court that the "separate but equal" standard set by Plessy vs. Ferguson was totally unconstitutional.

Mainstreaming

In the following years therapeutic thinking became mainstream. The government established institutes and commissions on mental health, and soon therapeutic thinking hit the airwaves. Phil Donahue led off, followed by Oprah Winfrey, and soon we had the entire increasingly tawdry cavalcade of celebrities spilling their guts and ordinary people taking shots at one another. All in the name of edification, of course, but all too often just for the sake of entertainment.

By Moskowitz’s reckoning, therapeutic thinking has become the hallmark of our culture, with all spheres of life affected. In the field of politics, she even has some harsh words for Bill Clinton, our first therapeutic president, who managed with well-timed psychobabble to finesse himself into the White House and out of his many self-inflicted jams. An incident she doesn’t mention, which shows just how far we have come in thirty years, is the nomination of Thomas Eagleton to the vice presidency by George McGovern in 1972. Eagleton bowed out of the race after the facts leaked that he had consulted a therapist and received electric shock therapy. In 1972 that was sufficient to raise suspicions in the public mind that a candidate was unfit for national office. After Clinton, having been in therapy is practically a prerequisite for the job. Woe to any stodgy candidates who believe that whatever your problems—poverty, discrimination, or being disabled through military service—the solution is to quit whining and suck it up.

The church does not escape Moskowitz’s notice, either. On the book’s first page she cites titles of therapeutic books written expressly for Christians. And indeed, anyone who glances through the catalogs of the major Christian publishers will find plenty of evidence that evangelicals have absorbed therapeutic thinking. I would argue that the massive bestseller The Prayer of Jabez reads not unlike a (thin) therapeutic tome; a slightly jaundiced view could see it as advising its readers to pray a formula every day for a month and guaranteeing results to those who diligently follow its prescriptions for a better spiritual life.

And of course there is a measure of truth in all of this. How we think does affect how we feel, how we act. It does affect our health and the way we approach work and human relations. But the real question is whether Christians should adopt full-blown therapeutic thinking. The short answer is No. We have many reasons to take a more critical stance toward our culture’s celebration of self-esteem.

Let’s note for the record that for many people with serious psychological problems, therapy is essential to achieving a functional existence. No one should be arguing that therapy is useless or a sign of weakness. But as is so often the case, what is salutary in some part of life for some people is not salutary in all parts of life for all people. We should take another look at the three tenets of therapeutic culture that Moskowitz outlines and discuss a possible Christian response to them.

Happy are you when men persecute you

First, the notion that happiness should be our supreme goal. While no one wants to be unhappy, and God certainly does not want any of his children to be unhappy, no Christians should say that happiness is our supreme goal. That honor is reserved for faithfulness to God and obedience to his commandments.

Would we say that Isaiah or Paul were "happy?" Certainly they were blessed, but is this the same thing? They were surely content, knowing that they were on the path of righteousness, but for them as for many thousands of believers then and now, the path of righteousness led to impoverishment, persecution, and death. We are enjoined to count such trials as pure joy—and may God help us do so when we face them—but is the joy of the martyr happiness as contemporary Americans define it?

When Polycarp, that great hero of the faith, was urged by the Romans to curse Christ and declare Caesar a god or face being burned alive, and he replied, "Eighty-six years I have served him, and he never did me any wrong. How can I blaspheme my King who saved me?", he could not have had his happiness, self-esteem, or psychological well-being in mind. Like the many thousands who preceded and followed him, he sacrificed what we would call happiness for fidelity to his Lord.

It is worth noting in passing that the byproduct of such fidelity is joy, much greater than happiness. Paul and Polycarp don’t seem lacking in self-esteem. But this is a matter, as C. S. Lewis comments, of not pursuing happiness but rather setting first what is properly first and allowing such "second things" as psychological well-being to come as they will.

Let sin be sin

Turn to Moskowitz’s second criterion, the notion that our problems are psychological in character. I suggested above that whereas now one is likely to hear the flip comment "You need therapy," an earlier generation might have referred friends and family to religious counsel. It seems likely to me that a Christian should want to argue that some problems are not psychological but spiritual in nature. Claiming that the world’s problems, personal and public, are the product of psychological imbalance is very different from asserting that they are the product of human depravity. Therapy may help me overcome a number of psychological disorders, but it does not follow that it can thus help me overcome anything.

The heart is desperately wicked, and the only cure for that problem is sanctifying grace. As Paul complained, we often do the thing we do not will, and I take this to mean that sometimes at least people are simply perverse and crave things that are evil. Therapeutic thinking reaches its limits at the point that men and women persist in pride.

The great Christian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky understood this and on it based his rejection of the utopian political theory of his day, which insisted that if society could just be put in order, crime would be eliminated. Nowadays we’re apt to think that if everyone could get therapy of some kind, even if we call it Christian therapy, all wickedness would be eradicated. I think Dostoyevsky would insist on the fact of man’s stubborn nature, which has a way of asserting itself even when—perhaps especially when—it seems it shouldn’t.

Treat or trick?

Finally, recall the third tenet, that all psychological problems can and should be treated. This tenet assumes that human action, the administration of therapy of whatever kind, can handle psychological problems. But if all problems are not psychological, it follows that not all problems are treatable by human agency. And even the evidence from responsible psychoanalysts demonstrates that some problems are treatable while others are not. Paul Vitz, for example, is a leader in outlining the limits of psychology and should be commended for his argument that it cannot replace religion.

Theologian and social theorist Jacques Ellul argued that therapy is only one case of a broader kind of thinking that he termed technique. Technique looks at everything as if it were a problem to be solved through a formulaic procedure. While technique works pretty well for fixing cars, Ellul argues that it does not—cannot—work so well on your marriage or your spiritual life. There is no fixed formula for some things, and some problems take more than three easy steps to solve—if they can be solved at all.

As the Scriptures testify time and again, God’s means of making us the people we should be are frequently not conducive to happiness. Often he leaves that thorn in our flesh to increase our dependence on him, and no one can deny that the thorn hurts.

Perhaps that is the nub of the conflict between true Christian belief and the therapeutic gospel. Francis Schaeffer once pointed out that as a culture we are increasingly afraid of anything that threatens our personal peace and affluence, and therapy tells us we should not be in pain. But personal peace and affluence are not promises of God. Our true calling may even—often—demand us to abandon them for the sake of something greater.

This abandonment is probably what we need. Our world is full of problems, so much so that a person in pursuit of righteousness might even be depressed by the sight of it, as Jeremiah was beside the ruins of Jerusalem. How much more depressed will be a person in pursuit of mere happiness?

The Christian writers Flannery O’Connor and Walker Percy argued that dissatisfaction and restlessness in the soul of a twentieth-century American might actually be a good thing, inasmuch as it would be a healthy reaction to a truly messed-up world. Even before the attack on September 11, we were seeing signs from the culture that the therapeutic gospel was proving a bit unsatisfying. Two 1999 movies, The Sixth Sense and Mumford do more than hint at it. Recent events have only reminded us just how distressed our world is. In their aftermath, as we think about our new experience of pain and of the disruption to our individual and national peace and affluence, it is especially timely to reconsider how we respond to suffering.

There are good reasons for us to be wary of therapeutic thinking, even when—especially when—it presents itself in a religious guise. We should all be so blessed as to have happiness and healthy self-esteem, but we cannot lead our lives as if those were are only concern, and we cannot expect all our problems to be solved by a quick therapeutic fix. Fortunately, even though God does not promise personal peace and affluence as our culture so aggressively seeks them, he does promise a reward for our faith.

Moskowitz’s scholarship offers a vivid portrait of the ways Americans have subscribed to the therapeutic gospel to promote their own personal satisfaction. But while therapy may have a role in healing the mind, it remains true that there is only one Gospel that can save the soul.

J. A. Hanson writes from New York City where he is completing a Ph.D. in philosophy at Fordham University. You can purchase In Therapy We Trust from the BreakPoint Store. For further reading, try Psychology as Religion by Paul C. Vitz.

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