Re:Furedi -- some thoughts

My own thoughts on this sociological critique of psychotherapy culture ...

Parts of Furedi's argument have properties of a "catch-22" of sorts, implying that you really can't win. If you look at independence and interdependence as opposing values, you are forced to pick one over the other. I expect that excessive dependence and excessive self-reliance both lead to pathological situations, either individually or socially.

Human social behavior as we think of it is heavily dependent upon emotional judgments of trustworthiness, and our ability to signal this to each other. Business contracts, laws, and everyday interactions with people all depend upon this. Our ability to function with each other depends equally on the skills and habits of self-empowerment and on developing the habits and skills that make social life possible.

The goal of the therapist is presumably to facilitate the functioning of the individual, both their individual and social functioning, and optimally their "actualization" of potentials, (that is, if you have a particularly optimistic view of the process).

So the cultivation of self-reliance seems to be an important therapeutic <u>value</u>, as is cultivating prosocial behavior. It seems to me that some of the best elements of the humanistic psychologies were in their focus on helping provide the individual with the resources to function, to achieve, and to "self-actuallize," which usually implies an emotional intelligence to relate to each other as well as the individual capacity to achieve.

My perception is that it is not the therapeutic value of self-actualization, viewed in this way, that is flawed, but the false dichotomy of self-sufficiency and emotional dependence. We are dependent on each other by our nature, and this does not diminish the value of individualism, though it may put certain limits on how we can interpret it. The radical libertarian perspective of the individual ego as an island unto itself seems thoroughly unrealistic to me if taken literally, but that's not to argue that self-reliance is not an important value. To me, individualism isn't a bad thing until it becomes a blinder that prevents us from appreciating and respecting our interdependence or becomes a way of suppressing social aspects of our moral sense.

I think the central claim that most of us cannot live in a distanced mutually self-realizing way with each other is probably true, and this may be where Furedi's argument has its best points. The twist in U.S. culture at least is that we have so long emphasized the importance of self-reliance that we have come to take it for granted, and its negative (or perhaps unrealistic) aspects sometimes come back to us as a surprise. That's where the sociological aspect of the analysis comes in.

Furedi's argument seems based on the idea that the cultural emphasis on self-reliance filters down into the culture of psychotherapy and becomes something excessive and dangerous there in particular, an instance of the more general sociological argument about the downside of the virtue of self-reliance; and then filters back up into politics and other discourse. Psychotherapy culture then adds fuel to our excessive individualism with its focus on self-esteem and its disdain for emotional dependence in any form. Part of the argument is that this emotional dependence is unavoidable, and comes back to us in other ways.

The main question Furedi addresses is the role of specialists (and the state) in this situation. To me, it isn't unreasonable to expect cultural institutions and professions of specialists to help fill gaps in our lives, but we can come to expect too much from them and become too reliant for their justification on their ideological bases of support rather than what they are really accomplishing. We come to take "values" themselves in frozen canonical form for granted, rather than seeing what they are leading us toward.

For a thoughtful broader look at the role of individualism in culture in the U.S., I recommend "Habits of the Heart" edited by Robert Bellah.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:Furedi -- some thoughts, by Been There, 11/20/03

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