Therapy …
On trial
Opening statements: The prosecution
 The rise of the therapeutic springs from and
contributes to ‘the fall of public man’ (Sennett,
1986)
Opening statements: The defence
Back to the Greek understanding of
therapy
The word ‘psychotherapy’ comes from the
Greek ‘psyche’ meaning ‘soul’ and
‘therapia’ meaning ‘care of’.
The prosecution calls upon its first
witness: Plato.
If we encourage young men to read, feel and
express their emotions through poetry:
‘... they are hardly likely to think this sort
of thing unworthy of them as men …
They will feel no shame and no
endurance, but break into complaints
and laments at the slightest
provocation’
(Plato, 1987: 84)
The defence calls upon its first
witness: Aristotle
Understanding and
expressing our emotions
does not make us weaker.
Instead, therapy, like
poetry, can allow for a:
‘purgation of emotions’.
(Aristotle, 1996)
The prosecution calls upon its second
witness: Furedi.
‘Everyday disappointments – rejection,
failure, being overlooked – are regarded
as risks to our self-esteem’
Furedi (2004: 1).
‘Increasingly, we tend to think of social
problems as emotional ones’ (Furedi,
2004: 24).
The defence calls upon its second
witness: Persaud
Furedi fails to:
“acknowledge the growing work that
‘positive psychology’ and other new fields
are doing in pioneering resilience
enhancement and self taught coping skills”
(Persaud, 2003: 327).
The prosecution calls upon its third
witness: Martin Buber
 ‘The true community does not arise through
peoples having feelings for one another (though
indeed not without it) but through, first, their
taking their stand in living mutual relation with
one another …Living mutual relation includes
feelings, but does not originate with them. The
community is built up out of living mutual living
relation, but the builder is the living effective
Centre’
 (Buber, 2004: 40)
The defence calls upon its third
witness: Cigman
 ‘Self-esteem matters in education for the same
reason that it matters in therapy: low self-esteem
can be crippling. … teachers may identify
children with low self-esteem as those who say ‘I
can’t’, ‘I’m stupid’, ‘I’m dumb’. Such children
need help. To make helping them a priority is …
to engage in the business of education’
 (Cigman, 2004: 105).
The prosecution calls on video
evidence
The defence calls on video evidence
The prosecution calls upon its forth
witness: Lefebvre
 ‘so long as the only improvement to occur are
technical improvements of detail … so long must the
project of ‘changing life’ remain no more than a
political rallying-cry to be taken up or abandoned
according to the mood of the movement’.
 (Lefebvre, 1974/1994: 59-60)
The defence responds
 Therapy ‘offers a better answer than ‘pull yourself
together’’ (Hodson, 2004: 412).
 Positive freedom: Taylor (1979/1997: 420):
‘obstacles [to freedom] can be internal as well as
external’
 Therapy allows us to be political
Why the rise in therapy culture? The
prosecution’s argument:
 None of the art therapies
‘promises an authentic therapy of commitment to
communal purpose; rather, in each the commitment is
to the therapeutic end itself … That a sense of wellbeing has become the end, rather than a by-product of
striving after some superior communal end, announces
a fundamental change of focus in the entire casts of our
culture …’
 (Rieff, 1987: 261)
 ‘Life itself appears only as a means to life' (emphasis in
the original, Marx, 1844/1992: 1163).
Why the rise is therapy culture? The
defence’s argument:
 It is the difference between our expectations and the
reality of our lives that has given rise to the increase
in therapy.
 In this sense, the rise of the therapeutic represents a
form of conscious awakening.
Closing statement from the
prosecution
 Therapy is a tool a of ‘disciplinary power’ which
‘objectifies’ children and casts a ‘law of truth’
upon them (Foucault, 1977).
 ‘… rehabilitation is the exercise of power by one
group over another and further, that exercise of
power is shaped by ideology … of normality
which, like most ideologies, goes unrecognised,
often by professionals and their victims alike’.

(Oliver, 1993)
Closing statement from the defence
Therapies should centre on caring for the
soul of the young person and the soul of
the school.
‘Freud thinks that psychoanalysis is
something scientific; he does not see that
it is before everything a moral question’
(Weil, 1978: 98)
References
 Aristotle 1996) Poetics (Trans. M. Heath) (London:
Penguin)
 Buber, M. (2004) I and Thou (London: Continuum)
 Cigman, R. (2004) Situated Self-esteem, Journal of
Philosophy of Education, Vol. 38, No. 1, pp. 91-105
 Furedi, F. (2003) Therapy Culture: cultivating
vulnerability in an uncertain age (London: Routledge)
 Lefebvre, H. (1974/1994) The Production of Space
(Trans. By D. Nicholson-Smith, Oxford: Blackwell)
 Marx, K. (1844/1992) Estranged Labour, in: M. L.
Morgan (Ed.) Classics of Moral and Political Theory
(Indianapolis: Hackett)
 McLeod, J. (2002) Counselling in the Workplace: the
Facts (Rugby: BACP)
 Oliver, M. (1999) Capitalism, disability and ideology: A
materialist critique of the Normalization principle, in:, R. J.
Flynn & R. A. Lemay (Eds) A Quarter-Century of
Normalization and Social Role Valorization: Evolution and
Impact (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press)
 Plato (1987) The Republic (trans. D. Lee) (London:
Penguin)
 Persaud, R. (2003) Book review: Therapy Culture:
Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age, British
Medical Journal, Vol. 327, No. 7426, p. 1293
 Rieff, P. (1978) The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of
Faith after Freud (Chicago: University of Chicago)
 Sennett, R. (1986) The Fall of Public Man (London, Faber
and Faber)
 Taylor, C. (1979/1997) What’s Wrong with Negative
Liberty?, in: R.E. Goodin & P. Pettit (Eds.) (1997)
Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology
(London: Blackwell)
 Weil, S. (1978) Lectures on philosophy (Trans. H. Price,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)