A month ago I featured long segments from a post by Adam DeVille on the romanticisation of monasticism. Again, here is another post worth reading in full.
What makes this post important is that, too often, commentators on “therapy culture” engage not with the actual thought that underlines psychotherapy, but a sort of a caricature. For instance, Frank Furedi’s “Therapy Culture” is an attack on what is presented as a privileging of emotion over reason and a denial of personal agency and responsibility. True perhaps of some of the bastardisations of therapy that permeate pop culture, but not of actual therapy as practiced by actual, rigorously trained therapists.
Back to deVille:
What makes Freud useful for MacIntyre is his unparalleled insight into the nature of our desires, and how we fail to be good reasoners when our desires go astray or are corrupted by unconscious trauma; and what makes Marx still so important and useful is that he continues to offer those willing to listen a very powerful critique of how capitalism subtly exploits and fuels those desires Freud recognized.
It is, alas, a staple of too much cheap and grubby Christian apologetics for a century and more now to run down Freud and Marx alike without ever having seriously read either man in the original (or a scholarly translation) and to treat both as the greatest threat ever faced by Christianity. I count myself fortunate to have been introduced, as an undergraduate in psychology in Ottawa in the early 1990s, to the original writings of both Freud and Jung (and others in that first generation around Vienna) in several classes, including especially a class on psychoanalysis and religion taught by a professor who was himself a Christian and not threatened by what psychoanalysis had to offer.
Séamus Sweeney 