Therapy

1
Therapy

• On trial

2
Opening statements The prosecution

• The rise of the therapeutic springs from and
  contributes to the fall of public man (Sennett,
  1986)

3
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.

4
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, 1955 125)
5
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)
6
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).

7
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).

8
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)

9
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 cant, Im stupid, Im dumb. Such
  children need help. To make helping them a
  priority is to engage in the business of
  education
• (Cigman, 2004 105).

10
The prosecution calls on video evidence
11
The defence calls on video evidence
12
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)

13
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

14
Why the rise in therapy culture? The
prosecutions 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 well-being 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).

15
Why the rise is therapy culture? The defences
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.

16
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)

17
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)

18
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)

19

• 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 (1995) 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) Whats 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)