The Blue Monkey Review

Over the weekend that just passed (March 26 to 28) I attended the annual meeting of the Organization of American Historians (OAH). This year the meeting was held at the Copely Plaza Marriott, in Boston. For me, the trip meant about 20 hours of driving and a small fortune to live in sham luxury at the Copely Marriott (underwritten, in part, by Seotn Hill University). What makes all of this worthwhile, of course, is that I had opportunity to hear panels on topics and issues that represent the latest thinking of some of the leading scholars in American history. Admittedly, sitting through several two-hour panels in a single day left me feeling dazed by the end of the day. When my friend Jim Reed took me to Durgin Square (“Good Yankee Food”) Saturday night, I felt like I needed a drink. Or a couple of drinks.

In general, however, the experience was well worth it and included several conversations with Jim about our developing project. Because we plan to write a book on adolescent sexuality, most of the panels I attended dealt with the history of sexuality. That meant skipping panels on Revolutionary war military tactics, the geography of commodities, American diplomacy in Indian country, and slave narratives. But, in spite of my narrow focus, I still kept running into topics and issues related to the Therapeutic Culture (the TC). Yes, there it was, at the OAH, hovering over almost everything that I did and thought about for the entire weekend. Paper presentations helped me see more clearly connections between therapy and psychometrics and between therapy and social control. And, even more interesting, I learned more than I expected about the link between therapy and eugenics.

Let me just start by saying that in what follows I mean therapy as real therapy, or something that would be recognizable and accepted as therapy—not, in other words, the therapeutistic. For this journey we need to keep our sites on therapy and the work of psychology in order to find our way to forms of these that become therapeutistic. But even though I generally see the TC as taking general and pervasive forms, it’s important to note that it has gained much more than a set of terms and metaphors from actual therapy.

One of the links that is clear to me but may seem factitious to readers is the connection between therapy and social control. Therapy, after all, deals with individual needs, and generally involves therapist and client in a struggle driven by the pain of the client. It can lead to a strong sense of self and self-esteem, to personal integration, and self-actualization. Yet, all of these worthy goals (no irony here) draw their power from a notion of mental health that may, itself, be more wishful thinking than human reality.

Or consider the connection between therapy and psychological testing (psychometrics). On the face of it, these two widely accepted technologies seem to have little in common. Therapy developed from the practices of asylum psychiatry and, at the end of the 19th century, from the work of neurologists. In the terminology of the late 19th/ early 20th century, a neurologist had an office-based practice that dealt with individual problems (“nerves”) that did not require institutionalization. Hence, Sigmund Freud never practiced psychiatry and did not develop his psychoanalytic techniques for the population served by psychiatrists. In the United States psychotherapy could only be practiced by physicians with special psychiatric training until after World War II. As we know, psychotherapy is now widely practiced by people without medical training, while contemporary psychiatrists probably offer less psychotherapy and more pharmaceutical help to patients.

Psychological testing, on the other hand, grew out of the needs of educators for instruments to separate students into special classes for the learning impaired. The early 20th century tests of French psychologist Alfred Binet quickly became popular in the U.S., and thanks to Lewis Terman were normed on American populations (hence the name Stanford-Binet). This, with the rise of a concept of general intelligence (invented by turn-of-the-century psychologist Charles Spearman who believed that a single underlying intelligence accounted for all intellectual differences) and the intelligence quotient (IQ) calculation of William Stern, made the IQ test a standard feature in American education. From its origin, then, psychological testing has meant social control. That is, an individual’s score on an IQ test determined whether s/he would remain in the regular classroom or not, and soon it would determine whether or not s/he would be admitted to an institution for the “feebleminded.” During World War I American psychologists convinced the U.S. Army to allow them to conduct testing on recruits. In the 18 months of American involvement more than a million recruits (my Uncle Walter among them) had to identify Christopher Columbus as the discoverer of America or decide what was wrong with a picture of a Barlow pocket knife. The Army Alpha and Beta test carried such egregious cultural biases that they should have destroyed psychological testing for all time. Instead, they convinced many psychologists and a wide swath of the middle-class that the average mental age of Americans was 14. [For more on intelligence see Stephen Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man (including examples from Army Alpha and Beta) and Raymond Fancher, The Intelligence Men.]

The “findings” of the Army tests, although certified by leading psychologists around the country, were also challenged immediately and persistently. In a famous exchange in the Nation, Walter Lippman and Lewis Terman debated the value and validity of mental testing. What do the tests test? Lippman wanted to know. As John Carson, of the University of Michigan showed in his paper “No Exit: Intelligence and Its Critics in Postwar America,” this debate has persisted to the present. Americans generally feel that intelligence tests test learning rather than aptitude, that they are useful in some narrow areas (such as in the case of special education) but that they generally do not accurately reflect one’s own intelligence. Popularly, and academically, intelligence as a concept has continued to receive skeptical scrutiny. In a democratic, open society that places a high value on upward mobility, intelligence almost needs to remain malleable, negotiable, multiple, and contextual.

In spite of the deep skepticism of American citizens over intelligence as a concept and over the ability of the tests to accurately reflect this controversial entity, intelligence testing (and its handmaiden, the IQ) has become pervasive in American society and remains a potent tool of social control. One corporation, the Educational Testing Service, provides instruments that will determine whether and where one will attend college, law school, medical school, business school, and a long list of other institutions. Some version of IQ testing still places children into remedial or enriched environments, and the state and federal mandates that children with special needs all have an Individualized Education Plan only places greater value on the apparent value of IQ testing.

Testing can also have a major impact on where you work and how far you rise in your job. Tom Chappelear in his paper “Danger! Pseudo-Psychologist at Work!” showed that after World War I tests developed by psychologists were heavily marketed to businesses. But these were not IQ tests. By the 1920s psychologists claimed the ability to quantify the personality, and either as academics or entrepreneurs began to make tests available to American business. For their part, business seems to have responded cautiously at first. Only after World War II did testing become more or less normal in corporations, though the types of tests could vary wildly. Some companies still relied on physiognomic charts. In fact, the rapid rise in testing led to the use of clearly inadequate or poorly administered tests. Although these gave greater weight to the judgments of personnel experts within corporations, academic psychologists began to fear that pseudo-scientific testing hurt psychology in general. Also during the 1950s, non-psychological commentators on business began to see testing as irrelevant to the real needs of business. William H. Whyte, in Organization Man offered a primer on how to cheat on the personality tests.

Criticism of testing led to changes in the testing regimen. In fact, during the 1960s and 1970s businesses began to abandon the typical personality test of the 1950s in favor of tests based on more humanistic approaches. Rather than search for personality flaws, tests moved toward finding natural abilities or temperamental leanings. Tests, in fact, turned toward the language and goals of therapy.

I don’t think that the convergence of testing and therapy is merely contingent. Testing emerged in the early 20th century out of a 19th century project of attempting to quantify the mind. Wilhelm Wundt, for instance, measured “the speed of thought” in a famous experiment on attention. American psychologists favored “functionalism,” that is, they wanted to deal with the mind in action, not in the abstract. And, they wanted to find tools to expand the realm of psychology in action. Defining and then quantifying such important concepts as intelligence and personality allowed psychology to take a role in education, corrections, treatment of the mentally challenged, and therapy. Psychological tests quickly became a fundamental element of work with many populations, including the institutionalized. Testing, from the beginning, became a therapeutic technology.

Sometimes, testing became the basis of therapy. Alexandra Stern, author of Eugenic Nation (U California Press), gave a paper that traced the career of the Institute for Family Relations, a California-based organization that spread across the United States. Distressed couples who came to the IFR took the Johnson Temperament Analysis (click here for a sample report) that rated temperaments on a variety of scales and so offered insights as far as the individuals need for improvement. While the JTA, with its diagnoses of “masculine protest” and “frigidity” may seem to us like a complete fraud, its use highlights the ways in which a therapy with a clear notion of mental health can nevertheless be complicit with other cultural forces for conformity.

And the IFR offers another interesting connection. The Institute grew out of the work of Paul Popenoe, a tireless advocate of eugenics, the movement for better families and more genetically fit children. Popenoe wrote widely on marriage, family, and eugenics in the pre-war period, and after the war, along with the IFR, he also promoted his views in a syndicated TV program, Divorce Court (I grew up with this program), and in his Ladies Home Journal column, “Can This Marriage Be Saved.” Late in the 1960s Popenoe joined conservative/evangelical groups that mounted the sexual counterrevolution, and some of Popenoe’s ideas (along with a new form of the JTA) have passed into Christian marital counseling.

The many connections we see here make up part of the matrix of the TC. But, the many panels I attended all made clear the power and discussion, criticism, and disciplined study (call it “better science” if you want to). I don’t think we need to abdicate to an analysis drawn from Michel Foucault (I didn’t find a soapbox in Copely Square on which I could stand to plead for a moratorium on the mention of Foucault for at least five years). These “discourses” are not simply hegemonic/emancipatory. They exist within a democratic culture that values discussion and opposition. If the power of such reifications as IQ seemingly sweep all before them, I can assure you that an irate (and active) parent can make a huge difference in how institutions treat a child even if they claim to justify their actions with legitimate scores. Individuals and groups need to remain vigilant in finding and naming bad science and bad therapy. Please note that among commentators on Blue Monkey that the most perceptive critics of therapy are therapists. Our guide isn’t Foucault, but Aristotle, who saw virtue in the mean behavior. No one wants to live in a world in which there is a deficiency of social control. Bad guys need jails. Drug addicts and the mentally ill need treatment. But neither does anyone desire a world of excessive social control. Yet, to find that mean (and Aristotle recognized this too) is hard work, the product of all our best thought. But it is the only way to the ethical life.

Posted by at 9:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Several of my blogs this year have dealt with therapy and the therapeutic culture (the TC) in one way or another. A recent e-mail from a regular reader makes it clear that my loose and inexact use of the term therapy has become a cause for concern. One defense I can make is that many people, some historians included, use the term history [i.e., a disciplined study of the past] in wildly meaningless ways. The current administration in Washington has been particularly irresponsible in making claims about something it calls the “lessons of history.” But I suppose that is no excuse for vagueness on my part.

I have no objection to therapy as a practice in the field of mental health. Many people have benefited from therapy or. When I go to therapy, I do it voluntarily and with a clear sense of what I want to gain. The therapist, or counselor, takes a particular role defined by her field of expertise and by the regulations of the therapist’s guild. The therapeutic exchange has the potential to become a search for clear thinking and deeper understanding on one’s self and one’s emotional responses. If you haven’t tried it, I recommend it.

But it isn’t actual therapy that compels me to rant about “therapy.” Rather, it is the saturation of contemporary U.S. culture with terms and metaphors drawn from therapy, and the even deeper alliance of therapeutic notions with consumer capitalism. We should not refer to the rapid proliferation of the therapeutic metaphor as therapy, but as “therapeutisitic.” So, for instance, when a local radio station plays a commercial that explains why I have a problem with my [car / love life / debt management / looks] and in 60 seconds introduces me to simple and certain means of eliminating this blight, I’ve involuntarily experienced a therapeutic moment administered by someone who has no credentials to perform therapy. In fact, it isn’t therapy. It’s therapeutistic. Or when a store manager who has taken a course in customer care soothingly responds to my complaints, and uses communication tools that signal to me that he understands my point of view, he is providing me a therapeutic environment. However, I don’t want a therapeutic environment, and it’s not really a therapeutic environment, because I haven’t sought therapy and the store manager isn’t interested in my mental health. It’s therapeutistic. But, I’m not European and don’t have a degree in post-modernism, so I’ll have to settle for real words. When I write therapy here, or anywhere else, I will leave it to you to decide if I mean therapy per se, therapy qua therapy, actual, genuine therapy, or if I really mean actions, words, or symbols that are simply therapeutistic.

I’ve written about ways that the language and metaphor of therapy have entered our lives, and undoubtedly I’ll ride this hobby horse again. At the moment, though, I just want to point to an interesting and useful article dealing with the idea of addiction. Timothy A. Hickman in the March Journal of American History writes of the growing concern about narcotic addiction in the late 19th century. The use of opium and its derivatives began much earlier than the 19th century, and addiction was known as a problem among Oriental people in their own lands and in their Diaspora. Narcotic addiction took on a far different meaning when more and more of the victims were white Americans. Medical authorities and reformers claimed grossly inflated figures for the numbers of addicts and demanded that the U.S. government respond by making certain drugs illegal. As Hickman shows, narcotic addiction became a symbol of the modern world that American elites resisted as they created it.

At the core of the narcotic issue was the loss of control. “Narcotic addiction,” Hickman writes, “signified the annulment of the bourgeois subject’s autonomy, willpower, and self-mastery.” (1274) As many historians have shown, middle class Americans looked toward the 20th century with ambivalence or even foreboding. Rather than a world of independent businessmen, farmers, and professionals—all capable of self-control in public and (less certain) private—the frightening reality of modernity offered a world of corporate work and dependence. Old verities, especially the religious kind, faded as new realities emerged. Interdependent markets, feminism, corruption scandals, reform all demanded that middle-class men change or move out of the way. No wonder that in the 1870s George Beard characterized neuralgia, a weakness of the nerves, as a distinctively American malady. Narcotic addiction joined neuralgia as a symptom of the weakening nerves, and therefore the weakening independence, of America’s middle class.

Of course, providing a historical context for an issue does not mean the issue isn’t really an issue. Physicians and other specialists dealing with narcotic use face an often vicious pathology. But Hickman’s work allows an insight into the TC at a time when it had only begun to spread through all levels of American society. A medical problem can become a stand-in for other issues in the culture. Demonizing narcotic addiction became a way of damning every new-fangled complication of the post-Civil War era, from corporate integration to paper money (one financially successful cure for narcotic addiction involved gold injections). Addiction, of course, has become one of the most widely-used metaphors of the TC. Helen Fisher believes we can become addicted to chocolate and to romantic love. Peruse the list of 12-step programs to see how many addictions plague modern American society. Again, I am not mocking the pain of those who suffer from a drug or behavioral dependence. I’m only pointing to the use of the “addiction” to stand in for other deep issues in American society, such as our sense of powerlessness and loss of control, our loss of vital relationships, and our alienation from the political process and from other important parts of our lives. In so far as the concern about a personal addiction distracts us from these other issues, it is not therapeutic. It’s therapeutistic.

Posted by at 7:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

Like it or not, most monographs could be rewritten by William Shakespeare then edited by Mark Twain and they still would not sell.
--Elliot J. Gorn

Right now, on most college campuses, faculty struggle to understand and repair what seem like the loss of academic integrity. Like the little Dutch boy trying to stem the leak in the dike, many of us feel like we’re running out of fingers and the water is already around our belts. My colleague Michael Arnzen, in Pedablogue, has posted reflections, with links, on these concerns from a variety of points of view. Plagiarism may, in fact, provide a “teachable moment” in which teachers can explore with students the mysteries of the creation of knowledge. Or, perhaps, we live in an age in which knowledge has become so abundant that it has been de-commodified; that is, it becomes like all goods and services in a Communist utopia, free for the taking whether from learned journals or from the blogosphere. But, even though these notions may intrigue us and help us, as intellectuals, better understand the life of the post-modern mind, when a student hands in a paper that appropriates information and insights and even the more or less exact language of someone else, we have a problem.

At this moment, for historians, especially historians of the United States, questions of academic honesty have become especially pointed since several prominent historians have been revealed to have followed methods that ranged from sloppy to clearly dishonest. The current number of the Journal of American History contains a set of short essays by historians and editors (of one of the leading journals and of one of the top tier academic publishing houses) probing this thorny issue. Elliot Gorn points to the pressures that academic historians feel to publish to gain tenure and status within the profession. The four academics most in the news in the last two years have all had more than simple academic success—all of them achieved market success with highly readable and, in one case, provocative books. For most historians, as Gorn points out in my epigraph, this kind of attention is probably not in the cards.

For me, the most interesting of these articles grapples with the subtle calculus of originality, one that perplexes professional historians and must certainly mystify students. In “A Heartbreaking Problem of Staggering Proportions” (excerpt only) Richard Wightman Fox considers the difficulty of recognizing the distinction between common knowledge and specialized knowledge. He cites passages from Shakespeare that need no reference or even quotation marks, since presumably everyone will recognize the quote or paraphrase from the Bard. I know that in my own writing I often use phrasing that may be drawn from the Bible, on the assumption that everyone, like me, spent many childhood hours memorizing scripture. More subtle still is a style that I know I’ve taken from Mark Twain (cf. the title of this piece). But as a historian, I should be eager to make my connections and debts and also disagreements with other authors clear and precise. In fact, Fox notes that this is one of the great advantages of academic history: “Since we historians are nonfiction writers who create texts, not paintings, photographs, or songs, we have the opportunity to do something novelists, artists, and musicians cannot ordinarily do. We can put the names of our colleagues or predecessors into our texts at no cost to either the originality or the dramatic force of our creations.” (1344)

None of this should give comfort to academic cheats. Rather, the point of Fox’ essay is that we should have a greater awareness of our intellectual debts and take advantage of the invitation to join the conversation (thank you, Richard Rorty, by the way). As teachers, we should also recognize that we have a responsibility to not only teach student what plagiarism is (so we can punish them with a good conscience when they commit it) but also what good scholarly practice means. In his syllabi Fox includes a statement on plagiarism that also states the following:

Don’t claim the ideas or words of someone else as your own. Do use the ideas and words of others to help develop your own. Do have friends read and comment on drafts of your papers. Always give explicit credit when you use anyone’s exact thoughts or language, whether in paraphrasing or quoting them. Give an acknowledgment of someone who’s helped you overall. Intellectual work is about developing and sharing your ideas, and it’s about taking note of and praising other people who have shared good ones with you.

Posted by at 5:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Since my ruminations last week on the connection between Christianity and the therapeutic culture (the TC), I haven’t managed to let loose of the issue. I haven’t received what I would call a lot of feedback (by the way, thanks Neha) on that posting, so most of this has gone on inside my head, without the discipline outside views and responses might provide. One reader who e-mailed me (but chose to remain otherwise anonymous) viewed the therapeutic potential of Christianity through the work of John Cobb who sees “the need for radical openness to learning truth and therefore being transformed from any source, any tradition.” In this view, therapy might also become a means of grace. I find this idea appealing, and it certainly fits the post-modern and ecumenical mindset that I’m most comfortable with. But I wonder if this might not assimilate all religions to a therapeutic ideal. Without knowing much more than I do about world religions, I can’t judge if the therapeutic fits them as readily as it seems to fit contemporary Christianity. I think there must be a deeper connection between Christianity and the TC, one that isn’t a matter of contingent convergence. Maybe Christianity didn’t just bump into the TC. Maybe the relationship goes deeper.

There is no clear, universal connection between religious belief and “feeling good.” Just as the religious traditions don’t generally advertise themselves as soporifics (“we will deaden your senses to the real pain that you suffer”), they also don’t claim to be the Prozac of the masses. More commonly religions offer some external good in exchange for belief and devotion. I remember a revival preacher telling us that if we tithed, God would pay us back many times over. That’s fairly primitive stuff, but television evangelicals still seem to hammer away at this message. From another perspective, though religion often becomes a motive for justice. Think of the Dalai Lama. Think of Jimmy Carter. Or, belief might be a ticket to a better berth in the life to come. That is the message that I remember best from my childhood training.

There is plenty of evidence that real faith just makes your life worse. The Old Testament prophets faced rejection, scorn, hatred, violence, and imprisonment. No wonder Jonah ran off to sea when he heard God’s call. Or, open the New Testament. After meeting God on the road to Damascus, Paul was torn out of the life he knew as a Pharisee and sent wandering and preaching all over the Roman world. He spent the last years of his life in prison pleading to congregations he had planted that they achieve some semblance of decent behavior.

In the therapeutic view of religion, however, the religious plea for justice and the hardness of the life of belief fade away in favor of a practice that should make us good and make us feel good. The Devil, Original Sin, evil all compress into “the problem(s)” of the individual and the path to a productive life that includes a personal relationship with God and interior peace (Oh my Gosh! Are we talking about mental health?) Evangelical Christianity certainly contains an opportunistic spirit that can turn almost any cultural excess to its advantage (Christian rock? Yes, it exists. Christian MTV? I don’t want to know). But I am suggesting that the relationship between Christianity and the therapeutic goes deeper, perhaps to the very core of Christianity. But to explore this, we need to consider Christian origins.

Roman society and government ignored or indulged religious cults. Even the Jews found a place in the Roman world, except when Jews in Judea rose in revolt. But the Christians seemed to irritate everyone. At times Christians had to worship in secret and try to avoid drawing attention to their congregations. As we all know, there were periods of persecution. Yet in spite of its marginality in Roman society, the Christian cult continued to grow. The success of the faith was sealed with the conversion of the emperor Constantine in 313, but by that time Christianity was already the largest cult in the empire. The success of Christianity may give us an insight into its current affinity for the TC.

But first we need to look at issues unrelated to the therapeutic. To begin with, persecution usually works. After Christianity became the official religion of empire (325), Christian Roman officials successfully chased into hiding and, eventually, out of existence, every Roman cult and every non-Nicene version of Christianity. Christian monarchs also had signal success in eliminating heterodoxies in their realms from Roman times to the Protestant Reformation. And if Christian examples aren’t convincing, consider the long-term success of Islamic rulers. After the rapid 7th and 8th century conquests of Arab armies, Islamic elites ruled populations that were mainly Christian. Without any extreme measures (Christians, after all, were recognized as religious fellow travelers in the Koran), the Islamic states became persistently more and more Islamic. Only the Jews have survived for centuries and in diverse cultures that discriminated against (at best) or actively attacked their communities. But Christianity not only survived in first to third century Rome, it flourished.

One explanation for the growth of Christianity comes out of the Milton Friedman School of Comparative Religion. Christianity offered a better deal, i.e. eternal life. All you had to do to get on board the Heaven-bound express was to give up your life of excess (which, let’s face it, most Romans couldn’t practice anyway), quit attending gladiatorial games, burn your idols, submit to Christian discipline, and contribute your bit to help widows and orphans and to pay the bishop’s salary. Is this a sweet deal, or what? But I have my doubts about the “pie in the sky” interpretation of Christian success. People must be trained to accept a religious concept, even one that seems so attractive to those of us within that religious culture. And even someone like, say for instance, me, who grew up with the expectation of living for-evuh would have to admit that Heaven seemed fairly unexciting. I had to assume that my whole consciousness about what was fun would change when I died. Otherwise, there was not much in the descriptions of Heaven to make eternal life seem, uh, blissful. But here’s my point about the necessity of being assimilated to a religious culture in order to accept its offers of bliss. One of the things that I notice, as an adult, about the Christian Heaven is that it is persistently sex-less. Nevertheless, I’m not motivated to become a Moslem because of the prospect of post-life congress with beautiful young dead women.

Another approach to the Christian success story sees Christianity as offering a superior cult to the other available cults (see Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians). Wars, civil wars, plague, poverty, crime, and violence constantly preyed on Roman society, if not all at once certainly at various places and at different times. In such a world, an individual might find comfort in the promises of the Christian cult. S/he might also need, or appreciate the need of others for, the help the churches offered to members in distress. Certainly the ritual and fellowship may have integrated members more fully and closely than would have been possible in other cults. This makes sense to me, and I don’t dismiss this as a fundamental process in building Christian communities. But I wonder if communal integration really offsets the potential for social ostracism and persecution? I don’t pretend to know much about early Christianity, but it still seems to me that a therapeutic explanation needs our consideration.

First of all, healing makes up a huge part of early Christian activity. Although the Gospels all take us down the road to the Passion, the major work of Jesus’ ministry is healing the sick. When John the Baptist (another victim of godsmack—in prison and soon to be executed) sends word to ask Jesus “are you he who is to come” (Matt. 11:2-6 and Luke 7:18-23) Jesus identifies the important marks of his ministry as “a whole lot of healing going on,” i.e., “the blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up” and, of yes, “the poor have good news preached to them.”

But I’m sure that any reader will now want to know if I’m claiming that these healing acts are literal, historical events. Well, anyone who knows me knows that I won’t have an answer for that. This healing language might refer to astonishing cures of psychosomatic illnesses. Jesus keeps running into demoniacs, and his disciples also have the power to deal the knock-out punch to demons. But whether we treat the this healing language as historical (i.e., something happened to make people well) or metaphorical, we are left with the historical “fact” that from its beginning Christianity is associated with healing.

That association continues. One study of the evangelization of the Roman empire offered the thesis that Christianity continued to grow because Christians continued to perform cures. Healing, then, was a special charisma (to use Max Weber’s term) or magic that belonged especially to the Christian faithful. This gave the Christian cult a comparative advantage over the other Roman cults that could only induce bacchanalian ecstasy or predict the future in the vaguest language known to western man.

And healing comes pretty close to what therapy offers. In fact, this might even be the reality behind the metaphor of healing. Someone living in poverty, struggling to find food and shelter each day, will find it impossible to achieve self-actualization. But belief might give that person the ability to snap out of a neurotic disability, or to turn away from the crippling sadness of grief and loss. Imagine the power of a cult leader who could perform the miracle of making someone feel better with no change in his or her outward circumstances. Such a cure could then draw the new convert into the socially meaningful life of the church and even convince him or her that Heaven looked like a pretty good deal.

And then, hundreds of years later, we have the TC. But maybe the TC is not a hegemonic product of consumer capitalism. Maybe it is another phase in the evolution of Christianity. I’m sure that you will agree that the implications of this are cosmic.

Posted by at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

This week Argentine President Nestor Kirchner agreed to pay the $3.1 billion due to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This seems like a defeat for Kirchner, who last week swore that Argentina would never pay its debts "with the hunger of its people." The Economist, however, points out that later this year Argentina will receive the money, and another $10 billion, in further loans. It isn't clear who "blinked" in this confrontation. There also remains the question of Argentina's debt to its private creditors, some $88 billion.

What is clear, though, is that for most Argentines globalization has lost whatever allure it may have had. In a recent debate reported in today's Pagina 12 a former presidential candidate claimed that Argentina's attitude toward the IMF was that of a swimmer who asks for help, but when the lifeguard pulls him to shore he shouts criticisms at the lifesaver. "It isn't that way," responded the head of the cabinet, Alberto Fernández. "In this case the lifeguard (bañero) threw us into the middle of the river and told us it was the safest place to be."

Read further if you want the Spanish text.

El jefe de Gabinete, Alberto Fernández, solo se alejó del Presidente para participar de la presentación de un libro sobre la globalización escrito por el español Guillermo de la Dehesa, de la filial europea de Goldman Sachs. En el debate, el ex candidato presidencial Ricardo López Murphy dijo que la actitud argentina hacia el Fondo parecía la de un nadador que pide la ayuda del bañero y después, en la orilla, le grita y lo critica. “No es así”, dijo Fernández. “Acá el bañero nos tiró al medio del río y nos dijo que ésa era la parte más segura.”

Pagina 12 March 12, 2004

Posted by at 10:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Any student of U.S. culture today must recognize the pervasiveness of therapeutic systems and language in daily life. At my gym the television that entertains the stationary bikers and elliptical trainees always shows the same channel, so every morning it makes the transition from “Good Morning America” to Regis and Kelly to Dr. Phil McGraw. Dr. Phil, although the latest and currently the most popular TV therapist, joins Dr. Laura and Dr. Ruth and a long line of radio talk therapy shows. We talk about our feelings these days, something my parents never did as far as I can remember. And when we talk about them we use words like “depressed” rather than sad, lonely, blue, sick, nostalgic, or even melancholy. A child might feel happy but describe herself (and, unfortunately be described by her teacher/parents/counselor) as “hyper.” Therapeutic language, and therapy of one kind or another, has taken the place of an older religious way of appropriating experience and understanding the world, a vision that pitted cosmic forces in the struggle between sin and salvation, heaven and hell.

That having been said, however, another feature of the therapeutic culture in the early 21st century is the seemingly seamless convergence of Christianity and therapy. Katja, in a blog entitled “Magazine Digest,” gave a thumbnail review of an article that she had read in a popular Canadian men’s magazine, Toro. The author noted the use of therapeutic terms in business, but he also included the observation of a friend of his that many of the terms had made been taken over from religious education. These include terms like “closure” and “community” (not as in “the Shaker Community in Canterbury, NH”; rather, this refers to individuals who have something in common but as a group lack all other characteristics of community, as in “the business community,” “the gay community,” “the political community,” “the cyber community,” and so forth). This observation does not contradict my previous judgment that therapy seems more important than sin and salvation. Some of the largest and least compatible of the subdivisions of American Christianity, like the Roman Catholic Church and American evangelicals have turned into a Christian therapeutic community. And while their theology remains unchanged, the therapeutic practice has changed the meaning of Christian dogma. God offers therapy, and therapy offers us God.

On the surface the affinity of Christianity and therapy seems less than unlikely. While I might draw from a wider range of Christian confessions, what follows will deal almost entirely with evangelical Christianity. As a recovering evangelical, I know it inside and out. Therapy developed from asylum psychiatry and, later, from the treatment of nervous disorders. It was a medical specialty, and had roots in the Enlightenment and medicine, and, later, psychology. Practitioners might be believers, but that was not a prerequisite. Tension and sometimes open conflict existed between the Enlightenment “faith” in human goodness and perfectibility and the Christian dogma of original and humanly irremediable sin. Growing up in an evangelical household, I never received any positive impression of any kind of psychotherapy. I believed that the people drawn into therapy must be weak, weird, and crazy. Certainly they had to be at least middle-class if not wealthy, because I never had the impression that therapy was something any of us could afford. And the best known symbol of therapy was Sigmund Freud, a cigar smoking atheist completely preoccupied with sex. How repulsive!

But even without my realizing it, therapeutic and evangelical practices had already merged and probably continued to merge all around me. I was just a kid. I didn’t know a lot of things. I was still Republican I didn’t even know about the therapeutic culture. But I did know about Alcoholics Anonymous, an organization that helped otherwise unsalvageable drinkers. A.A. had begun during the Great Depression and has continued to grow and spread across the U.S. and around the world. It has provided the impetus and model for the 12-step programs, a widely practiced approach to domestic violence, drug abuse, and many other social problems. I don’t know any of these organizations first hand, but I have attended an A.A. meeting and have some sense of how they operate. At the meeting one or two individuals shared their experience of alcoholic decline and their eventual recovery through the help of A.A. There were some other rituals, including holding hands and non-sectarian prayer. All very simple. All very evangelical. This exactly matched the experience of my Christian youth camp and of revival meetings when brothers and sisters would witness about finding Jesus. A.A., and for all I know the entire 12-step community, is evangelicalism minus Christianity.

If the recovery movement has carried evangelicalism into the mainstream of American culture, therapeutic language has become a fundamental part of the evangelical subculture. For decades Guideposts for Living has relayed a quasi-Christian message completely mixed with the positive-thinking views of Norman Vincent Peale. There now exists specialists in Christian therapy [see Comment for my explanation of “Christian”]. A vast literature links the teachings of Christianity and the needs of individuals for mental health. Verses of scripture serve as guidelines for better living and healthier relationships. So, for instance, in an attempt to impress readers with the importance of “input and feedback” in relationships, Drs. Henry Cloud and John Townsend note that “the Bible has harsh words for those who can’t handle input: ‘Whoever corrects a mocker invites insult; whoever rebukes a wicked man incurs abuse.’ (Proverbs 9:7)” (p. 63, and no, it is not clear to me how they drew that meaning from that verse). I don’t know if Jews, Moslems, and Hindus have mined their scriptures and rituals to shore up a therapeutic system (Yaacov? Saif? Neha? I need some help here.) But Christians have, and evangelicals seem to have taken on the task with all the fervor they are known for.

As I reflected on this it made more sense. One of the first steps in a 12 step program is to turn over the problem (alcohol, drugs, anger) to a “higher power.” Talk about lowest common denominator religion! Any concept of transcendent power, deity, god-head, or benign universal consciousness qualifies for the higher power position. All of us, even agnostics and atheists have times when they come face to face (or face to porcelain plumbing fixture) with problems that we cannot handle alone, when we want to turn the mess over to a cosmic parent no matter how unlikely. Ellie, at This is My Body, This is My Blood ends her poem “Dancing in the Dark,”
Remembering that you lost your religion a long time ago
Praying anyway” .
But it’s not just Ellie and I who’ve been there. A BBC
poll on religion in ten countries found that nearly 30% of self-identified atheists admitted to praying, sometimes.

Emergency prayer only reveals part of the connection between religion and therapy. After all, in a desperate situation, you will try anything, especially if it’s free. For someone who practices religion, though, belief can have far more important effects. In fact, the therapeutic Christianity of today promises that God or religion or redemption will penetrate every part of life. God will make us better, both in the sense of helping us to do good deeds but also in the sense of helping us overcome negative emotions and bad habits. And at the same time, a therapeutic Christian has ample evidence that God does all of this because, after all, the bad emotions loosen their grip and the bad habits come under control. I’m sure we have all come into contact with religious people who seemed always bright and cheerful, people who are so annoying that they are hard to forget. They seemingly live to convince us of the reality of false consciousness—religion, God’s drug.

Yet from their vantage, from the p. o. v. of therapeutic Christians, they really feel happy or in control or at least okay. And they’re sure that this feeling comes from their special, one on one relationship with the Creator of the Universe. Therapeutic Christianity, in fact, offers yet another variety of religious experience. William James, in Will to Believe and other writings offered as a means of grounding faith in philosophy the value of experience. Does belief in God make a difference for the believers? Does it strengthen the individual in the struggle for justice? Does it offer courage, patience, hope, and perseverance? Does it help us face the cold reality of death? If so, then belief has a value that we cannot ignore. For the pragmatist, or radical empiricist, experience always wins out over theory. Pragmatism should not be reduced to relativism. Purely idiosyncratic experience may have no value. To have “cash value,” a philosophic idea has to work “in the total push and pressure of the cosmos.” (Pragmatism, ch. 1)

We might expect to see the old “God is my Co-Pilot” bumper sticker replaced by “God is my Therapist” stickers—but don’t count on it. There’s still plenty of hellfire being handed around in evangelical churches. The therapeutic view of God and belief undermines orthodoxy which, after all, still relies on original sin with a capital “O” and on the cosmic struggle. There probably are not many Christians today who would accept eternal damnation for the glory of God, but there are still plenty who willingly condemn to hell non-Christians and even the Christian heterodox. No happiness in this life for unbelievers, and no eternal life. It sucks, but it’s God’s commandment.

But evangelical Christianity probably relies more on its therapeutic uses than most evangelicals recognize. Even the most ordinary descriptions of religious life contain some elements of it. You go to church because it makes you feel good; you enjoy the fellowship of other people in your congregation; prayer allows you to find relief from pressing personal problems. Although all of these have been used by churches and individual Christians through the ages, today churches emphasize these functions of religious life, and many churches have added elaborate new strategies for providing help for individual problems. And, the Christian groups that are most successful make the most use of therapeutic strategies.

The paradoxes here should be obvious. Evangelical Christianity, witness to a transcendent God and to a cosmic struggle carried out on planet earth, has all its claims now underwritten by the private experience of its adherents. And a movement that has consistently placed itself at odds with the secular culture that surrounds it has completely assimilated the language and rituals of secular therapy. That shouldn’t surprise those of you who believe in cultural hegemony. But it might also help expand our understanding of the pervasive power and influence of evangelical ideas and institutions in American society today. This reflection might also give us another reason—if we needed more--to reexamine all the claims of therapy and all the claims that the therapeutic culture has on us.

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