Psychotherapy: Illusion with No Future?

Abstract

Having spent the past 50 years involved in, and thinking about therapeutic psychology I find myself, with some embarrassment, coming to the inescapable view that for much of that time I, along with so many others, have been pursuing an illusion. Therapeutic psychology may just prove to be the great red herring of the twentieth century, a masterstroke of ideology which has managed to obscure from our view the full significance for our emotional suffering of the workings of material reality. Instead of seeing with absolute clarity that what makes people happy or sad, triumphant or despairing, lucid or confused, is a function of what happens to them in the real, material world which lies beyond their skin, our view has become clouded by a haze congealing all too easily into a mirage of personal responsibility and control. We are deceived into believing that mastery of our fate follows from the deployment of our psychological resources as private individuals.