AGAINST THERAPY: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing

by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 1988

The title says it all, and Masson (The Assault on Truth, A Dark Science) repeats it ad nauseam in this ill-conceived harangue: ""Psychotherapy, of any kind, is wrong. . .the very idea of psychotherapy is wrong."" Unfortunately, instead of supporting this thesis with cogent argument or relevant research, Masson offers instead an illogical hodgepodge of horror stories, potshots, and shrill rhetoric. After an opening chapter that offers two case-histories from 19th-century Europe (independent-thinking women treated as lunatics), Masson presents a half-persuasive but exaggerated critique of Freud's treatment of the woman known as Dora: ""He treated her like a patient, not like a human being. . . He simply ignored her needs in the service of his own."" Next come excerpts from the diary of Freudian disciple Sander Ferenczi, who recorded his anxieties about problems and abuses in psychoanalysis as practiced circa 1930. And then there's a diatribe against C.G. Jung: his collaboration with the Nazis; his preoccupation with religion; his alleged lack of interest ""in the tragedies that happen to all of us."" Masson's more recent material is even more beside-the-point: the lurid abuses of psychiatrist John Rosen (never trained in psychoanalysis) in treating psychotics--which led to his loss of medical licensing in 1983; the use of similar techniques by a doctor of osteopathy. (Masson vaguely speculated: ""Maybe many therapists, by the very nature of therapy, engage in activities that are not wholly unlike those of Dr. John Rosen. . . Rosen was no exception, no aberration. This is therapy."") Cad Rogers' benign approach is pronounced tainted because of Rogers' failure to protest against conditions in mental hospitals. And other forms of therapy--family, gestalt, hypnotherapy, ""eclecticism,"" etc.--are dismissed for one unconvincing reason or another in a ludicrously brief catch-all chapter. Therapy as it's most commonly experienced, in fact, receives almost no attention here; Masson relentlessly invokes feminist buzz-words re male therapists yet never mentions the fact that today's therapist is likely to be female. And he refuses to deal with the question of whether therapy actually helps some people. Instead he repeatedly falls back on polemics: the therapist as ""prison warden"" or ""slaveholder""; the patient as oppressed nonconformist; therapy as ""merely an extension of the views of the dominant society."" In sum--a half-tired, half-hysterical muddle, without the vision of Laing or even the inner logic of Thomas Szasz.

Pub Date: July 21, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION