The New Neo

This article understandably caught my attention:

The contributors to Cynical Therapies are lecturers and clinicians in mental health who are raising the alarm about the ideological takeover of their discipline over the past twenty years. A mix of Americans and Brits — with the usual lack of dignity, the field in Britain has slavishly followed America’s into the abyss — the authors are heretics and, to many colleagues, traitors. The book is a cry for help.

Few doctrines could be more self-evidently antithetical to the traditional imperatives of psychotherapy than “Critical Social Justice,” aka that tiresome, overworked term beginning with “w.” Although psychiatry has developed a wide range of approaches, not long ago therapists of all persuasions were coached to display openness, empathy, curiosity and neutrality. Good therapists avoided prescriptive “answers,” which the patient was encouraged to arrive at independently. They withheld judgment, appreciated complexity and, most of all, listened. Focus was on the individual. The premise of the therapeutic process was that people can be helped to change. Why else would patients show up?

CSJ, along with its little brother, Critical Race Theory, is a closed system — like those articles to which you can no longer add comments. It espouses perfect certainty: every human relationship is about power. You’re either the oppressed or the oppressor, and this world view recognizes no other categories. Far from being empathetic, the creed is pitiless, especially regarding popular majorities. Neutrality? Please. Fun extracurricular activities: labelling, blaming, shaming and getting people fired. …

Why would anyone seek counseling to be browbeaten with a partisan cudgel? They wouldn’t. Thus, writes Cynical Therapies editor Val Thomas, “The most likely outcome will be the chaotic breakdown of the field itself. As CSJ moves through the therapy professions in its usual manner, dismantling, disrupting, decolonizing and problematizing all that exists therein, it will hollow out the center.” When clinicians aim no longer to heal but to morally re-educate their patients, therapists aren’t therapists, and “the whole house of cards” will collapse.

I’m not at all sure about that “collapse” part. Institutions can get hollowed out and go on for quite some time riding on their former reputations.

It’s not just the last twenty years; it was happening long before that. First of all, therapy is a field that was always vulnerable to leftist takeover because most therapists are left of center and it’s been that way for ages (go to the category “Therapy” on this blog and you’ll see plenty of posts discussing that and related issues). I was getting my Master’s in Family Therapy over thirty years ago, and although we students were definitely encouraged to have an open and seemingly neutral attitude, there already was a different agenda going on concurrently in the Family Therapy field but somewhat hidden from client. I fought that agenda mightily – it involved, for example, strategic lying at times as well as deceptive manipulation – and even wrote papers against it. And when I say “fought” I also mean outright heated arguing with my professors and fellow students, especially the professors.

It was an interesting experience, to say the least. I was free to do whatever I wanted because I was already an older student and didn’t really care if I got that degree or not (long story, perhaps for another time). Nor did I think the professors could hurt me if they turned on me. I had confidence in my point of view and my ability to argue it. But the situation was troubling; why was I virtually alone in my position? I now see the issue as mostly political, although at the time I – a Democrat – had no idea that politics had anything to do with it.

A decade later, around 2001 or so, when I was undergoing a very stressful divorce and a lengthy recuperation from a surgery for a very painful condition, I searched for a therapist for myself. I was starting to undergo my political change experience, too, and was encountering some hostility from a significant number of previous friends on account of that, so it was one of the subjects I wanted to discuss in therapy. I had extraordinary difficulty finding a therapist who would take me as a client when I told them that was one of my issues. It shocked me, but I suppose it shouldn’t have.

As the years have gone by and education generally has become more openly woke and leftist, I have assumed the same has happened with the education of therapists. That fact has come up over and over again in discussions of “gender affirming” therapy for people who define themselves as trans; clearly, the younger therapists tend to be very much on board with that whereas the older ones are retiring or trying to negotiate being true to their principles of objectivity while simultaneously keeping the woke crowd from taking their livelihood away.

[NOTE: I see that I covered some of this in this previous post, sparked by a different article. In it, I also gave some suggestions for choosing a therapist if you are seeking one.]