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Psychology in general and therapy in particular are more art than science.

There are myriad roles that psychotherapists incarnate when we are in the office with a patient.

“Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased" stated Philip Rieff.

There is a backlash emerging against the commercialization of therapy.

In 1986-1988 I studied with Philip Rieff who twenty years prior had written the ironically entitled book The Triumph of the Therapeutic. His juxtaposition of our culture with pre-modern times is edifying: “Religious man was born to be saved, psychological man is born to be pleased.”

This observation names the shift from moral formation and communal obligation to self-experience, self-management, self-expression and the perpetual elusive quest to sate the hungry ghost of emotional satisfaction as the new organizing principle of modern life. Professor Rieff’s “triumph” is a Pyrrhic victory resulting in lives of self-absorption and estrangement as well as anxiety-provoking and depressing loneliness.

The death of “therapy” – as older generations know it – thus refers to the demise of an older form of talk therapy, of the protocol initially established by Freudian psychoanalysis – one in which patients arrive in an office with fewer (or no) prefabricated categories and diagnostic self-identifications, without a plethora of impersonal acronymic albatrosses – ADHD, PTSD, OCD – and with a willingness to enter a process that requires a........

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