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Critics argue "therapy culture" fosters societal division and personal dependency.

Psychotherapy reflects societal values more than it shapes them.

Psychotherapy can't transform society, but can empower individuals to influence it.

This post is Part 2 of a series.

According to philosopher and social critic Christina Hoff Sommers (One Nation Under Therapy, 2005) and author and licensed mental health counselor Jonathan Alpert (Therapy Nation, 2026), what Alpert disapprovingly calls our current "therapy culture" and Sommers deems "therapism" contribute heavily to the problems polarizing, dividing, and disintegrating American society today, diminishes our mental health promoting dependency and weakness rather than resilience and independence (see Part 1), "has reshaped the way we live, speak, and relate to one another...[and] is changing the fabric of American life." Quite an indictment! But this begs the big question: How much influence, pro or con, does the practice of psychotherapy truly exert on society today? Is the profession of psychotherapy really so extraordinarily powerful?

Indeed, from a very different perspective (such as mine), which considers psychotherapy a precious and still vitally important process promoting personal responsibility, freedom, consciousness, compassion, creativity, balance, vitality, and wholeness, or what Jung termed individuation, it would be wonderful to believe that the practice of psychotherapy could be so profoundly impactful on American culture—one way or the other. But, sadly, the reality is that this simply has not been the case, as somewhat pessimistically noted in an earlier book titled We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy--And the World's Getting Worse by James Hillman and Michael Ventura (1993).

Psychotherapy and American Culture

It is true that psychotherapy has become more popular,........

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