The Secular Faith of Therapy
The Secular Faith of Therapy
And other historical accidents future civilizations will struggle to understand.
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My friend Rachel asked me earlier today if I ever wondered whether a society a thousand years from now might look back on us today and struggle to understand our Abrahamic faith traditions, and how we think about the world.
In fact, I had been grappling with something like this, but in a completely different way.
I’ve recently decided to re-watch the Shakespeare and Politics lectures by the brilliant Straussian philosopher Paul Cantor on YouTube. I had watched a bunch of them during COVID lockdown, and had used it as an excuse to do a close reading of several plays that I had up until then failed to read. But I had picked the plays semi-randomly, and had watched only the parts of the lectures I wanted to watch.
This time around, I decided to “take” one of Cantor’s courses from start to finish. The semester starts with an analysis of Coriolanus, one of Shakespeare’s bleaker tragedies. In the second and third lectures dealing with the play, Cantor spends a good bit of time talking about how differently religion worked in Republican Rome.
Religion, he said, was “completely subsumed in politics” for Romans. “[The Romans] prayed to their gods in civic institutions,” he said, “and the priests were civic officials in these ancient communities.” In a way, this is not unlike how we sometimes (although increasingly rarely) refer to God in the course of our own political rhetoric, invoking divine blessing for whatever we are hoping to undertake.
But “these gods are not the kind of universal forces we associate with deity,” Cantor cautions. Politics in Rome were the direct outcome of a god willing this or that. In bringing the divine so close to the everyday, however, Roman religion paradoxically elevated human agency. Romans had a strong sense of free will, and individuals—and indeed cities—could run afoul of divine favor by choosing wrongly. Given that the gods were so intimately involved in politics, the distance between men and gods was much smaller than we can easily appreciate.
That distance was so small, in fact, that it could even be collapsed. In discussing the possibility of the play’s savage hero Coriolanus actually being perceived by the people as a deity, Cantor has the following to say:
We are used to monotheistic religions now, to a single god who transcends the natural world. In Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam, the gulf between divinity and humanity is absolutely unbridgeable (with one exception in Christianity, but that was in the other direction, god becoming man). The idea of man becoming god is deeply foreign to our religious sensibilities in the modern world. It was not in the ancient world.
That Julius Caesar, and Augustus and all the Emperors that followed were deified should not be seen as some kind of ceremonial honorific bestowed on important leaders, Cantor says. It should be taken quite literally.
Which brings me back to Rachel’s question in a different, roundabout way.
As I said in a recent podcast episode, I have never availed myself of going to a therapist. It’s not that I’ve always been happy. It’s just that as someone who has been raised secular, I have felt there was something religious about therapy—something analogous to religious practice which has never been part of my approach to the world. Like religious practice more generally, I’ve never begrudged it to others if it gives them comfort. But for me, it feels alien.
This past weekend, the Times ran a special feature of their magazine focusing on therapy. A tweet by my friend Nick Clairmont really drove home the point for me:
That’s exactly it: as a non-believer, I just don’t feel the pull of therapy. At all. The idea of excavating my inner self before anyone—it’s just not of my world. Having grown up in Western modernity, I can of course understand the pull. I can certainly understand it better than the idea that the people would think their leaders are literally divinities. But the gulf is analogously the same. My inability to fully grasp the appeal of either is only a question of degree.
For a believer, monotheism is revealed truth. Perhaps a believer could imagine a future society losing its way and falling into sad error, and in doing so find it difficult to appreciate how we think and relate to the world today. But in seeing any such drift merely as error, a believer may have trouble grasping the level of contingency I think most of our practices have.
For me, almost everything is contingent. All of our beliefs, and our means of understanding the world, emerge from history and from social accident. And as accident piles onto accident, and time goes on, I find it very plausible that most of what and how we think today will at some point be impossible to truly, fully understand.
I’m fairly certain that a believer won’t be moved by where I’m coming from. But I hope that if a devoutly religious person can start to glimpse how therapy itself is emerging as a secular belief system, and how it is self-contained and seemingly irrefutable to its adherents, and how if one takes a moment to stand outside the system and wonder about its premises… well, maybe the contingency of everything becomes at least a little bit more plausible.
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Interesting piece. A few thoughts—
1) Coriolanus is hugely underrated. Also I agree with the other commenter who recommended Rieff's Triumph of the Therapeutic. Very interesting book, but keep in mind when you read it that it was published in 1966 and is very much a product of its time.
2) "The idea of excavating my inner self before anyone—it’s just not of my world." Therapy hasn't been your thing, which is fine. Therapy isn't for everyone and I think people who say "everyone could benefit from some therapy" are overstating their case.
3) Therapy as emergent religion. I suppose there is some truth in this, but I think it is less structural (therapist-as-priest) than it is the fact that the "religious impulses" or needs or whatever haven't gone away, and have found various other outlets. Some outlets, like therapy, have a more interior aspect, while others, like politics and other group activities, are more communal. But also, people are calling almost everything a religion these days. Part of therapy's rise has probably has to do with people having less family around, fewer friends, and various other downsides of modern life. (One important difference among many between priests and therapists: while priests have always been desperate to get the halls of their churches full of congregants, even half-hearted ones, therapists hate doing therapy with patients who don't want to be there. It is boring, frustrating, and unfulfilling work.)
4) I think the real danger re: "therapy as religion" is less people submitting to therapists in blind obedience or anything like that, but more a function of interference from or capture by the state. Call it "religion" or whatever you want, but having therapists as state-sanctioned gatekeepers of any sort is where things get dicey. Even when well-intentioned, there is great risk. Having them be state-sponsored mouthpieces for certain political causes, as is starting to occur, is clearly a problem.
This is really interesting as always. I am agnostic on the question of therapy but I do have concerns over its increasingly sacral position in modern society especially amongst people my generation (I am 29). Having sadly experienced therapy as a result of a breakdown it did in some ways help. It got me back on my unsteady feet and the talking therapy which lasted for two years was pivotal in allowing me to stay functional at university.
However, therapy has become a catch all solution for whatever ails us. Increasingly it seems to be used in order to address normal anxieties or life events such as exam stress or an early split up with a partner. The go-to appears to be 'see a therapist', in some ways making therapy an evangelical form of religious identity. Perhaps, Haidt's work on social media links in with this kind of argument, therapy rather than being touted as a genuine solution is just another fad ppl want in on.
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