A Quick Fix for the Soul
Darian Leader in the Guardian links the popularity of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with the rise of neoliberal ideology:
Most therapies aim to hear what is being expressed in a symptom: not to stifle it, but to give it a voice and to see what function it has for the individual. CBT, by contrast, aims to remove symptoms.
… Today it is plasticity and change that govern our self-image. Personality itself is represented as a set of skills that we can learn and modify. Just as we can alter our bodies through cosmetic surgery, so we can change our behaviour through “work” on ourselves. Reality TV displays princes who become paupers, children who swap parents and geeks who become Don Juans. The possibilities of transformation seem endless. Thatcher’s dream of social mobility has become not just nightly entertainment, but also individual imperative.
CBT promises change just as swiftly. Unwanted character traits or symptoms are no longer seen as a clue to some inner truth, but simply as disturbances to our ideal image that can be excised. Instead of seeing a bout of depression or an anxiety attack as a sign of unconscious processes that need to be carefully elicited and voiced, they become aspects of behaviour to be removed.
The market has triumphed here, as our inner worlds become a space for buying and selling. We pay experts such as life coaches to teach us how to change in the desired way. Aspects of ourselves, such as shyness or confidence, become commodities that we can pay to lose or amplify. Depression or anxiety are seen as isolated problems that can be locally targeted without calling into question the rest of one’s existence, in the same way that a missile attack on a terrorist installation is supposed to get rid of the problem posed by terrorism.
I suggest giving the whole article a read. Leader’s criticism of CBTs seems spot on to me: the problem isn’t that it’s merely an attack on psychoanalysis, but instead that it is an attempt at a quick fix, a cost-effective method to conform people’s psyches to the so-called “realities” of the market-economy. And, as k-punk suggests, “it is the idea that positive thinking is mandatory which most closely links neoliberalism and CBT.”
Psychoanalytic Therapy Wins Backing
The New York Times Health section publishes a rare insightful account of the “talking cure” pioneered by Sigmund Freud over a century ago, which has (rightfully and wrongfully) found itself under attack from the medical establishment, psychology, neuroscience, and biopsychology, just to name a few of the usual suspects. Benedict Carey writes:
In a review of 23 studies of such treatment involving 1,053 patients, the researchers concluded that the therapy, given as often as three times a week, in many cases for more than a year, relieved symptoms of those problems significantly more than did some shorter-term therapies.
There’s quite a lot of evidence that psychodynamic therapy is making a comeback, largely as a reaction to CBTs, which research suggests only make short-term progress on unconscious symptoms. Yet the mere fact that psychoanalysis might be re-entering the mainstream is one that should not be taken as in itself a good thing: what is important is precisely how it will manifest itself. It’s up to informed psychoanalysts, particularly in the Lacanian field as opposed to ego psychology, to ensure that the path psychoanalysis takes in its ostensible resurgence is one that places the unconscious, and therein the signifier, at the center of analysis. What this amounts to is the proper re-politicization of psychoanalysis.