Therapeutic totalitarianism

Notes on an ideology and its consequences for universities

Throughout the twentieth century, a new conception of the self emerged that has since triumphed over all others. With an eye on developments in sociology, political discourse, and philosophy, I first describe this self before examining its ideological consequences for those of us who work in academia—both professors and students. Towards the end, I suggest a way out of this conception of self, having argued, albeit too briefly, that this conception of self is a significant component of a larger web of causes that is destroying scholarly credibility, especially in the human sciences.

Historically speaking, as Philip Rieff suggests, people have undergone several changes in their self-understanding. We should be careful not to read these changes simplistically as mere improvements. I do not endorse the myth of progress or the Whig theory of history that still haunts educational institutions across the globe. On reflection, we might say that each transformation has had benefits but not one has been without sometimes monumental disadvantages. That said, Rieff’s overview of these shifts is as follows. During the Greco-Roman era, man was political. This political sense of self gave way to a largely religious sense in the medieval world. The political did not vanish but was subordinated to the religious. Then, through various upheavals after the medieval period, right up to the first half of the twentieth century, man was reconceptualised as an economic entity. The religious and the political were thus reframed via an emphasis on economics. This changed dramatically with the boomer generation, although the seeds of this change had been sown a long time ago, first in the nominalist revolution, then in the Protestant Reformation, as well as in various echoes and confirmations of these upheavals in modernity, postmodernity, and our present age of absurdity.

Rieff records and explains what he calls the triumph of the therapeutic. The self has become a self-of-therapy—a psychological and neurotic self. The individual, especially his or her emotional state, has become a predominant organising principle of our time, as we see, for instance, in various regimes of self-improvement. You’d think that this would make culture more subjective but, as such regimes demonstrate, this self-of-therapy operates under a technical or even managerial gaze, with a specific aim towards unworlding, to use a Heidegerrian idea. This new self is, as Hannah Arendt has said, world-poor. Or, to use sociological philosopher Hartmut Rosa’s notion, it lacks resonance. To make the self so large is to render it lonely and increasingly prone to a tsunami of emotional currents and fluctuations. It is to make it prone to disintegration.

Those bygone selves of politics, religion, and economics asked not what the world could do for them but what they could do for the world; and so the world remained fairly stable. The self-understanding of such selves was, symbolically speaking, geocentric. In contrast, therapeutic selves are the myriad tiny suns around which everything must revolve; and so the world has become essentially unstable. The world is now an extension of the fluxes of neurotic (identitarian) selves and their tribes. Therapeutic selves don’t possess more self-insight or self-awareness than their ancestors, despite a steady diet of self-help literature and having their self-affirming tribe of ‘followers’. The opposite is true. These selves seldom look inward; as the critical theorist Byung-Chul Han has noted, the self is less a subject—it is not subject to something higher than itself—than it is a project. It lacks subjectivity but has plenty of what I’d call projectivity. Stripped of inwardness, the vacuous, interest-obsessed, faddish, often fanatical self is projected onto the world. At worst, it is weaponised. It is employed to modify the world.

Scholars interpret this variously but the trend is unquestionable. Robert Bellah refers to the rise of expressive individualism, suggesting that each self has a unique psychological character which needs to be expressed in some way. Congruent with this, Christopher Lasch names our culture as a culture of narcissism. There is a subtlety here worth noting: it is a decidedly psychological age that grants such a diagnostic label easy plausibility. To suggest that our age is pathological is hardly jarring to us at all. It is hard to think of Romans and Medievals as pathological. Even non-Western cultures are harder to think of in psychological terms.

Political theorist Chantal Delsol notes, in her indispensable book Icarus Fallen, that what is taken as true always generates obligations. If what we individualistically express becomes the measure of truth for us (as it has in this age), we feel we owe a duty to those expressions. Expressed emotion, solidifying in a collective attempt at catharsis, becomes the measure of what is real.

Even ethics is more therapeutic than ethical. Alasdair MacIntyre describes our ethics nowadays as emotivism. Perhaps the most overt expression of how widely accepted this ideology has become is in Pixar’s Inside Out movies. In these films, emotions run the show, quite literally. Emotions, personified as little characters in those films, have emotions; and these emotional emotions create each human character’s rather fragmented sense of self riding a cyclothymic tsunami. There is no faculty of understanding or judgment in any person with these little personified emotions running madly around in their heads, nor is there any logic or reflective reasoning. Even imagination has been reconceptualised as the accidental result of an outpouring of some emotion. Note the reductionism. It is not that people have feelings but that feelings have people.

Han articulates one understanding of this paradigm, calling it emotional capitalism. Even commodification serves our emotional needs. Even medicine, as a supposedly scientific practice, often bows to emotion. It is not even a joke to say that emotivism has begun to reshape legal structures. If the therapeutic self is perceived not only as true but as the dominant measure of all value, obligations unavoidably gain a narcissistic tinge.

“The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious,” writes Lasch. “People today hunger not for personal salvation,” he continues, “let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age,” but for settling into the emotion, “the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” Even your politics is likely to be determined these days more by psychological predispositions governing which fashionable concerns appeal to you than by more measured analysis or traditional affiliations. Personality researchers can now predict a person’s political beliefs, with fair accuracy, based on their personality profiles.

The ‘personal is political,’ to reference the old feminist slogan, is a sign of massive tectonic shifts in the social imaginary. Here is a familiar example of this. Not too long ago, Russia invaded Ukraine. Almost immediately, people with no understanding of what was happening in that region, people who had never even heard of Ukraine, added Ukrainian flags to their names and bios on various social media platforms. What they signalled was not understanding but tribal membership held together with emotivist glue. Even the politics of war might be swallowed up in the therapeutic paradigm.

Rieff suggests that cultures can be defined largely by what they prohibit. Cultures retain stability not only through established myths and rituals but also through specific taboos. This has been true throughout human history. But the therapeutic society is the first example in human history of what Rieff calls an anti-culture. It is defined by the prohibition of prohibition. An anti-culture is defined, in other words, by permissiveness. The 1968 protest slogan, ‘It is forbidden to forbid’ captures the heart of this shift. “Never tolerate intolerance,” says the text of a still popular America bumper sticker. Delsol observes that, paradoxically, this creates a culture fixated on political correctness.

Here I end my general description of the context in which we find ourselves, a context that seeks to place emotional validation above all else, aware that projectile therapeutic selves are already shaping the future in almost every domain across the globe, from the personal to the national to the global. With this in mind, I turn to what this ideological construal means for the little world of scholarship, teaching, and learning I find myself in—although, without a doubt, this affects people outside academia in many ways. First, I look at what this means for university research, especially in the humanities; and second, I explore some of what this means for student-lecturer interactions.

You may recall the so-called Grievances Studies scandal. Between 2017 and 2018, self-described liberals, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian submitted fake papers to several academic journals specialising in ‘activist’ ‘identities’ scholarship. Their mission was to discover how easy it would be to get “absurdities and morally fashionable political ideas published as legitimate academic research.” Several of their papers were published, including one, in the journal Hypatia, that translated parts of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf into the language of intersectional feminism and another, published in the journal of Fat Studies, advocating for dangerous levels of obesity to fight fatphobic people.

In the latter journal, you will not find anything like a paper warning people of the risks of obesity or declaring that nearly eighty per cent of deaths by disease in America can be linked to metabolic dysfunction. Such data would contravene therapeutic constraints. As the grievance studies hoaxers showed, the main issue is not about what is true or good but whether what is written helps others to feel good. Many scholars dismissed the scandal without contending with what it revealed, including the fact that the therapeutic has triumphed over more stable measures of academic credibility. As the Grievance Studies scandal showed, some fields of study have been constructed to resist negative feedback. The very source of what would allow discourses to adapt and grow has been cut off because it is too painful for therapeutic selves to handle. Therapeutic selves want painkillers, not pain. Moreover, as system theorists know, any system built only on positive feedback will eventually implode under the weight of its self-inflation. Narcissus, caught in a positive feedback loop between himself and his own reflected image, eventually starves himself to death.

What does this imply for teaching and learning? Given that the therapeutic paradigm has fostered a soft totalitarianism that dictates how we should behave in the world, it is no surprise that this has affected the educational aspects of university life. Not too long ago, we were worried about university standards dropping. Now, although this concern hasn’t gone away, we’re more worried that our students are anxious, emotionally needy, and just generally psychologically unwell. When I was a student, it would never have occurred to me to regard a teacher or lecturer as someone to confide in about personal problems. Now it is standard for students to expect not just that lecturers should be landfill sites for emotional garbage but that the university should provide for their mental healthcare needs.

The optimistic interpretation is that we live in a more enlightened time. Our ancestors were ignorant, we might claim, and we are not. However, by all available metrics, our collective mental health is in decline. We are more aware of mental health than ever and we are also more mentally unwell than ever. We’ve all seen this. When I first started as a lecturer, encountering students with psychological struggles was infrequent and the causes were often easy to identify: the loss of a loved one, for instance, or a breakup with a boyfriend or girlfriend. But in the last few years, more than at the start of my career and with thinned-out curricula, the sheer volume of cases involving students with mental health troubles has ballooned; and the causes are increasingly vague.

This spreading of indeterminate anxiety is confirmed in two recent books, one by Abigail Shrier called Bad Therapy (2024) and one by Jonathan Haidt called The Anxious Generation (2024). There is a definite decline in collective mental well-being, especially among those without fully developed prefrontal cortexes. Various causes can be explored. One is the rise in social media use. Haidt notes some of this in his article Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest. But, as this article’s title shows, circumstantial shifts are not the only problem: worldviews play a part. Liberal girls are the most badly affected because they buy into the grievance studies paradigm which reinforces the idea that people are by default at the mercy of systems and so-called systemic oppression. They believe they have no internal locus of control. So that would be a second cause for the rise in mental illness. A third would be the change in parenting styles. So-called ‘helicopter parenting’ has become more prevalent. Shrier argues that this is the main cause. But she also implicitly points to a fourth cause, namely the therapeutic paradigm itself.

I recommend Shrier’s book in particular for its many insights. She is right that therapy is not an unmitigated good. Just as medical doctors can cause harm even while trying to heal patients, just as medications come with side effects, therapy can do damage even as healing is sought. For my colleagues, I cannot stress this point enough. Assuming that psychology has all the answers is naive. Something else that Shrier notes is worth highlighting. Good psychological research shows that rumination is often toxic. Getting people to reflect endlessly on how they feel will make them more miserable. One of the greatest gifts of any school, university, or workplace might be that it offers a space where people can get away from themselves for a bit. Reminding students of their agency, especially when they are increasingly prone to giving it up to Spark Notes summaries and AI-generated text, is one of our most vital tasks. None of us is absolutely powerless.

As I work towards a conclusion, I want to return to an implicit claim in everything I have said, namely that the psychological paradigm has become ideological. My claim is not that psychology is bad. Mental illness deserves serious and careful attention from psychiatrists and psychologists, although, yes, there are risks that interventions from such professionals may not be the silver bullets that people have made them out to be. Also, because life is tough, all of us, from time to time, may struggle sufficiently to deal with our circumstances to require temporary support. However, what is bothersome is that life itself has been reduced to a psychological condition.

What is an ideology? Mark Lilla notes the inadequacy of the usual dictionary definition of ideology as a “‘system’ of ideas and beliefs” that inform human action. This definition implies that ideology is a predominantly conscious phenomenon, indicating that we should be able to spell out our ideological commitments when prompted. But, at best, this is only a fraction of the story. As Lilla suggests, it would be more accurate to say that ideology is like enchantment. Most of it is unconscious. What we see counts less than the invisible lens by which we see things. “To follow the optical metaphor,” says Lilla, “ideology takes an undifferentiated visual field and brings it into focus so that objects appear in a predetermined relation to each other.” This ‘predetermined relation’ appears to the ideologue as intuitive. It is so natural to him or her that it goes uninterrogated. 

I think of David Foster Wallace’s famous fable of the two fish passed one day by a wise old fish who greets them and remarks on how lovely the water is. When he is gone, the one young fish says to the other, “What the hell is water?” I have attempted here to describe the water we’re all swimming in. It is murkier and possibly more toxic than perhaps we tend to think it is. We’re so accustomed to the reductionistic and utilitarian therapeutic paradigm that we have all become, perhaps inadvertently, part of the movement that is turning educational institutions into mental health facilities. 

At the very least, with all of this in mind, we need to recover a renewed sense of what personhood amounts to and recover the chief pursuit of human beings apart from ideological palliation. We need to recover meaning. In a small gathering of students, I recently asked what texts they engage with (news, books, series, movies and the like). My sample group was small and by no means representative of the general student population. Still, among just six students I learned that their chief source of external stimulus is their self-curated TikTok and/or Instagram feed. It seems to me that many of my students are world-poor and isolated. They have barely any shared context, although they have ample content and many discontents. By making the self as large as we have, the world has become almost non-existent, barely even remotely relevant.

Since the psychological self has triumphed, these students are more incapable of reasoning carefully through complex conceptual problems than any previous group of students I have taught. They are more manipulable. They are noticeably lost; noticeably unhappier. Psychologising everything has not worked. I think it is worrying that even universities often respond to students, not by offering them a bigger world to think about or training them with ways to evaluate if perhaps their very own professors and lecturers are ideologically possessed, but by increasingly reflecting their worldview right back to them. This forgets even the most formative of our first experiences when we were children—when we were confronted with things we could marvel and wonder about. We need to encounter things that stimulate inwardness and which also draw us out of our natural selfishness. In one of the earliest reveries on the role of education, in Plato’s story of the cave, that great philosopher mused on the chief function of the educator, which was not to convince his students to love the shadows that were flickering on the walls in front of them but to draw them out of themselves and out of their unreality.

Although I am not without hope, I am also not what you’d call optimistic about whether such a task is achievable at all under current conditions. I am as aware as many are of just how cave-like and shadow-filled—just how ideological—universities have become. But the status quo does not spell inevitability. I’m reminded of two things said by Marshall McLuhan that are pertinent. In a letter to Life Magazine (March 1st, 1966), he wrote: “Determinism is the result of the behaviour of those who are determined to ignore what is happening around them. Recognition of the psychic and social effects of technological change”—I’d add psychological and ideational change—“make it possible to neutralize the effects of innovation.” In The Medium is the Massage, he said this: “There is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate the situation.” The point is that if there is to be any kind of remedy to the situation, it’ll begin with the act of waking up to what is actually going on.