Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried

by Ethan Watters, Richard Ofshe

From the critically acclaimed authors of Making Monsters, a no-holds-barred critique of talk therapy that will forever change your view of the couch.In this clearheaded and courageous book, Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe expose the pseudo-science behind the twentieth century's most enduring myth -- Freud's theory of the psychodynamic mind. Despite the lack of credible evidence for a powerful unconscious that controls our behavior, a huge number of therapists continue to base their practice on the idea that only they can uncover their patients' unconscious motivations, luring thousands of Americans, from the mildly demoralized to the seriously ill, down dangerous and arbitrary paths of treatment.Therapy's Delusions reveals how, over the years, talk therapy has masqueraded as a scientific discipline and has cost patients time, money, and their mental well-being. Waters and Ofshe demonstrate how patients, therapists, and society alike are fooled by the stories created in therapy. This back-and-forth belief-building process has popularized countless faddish and speculative notions, some of the most aberrant of which have popped up in recent years, including the recovered memory trend the authors exposed in Making Monsters.Therapy's Delusions also makes a decisive case for the biomedical approach to mental health care. In addition to the celebrated success of drugs like Prozac, revolutionary advances are being made in genetic research and in the field of cognitive and behavioral counseling. This book is a powerful call to action for reforming the poorly regulated mental health profession, so that no more patients are misled by a myth that has held sway over American minds for far too long.Talk therapy's tight grip on both its patients and practitioners is exactly why it deserve close examination. Brilliantly argued, Therapy's Delusions is a crucial addition to the dialogue about Freud's legacy and essential reading for anyone considering taking his or her troubles to a psychodynamic

Genres: Psychology, Nonfiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Ethan Watters is a free lance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Discover, Men's Journal, Spin, Details, and Wired. A frequent contributor to NPR, Watters' work appeared in the 2007 and 2008 Best American Science and Nature Writing. He co-founded the San Francisco Writers Grotto, a work space for local artists. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and children.

Reviews

[Carrie Poppy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is tremendous. It lays out the limits to psychodynamic therapy (think Freud) as a psychological framework and a clinical practice. I was constantly struck by how clearly and economically these authors expressed their arguments. I found the central premise (that talk therapy based in psychodynamic principles is somewhere on a scale from useless to harmful) very compelling.

The only major flaws are the title (it makes it sound like this book is a critique of ALL talk therapy; it isn't) and its somewhat outdated concept of talk therapy as a solely Freudian enterprise. The book was written in the 90s, and that might have been the case then, so I can hardly fault the authors for not seeing into the future and knowing that psychology would change for the better with the explosion of CBT and its relatives. Maybe their book was even part of that evolution.

As someone who found strictly-talk-therapy ineffective and frustrating, I constantly wish people knew that talk therapy is an underdeveloped science. Anyone with moderate depression or anxiety who is looking to improve their lives should look for mental health help from someone schooled in behaviorist approaches... they are basically the only approaches that we know work. You will probably experience more relief from buying a $20 CBT workbook like Mind Over Mood (and working on it for a couple years) than spending the same amount of time and way more money on someone's couch. But I digress.

The book really lays out the limits of talk therapies and theories of the subconscious, especially the really out-there and harmful notions, like repressed memory. It is a compelling call to make psychology into the science it should be. Indeed, I think that call is slowly being answered (DSM-V hooplah notwithstanding).

Interestingly, I posted a picture of this book on social media and got a few comments saying things like, "This title makes me nervous," and "I depend on therapy to stay alive." For anyone feeling this way, there is absolutely no need to pick at those wounds and read this book. If talk therapy, from a licensed practitioner, is working for you, GREAT! I don't think the authors of this book would be particularly bothered by that, assuming your therapist wasn't trained in Freudian theory (most aren't these days) and has a strong scientific POV (not always the case, but many do). This book is mostly against those therapists who would assert that your problems come from some memory or paradigm hidden in the corners of your brain, where you can't access them. The therapists who insist that THEY have some personal insight into your soul that YOU don't have. That is where the danger largely lays.

All that said, I am somewhat compelled to repeat something my dad told to me when I was thirteen and he saw me reading a book that he found ahistorical. After he explained why he thought I should take the book with a grain of salt, he shook his head as if erasing from his own mind his skepticism in favor of a greater purpose. "But Carrie?" he said, "No book is dangerous."

Anyway, the subconscious exists, but not in the dark-alley-in-your-brain sense. Your therapist has far less knowledge of you than you do. This book is about that.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A WRITER AND A SOCIOLOGIST CRITIQUE PSYCHODYNAMIC "TALK THERAPIES"

Richard Jay Ofshe is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American sociologist and Professor Emeritus of Sociology at UC Berkeley, and a member of the advisory board of the False Memory Syndrome Foundation; Ethan Watters is a freelance writer. They have also written 'Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, And Sexual Hysteria.'

They wrote in the Introduction to this 1999 book, "The case we intend to make in this book is that many, if not most, of the more than two hundred types of talk therapy currently being practiced share a lineage of mistakes. This means not only that generations of therapy patients have been misled, but that we all share cultural notions about the workings of our minds that are fundamentally incorrect... The premise of this book is that the psychodynamic theory of the mind that has informed and shaped the current practice of so much psychotherapy is wrong... we will expose the lack of evidence for the assumptions common to most schools of psychotherapy; and then we will take stock of what is left." (Pg. 12-13) They add, "We will explain the mistakes and excesses of psychodynamic forms of therapy both in terms of the history of the profession as well as in descriptions of the damage many of these theories have caused patients." (Pg. 26)

They assert, "we posit that all schools of talk therapy derived from the psychodynamic tradition share a set of fundamental errors... the psychodynamic schools have often limited their search for the cause of disorders to the patient's childhood... they have assumed that psychotherapy is an effective way to find these historical pathogens... the question remains: Does simply discovering that explanation ameliorate the patient's troubles or mental illness?" (Pg. 37)

They argue, "If the [psychotherapy] profession makes no effort to weed out ineffective treatments (and seems to have little desire to control even the most outrageous practices)... 'Respectable minority' cannot be the standard in a profession that does not take the time to make any minority opinion DISrespectable." (Pg. 99)

They add, "We have argued that psychodynamic therapy is flawed through the process by which the patient is molded by the therapist's suggestions and the therapist is influenced by the patient's eventual belief... both are easily blown by the cultural winds of the moment... for several generations therapists... have had a hand in determining which fears, concerns, and interests we have focused on as a culture." (Pg. 188)

They conclude, "We believe there is good reason to warn people... away from explanatory theories and treatment methods that ... in reality are built on myth." (Pg. 235)

This book will interest those looking for critiques of psychodynamic "talk therapies."