cover image In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment

In Therapy We Trust: America's Obsession with Self-Fulfillment

Eva S. Moskowitz. Johns Hopkins University Press, $43 (362pp) ISBN 978-0-8018-6403-2

I may be OK, and you may be OK, but what about the culture at large? Are Americans obsessed with self-fulfillment? Has illusory self-esteem become a highly lucrative commodity? In this entertaining, informative and provocative cultural analysis, Moskowitz, sometime college history teacher and New York City Council member, explores how the desire for personal happiness became supreme, and how success in every arena from sports to geopolitics has come to be measured ""with a psychological yardstick."" Moskowitz's lengthy historical view encompasses the mid-19th-century New Thought movement (epitomized by Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science), which sought physical happiness through mental will, as well as the impact of various forms of therapy on education movements. She also analyzes how the therapeutic community helped shape postwar social reforms such as desegregation by arguing that legalized racism was psychologically harmful to African-Americans, and how second-wave feminists in the 1960s and '70s ""blamed psychological experts for women's false consciousness,"" while simultaneously citing ""the psychological nature of women's oppression."" While Moskowitz charts what she sees as the excesses of this culture Oprah and Sally Jesse Raphael's confessional televised therapy fests, and the glut of 12-step programs for everyone from nail-biters to ""dataholics"" and information addicts her criticism is as judicious as her careful praise of an encompassing therapy culture. (Apr.)