Therapy has turned on itself

Were I to overcome a lifelong scepticism about the healing powers of talk therapy, I imagine languishing on a psychiatrist’s divan and whimpering something along these lines: ‘All this “woke” stuff – I’ve even come to hate the word. Resisting its idiocies is taking over my life. I worry that I’m not setting my own agenda. When you decry something as stupid, aren’t you still babbling about something stupid? It’s a big, wonderful world out there, and “wokery” is killjoy, reductive and mean. I feel trapped.’

Yet according to the recent essay collection Cynical Therapies, I’d elicit an icy response. ‘Look here, Karen,’ my hypothetical therapist charges with a scowl. ‘Your only claim to my sympathy is being female. Otherwise, you’re criminally white, straight, cis and non-differently abled. Those sad little tits and crumbling knees can’t earn you out of the white supremacist oppressor class. Unless you suddenly decide that all along you’ve been a boy, you must devote yourself to anti-racism, apologise for having ever been born and do the work!’ Thanks, pal. Just what I needed.

The contributors to Cynical Therapies are lecturers and clinicians in mental health who are raising the alarm about the ideological takeover of their discipline over the past 20 years. A mix of Americans and Brits – with the usual lack of dignity, the field in Britain has slavishly followed America’s into the abyss – the authors are heretics and, to many colleagues, traitors. The book is a cry for help.

Few doctrines could be more self-evidently antithetical to the traditional imperatives of psychotherapy than ‘critical social justice’, aka that tiresome, overworked term beginning with ‘w’. Although psychiatry has developed a wide range of approaches, not long ago therapists of all persuasions were coached to display openness, empathy, curiosity and neutrality.