Philip rieff the triumph of the therapeutic

Even on the island of my couch, I am getting buzzed these days by streaming advertisements for psychotherapy. Some of them dangling the lure: even if you don’t feel like you have problems, perhaps you could use help clarifying what you really want out of life, so make an appointment with a therapist. Far be it from me to get snide about shrinks — after all, I’ve been in therapy for half-a-century. Nevertheless, the commercials come across like an ad for “rent-a-friend”.

How remarkably prescient Philip Rieff was when, sixty years ago, he heralded the “triumph of the therapeutic” — which is to say, an era in which we would understand ourselves, not in terms of the old vocabulary of faith, but in the language of mental health.

The therapeutic congregation is non-judgemental. Late in his career, Sigmund Freud concluded that most neuroses do not stem from some overwhelming libido, but from pit bull-like super-egos. To that end, most therapists today will strive to grab the self-lacerating whip out of your hands and assure you that the feelings for you which you might have always hated yourself are natural and normal. According to Freud, the hyperbolic ideals we inherited from religion only lead to more repression and, ultimately, transgressive explosions of instinct.

Whereas Søren Kierkegaard preached “the more ethical ideals, the better”, the cigar-puffing moralist Arthur Schopenhauer — one of the few philosophers who influenced Freud — declared that humanity would be better served by adjusting their moral ideals to psychological reality rather than aspiring to the likes of “loving your enemy”.

To use an example that is close to home: lately, I have been throttling myself because of my lack of patience and irritation in caring for a chronically ill loved one. The therapeutic counsel would be that I should worry about my pique, because such feelings are natural and normal.

In the new-speak of psychotherapy, instead of claiming that you found someone’s speech or behaviour “reprehensible”, you would now point out, “I’m uncomfortable with what you did or said.” When death snaps the ties that bind, rather than wailing, you will seek to find “closure” with the deceased — perhaps by “celebrating” their lives instead of conducting an old-fashioned funeral. If you are grief stricken, you now have access to a psychological sherpa to guide you through the seven stages. With the triumph of the therapeutic, the revised table of moral virtues might replace courage with the capacity to tolerate vulnerability.

Philip Rieff prophetically glimpsed this seismic shift in the way we interpret our inner lives. I was fortunate enough to study under this seer — permit me to share a story about an early encounter with Professor Rieff.

“Stop identifying down”: A recollection

As a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania with a keen interest and respectable background in psychoanalysis, I wrote a note to the famous Freud scholar and Benjamin Franklin Professor of Sociology, Philip Rieff, pleading with him to supervise an independent study on Freud. Word had it that my chances of Rieff’s agreeing to my request were next to nil. At this late stage of his career and in bad health, he was not likely to take on a new graduate student — especially one from another discipline. But the fates were with me this time, and one afternoon his secretary called me with the good tidings that Professor Rieff had consented to meet to discuss the possibility of working together.

I was as intimidated in our first encounter as I was in my not-so-long-gone days as a competitive boxer. Clad in a grey three-piece suit complete with a pocket watch on a gold chain, Rieff spoke with the gravity and rhythm of an actor playing Hamlet. After exchanging greetings, Professor Rieff — who knew I was a novice Kierkegaard scholar — surprisingly suggested, “Instead of Freud, why don’t we study someone interesting like Kierkegaard?” Fine by me.

^{A panel on “The New Left and the American Consensus”, convened at Colorado Women’s College in Denver, Colorado in 1967. Philip Rieff is seated at the far right. (Denver Post via Getty Images)}

Over the span of a couple of months we met on a weekly basis. A fear-inspiring figure, he sneered at both the why and how of my attempts to communicate verbally with him. He not only corrected the content of my speech but the patterns, the halting stops and starts. Sometimes he interrupted mid-sentence, with a “Why the irritating flow of “ums and uhs when you speak?” I tried to excuse myself insisting that by my age (30) adult patterns of speech are well-nigh impossible to change. Sneering he countered, “If you can learn how to write you can learn how to speak properly.”

One darkling mid-winter afternoon, at the end of a session, the moralising author of the classic Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, suckered punched me with the observation, “Gordon, look at you! You dress like a thug.” True, I was unshaven, and my leather jacket and wardrobe were Hell’s Angels style. He continued, “And why the earring?” Stumbling, I responded with the risible, “Its a symbol.” “A symbol of what?” he chortled, adding, “The earring is something the peasant class wore in southern Italy where your ancestors came from.” Dripping with condescension, he accurately predicted, “Symbol? Within ten years everyone in the business school will be wearing earrings.”

Despite my begging him to take me on as a student, my self-image was one of a street tough who didn’t take a knee before anyone. The curse, “Go f*** yourself” was right there on the tip of my tongue. That toxic masculinity, that slice of my identity had already been responsible for burning a series of bridges. Fortunately, this time, my frontal lobes kicked in and prevented an outburst that would have torched a relationship that shaped my life.

I suspect that Professor Rieff was tempted to make his point from the days of our first meetings, but the depth psychologist in him waited until he figured I had formed a strong enough identification with him to cast aside my bad-boy script. And that late afternoon, I did just that — I listened and kept my mouth shut.

We closed up shop and, somewhat shell shocked, I walked Professor Rieff to his car. On the way, and now in a more gentle but still commanding tone, he said, “Gordon, stop identifying down. Identify up”. And then there was a brief homily in which he explained:

As a professor, students are going to identify with you and you will have a responsibility not to tempt them with the masquerade that in your jeans and leather jacket you are one of them … Today most professors are too narcissistic to act as the parental figures they need to be. They would prefer avoiding the messy business of confronting students about their dress or manners. They just want to get back to their offices, shut the door, and write their next forgettable article.

Then the gavel came down: “If you have an authentic calling to teach, you must be willing to tell students what they need to hear, not just what they want to hear.”

We shook hands and, feeling somewhat punchy, I shuffled off with a line from Kierkegaard’s Works of Love bubbling up behind my brows. The Danish firebrand whom Professor Rieff evidently ranked as more interesting than Freud, wrote, “There is no word in the language that in itself is up-building, and there is no word in the language that cannot be said in an uplifting way and become up-building if love is present.”

Gordon Marino is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and the former Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College, Minnesota. He is the author of The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age and Kierkegaard in the Present Age, and co-editor of The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard.