Bob Schwartz

In this week’s Time Jamie Ducharme asks “America Has Reached Peak Therapy. Why Is Our Mental Health Getting Worse?” She writes:

“The U.S. has reached peak therapy. Counseling has become fodder for hit books, podcasts, and movies. Professional athletes, celebrities, and politicians routinely go public with their mental health struggles. And everyone is talking—correctly or not—in the language of therapy, peppering conversations with references to gaslighting, toxic people, and boundaries….

But something isn’t adding up. Even as more people flock to therapy, U.S. mental health is getting worse by multiple metrics.”

I’ve featured the psychologist James Hillman before. He has been called “the most lively and original psychologist we’ve had in America since William James”. Among his many valuable works is his published dialogue with journalist Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse (1992).

No easy way to sum up that book, or the breadth and depth of Hillman’s thought (see Blue Fire: The Essential James Hillman for an overview). Hillman says in We’ve Had a Hundred Years:

“We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. Maybe it’s time to look at that. We still locate the psyche inside the skin. You go inside to locate the psyche, you examine your feelings and your dreams, they belong to you. Or it’s interrelations, interpsyche, between your psyche and mine. That’s been extended a little bit into family systems and office groups—but the psyche, the soul, is still only within and between people. We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feelings and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.

What’s left out is a deteriorating world.

So why hasn’t therapy noticed that? Because psychotherapy is only working on that “inside” soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do its job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.

You know, the soul is always being rediscovered through pathology. In the nineteenth century people didn’t talk about psyche, until Freud came along and discovered psychopathology. Now we’re beginning to say, “The furniture has stuff in it that’s poisoning us, the microwave gives off dangerous rays.” The world has become toxic.”