In association with Routledge and King's College London, and sponsored by the Body&Soul

section of The Times

Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age

An Institute of Ideas symposium at King’s College London, 22 November 2003

Closing panel: Round table ruminations on therapy culture

Speakers:

Frank Furedi

professor of sociology, University of Kent, and author of Therapy Culture

Adam Curtis

maker of The Century of The Self, a BBC2 documentary series about how Freud's
ideas have been used for social and political purposes

Michael Gove

saturday editor, The Times

Sally Satel MD

author of One Nation Under Therapy and PC MD: How Political Correctness is
Corrupting Medicine

Chair:
Claire Fox director, Institute of Ideas

Claire Fox:
What I was interested in reflecting on was the political implications of the new therapy
culture? Not everybody in this room likes the therapy culture, but there are some people who
say it’s not all a bad thing. But regardless of whether one is positive or negative about it, there
are implications of this widespread therapy culture for politicians, institutions, the new elites
and so on. Another underlying theme that has come up was, say you don’t like it – what are
you going to do about it? What’s the strategy? How do you challenge some of the more
negative aspects of therapy culture, or even challenge it head-on? Is this just sniping from the
sidelines? Basically, I’m opening that up to my panel to comment on this – undoubtedly they’ll
ignore me and say what they want, but anyway…I’m going to start with you, Frank.

Frank Furedi: If you look at chapter 2 of my book, you will find the damaging consequences
this culture has on policy-making and on political life, and I’m not going to make any cheap
points about the use of emotionalism as a political currency by politicians, but I think we all
need to be very sensitive to the way in which the therapeutic imperative has now been
assimilated into all aspects of social policy. If you look at the British government’s social
exclusion unit, you will find that every single one of their policies, without exception, is
diagnosing low self-esteem as the problem, whether it’s people sleeping rough on the streets,
whether it’s people who have bad educational facilities, every problem is low self-esteem.

I think this has consequences – you can see this most clearly if you have children –what’s
happening in our schools and the way that education is now conceived of, in the area where I
live, it is almost impossible for children to enjoy competitive sports in our school system
because competition is bad for children’s self-esteem. I’m not making it up, I can put you in
touch with dozens of parents who are having to invent competition for their children because
they’re not going to get it in schools.

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You’re getting similar sort of regressive social policies in other domains as well: the cultural
policy we’ve adopted, where museums and art galleries have become an area for people to
recognise themselves, to embrace their voices instead of an institution where we discover
beauty and truth. The degradation of these institutions to a narrow therapeutic function is very
very worrying. I could go on and on, in fact my next book is devoted to this subject of the
policy areas.

I want to end by making one point – what can you do about it? I think there’s a lot you can do
about it. I’ve discovered if you open your mouth and speak, there is a resonance for it. There
are intelligent people out there who hate being patronised, who really resent being infantilised
by policy-makers and treated like children, so there are a lot of people out there who can get
involved and make their own voices heard. I think there’s also a lot more we can do in a
systematic way – back in the 80s and the 90s, in the United States people used to talk about
the culture wars, and I’m not really sure what the culture wars were, but I experience the rise
of therapy culture as a culture war that’s waged upon me and upon my friends.

It’s something that I didn’t invite and wasn’t consulted about it, and yet there’s this relentless
process of a particular kind of culture that influences our most intimate kind of life. I think it’s
about time that we started a culture war in this country where we take up these ideas in a very
aggressive and confident way, use the media, use other facilities and our informal network to
take up this argument.

There are many words we now use unthinkingly, many words we now think are unthinkingly
good. Take the word ‘transparency’ – it just trips off the lips of every politician, we need to be
‘transparent’. Well actually we don’t, I don’t think we need to be transparent most of the time –
if I’m in the toilet, I don’t want to be too transparent about it; if I’m having an intimate relation
with someone, I wouldn’t want to be too transparent; if I’m having a passionate discussion
with my son, I don’t want everyone else to see – there are a lot of things that we don’t need
transparency for, in the workplace, where we are discouraged from solving problems
informally.

I think we’re now using words that are the language of ‘Big Brother’ writ large, that we no
longer inspect and think about, and I think we need to challenge this way of thinking. We can
do it in our own ways if we make a bit of an effort. The nice thing about therapy culture,
despite its strengths and everything else, is that it is a bit of a case of an emperor with no
clothes – these are policies that are not evidence-based, these are policies that are not
solidly-rooted in empirical reality, these are culturally-forged truths that have a very fragile
foundation to them. I think it’s an invitation to us to wage a culture war against it, and I invite
all of you to participate in it

Claire Fox: Thank you Frank. Now Michael, you haven’t spoken yet, so you can give us
some broader thoughts on the issue.

Michael Gove: Thank you very much, Claire. I’d like to take up the challenge that Frank put
forward to look at things in a pragmatic and an empirical way – I’m an Anglo-Saxon kind of
guy, and I think that’s the best way to approach some of the things Frank’s raised and that
we’ve been discussing today.

The first thing that I should say, pragmatically and empirically, we do know that some types of
therapy do work. It’s certainly clear that there are certain identifiable mental and emotional
disturbances for which therapy can be the answer, that there are certain therapeutic
interventions which are medically sanctioned, make sense and make people better, healthier
individuals. It has to be recognised in that respect that therapy can be seen, analytically, very
close to other forms of intervention, for example drugs – chemical interventions in that way.

The one thing I do want to do however is to join Frank in rejecting the notion that you can
make extravagant claims for therapy on the basis of certain incremental improvement that it
can secure in certain individuals. I’m suspicious of grand claims that are made for therapy
under the banner of therapy culture, much as I’m suspicious of those attempts to medicalise

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social problems through the use of drugs. We do have a problem in the way that our children
are being brought up, I would attribute it to a lack of discipline in homes, but that conditions
has been medicalised, and the way we ensure that children become docile and attentive now
is to dose them with drugs. In the same way, I think there is a genuine problem with the extent
of solipsistic self-absorption amongst people when they reach maturity – we attempt to deal
with that nowadays through anti-depressant drugs. I think that the way that’s seen as a
panacea is a problem as well.

So, one of the things I want to do is extend, as it were, some of the criticisms Frank makes of
therapy culture overall and to look at the way there are other medical interventions that are
seen to be panaceas for what are actually individual social problems which should be looked
at in a moral or an ethical context.

As a self-proclaimed pragmatic sort of guy, the one other thing I want to do is warn against
grand unification theories. I think that Frank and a lot of the speakers here have made a
number of very good points in particular individual circumstances, but I’m suspicious of grand
unification theories such as the one that Frank’s advanced overall which seek to locate all the
problems that we see nowadays to one particular phenomenon to which we can give an easy
tag like therapy culture. There are certain social changes, some of which we may consider to
be admirable, some of which we may consider to be regrettable, which operate outside the
realm of the phenomenon that Frank and others have identified.

It’s important to recognise that some of the things that Frank is talking about, some of the
things to do with a greater degree of solipsism or egotism, aren’t explicable by the rise of
therapy culture overall. There are other factors which have been brought to bear. There are
reasons why individuals are no longer prepared to essentially indulge in a culture of sacrifice
anymore, there are reasons why individuals believe in a culture of instant gratification, which
have nothing intrinsically to do with therapy culture. The decline of the stiff upper lip, the
decline of community values, the decline, essentially, of a traditional stoicism is not just to do
with the rise of therapy culture, but also to do with the belief that we can demand gratification
now, and therefore ties of loyalty to our family, to our partner, whatever, can be dissolveable
instantly. So I think it’s important to recognise that some of the social ills or malaises or just
changes which Frank identifies, aren’t just attributable to therapy culture.

One other thing that I was going to mention, and I’ll get onto Claire’s points about political
ramifications and solutions in a second, one of the other speakers mentioned Northern
Ireland, and I am particularly interested in Northern Ireland for a variety of reasons, and one
of the points that was made was that of course, in Northern Ireland, we’ve had a conflict of
greater or lesser intensity going on since the late 1960s, and there’s been no increase in the
number of people seeking recourse to therapy in Northern Ireland.

Well, one of the things I think we should look at in Northern Ireland is that to look at it simply
as a society that’s been going through a conflict is actually to diminish a number of points
which make Northern Ireland distinctive, even within the United Kingdom and even within
Western Europe. If we look at some of the other things that are distinctive about Northern
Ireland, apart from the fact that there’s been a war going on there you can see some of the
reasons why there hasn’t been a recourse to therapy culture or to therapy there in order to
deal with some of the difficulties individuals have had.

One of the key things about Northern Ireland is that it has very traditional social structures,
relative to the rest of Western Europe – less divorce, a more traditional educational system,
there’s a stronger and greater sense of communal identity of course that spills over into
violence, but there’s nevertheless the fact that people have a greater sense, not just that
they’re respected for who they are, but also because they’re respected because they play a
part in specific communities, not just Loyalist/Republican, Protestant/Catholic, but also
urban/rural communities as well, but it’s also the case that the conflict has – and it may seem
bad taste to mention it – but it has also given men a chance to have a sense of dignity in their
masculinity which is denied them elsewhere.

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I’m not just talking about those who’ve engaged in illegal military activity, I’m also talking
about the fact that Northern Ireland, because it has a larger police force, because it has had
until recently a much more organised security structure, allows men to play a role which it’s
very difficult to find them play elsewhere in Western Europe, and that means that essentially,
for want of a better word, manliness, masculinity, is more highly prized in Northern Ireland,
and therefore there’s less recourse to that search for meaning which is part of what Frank has
identified.

Final thoughts – what are the political consequences of therapy culture, the political
implications? The first thing simply, and you can probably tell politically where I’m coming
from when I say this, first thing simply is cost. Many of the developments Frank has identified
lead inevitably to a growth in the state, or a growth in para-state agencies, all of which we as
tax-payers have to pay for.

The other problem with the growth in therapy culture, or the use of therapy as a means of
explaining our behaviour, is that it deprives people of autonomy, it deprives people of the
dignity of being able to take responsibility for their own actions, and the third thing which of
course Frank mentioned, is that it also privileges emotion over reason in arguments and
debates. For me, the culmination, or rather the most striking example of emotion trumping
reason in the public sphere was the debate, well, the reaction to the death of the Princess of
Wales. For a week, the country collectively lost its head as it was trying to find its heart, and it
seems to me that rational arguments about the constitutional future of this country were
completely trumped by people weeping over their own emotional image of the ‘queen of
hearts’.

So, those are some of the political implications. What can we do about it – well, engage in a
robust, for want of a better word, piss-take of some of the more preposterous claims that are
made by therapists, use irony and at the same time keep a sense of proportion, and
recognise that there are some individual therapists and indeed some individual counsellors
who are doing discreet, good work for individuals in specific circumstances, it’s only when
extravagant claims are made for their activity that it becomes a danger.

Claire Fox: Somebody suggested we have another war to get more robust, that was Virginia
[Ironside], and now it’s the Northern Irish conflict’s been very good for masculinity. Classic. If
that’s ever quoted, I deny all knowledge. OK, Sally, at this stage, just some brief thoughts.

Sally Satel: Well Frank, my own contribution to this debate – or, what word did Michael use?
Piss-take? – is the book you mentioned, One Nation Under Therapy that I’m writing with my
colleague, Christina Hoff-Summers. Our books will be very complementary and besides, you
have paved a wonderful road ahead for us, but the orientation we’re taking is, we are trying to
take an empirical one, we are using as much publicly published data as we can find, generally
in the social psychological area, to refute statements not on aesthetic grounds, or preference
grounds, or even common sense, which can even be a little misleading, believe it or not.

We refute the fact that self-esteem is first-off a legitimate concept, and secondly has any
correlation with success. We have data showing that an anti-competitive strain in schools is
not healthy for children, we talk about emotional correctness – Virginia earlier talked about the
prescribed way of grieving, well there’s a large literature on that, that there really is no
prescribed way, and of course and impose this on some folks it can be quite destructive for
them.

Again, the presumption of fragility – we use 9/11 to show that, but other historical examples,
the Blitz was mentioned, we can show through data that the notion that repressing emotion is
a bad thing is not always true, and we also talk about violence and addiction, and we try and
show that they are in no way uncontrollable as a number of my colleagues are trying to
convince others by using models of brain neuroscience.

I do think, and I’ve been encouraged by the reaction to your book already Frank, that a lot of
people will be relieved to hear it, people both in the ‘lay community’ as well as therapists, and
that a sizeable percentage of people may respond to data in terms of very specific

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prescriptions because that’s the only, they can only think kind of concretely, are two things,
changing gears a little bit here, in terms of entrenching a kind of victimhood, what Derek
Summerfield was talking about before, about people in the disability arena, you know, if you
don’t work, the longer you don’t work, the longer you don’t work – your skills atrophy, your
confidence erodes, and this is very destructive.

We can argue about who’s sick and who’s not, but once a person defines himself, or is truly
sick, then what do we do with them, in a way that encourages future autonomy or entrenches
them in a victim or disabled role? Two things we end up doing unfortunately are giving
ongoing disability payments, there are some folks who are entitled to that – my threshold is
paraplegic, because I work with drug addicts, and believe it or not they were once eligible for
disability payments, you know, ‘I’m too drunk to work so I’m disabled’, and we actually cut that
programme out, but the point being that there are disability programmes which could be re-
engineered in a much more constructive way so that the secondary gain is gone, so that the
perverse incentive to stay sick to gain that benefit is gone and, I don’t know how big this is in
this country but in ours, you need tort reform, I mean you cannot make it so remunerative for
people to sue over fairly frivolous kinds of injuries, and we know that people who have suits
pending are often consciously, if not unconsciously, sick and that this resolves when the suit
is settled.

Claire Fox: OK, thanks. Adam, your thoughts on anything at this stage?

Adam Curtis: I just briefly wanted to pick up on what Michael Gove said, the phrase, I think
you called it privileging of emotion over reason, which is essentially what I think we’re talking
about here. Therapy culture just gives you the terminology to deal with that and talk about
that, but that’s essentially what the change that’s going on in our society and it seems to be
that we’re discussing.

An issue that everybody seems to be tip-toeing around is that actually, the majority of people
really like that, because it comes over that their feelings are being paid attention to. That’s
really really really important, and of course they may be being patronised and manipulated but
actually, compared to what went before, in human resources, in medicine, in the law, run by a
patronising and arrogant elite, a distant elite, paying attention to your feelings is very
attractive, and there is a sense that’s come out of some of the stuff I’ve heard today, it’s very
very gentle but it’s, I wrote it down like this, it’s a sort of, it’s all terribly bad for them, these
emotions, that somehow, the people out there, which is exactly the feeling, or exactly the
attitude that people, which is why people like having their feelings paid attention to.

Really what I wanted to pick up from that, someone said earlier on that there was a sort of
loss of legitimacy on the part of the elites that has led to this. It isn’t a way of management, it’s
actually because they’ve run out of ideas, so what you actually do is just listen to everyone,
you indulge their feelings because you’ve lost confidence in the project you had, the trajectory
of patrician advancement that you were going about, and I just wonder whether that’s what
we’re talking about – it’s not a new system of management, it’s the result of the failure of an
old system of social and political management.

Claire Fox: OK, thanks, Adam. Any brief things to come back on Frank?

Frank Furedi: Just on empirical reality – I’m glad that Sally’s doing that because it’s useful to
have the arguments. I’ll just make one point which is that even if you have the most airtight
case, absolutely brilliantly substantiated, it’s not going to do the job for a very simple reason,
that many people I know in government are aware of that.

For example, I was asked by one government official to comment on the parenting strategy
they had. I made a point that there’s no empirical evidence that parenting classes work,
there’s overwhelming evidence that it doesn’t work. But that’s how the government works –
let’s get the evidence to prove what they want to do, so we have to understand that empirical
research in the area of social policy is entirely advocacy-driven, and this is an area that is
entirely a minefield.

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Having said that, it’s great you’re doing that, but just as you cannot convince a God-fearing
Jehovah’s witness that God does not exist and that Darwin’s theory was right, no matter what
you say, so too the people that buy into this will not be convinced by empirical arguments.
Only when the circumstances have changed will they begin to question things.

I just want to say, I liked almost everything Adam just said except for his last point – I don’t
think people remember things, I don’t think we remember what has gone on. Memory is also
extremely plastic – the way we remember, and what we remember is continually changing
and what I think is happening is that it isn’t people saying ‘Oh, it used to be really bad in the
good old days when I wasn’t taken seriously and nobody listened to me, and it’s brilliant that
they’re listening to me now’.

I think that there’s a much more subtle process at play here which is that people believe that
this is who they are, that as human beings, being at the receiving end of therapeutic
intervention is what being a citizen is about, that that’s what their entitlement is, that’s what
their rights are about, and I think it’s a memory issue, it’s very much the fact that everything in
our life affirms what a subject is, so we increasingly see ourselves less as a citizen than as a
patient – that shift is quite important.

I completely agree with Michael’s point that therapy culture is not responsible for most things,
only certain very important things, and it would be wrong to blame everything in the world on
therapy culture, but where it’s a problem, I think it needs to be identified and taken seriously.

Claire Fox: OK, I’m going straight out to the audience

Audience Member 1: In terms of what you can do about it, which is a constant frustration
and it’s very difficult I think, I did some research on a curfew that was introduced in Hamilton,
and one of the points I was trying to make in relation to it was how fear was being
institutionalised through this process where the local community were being encouraged to
see local kids as particularly dangerous and they were being told specifically that they should
not intervene, they should not go out, and so in a way you try and make the point that this
actually undermines community, it undermines activity and when they’re trying to promote
community and active citizens, you can actually show, to a degree, that what they mean by an
active citizen is someone who now phones the police rather than actually does something.

Even when I went back to look at it, because it was never called a curfew, it was called a
child-safety initiative, and to a degree, that’s what it was, everyone was saying, the police in
particular, that this is about the safety of under-ten-year-olds, and I looked at every single
newspaper article and every comment that any politician, local police, anybody had said
about child safety for under-ten-year-olds, children under ten were in danger on the street.

Not a single person said ‘Why don’t local adults look out for children under ten on the street?’,
not one person, not a single official politician, nobody said the most basic thing that if children
are at risk in your streets, in your community, why the fuck don’t you get off your backside and
do something about it? Now I think that’s shocking, that’s an embarrassment that politicians
are not prepared to say to people get off your arse, you’re supposed to phone the police
because children are in danger, the most basic instinct we’ve got is to keep children safe, not
a single punter who’s got any authority was prepared to put it on the table and say get your
backside and do something about it.

Claire Fox: Now I know it’s the end of the day, and I know Michael Gove swore on the panel,
but there’s no need for standards to collapse completely…

Audience Member 2: Quite a lot’s been said today about the creep-in of therapy to teacher-
pupil relationships and parent-children relationships, and I’m going to make a suggestion
which is probably quite simplistic but nonetheless I’m going to make it, which is trust the
students and trust your kids. I want to give you an example of how this trust can work – I was
fortunate enough to attend the North London heat of the Debating Matters competition a
couple of weeks ago, where there was really passionate intelligent articulate engagement

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from the students in some quite difficult topics. They took some really rigorous criticism, not
just from the judges but from the other students as well.

Just to show you again how this can work, I’ve just heard today, there was a particular debate
on human genetics and it was very polarised, passionate debate, quite emotional as well. I’ve
just heard today that the losing side of that debate, instead of going off in a big huff and
saying ‘I’m deeply offended, how could you say those things’ which is I think denial of their
own ability to argue and their own agency, the losing school has invited the other school to a
rematch, and I think that’s a really good thing, and I’m going to go along and see what
happens.

Audience Member 3: One of the things that’s been alluded to earlier today has been the
collapse of what’s been called the web of meaning or the more collective senses of purpose
in society. That process of erosion is one of the things that makes it very difficult to get to
grips with how we can challenge these things, we’ve heard some useful suggestions but we
need to get a grip on the magnitude of this problem too.

One of the solutions that’s been put forward, we heard from Virginia Ironside the proposal for
a new war, a kind of new world war would galvanise people. It’s suggested from time to time,
you hear people speaking in this way, we heard from Michael about the effect of the war in
Northern Ireland, but then when we look around and we find many people would say that we
are at war already today in the war on terror since September 11, and I think the reaction to
September 11 and the various wars that have flown from that tell us quite a lot about the
problems that we’re facing with therapeutic culture.

It’s easiest to see the therapeutic impulse on the anti-war side, appeasing the rage of the
Islamic fundamentalists and so forth, but I would maintain that the pro-war side has also been
fundamentally influenced by the crisis of purpose. What the prosecution of the war has really
revealed is that it’s not being fought for freedom or development or the advance of science or
art or culture, it’s being fought for safety, it’s a war fought on the basis of fear and that is what
is unravelling in Iraq at the moment, not a war fought on the basis of evidence but on the
basis of fear. The simple lesson that I would draw from that we don’t need a war to give us
purpose but rather first we need a purpose which will then allow us to prosecute a war.

Claire Fox: Please can we stop advocating war as the solution, because I’m getting nervous
now…

Audience Member 4: It’s kind of an example of where this might lead to in terms of policy,
and I hope it’s going to hit a point where not only people in this room but wider society, people
might actually be resistant enough to step back and go ‘now hang on just a minute’.

I’ve recently been to a conference on driver behaviour and training which I’m afraid I was
covering for the Telegraph, but it was quite a shocking experience because the whole thrust
of this was that the idea of skills in driver training had to be expanded not just to cover vehicle
control, traffic, the idea of the context of your journey, but actually had to cover things like
sensation-seeking self control, peer pressure – I’m completely serious about this, there were
whole sessions about this – and the only argument that was happening was whether
enforcement was worth pursuing at all or whether you had to go completely to education.
People were literally sitting in the audience, and these were people who work for police forces
on road safety, sitting in the audience saying to speakers, ‘are you really saying that the
average driver is capable of making a decision on what’s an appropriate speed?’, and this
was the kind of level.

So when Frank says we are increasingly seen less as a citizen than as a patient, this has
gone far enough in terms of what they call the multi-agency approach, that drivers are
basically pathologised. Speakers were literally standing up and saying ‘The problem here is
not skills, it’s attitude: we have to re-educate drivers to be more socially responsible. If they’re
driving 5 miles an hour over the limit in Lancashire, they’ll be invited onto a speed awareness
course as an alternative to points and a fine’. Now, I’ve got 6 points, so that’s kind of attractive
to me, but it’s very worrying as a long-term trend.

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Audience Member 5: I think it’s been pretty well established today that the therapy culture is
both an individual problem and a social problem, so at an individual level people are
consistently undermined in their ability to cope with problems, the way they relate to people is
increasingly contractualised and professionalised . At a social level, I think Frank described it
as a public health problem – it’s debilitating and it restricts activity in areas like the workplace.
In education and law, it erodes the social relationships that are required to build stable
institutions in any effective society.

If the problem is both individual and social, I would suggest that the solution is found at both
the individual and social level. A few people have said that the solution might be to tell
individuals to be more robust, to get tough, and to trust their colleagues and people in
relationships a bit better, I think that’s a very important thing to do. I think at the social level,
we also need to give people a reason to come together, to have solidarity, to co-operate, and
this goes back to a point that was made earlier about giving people a frame-work of meaning,
and I’m not going to advocate war as a solution, but I do think that the idea of a culture war,
actually there are certain areas of contemporary life where we could take up certain ideals
and actually campaign for them. For example, science, art and culture, enlightenment
principles of reason, those are things that are constantly being attacked, that would be a good
project to actually try and bring people towards and actually build reasons for solidarity.
Rather than looking for just individuated solutions, we should look for a social solution as well.

Claire Fox: Michael, any thoughts at this point? Anything you want to add to the discussion
on anything?

Michael Gove: I’ll try and be brief; it’s always difficult for me. I hope no-one thought I was
actually advocating mass outbreak of civil disorder across western Europe or indeed the
world [Claire Fox: Michael Gove advocates revolution!] in order for those of us weak males to
feel better about ourselves – I was just observing one factor that might help explain what has
happened and what hasn’t happened in Northern Ireland.

Putting that to one side, I’ll probably dig myself a deeper hole now by going on to the point
that was made about the war on terror. I take the point that was made about the pro-war side,
I was of course in favour of the war on that occasion, I take the point about the pro-war side
themselves having to examine some of their own motivations, but I think that on the whole, a
war for safety or security is a classically well-understood concept. What I think is novel, more
interesting, and perhaps more damaging is the way in which the therapy culture affects one
particular aspect of international relations, which is the way we always try and find what the
root cause is of an individual’s or a nation’s or an organisation’s actions, and that we always
try and locate those root causes in our own errors.

So, it’s never enough to say that Al Quaeda terrorists or those responsible for the Istanbul
bombing are either evil or in the grip of a murderous ideology. We always have to explain
their behaviour in terms of their anger or despair, or rejection, or feelings of powerlessness,
which are all consequences of the West’s actions. So the West, Britain and in particular,
America, are held responsible for Muslim rage, as though we are somehow parents who have
been abusing the children in the third world, and the children are hitting back in this particular
way. I think rather than trying to see it in a therapeutic way and trying to look at international
relations precisely in that way, it’s far far more helpful to look at these things in a moral
context, and to ask was this behaviour ethically justified, and if it’s nor ethically justified, what
reaction, including a punitive reaction, is morally warranted?

Sally Satel: You know, Frank, I certainly agree with you that data will not resolve everything,
but there may be a dimension to it to say that there may be points along the trajectory where
there is more receptivity to the facts. I was just thinking of that lady who was talking about her
driving course, for example: there may just be a critical mass now of people who are realising
that a lot of these programmes just aren’t working and secondly, when they cost money, that
starts to register with people, because it’s money that is wasted and diverted, if you can show
them that it’s diverted from resources that will palpably benefit them, I think it can roll into a

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kind of antagonism that maybe will finally, in addition to more arguments, complement them
as well and maybe help defeat some of this trend.

Frank Furedi: I agree with that, I think there is more than one way of skinning a cat. But take
an area that’s close to my heart, because it’s one of those areas where people are scared to
speak out – sex education. I think people think sex education is a good thing because parents
are too scared to talk to their children about sex. There’s a lot of empirical evidence that it
doesn’t work – it simply does not work, the evidence is overwhelming on that score, but it
doesn’t mean to say that sex educators stop doing it or stop commissioning new research, it
still continues.

So one way of taking up sex education and the way it’s thought of at the moment is by giving
the empirical evidence which is very important, but another way which I’m probably more
suited to do because I’m innumerate, is actually to raise the fundamental assumption behind it
– what is it that sex educators say more than anything? It’s the same thing that the Blair
government hates more than anything, the social exclusion unit hatres more than anything,
it’s what they call peer pressure. Now just think about the words ‘peer pressure’ for a second.
The minute you say peer pressure in certain circumstances, in certain meetings, it’s ‘oh peer
pressure, it’s disgusting’ or whatever. Now what is peer pressure? It’s basically human beings
who know each other, putting pressure on each other.

I call it informal relationships, when I’m with my mates I’m under a lot of peer pressure from
them, they tell me what’s good and what’s bad. Sometimes they intimidate me because when
I say something silly, they spot it straight away and put a lot of pressure on me. Children live
in a world of peer pressure. You are going to have to make a choice – are you going to
believe in the creative potential of peer pressure top turn us into human beings, or are you
going to depend on the sex educators, who can barely spell the word sex, who are going to
come down and educate young people about their sexuality – who are you going to trust?

That’s basically what this whole discussion is about – people who know each other are going
to come up with a better answer than people who give them these professional solutions, and
I think the way you can demonstrate the silly character of sex education is to demonstrate
how it estranges the people who are being targeted by the educators from their own
relationships with other people.

The answer they will give me, one final point, this has been directed at me by sex educators,
is why don’t we formalise peer pressure? This is the answer they’re coming up with now – we
know that informal networks are really important, well let’s formalise it and send out young
men into special mentoring classes where they learn about the fact that sex is really boring,
you’re not really interested in it, and all the rest of that, so they can then come back and put
the right kind of pressure on their peers, that’s basically the kind of intervention that we opt
for.

That’s what we’re seeing here all the time, on every issue, because it’s the same on every
single issue, you have a choice to make. Do you trust other human beings, or do you trust the
professional educators or the professional counsellors or whatever, to put things right? That’s
the choice you’re confronted with time and time again, and I think debating these issues and
confronting these issues in that kind of upfront way is likely to work along with Sally’s
empirical evidence having quite a nice impact.

Adam Curtis: The question no-one really has asked is, is this for the long term? Have we
changed form a society of non-emotion to being a society ruled by emotion, or is this just a
temporary blip? Not withstanding terrorist attacks, it is a period of great prosperity, it’s a
moment of ease in society, and whether this is just a moment of hedonistic indulgence in
feeling, at the same time that a ruling class has run out of ideas.

One of the things I wanted to pick up on, the strategy of how you get out of this, the problem
with feelings, and someone earlier on talked about the history teacher of their child saying
‘Can you imagine how the Romans felt?’, well your only point of reference in that is yourself,
so in a sense, you see the Romans as yourself, you become completely trapped by yourself,

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there’s no evidence from history as to what the Romans felt like, it’s you, so in a sense, it
becomes a very very static world.

Really what I wanted to ask is whether in fact it’s a political idea, to take us out of ourselves,
that we’re lacking, that we’re trapped within feelings at a moment of indulgence and what
we’re waiting for is a series of stories about where we can go to which will take us out of
ourselves, and that’s the next stage and this may be just a temporary moment

Audience Member 6: On the last point about a ruling elite that has run out of ideas. It seems
that one of the ways in which this therapeutised culture manifests itself is as an attempt by the
political elites to connect with people in a very therapeutised way, whether that be in terms of
the excluded youth who are connected to through trying to boost their sense of self-esteem,
or trying to make us all feel reassured through the war on terror, this idea seems quite
important. The problem is this is a very anti-political means of trying to connect with people.

It strikes me that any meaningful politics requires a distinction between what it politically and
publicly relevant and what is an issue of private life. This seems to be precisely what the
therapeutised sentiment wants to dismantle. Every aspect of life, whether it be our home lives
or interpersonal relationships or or very psyche and sense of self, all of these seem to be
open to increasing political intervention. Finally, there is something quite insatiable about it,
because as a means of connecting with people, you can never actually reassure people when
they’re feeling insecure; that seems to be the problem with the attempt to reassure us about
terrorism. You can’t connect with us by presenting an image of ourselves as utterly
diminished and vulnerable.

Adam Curtis: The question is are they reaching out to people because they’ve found a new
way of manipulating them to go somewhere else, or is it because they’ve run out of ideas?
Like New Labour is going around the country asking people what should be in the manifesto.
Is that because they don’t know?

Audience Member 7: I just want to follow on from the point that was made in the back here
because Frank’s book looks at the erosion of the private/public distinction and the way in
which people’s internal emotional lives are becoming much more widely policed. I do think the
way to challenge a lot of these developments and the rise of emotionalism is to insist on that
separation between public and private because it does seem that if you’re discussing the way
in which you should understand that separation is that peoples’ private lives are there for the
realm of emotion and the public discourse should be in relation to a rational assessment of
how a policy should be conducted. And if we have that as a rough guide to what should be
happening in society then I don’t think we’re going to go too far wrong in coming up with how
to challenge any attempts to either emotionalised public life or, on the other hand, undermine
rational discourse in public discussion.

Audience Member 8 (Dolan Cummings): I’m not that convinced by this idea that we’ve now
moved into an age of emotion as opposed to reason, because one of the more irritating things
about therapy culture is that it is so reasonable. And it’s not just that, as Frank said, the
culture is hostile to strong passions and so on, but also that it’s pseudo-scientific. But the
emphasis there is on the scientific – that, psychiatry obviously is a real science, but the idea is
more generally that you try to explain things in rational terms and understand human
behaviour and so on.

Reason is a very good and important thing, but ultimately is a tool we use for our own ends
and it seems to me that part of what therapy culture is doing is turning reasonableness into an
end in itself. In that sense, you can’t simply argue against it in rational terms, because it’s
about what we want, the way we want to live, and that means asserting things that aren’t
necessarily explicable in terms of science or reason and asserting them against what seems
to be reasonable simply because it fits in to some kind of scientific jargon.

Audience Member 9: Implicit in the spread of the therapy culture is the assumption that
therapy is necessarily a good thing. And something that hasn’t really come up today is the
harm that therapy can do, the trauma that it can generate and the spread of therapy culture

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makes it necessary for us to address this question. Virginia, in her article in The Times today,
spoke of her own negative experiences and I’ll just quote what she said: ‘In today’s money, I
have wasted more than £54000 on therapy. Now, like an ex-Moonie, I feel released from a
damaging cult.’ I think that this comment is typical of what a lot of people would say who have
the same kind of negative experience in therapy. Now, Mike for example, he spoke of the
pervasiveness of a culture which previously was restricted to a small section of the
community, i.e. those who had psycho-analysis or psycho-therapy, but now many, many more
people are having this. I just wanted to point out how important it is, because the therapy
profession themselves have always been very unwilling to acknowledge, much less examine
this question and it’s up to the rest of us to ensure and insist it is done.

Audience Member 10: I just wanted to return very briefly to this idea of community. Frank
was mentioning community in opposition to Africa where there are stable communities that
we’re in a sort of atomised society, and Stuart was talking about community in the context of
child safety. In a conversation that’s dispelled so many myths that we’re given about
contemporary society, nobody has seemed to dispelled the idea that we’re atomised. This is a
thing we’re constantly told – that we’re fragmented and atomised and it’s almost taken as an a
priori of our discussion of why we’ve been vulnerable to sort of therapeutic strategies, that we
are in fact atomised.

Two things: one, Frank do you in fact believe that we are atomised, really, in a way that we
weren’t in a previous generation. Secondly, on the relationship of atomisation and
vulnerability to therapy strategies, if you take certain communities in the states that are highly
tight communities, they still practise or are prey to these therapy strategies. How do you
respond to the fact that clearly even strong communities wholeheartedly take on these
strategies.

Audience Member 11: The government has recently got quite worried about the fact that
there is a low rehabilitation rate for people who have suffered serious personal injury. In other
words, a surprisingly low number of people are able to get back into work. It seems to me one
of the reason for this is that we are much more inclined in this society to buy in to the nature
of the vulnerable person. So doctors are much more inclined to certify that someone will
never work again, lawyers are more inclined to make those arguments and judges are much
more inclined to buy them. And this is one of the reasons that compensation payments have
really been escalating in recent years.

Now, what’s interesting about this is the therapeutic way that the government is going to
respond to this problem because instead of allowing people to have once and for all
compensation payments it’s suggested they should have structured payments so they can
only get so much for a period. That, in some ways, so that getting your compensation will be
like getting your Job Seeker’s Allowance. You’re going to have to satisfy certain people every
so often that you’re still ill. This is gonna make the problem worse because people are going
to have the continuing incentice to be ill.

Audience Member 12:: I have a problem with this emotion vs. reason of what therapy culture
is as well. I think one of the main weaknesses of therapy culture is that it doesn’t feel right – it
can’t feel right. What it does, essentially, is try to give people satisfaction outside the struggles
of life, outside of friends, pain, struggles – all those kinds of things, to enable them to be
satisfied as a kind of individual, which is why people in therapy often go back to childhood or
even the womb as that kind of state when they were sort of completed and satisfied before
the world and other people messed it up. I think it stunts the questions of everyday existence,
of how should we live, how should we behave and it drags all issues of human achievement
of art, science down to a really base level. So I think when it comes to fighting therapy culture,
feeling is very much on our side.

Audience Member 13: Two things that struck me from Adam and Michael was the sense of
‘How do we get out of this?’. Adam saying is there a political idea that’s gonna come along
and reveal that we’ve just been waiting for something else to happen? I don’t think so really.
Michael sort of looking the return of tradition or at that’s what it seems to me. From my point
of view, you can’t replay the past to find a way out of this. In a sense that allows you to look at

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things a bit differently. You might want to use the unions to try and find a voice for your
antagonisms in the work place, but they don’t express the things they used to, they just try
and claim you’re a victim of something. You might try and look to old institutions like the
church, but you know what they’re falling apart at the seams around the same kind of things
we’ve been talking about.

So, the point then is how can you recreate an informal network which can allow you to
demand some way out of this? In one sense, is ask and demand more of your colleagues and
then management strategies put forward and so on and so forth, you’ll create an opening
where you a debate can take place, where you can challenge some of the aspects of
therapeutic interventions being used to try and behaviour manage all of us and in so doing,
hopefully creates space where you can express that kind of thing.

Michael Gove: Two things struck me. One is the point about the pseudo-scientific nature of a
lot of the claims made by advocates of therapy culture. I think it is particularly dangerous and
it happens in a variety of spheres now. People apply lessons that have been learnt in a
particular sphere, which is quite tightly regulated and where empirical scientific method is
used and then they project the ideas that work genuinely well in the laboratory or within the
consulting room and try to use those ideas to explain essentially how different arts of the
world work.

It’s often inappropriate, but there’s a seductive authority which is lent to those grand theories
by the fact that they have been developed in academic terms. One of the things, again, I will
say, is that it doesn’t just apply to therapy culture. There are a number of ways in which the
behaviour of human beings and societies is essentially explained by recourse to grand
theories, which fit in particular specific circumstances, sometimes economic, sometimes
political theories, but they don’t take account of the multiplicity and perversity, as it were, of
human beings.

The other thing I would say is about ‘are we more atomised?’ Yes, we are. I think that,
following on from what the gentleman over there said about not wanting to go back to the
past, of course you can’t clear up spilt milk, but it’s undeniably true that we are more
atomised. Individuals are more likely to die further away from their place of birth, more likely
to divorce, less likely to nurture the children that they were brought up, the more likely to
change employment, to be starved of some of the factors tat gave them a collective identity in
the past. As you can probably sense, I regret some of those things, but I also acknowledge
that the are the consequence of other factors, which have been genuinely progressive.

Claire Fox: OK, thanks Michael. Sally.

Sally Satel: Earlier today somebody asked a disarmingly simple question, ‘what is the goal of
therapy?’ and I’m just answering as a psychiatrist now. I think the goal of dynamic psycho-
therapy is to show patients how they sabotage themselves, and to do that in a very practical
way, usually relying on cognitive behavioural techniques and usually in a short time limited
fashion. But that said, coming from a clinical perspective, as therapists, we have an
imperative not to make patients worse, and then in parallel to that, as purveyors and
perpetrators sometimes of social interventions for social problems, we also have that
responsibility not to make people worse. Thanks.

Claire Fox: Thank you very much. Adam.

Adam Curtis: I just wanted to say two brief things in response to the person over there. If it
goes on like this, you’re going to get different groups beginning to argue about what’s a good
feeling and what’s a bad feeling and I mean you’ve just started and then they’ll be given grand
names and then we’ll realise we’ve got back to old moral virtues. Well, they’ll be called virtue -
they’ll be goodness and honesty and we will have gone backwards. On the other hand, if this
is the end of a political age and this is just a nihilistic moment where we all indulge in feelings
and we don’t really know what we’re doing, a new idea will come along and it will take us out
of ourselves, which is what I sense – people call it atomised – is what we’re awaiting for.

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Claire Fox: OK, thanks. Frank.

Frank Furedi: I really enjoyed today in a really selfish way. I think I’ve learnt a lot and I
certainly wouldn’t write my book again in the same way because of the arguments I’ve heard.
You’ve kind of forced me to think about issues. I’m really jealous of Sally cause she hasn’t
finished her book yet. She can actually benefit a lot more from this than I can.

One simple point just to kind of end the day with some ideas that we haven’t really discussed.
Are we more atomised? That’s an issue that’s raised time and time again. I wouldn’t disagree
with the point that Michael just made earlier on. In one sense, we are more atomised, but in a
sense we’re not. I think as a sociologist I’ve come to be very suspicious of the before and
after depiction of reality. Whereas we in the old days had a good old day, now we have a
horrible time, or it used to be so terrible in the past, it’s so good today.

I don’t think reality is working like that and certainly, when it comes to atomisation, I think that
the experience of atomisation is soething human beings have lived with for a long, long, long
time – something that therapy culture doesn’t really understand. You see, if you think of your
parents, grandparents and their parents’ generations, it wasn’t really the case that because of
strong communities and networks, peoples’ personal lives were terrific, that all there problems
were sorted out because they got all this support. 50. 60, 100 years ago, you still had to work
very, very hard to make a good friend. Good friends did not drop out of heaven. You still lhad
to work very, very hard to have close, intimate relationships. Lovers did not drop out of
heaven. You had to work very, very hard to get that kind of very rare experience of passion.

In other words, you had to work hard to cultivate a close, strong, supportive network around
you. That didn’t just happen like that. It wasn’t the case that you woke up one morning and
people were crawling all over you to support you. That notion of the past did not exist. I think,
in that sense, we’re confronted with the same problem today. We’re not gonna get lovers by
going down to Tescos and just by buying one. We don’t get friends by just wanting one. We
have to go out and cultivate close friendships. Really rewarding friendships need to be
cultivated as do our husbands, wives or partners. We need to cultivate all these support
networks for us. And I think what therapy culture does is it makes that very difficult.

I think it distracts us from the task we all have to undertake of making friends, finding lovers,
finding support, creating an informal network around us – things we need in order to be strong
as individuals. To be a strong individual you need to have cultivated this relation of
dependence and that’s no more easy or difficult than it was for my mum or her mum or
anybody else. That’s important to firstly realise. And the reason why it’s important is that we
need future-oriented solutions and part of a future-oriented response to the things we’re
discussing is that we do undertake these particular tasks. Instead of saying ‘It’s impossible, I
cannot do that, I’m lonely and isolated, please help me, call the helpline’, the answer lies
within our hands as potentially autonomous individuals.

Instead of dismissing that possibility as something you could do in the past but no longer
today, we should look at the creative potential we all possess to find answers to the historic
problems of our time.

Claire Fox: Just a couple of points to finish the day and a few people I’d like to mention.
I think, from the point of view of the ‘what’s the strategy’ and to locate the Institute of Ideas in
this, quite a few people made the point, latterly, that therapy actually has been very
damaging. During the rest of the day other people were concerned that we didn’t throw all
therapists into the same camp and so on. But I do think there are times when it’s quite
appropriate to, if therapy has been damaging people, to make a fuss about it and to say it
and to go out there and say that actually people have their lives destroyed by inappropriate
third party intervention and I don’t think we should be frightened about saying it even though
that wasn’t the point of this conference.

The point of this conference, and actually what I’m very keen that the Institute of Ideas is
associated with, is not allowing therapeutic culture to go unchallenged or unscrutinised. That
there has to be an interrogation of it and so I hope that, as a continuation of the debates that

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have started today and that obviously have been brought together largely through Frank’s
work in the book, that ever time you hear anti-bullying initiatives or work/life balance or
workplace stress or war trauma or PTSD, at least you’ll think ‘Ey up, there might be another
side to this argument’. This does not have to be what is given.

Maybe it’s just possible this is a therapeutic intervention, that actually this is not something
which we all have to nod and shake our hands at. I think it’s incredibly important that the
fragile personality we are being sold as the vision of ourselves and as the future of humanity
is a very degraded and depressive one and its certainly not one which we at the Institute of
Ideas are particularly excited about. We want to develop a more positive view of humanity
cause we think we’ve got a lot more about ourselves.

So, on that note, if you find that in any way appealing, then you should join the Institute of
Ideas of course and you can still do so. I of course want to thank a number of people.
Particularly Geoff Kidder and the team of people who have worked behind the scenes in
relation to this conference and have made sure it has run smoothly. They are the people who
aren’t actually even in the room when I’m thanking them cause they are still being busy.

I want to thank of course Routledge. Karen, Digby, Aine, who’ve been involved in the
promotion of the book, been here today and so on and have helped put this conference
together. And of course Hilly Janes and Body&Soul. I just wanna end with a quote from
Body&Soul really. It says: ‘Therapy on the couch. Friends or phoneys? Which side are you on
in the battle of the minds?’ Well, whichever side you’re on, thank you for coming in and joining
in the battle. Whether you’re going to join Frank’s culture war or not, thank you very much for
being here. Thanks to our sponsors and now we’re going to go to the pub to carry on the
battle!

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