3/20/2021 The Act of Living by Frank Tallis review: Old and new solutions to the problems of life

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Contemporary philosophy | Book Review

Ordinary human unhappiness

Old and new solutions to the problems of life

By Antonio Melechi

March 5, 2021 Read this issue

A doctor performs autogenic training | © Sueddeutsche Zeitung Photo/Alamy

IN THIS REVIEW

THE ACT OF LIVING

What the great psychologists can teach us about surviving discontent in an age of anxiety
352pp. Little, Brown. £18.99.

Frank Tallis

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T
he history of self-improvement is filled with hucksters, gurus and a scattered trail of promissory

notes for unlimited success, wellbeing and empowerment. Its beginnings were, however,
altogether more modest. In the latter part of the nineteenth century, self-help functioned as a

respectable and secular curriculum for working-class autodidacts. Replete with tales of real-life Horatio
Alger characters rising from adversity and destitution, the self-help ethos regarded poverty as a moral
rather than economic issue: hard work, good habits, perseverance and self- belief were the only resources

required to achieve success.

As the self-help industry revised its backbone and bootstraps syllabus, embracing New Thought and
hypnosis, appeals to the power of the subconscious as an agent of personal change became commonplace.
Émile Coué’s bestselling guide Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion (1922), for example, gave life

to the idea that a daily dose of self-talk (“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better” was Coué’s
famous affirmation) could coax the subconscious mind into overcoming illness and sundry obstacles to

success. Over the following decades, self-help continued to extend its psychological register. Borrowing
from behaviourism, cognitive psycholo y and Eastern philosophy, it nevertheless remained firmly tethered
to a can-do individualism that was electively oblivious to questions of communal betterment and collective
change.

In The Act of Living, Tallis laments that self-help and popular psycholo y have not turned to
psychotherapy’s main schools and thinkers for life lessons. “Apart from Freud and psychoanalysis, the
intellectual legacy of psychotherapy remains relatively inaccessible … encountered almost exclusively in
consulting rooms and academia.” And when not being ignored, “the key ideas of significant therapists are

either misrepresented or simplified”. For Tallis, this is a missed opportunity, for as well as having proved
their efficacy as a treatment for depression, anxiety and stress, psychotherapeutic ideas (whether derived
from classical psychoanalysis, cognitive behavioural therapy or other variants of the talking cure) are
uniquely placed to minister to difficulties and frustrations of modern life. “For almost a hundred years,
psychotherapists have been developing and refining models of the human mind. They have endeavoured to

alleviate distress and they have offered help to those who want to make better life choices.”

There are some interesting questions to be asked about why psychoanalysis pivoted from a symptom-curing
therapy into a treatment for “ordinary human unhappiness”, and how cognitive behavioural therapies have
steered the health marketplace’s demands for empirically supported therapies with clear “outcome

indicators”. But Tallis, a clinical psychologist and expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder, has a different
kind of audit in mind. Waving a flag for “judicious eclecticism”, he bypasses the turf wars and conceptual
disputes that have enlivened most forms of twentiethcentury psychotherapy, and instead looks to find a
vein of deep wisdom in its variegated bedrock.

Eclecticism, at both a technical and theoretical level, has proved a thorny subject for psychotherapists. Back
in the late 1950s, Hans Eysenck, the doyen of British psycholo y (today best remembered for his
controversial views on the genetic basis of IQ, and his theory of the “cancer-prone personality”)

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pronounced against the fusion of cognitive and behavioural approaches, arguing that any merger of
therapies with different models of patholo y was methodologically flawed. Tallis, by contrast, finds a surfeit
of transferable knowledge across the major camps. In Carl Jung’s analytical psycholo y and Viktor Frankl’s
existential psycholo y, he sees potential antidotes to the solipsism and rootlessness that is cyberspace’s

Faustian payback. Carl Rogers’s humanistic psycholo y and Erich Fromm’s “being mode” yield clues for
“fully inhabiting the present moment, trusting one’s feelings and judgements, taking responsibility … and
viewing oneself and others with unconditional positivity”. Fritz Perls’s Gestalt therapy suggests a way of
reframing our experience of helpless situations. And across the so-called “third wave” of CBT therapies
Tallis sees practical methods of assuaging negative thoughts and emotions.

Tallis’s engaging and expansive tour of our modern-day therapeutic landscape is dotted with telling
vignettes and thumbnail cameos. Inevitably, the journey proves more interesting than the tag-line
destination. Too often, the translation of therapeutic expertise into survival tips for the “problems of life”
(the phrase belongs to anti-psychiatry, but has become acceptable psychological shorthand for the stresses

behind the symptoms of mental illness) carries the hollow ring of twice-told truism. “Arriving at an optimal
solution requires insight”, Tallis advises, before recommending that we “descend into the unconscious …
and discover how the past is influencing us.” “A coherent sense of self gives us the strength to face up to
reality.” “Life is fulfilling when the true self can satisfy its basic and complex needs.”

To build a perennial philosophy or practical psycholo y from psychotherapeutic lore is an ambitious

undertaking, and the dangers of disciplinary upselling come into sharp focus when Tallis suggests that
findings from the consulting room might also form part of the school curriculum. This brave new world of
psychological literacy – in which the Year 6 whiteboard might, presumably, be enlisted to signal the dangers
of false identities, while celebrating the power of meaningful personal stories – is certainly likely to provoke

critics of therapeutic overreach. In fact, even those professionally open to the retooling of clinical acumen
may hesitate, wondering whether self-work really ought to be rolled out to the classroom.

The dangers attending the “triumph of the therapeutic” and the rise of “psychological man” have been
debated since the mid-1960s, when the American sociologist Philip Rieff warned how “self- contemplative

manipulation” was undermining the old order of collective obligation. Following Rieff, a chorus of
commentators, from Christopher Lasch to Frank Furedi, have served up their own brickbats, suggesting
that the therapeutic turn has, among other things, served as a convenient smokescreen for the woes of
modern capitalism.

Tallis is not entirely deaf to these objections. There is partial truth, he concedes, to the claim that
psychotherapy has failed to engage with the social causes of distress. Yet, while recognizing that a more

equitable society would add to the sum of happiness, he ultimately fends away the question, noting that
“rich people get depressed too”. Such a glancing acknowledgement of the ways in which poverty, inequality
and social exclusion affect psychological wellbeing is rebutted by a large corpus of social psychiatry and

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longitudinal health studies that have plotted the steep socio-economic gradient along which depression and
anxiety are distributed.

The problems of life have multiple passports: they belong to our minds, bodies and the worlds we live in.
The untangling of this complex provenance takes us far beyond the ambit of self-help or any version of
psychotherapy. As Kathryn Schulz writes in a recent essay, “What none of us know is who we would be – or
could be – if our context altered in crucial ways at critical times”. To ignore our social environment, to give
priority to the fortifying powers of an integrated self or competent inner narrator, ignores a form of

sel ood that is socially contingent.

The great Russian psychologist Alexander Luria was forcefully reminded of this back in the 1930s, when his
field work took him to the remote farming communities of Uzbekistan and Kyr yzstan. On asking one
illiterate peasant to describe himself, Luria was told: “How can I talk about my character. Ask others; they
can tell you about me. I myself can’t say anything”. Behind this disarming reply, there is an enduring truth
that self-help and pop psycholo y rarely concede: the self is a social artefact whose currency has, like it or
not, been professionally and commercially inflated. Of course, psychotherapy, philosophy and positive
psycholo y all have a place in helping us to understand and endure anxiety and despair, but the mirrors
that we hold to our troubled selves can easily turn into blindfolds.

Antonio Melechi is a research fellow in the Deparment of Sociolo y at the University of York. He is the
author of Fugitive Minds, 2003, and Servants of the Supernatural, 2008

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