Psychotherapy is an institution that has had an abundance of (usually self-interested) celebrants, but only a few serious detractors. Now its first abolitionist, Jeffrey Masson, argues that therapy is an edifice constructed in such a way that it endangers all who enter. In his new book, Against Therapy, he is a one-man wrecking crew of considerable energy and intelligence.
Maintaining such views in private was one thing; expressing them in the New York Times quite another. Venom rained upon Masson from throughout the psychoanalytic world; analyst friends who had cultivated him were suddenly afraid to be seen in his presence; he was relieved of his position at the archives. A prominent German analyst (and former friend) stood up during one of Masson’s talks and suggested having him committed: only a paranoid, he contended, could believe that incest was so prevalent. And Janet Malcolm wrote a series of gossipy New Yorker articles that focused on Masson’s personality and seemed not to notice the very serious questions he had raised.
I first got to know Jeffrey Masson when I recruited him to write an essay for Men Confronting Pornography, a forthcoming book in which men sympathetic to feminism address the thorny issue of pornography. Finding Masson a remarkably youthful 47, I grew to admire his spontaneous and alert mind and his willingness to pursue ideas wherever they might take him. I also found him to be a man of genuine humility.
TB: And if a client expresses anger or frustration toward the therapist, a lot of therapists will not treat it as legitimate, serious criticism of them. They may encourage the client to examine and explore the sources of their anger–the assumption being that it’s not just. And clients have an investment in taking very seriously the directives and observations of therapists.
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JM: I would argue that the fact that therapy helps some people does not mean the institution is, on balance, a good thing. It’s so difficult to have any kind of objective measurement of what goes on in therapy or to know what helps. The studies being done now to videotape therapy and measure the physiological responses of therapist and client strike me as absurd and impossible. And the people doing the investigation have a stake in the results. One can’t expect them to give a fair assessment.
Informed consent is largely nonexistent for clients. How many clients know that in anonymous surveys 10 percent of male therapists admit to having had some kind of sexual contact with women clients? The real figure is undoubtedly higher. How many people are really informed of the potential negative effects of psychiatric drugs or electroshock? Or, to place it on a more mundane level, how many people are informed that they may spend a great deal of money and not be helped? Or worse, find the experience so painful that they must end it?
What’s striking about all this is how much it sounds like confession without penance. One confesses a whole internal life with which one feels uncomfortable, and the therapist says it’s fine.
