Folklore has it that August is the time when all the shrinks go on vacation, leaving behind heat, humidity and the miasma of anxiety surrounding their patients. What are these abandoned psyches supposed to do for a whole month? This summer offers them a new option. They might pick up a copy of Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's Against Therapy, turn to the preface and read the following: "This is a book about why I believe psychotherapy, of any kind, is wrong. Although I criticize many individual therapists and therapies, my main objective is to point out that the very idea of psychotherapy is wrong."
This is not the first time that Masson, a nonpracticing psychoanalyst, has published a book designed to drive mental-health professionals nuts. His The Assault on Truth (1984) attracted headlines and controversy with the charge that Sigmund Freud had fudged certain of his evidence and thereby left the whole foundation of psychoanalysis teetering. According to Masson, Freud had initially believed his female patients during the 1890s when they told him of being sexually abused, often by fathers or other relatives. But under strong pressure from a male colleague, and knowing how little his fellow Viennese cared to hear or to talk about incest, Freud later changed his mind: these women had not been molested or seduced; they had fantasized such experiences.
Masson harks back to this accusation fairly often in Against Therapy, but Freud is not specifically his target this time. Instead, the author is gunning for everyone who has ever had the gall to offer any sort of psychological treatment or aid to another person. His subtitle accurately indicates just how hyperventilating his argument is going to be: "Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing." Readers looking for nuance or subtlety should probably go elsewhere. But Masson raises some intriguing points, even if he insists on doing so at the top of his voice. Psychotherapy is a big and largely unchallenged business in the U.S.; many of its practitioners wield considerable influence over personal lives and public policy. Once in a while, it does no harm to listen to an alarmist hollering that some of those shrinks have no clothes.
Actually, Masson goes much further than this. "The therapeutic relationship," he writes, "always involves an imbalance of power. One person pays; the other receives. Vacations, time, duration of the sessions are all in the hands of one party. Only one person is thought to be an 'expert' in human relations and feelings. Only one person is thought to be in trouble." Well, one is tempted to say, yes indeed, that is the way it happens. Masson, however, is an absolutist; he is of the persuasion that if something is not perfect it is terrible. This point of view rarely works well in the real world, but there are instances in which it can be helpful. And the author's point that the possibility for mischief is inherent in psychological counseling seems inarguable.