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Masson notes that people who have heard his ideas have asked with what he would replace psychotherapy. "In reply I would note that, as one feminist friend put it, nobody thinks of asking: What would you replace misogyny with? If something is bad, or flawed, or dangerous, it is enough if we expose it for what it is." This analogy does not work. If ill-treatment of women disappeared, the world would be a happier place; if psychotherapy in all its guises suddenly vanished, some severely deranged and dangerous folks would be walking about the streets. That would be O.K. with Masson, who several times states his opinion that mental institutions should be emptied and that "patients should not be incarcerated." In fact, Masson calls schizophrenia a "specious medical disease" and announces that "there is no such medical entity as mental illness."
Ultimately, Against Therapy amounts to an impassioned diatribe against the very idea of society. Masson does not make this animus particularly clear, but it surfaces occasionally, particularly in his concluding chapter: "Historically therapists have never been in the forefront of the struggle for social change. It is not in the interest of the profession to create conditions that would lead to the dissolution of psychotherapy." This is dime-store utopianism: people would not be unhappy anymore if the world were nicer. And Masson bristles at the notion of control: "Once we give anybody the right to decide who or what is normal and abnormal we have abdicated a fundamental intellectual responsibility (to repudiate the very idea of making such distinctions) and we should not be surprised when it is 'misused.' " But people who gather to live in groups have always made distinctions, rules that impinged on their freedom: this is acceptable; that is taboo. Existing together without a code of conduct seems unimaginable. Deciding what is normal behavior is an act everyone performs all the time. Masson would like to see the day when such judgments have gone the way of the dunking stool and the rack. But the course he would follow means not just the abolition of psychotherapy but of thinking as well.