Therapist

By Ellen Plasil

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312799128
• ISBN13: 9780312799120
• Release Date: January 1985
• Publisher: St Martins Pr
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A courageous journey

This was an important book in my regrouping after harmful therapy. It illuminates the dangers of the paternalistic model which the psychotherapists call healing. Power corrupts.

The tragic fruits of rationalist ideology

Plasil's account of how her therapist, Dr. Lonnie Leonard, took advantage of her emotionally fragile state to turn her into his own private sexual plaything is not for the squeamish.  But the book is important nonetheless for the light it sheds on what can happen when individuals turn away from traditional sources of social support like religion and instead try to follow some sort of rationalist ideology.  Dr. Leonard had no trouble passing himself off as an important follower of Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy.  Allan Blumenthal, the leading Objectivist psychotherapist of the time, described Leonard as "the only psychiatrist I would recommend."  Plasil herself was an Objectivist--as were all her friends and acquaintances.  She would learn from brutal experience what happens when all one's friends are true-believing ideologues. Normal people--that is, people who are not adherents of some rationalist ideology--look for emotional support in the social and moral bonds of traditional social groups, such as the family or church.  But when these social and moral bonds are destroyed through rationalist criticism, human beings are left without any support whatsoever.  This is what happened to Plasil.  At the time of her therapy with Dr. Leonard, all her friends and acquaintances were Objectivists.  They were, as Plasil herself put it, her "entire support system."  If they abandoned her, she would have nobody.  So what happened when Plasil finally stood up to her therapist and accused him of shamelessly exploiting her?  Did her Objectivist friends stand by her and give her the support she needed?  No, of course not.  In keeping with the heartless rationalism which is at the center of Rand's ideological philosophy, Plasil's Objectivist all sided with Dr. Leonard.   "I received innumerable phone calls, from men and women alike," she later recalled, "who condemned me for terminating my own therapy and for the reason they had learned was behind my doing so.  In one call, I was accused of 'destroying the closest thing Man has ever had to a god.'  In another, I was threatened with retaliation for causing the closing of Dr. Leonard's practice." Here we have an eloquent example of the subversive effects of rationalist ideology.  Rand's morality of "enlightened selfishness" and excessive individualism had, like a corrosive acid, eaten away the tradition-based social bonds that are suppose to hold a community of friends and acquaintances together.  In the absence of these social bonds, the individual is forced to rely entirely on his own private judgment in dealing with the immense complexities of social reality.  Because this is not in fact possible, what happens instead is that the individual attaches himself to any charismatic figure who is willing to fill the void left by the absence of all those uncritically accepted traditions that give people the sense of community they need. Once this is understood, we can begin to understand why all of Plasil's Objectivi