Therapy's Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and the Exploitation of Today's Walking Worried

by Ethan Watters and Richard Ofshe

Book Overview

Two acclaimed authors deliver an attack on talk therapy, from its Freudian underpinnings to contemporary practice, and expose the failure of this "pseudoscience" that still holds enormous sway over... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684835843
• ISBN13: 9780684835846
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 287 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Useful but diffuse

After three years of therapy and several years of reflection I achieved an insight: I'd been sold a theory that I didn't subscribe to. Namely, that all my present problems were caused by incidents in my distant past that I'd forgotten. Once I'd remembered these incidents, my present problems would go away. I was also angry that my therapist seemed indifferent to serious problems I was facing in the present. I achieved another insight: that you can use your conscious mind to seek a solution to your problems. I enjoyed this book, because it supported these conclusions, and gave a lot of historical background. It is also good on the way people follow the herd and justify decisions after they've made them, the way people invent a self-narrative that will meet with their peers' approval. The only flaw is a serious lack of copy editing. Sentences ramble without making a point, modifiers dangle, apostrophes come and go and spelling is random. No doubt after another 20 years' work on my anal tendencies I will learn to live with the authors' bad grammar.

Brave and Brilliant

This book illustrates to all what many who have been involved in the, highly speculative and sometimes dangerous, psychotheraputic system have experienced. This is not a psychology book and never pretends to be (one author is a Professor of Social Psychology UCB and the other an independent journalist). It is a book about psychotheraputic methodology and its efficacy. Many who have been unfortunate enough to sit through sessions with one of the psuedo-scientists commonly known as tharapists, will immediately identify with what this book has to say.Here are my personal opinions which are completely supported by this book:1. If you are not mentally ill - then make a concerted effort solve your own problems with the help and support of family and friends. The solutions you find will be more appropriate to your own life situation than those any therapist can manufacture.2. If you ARE mentally-ill then seek out medical attention and stay on your medications as long as you need them.You wouldn't advise a diabetic to try to go off their meds and switch to talk-based therapy. Don't make people who require drug therapy feel guilty about ther reliance on medication - THEY ARE ILL!Our society needs to seriously revise the manner in which psychological discomfort and mental illness are dealt with. This book will provide readers with the necessary dose of skepticsm and food for thought that will be necessary if such a social revolution is to ever be undertaken.

Caused a sea change in my thinking about therapy.

This book is essential to anyone who currently is in therapy or who is thinking about entering therapy. The author will talk you out of it, and rightly so. For those of you who have already completed therapy (as I had when I read the book), be prepared to be very angry. You've been the victim of a hoax, and partially it is your (our) fault, for in order to enter and continue with therapy you have to subscribe to the presumptions of psychoanalysis and not question them. Once released from these assumptions (after you read "Therapy's Delusions") you will at least be thankful that you might never be fooled again. As Milton said, "Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new."

A challenging and important critique of psychotherapy

This book forced me to rethink many ideas about psychotherapy and even 20th Century culture. Calling for increased accountability for psychotherapists, the authors document how psychotherapeutic techniques have damaged mentally ill individuals. They also present the process of psychotherapy as one of manipulation and delusion - storytelling that deliberately encourages the confusion of fiction with fact. A critique focused on behalf of mentally ill and so-called "walking worried" individuals, Therapy's Delusions may prove difficult for functional people in crises (the walking wounded?) who need no reminder of the complexities of the human mind. Compelling, and challenging to many 20th Century assumptions, the book raises fascinating questions, for example whether it's a fool's game for humans to even attempt to understand themselves.