Revisiting "Triumph of the Therapeutic" after Half a Century (Part 1 of 4)

Philip Rieff's dazzling 1966 classic precisely analyzed the cultural catastrophe that was about to explode at the exact moment he was writing: the loss of faith, of therapies of committment, of communion with higher purposes of community and religion...in favor of the therapeutic self, the psychological man, the isolated (Freudian) ego void of higher moral purpose moderating the irreconcilable war between instinct and culture. Not a culture warrior, he pledges allegiance to no traditional code. As a result, he sees with stark clarity and heightened horror the nihilistic abyss into which the therapeutic self is cast. He emulates his mentor Freud in his cold sobriety, harsh realism, and freedom from illusion. To his credit he disparages the post-Freudians (Jung, Reich, Lawrence) who relinquished the clinical objectivity of the Founder in favor of private, fantasized "religions" of their own imagining. Clearly a deep, sensitive soul, yearning for a faith that eludes him, he mourns the loss of purpose. Like his contemporary Ernest Becker (Denial of Death, he is a secular Jew whose soul is haunted by a longing for an enchanted, beautiful, moral universe that has been lost. His grief is poignant and profound. With Becker he is a heroic soul undergoing the Dark Night of a cosmos without hope or meaning. His is the stoic path of realism, sobriety, and courage in the steady, untiring mediation of id and superego in order to diminish misery and enhance a small domain of freedom without illusion about complete salvation. Possibly due to his Jewish heritage, he has about him a moral splendor even as he is agonizingly bereft of belief. Reading him, the reader wonders: "Okay, faith is a gift from above. But why is such a beautiful spirit denied this gift?"

Writing in 1966, Rieff saw as absolute the contradition between the prior world of transcendence, purpose and enchantment and the new world of sober, scientific therapy and the unhinged, uprooted, isolated self. Reviewing the subsequent half century, three thoughts emerge:

1. Rieff had little sense of the Catholic Faith in its resiliencey, breath, inclusivity ("catholicity") and capacity to welcome whatever is True-Good-Beautiful in the emerging therapeutic. In my adult lifetime, I have observed the positive incorporation of the best of psychology into the Catholic synthesis and the emergence of what I will call "the therapeutic Catholic."

2. In his brutal rejection of the faux, delusional pieties of Jung-Reich-Lawrence he anticipated the unhappy trajectory of liberal Catholicism into what I will call the "Catholic Therapeutic" which is entirely therapeutic and not at all Catholic.

3. Now, fifty years later, we can see the entire form of the "therapeutic faith" that seeks to replace Christian tradition.

The following three blog essays will consider these three throughts, with much gratitude to Philip Rieff.