Saturday, October 29, 2011

Rise of therapism

I just learned a new word. It is therapism, as defined here with example usage:
therapism n. a culture or ideal of mental therapy, empathy, or sharing of feelings, especially as a cure.

Therapism is an overvaulation of feeling. In a real sense, it is a tyranny of feelings where women have come to believe that what realy counts in their life is their “psychology.”…We might say that therapism promotes a psychological hypochondria with women as the major seekers of emotional health. [1993]

Some are put off by the New Age rhetoric of crystals, spiritualism, and therapism. [1995]

Once we saw ourselves as serving God, then science, then the state: now we turn inwards and serve ourselves, worship our individuality. This is what I mean by Therapism. It is a religion which began a hundred years ago in the consulting rooms of psychotherapists, and which now, in its wider social and political context, sweeps all before it. [1997]

The first step that women took in their emancipation was to adopt traditional male roles: to insist on their right to wear trousers, not to placate, not to smile, not to be decorative. The first step men have taken in their self-defense is to adopt the language of Therapism: a profoundly female notion this-that all things can be cured by talk. [1998]

“Therapism,” they write, is a doctrine that “valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings.” [2005]
This is a disease that has infected our society. I did not know that there is a word for it. It is not in any regular dictionary yet, but it ought to be.

A distressingly large number of people seem to believe in therapism like a religion.
This is especially true of family court personnel. They rely on psychotherapists who overvalue feelings and talk therapy, to the detriment of much more important issues.

Therapism. I am against it. It undermines what made America great.

1 comment:

Dulantha said...

All of these things are happening as a result of western feminism. It is not accepting the real nature of sexuality. Feminism teaches women to give up their natural femininity and fight against masculine men and natural male sex drive. Feminists do not accept the natural order of sexuality. They do not like sexual attraction between men and women. That is why they want to eliminate the gender specifications. They have a heterosexual poisoned mind set too. Finally these things are for fighting against heterosexuality.