Read an interesting short essay by Charles Krauthammer today. It’s from The Point of It All, a collection of columns he wrote for the media that was published shortly after his death in 2018 and edited with an introduction by his son. As politically conservative columnists go, I prefer Krauthammer to George Will; the former seems less florid and more matter of fact.
The essay, “The Twilight of Psychotherapy,” was first published in 1985. Before becoming a political columnist and pundit, Krauthammer had been a practicing psychiatrist. My blog yesterday mentioned Freud, who has fallen somewhat out of fashion in many circles but remains a touchstone in others. The basic point of this essay, prompted by a conference on the evolution of psychotherapy, is that the field was at risk of obsolescence academically and professionally. He notes the conference included representatives of schools including Freudian therapy, behavior therapy, existential therapy, and even one thinker who believes mental illness is a myth (that it really amounts to lying). One pithy line in the essay is that “if psychotherapy is really an art, it should be supported by the National Endowment [for the Arts], not by Blue Cross [i.e., medical insurance].”
From my worm’s-eye-view of psychiatry, practitioners now seem to favor cognitive behavioral therapy over traditional Freudian therapy. In a nutshell, CBT (not to be confused with CBD, haha) emphasizes present mental and behavioral problems over past traumas or disturbances. I think the controversy over repressed memory theory since the 1980s and the simple logistical difficulties for psychiatrists to prove what may have happened in the past makes CBT more popular.
The sense that a scientific–or at least academic–discipline is diluting into a mélange of sometimes mutually exclusive opinions can also seem true of literary analysis (the subject of the book this site promotes). My book quotes the French literary critic Jacques Derrida that “Babelization does not…wait for the multiplicity of languages.” I’m thinking of some graduate-study research I did on Henry James’ famous ghost story “The Turn of the Screw.” One critic said the ambiguity of the tale and the proliferation of theories about what is really happening in it call into question the entire enterprise of literary analysis as an academic discipline. And I have read that some smaller universities are doing away with English literature departments, apparently because they seem impractical or maybe too politically charged.
It is interesting that English literature and psychoanalysis came into existence as formal academic disciplines at about the same time, about the turn of the 20th century. When I was teaching college literature, I conceded to students that English teachers have a bit of an inferiority complex within universities because our field is relatively immature.