by Derek Neal
There is a meme on the internet that you probably know, the one that goes, “Men will do x instead of going to therapy.” Here are some examples I’ve just found on Twitter: “Men will memorize every spot on earth instead of going to therapy,” “men would rather work 100 hours a week instead of going to therapy,” and “men would literally go to Mars instead of going to therapy.” The meme can also be used ironically to call into question the effectiveness of therapy (“Men will literally solve their problems instead of going to therapy”), but its main use is to mock men for their hobbies, which are seen as coping mechanisms taking the place of therapy (“men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy”). The implicit assumption in this formula is that the best way for men to solve whatever existential problems they may have is to go to therapy. I don’t particularly like this meme, and I don’t think therapy is necessarily the best way for a man to solve his problems (although it may be in some cases), but what do I know? I’m setting myself up for this response: “men will write a 2,500-word essay about why you shouldn’t go to therapy instead of going to therapy.” Fair enough. I should specify that I don’t have an issue with therapy itself; instead, I have an issue with a phenomenon I find pervasive in contemporary American culture, which is the assumption that therapy is a sort of magic cure for any ills one may have.
If you need to be convinced of the cultural capital that therapy currently holds, just turn on any reality TV show. All the characters will mention how they go to therapy or how they want to go therapy. In the same way that certain men 10 or so years ago would proclaim themselves as feminists in order to become more attractive to a certain type of woman, now men will say that they’re going to therapy for the same reason. Going to therapy is a sign of maturity, of growth, of “healing”. We are all in a perpetual state of healing, a journey that has no end, or so I’m told. To cite one recent example, in season 6 of Love is Blind, a Netflix show in which people talk to each other without ever seeing each other, and then, in some cases, propose marriage to one another, a man named Clay repeatedly emphasizes to the woman he’s proposed to, named AD, that he’s gone to therapy and he’s continuing to go to therapy, and AD finds this attractive. He’s working on himself, and this shows him to be a mature and desirable partner. I found this shocking. I have never been to therapy, but if I do go one day, I certainly won’t go around publicizing this fact as part of my social identity. Of course, this is all the more reason why I need to go to therapy, isn’t it?
To avoid misinterpretation, it would be a good idea to differentiate real therapy from the watered-down version frequently encountered on social media and reality TV. Good therapy, I imagine, is all about looking at yourself honestly. Recognizing your faults, your errors, but also acknowledging your strengths and positive qualities. Seeing yourself as you are; knowing yourself. The kind of therapy I see “in the air,” so to speak, does not always take this form. Instead, people seem to wield therapeutic jargon as a source of power, allowing them to preserve their solipsistic worldview and avoid a confrontation with reality.
To return to Love is Blind, the characters frequently use psychoanalytic (or, in some cases, pop psychological) terminology like “narcissist” “gaslight” “validate” and “love language.” When a character does something that may be considered morally wrong, the character will frequently cover this up by saying that they were just expressing their feelings, and their feelings are “valid.” Any behavior can seemingly be excused by viewing actions as a manifestation of valid feelings, thus making the action valid.
In other instances, when a character expresses their point of view on something that differs from another person’s, they are seen to be “gaslighting” the other person, or manipulating them by presenting a knowingly false version of reality which leads the other person to question their own ability to interpret reality. Yet in some cases, two people may simply have different understandings of the same event. The prevalence of the term “gaslighting” and how its meaning has been corrupted by the public was recently written about in The New Yorker by Leslie Jamison.
Finally, when someone does something you don’t like, they are a narcissist. This is another instance of the subtitle to Jamison’s piece, which is “What happens when a niche clinical concept becomes a ubiquitous cultural diagnosis”. This terminology can then be used to cast other people as gaslighting narcissists who don’t validate one’s feelings, lending a veneer of scientific truth to what is effectively an infantile tantrum.
Further proof of the power of therapeutic jargon was recently displayed in the story on Andrew Huberman in New York Magazine. Huberman is a podcaster and self-help guru, but he’s also a tenured professor at Stanford with an eponymous lab in the Department of Neurobiology. Multiple people in the past few months have told me to listen to his podcast, much in the same way people told me to listen to Jordan Peterson’s podcast five or six years ago. In both cases, I’ve been unimpressed. I don’t need someone to tell me to make my bed or take a cold shower, thank you very much. According to the article, a large part of Huberman’s appeal is that he’s physically fit and highly intelligent while also being emotionally intelligent and open about being in therapy. This is an astute observation; like the reality TV characters I’ve mentioned, Huberman has identified that therapy is no longer a weakness but a positive attribute in the construction of a masculine public persona. His personal story (in therapy since high school) and the fact that he frequently invites guests who discuss psychology and mental health, combine to make Huberman himself, in the fashion of all gurus, the proof that his system works. He is a healthy, happy man, and you can be one too if you follow his advice. This is what makes the revelations in the New York Magazine article so damning; contrary to his podcast persona, the article presents a manipulative and controlling man, the strongest evidence being that he dated five women at the same time and convinced them all that they were in exclusive, monogamous relationships, likely leading to marriage and family. Eventually they discovered the truth, and when confronted, Huberman responded with various text messages such as: “I defaulted to self-safety. I hear your insights. I appreciate them,” or “I hear you are saying you are angry and hurt.” When criticized other times for not being available, he sent messages like “Your feelings matter” and “This sucks, but doesn’t deter my desire…to…establish clear lines of communication and trust.” In these communications, Huberman is “validating” his various girlfriends’ feelings using therapeutic language as a way to placate them and eventually, manipulate them. As noted by the author of the article, his “therapeutic language took on a sinister edge.” However, the article fails to ask the larger question, which is whether this is a feature or a bug of therapeutic language when used in everyday social interactions. Personally, if anyone ever spoke to me in this way, I’d ask them to translate their words into ordinary language, to see if they had anything meaningful to say or were just regurgitating memorized slogans.
At this point my aversion to the prevalence of therapeutic language and the exalted status of therapy in contemporary society is clear. However, my certainty on this matter was recently thrown into doubt when listening to a presentation by Paul Schrader, one of my favorite directors and the mind behind films like Taxi Driver and First Reformed. In discussing Taxi Driver, which tells the story of a lonely, isolated, and violent young man, played by Robert De Niro, Schrader outlines his life at the time of writing the script: “This came out of a period of…a dark period of wandering and being ungrounded, and, uh, I was sort of living in my car and I had a pain in my stomach. I went to the hospital, I had a bleeding ulcer at the age of 25…because I was just drinking and driving.” He then goes on to say how the image of a man in a taxicab came to him as a metaphor of isolation and loneliness, and how “I knew I had to write that story because I was becoming that young man, and the only way I could not become him was to establish his identity apart from mine—to write about him. So I did…I learned about that young man, and I learned not to be that young man by writing about him. So I walked into the whole screenwriting business as self-therapy.”
Learning that a director I respect considers his own films, his own art, to be a form of therapy, was rather surprising. Perhaps, I thought, I need to reconsider therapy. Perhaps I shouldn’t be so dismissive of it. After listening to this lecture, I began to see more examples of art explained as a certain type of therapy. Justin Smith-Ruiu, in describing his own writing process on Substack, wrote this: “This week, in particular, I failed miserably in my effort not to write. My acne went away years ago, but in other respects I am as oleaginous as ever, still squeezing out the oily build-up, no longer with tweezers, but with a keyboard. So although all I have to share here today are the traces of this week’s spontaneous emissions, little fragments I have had to write at various moments in the middle of my daily pursuits, just to get them out of my head, just to relieve the pressure of their build-up, even this brings me almost all the way, just like every week, to Substack’s e-mail word-limit” (emphasis mine). While Smith-Ruiu doesn’t explicitly mention therapy, he characterizes his writing in the same way that Schrader characterizes his screenwriting: as a form of cleansing, of healing, as a sort of exorcism. There is something inside oneself that one must get out, and the way to get it out is not to ignore it, not to repress it, but to bring it into the light so that it may be known, confronted, and extinguished. This may be an accurate description of talk therapy as well.
Thomas Bernhard’s novel Extinction may be seen in this way as well. Bernhard was notoriously critical of his native Austria, and in Extinction, a character seeks to destroy his family’s estate, Wolfsegg, by writing an encyclopedic account of it. Wolfsegg, it is evident, is a stand in for Austria, and Extinction is Bernhard’s way of bringing forth everything he despises about Austria in order to extinguish it. Murau, the main character, describes his project thus:
“The only thing I have fixed in my head is the title, Extinction, for the sole purpose of my account will be to extinguish what it describes, to extinguish everything that Wolfsegg means to me, everything that Wolfsegg is, everything, you understand, Gambetti, really and truly everything. When this account is written, everything that Wolfsegg now is must be extinguished. My work will be nothing other than an act of extinction, I told Gambetti. It will extinguish Wolfsegg utterly…We carry Wolfsegg around with us, wanting to extinguish it in order to rescue ourselves, to extinguish it by recording it and destroying it. Yet most of the time we haven’t the strength to perform this work of extinction. But maybe the moment has arrived (99)” (emphasis mine).
Like Schrader, Murau (or Bernhard) must articulate something in order to then destroy it, with the intention of saving oneself in the process. I am reminded as well of Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère, in which he describes the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks, his divorce from his wife, his diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and his yoga practice. The book begins with an epigraph from the Gospel of Thomas:
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
All of the works I have cited can be said to have a therapeutic function on their creators, and they can conceivably be portrayed as forms of therapy. One might think of the meme I mentioned at the beginning of this article and say, “Men will write a screenplay about a deranged taxi driver instead of going to therapy,” but one might also cite that other instance of the meme, “Men will literally solve their problems instead of going to therapy.” If writing a screenplay can achieve the same result as therapy seeks to achieve, as it did for Schrader, then it must be considered an effective alternative to therapy.
Just as there is good art and bad art, there is good therapy and bad therapy. A film like Taxi Driver may have the same relation to, say, Ghost Rider, as a professional and effective psychotherapist has to a therapist-coach on Tik Tok. In the same way that a run of the mill Netflix film tells us little about the human experience, the therapeutic language saturating contemporary culture flattens and distorts reality. This argument has been made recently in discussing the “trauma plot,” which highlights how contemporary fiction frequently explains characters’ actions and personalities through reference to past traumatic events at the expense of alternative, more complex framings. In looking at discussion around the trauma plot, we can see the difference between Schrader and Bernhard’s works and a work that uses a consciously therapeutic framing, such as the ones discussed in Parul Sehgal’s “trauma plot” essay. While Schrader and Bernhard may see their work as performing a therapeutic function in the act of creation, what they have created does not, in fact, utilize the language of therapy. Think of how different the passage I quoted from Bernhard’s Extinction would be if it had used language borrowed from psychoanalysis rather than his own language, or if Schrader’s characters used this type of language to describe their existential crises rather than their own language, as, to choose one at random, Oscar Isaac’s character does in The Card Counter:
“You know the phrase ‘tilt’? he says.
“It means when a player gets too caught up with winning. And he plays outside his zone. He tilts,” Isaac’s partner responds.
“Just like in pinball…There’s something similar in interrogations. It’s called ‘force drift.’ It happens when the interrogator applies more and more force to the prisoner with less and less results. The interrogator becomes intoxicated by frustration and power. He applies more and more force, without reason. Without result. Any man can tilt. I can tilt, your father can tilt. You can tilt.”
For me, this captures a certain state of mind better than any medical term could.