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Life is not a story with a happy ending. Therapy or no therapy, for most people, things don't just get better and better. Everyone's prognosis is death. Along the way, we can expect to encounter death's myriad accessories: pain, sickness, deterioration, misery, fights, war, disaster, and the death of others, to name a few.
People come to psychotherapy not only to cure a condition they or others view as abnormal, but also wanting help with these inevitables. Not infrequently, they expect to be made happy, as if through psychotherapy they could evade the vicissitudes of life itself. An implicit assumption that to be well is to be happy pervades the psychotherapy enterprise, Freud's famous disclaimer notwithstanding. As a psychotherapist, I repeatedly encounter people who are surprised and disappointed when this outcome remains elusive.
For this reason I was eager to read Emmy van Deurzen's new book Psychotherapy and the Quest for Happiness, which at the outset promised a robust critique of the expectation that psychotherapy should provide enduring bliss. Herself a philosopher who reluctantly pursued training in psychotherapy, van Deurzen criticizes therapists for being insufficiently grounded in philosophical theory despite being, in practice, “the applied philosophers of our age,” (p. 5). Dwelling principally in existential philosophy, with several forays to Ancient Greece, she offers a survey of ideas relevant to psychotherapy but often neglected by practitioners. Happiness as a state is not a worthy goal for therapy or for life (it is, she says, the goal of opiates and of Nazism, p. 74); instead, she proposes developing “a more realistic psychotherapy profession, one that is not narrowly confined to focus either on psychopathology or on happiness,” (p. 168). Life is hard, and psychotherapy can be helpful as people navigate its hardships; of particular use would be more attention to what both parties value. However, from its ambitious beginning, the book expands to th