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In his inquiry into psychoanalysis and contemporary culture, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, the sociologist Phillip Rieff makes this observation:
Psychoanalysis is yet another method of learning to endure the loneliness produced by culture. Psychoanalysis is its representative therapy—in contrast to classical therapies of commitment. It is characteristic of our culture that there is no longer an affective sense of communion, driving the individual out of himself, rendering the inner life serviceable to the outer. This has led to cultural artifacts like psychoanalysis, designed primarily to protect the outer life against further encroachments by the inner and to minimize the damage caused by disorders among the parts inside. When so little can be taken for granted, and when the meaningfulness of social existence no longer grants an inner life at peace with itself, every man must become something of a genius about himself.10
According to this diagnosis, the restraining “walls” of traditional culture have been reduced to a shambles, have yielded to a kind of civilized barbarism programmed for hedonistic gratification rather than communal purpose. The loss of an authoritative system of moral constraints, one rooted in a viable religious life, not only has marked another episode in the evolution of Western culture, but threatens the fabric of cultural life itself as we have known it. Rieff would describe the response to this dilemma as therapeutic—the narrow cultivation of private potentiality in the face of public decline. And he views with alarm the protean image of man, left with only self-imposed standards, that has arisen from the therapeutic orientation.
Rieff describes psychoanalysis as the “representative therapy” of our culture, yet he falls short of identifying it with the therapeutic