It is discouraging that The Triumph of the Therapeutic is not given more press than it has received. It's awfully keen that ISI has done us all the favor of a 2006 redo. The apparatus is very nice, what with a poignant introduction composed by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, and two appendices by Stephen Gardner and Jeremy Beer.
Lasch makes a good point that if you already have Weber, Freud, Riesman and MacIntyre on your shelf, then you had better have Rieff there also, and I completely agree.
I remember reading about Rieff in my undergraduate years, then nothing about him in my graduate tenure, then less than nothing since. This disappearance from radar is surprising, because the critique Rieff waged against the crowd not only remains trenchant, but even more significant. The trends he examined have gained a wider, deeper tendril grip on the psychic eco-system, like the current mulberry infestation in Islamabad.
Perhaps the shortcomings of Psychological Man has become like water to our fishiness: i.e., all around and inside, but unremarked.
Thanks to Lasch's intro, here is a list of Rieff's riffs and troubling paradoxes, pertaining to the society of Psychological therapeuticized Man:
- Contemporary life holds to a therapeutic ethos more than any previous age while simultaneously removing all traditional sources of therapy ...
- Modern history brought a revolutionary expansion of individual freedom at an unfathomable cost, precisely, to the individual ...
- Newfound religiosity, as much as science, slammed shut the door on genuine faith ...
- Reformers who sought to "liberate ... the inner meaning of the good, the beautiful and the true" ended up severing the historical bond between us and these goods, threatening to render us "damned for all time" ...
- Without gravity or anchor, we speed aimlessly through the icy darkness of space. A Stygian fate.
And you thought I was crabby.
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