Customer Reviews

Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Furedi's interesting book explores how self-reliance and problem-solving through informal relationships have been gradually replaced by a therapeutic culture that, by medicalising everyday behaviour, encourages helplessness and promotes new forms of social control.

This book was well worth the read because the ideas were so fascinating, but one could be put off by the atrocious copy editing. Compared with Furedi's earlier well-edited "Paranoid Parenting," "Therapy Culture" had numerous distracting grammatical and spelling errors. It would have deserved a higher rating had it been better edited.

I was excited when I found out about this book, because I agree with the author's overall thesis. I really wanted to like the book, but I came away sadly disappointed.

Furedi has some interesting ideas, but his writing is needlessly dense and dreary. Granted, this is an academic work, but still -- a good editor could probably bring this book to life. As it stands, however, the overall subject matter is interesting, but the book is almost unreadable.

For a much better treatment of essentially the same topic, see "One Nation Under Therapy", by Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel.

Personally I wasn't bothered by the writing style, as the others were. What I am interested in is what an author has to say, and Furedi has an important message.

I'm reading this book right now, and I'm amazed it went to print with so many grammatical errors, particularly agreement problems. (For instance, the author repeatedly begins sentences with plural subjects and then uses singular verb forms.) There are also many typos. It's really unbelievable. There must be at least one error on every page. The book brings up some interesting ideas and criticisms of the growth of pop psychology and Western culture's reliance on therapy, but good lord, the errors are incredibly distracting! I just had to comment on it because I can't believe how bad the editing is.