Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry Is Doing to People (Paperback)

Somehow, it's now the norm after every school shooting, car crash or airline disaster to bring in psychologists who, Moses-like, will lead those who survive the tragedy or even witnessed it to the promised land of "wellness." Somehow we've come to accept the idea that stranger with a few initials behind her name is needed to help us deal with the experience of violence or death.

Where did we ever get the infantile idea that after some tragedy - a parent's loss of a child, for example - we're supposed to be "healed"? Dr. Tana Dineen, in her book "Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People," answers to that question. And a fine and devastating answer it is. Well-researched, sharply focussed and leavened with numerous concrete examples, her critique of the profession of psychology should make you want to, well, burn your self-help books and motivational tapes.

The opening paragraph neatly sums up her argument: "Psychology presents itself as a concerned and caring profession working for the good of its clients, but the effects are damaged people, divided families, distorted justice, destroyed companies and a weakened nation."

That's a stinging indictment. And after you read Ms. Dineen's book you'll be hard pressed not to agree with it. Certainly, Dineen is careful to acknowledge that in the hands of dedicated researchers, psychology remains a respected field of scientific inquiry. The focus of her scorn is the clinical psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and sundry counsellors and mental health practitioners who distort or ignore the research and reduce it to ego-stroking psychobabble and feel-good placebos.

A PhD in psychology herself, Dineen spent nearly 20 years as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist in Ontario. In the mid-1990s, she packed it in. As she put it in an interview: "I couldn't maintain my integrity in a profession that is almost devoid of integrity. This book is my apology for decades of biting my lip about the pernicious effects psychologists are having on individuals and society."

Perhaps her most explosive argument is that refuting the concept of recovered memories. Dineen cites numerous cases where people, usually men, have been falsely accused of sexual abuse crimes based on such "memories." According to Dineen, there is no reputable scientific evidence that these memories are anything more than fanciful inventions. Because of this and other misuses of research, Dineen says psychologists should be barred from testifying in court as "experts" on human behaviour. Indeed, most of what psychologists is little more that job-creation, she argues. Therapists need patients, so they create disorders with which they can label their erstwhile consumers. In this way everybody becomes "abnormal" and in need of treatment.

The industry is also fond of inflating symptoms far beyond the original condition they once described. For example, the word "trauma" once referred to a physical injury. But now, after much "semantic inflation," trauma covers anything that upsets us. Ditto for "addiction;" it no longer refers to drug or alcohol abuse, but also to sex and shopping.

Psychology may have once been part of science's laudatory effort to mitigate life's hardships, but Dineen ably demonstrates how the psychology industry has gone, well, crazy in its attempt to pathologize every aspect of the human condition and turn every upset into a "dis-ease" in need of therapeutic treatment.

What Dineen's book ultimately reveals is the steady sentimentalization of society. A sentimentalist is someone in denial, and what she denies is reality. The sentimentalist assumes that good ends can be achieved without effort, self-discipline, patience or sacrifice. Such sentimentalism might be tolerated if it were confined to a deluded few. But western societies increasingly driven by sentimentalists promoting social engineering schemes. We are a society that runs whining to politicians who'll feel out pain or, more often than not, to a therapist who'll assure us that we aren't stupid, lazy or greedy, but victims of poor parenting.

In our secularized world, psychotherapy has replaced religion in that, like religion, it is what we turn to to cope with the vagaries of existence. The difference, though, is that psychology, unlike religion, seeks to eliminate those experiences that define what it is to be human. At the core of human experience is the mystery of both the grandeur and the misery of self-conscious mortality. Unlike animals, humans know they will die. Yet, if we have courage, we also learn that our awareness of death gives life its juice and joy. It is because our lives are so painfully transient that they can be so achingly meaningful.

Psychotherapy seeks to deny those experiences that make us human. As such, it is a threat to our freedom. As philosopher Leon Kass puts it, the ultimate aim of psychotherapy is "to order human experience in terms of easy, predictable contentment." But if we are always haunted by death, there is the need for character and courage to live with what we know is ineradicable. Psychotherapy, however, makes emotional security easy by eradicating the need for moral virtue.

This has political consequences: Individuals freed from moral responsibility are no longer citizens, but patients or victims unable to manage their lives. As Dineen writes: "The psychology industry considers and treats people as children who, regardless of age, experience or status, must be protected, guided, sheltered and disciplined." But this smothering individual responsibility for the sake of self-esteem creates a depoliticized society of contented creatures who need only to be administered and kept passified.

And that, as far as I can see, is a form of tyranny, albeit a nice one. If so, Dineen's book provides the valuable service of exposing the threat to our freedom posed by all those trauma counsellors rushing to rescue our shivering psyches.