100 Books Like The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Frank Furedi is one of the world’s leading intellectuals. He has written on a wide range of issues from parenting, reading, education, therapy culture, risk, and on philosophical topics. I think this book brings together his many sociological books and papers with a concrete focus on one institution, the university. It provides a wider and more detailed discussion of the therapeutic university than Kathryn Ecclestone and I could in our book. He covers issues such as ‘safe spaces,’ ‘micro-aggressions,’ and ‘trigger warnings’ that suggest the university is dangerous place for vulnerable young minds. The tragedy of the contemporary university for Furedi, and me, is that it has become just a ‘big school’ in which students are treated like children. 

Ken McLaughlin approaches vulnerability and victim culture from what I think is a new perspective. The idea of victimhood culture and people seeing themselves as vulnerable was commonplace when he was writing his book. Looking at victims as ‘survivors’ he reveals how the victims may see themselves. McLaughlin looks at examples from social work and elsewhere to show that in therapy culture, the constant need for recognition and respect for vulnerable identities is both empowering and yet socially isolating. People may celebrate the fact that their victim status has been respected and they have ‘survived,’ but this leaves them unable to form any connection with others. A set of victims cannot be a community as it requires constant external validation.

Claire Fox is the founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank that has produced the annual Battle of Ideas Festival for over a decade and a half. Fox is passionate about freedom and speech and debate. This short polemical book begins and ends with how young people have adapted to victim culture. It begins with an example of how genuinely hurt young people are when hearing views that they found offensive. This book is said to have been responsible for the introduction of the concept of the ’snowflake generation’ into the UK. But Fox is nuanced in her approach, and she ends her book with a ‘Letter to the Snowflake Generation’ and a ‘Letter to the Anti-Snowflake Generation’. Her book should be mandatory reading for anyone beginning university.

For Williams, ‘woke’ is a contested concept but a useful one. It captures an elite ideology that dares not name itself but that is intolerant of any criticism. It attempts to dominate our attitudes toward children, education, sex, and politics. At the heart of woke is what she calls the ‘weaponisation of victimhood’. Woke attitudes are only possible in a culture that valorises individual fragility. Being ‘woke’ means that you see the world through the idea of human vulnerability. Children, women, and minority groups are all seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Williams believes that despite its current victory, woke is weak and fearful of debating its ideas and of collective democratic action. The first step forward, she argues in her conclusion, is for people to step forward and speak up.

This is a very good, fair, smart, early interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and of its significance for culture and intellectual history in particular. It’s very well written, probably because Susan Sontag (Rieff’s wife at the time) is widely reported to have actually written the book, and in the 1960s the book became highly influential. It is easily Rieff’s best book. 

This well-written, tightly-argued little book of 1995 gathers together four feature articles from The New York Review of Books that together represent a watershed moment in ‘Freud Studies.’ For here was the NYRB, a long-standing bastion of psychoanalysis, publishing splashy articles that functioned like a Hollywood expose of Freud’s failings as a man, thinker, and therapist. In truth, Crews was simply giving voice to a ‘revisionist’ portrait of Freud that started in earnest in the wake of Jones’s three-volume ‘life and work’ of Freud (1953-57). Best of all: Crews connects it all to the ‘recovered memory’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, thereby drawing a  disturbing portrait of Freud’s legacy.  

No work of the great psychologist Sigmund Freud has been more maligned than this book. When the first edition was published in Germany, it was rightly hailed as a literary masterpiece. But Freud kept expanding it over the years, aiming to make it more “scientific,” but only managed to turn it into a turgid object of mockery.

My first attempts to read the final edition all failed. But when, a few decades ago, a fresh and highly accessible English translation of the first edition was published (by Oxford University Press) all my simple minded views about self-knowledge and self-deceit underwent a transformation. It was like growing a new set of eyes.

Faith journeys fascinate me. I love the dramatic tales of how we come to religious faith, or more commonly today, how we lose that faith. Our individual stories of loss are microcosms of the 19th-century loss of faith, which saw so many Europeans lose their belief in God but not their need for something transcendent to ground their understanding of reality.

I love the way A.N. Wilson tells this story as a sobering tale of loss rather than liberation. He dispels the notion that external forces like science are the full or even most important part of the story. Biblical scholarship was casting doubt on the veracity of the Bible long before Darwin challenged Genesis with his theory of evolution.

Whenever I begin to study a topic, I look for books with a broad historical sweep that helps me contextualize the present. This is just that kind of book. Andrew Scull deftly traces the cultural understandings of madness from antiquity to today.

You might think such an ambitious task would make for a dense and plodding slog, but Scull’s easy prose, as well as his penchant for inserting pithy, fascinating anecdotes at just the right moment, make this book a pleasurable read. Come for the critical history, stay for all the curious characters you meet along the way.

In principle, psychoanalytic theory and practice rely on evidence adduced from the clinical case studies of patients. Freud, however, presented very few such cases. With this in mind, Borch-Jacobsen has done something of permanent importance to the field: he researched and wrote 38 ‘lost’ and unofficial case studies of Freud’s patients and gathered them all into one volume. The book as such functions as a shocking disconfirmation of everything we thought we knew about Freud the man, the theorist, and the therapist. And, best of all, it does so in plain, highly accessible language.