“Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer give birth to a star...
'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?'—thus asks the last man, and he blinks...'We have invented happiness'—say the last men, and they blink.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In the novel “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden”, the psychotherapist Dr. Fried admits to her patient Deborah: “I never promised you a rose garden. I never promised you perfect justice [...] and I never promised you peace or happiness. My help is so that you can be free to fight for all of those things. The only reality I offer is challenge, and being well is being free to accept it or not at whatever level you are capable. I never promise lies, and the rose garden world of perfection is a lie... and a bore, too!”. The psychotherapeutic goals of some of the contemporary psychological treatments attempt to turn life into a rose garden by promising complete happiness, productivity, and the adaptation of individuals to a society of tireless production and consumption. Psychotherapeutic practices are based on the prescription of generalized therapeutic interventions such as practical behavioral skills and tools reminiscent of a market mentality which are superficial, simplistic, impersonal, generalized, and massified. Such aims of cure and therapeutic practices do not require the subjective implication of clinicians nor patients in treatment. And most importantly, there is a denial of the unconscious, as well as any need for personal meaning.
Health care, psychology, and psychotherapy exist within specific cultural, historical, socio-economic and political conditions. Although these disciplines attempt to present themselves as neutral and purely scientific they are moral discourses. Modern psychology started during the industrial revolution and with the aid of statistics and controlled laboratory experiments it began to study, isolate, measure, catalog, categorize, and collect psychological, demographic, and economic data. The measurement of individuals, their behavior and psychological characteristics allowed the state and organizations to rank individuals according to several attributes such as intelligence, agreeableness, attitudes, openness, resilience, motivation, conscientiousness, and personality. As psychology separated from philosophy and became an independent discipline, the interest shifted from understanding human nature, the search for meaning, and the attempt to find what the good life is, into the measurement, categorization, ranking, surveillance, engineering, control, and pathologization of human life. This significant shift became more explicit in 1913 when the father of behaviorism John Watson defined psychology as “… a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior”. Following a positivist and scientific approach to the world, the goal of contemporary psychology is to discover universal laws of behavior, treatment, and cure that can be applied to everyone at all circumstances. Hence the focus on quantitative research, empiricism, and pragmatism with a dismissal of context, culture, inter connectedness, and complexity in life. With the reduction of the subject to measurable quantitative external behavior determined by the environment, or the view of subjects as cognitive modules that process computational cognitions, psychology etymologically defined as the logos of the psyche has in fact lost its soul.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Still Life with Roses (1882)
As psychology separated from philosophy and became an independent discipline, the interest shifted from understanding human nature, the search for meaning, and the attempt to find what the good life is, into the measurement, categorization, ranking, surveillance, engineering, control, and pathologization of human life.
Capitalism is not only an economic system but also a discourse with specific types of subjectivity, social bonds, and relationships, The world for capitalism is a concrete material commodity defined by its monetary value in the market place. The well adapted individual to capitalism considers the ethical good to be whatever is profitable; is focused on productivity and achievement as life goals; has a happy, “go-getter”, and optimistic attitudes towards life; is distrustful of secrets and values communication and transparency; values autonomy and individualism over community life and solidarity; has a liquid self and is adaptable to the changing markets; is not attached to ideals, place, and others; values hyper rationality; prioritizes action over thinking, reflection, or contemplation; needs certainty and abhors uncertainty; values materialistic realism over fantasy, myth, or narrative, etc. Relationships and social bonds in capitalism are based on utilitarian ends to exploit value from others, or to compete with others for status and existing resources. This view of subjectivity and relationships is in contrast with the psychoanalytical notion of human nature defined by the unconscious, interdependency, the infantile, the primacy of emotional life, desire, and fantasies.
For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, lack (manque) is at the center of being. Not just a lack for something, but a lack of being itself in a way that there is no ground for the subject to stand on. And it is because we lack that we can desire, as desire is the consequence of being lacking beings. Because we have an unconscious, we are divided subjects who will always feel alienation, unease, doubt, angst, and something other inside ourselves which escapes and defies the willful control and full understanding of the ego. Capitalism attempts to persuade us into believing that the reason why we suffer is not because we ontologically lack and have an unconscious, but because we are abnormal, defective, and haven’t found yet the right market product or solution for our misery. Consequently, what capitalism promises us is to fill our lack and discontent by offering us the illusion of generalized, massified, and impersonal solutions to our problems, available to be bought in the marketplace.
How does psychotherapy consider questions of suffering and cure in times of capitalism? Precisely in the same way as any other products available in the market with a promise of guaranteed results. Some psychotherapies in the 21st century are aligned with the discourse of capitalism because they have adopted a market solution mentality promising cure as complete happiness, productivity, and control, through the removal of suffering, lack, and the unconscious. Some psychotherapists advertise their profiles and services to potential patients on psychotherapy online directories and websites. On such websites, some psychotherapists state their therapeutic goals by promising to their potential patients: “you will change your life”, “you will live a happy, healthy, and successful life”, “you will live life to the fullest”, “you will achieve inner peace”, “you will learn new coping skills to cope more effectively”, “you will live the life you have always been hoping for”, “you will achieve all of your goals and dreams”, “you will envision a life free of the influence of symptoms and anxiety”, “start your healing journey and change your life”, “you will become empowered”, “to embody your true authentic nature”, “become in complete control of your life”, “stop procrastination and become more productive”, etc. But how can one offer guarantees in psychotherapy? Moreover, such promises are focused on strengthening the narcissistic ego ideal and its control, i.e., to restore the ego as the master in its own house, and not so much on the exploration of the internal world and personal meaning. However, the truth is that there are very few guarantees in psychotherapy and in life.

Some psychotherapies in the 21st century are aligned with the discourse of capitalism because they have adopted a market solution mentality promising cure as complete happiness, productivity, and control, through the removal of suffering, lack, and the unconscious.
Have psychotherapists become technicians rather than the experts of the soul? A psychotherapist once told me, “I have a tool-belt with a set of tools that I use to solve any diagnoses that my clients bring me. I have tools to cure anxiety, depression, ADHD, trauma, you name it!”. Advice such as “Practice mindfulness three times a week”, “Develop a good sleep hygiene”, “Do your daily journaling”, “Meditate once a day”, “Go for long walks”, “Go to the gym three times a week”, “Practice healthy anger”, are some of the usual treatment prescriptions offered by some of today’s psychotherapists. While some of these skills and activities can be helpful to some extent, it is easy to see how they have very little to do with any psychological principles. Moreover, these are concrete, superficial, simplistic, generalist and impersonal, and do not foster personal exploration nor questioning of self and symptoms. Also, they do not focus on the relationship between psychotherapist and patient. In fact, the subjectivity of the psychotherapist such as personal history, bias, expectations, emotions, countertransference, stereotypes, conflicts, etc. is often perceived as an extraneous variable which could negatively interfere with the efficacy of therapy and ideally should be removed out of the treatment. The ideal therapeutic working alliance for the “tool-belt fixing mentality” and “guaranteed results” psychotherapies would be between a dead psychotherapist who follows and applies standardized treatment plans provided by protocols and guidelines, and a dead patient who remains a passive and docile recipient of the psychotherapist’s knowledge and expertise. Is there a cure through death?
It is understandable that psychotherapists live in a competitive economy. As Max Weber stated, when one is living in capitalism one needs to comply with the capitalistic ethic. Moreover, the competition for attracting patients is fierce: Other fellow clinicians, other mental health disciplines, the medicalization of mental health care, life coaches, large corporations that mass recruit psychotherapists to offer psychotherapy on a as needed basis (the uberization of psychotherapy), and more recently AI chat bots, apps, and scripts that provide free or cheaper psychotherapy. Perhaps under Spencer’s rule of “the survival of the fittest”, psychotherapists are under the pressure to adapt their promises of cure and psychotherapeutic methods to the demands and standards of the market, promising patients to become better adapted to a capitalistic and competitive society. How many patients would a psychotherapist attract by describing the treatment goals as Freud once stated, as to achieve ordinary unhappiness, meaning, the transformation of neurotic misery into ordinary unhappiness? Certainly none. Nevertheless, the problem with psychotherapeutic promises of turning life into a rose garden devoid of suffering is that it often results into unfulfilled promises, causing further disappointment and frustration. When treatments fail, clinicians blame patients by categorizing them as defiant or treatment resistant. And patients become upset and disillusioned and continue the search for a different psychotherapist or impersonal solution, only for the same cycle to be repeated ad aeternum. No wonder that depression, states of emptiness, chronic anxiety, and burnout are some of today’s dominant mental health problems.

The ideal therapeutic working alliance for the “tool-belt fixing mentality” and “guaranteed results” psychotherapies would be between a dead psychotherapist who follows and applies standardized treatment plans provided by protocols and guidelines, and a dead patient who remains a passive and docile recipient of the psychotherapist’s knowledge and expertise. Is there a cure through death?
Contemporary psychology and psychotherapies are aligned with a neoliberal and capitalistic view of self as hyper rational, objective, measurable, concrete, exteriorized, individualistic, mechanical, predictable, and controllable. It is important for the psychological sciences to maintain a subversive, disruptive, and critical stance towards dominant and hegemonic discourses in society with its demands for keeping the status quo and adaptation. Contemporary psychotherapies present as natural and scientific, however they clearly have values such as clarity, activity, speed, concreteness, solutions, practicality, realism, efficiency, systematization, functioning, adaptation, and parsimony. Under this view, the psychotherapy process appears to be a mathematical, instrumental, efficient, predictable, painless, cost-effective, and uncomplicated removal of symptoms and installment of happiness and productivity. Perhaps psychology and psychotherapies could retain something more from philosophy and other disciplines from the humanities, in helping us to understand that life is indeed tragic. For example, Cushman & Gilford argue that psychotherapies should adopt a hermeneutic perspective and understand humans as moral and historical beings, rather than computational machines that can be optimized, controlled, and upgraded through therapeutic technical procedures. This hermeneutic perspective would foster a genuine conversation between clinicians and patients, inviting a moral discourse that would encourage an encounter with mortality and an examination of the moral trajectory of one’s life. Hopefully such approach would bring a re enchantment to psychology and psychotherapies, allowing us to include mystery, meaning, uncertainty, the unconscious, complexity, and depth back into our psyches.
Note: Psychology and psychotherapy is a diverse field of theories and practices. This critique is applicable to theories and practices of psychotherapy which are more closely aligned with capitalism and neoliberalism.
References:
Cushman, P., & Gilford, P. (2000). Will Managed Care Change Our Way of Being?. The American psychologist, 55(9), 985–996.
Green, H. (1964). I Never Promised You a Rose Garden. Signet: New York.
Lacan, J (1998). The Seminar Book II. The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Roberts, R. (2015). Psychology and Capitalism: The Manipulation of the Mind. Zero Books, Uk.
Watson, J. B. (1913). Psychology As The Behaviorist Views It. Psychological Review, 20(2), 158–177.
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