Book Review

"America's obsession with self-fulfillment," Eva S. Moskowitz claims, is not a phenomenon just of the late twentieth century. In her sweeping study of the popularity of the therapeutic ethos, Moskowitz demonstrates that long before the impact of Sigmund Freud Americans were already "obsessed" with the pursuit of personal happiness, the search for salvation through self-esteem, and a prurient interest in the emotional traumas of others. Furthermore, the attention given to resolving personal feelings of inferiority or unhappiness has left Americans unable to entertain other causes of the social, economic, and political problems that plague the nation.

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In Therapy We Trust takes readers back 150 years to the genesis of a therapeutic culture in the medical practice of an obscure Maine physician, Phineas P. Quimby. Though marginal in his own time, Quimby's ideas became quite popular in the 1890s as the New Thought movement. Moskowitz then draws us along a historical path littered with the efforts of professional (and unprofessional) psychologists and psychiatrists to expose the unhappiness of the American public and advertise the mental therapies that promised release. At every stage (in every chapter) yet another nail is added to the coffin in which Moskowitz finds our social consciousness buried by a cult-like faith in therapeutic cures. The "therapeutic reformers" of the Progressive years hoped to use psychology to uncover the causes of poverty. They were followed by the marriage experts of the 1920s and 1930s and the psychiatrists and psychologists who during World War II exposed many unsuspecting Americans to psychotherapy.

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