Our Last Great Illusion

    A Radical Psychoanalytical Critique of Therapy Culture

    Rob Weatherill

    January 2005, 96 pages
    ISBN 0 907845 959 (paperback), £8.95/$17.90

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    "Psychologists and therapists will find the thesis challenging but well worth the engagement with the author's deep understanding of postmodern trends."  Network
    "Therapy may be mad," declares the author of this outspoken volume. Therapy here means, particularly, psychotherapy and counselling, but can be taken to signify the whole therapeutic culture of well-being. More and more people believe in therapy who have lost belief in everything else, but their faith is misplaced: "For a long time now it has been punching above its weight."

    Counselling and therapy yearn to bring about integration within and between people. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and postmodern theory, the notion of a return to nature, to holism, or to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. Far from helping people, therapy culture's utopian solutions may be a cynical distraction, creating delusions of hope. Yet solutions proliferate in the free market, to the precise degree that there are *no* solutions. This is why therapy is our last great illusion.

    Rob Weatherill has been in private practice as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist in Dublin for 25 years, and he lectures in psychoanalysis at St. Vincent's University College Hospital, Trinity College and the Milltown Institute of Philosophy and Theology. He is the author of over thirty papers and articles on psychoanalysis and has published four books.

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