Critical Theory and Psychotherapy

Abstract

This chapter critically examines the claim of the Frankfurt School that, in an alienated society, psychotherapy is destined to fail. According to these 'critical theorists', therapeutic 'success' amounts to the 'normalisation' of the patient, their adaptation to the 'normal' functioning of society, whereas the crucial achievement of critical theory is precisely its explanation of how mental distress results from the very structure of the existing social order. Therapy can only succeed in a society that has no need of it - that is, one that does not produce 'mental alienation'. Here we have a special kind of 'failed encounter': psychotherapy is necessary where it is not possible and is only possible where it is no longer necessary. Psychotherapy needs to be neither accepted at face value nor ignored. Instead it should be employed in such a way as to both criticise existing forms of conformist psychotherapeutic practices and promote a form of radical psychotherapy which can provide the means by which patients can retrieve some of their ability to realise the extent of their alienation and fragmentation, recognise a small part of themselves in the fractured social mirror and try to find a way to build on it. It can never aspire to repair the damage done by a society that has seriously undermined the psychological wellbeing of its members.