I wonder if this newfangled "philosophical therapy" is being marketed out of a desire to find "alternative careers" for philosophy teachers & students. In English, for the last several years, management & the MLA have been offering workshops, etc., often inviting "successful people" who turned their Ph.Ds into "career assets" outside English Departments as speakers: editors, courseware developers, educational administrators, copywriters, screenplay writers, etc. Can "poetic therapy" & "literary therapy" be far behind?
Here's a Salon article on "Plato, Not Prozac!" for the inquiring mind:
***** Plato not Prozac
A new movement in America uses philosophy instead of Freud as a basis for therapy.
- - - - - - - - - - - - BY CHRISTINA VALHOULI
When Megan, 29, goes to see her therapist, she never has to talk about her mother, lie on a couch or engage in an hour-long dialogue. What she does do is elbow her way past dozens of college students to the cluttered office of Lou Marinoff, a guitar-playing philosophy professor-cum-therapist. "I went to talk to him because I was in a lot of debt. So we talked about the political and economic history of the last 20 years. It was very cool," she says.
Marinoff is at the forefront of a movement called "philosophical practice" -- philosophy professors setting up shop as therapists. A professor at City College of New York, Marinoff has been in practice since 1991 and recently published "Plato Not Prozac!" (HarperCollins). He is also the president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which has certified about three dozen people in the United States. While using philosophy as therapy is relatively new in the U.S., Europeans have been doing it since 1981. The trend is huge in Europe, especially in Germany, which claims more than 100 counselors....
The full article is available at <http://www.salonmag.com/health/feature/1999/08/20/plato/print.html>. *****
I wonder if Marx & Marxists (like Doug Henwood) are included in therapy. If personal debt is the source of woes, however, what Megan needs may be less "philosophy therapy" (which may push her deeper into debt) than a better-paying job, union organizing, a good bankruptcy lawyer, and/or a winning combination in lottery.
That said, when I was suffering from eating disorders (in later high school & early college years), reading Foucault was very helpful. Back then, sufferers of eating disorders were often asked if they had been sexually abused by fathers in childhood, tormented by overprotective mothers, etc. if they turned to therapists (so I didn't). Before reading Foucault, I had already thought that such pop-psychoanalytic nonsense was not just silly but positively harmful, but _The History of Sexuality_, _Discipline & Punish_, etc. gave me a delightful reading experience of having what I had been thinking expressed better than I could have then. Skinner, Wittgenstein, would have been helpful also, but I read them after I overcame eating disorders. Marx would have been helpful had I been a better reader than I was then.
Yoshie