A British physician and psychiatrist argues that psychology enables numerous opportunities to sidestep the moral life by insisting that human dysfunction is due to environment or other factors beyond the individual’s control.

If the world’s psychotherapists quit their practices, all the available psychopharmaceuticals were dumped in a river, all university psychology programs were terminated, and all psychology textbooks burned, would the world go to hell? Would we be any worse off? Would humanity’s self-understanding suffer? The author’s response to these questions is no, no, and no!

The suggestion alone is probably horrifying for some. But who’s willing to say that he understands human nature better than Shakespeare or Tolstoy or other great writers and thinkers of the past? That would be pretty arrogant. And while people can identify aspects of life that have improved over the past century, the question that remains is what portion is due to psychologists. We owe a far greater debt to those who invented closed sewer systems than those who invented psychoanalysis.

Many psychologists overestimate their profession’s contributions to humanity, that they have deepened our understanding of our condition. In the 1800s, psychologists were confident that the brain produced thoughts much the same as the liver does bile. Recently, neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran said something very similar, that “the richness of our mental life…is simply the activity of these little specks of jelly in our heads.” Ramachandran was eloquent in his reflections regarding neuroscience, but eloquence does not mean progress.

The world that psychoanalysts—and then behaviorists, sociobiologists, and evolutionary psychologists—envision conflates knowledge and wisdom, because the good life is the result of what science has shown us about how humans function.

Psychology overestimates its ability to lay bare the deepest mysteries of humanity and create solutions to its ticks and vicissitudes.  Pascal wrote—very incisively, we could add, for someone without access to modern technology and research—that, “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Pascal made a keen observation about the way people are. He did not claim he’d conquered the challenge himself; nor did he feel the need to do so. Even if psychologists and other social scientists found a way to engineer away all the unsavory aspects of human nature and make life feel like a nonstop pleasure cruise, we problem-creating creatures would find a way to sink the ship.

Psychologists themselves now impugn Freudianism, but let’s not forget how taken the Western world was with the theories of psychology’s founder.

Sigmund Freud was undeniably brilliant and a prolific writer, but when he stopped his investigations of animal nervous systems and turned his hand to theorizing about the human mind, his career ground to a halt. He was more of a self-help guru with techniques for self-management than a man of science.

What is more, Freud was often dishonest, falsifying evidence and taking credit for the insights of others. He could be extremely manipulative and self-aggrandizing, dogmatic about his theories and vindictive toward those who disagreed with him. His friendship with Carl Jung, for example, disintegrated as soon as Jung began to take issue with some of Freud’s assumptions. Freud came after dissenters like Mohammed came after infidels. His actions revealed an intolerance of basic human nature that he professed to understand so well.

And how original were Freud’s insights, really? He argued that civilization could not continue to exist if its people did not curb their animal drives like fighting and sex. This is apparent to most thoughtful people, and has been a common talking point in sermons and religious texts for centuries. Equally apparent were Freud’s “insights” that human beings are complex, that we don’t always say what we mean, that we ourselves don’t always know what we mean, that we often have mixed motives, that we often say one thing and do another, and that we get angry at people for doing the same things we do. Shakespeare said as much centuries ago, and far more poetically: Why dost thou lash that whore? Strip thine own back. / Thou hotly lust’st to use her in that kind/ For which thou whipp’st her. Shakespeare was a keen observer of human nature, but the statements above are fairly evident to anyone who’s spent time with other human beings.

Freud’s deficiencies in clear thinking and character do not automatically nullify his theories, but it is odd that, for all his brilliance, his ideas obfuscated as much as they clarified; and that, for all his talk of neuroses, the physician apparently did not confront his own decisively.

Freud and his cadre of psychoanalysts were attempting to escape the heavy weight of being human. In doing so, however, they also missed out on humanity’s glory. Their tradition remained a bedrock for decades, but eventually the behaviorist movement gained traction when psychoanalysis failed to produce solid results. The behaviorists took issue with the psychoanalysts’ emphasis on consciousness. They were very empirical in their approach: the mind could not be seen, so there was little point in investigating the immaterial. They saw life as a long series of observable stimuli-response sequences that can be quantitatively measured.

Eventually, the behaviorists came to acknowledge that, just because one cannot “see” thoughts or consciousness, this doesn’t mean that they have no impact on human behavior. Consciousness, whatever it is, is important. In a display of brilliant, intellectual dexterity, the behaviorists tweaked their approach, making behavioral therapy “cognitive behavioral therapy,” or CBT. The behaviorists realized the absurdity of arguing that humans are exactly like animals.

Cognitive behavioral therapy has ameliorated mild depression and obsessive behaviors in some cases, but it has its own issues. It owes its popularity to exploiting the power of suggestion and to people’s hypochondriac tendencies. People become convinced that they have multiple conditions they didn’t even know existed until reading or hearing about them.  

Simply discussing a dysfunction ad nauseam can increase its prevalence. Sociologists call it the Werther Effect, a reference to The Sorrows of Young Werther, a story of unrequited love that ends with the young, painfully romantic protagonist killing himself. Not long after its publication in the late 1700s, there was a spike in suicides, particularly among young men. Some of the deceased were even found dressed the fashion of the novel’s tragic hero and with the book near the body.

Certain psychological disturbances are not necessarily brute facts of nature, but can be due rather to imitation. We should approach incidence reports with a healthy skepticism—especially in causes and non-profits that are looking for funding. Studies don’t account for the fact that they stir up the very disturbances they’re warning against.

Just because there might be some positive results from a model, doesn’t mean the model itself is positive as well. Sometimes the approach can do more harm than good. The therapy model needs weakness and vulnerability like a predator needs meat, which makes virtues like resilience its enemy.

Descartes famously wrote, Cogito ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am.” Psychology has given the layman an alternative: “I suffer, therefore I’m a victim.”

In 2008, George W. Bush signed the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act into law, which mandated that health insurance limits on mental health costs could not be less than those on physical health. One of the immediate practical consequences was the over- and under-treatment of psychological issues. Those with legitimate psychological issues, like chronic schizophrenics, are the ones who inevitably get short-changed. Parity laws, which equate psychological issues with physical ones, lead to the overtreatment of some and under-treatment of those truly in need.

Another consequence of giving the psychological and physical equal weight in law is that the broader culture now does the same. People are just as powerless to solve their psychological issues as they would be to heal their own bodies. Whether by design or inadvertence, the therapist treats the client as a victim. Suffering can no longer be self-inflicted, the result of the individual’s own poor choices. It becomes a disease like any physical ailment, for which the person cannot be held culpable and for which none but the specialist holds the cure.

Shakespeare described the shirking of responsibility or blaming of externals as “the excellent foppery of the world,” that, “we make guilty of disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains of necessity.” The disease model for treating psychological problems is a chief example of psychology enabling moral evasion. It incapacitates the addict. In Shakespeare’s day, people blamed their poor decisions on the position of planets and divine will; in our own time, psychology has become a chief enabler.

This new assumption of parity has led to a disturbing inability and unwillingness to call some sets of feelings and actions superior to others, and has given rise to a culture that refuses to pass judgment. There are three main components to this decision not to judge: a fear, a wish, and a hope.

The fear is of accidentally blaming a victim. Without judging, you don’t commit that error. Of course, that’s not the only error that one could commit by withholding judgment. Refusing to judge also stems from a wish to come across as gracious and tolerant. Suffering is never self-inflicted now; to suffer is to be a victim. This allows us a feeling of magnanimity; we come across as understanding, all-forgiving gods.

Underneath this magnanimity is the hope of avoiding judgment. If I don’t judge anyone, then no one can judge me—including myself. In this way (as in others), behavior becomes neither good nor bad, moral nor immoral, but phenomena to be understood and shown compassion. It’s a blank check that people can fill in with any lifestyle they choose.

Should people be congratulated simply for existing? The rise of self-esteem and self-love is the outcome of a society that refuses to judge on principle. It’s participation trophy logic: you get a medal for being alive: Congratulations for not killing yourself yet!

Self-esteem is supposed to make us brave. But what good is bravery isolated from other virtues and a worthwhile goal? With a goal, a person will inevitably use her self-regard to put others down.

The phrase “low self-esteem” suggests that excessive self-esteem is also possible. To talk about having the “right” or “healthy” amount involves a moral judgment. Such judgments require psychologists to look beyond the borders of their discipline, and even past the directly observable world. Discussions of the Good must enter the conversations at this point.

If self-esteem were the game-changer that psychologists are telling us it is, then why wouldn’t we be pleased with the criminal who has unconditional positive regard for himself? For most people, it is quite unnerving that a mob boss has no shortage of self-esteem and is also perfectly cavalier about making people offers they can’t refuse. Evil and self-esteem can co-exist quite happily.