Los Angeles Times
Sunday, April 5, 1998 p.A1
Amy Westfeldt, Associated Press
A Consulting Philosopher
Aims to Help the 'Ethically Challenged'
JERSEY CITY, N.J. - Lou Marinoff
isn't a psychologist. But people come to his office,
tell him their troubles and pay him $100 an hour.
The folks Marinoff sees aren't
patients. He calls them clients. And they are not sick,
just ethically challenged.
"I am not in the business
of diagnosing people," Marinoff says. "This
is not a science; it's an art form."
"This" is a therapy
conducted by a philosopher, the academics' answer to
shrinks.
The prescription is Plato
versus Prozac.
Marinoff, a philosopher professor
at City College of New York, is one of the country's
first philosophical practitioners. These philosopher-counselors
use their knowledge of ideas, not medical science, to
help them guide people with problems.
Over seven years he has see
dozens of clients, counseling them through divorces,
deaths in the family and professional struggles.
Recently, he began teaching
a course on the subject at Felician College in New Jersey.
And he's won the support of a New York legislator who
is sponsoring a bill that would license philosophical
practitioners.
Marinoff has no training
in psychology and counseling and says he doesn't need
it. Philosophers, he says, are uniquely qualified to
deal with troubles of the mind.
"If you go to the psychiatrist,
he's going to find something wrong with you. If he doesn't
find something wrong with you, he's out of business,"
Marinoff said.
What his clients can expect
is something very different, he says.
"I'm helping them through
dialogue to lead a more examined life."
Outraged by Marinoff's foray
onto their turf, psychiatrists said his inexperience
could cause him to misdiagnose suicidal or schizophrenic
people and lead to malpractice lawsuits.
"This guy is practicing
medicine without a license and is approaching a major
ethical violation," said Herbert Sacks, president
of the American Psychiatric Assn. "I would no sooner
go to him than I would go to a chiropodist if my heart
was skipping a beat."
A patient with severe mental
illness that requires medication "would stand no
chance of recovery" if that patient sought out
a philosophical counselor, said Valerie Rheinstein,
a spokeswoman for the National Alliance for the Mentally
Ill in Arlington, Va.
Marinoff said he would be
able to spot people with serious disorders, because
:I've read the DSM-IV [medical diagnostic manual], like
anyone else" and would refer them to doctors.
For most people, however,
Marinoff says modern psychiatry has failed by focusing
on curing illness and not on universal questions of
value, meaning and ethics.
Psychiatrists are "very
paternalistic," said Keith Burkum, chairman of
Felician College's philosophy department and a counselor-in-training.
"You go into an office. There's this person sitting
there that supposedly has this special kind of knowledge
about the human condition."
Philosophical counselors
should appeal to people who would never see psychiatrists,
Burkum said, because "they'll grasp that this is
something more open and condescending. It's more adult."
Psychiatrists say they're
not hired to be friends giving advice, a role they see
philosophical counselors playing, or to talk ethics.
People who go to therapy,
New York City psychiatrist Josef H. Weissberg said,
"are usually in distress, and the distress does
not have much to do with the meaning of life."
"Our business is to
diagnose and treat illness," said Weissberg, a
Columbia University psychiatry professor and former
president of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis.
And while Burkum says psychiatrists
are condescending, Weissberg said philosophical counselors
seem much more judgmental.
"Maybe a philosopher
is uniquely qualified to give advice but that's not
what we're doing," he said. "We try to understand
rather than advise."
After several years on the
fringe, Marinoff is hoping to give his movement more
legitimacy.
Marinoff is executive director
of the 130-member American Society of Philosophy, Counseling
and Psychotherapy, which was founded in 1992 as an academic
group. He just founded a second group -- the American
Philosophical Practitioners Assn., which he hopes will
become more of a trade organization. The group has a
handful of members.
Marinoff sees fewer than
10 people on a weekly basis, in his Manhattan offices
or at his Jersey City home. He regularly charges $75
for an initial visit, $100 for subsequent sessions,
but a research grant covers the costs for his New York
clients.
Earlier this year, New York
Assemblyman Ruben Diaz introduced a bill that would
license and regulate philosophical practitioners.
Philosophers don't know what
to think of Marinoff's new movement.
"Some of our members
feel it is horrible," said Eric Hoffman, a University
of Delaware professor who heads the American Philosophical
Assn.
He said philosophers should
have some training or experience in counseling before
starting a business.
Sacks said Marinoff can't
treat illnesses he doesn't have the training to recognize.
"He is exposing a patient and, indirectly, himself
to serious mistreatment," Sacks said.
Marinoff went to psychiatrists
as a child -- his parents made him go because he was
misbehaving in school. They didn't help him, he says.
"What are they trained
to talk about? What your mother said when you were 3
years old. How does that help you or me?" he said.
He began counseling on the
side in Vancouver while working as an ethicist at the
University of British Columbia. He noticed that ordinary
people frequently came into the university's Center
for Applied Ethics for advice on personal problems.
"People were just walking
into the center and saying, 'I want to see a philosopher,'"
he said.
There was John, a graduate
student who didn't know whether to bring his ailing
mother home to live with him for the summer or leave
her in the hospital. In a published case study, Marinoff
focused on the notion of moral responsibility in decision-making,
concluding that John should make a decision in his mother's
best interests, not his own.
Marinoff doesn't send clients
to libraries to look up the great philosophers, though
he refers to them if he thinks a person's current struggles
relate to an ancient one.
For a woman whose mother
criticized her for not being more religious, Marinoff
cited Socrates' theory that every person had to find
his or her own values through self-examination.
Knowing that the world's
greatest thinkers faced problems too can be encouraging
to his clients, Marinoff said.
"That would make them
feel good about having minds, instead of [feeling] sick."
