New York Observer
August 4, 1997, p.17
Plato or Prozac?
He may not dress as nicely
as your therapist; he prescribes Socrates instead of
Xanax; he doesn't take august off; but he charges $100
an hour. Yes, Manhattan, the personal philosopher is
here to cure what ails you. ALEX KUCZYNSKI spends a
few days with men and women who might not resolve your
commitment issues but know what "hermeneutics"
means.
Dr. Lou Marinoff may bear
a certain physical resemblance to Sigmund Freud, and
he may charge $100 an hour to people seeking emotional
guidance--but don't call him a therapist. No, Dr. Marinoff
is a philosopher. And joined by a number of peers, Dr.
Marinoff, a professor at the City University of New
York's City College, is trying to take philosophy out
of academia and onto the couch. Depressed? Try Plato
not Prozac.Marriage trouble? Kant's your man. In short,
if you're worried about the lack of progress you've
made with your Jungian analyst or feminist psychotherapist
or Freudian-Lancanian psychopharmacologist-- maybe it's
time for your very own personal philosopher.
There were plenty of them
to chose from in new York at the end of July. More than
60 "philosophical counselors," as they like
to call themselves, gathered at the City College of
New York Graduate Center, across from Bryant Park, for
the Third International Conference on Philosophical
Practice. The Philosophers--who are mostly university
professors--were there to discuss how they would wrest
the world of neurosis away from the psychiatrists, psychotherapists,
marriage counselors and social workers who make their
living off New York angst. And why not? How many Ph.D.'s
make $100 an hour?
It was the afternoon of July
23, and the chianti was flowing, the wheels of brie
bore plastic--knife bite marks, the classical guitarist
was working his way through a Hungarian rhapsody. A
crowd of philosophy professors, graduate students and
a handful of curious psychotherapists were eagerly awaiting
talks such as "Which philosophers or Philosophical
Concepts Are Particularly Suited to a Philosophical
Counseling Session?" The women wore flowing skirts,
sandals with socks, silver jewelry; the men favored
saggy khaki pants, ponytails, sandals with socks--Hush
puppies.
"Driese!" shouted
a tall blond women swinging silver jewelry as she ran
toward a short man with blond curly hair, wearing a
tweed suit. "I haven't seen you since the Second
International!" He turned out to be Driese Boele
from the Netherlands, editor in chief of one of the
movement's first journals, Filosofische Praktijk,
and a bona fide conference celebrity, a sort of a Mick
Jagger of the world of philosophical counseling. They
started discussing theorists, which they pronounced
"tea-orists"
Nearby, a doctor of philosophy
from Hawaii named Russell was arguing that psychotherapy
and psychiatry just don't cut it, particularly on the
big midlife issues. "Someone going through a midlife
crisis is not suffering from pathology," he said.
"They are having a crisis of values. Up until a
certain point in ones life, X, Y and Z were important.
Now that you have X, Y and Z, who will tell you what
is important? You don't need a psychiatrist for that.
You need a philosopher."
"A philosophical counselor
will grapple with questions that your therapist won't-questions
like, 'Does God exist?' 'Should I undertake political
action?' "What happens after death?' and 'What
is the nature of love?'" said Dr. James Elliott,
a grandfatherly figure who wore a Greek fisherman's
cap throughout the conference and who, with his wife,
Dr. Kathy Elliott, counsels about 20 patients a week
in Lafayette, La. "A psychotherapist will say,
'Sorry, that stuff is all up to you.' A philosophical
counselor will delve deeper into the question and give
you more help with those big, whopping existential problems."
But therapists aren't buying.
"Would you go for treatment
of your health to someone who was way, way outside the
training modes that you are used to?" asked Dr.
Dorothy Cantor, former president of the American Psychological
Association and a psychotherapist in New Jersey. "Some
people would say yes. I would say caveat emptor--buyer
beware."
"The whole history of
medicine and psychology is littered with overblown efficacy
claims," argued Dr. Randall Marshall, an assistant
professor of clinical psychiatry at Colombia University's
New York State Psychiatric Institute. "Why did
people apply leeches for 500 years?"
BETWEEN LECTURES, DR. MARINOFF
gave a reporter an example of how philosophical counseling
works. He said he had recently treated a woman who complained
that her dead brother's spirit was bugging her.
"Psychotherapists would
say that she is re-creating the guilt triggered by her
brothers death, that it's some deep-seated unresolved
psychological problem," he said. "But it may
be possible, according to some philosophical systems,
that there was something there. I am here to help the
client better understand her belief system and not to
offer criticism as a psychotherapist might, but to pick
out any inconsistencies."
"People go to philosophical
counselors for the same reason they go to anyone in
the counsel-dispensing professions: with a view to getting
a meaningful dialogue going, and with some end in sight,"
he said.
Then Dr. Marinoff took the
stage. He spoke darkly of the scarcity of academic positions
for the students of philosophy; he discussed the American
Society for Philosophy, Counseling and Psychotherapy,
of which he is president, and the society's plans to
open a national headquarters in New York this year.
"And remember," he said, "there are hundreds
of potential clients for every philosophical practitioner."
A tiny, hopeful shudder of applause went through the
audience.
Later, two doctoral students
from Canada, Stephen Hare and Alexander Boston, chatted
about whether they might become philosophical counselors--a
job choice driven largely by the fact that, in academia,
there are literally hundreds of applicants for each
teaching job in a university philosophy department.
Mr. Hare--tall, oxford shirt, gold aviator glasses,
eager, gap-toothed David Letterman smirk--said, "I
understand that, in the United States, business ethics
counseling--a related field to philosophical counseling--is
a $3 billion-a-year industry. I'm very excited about
that."
Mr. Boston--Men in Black
baseball cap, earring, Ray Bradbury paperback--agreed."Yeah,"
he said "I'm really not sure what the future is
for your average Ph.D. in philosophy."
Did the young men see themselves
sitting cross-legged at the top of a remote mountain
and receiving visitors?
"I'm thinking more along
the lines of Woody Allen movies," said Mr. Boston.
"I could be one of those wise old guys he consults
when he's thinking about death."
Did the philosopher have
any other plans besides helping rid New York of psychiatrists?
"Maybe see some musicals,"
said Mr. Boston. "Is La Cage still playing?"
PHILOSOPHICAL COUNSELORS
ARE not covered by insurance and have yet to be licensed
by the state, but Professor Marinoff will begin lobbying
the State Legislature this fall to change that, and
is also planning to hold "philosophers forums"
at Barnes & Noble stores starting in September to
introduce the public to the notion of philosophical
counseling.
According to Essays on
Philosophical Counseling, the movement's nominal
handbook, philosopher-counselors enter into a dialogue
with a patient, using examples from recognized philosophers
to answer questions such as: "What does happiness
consist of? How should a friendship be conducted? How
is one to educate? How should one deal with one's enemies?
What do sickness and death mean? What does it mean to
be a man or a woman?"
The book also offers handy
legal guidelines ("Sex with a client or even a
former client is unethical, malpractice, and, in some
jurisdictions, a felony, i.e., a criminal act ... Disaster
hovers over the tempted philosophical counselor")
and trial sessions. In one, the counselor applies the
philosophical rules of Hypothetical Syllogism and Material
Implication to a series of complaints from his counselee.
who is, tellingly, a philosophy professor just denied
tenure: "I am denied tenure [therefore] all my
graduate school years are wasted [therefore] I am a
damn waste of life." The counselor points out that
the counselee is a victim of "fallacious thinking."
Problem solved.
In another case study, a
patient can't bring himself to buy a car because he
believes "All car dealers are slimeballs";
the counselor points out that the patient has therefore
concluded that "I will be made a fool of [if I
attempt to buy a car]." After the counselor again
points out the patient's error of fallacious thinking,
"He was satisfactorily able to purchase a car."
But what if your problem
is something less existential--say, a marriage is falling
apart?
"Well, you would come
in and say, 'My marriage is falling apart,'" said
Professor Marinoff. "We would have a talk about
what is expected from one another in marriage, what
are the obligations of marriage, what are the duties
of marriage, what rights if any, what claim does one
person have over another. Are there intellectual conflicts,
emotional conflicts? And, of course, different counselors
have different philosophers, so every approach would
be different."
"That sounds just like-
marriage counseling," said Columbia University's
Dr. Marshall. "Some of this sounds suspiciously
like cognitive therapy"- a traditional psychotherapeutic
approach.
James Elliott of Louisiana
admitted that philosophical counseling does have an
element of "psychophobia"--but that makes
it perfect for people who are afraid of discussing their
private feelings with a psychotherapist, "because
you can just enter into a rational debate--should I
get married? Should I do this or that?--as an objective
viewer."
A devotee of daily Zen meditation,
Dr. Marinoff said he used mostly Eastern philosophy,
as well as game theory and decision theory, to help
his clients tackle problems--"but," he said,
"there are people who love Heidegger and who will
find a way to apply his ontology to their lives. It's
really an art form. If you were seeking a philosophical
counselor, you would ultimately find the counselor with
whom you had a rapport, who identified with philosophers
you comprehend."
Essays on Philosophical
Counseling says that some philosophers are better
suited to certain crises than others. The work of Immanuel
Kant crops up in the chapter on marital counseling.
The dark Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard pops up
in the discussions of death. In one of the conference's
sessions--"The Role of Philosophical Counseling
for Drug Users"--a professor from England discussed
how he used Socratic dialogues and Plato's Republic
to teach drug addicts how to relate to the world in
a responsible way.
"I will piss off psychologists
by saying this," said Professor Marinoff, as he
sat in a darkened auditorium during the conference.
"But this is a parent discipline to psychology.
We study psychology; they don't study philosophy. There
is a philosophy of psychology; there is no psychology
of philosophy. We encompass what they do. We came first."
Therapists contacted by The
Observer said that the philosophers had an out-of-date
image of psychotherapy.
"One of the beauties
of our field is that psychotherapy is always evolving,"
said Dr. Cantor, the former president of the American
Psychological Association. "If you start with an
erroneous premise--like they seem to be doing--you can
build all kinds of logic on it. I think they are looking
at some very old modalities of therapy. Freud would
not recognize what is happening is psychotherapy today
any more than Socrates would recognize what they are
doing. They sound very fringe."
Dr. Cantor said she believed
philosophical counseling could be harmful. "It
reinforces the person's defense against feeling and
denying a whole part of the human condition," she
said. "We are not just governed in our actions
and relationships by intellect."
"It's clearly on the
fringes of her understanding," said un-Zen Professor
Marinoff in a later telephone conversation.
On the Thursday after the
conference began, Stanley Chan, a social worker and
philosophical counselor at the Ontario Cancer Institute--Princess
Margaret Hospital in Toronto, led a workshop titled
"On Time and Dying." The conference's program
described Mr. Chan's lecture this way: "The terminally
ill who are confronted with the truth of the inevitability
of their impending nonexistence are said to be acutely
conscious of their temporality.Why is this so?"
Outside the 18th-floor conference
room, the sun was shining.You could look out the windows
and see people walking down the street, sitting in Bryant
Park, eating sandwiches, talking, laughing. They did
not seem aware of there temporality.
"If you can deny the
existence of time," said the excited Mr. Chan,
explaining theory of time espoused by philosopher John
E. McTaggart, "then there is no change, and if
there is no change, then there is no death."
He placed clear sheets on
a projector. The words "The Dying" flashed
up on the screen. Another sheet illustrated a passage
from the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus: "So
death, the most terrifying of ills, is nothing to us,
since so long as we exist death is not with us; but
when death comes, then we do not exist."
Mr. Chan's voice boomed:
"The greatest fear of dying is ..." He paused.
"Being-out-of-sight!" he shouted. "Being
out of mind! Being buried! And most important of all"--he
lowered his voice--"being forgotten."
"We do all sorts of
things to assure that people will remember us,"
he said. "Write a book, teach classes, have children,
make museums, build libraries"--he gestured out
the window toward the New York Public Library--"and
it is all in vain. But I tell my patients, why should
we be worrying about what happens after the last breath?
Did you worry about what happened before you were born?
Sure, your parents told you stuff about what life was
like before you were around, but do you really remember
any of it?"
"Of course," he
said, "it is up to the dying person if they really
buy this stuff." And if the patients are there
because their spouse has run off with the next-door
neighbor, it's up to them if they really want to discuss
some philosopher they never read in college. And in
New York City, a nexus of Psychobabble that is host
by some estimates to at least 300 schools that teach
various forms of psychotherapy, philosophical counseling
may be just another emolument for bruised egos and thwarted
ids, a psychic placebo, a sympathetic ear.
But Professor Marinoff
remains stalwart. "It's already in demand,"
he remarked in a telephone conversation the week after
he had closed up the conference, after the socks-and-sandals
crowd had dispersed, after the tweedy philosophical
celebrities had flown home to the Netherlands, after
the doctoral students had caught at least Rent.
"The world is more complex now and that is why
philosophers are in more demand," he said. "Philosophy
doesn't belong in the classroom anymore. It's only an
historical accident that it got institutionalized. Let's
hope it can go into remission and become useful again."
