The Philadelphia Inquirer
Tuesday, August 17, 1999
A Dose of Philosophy
Carlin Romano, Inquirer Book Critic
Lou Marinoff's "Plato,
Not Prozac!" looks to become the bible of the "philosophical
counseling" movement - which would treat people
who have problems with clear thinking instead of psychotherapy.
JERSEY CITY, NJ - The moment
cynical journalists hear about Lou Marinoff's professional
crusade - lobbying for philosophers to practice as therapists,
just like psychologists and psychiatrists - the jokes
and headlines form fast.
I Shrink, Therefore I Am.
Take Two Aphorisms and Call
Me in the Morning.
The Uncompensated Life Is
Not Worth Living.
How many Philosophers Can
You Fit on the Head of a Couch?
Marinoff knows the drill,
and has the clips to prove it, but the 47-year-old philosophy
professor at City College of New York doesn't mind.
Compared with the hemlock that Socrates faced, or the
fiery stake offered Giordano Bruno, what's a little
gentle mockery?
"This is an example
of mass culture's incessant drive for the lowest common
denominator." Says the bearded, intense-looking
Canadian native, clad in a Plato T-shirt, as he relaxed
in his Jersey City apartment.
"How can we further
simplify what we've already oversimplified?" Marinoff
asks, his rhetorical questions dripping sarcasm. "How
can we further dumb down what we've already made unintelligible
by dumbing down? Can we do this with philosophy? That's
the challenge!"
Fast-talking and forceful,
but good-humored, Marinoff is teeing off on the simplistic
reception his "philosophical counseling" movement
has sometimes received in the past, and that he fears
may also greet his just-published first book, Plato,
Not Prozac!: Applying Philosophy to Everyday Problems
(HarperCollins, $23.95), which looks likely to become
the bible - or the Interpretation of Dreams - of the
movement.
"When people come to
see Dr Marinoff," the book's jacket copy announces,
"they do not get endless discussions about their
childhoods, quick prescriptions for anti-depressants,
or tedious analyses of their behavior patterns. Instead,
they learn how the ideas of the world's great thinkers
can shed light on the way they live, from Kierkegaard's
thoughts on coping with death and Kant's theory of obligation
to the I Ching's guidelines on adapting to change and
Aristotle's advice top pursue reason and moderation.
Indeed, Marinoff ventures
into every messy corner of everyday life - relationship
trauma, career frustration, family strife, doubt about
life's meaning, coping with loss - while offering a
five-step plan for identifying, expressing, analyzing,
contextualizing and solving a problem. Case studies
about "Vincent," "Doug," "Janet,"
and "Larry" weave their situations together
with insights from wisdom traditions and enough jazzy
one-liners to keep you reading for more than 50 minutes.
Philosophical counseling,
in Marinoff's version, targets the future, not the past.
It does not "disease-ify" every human problem,
but accepts that having problems is normal. Despite
the book's absolutist title, Marinoff admits as early
as page 10 that "Some people may not benefit from
Plato, just as others may not benefit from Prozac. Some
may need Prozac first, then Plato later, or Prozac and
Plato together."
"I work with people
as a human being," explains Marinoff, leaning over
his dining room table, "not as an encyclopedia
of aphorisms, or as a database that matches your problem
with some fortune cookie." He has been counseling
clients (not "patients") for eight years,
sometimes at $100 an hour, sometimes pro bono.
One example Marinoff likes
to cite is that of a successful Wall Street businessman
who came to him because the discovery that his wife
was having an affair shook his fundamental beliefs about
his life. Marinoff says that by careful questioning,
he established that the man did not want to end his
marriage, as he initially claimed, but to preserve it.
Marinoff then led the man through Kant's Principles
of Forgiveness, Compassion and Duty, enabling the man
to see the willingness to forgive as a strength, not
a weakness.
"What the media want,"
Marinoff says, "is for me to be waving another
magic wand, to be someone who says, 'Plato! You feel
better now?' That's nonsense."
Marinoff is media savvy enough
to know that his book's catchy title bears some of the
blame. Good Reasoning, Not Prozac just isn't as snappy.
But if "philosophical counseling" takes off
in America on the Heels of Marinoff's well-promoted
tome, it may be because an idea whose time has come,
and a Woody Allenish philosopher with a jaunty, colloquial
style, somehow found each other.
Philosophical counseling,
Marinoff acknowledges, was pioneered by philosopher
Gerd Achenbach in Germany in the early '80s. Achenbach
urged personal counseling that drew on insights developed
in philosophical dialogue. Opposed to dogmatic psychological
theories, Achenbach envisioned what freewheeling "dialogic
dance" between participants that would produce
self-understanding.
Achenbach's ideas caught
on in the Netherlands, Israel, Canada and other countries,
where hundreds of philosophical practitioners now operate.
Organizations formed, literature grew, Web sites appeared.
Marinoff entered the scene
in the early '90s. Raised in Montreal, where he did
a first degree in mathematical physics at Concordia
University, he'd spent much of his 20s questing - as
a poet, classical guitarist and "Dharma bum"
- before settling down at age 20 to study philosophy
of science at the University College, London.
In 1991, with a doctorate
in academically respectable "decision theory,"
he moved to Vancouver to take a part-time position at
the University of British Columbia's Centre for the
Applied Ethics.
"Every week," Marinoff
explains, "one of us was on radio or TV or quoted
in the newspaper. All of a sudden, People started coming
to us or even walking in off the street and demanding
to see a philosopher... I developed protocols. I started
seeing people."
Marinoff found that many
former patients of psychiatrists of psychologist considered
them dogmatic, controlling, condescending, and/or simply
unhelpful, and wanted to try something new. Then an
em-mail from Israeli philosopher Ran Lahav led to Marinoff's
contributing an article to the leading academic book
on the subject - Essays on Philosophical Counseling
(1995), which Lahav co-edited.
Marinoff and Lahav followed
in the footsteo9ps of earlier intellectual movements
and next organized an international conference of their
peers at the University of British Columbia in 1994.
The Third International Conference on Philosophical
Practice, in midtown Manhattan two years ago, proved
a watershed event. A splashy article in the New York
Observer triggered a sheaf of articles on Marinoff and
company, as well as the book contract that became Plato,
Not Prozac!
In the United States, two
main organizations now define the field. The American
Society for Philosophy, Counseling, and Psychotherapy
conducts academic meetings. The more recent American
Philosophical Practitioners Association (APPA), cofounded
by Marinoff in march 1998 is an activist trade group
pushing for the national licensing of philosophical
practitioners.
Already, it has some support.
In New York state, Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., a South
Bronx Democrat who believes lower-income constituents
should have as much access to philosophical therapy
as wealthier clients, has introduced a bill that will
enable philosophical therapists to be paid by third-party
insurers such as HMOs. Responses from the psychotherapeutic
establishment have generally been severe.
The New York Health Plan
Association, the industry's trade group in that state,
mocked the Diaz proposal as an "I think, therefore
I bill" plan. Dorothy Cantor, former president
of the American Psychological Association, charged that
philosophers can't handle something as delicate as a
person's mental health," and "totally ignore
the role of the unconscious." Herbert Sacks, former
president of the American Psychiatric Association, accused
Marinoff of "practicing medicine without a license."
If the "philosophical
counseling" movement heads toward this area - no
legislative initiatives exist here yet - indications
are it will receive an equally frosty reception.
"I think it's a big
joke," says psychiatrist Michael Miller, 39, who
practices with the Psychiatric Physicians Association
at 1525 Locust St. "People who want to talk to
philosophers are misguided."
While Miller concedes that
individual philosophers might make good therapists in
limited situations, the idea of their supplanting trained
medical personnel in evaluating people who might have
serious mental illness outrages him.
"The intellectual tradition
of philosophy has nothing to do with real world problem
solving," says Miller. "They're the least
qualified people to do that. They have no clinical experience.
Even psychologists, in my opinion, are not qualified
to handle most patients that I see."
Miller thinks the Pennsylvania
Psychiatric Society would oppose licensing or accreditation
of philosophical practitioners if it became an issue
here. "If they get paid, good for them," Miller
says. "Anyone who goes to them is a fool.... In
my estimation, any doctor who sends a patient to a philosopher
deserves to lose his license."
Marinoff says he's used to
hostility from established psychotherapists. "They
try to scare people," he says. "They always
say, 'Oh, but they're not trained. What if a person
is suicidal?'"
"Do you think people
are so damn stupid," Marinoff asks, "or inappropriately
equipped by evolution, that when a crazy person gets
on a subway, a bunch of untrained people - not clinical
psychologists - don't know it? How trained do you have
to be to recognize someone who's dangerous? It's nonsense."
Psychiatrists and psychologists,
Marinoff adds, have little to brag about concerning
ability to predict behavior. " If only they could
predict who the serial killers are, we wouldn't have
them," Marinoff gibes. "Don't even get me
started."
Marinoff says his voicemail
and e-mail "overflow" when the psychotherapists
attack him. "They drive clients to us because people
can see its hubris."
In any case, Marinoff reiterates,
while philosophical counselors disagree among themselves
on a number of subjects - the appropriateness of fees,
for instance, or government licensing - they aren't
generally as dismissive of established therapists as
vice versa, and he thinks many of the latter misunderstand
his movement. One of the philosophical practitioner's
first tasks, Marinoff emphasizes, is to establish whether
a client might have a biologically based problem and
be better served by a psychiatrist. Philosophical counseling,
Marinoff like to say, is "therapy for the sane,"
for "rational autonomous beings" who "don't
need to be patronized."
For now, Marinoff is savoring
the unexpectedly large crowd that showed up the other
night at Barnes & Noble's Chelsea superstore in
Manhattan for his book's national launch. It resonated
to Marinoff's one-liners ("The idea that every
personal problem is a mental illness is itself a mental
illness!" and got off some of its own ("Have
you heard about the sequel?" a retiree asked a
reporter. "Voltaire, Not Viagra!")
And no matter where you stand
on the issues, Marinoff plainly has his enemies stymied
on one point.
He's around in August.
