The Times Higher Education Supplement
June 16, 2000
I Have a Good Mind to Help
Do you have a problem at work?
Trouble in your marriage? Need new direction in your life?
Perhaps a philosopher can help. More and more philosophers
are leaving their departmental coffee rooms to offer "philosophical
counselling". Philosophy is not just some dry intellectual
pursuit, they claim - it has real relevance to our everyday
lives.
Lou Marinoff, a professor of
philosophy at the City College of New York, is at the
vanguard of this emerging profession. Author of the best-selling
book Plato Not Prozac, Marinoff argues that many
problems are at root philosophical. "We need to distinguish
between psychiatric, psychological and philosophical problems.
Prozac can be very helpful, but there are people whose
brain chemistry is perfectly all right, and whose problem
may have to do with issues such as purpose, meaning, values,
ethics. And this kind of person is better off seeing a
philosopher," he claims.
Plato Not Prozac is
already available in 15 languages and seems to have hit
a rich vein of public interest. In it Marinoff gives examples
from his own practice - including the case of Vincent,
a writer who turns up preoccupied by a problem at work.
A female colleague, offended by the Gauguin reproduction
Vincent had put up in his office, complained to their
boss. Vincent was given a stark choice - take the picture
down or resign. Though he chose to keep his job and remove
the picture, he was left feeling angry and full of resentment.
Marinoff decided that Vincent's
negative emotions stemmed from his sense of injustice
and turned to the 19th-century British philosopher John
Stuart Mill for help. After Mill's distinction between
offence and harm was explained to Vincent, he realised
that his female colleague had mistaken being offended
by the picture with being harmed by it. "But Vincent
also realised that he too had merely been offended, not
harmed. He was then able to laugh the incident off,"
says Marinoff. Peace of mind, delivered in one hour, at
a cost of $100.
Marinoff has since set up the
American Philosophical Practitioners Association to deal
with the flood of interest from academic philosophers
hoping to ply their trade, and the association offers
certification in philosophical counselling.
Marinoff insists that demand
has been driven by the public and that he and his colleagues
are being dragged down from their ivory towers by the
masses. While he was working at the centre for applied
ethics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,
people would turn up on his doorstep, asking for his help,
he says.
"They began by telephoning.
They would say, 'I have what looks like an ethical problem
or a moral dilemma, so maybe what I need is a philosopher.'
Then they started walking into the centre saying, 'I want
to see a philosopher.'" he says.
In 1991, Marinoff and his colleagues
began offering philosophical counselling as a public service.
When he later moved to New York, he realised that this
was the sort of thing that New Yorkers would pay good
money for, and that the "marketplace of ideas"
need not be just a metaphor.
Now the choice is not just
between a Freudian or Jungian therapist, but between a
Hegelian or an Aristotelian or a therapist from any other
school of thought.
"Of course, there are
more philosophers than psychologists because our tradition
is 2,500 years old, not 100," Marinoff boasts.
While some psychologists have
welcomed philosophers into the fold, many are uncomfortable
with the new competition. Dorothy Cantor, former president
of the American Psychological Association and a private
practitioner in Westfield, New Jersey, is worried by the
possibility that academics with PhDs in philosophy might
try to "treat" patients with deep-rooted troubles.
She is not comforted by assurances from philosophical
counsellors that they will restrict their practice to
people with philosophical problems, referring others to
psychiatrists or psychologists. "My challenge is,
without having been trained, how will they recognise the
person with serious psychological problems?"
Speaking from her private practice
at Westfield, New Jersey, Cantor is sceptical that many
problems are at root philosophical. "Occasionally,
a very depressed patient will ask, 'What is life all about
anyway?' which could be interpreted as a philosophical
question. But to me it is a desperate cry of, 'My life
is meaningless, I have no direction, I have no purpose.'
That is not a philosophical question at all. I also have
a sense that there is an economic issue here. Academic
jobs are very hard to come by and when you can't find
a job doing what you were trained to do, you try to look
for some other way of making a living using your training.
Some philosophers also have
reservations about philosophy as therapy. Roger Scruton,
visiting professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College,
London, worries that the purity of the subject might become
tainted. "Philosophy is not a form of counselling,
it's a way of life that involves the pursuit of truth,"
he says. In an article for The Times, Scruton wrote: "Philosophy
has until now spoken with the accents of the academy and
not with the voice of a fortune teller."
Marinoff counters that philosophy
is neither about discovering the truth nor about curing
people. "The premise of a philosophical counsellor
is not that there is something wrong with you, but that
there is something right with you, for wanting to understand
what is going on."
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