Psychology Merchants
February 12, 2019
IF A perfume company released a report lamenting the fact that few men use perfume, and stated that “traditional masculinity” is to blame, would you be surprised? How about if the company said perfume will make men happier and the world a better place?
Wouldn’t the possibility of self-interest on the part of the company occur to you?
Why then when the leading organization that markets and regulates talk-based psychotherapy announced that “traditional masculinity,” with its stoicism and emotional reserve, is bad and that men need to be more emotional and willing to submit to psychotherapy, were so many conservative commentators alarmed and seemingly stunned?
A storm of protest continues over the American Psychological Association’s recent guidelines on psychological treatment for men and boys.
“Traits of so-called ‘traditional masculinity,’ like suppressing emotions & masking distress, often start early in life & have been linked to less willingness by boys & men to seek help, more risk-taking & aggression — possibly harming themselves & those with whom they interact,” the APA stated as part of its highly successful promotional campaign.
Men don’t seek or like psychotherapy as much as women. That’s been true since Sigmund Freud. Can you imagine any of the men Americans have, for better or worse, most admired in therapy? Can you imagine George Washington on the couch? Yes, masculinity itself is to blame. Therefore, if you want more people to go into therapy, you would want there to be less masculinity in the world. If you sell french fries, you want more people to eat french fries.
Who cares what the American Psychological Association, with its hundreds of millions of dollars and its blind endorsement of all kinds of social ills, thinks about masculinity?
Seriously, who cares? What else would you expect? The enemy will always try to disarm men.
The APA can’t even convincingly answer the most basic questions of human existence, such as why suffering exists and whether life has any meaning at all if one is not happy. It can’t tell you why you are here. It cannot give a single human being a truly good answer for why he should accept and endure. That would be okay if it were selling perfume or french fries. But it purports to sell actual cures for unhappiness and emotional suffering. That’s a tall order for a profession that cannot explain why these exist in the first place and that endorses the whole panoply of disorders that has caused grave personal unhappiness, including crushing materialism, broken marriages, homosexuality, abortion, contraception and mixed-up sex roles. Since the modern science of psychology was born, things have gotten worse, not better. That’s because it’s not science alone, it’s a philosophy of life, and this philosophy, which cannot answer even a child’s philosophical questions, is deeply nihilistic. It does not offer the two greatest cures for unhappiness — prayer and penance — because it cannot even begin to grasp these supernatural things or the love that is the infrastructure of reality. It is nihilistic. It does not understand the source of our problems, whether it be depression or addiction or sadness in marriage. Sin — our own sins and the sins of others — makes us deeply unhappy. If there is one word you will never find in the lexicon of psychology it is “sin.” And yet it explains so much.
We have a purpose regardless of our pain. It cannot be found in modern psychology. Who cares what these masters of the universe think? They are running a business.
Someday this business will be reduced to dust. Our souls, on the other hand, will live forever. And in the moments after our deaths, our whole lives will pass before us in the presence of God. And whether we were unhappy or not won’t matter in the least, only what we did to respond to that love. How much we loved in return will matter a great deal.
