How to Be Happy Lesson #17: Get Thee to a Shrinkery

“And happiness — if such a thing is even achievable — is a much murkier matter.” This rather “disenhappying” statement falls in the middle of Oliver Burkeman’s 2016 article in The Guardian titled “Therapy wars: The Revenge of Freud.” Burkeman relates the story of how Freudian psychoanalysis has been much debunked since its salad days in the late 1890s through the 1940s. To visit a psychoanalyst in these “modern” times, as Burkeman did, is to “plunge immediately into the arcane Freudian language of ‘resistance’ and ‘neurosis,’ ‘transference’ and countertransference.’” The doctor Burkeman went to see views himself as “an excavator of the catacombs of the unconscious: of the sexual drives that lurk beneath awareness; the hatred we feel for those we claim to love; and the other distasteful truths about ourselves we don’t know, and often don’t wish to know.” Yikes! What’s that old saw about leaving well enough alone?

Many have taken a dim view of psychoanalysis as a path to well-being and happiness since its inception. One critic Burkeman cites had this to say about Freud and his ideas: “Arguably no other notable figure in history was so fantastically wrong about nearly every important thing he had to say.” Freudian analysis became de rigeur to say the least, he tells us, and of all the therapies that arose to compete to be the psychopenultanine [top dog in psychology], cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) won out. Rather than diving into what you think about your mother or the level of your dickealosy [penis envy], CBT focuses on “adjusting the unhelpful thought patterns that cause negative emotions.”

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? Just dial in the correct emotional settings and you’re good to go. But, as Burkeman reports, some psychoanalysts think CBT is a cheap and bogus path to happiness:

At their core is a fundamental disagreement about human nature — about why we suffer, and how, if ever, we can hope to find peace of mind.”

CBT doesn’t exactly claim that happiness is easy, but it does imply that it’s relatively simple: your distress is caused by your irrational beliefs, and it’s within your power to seize hold of those beliefs and change them.

Psychoanalysts contend that things are much more complicated.

This is the point where the “happiness is murkier” line comes in. Some recent studies have shown that CBT may not be as effective as previously thought, that it may be more of a placebo than a cure for mental anguish, and some say the CBT may even make things worse.

Toward the end of his article, Burkeman offers this admission:

Perhaps the only undeniable truth to emerge from disputes among therapists is that we still don’t have much of a clue how minds work. When it comes to easing mental suffering, “it’s like we’ve got a hammer, a saw, a nail-gun and a loo brush, and this box that doesn’t always work properly, so we just keep hitting the box with each of these tools to see what works,” said Jules Evans, policy director for the Centre for the History of Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.

The legacy of Freud, Burkeman writes, is “a reminder that we shouldn’t necessarily expect life to be all that happy, nor to assume we can ever really know what’s going on inside — indeed, that we’re often deeply emotionally invested in preserving our ignorance of unsettling truths.”

Well, shoot. I can’t end this lesson on how to be happy on that note. There is one renowned psychoanalyst that Burkeman omits from his discussion: Lucy van Pelt. Lucy offers sage, very reasonably priced advice to her clients, e.g., “Go home and eat a jellybread sandwich folded over.” So, in her incisive, succinct words, lesson #17 in how to be happy is simply this: “Snap out of it!”

(Published originally on RatBlurt™, April 3, 2019.)