Smail

"The best name I can think of for the philosophy that underlies this phenomenon is ‘magical voluntarism’...The way may certainly be hard, possibly (at the expensive end of the therapeutic spectrum) necessitating Odyssean ventures into the Unconscious, but ultimately salvation depends upon personal acts of will.

This was the principal achievement of the founders of modern psychotherapy: to turn the relation of person to world inside out, such that the former becomes the creator of the latter. With many ‘postmodernist’ approaches (e.g. ‘narrative therapy’) magical voluntarism reaches its apotheosis: the world is made of words, and if the story you find yourself in causes you distress, tell yourself another one.

From any rational, scientific standpoint, this kind of view is completely incoherent—indeed it is psychotic. And yet the universe of discourse in which it is put forward is, essentially, a rational, scientific one: the propositions of ‘psychology’ purport to be statements about our own nature and the nature of our world, and in this specific case it is asserted that our world is made of words and can be remade through rearranging words. That such a preposterous notion could be seriously put forward and maintained by people considered to be social scientists is inexplicable unless one introduces into the explanatory framework the notion of interest. In other words, it cannot be that the proposition in question is true; it can only be that it is useful, i.e. that it suits the interests both of those who assert it and those who assent to it. As long as consideration of interest is repressed we are likely to remain utterly mystified about the causes and cures of our psychological ills, trying instead to find our way in a make-believe world while looking for guidance principally to the adepts of magical voluntarism.''

"The trouble is, as soon as therapeutic schools start to formalize and professionalize their procedures they nearly always—advertently or not—enmesh themselves in interiorizing philosophies of one kind or another. There are in fact very few approaches to psychological therapy that don’t in some measure subscribe to individualist, idealist and/or what I call magical voluntarist positions. All such approaches have their foundation in a general cultural assumption that is in fact very hard to shake off—i.e. that fundamentally we are all individuals who just happen to find ourselves in societies. I suspect that it might be more accurate to say that fundamentally we are social creatures who just happen to feel as individuals''.

"Margaret Thatcher was a big influence...In one sense, she was just about the best psychologist that I’ve ever come across, because she knew better than anybody (or the influences she stood for knew better than anybody) what changes people, and how to bring people into line and that’s by affecting their interests and threatening them, inducing them through paying them lots of money and so on. It became very evident after 1979 that the people who came to see me didn’t have much room for manoeuvre, no matter how much will power they applied to the circumstances that they found themselves in, and usually because of some nasty, punitive measure that the Tory government had taken. These people blamed themselves, and they thought: ‘what is it about me…my personal strategies and so on that are not working…why am I so inadequate in these circumstances…?’ and it was perfectly obvious to me that they were not inadequate; it was the circumstances that were the problem''.

David Smail