We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse
We've Had 133 Years of Psychotherapy and the World is Getting Worse
It happens every day in my psychotherapy office. A client comes in and complains about the state of the world. The climate is heating up, politics has dissolved into name-calling, madmen with mad weapons threaten extinction. It's almost as if they're asking me to do something about it. It's almost as if they've been reading James Hillmann and Michael Ventura's book, "We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse."
Hillmann and Ventura wrote their book 33 years ago. It must have been put on the remainder shelf long ago. It never caught on when they wrote it, as the authors might have predicted, because it challenged everything the therapy world held sacred. I'm late to review it because I didn't read it when it came out. I recently read it now because I've been trying to put my finger on what's wrong with therapy and what on earth is wrong with the world.
What I found changed how I understand both.
Symptoms are Messages
Whenever my clients bring up politics, I say we're not here to solve the problems of the world, we're here to solve their problems. Why can't you stop worrying? My clients know it, Hillmann and Ventura knew it, and I would know it if I had read their book, but my clients can't stop worrying because of the problems of the world. The symptoms we've been trying to address are not my client's symptoms, they're the world's.
My clients are not supposed to stop worrying while the climate is heating up, politics has dissolved into name-calling, and madmen with mad weapons threaten extinction. Worrying is supposed to motivate them to do something about it. Symptoms, according to Hillman and Ventura, are not problems to be solved but messages to be heard.
The message is pay attention, and not just to your inner world. But that's not what therapy does. Instead, therapy takes your legitimate concerns about a crazy world and makes them about you. Therapy has become a massive machine for converting political problems into personal ones. It's been so successful that people now know more about their attachment styles than they do about how their city council works.
The Acorn Theory
James Hillman was one of the most influential and provocative psychologists of the 20th century. Michael Ventura is a cultural critic, novelist, and journalist. Their central insight came from Hillman's "acorn theory," which turns traditional psychology on its head.
Rather than focusing on what damaged you, Hillman asks what you're meant to become. A director of studies at the Jung Institute in Zurich, you wouldn't expect Hillmann to be as disapproving of the inner child as he is in the book. That precious, wounded part of you holds all your creativity and authentic self, but he says we should be more concerned with who we're becoming than who we were. The inner child sounds lovely, but as he points out, "The child archetype is by nature apolitical and disempowered." It does not possess the abilities to do something about anything.
The metaphorical inner child has become the perfect distraction from actual, living children. When you're processing your childhood trauma, you're not organizing against a system that’s traumatizing kids right now. We're very trauma informed these days, but Hillman was more informed about acorns. To understand an oak tree, he says you can look at all the trauma it suffered. It lost a branch here, fire got to it there; but nothing will determine the nature of the tree as much as the hidden instructions within the acorn.
Your struggles, quirks, and even what we call symptoms isn't damage to be healed but signs of a guiding spirit steering you to your true nature. Early difficulties shape you into who you are meant to be. Instead of asking "How did my past damage me?" you should ask "How is my essential self showing up in my problems?"
The perfectionist who can't finish projects might actually be a visionary who refuses to settle for mediocrity. The people pleaser who gets walked over could be a natural healer channeling deep empathy. The anxious overthinker might be a strategic planner whose soul is wired to see patterns others miss. The rebellious troublemaker could be an innovator who refuses to accept systems that don't serve humanity. The sensitive person who gets overwhelmed might be picking up on subtleties others can't perceive. Instead of asking "What's wrong with me?" Hillman would have you ask "What is this trying to teach me about who I really am?"
Therapy Language
As bad as things were when they wrote their book in 1992, the world seems to have gotten even worse. It certainly hasn't gotten better. Meanwhile, the therapy world is even more ubiquitous. Everything is put in therapy language now. Dating apps are full of people listing their attachment styles like credentials. TikTok overflows with people diagnosing themselves with everything from ADHD to bipolar disorder. Disagreements are "triggering," bad bosses are "toxic," conversations need "safe spaces," exes are "narcissists," and parents are "emotionally unavailable." You're not tired, you're "burned out," you're not sad, you're "depressed," and you're not different, you're "neurodivergent."
Hillman and Ventura warned us about that. They would not have been happy. When we reduce our rich, complex inner lives to therapeutic abstractions, we're killing our souls. We're trading poetry for pathology, metaphor for jargon. Therapy language makes us dumber, not smarter. It packs problems up in prim little packages and misses their point.
What's worse, therapy language has become a way to divide people into the enlightened versus unenlightened, healthy versus unhealthy, evolved versus toxic. If you're not fluent in therapy-speak, you're dismissed as someone uneducated or who "hasn't done the work." If you question whether every human interaction needs to be analyzed through a psychological lens, you're "in denial" or "emotionally unavailable." The language that was supposed to bring understanding has become a weapon for moral superiority. People use their therapy vocabulary to shut down conversations rather than open them up.
The Psyche is Not in You
Perhaps most insidiously, therapy culture promotes a radical individualism that horrified Hillman and Ventura. Everything is about your personal journey, your healing, your growth, your boundaries, your trauma. Everyone else becomes either a supporting character or an antagonist in your story. Community becomes impossible when everyone is too busy working on themselves to actually show up for each other. This hyperindividualism has left us more isolated than ever, which brings us to one of Hillman and Ventura's most profound insights. We've forgotten we're part of something bigger than ourselves.
Hillman puts it succinctly, "The psyche is not in you, you are in the psyche." The conventional view is that your psyche (your mind, soul, inner life) is contained inside your individual body. Thoughts and feelings happen in your head. This makes psychology a private, internal matter; depression, anxiety, and all your problems are in you.
Hillman argues the opposite. Your psychological state isn't just determined by what's happening inside your skull, but by a whole web of connections. You can't help but be affected by the environment, the relationships, and the cultural moment you're living in. They're all part of your psychological reality. If you're living in a sick society, you're going to feel sick too, and no amount of personal therapy will fix that. The psyche that needs healing is the world.
My Critique of the Book
I feel convicted while reading Hillman and Ventura's book. They would've counted me as part of the problem for the forty years I've been shrinking heads. I should have read it when it came out. But that's not to say that they're entirely right.
First, the practical problem: The amount of influence you have over the problems of the world is miniscule at best and non-existent at worst. Therefore, it makes more sense to cultivate your garden. You have the most impact on yourself and your immediate relationships. It all starts with inner work, but it shouldn't end there. There's nothing to say you can't learn about your city council as well as your attachment style.
Second, the inner child issue: I'm sorry to say that Hillman misses the point about tending to the inner child. The idea is not to become childish, but to see what the kid within you has been crying about. See what it needs so it'll let you get your work done. The kid inside isn't meant to run your life, but until you acknowledge what happened to them and give them what they're lacking, they'll keep sabotaging your efforts to show up fully in the world. He's right about acorns; there does seem to be something that pulls people towards their destiny, but your acorn will never grow into a mighty oak if a squirrel eats it.
Third, therapy talk: Somehow, Hillman and Ventura's objection to therapy language must have seeped into my consciousness years ago without my ever reading the book. I learned to speak it when I learned to be a counselor, but then found it wasn't very helpful. My whole writing career has been an attempt to move past the jargon and come up with a more authentic understanding of psychology. That being said, there's no reason to believe the TikTokers who spout therapy talk today won't become as disappointed with it as I was. Meanwhile, they've improved their vocabulary.
Fourth, the psyche is the world: When you locate problems in larger systems, it gives you a chance to evade responsibility for the things you can control. You can spend all your time analyzing how the world is making you sick without ever asking what your contribution to the madness has been.
Finally, my main critique of Hillman and Ventura: They do not take their analysis far enough and apply their own principles. If we conceive of the world as a psyche, and if the problems the authors identified (regression to the inner child, therapy talk, and individualism) are symptomatic, then what is the message those symptoms are trying to deliver? If the world as we know it is an acorn struggling to grow into an oak tree, what is this oak tree and how do the symptoms they identify contribute to its formation?
What the Symptoms Are Trying to Tell Us
The symptoms of cultural sickness that Hillman and Ventura saw might actually be healthy immune responses to genuinely toxic conditions and a necessary stage of development.
Consider this interpretation: After 133 years of totalitarian states, global capitalism, and mass movements that crush individual identity, of course people are retreating into radical individualism. It's not pathological; it's protective. When people spend their days in dehumanizing corporate environments, getting in touch with their inner child isn't regression; it's resistance. It's a way to reclaim a part of themselves that work kills. And, when people are grappling with unprecedented psychological and social complexity, they need new vocabulary. Therapy language, however clunky, gives them words for experiences that previous generations didn't have to name.
Therapy culture is not a distraction from political action but a form of political action. It’s a way people protect their humanity in an inhumane world. The "oak tree" our collective acorn is growing into might be a society that integrates individual authenticity with genuine community, and therapy culture is one messy step in that evolution.
Why isn't the world getting any better, then? Hillman, as a Jungian, ought to have known the answer. According to Jung there's a stage called the nigredo, the blackening, when everything appears to get worse before transformation can occur. This dark phase involves the breakdown of existing forms, a kind of necessary death that precedes rebirth. Everything seems chaotic, hopeless, even destructive; but it's actually the psyche's way of clearing out what no longer serves you so that something genuinely new can be born.
Maybe we're in that phase now. Maybe our current cultural obsession with individual healing is a necessary breakdown phase. We're learning to value the individual self precisely so we can bring an authentic self into genuine community.