The Psychotherapy Culture

Several studies have shown that mental health professionals are heavily concentrated in university towns and in affluent communities where the college-educated settle.  The problems for which most of these people seek help are not serious mental illness, but rather intrapersonal (e.g., low self-esteem) and interpersonal (e.g., marital) difficulties.  (Indeed, "It was recently reported that in one part of the United States [an academic setting] the principal presenting symptom for patients who offer themselves to be analyzed by analysts-in-training is the difficulty of completing their Ph.D. dissertations.")  Freud himself stated, "The optimum conditions for . . . [psychoanalytic psychotherapy exist where not needed -- i.e., among the healthy."  Thus professional mental health resources are strongly oriented toward the worried well rather than the suffering sick.

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., in "Freudian Fraud: the Malignant Effect of Freud's Theory on American Thought and Culture," p.208