Fans pick 100 books like The Triumph of the Therapeutic

Frank Furedi is one of the world’s leading intellectuals. He has written on a wide range of issues from parenting, reading, education, therapy culture, risk, and on philosophical topics. I think this book brings together his many sociological books and papers with a concrete focus on one institution, the university. It provides a wider and more detailed discussion of the therapeutic university than Kathryn Ecclestone and I could in our book. He covers issues such as ‘safe spaces,’ ‘micro-aggressions,’ and ‘trigger warnings’ that suggest the university is dangerous place for vulnerable young minds. The tragedy of the contemporary university for Furedi, and me, is that it has become just a ‘big school’ in which students are treated like children. 

Ken McLaughlin approaches vulnerability and victim culture from what I think is a new perspective. The idea of victimhood culture and people seeing themselves as vulnerable was commonplace when he was writing his book. Looking at victims as ‘survivors’ he reveals how the victims may see themselves. McLaughlin looks at examples from social work and elsewhere to show that in therapy culture, the constant need for recognition and respect for vulnerable identities is both empowering and yet socially isolating. People may celebrate the fact that their victim status has been respected and they have ‘survived,’ but this leaves them unable to form any connection with others. A set of victims cannot be a community as it requires constant external validation.

Claire Fox is the founder of the Academy of Ideas, a think tank that has produced the annual Battle of Ideas Festival for over a decade and a half. Fox is passionate about freedom and speech and debate. This short polemical book begins and ends with how young people have adapted to victim culture. It begins with an example of how genuinely hurt young people are when hearing views that they found offensive. This book is said to have been responsible for the introduction of the concept of the ’snowflake generation’ into the UK. But Fox is nuanced in her approach, and she ends her book with a ‘Letter to the Snowflake Generation’ and a ‘Letter to the Anti-Snowflake Generation’. Her book should be mandatory reading for anyone beginning university.

For Williams, ‘woke’ is a contested concept but a useful one. It captures an elite ideology that dares not name itself but that is intolerant of any criticism. It attempts to dominate our attitudes toward children, education, sex, and politics. At the heart of woke is what she calls the ‘weaponisation of victimhood’. Woke attitudes are only possible in a culture that valorises individual fragility. Being ‘woke’ means that you see the world through the idea of human vulnerability. Children, women, and minority groups are all seen as vulnerable and in need of protection. Williams believes that despite its current victory, woke is weak and fearful of debating its ideas and of collective democratic action. The first step forward, she argues in her conclusion, is for people to step forward and speak up.

This is a very good, fair, smart, early interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis in general, and of its significance for culture and intellectual history in particular. It’s very well written, probably because Susan Sontag (Rieff’s wife at the time) is widely reported to have actually written the book, and in the 1960s the book became highly influential. It is easily Rieff’s best book. 

This well-written, tightly-argued little book of 1995 gathers together four feature articles from The New York Review of Books that together represent a watershed moment in ‘Freud Studies.’ For here was the NYRB, a long-standing bastion of psychoanalysis, publishing splashy articles that functioned like a Hollywood expose of Freud’s failings as a man, thinker, and therapist. In truth, Crews was simply giving voice to a ‘revisionist’ portrait of Freud that started in earnest in the wake of Jones’s three-volume ‘life and work’ of Freud (1953-57). Best of all: Crews connects it all to the ‘recovered memory’ movement of the 1980s and 90s, thereby drawing a  disturbing portrait of Freud’s legacy.  

With the exception of the prefatory material, which one can skip, this is one of the very best books on Hitchcock.

It is beautifully written and attentive to cinematic details and larger themes. It offers rich interpretations of several central films, with the first half focused on close interpretation and the second half, written later in Wood’s career, more orientated toward Marx, Freud, and gay studies.

Though the book is uneven, it contains some of the best analyses one will ever read of Hitchcock’s major films.

Of all Freud’s writings, 1920's Beyond the Pleasure Principle occupies a special place in relation not only to Žižek’s conception of psychoanalysis but also to his philosophical/theoretical framework as a whole. This is the text in which Freud introduces his audacious and controversial hypothesis of the “death drive” (Todestrieb). It is not until 1920 that Freud fully brings to light tendencies within the psyche disrupting and disobeying the pleasure principle, forces of negativity able to suspend (if only momentarily) the psyche’s usual pursuits of gratification, satisfaction, well-being, and the like. Žižek repeatedly insists that his core intellectual agenda ultimately is to demonstrate an underlying equivalence between the Cogito-like subject of German idealism and the death drive as per Freud and Lacan.

In principle, psychoanalytic theory and practice rely on evidence adduced from the clinical case studies of patients. Freud, however, presented very few such cases. With this in mind, Borch-Jacobsen has done something of permanent importance to the field: he researched and wrote 38 ‘lost’ and unofficial case studies of Freud’s patients and gathered them all into one volume. The book as such functions as a shocking disconfirmation of everything we thought we knew about Freud the man, the theorist, and the therapist. And, best of all, it does so in plain, highly accessible language.  

During the short walk that entered literary history, Sigmund Freud met Rainer Maria Rilke, a poet who experienced the terror of mortality and felt eerily that everything human is ultimately worthless. Not really, Freud answered.

The mortality of nature and humans–the end of the beloved human face–gives them their ultimate meaning. It is because we know that everything that exists will be gone one day, which is why we cherish them. I read about it for the first time in this book. It is written with a very mild and careful hand, describing all things worthy of living.