“Most psychoanalytic theory now is a contemporary version of the etiquette book.”

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2013/01/beyond-couch

Beyond the couch

Psychoanalysis and the human talent for unhappiness.

BY JANE SHILLING PUBLISHED 03 JANUARY 2013

The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves
Stephen Grosz
Chatto & Windus, 240pp, £14.99

What, exactly, is an “examined life”? One that is worth living, according to Plato’s Apology, in which he records Socrates, on trial for his life, arguing that “the unexamined life is not worth living”.

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More than a decade ago Phillips wrote, “Most psychoanalytic theory now is a contemporary version of the etiquette book.” This was prescient, given the subsequent development of what one might call “psychoanalysis lite” – the dilution of the hermetic, private intensity of individual therapy into a more appetising and popular fusion of self-help and entertainment. Examples of the tendency include the successful television drama series In Treatment, in which the actor Gabriel Byrne plays a troubled psychoanalyst; the flourishing of such ideas nurseries as Alain de Botton’s School of Life, which offers, among other opportunities for self-examination, a “Life MOT” with a “highly qualified psychotherapist” for £100; and, indeed, some of Phillips’s more light-hearted publications. Yet etiquette books, though despised by those who think they already know how to behave, can offer considerable reassurance and consolation to those who think they might not.