The Discovered Self: Identity in the Therapeutic Age

If you think people in general have gone crazy in the last decade or so, you're right. Some do ok and some barely have their heads above water, but millions wallow in mass delusion about what a human being even is. Social contagion of mental illness is not unprecedented in the history of the world. What is unprecedented is the shift from a solid objective foundation for truth, to a shifting flow of subjective, irrational emotion. It is a worldview shift, across society, casting us adrift now in ceaseless flow, with no land in sight.

The therapeutic worldview entails a shift from morality to psychology - from sin to syndrome. The cost is a sense of helplessness, and therefore victimhood, brought on by feeling we're in the grip of psychological forces we can't control. The moral paradigm, on the other hand, preserves one's agency and therefore one's dignity.

If you fail, you can do something about it. It's not you, it's the conduct. Go and sin no more. But if your anxieties and idiosyncrasies and lack of confidence are put down to psychological disorder, it is you, and you're marked thereafter as vulnerable.You're left to walk through the world in a timorous state of presumptive victimhood. That subjective feeling of helplessness incapacitates, and it is contagious, spreading through society as an ideological virus.

There is hope. We can break out of this mind-trap. But first we have to understand it.

ALBERT NORTON, JR. is a writer and attorney working in the American South. He is author of The Mountain and the River: Genesis, Postmodernism, and the Machine (2023) and Dangerous God: A Defense of Transcendent Truth (2021), both concerning the formation of truth and values in a postmodern age; and Intuition of Significance, a 2020 work weighing the merits of theism against materialism. He is also the author of several award-winning short stories, and two novels: Another Like Me (2015) and Rough Water Baptism (2017), on themes of navigating reality in a post-Christian world.