What's Therapy Good For?

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 23 January 2024

⏱️ 59 minutes

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Summary

People are fighting online (shocking, I know) about whether therapy is a godsend, a scam, or something in between. Without delving too deep into the Twitter weeds, we can actually extract a pretty important insight from this debate: whatever the merits or drawback of any particular therapeutic practice, our understanding of spiritual matters--our actual psychology or "study of the soul"--is badly in need of a reboot. As part of my ongoing investigation into the relationship between the inner and outer life, I take a look at what T.S. Eliot and Freud have to say about the nature of spiritual life.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to Young Heretics where today we will be reading T.S. Elliot as a form of self-care.
0:07.0	Okay, I would like to start off today by talking about therapy discourse.
0:19.8	And if you don't know what I mean by that, first of all, God bless you because you're probably not as online as I am and I'm sure that is a good thing.
0:30.0	But if you do know what I mean by capital T capital D therapy discourse then you're probably sick of it and you're probably thinking
0:37.8	What can we say about therapy and its uses or its failures or whatever it hasn't already been said to death
0:45.4	and argued screamingly over online on Twitter on social media. What else do we
0:51.1	really need to beat this dead horse? What could Spencer possibly contribute to this entire disaster,
0:57.2	to this dumpster fire that's going on?
1:00.1	But I actually do think that I have something to say here that can lead us into, maybe away from the
1:07.5	TL, away from the frantic madness of arguing online, and into more searching. of when it comes to the soul because I'm gonna suggest here that that's what
1:24.0	therapy discourse is all about and it leads me again back into this set of
1:30.0	questions about the right relationship between the inner and outer life.
1:35.7	That's what we've been talking about basically all year so far and I think what we're going
1:40.1	to keep talking about through two particular perspectives.
1:43.3	We've talked about the relationship between art and morality, which is about how we take visual
1:49.2	or audio media or anything at all and use it to express the inward life and how we do that
1:56.0	rightly and beautifully but also in a way that is virtuous and then there's the
2:00.1	relationship between science and faith which is about the material world and its relationship to the spirit and the soul and it's that aspect of the
2:08.2	question is that set of concerns that I think this therapy discourse thing is really getting at.
2:14.3	So this is one of those conversations that sort of gets kicked up online and suddenly there's
2:21.0	all this dust and heat and maybe not so much light and by the
2:26.3	time you get to it people have already very quickly hardened into these extreme
	...

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