CALL ME MAGGIE

Looking back over the centuries, philosophy has often served society as the proto-discipline par excellance.  It was the name given to the community of the wise, before that wisdom become specialized enough or technological enough to become some professionalized academic discipline.  But sometimes, those professionalized offspring grew into philosophies of their own – usually marked by the telltale suffix “ism” – often to the detriment of both originary philosophical thinking and scientific acuity.  The awkward gait of these philosophies on stilts  moved clumsily through the radical questioning of philosophy and the objectivity of science.

Psychotherapy offers a case in point.  In a brief narrative of the history of psychology, Ronald Dworkin claims that psychotherapy has finally come back down to earth.  This grounding has not brought it back to being a science, but more accurately a “technology of friendship” (my words.)  My question to Dworkin is whether this evolution will…