'One Nation Under Therapy': They Don't Feel Your Pain

New York Times
Books
Sunday Book Review
May 1, 2005

'One Nation Under Therapy': They Don't Feel Your Pain
By
ALISSA QUART

ONE NATION UNDER THERAPY How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance.By Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel.310 pp. St. Martin's Press. $23.95.

THE alarmist nonfiction book is a staple of publishing. In fact, it is such a staple that it has its own backlash genre, the anti-alarmist alarmist book. Anti-alarmist alarmist books argue the counterintuitive points: that the kids are all right, that everything is getting better not worse, and that we have nothing to fear but therapy itself. Christine Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel's ''One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance'' is one of the latest examples, joining a canon that includes ''The Myth of Self-Esteem,'' ''The Progress Paradox'' and ''The Culture of Fear.'' According to Sommers and Satel, our self-pity and self-concern are doing something far worse than simply annoying our friends. Self-absorption, they claim, is destroying America.

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