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The Fading Promise of Higher Education / Summer 2026 / Essays

Freud in the Age of Therapy-Speak

The False Promise of Self-Articulation

Anna Ballan

Sigmund Freud (detail), 1977, by Jean de Gaspary (b. 1938); Bridgeman Images.

Anna Ballan

Anna Ballan is a writer based in New York.

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W.H. Auden’s remark that Freud had become “a whole climate of opinion/under whom we conduct our different lives” has become something of a commonplace, but today it holds true only partially. We are all, in Philip Rieff’s lexicon, psychological men: We speak of triggers, defenses, attachment styles, and unconscious motives with a fluency that would have startled Freud’s most jargon-happy disciples.

But while the language we use is ostensibly analytic, our worldview is something like the inverse. Freud, read against the assumptions of our own therapeutic times, becomes uncooperative. The psychological culture popularized on screens often assumes several things: that you actually want to get better; that insight leads frictionlessly to change; that naming an issue defuses it; that the self is a project to be perfected. Freud assumes that a part of you—perhaps the most salient part—does not want to get better; that apparent insight can deepen the problem and naming an issue can intensify its grip; that the self is a kind of battlefield. If the therapy of today’s screen culture holds a mirror up to a curated self-image, actual therapy, Freud would insist, is more like a light held up over a swamp.

Freud’s influence in the United States reached its peak in the 1950s through the 1970s, when he became an unquestioned sovereign of American intellectual and cultural life. Between the arrival of Freudian émigrés and the publication of new, authoritative translations—not to mention propagation by Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and others—Freud’s ideas took the college curriculum and popular imagination by storm. One need only watch early Woody Allen films to see the analyst treated as a kind of oracle, spoken of with the reverence one would ordinarily reserve for a sage or a rabbi. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, Freud had been effectively dethroned from his mid-century prestige. The rise of psychopharmacology, beloved by insurance companies for its cost-effectiveness, combined with the comparative efficiency of approaches such as cognitive behavioral therapy, started to eclipse the slow and narrative-based art of analysis. Not that these forms of treatment need be pitted against one another—each has its place, and they can work in tandem—but the overall trend was decisive: The American mind turned toward the quantifiable quicker fix. Psychoanalysis largely retreated into private practice and the academic humanities, and Freud himself was thrown out with the bath water—his blind spots and failures fairly taken to task, and his more outré flights of theory met with groans rather than knowing smiles.

The language of pop psychology, meanwhile, continued its absorption into the mainstream. Therapy found its way onto daytime television and bestseller lists; Oprah, Dr. Phil, and the self-help industry translated clinical concepts into everyday language. The burgeoning wellness industry coupled psychology with consumerism, while some corporate HR departments adopted their own therapeutic dialect (all the better to cushion mass layoffs). By the 2010s, Tumblr and other social-media platforms had made psychological vocabulary a kind of lingua franca, if only for an expanding cohort of plugged-in users. Even as the diffusion of that vocabulary brought clarity or relief to many—a point not to be minimized—for young people especially it seemed to dissolve into an insight-devouring churn, a talking-about-feelings rather than a working-through-them. Therapy-speak had been gaining ground, but the Freudian strand of it, with its attention to ambivalence, defenses, and drives, had been gradually sidelined. In its place arose a thinner idiom, one that promised empowerment through perpetual scrolling and self-disclosure rather than a plunge into the murkier depths of psychic life.

The False Promise of Self-Articulation

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the assumption that self-articulation liberates is only half true. The more articulate we are, the more elaborate and agile our evasions may become. Pathological symptoms are not random errors, after all: they are solutions the psyche has devised, protective compromises that maintain a precarious psychic equilibrium—a panic symptom that holds in abeyance a deeper grief, a chronic independence that protects against the anxiety of dependency, a rigid scruple that helps fend off an inconvenient desire. To unravel these is to tamper with a system that may, however...