The Origins of Unhappiness, by David Smail (1993)

Instead of looking inward to detect and eradicate within ourselves the products of 'psychopathology', we need to direct our gaze out into the world to identify the sources of our pain and unhappiness. Instead of burdening ourselves with, in one form or another, the responsibility for 'symptoms' of 'illness', 'neurotic fears', 'unconscious complexes', 'faulty cognitions' and other failures of development and understanding, we would do better to clarify what is wrong with a social world which gives rise to such forms of suffering.

I have become less and less able to see the people who consult me as having anything 'wrong' with them, and more and more aware of the constrains which are placed on their ability to escape the distress they experience.

For what are on offer in the psychotherapeutic bazaar are not so much - indeed, are not at all - substantiated theories of psychological damage or demonstrably effective cures of emotional pain and confusion, but a range of more or less homespun philosophies of life and the attendant strategies they spawn for trying to cope with it.

Very often the need for solidarity with a person who is perceived as possessing power in relation to the individual's predicament outweighs any rational assessment of how effective that power actually is. [...]

There is a great deal of comfort to be gained from association with someone who is able to convince you that s/he knows what s/he is doing, even if s/he doesn't.

The notion that there is something 'wrong' with the person in distress which has to be put 'right' is absolutely central to the medical and psychological disciplines which have grown up over the past 150 years. [...]

And yet the evidence that despair, confusion, misery and madness can really usefully be conceived of as varieties of 'pathology' is slender in the extreme, and, even at its most persuasive, rests on the ideological interpretation of otherwise ambiguous research findings rather than on any intellectually compelling demonstration of its validity.

What is a 'mentally healthy' way of life - for instance, is compliance better than opposition, or assertiveness preferable to meekness?

For the problem psychologists and psychotherapists are addressing is not really a technical one of how to cure an illness or adjust an abnormality, but how to live a life, and that is simply not a closed question of the kind which can expect a simple answer.

It would take an optimist of outstanding proportions to expect a mere book to make any difference to this state of affairs, but nevertheless I think some of the main reasons for it are discernible, and need to be stated at every opportunity.

For power is the social element in which we exist. It is almost impossible to think of a human experience which is not shaped by power, does not carry either a positive or negative charge of power. We are thrown at birth into the most highly charged and potentially shocking field of power which it is possible to imagine. At no other point in life is the disparity of the power between the individual (the infant) and the adults (usually parents) around it likely to be so great. Stamped at the root of our experience is a message of overwhelming significance - that we have to deal with a world which is immeasurably more powerful than ourselves.

The world forces on us at the earliest point of our experience strategies for dealing with it which I doubt we ever really abandon.