Watters and Ofshe say the dozens of types of therapy practiced today all share a "lineage of mistakes" dating back to Freud. Talk therapy's fundamental belief is that we are all at the mercy of unconscious mental forces outside of our awareness, which we cannot by ourselves name or tame. Freud believed mental illnesses had developmental causes, most often stemming from childhood. He believed that trained analysts could understand these in a way that could ultimately tame them, bringing self-understanding, an end to problem behaviors and -- the grandest claim -- a cure for major mental illnesses.

The scientific and pharmacological breakthroughs of the last few decades have left most therapists with an entirely new client base, the non-mentally ill: average "walking worried" people looking for answers and receiving simplistic explanations from therapists selling the myth that therapy is the best means to self-knowledge.

Salon talked with Watters recently near his office in San Francisco.

What was the genesis of your new book?

In "Making Monsters" we exposed the myth of recovered memory syndrome. But the fundamental problems that allowed recovered memory to "bloom" were still present. There are no checks on the system -- no checks on therapy, no checks on the myth-making potential of the therapy encounter.

We felt there was a bigger book here -- about the history and practice of psychotherapy. We made one good argument in "Making Monsters"; the bigger story was another book.

Have you been in therapy?

No; there's room for one book from people outside therapy. Our argument lends itself to an outsider. We saw our job to be the outsider -- to connect the dots in the history of psychotherapy. I'm a journalist, and I don't think it's necessary for me to have been in therapy to write about it.

This isn't meant to be the end-all book about psychotherapy, but it's an attempt to expose the conceptual murkiness in the therapeutic system. And we show how Freudianism took hold in the United States, and how psychoanalysis and psychotherapy became a sort of secular religion.

What is the myth of psychotherapy?

For generations, therapists have been claiming that they could cure mental illness with a small set of techniques that would work for everyone. And they can't. Most psychiatrists aren't even on the cutting edge -- they've ceded that to the neurologists and other brain scientists. That's where the real work is being done, developing medications that can successfully treat major mental illnesses.

Why do so many of us go into therapy?

We've believed the therapist's claim that it's the best way to self-understanding. It's not. We've been led to believe it's the highest calling, but I think that's the problem. The human mind is not well designed to understand itself -- it sees out, not in. Therapy's claim to be the best mode to understanding yourself is a false one. I think there are ways to understand the human creature, but they often come at you obliquely, through music or art or literature -- ways of understanding our brains in a very non-direct way. Those things have more claim to leading you to self-understanding than therapy does.

Therapy sells the ability to know yourself, even though there are no provable results. If you look over the entire course of psychotherapeutic literature -- not that I've read every bit of it -- but if you read every generation of therapists, and the stories that have come out of therapy, the patient's accounts and the therapist's accounts, you have to say they believed such stupid, simple myths.

Like the idea that "bad mothering" caused autism or schizophrenia?

Exactly. It's based on a certain kind of cultural misogyny. Women were told penis envy was the cause of their depression. The broader the claim, the more suspect it is. After it's passed, we see the cultural myth manifested in someone's belief. But since we share the same myths, we don't recognize them as myths until the myth has passed us by.

What you're likely to get out of therapy is a sharing of whatever social narrative has currency at the time. Often, that's what accounts for the "Aha!" feelings people get in therapy. Aha! I knew my father was a molester or my mother was domineering. It's not from matching your memories or coming to a better understanding of yourself. The "Aha!" comes from matching the cultural currents of the times. The connection is with the society around you -- not with your past or the interior of your brain.

There's the idea that therapy is the way to deep knowledge. In most instances, therapy is the way to the shallow end of the pool.

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