"Lastly, there's something that we psychologists call "the locus of control." These are all people who place the locus of control inside themselves. What do I mean by that? Well, obviously we can't control what our parents do to us and we can't control whether we're poor or rich. But the issue is what we do with those events, how we manage and perceive them. Do we tell ourselves that we are the helpless victims or that we can manage somehow? People who see themselves as out of control, who place the locus of control somewhere out there, are those who see themselves as society's victims.

That seems to be a common self-perception these days.

That's the other reason I wanted to write this book. The culture of complaint we live in today has created an atmosphere in which people clutch their victimhood to their breast as if it's some badge of honor. We're a nation of whiners. I understand that there are many good political reasons for some of the complaints of victimhood. The question is whether you adopt the victim stance or whether you say, "I've been victimized, but I'm going to find a way out of this, no matter what it takes personally and socially, if it means changing the social order." People who try to figure a way out are those who place the locus of control inside themselves. The people who go to support groups that tend to facilitate endless whining place the locus someplace else. They literally sit for years, complaining.

How do you think this culture of complaint developed?

Two things come instantly to mind. One is our therapeutic culture. We now have a society in which psychobabble rules. We have distorted the real psychological theories. And psychological theory itself is often to blame because, despite all the evidence to the contrary, the dominant psychological theories still insist that what happens from birth to five determines the course of a life, and that is simply not true. It is not true. How psychologists can continue to spout this theory while they sit in their offices dealing with 30-, 40-, 50-year-old people who are changing their lives I do not understand. The reality is, if we couldn't help people to change their lives, we'd have no reason to be in business!

And of course, the politics of the times. There are real victims in this society. Women, blacks, Latinos, gays -- people who are subject to prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping in their everyday lives. People whose lives are brutally ruined in some ways, as we see in the African-American community, by a long history of vilification and disgust. It's a racist, sexist, homophobic society that we live in. We have our strong points, but those are our weak points. The politics of this country has always been built on interest group politics, which had its own problems. Now we've moved to identity politics, which means you make some claim to special treatment because you've been victimized. The political and psychological causes have come together to create a culture of victimhood. At this point we live in a nation where for anyone to claim their rights they have to claim victimhood. So now we have whites claiming victimhood because blacks take three places at Berkeley or something.

As a leftist and a therapist, do you worry about being part of the problem?

At times I have had conflicting feelings about doing psychotherapy, but I always come down on the side of doing it because I don't think I adapt people to the status quo. That is the historic leftist criticism of psychotherapy, and a just one. For example, with a gay or lesbian client, I encourage a sense of self-pride. Not the kind of pride that comes with politics, like Black Pride, Jewish Pride, Gay Pride, which means you can say (thumps chest) "I'm great!" -- but what happens inside is something else. I encourage a more grounded development of self-awareness and self-pride along with a real understanding of what the social forces are that make that so difficult. But I never leave the social situation out. Whether you're rich or poor, it always plays a part in how you see the world and how the world treats you.

Do you worry that by writing about people who transcend abuse and other traumas you'll be seen as blaming those who haven't?

Yes. My nightmare about this book is that I'm going to turn on the TV or pick up the newspaper and there will be Newt Gingrich holding a copy of my book and saying, "You see: anyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps."

What about critics from the left accusing you of blaming the victims?

Yeah, I knew that might happen. That bothers me much less. That kind of criticism comes from a thoughtless left, politically correct stuff that I just don't have the patience for.

Some people would self-censor to avoid that.

This is one of the tragedies of the left. The right has us in a box because of it. We don't dare say what we know because maybe it'll play into the hands of the racists, or homophobes, or the Rush Limbaughs. So we keep quiet and when people say there's a crisis in the family we say, "What crisis? We love the diversity in the family!" This is craziness! I love the diversity in the family, but I also know there's a crisis in the family. There are some serious issues here. And when we finally grant that there is a problem, we say "Oh, well, the whole problem will be solved by childcare." That's nonsense, nonsense. You have two people working 40, 50, 60 hour weeks -- when they're lucky enough to work -- and two or three little kids in unsupervised or barely supervised settings. The question of who will raise the children seems to me to be a serious social issue.

Going back to therapy, which also seems to be in a crisis, what do you believe it takes to be a good therapist?

It's not what we say, but what we do and how we do it. I can tell you that my work is to empower people, but it's just a word, a word that we use loosely. A recovered memory therapist will tell you that they're empowering people, which is total nonsense. The recovered memory people think it's empowering to make people believe that they had these terrible experiences and should go put their parents in jail.

A colleague and I talk occasionally about how I turn people out of therapy a lot more quickly than she does. Long term therapy for me is about three years. Others have people in therapy for 10 or 15 years. When you talk about it they'll always say that it's because those patients are so disturbed. Well, I've seen a lot of very disturbed people. The longest I've seen anyone was a woman who came into my office looking alright on the surface and then wound up sitting behind the chair on the floor with her thumb in her mouth after about 10 minutes. She was in therapy about five years, but that was the longest. And she has a wonderful life now.

The patient/therapist relationship, if it works, is a healing relationship. That's not news; most psychologists believe that, but I think it's the core of all therapy. Without that relationship, which is not just a transference, you get a more aborted therapy and something that takes much longer.

When something like the recovered memory movement flares up, it's really alarming. Why do you think these movements prove so appealing to people?

We live in a society that's totally fad-driven. This is not different from any other fad. Before recovered memory, there was the child abuse fad. People's lives were ruined. Teachers were fired because someone convinced some three-year-old that they had been abused. Everything gets writ large, larger than life. People jump on the bandwagon. There are a lot of perks for jumping on the bandwagon. Professionals make careers out of testifying as expert witnesses. These aren't necessarily venal people. Often they believe in what they're doing. But it's easy to believe in what you're doing when fame and fortune come with it.

We have an enormous well of poorly trained people out there doing therapy. I don't think the good training is very good either. That's another issue, but at least it makes people responsible for what they do. Now we have thousands of really poorly trained people, not terribly bright, out there doing therapy and it's easy for them to grab on to all these movements. They attract patients based on it. Doesn't seem like a mystery to me. Just another American phenomenon, like the current T-shirt -- the current illness.

In psychology we have diagnostic fads. There was a while when everyone had borderline patients, then a time when everyone had multiple personality patients. And now we discovered Prozac and that family of drugs and now everybody's depressed. It's hard. I'm not immune to this. Well, I am to the recovered memory and child abuse thing, but when the borderline thing became so fashionable, all of a sudden I was looking at my patients, thinking, "Hmmm."

What about popular quasi-therapeutic trends, like the recovery movement?

I suppose they have some place. Alcoholics Anonymous has been good to some people. We never hear of the failure statistics, only the successes. As I understand it, the failure rate is very high. I was talking to someone recently -- a very attractive, 30-year-old man -- who spends his life going to these spiritual retreats. After two hours of talking to him at a dinner table I thought this guy is such a mess and he's spent 10 years doing this. He's quite proud of the fact that he's doing it. Like support groups, it replaces doing something to help yourself seriously. You keep going to another retreat and another meeting and somehow it doesn't change your life. As far as I'm concerned, the goal of therapy is to change people's lives.

If you go to a support group for people with a particular problem and overcome the problem, then you lose all those people who you've become so close to.

That's exactly the point. Nobody leaves. Membership is dependent on you being a victim, and wounded.

Although "The Transcendent Child" gives us a rich sense of how these people managed to transcend, you don't solve the mystery of why some people can do it and not others.

That's the most interesting question of all, and it's not one I can answer. What I can say is how people do it. And I do believe that people are born with a certain spirit, a constitutional given that makes life easier for them, even if their life is hell, that makes it easier for them to cope than it is for others. That doesn't say a lot, though, because I believe that most people are born that way and the question is why some of those people cope so well and others don't.

I do think that the environment makes an enormous difference in who we are and how we manage our lives and I think it's a mistake to look to biological explanations as many people are doing now. Daniel Goleman's work on emotional intelligence is very interesting, and I also think that some of it is not going to be proven true.

Why do you think people so often resort to biological explanations these days?

They're comforting. It's an explanation. Psychology says, "I don't know," if it's honest. Or we reach for explanations that no one really believes. Then biology comes along and says, "Here's a gene." It's something you can feel, you can touch, you can see under a microscope. It's not just an idea. It's real.

You also avoid, in this book, making therapeutic recommendations.

The therapist part of me isn't in this book. These people weren't my patients, and I didn't think I had a right to psychologize them in that way. I also didn't want this to be about, "Look how smart I am. Look at what I did; I helped these people." They helped themselves, although most of them had therapy at some point and obviously it did them some good.