Our Last Great Illusion: A Radical Psychoanalytical Critique of Therapy Culture

RE-ISSUED WITH INDEX. 'Therapy may be mad, ' declares Rob Weatherill in this outspoken volume. Therapy here means particularly psychotherapy and counselling, but should be also taken to signify the universal logic of the post-modern therapeutic culture of well-being, happiness and enjoyment. More and more people want to believe in therapy who have lost belief in anything else. Counselling and therapy increasingly inform all human interaction. The dominant ethos is a holistic one. This book aims to refute, primarily through the prism of modern psychoanalysis and key theorists like Baudrillard, Levinas, Lyotard, Paz, Steiner, Reiff as well as Zizek, the fashion for a return to a pre-Cartesian ideal of harmony and integration. On the contrary, there is something monstrous, something excessive, that Freud termed the death drive, at the heart of the Real upon which ordinary reality, so to speak, rests. Enlightenment thought, in which we in the West in particular are caught, is entirely incapable of going beyond the ideal humanist version of man - our last great illusion.