Therapy, Neoliberalism, and the Social Roots of Distress with Bruce Rogers-Vaughn

In this episode, pastoral theologian and psychotherapist Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn—pastoral theologian, clinician, and author of Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age—exposes how today’s mental-health system locates suffering in individual pathology while ignoring the social and economic forces producing widespread distress.

He explains how research funding, psychotherapy models, and the biomedical frame all shift attention away from the societal roots of depression, anxiety, and addiction. Instead of understanding suffering as a meaningful response to harmful conditions, the neoliberal model blames the individual and demands “resilience” and compliance.

This conversation doesn’t stop at critique. Bruce reframes depression as a meaningful signal, not a malfunction; argues for therapy as deep transformation instead of symptom deletion; and offers a concrete starting point for care that resists adaptation: make friends, build comradeship, recover solidarity. We connect the dots between research policy since 1980, the rise of resilience talk and positive psychology, and why mindfulness without tradition can become just another corporate tool. 

Key Points

• The biomedical model serves neoliberalism by hiding systemic causes of suffering.
   “It’s a way neoliberalism covers its own ass… so nobody can trace back their suffering to the system.”
• Research funding was redirected in the 1980s to brain-based explanations, shutting down community-level studies.
• Modern therapy focuses on symptom removal, not transformation.
   “Psychotherapy today has become a sophisticated exercise in blaming the victim.”
• Competitive individualism isolates people, fragments identity, and undermines community life.
• Rising mental-health treatment and worsening mental-health outcomes reflect a disconnect between what’s treated and what’s causing harm.
• Debt, workplace performativity, and isolation create what Rogers-Vaughn calls “third-order suffering”—distress whose source is invisible but pervasive.

Dr. Bruce Rogers-Vaughn is a pastoral theologian, licensed psychotherapist, and longtime faculty member at Vanderbilt Divinity School. With four decades of clinical experience, he is known for his groundbreaking book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age, which critiques how contemporary mental-health systems adapt individuals to unjust social conditions. His work brings together psychoanalysis, political economy, and pastoral care to reveal the deep links between suffering and the structures of neoliberal capitalism.

About Religion and Justice
Religion and Justice is a podcast from the Wendland-Cook Program in Religion and Justice at Vanderbilt Divinity School. We explore the intersections of class, religion, labor, and ecology, uncovering how these forces shape the work of justice and solidarity. Each episode offers space for investigation, education, and organizing through conversations with scholars, organizers, and practitioners.

Learn more at religionandjustice.org

Follow us:
Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/religionandjustice

Twitter/X — https://twitter.com/ReligionandJ

Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/religionandjustice/

Episode Transcript

SPEAKER_05 (00:00):
The biomedical model is a way that neoliberalism
covers its own ass.
Because that way nobody cantrace back their suffering to
the system.
So it doesn't become a sort offertile ground for resistance
against an unjust system.
Instead, it's simply turned intoa symptom to be expunged, pure
and simple.

SPEAKER_04 (00:23):
Welcome everyone to a very special edition of
Religion and Justice.
There are times when Gabby and Iare having conversations about
the future of the podcast, andwe're trying to decide who we
want to invite on.
The name that keeps coming upfor us as we both get a really
stupid, shitty grin on our faceis Dr.

(00:46):
Bruce Rogers Vaughn.
Bruce is one of those peoplethat we have just been
desperately wanting to talk tofor a long time, and we'll
hopefully get him on again afterthis as well.
Bruce is one of these watershedfigures in pastoral theology and
really in the caregivingindustry in general.

(01:06):
It's really a big pleasure andan honor to have you on here,
Bruce.
Could you give everybody alittle bit of background about
sort of where you come from, youknow, and what sort of brought
you to the profession that youfound yourself in now?

SPEAKER_05 (01:19):
It's a dangerous question because I was recently
uh in a group where I had to domy whole autobiography.
So I could go on a long timeabout this.
I grew up in Fort Paint,Alabama, which is just in the
foothills of Appalachia, downbelow Chattanooga, Tennessee.
So I'm a hillbilly at heart, andI did not grow up in the PMC.
I grew up in the laboring class.

(01:40):
My father was a member of twodifferent unions during his
career, 40-something years inthe International Union of
Electricians.
His father and his father'sfather were both in United Mine
Workers.
So I come from a long traditionof laborers.
Also, most of the white folk inSouthern Appalachia have
intermarried with Cherokee.
So there's Cherokee blood.

(02:01):
I don't claim members of thetribe, for goodness sakes, but
we all have sympathies withindigenous Americans that you
wouldn't expect growing up inthe segregated South, as I did.
So that's sort of the culturalbackground I grew up in.
I mentioned at the beginning ofthe book, I'm one of the last
people you would ever expect toeventually become a major critic

(02:22):
of capitalism.
I grew up in a veryfundamentalist evangelical
Christian home.
My father became a minister whenI was 11.
It was not a militantfundamentalism, it was what I
call a naive fundamentalism.
The Bible just was true ineverything it said without using
the word inerrant.
Capitalism wasn't reallydiscussed.

(02:44):
It wasn't on the table, but itwas assumed.
From there, I responded to acall to ministry to preach, as
we put it, when I was a seniorin high school after the death
of my grandfather, my maternalgrandfather, who was ministered,
literate Baptist farmerpreacher.
He could not read or write.
He used to pray in familygatherings that one of his 13

(03:06):
grandsons, sons, of course, thiswas patriarchy, but one of his
13 grandsons would become aminister.
Eleven of the 13 did.
I'm the only one who took thatcall as meaning you would go to
college and then to seminary,which I did.
I went to Sanford University,University in Alabama, where my
life was turned around.

(03:26):
We had excellent professors inthe religion faculty.
I encountered a completelydifferent way of reading the
Bible and understanding Jesus,which revolutionized my
thinking, set me on a differentpath.
It did not put me on ananti-capitalist path.
That path came after graduatestudies, after my PhD at

(03:46):
Vanderbilt.
I moved from chaplaincy intopastoral psychotherapy, pastoral
counseling, which I've done nowfor almost 40 years.
I can't believe it, but yes,almost four decades.
So the anti-capitalist spirit inme emerged as I was in clinical
practice.
What we've been told since 19roughly 80, when the Diagnostic

(04:08):
and Statistical Manual MentalDisorders, the DSM, third
edition, was published, was thebeginning in the United States
of a complete sellout to abiomedical model of mental
illness and psychologicaldistress.
I was educated in apsychodynamic world that was not
part of that biomedical model,but I began to breathe in the

(04:30):
air of this biomedicalunderstanding of mental health
care.
But people were coming to me,mostly individuals, some couples
and families, in distress,usually some form of depression
or anxiety, with or withoutaddictions.
Over time, and I mean over along period of time, it was not
making sense to me that whatpeople's distress was about was

(04:51):
their genetics or their brainchemistry or chemical imbalances
or even trauma understood in arestricted sense as being about
childhood experiences.
I mean, that made sense to apoint.
But none of that was adding upfor me to explain why people
coming to me were in thedistress they were in.

(05:12):
I knew in my gut there was moregoing on than just something
residing in their individuallife narratives, as important as
that may be.
So I began to read and doresearch related to the mental
health field about oldertheories, classical theories,
actually, psychoanalytictheories, all the way back to
the time of Freud, that did notunderstand psychological

(05:35):
distress and individualformation for that matter,
personalities.
They did not understand that asa biomedical process.
They understood it as a culturalone.
People tend to forget that Freudpracticed in Vienna, and he was
interested in himself and thesocial origins of what he called
the psychoneuroses.

(05:56):
But at the Berlin Clinic, at thesame time, the Berlin Clinic was
actually founded a little beforethe Vienna Clinic.
All the analysts at the BerlinClinic were communists and
socialists, all of them.
And every one of them understoodthe neurosis as originating in
problems in society rather thanin the individual.
In other words, it had to dowith problems between individual

(06:19):
psychological, emotional health,and the social realities that
people lived in.
I began to read more of thatmaterial, both old and new, that
tried to understand people'sproblems in a social material
context rather than simply abiomedical one.
So that's about as short aversion I can give you of what

(06:39):
led me from Appalachia andBaptist evangelical roots all
the way to preaching againstcapitalism today.

SPEAKER_04 (06:47):
You're a professor of pastoral theology at
Vanderbilt Divinity School.
You've been a licensed therapistfor a very long time.
All of this culminated in a sortof magnum opus for caregiving
professionals in a book youtitled Caring for Souls in a
Neoliberal Age.
You sort of, in a small part,kind of sketched a little bit of

(07:09):
the beginnings of it.
You talk about the ways in whichneoliberalism is part of the
pool that generates what wewould describe as sort of mental
health problems, right?
Does that sound accurate?
Yes.

SPEAKER_05 (07:23):
Could you say more about that?
Let me give a little prelude tothat, since clearly I was
thinking about it before I wrotethe book, right?
I was thinking about this for awhile.
And by this, I mean aboutneoliberalism.
Once I understood that theclients, patients, I don't
really like the term clients,that's a very capitalist term
for people who come to see you.

(07:43):
The folks who come to see me, Iwas trying to understand them.
So I had to go back tounderstand people in context.
By context, I mean, what is theforce shaping culture today and
how is it doing that?
I mean, I had to go to folkslike Antonio Gramsci, who I've
never read before until then,and his concept of hegemony to
understand how Marxism was notjust about producers and

(08:07):
workers, it was, but it was alsoabout a larger cultural model of
how society gets shaped and whatis assumed to be true, including
how we understand what it meansto be a good human being.
So I had to learn aboutneoliberalism.
I had to learn about the currentphase that we're in.
And by the way, the best historyon this is Quinn Slobodian.

(08:29):
Lots of histories have beenwritten, but Quinn Slobodian's
history came out after my bookdid.
The book titled is Globalists,and he does a superb unpacking
of the roots, the ideologicalroots of neoliberalism back in
the 30s, up until it came intopower in the 90s.
I had to read a lot of stuffabout neoliberalism.
To understand and push itfurther than most Marxists would

(08:52):
push it, I had to push it intounderstanding how it was shaping
life on the ground.
In other words, the lives of thepeople who were coming to me in
distress.
What were the dots connectingneoliberal culture as well as
the material facts ofneoliberalism, like economic
inequality, which in itself hasa bad impact on mental health?

(09:13):
How did the culture shapepeople?
And the bottom line of thatreally is the radical
competitive individualism thataccompanies neoliberal culture.
Why does that matter for mentalhealth?
Well, many ways.
One way is it isolates us.
So we all live in our individuallittle iron cages.
Iron cage, Ebb and Weber.

(09:34):
We all live in our littlesolitude, almost solitary
confinement, in our own littleinner worlds of meaning, which
we assume has nothing to do withcommon truth.
It just has to do with ourindividual truths.
So isolation is one effect.
Human beings are like many otheranimals.
Dogs, for example.
We live in packs.
We're social animals.

(09:55):
When you separate us from thepack, we get sick and even die.
Living connected organicallywith other people is essential
for us.
Neoliberalism, at its core, NoamChomsky has even affirmed this.
The core of neoliberalism isn'teven just economics.
The core of it is a systematiceffort to dismantle human forms

(10:17):
of association.
Why does today's capitalism needthat?
Why does it need to dismantlehuman institutions and
organizations to remove allcompetition, to its own
ideology?
So that's part of why peoplebecome more depressed, anxious,
and addicted is they'reisolated.
The other part of competitiveindividualism is we all become

(10:38):
our own brand, or as Wendy Browncalls it, entrepreneurs of the
self.
I mean, look at any of oursocial media profiles.
We're just self-promoting allthe time, even when it's not
monetized.
So what is the upshot of that?
The upshot of that is if you'redepressed, it's your own damn
fault.
Even with the biomedical model,which the idea was to
destigmatize mental illness,right?

(10:59):
But the research shows that thatmessage that mental illness is a
disease like any other hasactually led to worse
stigmatization.
So the depressed individual isontologically different for me
because they're biologicallydifferent.
Something's wrong in theirgenes, something's wrong with
their brains.
So they're just different forme.
And even if they think it's adisease like any other, so

(11:22):
they're not to blame, well,they're responsible for getting
better.
So if they don't get better andget over being depressed, it's
their own damn fault.
It became more obvious to meafter doing this research about
the cultural context ofwell-being, psychological and
interpersonal well-being, itbecame more obvious to me that

(11:42):
psychotherapy, even, as it isdone under the neoliberal model,
that even psychotherapy todayhas become a very sophisticated
exercise in blaming the victim.
Why?
Because we locate people'sproblems within themselves.
It's your fault.
It's your fault.
If you're responsible for it, ifit comes from inside you, then

(12:04):
you're responsible.
And you either have to treat it,get it treated appropriately,
and get beyond it.
But it's up to you.

(12:40):
Perfect.
The precedents for Le Guin'scomment are people like the
Frankfurt School, people likeEric Fromm, Harry Stack
Sullivan, I could go on withmany others.
This was a school ofpsychoanalysts and psychologists
who believe to their core thatthe societies in which we live
is what shapes who we are.

(13:01):
Individualism, if we really getright down to the nitty-gritty
of it, is a big myth thatneoliberal capitalism tells
itself and others.
We are shaped by the forcesaround us.
We do have agency.
If I didn't think there was sucha thing as individual agency, I
wouldn't continue being apsychotherapist.
But what we have to understandis what little agency we have is

(13:24):
very small compared to theenormous social forces that bear
upon us.
Some for good, but much of itfor destructive, never existed
as a diagnosis, a psychiatricdiagnosis until 1980.
Even in the former versions ofthe DSM during Reagan.
Exactly.
It happened when Reagan waselected, but clearly the DSM was

(13:47):
in formation, the 1980 version,DSM III before 1980.

SPEAKER_04 (13:53):
These ancient traditions are trying to say
that something important wasgoing on to you, on with you
during the Dark Knight of theSoul.

SPEAKER_05 (13:59):
Right.
So I'm trainedpsychodynamically.
I mean, one of my teachers in mygraduate program was a
psychoanalyst, and one of myfirst supervisors when I was in
training was a psychoanalyst.
In that training, depression wasnot a diagnosis.
Depression was seen as thepsychological equivalent of
running a fever.
It was not a thing, it was afever.

(14:22):
So when someone is running afever and goes to the doctor,
the doctor doesn't say, oh,we're diagnosing you with fever,
and we have a medication forfever.
That's not what they do.
I understand depression in theclassical sense.
Depression is a sign thatsomething else is going on.
And it is the responsibility ofthe therapist and the patient in

(14:44):
relationship to one another toexplore and understand what is
going on with the patient and inthe patient's world that leads
to them being in a depressedmood, in a depressed state.
That to me is the therapeuticchallenge.
If you want to talk about it ina spiritual sense, there's lots
of literature going back, as youmentioned, the dark night of the

(15:05):
soul.
In that sense, depression isabout understanding what is
happening.
What does this mood that hascome over me, what is it trying
to say to me?
And maybe not just to me, to myworld, to the world around me.
If it could be given a voice,what would depression speak to
us?
And I first wrote about this ina paper that came out two years

(15:27):
before my book did.
There was a paper published inthe journal called Pastoral
Psychology, and the title of thearticle probably says it all
Blessed are those who mourn,depression as political
resistance.
In that paper, I definedepression as a symptom of the
immune system of the soul.

(15:48):
So when the soul is distressedand becoming fragmented,
becoming depressed may be oneway that it seeks to find a
voice.

SPEAKER_01 (15:57):
I want to make a distinction here for our
listeners, because you get intoit very clear in caring for sure
souls in a neoliberal age, butyou're consistent with it in
your other writings as well.
But that depression being asymptom of another problem, the
way our neoliberal psychotherapyworld treats depression as is we

(16:17):
can fix it if we can teach youhow to comply in the current
social and economic order.
The reason it's a problem isbecause you're putting gunk in
the cog that you're supposed tobe for us.
That's like what the problem is.
I think you just touched on itpretty well.
After I read your book, I thenmoved on to internal family
systems by Dick Schwartz andthen started therapy with IFS

(16:41):
and somatic experiencing.
What was so foundational in thatfor me was that I realized that
the individualistic approachthat our society and our social
structure enforces on us, we doit to ourselves internally too.
I just thought that anindividual is a whole as itself,
there's not distinctions betweenparts, which is also what our
social and economic orderteaches is that like you are

(17:03):
responsible for all of thesethings.
It's your fault that you havedepression or anxiety or all of
these things to fix it.
You just need to perform betterin your family at work, and all
of that is compliance.

SPEAKER_05 (17:16):
There's cracks in every hegemony, as Gramsci
himself taught us.
But the dominant model today inpsychiatry, psychology, and
psychotherapy is really one ofadaptation.
So what it is trying to do withsuffering individuals is to
better adapt them to theexisting system.
Correct, Abby, as it is.

(17:36):
So under this model, it's theindividual that has to change,
not the system.
And psychiatry andpsychotherapy, psychology exist
to help individuals do that, toadjust to the system.
Well, clearly something's wrongwith that model because more and
more people are getting therapy.
Go online and look at thenumbers.
More and more people are seekingtherapy, and the mental health

(17:59):
is getting worse and worse.
So what's going on here?

SPEAKER_01 (18:05):
What's interesting is for you when you open this
book, your clients that weremost pivotal in you discovering
this, folks that are middleclass or upper middle class or
even upper class who maybedidn't have childhood trauma and
were still experiencing all ofthese signs of distress and
maybe weren't in a situation ofeconomic precarity the way that
a working class or a workingpoor person was.

(18:26):
And that was really pivotal tome as well to realize hold on,
the whole system is affectingthe whole people.
It's not just isolated to thoseat the bottom.
The system is destroyingeveryone, regardless of
childhood trauma indicators.

SPEAKER_05 (18:42):
Yes.
I'm not saying childhood traumais unimportant.
There's lots of great researchgoing on now about trauma.
We do have to be careful.
I want to put up a warning here.
It's often the best theoriesthat get co-opted by the
neoliberal state or thecorporate state, if you want to
call it that.

(19:03):
And that includes trauma theory.
So trauma theory is now gettingtwisted to apply only to
specific personal narratives oftrauma, not to any trauma, for
example, that might emerge fromliving in a particular society,
but only trauma from living in aparticular family or from, you
know, childhood sexual abuse,rape, and so forth, which are

(19:25):
terrible.
I would not erase trauma theory,I would recontextualize trauma
theory.
I'm going to sound like ano-fuggy today, so I'm going to
go back to Eric Erickson.
Remember the famousdevelopmental psychologist, Eric
Erickson, who was apsychoanalyst.
Erickson's most famous book wascalled Childhood and Society.
Now pause for a minute.

(19:45):
Just imagine a title like thatbeing published by dominant
forms of psychiatry today.
No, it wouldn't happen.
Not in the United States.
And here's what Erickson saidthat he would add to this
discussion, Gabby, about trauma.
He would say, of course,childhood trauma occurs.
Of course, children are affectedby what happens in their family

(20:07):
that they grow up in.
But he would add, that familyand that childhood is itself
shaped by the larger societalcontext.
So we're not talking abouteither this or that.
We're talking both and.

SPEAKER_01 (20:23):
Yes.
Well, and then that that societyitself is imposing trauma on the
members of the family, which isthen impacting their not that
responsibility gets removed fromindividual actions, but that the
trauma is coming in from allsides at that point.
Existing in the society,conforming to the society, and
then the stressors that comewith attempts to conform in the
society.
What your model showed me, andit was revolutionary, was that

(20:46):
no wonder I'm so exhausted allthe time.
Not only do I have childhoodtrauma, not only do I have
economic trauma, I'm alsoexisting in an economic and
social system that is acontinuation of all of those
things.
It hasn't stopped.
There's not been a sort of endto the experience of constant
conforming, constantexploitation of labor.

(21:08):
And then any sign that I'mresisting that is bad.
The system doesn't like that.
People who want to conform tothe system for whatever reason
don't like that.
But your model in particularchanges accountability from just
an individual perspective.
If society is playing a role inour families, our communities,
the expectations of the economicsystem are being imposed on all

(21:29):
of us, that changesaccountability just from an
individual to everyone.
That's why the corporate uhsystem doesn't like what you're
saying.
It's pointing the finger at theways that it's retaining and
obtaining the power.

SPEAKER_05 (21:44):
The biomedical model, we may think of this from
the standpoint of hegemony,Gramsci's word.
The biomedical model is a waythat neoliberalism covers its
own ass.
Because that way nobody cantrace back their suffering to
the system.
So it doesn't become a sort offertile ground for resistance
against an unjust system.

(22:04):
Instead, it's simply turned intoa symptom to be expunged, pure
and simple.

SPEAKER_04 (22:09):
I have some sort of like Seinfeld imagery or maybe
uh soprano imagery, or I'mthinking of all these different
TV shows.
Everybody loves Raymond, whereuh the mother finds out their
her son is going to therapy andshe's thinking, they're just
gonna start blaming mom, aren'tthey?

(22:30):
And I'm thinking of theneoliberal state finding out
that uh one of their children isgoing to Bruce Rogers' bond.
Oh, well, Bruce is just gonnaget them to start blaming the
neoliberal state, aren't they?
I actually want to jump back toa point that you made that gets
to the title of a presentationyou gave to the psychotherapy

(22:52):
division of ACPE last October.
And the title of thepresentation has a question mark
at the end of it.
It starts out with a declarativestatement, or at least it feels
very declarative.
Psychotherapy has become aweapon of the neoliberal state.
And then here's where thequestion part, I guess, is can
psycho-spiritual liberation saveus?

(23:14):
But I'm interested in mentalhealth care working and how is
it working today?
Because it seems like you justbrought up a stat that says
we're seeking more mental healthcare, but mental health is on a
massive decline.
So could you fit all thosepieces together for me about how
psychotherapy is has become aweapon of the neoliberal state?

(23:35):
And then this inverserelationship, or is it even a
relationship, or is it somethinggreater?
This sort of rise in the seekingof mental health care and the
decline of mental health.

SPEAKER_05 (23:46):
Well, the neoliberal state part, maybe we've already
talked about a little bit interms of an individualized
theory of how psychologicaldistress emerges, is a way to
avoid talking about the externalconditions, the societal
conditions that may play into aperson's depression or anxiety
or whatever.
That part maybe we've talkedabout some.

(24:08):
The part you're bringing inthat's new, I guess, from that
talk I gave last fall, is thatmore and more people are doing
therapy, but people are getting,to use the slang term, sicker
and sicker.
So where is the disconnect?
What is happening?
Why are people getting sicker ifthey're seeking more and more
mental health services?
The reason is there's adisconnect between what is

(24:31):
actually affecting peoplesuffering the most and what
they're being treated for.
This is parallel topsychological or psychiatric
research.
When Ronald Reagan came intooffice, one of the executive
orders he wrote, yes, there wereexecutive orders before Trump,
Ronald Reagan wrote an executiveorder to the National Institute

(24:51):
of Mental Health.
In the order, he said, we willno longer be funding research on
the community or societalorigins of mental suffering.
That's exactly what the ordersaid.
Prior to 1980, there was a veryrobust community psychology and
a community, what was it calledin psychiatry?

(25:13):
In psychology, it was called thecommunity psychology movement.
In psychiatry, it was calledsomething else.
I think social psychiatry orsomething like that.

SPEAKER_01 (25:21):
It all comes back to Reagan.

SPEAKER_05 (25:22):
In a simplistic way, we could say that.
Quinn Slobodian would correct usa little bit, but it's it's
roughly that's how the timinggoes.
But what was parallel to that isresearch from Reagan on in the
U.S.
and then eventually around theworld went into biomedical
research.
It was George H.W.
Bush who declared when he cameinto office this is the decade

(25:44):
of the brain.
That's what he called it, thedecade of the brain, meaning all
psychiatric research that wasfunded by the government was
going to go into studying thebrain.
So this is when thecontemporary, robust field of
neuroscience was born.
Now, here's the problem with it.
Neuroscience, I don't put it alldown.
It's contributed someinteresting things to what we

(26:06):
need to know.
We've spent billions, literallybillions of dollars trying to
tie depression, anxiety, andother diagnoses to genetics, to
the brain, to various thingsinside the human body, with
absolutely nothing to show forit.
We've come up with no empiricalevidence that says that the
brain or the body is the bottomline cause for psychiatric

(26:29):
suffering.
Zero.
Still not there.
The same thing, parallel isgoing on in psychotherapy.
So we've been spending millions,if not a few billion dollars, on
what is now called ESTs,empirically supported
treatments.
Empirically supported treatmentsare developed not in
psychotherapy offices, they'redeveloped in psychology

(26:51):
departments of universities.
Well, how do psychologydepartments earn their keep, so
to speak?
Well, they earn it by servingthe powers that be.
The emphasis now inpsychotherapy is to eradicate
symptoms.
The purpose of psychotherapybefore the neoliberal age was a

(27:12):
transformation of the self.
Transforming the self, personalchange, deep-going personal
change.
Not so anymore.
The purpose of the dominantforms of psychotherapy today is
to expunge symptoms.
Remove depression, removeanxiety, get rid of panic
attacks, get people not addictedanymore, whatever the symptoms

(27:35):
are.
It's not about personaltransformation.

SPEAKER_04 (27:40):
Yeah, I mean, aren't there even forms of like
Lacanian psychotherapy where ifyou were to come into your
therapist and be like, I'munhappy, they'd be like, Yeah,
that's probably for the best.
There were forms ofpsychotherapy that kind of said
happiness is not a goal youshould be trying to shoot for in
a fulfilling, deep life andmeaningful.

SPEAKER_05 (27:58):
Outside the United States, you know, there are
other forms of psychiatry andpsychotherapy that are pushing
back.
And there is even in the UnitedStates.
I mean, we could get to nuancingthis shortly if you wish, but
I'm focused on the dominantthing, what's being taught in
master's and PhD programs inpsychology and mental health in
the United States.
And what's getting taught thereare these ESTs.

(28:20):
Well, what is an EST?
Well, they form these littleresearch modules based on
medical research, where you havea control group and you have an
experimental group and you tryto control the variables, right?
The best source for debunkingthis is Jonathan Shedler.
So for your listeners who wantto follow this up, Jonathan
Shedler, S-H-E-D-L-E-R, is onthe faculty at the medical

(28:44):
school of the University ofColorado.
Shedler has shown thatempirically supported treatments
aren't even well supportedempirically.
I'll give an example.
In a number of these researchmodules that tried to say
compare psychoanalysis to somesort of brief solution-focused
therapy, what they would do isnot bring in an actual

(29:05):
psychoanalyst or study whatpsychoanalysts are doing in the
field.
They would train a graduatestudent to operate according to
the following principles.
He or she or they weren't even apsychodemic therapist.
They were being trained to actlike one for the basis of the
research.
And then that would become thecontrol group to which they

(29:25):
would compare this newempirically supported treatment,
the triumph.
Well, you can get the idea ofhow this skews the research.
So Schedler has found that theresearch is by and large flawed
because it focuses on a veryshort-term outcome because, you
know, you got to get tenure.
And the results that aremeasured, he says, don't last.

(29:45):
So when they follow up thesegroups a year later, the good
outcomes that did occur haven'tlasted.
I'm rolling back to yourquestion about why are people
getting more and more therapy,but people are getting worse and
worse off in terms of their wellbeing.
The other answer, of course, isthat neoliberalism is growing
and getting exponentially morepowerful by the year.

(30:06):
So what we're up against is alsoincreasing exponentially.
So there's multiple reasons whypeople are getting worse in
terms of their well-being.

SPEAKER_01 (30:14):
I'm getting to the back half of your book now.
You start talking about howneoliberalism is a voice-denying
rationality, and it has sort oflike these three prongs, named
desymbolization,de-institutionalization, and
desubjectification.
Can you pause for a minute andwalk us through each of those?

SPEAKER_05 (30:35):
I shamelessly stole these, and my French is
terrible, so forgive me if Idon't pronounce his name right.
Robert Danny Dufu was a Frenchphilosopher who wrote a
tremendous book called The Artof Shrinking Heads.
These were the terms he used inthat book.
You can tell it's French by howlong the words are.
I'll walk you through those.
Deinstitutionalization.
What Dufu meant by that was thatneoliberalism, as I put it

(30:59):
earlier, quoting Noam Chomsky,is a systematic dismantling of
human forms of association.
So it erodes what we calltraditional institutions.
One obvious one is religion.
Churches, congregations,mosques, their size, area of
influence is dissipated.
And we see that today.

(31:20):
I mean, Gen Z is the mostnon-church going generation
we've ever seen since the UnitedStates has been recording
religious involvement.
But it doesn't stop at religion.
And DeFour is very clear aboutthis.
It goes to things like laborunions and civic organizations
and neighborhood organizations.
All of these are beingsystematically dismantled.

(31:42):
What is left?
The only institutions that arestrong are those that support
neoliberalism.
Large corporations, the bankingsystem, the finance system,
governments actually get biggerrather than smaller.
All the talk is about reducingthe size of government in the
U.S.
But in fact the research showsthe government gets

(32:02):
exponentially larger, even underTrump.
Just look at the big, beautifulbill.
How many billions and trillionsof dollars that is going to add
to the federal deficit?
So the only institutions thatprosper are those that directly
serve neoliberal interests.
All the other institutions aresystematically eroded.
That's deinstitutionalizations.

(32:24):
People become more and morelonely, as I mentioned before.
Desymbolization goes along withit because the lives of
institutions are nourished andfed by their historic
narratives.
Marx had historic narratives,the revolt of the proletariat,
and all that went with that.
Labor unions have narratives.
So these are symbolic narrativesthat support the lives of these

(32:47):
collectives.
I had to smile when I got tothat place in the book, reading
The Art of Shrinking Hits,because he actually calls these
soteriological narratives.
In theology, we refer to thoseas narratives about what
salvation looks like.
So these narratives get erodedas well.
We no longer have stories ofmeaning that have depth, that
feed our souls, that sustaincommunal as well as individual

(33:11):
lives.
And so individuals are left withnothing but their own
narratives.
This really makes me want tocry.
People have to create their ownindividual personal narrative
out of thin air, the stories oftheir own little lives.
I'm not demeaning people'spersonal narratives.
I've lived a life of listeningto people's personal narratives.

(33:31):
It's important.
What makes me want to cry isthose personal narratives have
progressively been disconnectedfrom any story of common
humanity or of their communityor even sometimes their family.
That's desymbolization.
And one thing that goes withthat, by the way, especially my

(33:52):
Catholic scholars would want meto say, is the removal of
ritual.
So life becomes deritualized.
And here again, we have tocreate our own personal ritual.
There's a whole self-helpliterature based on how to
create your own personal ritualsto live by.
Imagine that.
That wasn't even needed prior tothe neoliberal age.
And finally, the third one isdesubjectivation.

(34:15):
Well, the subject in this casemeans the self, the individual
self.
And desubjectivation means thefragmentation of our actual
experience of being a cohesiveself.
So now we're more likely toexperience ourselves in
fragmented ways.
You know, we don't have as muchof a durable sense of who we are
over time as we used to.

(34:37):
And this in itself is leading towhat we talked about, dramatic
increases in depression,anxiety, or even the sense of a
going-on being, of being a selfin worst cases, which leads to,
I guess, your question aboutthird-order suffering.

SPEAKER_01 (34:56):
You are listening to Religion and Justice.
Coming up, more of ourconversation with Bruce Rogers
Vaughn.

(35:26):
In traditional paradigms, therewere two orders of suffering.
The first comprised forms ofsuffering that are simply given

in the human condition (35:32):
death, grief, separation, illness,
disability, natural calamities,conflict, physical pain, and so
on.
In previous ages, people dealingwith first order suffering
generally did so from withincollectives that accompanied
them in their distress, with amore or less durable and
cohesive sense of self, and withcultural narratives and

(35:52):
liturgies that helped make senseof what they were enduring.
Second order suffering isdistress produced by human evil,
whether individual orcollective, direct or indirect.
Examples of this includemalicious acts of individuals,
such as murder, violence, theft,fraud, deception, etc.
As well as collective actionssuch as war, root violence,

(36:14):
enslavement, oppressive workingconditions, and injustices
focused upon identities likeracism, sexism, heterosexism,
ethnic or religious-baseddiscrimination, and so on.
This also comprises oppressionemanating from Foucault's
disciplinary societies.
Here, significantly, the sourceof suffering is readily
identifiable, even if, in thecase of disciplinary control, it

(36:36):
is rather impersonal, as in thestate, the corporation, or the
church.
And there's a palpablepotential, if not the actuality,
of forming collectives forresistance.
There are as well narrativeresources at hand for
articulating such a resistance.
Bruce is proposing in this bookthat heretofore the theories and
practices of pastoral care aswell as other forms of soul care

(36:58):
have been directed towards thesetwo orders of suffering.
We have not yet, in Bruce'sestimation, developed theories
and practices adequate foraddressing the new chronic,
which then leads into what youcall third order suffering,
which is the new normal forhuman distress appearing under
neoliberalism.
It's not easy to articulate, asyou write in the book, perhaps

(37:18):
impossible to articulate interms of how easy it is to sort
of articulate the first andsecond order suffering.
So I'm gonna give you thechallenge of articulating it to
our audience.

SPEAKER_05 (37:27):
Yeah.
Third order suffering, I say inthe book, it is not exactly true
that it has never existed priorto the neoliberal revolution
that has occurred since 1980.
But in other periods of history,it existed only in times of
great cultural upheaval or theends of whole civilizations, or

(37:48):
like when a whole country wascolonized and their culture was
ripped away from them, like whathappened to Native Americans
during the period ofcolonization.
Third order suffering existedthen, and it'll make sense why
when I say what it is, but itexisted as a transition from one
cultural domination to the next.

(38:10):
What is new today is that thirdorder suffering has become
normative.
It is becoming normative as wespeak in this interview.
So what is it that's becomingnormative?
Well, people are unable toidentify the source of their
suffering.
As you mentioned a while ago, infirst and second order
suffering, we knew exactly whywe were suffering.

(38:31):
We were diseased, we were sick,we were dying, we were grieving,
we were suffering injustices, weknew who the people were
imposing upon us were who wereperpetrating the injustice.
In third order suffering, theenemy, if you just want to use a
metaphor for that, the enemy hasbecome invisible.
We don't know what we're upagainst.
We can't even describe it.
In other words, we have nothingto resort to except blaming

(38:54):
ourselves.
We don't know that we haveanything else to blame.
I call this one part of what Irefer to as in third order
suffering is a doubleunconsciousness.
The first unconsciousness iswhat we're talking about now, is
the external source of ourdistress or suffering.
Neoliberalism is so diffuse,it's just the water we're

(39:15):
swimming in.
We can't name a person, place,thing, or even an institution
that is oppressing us unless wemake it conscious.
The first unconsciousness istoward the external world.
There was a psychologist in theUK named David Smail, he's
recently deceased.
But Smail says when we talkabout the unconscious, the
biggest unconscious that mattersis the external unconscious,

(39:39):
what we're unconscious of thatis outside of ourselves, what he
calls the distal powers ratherthan the proximal powers.
The other uh part ofunconsciousness in third order
suffering is we we becomeunconscious of what is within
us, of what we used to call theinner world, the inner life of
the self.
I call this zombie suffering,walking around falling apart,

(40:02):
but we're hardly aware.
So the internal unconsciousnessis at its deepest levels.
I'm gonna quote Kierkegaardhere, as I do in the book.
Kierkegaard talks about despairthat is not aware of itself as
despair.
Third order suffering issuffering that is not aware of
itself as suffering.
So people can look perfectlyfine, they're going along with

(40:25):
their lives, they can evenappear successful, they can be
entertained.
There was this book published afew years ago called Amusing
Ourselves to Death.
Kierkegaard couldn't have saidit better, but Kierkegaard did
write about that.
So we have people who aresuccessful in the neoliberal

(40:46):
systems, maybe they'refinancially successful, they
seem to be happy and cheerful.
If you pause them for a second,they would become very
depressed.
Or they appear to be successful,but there's a secret life.
And usually it's a secret lifeof addiction.
Either a substance addiction orsome process addiction,

(41:07):
addiction to work, addiction tosex, addiction to money, or
whatever else.
That would be all thedefinitions of addiction.
People will suicide these daysout of thin air with no previous
mental health historywhatsoever.
How is this happening?
People can be sick and not knowthey're sick if they're

(41:30):
suffering from third-orderdepression.
In its deepest forms, they don'tknow they're suffering.
And even if they did know, theywouldn't know why.
There's a bit of research that Iput up on a slide in that talk
last fall.
This research actually came outof China, a psychological study
of Chinese students inuniversities.

(41:51):
And over 60% of them said thatthey have no internal dialogue.
60% of these Chinese students inthese studies, undergraduates,
universities.
So we're talking what, probablyGen Z or something like that,
said that they had no internaldialogue.
In other words, there's nointernal conversation with

(42:13):
themselves going on.
And the researchers even pushedthis to the level of imagery,
said that they were having nointernal images either.
In classical terms, we wouldcall this an erasure of the
subject.
The article I found online, ajournalist was interviewing two
psychotherapists who weretrained under the dominant

(42:35):
models, no doubt, I might add.
One was a marriage and familytherapist, the other was a
social worker, as I recall.
When she was interviewing them,they were trying to say, this is
simply neurodiversity.
There's nothing wrong with this.
It's just the way some peoplehappen to live.
And when I read that, I washorrified because I thought they
were trying to turn the absenceof being a self into

(42:57):
neurodiversity.
So therefore it's okay.
But what we're really talkingabout here are individuals that
can only live and react in thepresent moment.

SPEAKER_04 (43:06):
You talk about zombie suffering, and in
philosophy of mind literature,there are questions around, you
know, sort of what is a mind?
And they'll have these thingsabout can you imagine a mind
without the epiphenomenalfeelings being there?
Right.
The stuff that you just sort oflike a human being sort of feels
things, but they don't have thatlike billiard ball, you know,
neuron is hitting anotherneuron, and then your hand rises

(43:29):
or pulls its hand off of a hotplate or something.
And it was a thought experiment.
And I remember reading this andbeing horrified by this thought
experiment.
Like, yeah, I guess I couldimagine that like the
solipsistic world I'm living inwhere everybody around me is
just, you know, this robotthat's moving around without
feelings.
You talk about McDonald's ofemotions.

SPEAKER_05 (43:50):
Yeah, McDonald's of emotions.
So there's a great book outthere if you're in for heavy
reading, Mestrovik.

SPEAKER_04 (43:57):
Nothing you've mentioned so far is too heavy.
So I've I'm glad that we're nowbringing on the heavy reading
here.

SPEAKER_05 (44:02):
I'm blanking on his first name.
His last name is Mestrovik, buthe he's a U.S.
citizen.
He he's on a faculty here in theU.S.
But the name of the book isPost-Emotional Society.
And he says in that book,something that is related to
this third world suffering I'mtalking about.
He said, on the surface, we livein all of this emotionality.
It's all about vibes and feels,right?

(44:24):
We use the word vibes thesedays.
It's all about the feels and thevibes.
But he says when you try to digunderneath the vibe, there's
nothing there except what'sgoing on in the present moment.
So if you ask someone who feelshappy, well, why are you happy?
Let's talk about what'sunderneath this feeling.
They don't have any answers,except extremely superficial

(44:45):
ones, because the ice creamtastes good.
We're even told by these gurusthat, you know, mostly are paid
by the PMC, professionalmanagerial class, for those who
don't know what that stands for.
We're even told by these gurus,live in the present moment.

SPEAKER_04 (45:00):
Yeah, I think about where I'm so exhausted from the
job I just got done doing, andI'm with my child.
And there's a double injunctionwhere I'm I'm tired and I'm
being with my child, and I'mlike, oh my God, I'm so tired
and depressed.
But then society is also tellingme, well, you should be living
in the moment of really enjoyingthis time with your child.
And you're like, I can't, whatare you what the hell am I

(45:22):
trying to do here, right?

SPEAKER_05 (45:23):
So we have a peculiar relationship with
emotions these days.
We treat emotions almostontologically.
Emotions are not to beinterrogated for what they mean,
they're just to be appreciatedfor what they are.
So don't ask me what my feelingsays or what my feeling means.
You're just supposed to respectthat that's what I'm feeling.

(45:44):
Don't question it.
That's where we are these days.

SPEAKER_01 (45:47):
I want to pivot for a second into class analysis
because you go well into thisinto class struggle in the
caring for souls in a neoliberalage.
And I think it's even morerelevant now as our national
debt in the United States andour individual debt are at
all-time highs.
I'm just going to quote youagain.
The desubjectivation occurringin the neoliberal workplace has

(46:08):
been highlighted by Boltanskyand Chiapello in the new spirit
of capitalism.
They note that in this sort oflabor, one's very self becomes a
means of production.
The worker must behave such thatthe customer or employer is
convinced that she is reallysincere in her carefully
performed demeanor.
Corporations have learned thatempathy has become big business
and that empathy makes moneybecause customers are far more

(46:30):
likely to return to stores andservice providers and even pay a
premium for receiving a certainkind of interaction.
A human resources manager for aretail giant boasts that his
employees are extorted andtrained to provide miles of
smiles and adds that it's got tobe a real smile.
This practice not only oppressesworkers who are denied in the
spontaneous response ofself-expression because they

(46:52):
must follow a corporate script,but it commodifies human
relationships.
The end result for laborers isdisastrous.
Employees are left to manage thedilemmas of authenticity,
integrity, and their sense oftheir own natural, spontaneous
personality, which all spillinto their private lives.
Our thoughts, interpersonaldesires, and even our feelings
belong to work rather than toourselves.

(47:12):
And most importantly, therepetition of
pseudo-authenticity blurs theboundary between the real self
and the virtual self.
We may ultimately, as we werejust discussing about this study
out of China, lose our grip onwhat it means to even be a self.
And I think that points to notonly are we commodifying
emotions, we're we'vecommodified this self such that
like it's even harder now toform genuine relationships,

(47:36):
retain connection throughconflict without immediately
feeling like we're denying whowe are as a person by
compromising on something.
And this is outside of abusivecontext.
So I also want to have that,Bruce, she said it, but I just
want to say it again.
Can you say a little bit moreabout that in relation to our
work?
And then also by extension, debtthat debt has almost become an

(47:59):
identity that turns the blameonto the debtors, uh, that it's
like a moral sin to have debtnow.

SPEAKER_05 (48:07):
Yeah, I'm no expert on Marx.
I think there's just no betterresource for understanding how
capitalism works, especially inthe industrial age in which Marx
lived than his work.
I don't know how much Marx couldbe expected to have foreseen
where we are today and what ishappening to laborers today, how

(48:28):
third order suffering crops upin labor.
But I think workers today aresomewhere on a spectrum between
knowing they're beingperformative and therefore
manage somehow to survive as faras an individual self being a
self, their selfhood can remainmore or less intact.
But of course, they becomeresentful of being put into this

(48:51):
performative state.
They know they're beingcommodified.
In a sense, you might saythey're primarily enduring
second-order suffering, whichwas the predominant thing under
Marx with labor, wassecond-order suffering.
In third order suffering,though, we have another part of
that spectrum where we haveworkers and laborers who
genuinely become confused aboutwhether their happiness when

(49:14):
they're at work is authentic ornot.
So the line becomes blurry aboutwhen they're being real and when
they're not being real.
They're not quite sure.
Especially when there's thisdemand from management that
their smile has to be a realsmile.
That was actually a quote fromsomeone's interchange.
So this becomes a kind ofevisceration of the self, or at

(49:39):
least a mangling of the self, sothat the line becomes blurry
between what I'm actuallyexperiencing and what is
performative, right?
That's how third-order sufferinglooks in the workplace.
Lacan talked a lot about this.
People become unmoored from whathe called the real.
What is real, really real,actually authentic, not

(50:03):
marketplace authenticity, butreal authenticity, we begin to
lose our grip.
And it becomes hard to determinewhen we're in the real and when
we're in the performative.
I hope, Gabby, I'm responding toyour question.
Another example of it forlaborers that I mentioned in my
book is debt.
Well, of course, most laborerstoday are in debt.

(50:25):
There's an Italian thinker namedLazzarato, who's written a book,
Indebted Man, but he's using manin terms of human, right?
And he says, unlike priorversions of capitalism in which
debt was expected to be atemporary state.
In fact, you were expected topay off your debts if you're a

(50:45):
responsible human being.
Today, he says, we live in whathe calls infinite debt.
Debt today is infinite.
In other words, we're neverexpected to pay it off.
The responsible neoliberalsubject does not pay off their
debts.
They quote, manage their debts.
They quote, service their debts.

(51:07):
You hear the labor languagehere?
They service their debts.
They're not expected to pay themoff.
In fact, you're discouraged frompaying off your debt.
You're just supposed to paywhatever it says the minimum
monthly payment is, whether it'syour house or your car or
anything else, credit card.
Pay the minimum payment.
And we know if you pay theminimum payment, you're never

(51:28):
going to pay it off.
Everybody knows that, right?
So I mentioned in the book thatthe indebted subject is not just
laboring when they're at work.
They're laboring in their sleepbecause they're still in debt
while they're sleeping.
And their debt is making profitfor the company, even while
they're asleep.
Why?
Because neoliberal economies runon financialization, not simply

(51:51):
production.
Most of the money circling theplanet today is not money,
profit made from the sale ofgoods and services.
Most of it's speculation onfinancial instruments, which are
based on debt.
So where Marx is correct andcontinues to be applicable is
all of this debt can still betraced back, as Philip Goodman

(52:12):
said in his book, Theology ofMoney, all money can be traced
back to sweat and blood, eventhe most esoteric financial
instrument.
Why?
Because it's based on debt.
All debt has to be paid off bysweat and blood.

SPEAKER_01 (52:26):
But you said we do not simply access the means of
production, we have become themeans of production.
I remember when I read that,because that's the type of thing
that people aren't thinkingabout.
They're exhausted from work.
You're also exhausted becauseyou're constantly being
extracted from.

unknown (52:40):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 (52:44):
I would almost long for the days when we just come
home physically exhausted.

SPEAKER_01 (52:48):
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 (52:49):
Instead we come home physically and emotionally
exhausted.

SPEAKER_01 (52:53):
Yep.
You clock out at work and you'renot really done.
You're not really done.

SPEAKER_04 (52:56):
Even self-care has that.
You're doing it not for yourfamily or for yourself.
You're doing it so you can getback to another form of labor.

SPEAKER_05 (53:05):
Yeah.
I'm serious.
Laboring on the self becomesanother form of labor.

SPEAKER_01 (53:10):
And then you also, and this you're quoting Lazarato
here, but he said debtorsinteriorize power relations
instead of externalizing andcombating them.
They feel ashamed and guilty.
And then you say what thissuggests is that we consider
debt to be a form of moralinjury, and that uh one sense of
self begins to dissolve as theyidentify their very being as a

(53:31):
source of injustice.

SPEAKER_05 (53:32):
And by moral injury, I mean neoliberalism as a
system.
Now I'm talking about theeconomic aspects of
neoliberalism.
Neoliberalism as a system isconstructed to indebt us all,
and yet we're blamed for beingin debt.
It's both.
You can't live today withoutbeing in debt.
And yet you get blamed fortaking on too much debt that you
can't pay back.

(53:52):
When that's exactly what thesystem is constructed to make
you do.

SPEAKER_04 (53:58):
Since we're really trash talking certain industries
here, where does positivity nowcome into this?

SPEAKER_05 (54:05):
Positive psychology never existed prior to
neoliberalism.
Does that surprise you?
That's when it happened.

SPEAKER_04 (54:13):
But joy, aren't I supposed to be trying to be
joyful?
Aren't I in control of mybehavior?

SPEAKER_05 (54:18):
Aren't I in control of my own mind?
A good source on this is WilliamDavies, who teaches at, I think
at Goldsmiths in London.
He wrote a great book called TheHappiness Industry.
It opens with a guru speakingto, of all places, Davos in
Switzerland.
Well, say what Davos for thosewho don't know.

(54:40):
It's an international meeting ofcorporate executives.
Yeah.
The ultra-wealthy that meets inDavos, Switzerland once a year.
So they flew in this person.
I don't know what his religiousbackground was, but he was sort
of a neo-Buddhist guru of somekind.
Right.
To teach them meditation and tolive in the moment.

(55:02):
Okay.
He uses this as a case exampleto talk about the happiness
industry and how there isactually an industry right now
that capitalism is very muchinto and making a lot of money
off of it to sell peopleproducts and to sell people
experiences to make them happy.
And positive psychology is verymuch a part of this.

(55:24):
But to go back to the statementwhere you were leading, George,
in psychoanalysis, the objectivewas not to make people happy.
The objective wasself-understanding and
fulfillment as a human being.
That's not identical tohappiness.

SPEAKER_04 (55:39):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 (55:39):
And that's without even getting to the religious
background.
The understandings of thespiritual journey were not about
happiness either.
It was about finding meaning andpurpose in this life.

SPEAKER_04 (55:49):
Uh, you said a phrase just two minutes ago
where it kind of jumped up andbit me for a second, and I just
wanted to address it again.
You said psychotherapy isintended to help you change.
Right.
Deep going change, not justcircumstantial or superficial.
Tell me how that's differentthan the sort of trying to fit

(56:10):
into a certain mold of societyor trying to fit you into a
certain in other words, how ishow is it different from a
change that has a predeterminedpoint of arrival, right?

SPEAKER_05 (56:21):
Yes.

SPEAKER_04 (56:22):
A lot of therapy models seem to be driving
towards trying to get you to fitinto society.

SPEAKER_05 (56:27):
I'm going to give you what may sound like nonsense
answer to your question.
So contemporary psychotherapylives off of this neoliberal
ideology of individualism.
I mean radical competitiveindividualism.
We all have our own truths.
And to question anybody to aimtoward a common truth is
considered now heresy.

(56:48):
You're not supposed to do thatbecause if you did it, you would
violate people's personaltruths.
That's the understanding.
That's the radical individualismI'm talking about.
Okay, here's the thing.
There's a huge differencebetween individualism and
individuality.
Individuality, okay, I'm aChristian minister, so y'all let
me lean back on my Christianidentity for a moment.

(57:08):
In the Gospels, Jesus says, it'srecording one or more of the
gospels, you are so precious toyour father in heaven, forgive
him the ideology of father inhis day, you are so precious to
your father in heaven that eventhe hairs on your head are
numbered.
How's that for individuality?
If the Father in heaven knowswhen one of these little

(57:29):
sparrows fall, how much moredoes he know when you are
suffering?
That's individuality.
Individuality is a recognitionand an affirmation and
appreciation of everyone intheir idiosyncratic uniqueness.
That's individuality.
We're all different.
Every religious traditionteaches this in their own way,

(57:52):
and Judaism and Christianitycertainly do.
But true individuals are shapedby and arise out of genuine
organic communities who thenappreciate them for the unique
person they are.
But we live in an era, theneoliberal era, when we think
the only way you could surviveas an individual is to not be

(58:15):
part of anything.
And the minute that any humanrelationship, and I mean the
whole spectrum from intimaterelationships all the way up to
society and institutions, theminute a relationship becomes
inconvenient or uncomfortable ordistressing, we're taught to
exit.
And we call that exit self-care.
Isn't that ironic?

(58:36):
Now please understand, both ofyou, George, Gabby, I'm not
offering a justification forpeople submitting to abuse.
That's not what I'm talkingabout.
Anybody should exit beingabused.
But we've gone way, way, way inthe other direction.

SPEAKER_01 (58:51):
Well, it's an avoidance of conflict.
I mean, because we've beentrained and perceived that
conflict is a threat to theindividual, or really
individualism has trained usthat conflict is a threat to the
individual and that if someone'spersonal truth, you know, live
your truth, if that's differentthan yours, it's a threat.
And so the best way to protectyourself is to not expose

(59:11):
yourself to people who don'tshare your truths.
But the truths aren't evennecessarily communal anymore
either.
And so there's also no communalchecks and balances, if you
will, not to make community likewith government terms.

SPEAKER_04 (59:24):
Can you zero in then on the positivity stuff?
Because I'm really this is oneof my favorite points to get
upset about.
So what is it about positivitythen?
Is it a disregard for the socialmaterial conditions?
Like what's going on in thepositive psychology that you
would critique?

SPEAKER_05 (59:40):
Boy, there's lots of ways to talk about this.
To talk about itphilosophically, it's a form of
philosophical idealism.
It's sort of an anti Marx viewof the world where we divorce
people completely.
I'm I'm not this is noexaggeration.
We completely divorce peoplefrom the material conditions of
their existence and put theirMind in another world so that

(01:00:02):
they can experience happiness.
Let me tell you to where theextreme to which this goes.
The father of positivepsychology, he and his team were
hired by the U.S.
Army because they told the Armythat if they would let them use
their methods for positivepositive psychology on soldiers
who had experienced combat, thatthey could prevent PTSD so that

(01:00:26):
they could put the soldiersdirectly back into the field.
And they received amulti-million dollar contract
with the U.S.
Army.
This is an example of what Imean by removing people from
their material context andmaking them happy, or at least
removing unhappiness.
Martin Seligman, he goes byMarty Seligman.
Yeah.
He's the father of the.

(01:00:54):
Basically, yes.
Which is opposite, Gabby, right?
To what we were saying earlier.
When a depressed person comes tome and presents themselves, what
I immediately begin aconversation about is well,
there's obviously a reasonyou're depressed.
Let's let's talk about that.
In other words, we assume theirdepression means something.
It's the fever.
The symptoms.
The fever.
It's the symptom.

(01:01:15):
Our challenge is not to get ridof the depression.
Our challenge is to understandit.

SPEAKER_01 (01:01:19):
We're telling ourselves something is wrong.
Something's off in somesituation, whether that's
societal or an isolatedrelationship that we have with
one person or a group of personsor whatever it is.
If something is disjointed,we're fragmented from connection
with others or saferelationships with others.

SPEAKER_05 (01:01:35):
Positive psychology is actually probably, we should
see it as a branch of CBT.
CBT stands for cognitivebehavioral behavioral therapy.

SPEAKER_04 (01:01:43):
Here's the next one I want you to add.
Seligman and others believe thatpsychology focused too heavily
on disorders and deficits ratherthan the strengths that allowed
people to lead happy, and thisis the term I want you to get
to, resilient, meaningful lives.
Can you talk about resiliencyfor a moment?

SPEAKER_05 (01:02:01):
Yes.
So part of the empiricallysupported treatment focus today
is very focused on resiliency.
That's one of the hugeobjectives.

SPEAKER_04 (01:02:10):
Massive in the military, too.
Resiliency.

SPEAKER_05 (01:02:13):
Of course, because you want virtual resilience.
You want to return soldiers totheir assignments as quickly as
possible.
You don't want them to besidelined.

SPEAKER_04 (01:02:21):
The capacity to re-engage in the fight.

SPEAKER_05 (01:02:23):
Yeah.
So the quick fix is extremelyimportant in that context.
But resiliency to me is anotherway of, and those who use the
term now are going to disagreewith me.
But I do think this is anotherversion of blaming the victim.
So we tell people if theyundertake this tool that we're
going to teach them.
I don't care what the tool is,it's a CBT tool.

(01:02:45):
It can be mindfulness, it can beyoga, it can be a certain level
of thinking or mess self-talkthat you're supposed to teach
yourself.
It doesn't matter what it is.
It's some sort of cognitivebehavioral method that you can
literally perform.
And once you do it, if you do itright, you will then be
resilient against what?
Against anything negative.

(01:03:06):
Any negative emotions, negativeexperiences, you will be able
to, quote, overcome, and here'sthe other buzzword, flourish.
Flourish.
Flourish.
If you will just adopt thesetools.
Now things are beginning tochange, by the way.
I told you there are cracks inthe hegemony.

(01:03:32):
I did an intake with a20-year-old man just about a
month ago.
A college student, referred byhis parent, who was a therapist.
This is a young man who'd beenin therapy most of his life,
because after all, he had aparent who was a therapist, and
we got lots of therapists.
He did not want to come.
So one of the first things hesaid to me when he sat down is

(01:03:53):
that he didn't want to be here,here in this room where I'm
sitting, because he'd been tolots of therapists and they were
all negative experiences.
I'm using this as a symbol thatthings are beginning to shift.
There's beginning to be pushbackagainst this dominant model I'm
talking about.
He asked a question.

(01:04:20):
I'm going to listen to you.
Try to understand you.
He looked like he'd never heardthat answer before.
So it sounds like I'm trashtalking contemporary therapy,
and in some ways I am.
Jonathan Shedler says thatempirically supported treatments
are basically forms ofpsychoeducation.
And he said psychoeducation isjust fine.

(01:04:42):
It has its place, but it's nottherapy.
Psychoeducation can teach youthings that some of which can be
useful.
But therapy, to go back to mypoint earlier, is about personal
transformation and change.
It's about changing yourself.
It's not about expungingsymptoms.
It's not about resiliency.
And it's certainly not aboutjust being positive and happy.

(01:05:05):
So here was a young man saying,I don't want any more therapy
that just tells me I need to domore yoga or practice
mindfulness.
And by the way, I'm not puttingdown yoga and mindfulness.
I'm just saying it's how they'retreated and used and regarded
that's the problem.

SPEAKER_01 (01:05:20):
Covering up symptoms.
They're not actuallytransforming an individual.
They're helping that I meanhelping is a that's a loose word
thing right now, but they'rehelping the individual cover up
X, Y, and Z so that they canfeel like they can function.

SPEAKER_05 (01:05:34):
Here's the way I heard it.
He said, I do not want you totreat me superficially.
Don't give me a bag of tools andsend me away.

SPEAKER_04 (01:05:42):
It's interesting too, mindfulness and yoga are
almost this, and I'm probablyusing your language wrong here,
but the sort ofde-institutionalization of it,
but they are attached totraditions.
I knew a physical therapist.
He said 75% of the cases ofinjuries that he would be
working with people to uhrebound from came from going to
yoga classes.
And I was like, what do you whatthe hell do you think is going

(01:06:04):
on there?
And he said that it took areligious practice and turned it
into a stretching thing for winemoms in suburbia.
And when you disambiguate itfrom the tradition and the
rituals that it was made toenrich, you get this thing that
just is prone to injury.
And I wonder again, too, if likemindfulness, right?
It was a sort of meditativepractice with a long religious

(01:06:26):
tradition in different religiousgroups.
Christianity has a certain kindof quote unquote mindfulness,
you know.
I'm thinking of the Jesuits,right?
When you take mindfulness awayfrom it and you think you can
run it through the siliconevalley tube, get the perfect
little nugget out, you know, thekernel in the husk, you get
something actually kind ofdangerous.

SPEAKER_01 (01:06:44):
And historical narrative as well.
It's devoid of everything thatwent into creating it, embodying
it, living it.

SPEAKER_05 (01:06:52):
It's it's kind of like saying we're going to use a
performative model ofthird-order suffering to cure
third-order suffering.

SPEAKER_04 (01:06:57):
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm laughing, but I actuallydon't know what you mean there,
Bruce.

SPEAKER_05 (01:07:03):
Well, if you decontextualize and
dehistoricize a practice, you'vemade it unconscious of its
history.

SPEAKER_04 (01:07:11):
What would you then prescribe medical model here
again?
To the person who would use thelanguage, my mental health, I am
unwell.
I'm having bad thoughts all thetime.
All I can think of are thethorns in my life.
It just seems like everything'sgetting worse.
Who should I be seeking out thento talk to about these sorts of

(01:07:32):
things?
Or what should I be doing?
Bruce, fix me.

SPEAKER_05 (01:07:37):
What should I be doing?
You want my two-word answer?
Making friends.

SPEAKER_04 (01:07:43):
Fucking a Bruce.
Making friends, making comrades,I'd also say.

SPEAKER_05 (01:07:52):
Solidarity is the answer.
Solidarity, so I'm using morethe Marxist or labor phrase, but
it's a very good one.
Finding our common humanity withone another.
Identity politics, maybe in itsoriginal version, was to be
applauded for its efforts.
But what it has become by beingco-opted by neoliberal politics,

(01:08:15):
it has added to our isolation.
Instead of us finding commonhumanity with others, we're
retreating into our identitycommunity, where others are more
like us.
They're mirroring us back.
Friendships and other forms ofsolidarity involves getting to
know someone who's not like mein so many possible ways,

(01:08:39):
including politically for thatmatter.

SPEAKER_04 (01:08:46):
With that, we have very little time left at the
end.
And we we always we always enduh our uh conversations with
Augustine's line about hopehaving two beautiful daughters,
anger and courage, anger at theway things are and the courage
to change them.
So what are you angry about andwhat gives you courage at this
time?

SPEAKER_05 (01:09:06):
Me?
What I'm angry about is theglobal oppression of the masses.
We're talking 80 to 90 percentof the population of this planet
of all identities, but they'reall oppressed in mass.
I'm angry about that.
And that it's done deliberately.
The ruling class are notunconscious.

(01:09:26):
They know what the policies are.
That's what I'm angry about.
What I'm encouraged about, as Isaid earlier about the client
that I met a few weeks ago,there's increasingly pushback,
yeah, both on a personal leveland a social level.
We're seeing it right now inMamdani.
He's making it very clear.
I'm standing up for everybody.

(01:09:47):
I'm pro-Palestine, and I cantalk to you why I hate what he
does and sit right beside myJewish brother here who's
helping me in my campaign.
Nothing is sticking.
So keep an eye on that as a signfor what lies ahead.

SPEAKER_04 (01:10:06):
Thank you so much, Bruce, for being with us.
And we're gonna have to have youon again because uh we're gonna
have to talk about money at somepoint.
I'm all into money now.

SPEAKER_05 (01:10:14):
Money is affecting us too, it's part of it.

SPEAKER_04 (01:10:16):
All right.
Great to be with you.
See you guys.
Thank you.

SPEAKER_05 (01:10:20):
Bye-bye.

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:31):
And you have to read up to your friends.
And yep, one of the stuff.

SPEAKER_01 (01:14:28):
You are listening to Religion and Justice.
This podcast is a project of theWinland Cook program in religion
and justice at VanderbiltDivinity School.
We'll be back after this shortbreak.
You are listening to Religionand Justice.
We'll be back after this shortbreak.
You are listening to Religionand Justice.
Coming up, more of ourconversation with Bruce Rogers

(01:14:48):
Vaughn.
Thank you for tuning in for thisepisode of the Religion and
Justice Podcast.
Our show will continue afterthis short break.