One of the terrifying achievements of the modern cult of therapy has been to churn out a generation of people completely focused on the self and in constant need of validation from others.
The most striking revelation about Elliot Rodger, the alleged Santa Barbara shooter, is that he had been in therapy for most of his life.
A family friend said Rodger had been seeing a therapist since the age of eight. Apparently he had visited a therapist “virtually every day” during his high school years. By the time of the massacre and suicide at the University of Santa Barbara over the weekend, when he was 22, Rodger reportedly had “multiple therapists.”
Today it has been revealed that so central were his therapists to his daily existence that he emailed his hateful 141-page manifesto to them (and to his parents) 15 minutes before going on his stabbing and shooting spree.
I think Rodger’s reported reliance on therapists from childhood through to adulthood deserves more analysis than it has so far received, because it potentially speaks to a dark side—a very dark side—of the modern therapy culture. There has been a mad dash to blame Rodger’s actions on the misogynistic websites that he was known to visit, with some claiming these sites warped his mind and made him murderous. There has been far less focus on the therapy culture which by all accounts, and according to his family and friends, was a far more longstanding part of his life than his Internet habits.
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