Plato not Prozac

A new movement in America uses philosophy instead of Freud as a basis for therapy.

By Christina Valhouli

Aug 20, 1999 | When Megan, 29, goes to see her therapist, she never has to talk about her mother, lie on a couch or engage in an hour-long dialogue. What she does do is elbow her way past dozens of college students to the cluttered office of Lou Marinoff, a guitar-playing philosophy professor-cum-therapist. "I went to talk to him because I was in a lot of debt. So we talked about the political and economic history of the last 20 years. It was very cool," she says.

Marinoff is at the forefront of a movement called "philosophical practice" -- philosophy professors setting up shop as therapists. A professor at City College of New York, Marinoff has been in practice since 1991 and recently published "Plato Not Prozac!" (HarperCollins). He is also the president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association, which has certified about three dozen people in the United States. While using philosophy as therapy is relatively new in the U.S., Europeans have been doing it since 1981. The trend is huge in Europe, especially in Germany, which claims more than 100 counselors.

So what exactly is philosophical practice? Marinoff calls it "therapy for the sane." In a nutshell, it's using the 2,500-year-old tradition of philosophy to solve everyday problems, like work, relationship and family issues. His point is that philosophy wasn't meant to be confined to dusty academics, or a bunch of bearded, sandaled, toga-wearing Athenians. It's a return to what philosophy was meant to be -- a guideline for a way of life.

Marinoff became a therapist by accident. "Honestly, I never envisioned myself doing this," he says. In 1991, he was working at the Center for Applied Ethics at the University of British Columbia. He spent a large part of his day fielding calls from members of the media seeking his opinion on sticky social issues like abortion and euthanasia. "Pretty soon, ordinary people would call up asking questions, or just walk in the door. So we counseled them," he says. The rest, as they say, is history.

Marinoff describes his role as that of a philosophical midwife, where he helps clients (never patients) extract their philosophical views -- not with forceps, but with the Socratic method. So Socrates, who was put to death for corrupting the youth, is helping to set them straight again. "The whole point is to make people become philosophically self-sufficient," Marinoff says.

What also fueled Marinoff was his dissatisfaction with traditional therapy. "It's normal to have problems, it's normal to have emotional distress. But doctors treat it as a disease and medicate people to oblivion," he says. He is also quick to point out that philosophical practice may not be for everyone, and stresses that he is not striving to replace medicine. "If you're dysfunctional, can't work, can't think, then no, your first stop shouldn't be to a philosopher. And sometimes the best course of medicine can be Plato and Prozac," he says.

Next Page: Marinoff is also a big fan of Ayn Rand's "virtue of selfishness"

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