By Gary Greenberg
It will be left to future historians, if there are any, to explain to their contemporaries why a profession came into existence in the 20th century whose well-paid practitioners sat in an office while people otherwise unknown to them talked about their unhappiness, one after the other, for an hour at a time. I have been a therapist for 35 years, and I still don’t really understand it. I don’t speak in delphic tongues or offer holy absolution or perform shamanic hocus pocus; I really don’t do much of anything but sit there, listen and try to tell the truth. Not that it is easy; it is taxing to spend your days immersed in other people’s misery, and whatever is wrong with me that prompted me to do this with my life, and left me able to withstand it, is not improved by the exercise. Still, I am grateful to the marketplace for providing me with such an improbable way to make a living.
I suppose those historians will also note the inexhaustible genius of a political economy that created this marketplace and ensured a robust supply of the pathologies for which renting a rapt audience by the hour was the cure. Still more impressive, in retrospect, will be the imposing professional infrastructure – offices, licences, the monetisable unit of time – for legitimising the listening caste.
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