This list doesn’t include every book or article that is critical of the Con psychotherapy, just the ones I have read so far, in no particular order. There are LOTS more.
Commenters, feel free to add your recommendations.
Notice how much has been written against therapy. That’s a red flag in itself.
I find it interesting and troubling that the criticisms of psychotherapy go back decades, and yet there is still so little change or improvement in psychotherapy practice. It is as if Grifters psychotherapists are either unaware of these criticisms, or simply do not care. As long as the public believes that psychotherapy is helpful and remains ignorant of these criticisms, I suppose psychotherapists have no incentive to change. They can just keep practising their nonsense and collecting their fees.
There are also numerous first-person accounts of experiences in therapy. You can also read the texts associated with different therapeutic approaches – and marvel at the lack of critical thinking, the anecdotes that always prove the theory (and never an anecdote that challenges the theory), and the underlying smugness that practitioners of this therapy are never wrong, and any clients who think so are merely showing how badly they need to be cured.
Shouldn’t I Be Feeling Better By Now? Edited by Yvonne Bates. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Mind Games. Robert A. Baker. Prometheus Books, 1996.
The Psychological Society. Martin L. Gross. Random House, 1978.
House of Cards: Psychology and Psychiatry Built on Myth. Robyn Dawes. Free Press,1996.
Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists: The Common Roots of Psychotherapy and Its Future. E. Fuller Torrey. Emerson Hall Publishers; 1st edition (1972)
“The Bait-and-Switch Tactic in Psychotherapy” by Martin H. Williams, in Psychotherapy, 1985, vol. 22, pp. 110-13.
“Fringe Psychotherapies: The Public at Risk” by Barry L. Beyerstein for The Scientific Review of Alternative Medicine, circa 2002.
Smoke and Mirrors: The Devastating Effect of False Sexual Abuse Claims. Terence W. Campbell. Da Capo Press, 1998.
Psychotherapy: The Purchase of Friendship. William Schofield. A Spectrum book, 1964 (updated in 1986).
Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing. Jeffrey M. Masson. Common Courage Press, 1993 (revised edition, I think the first came out in 1988).
Manufacturing Victims: What the Psychology Industry is Doing to People. Tana Dineen. Robert Davies Multimedia Publishing (US),1998.
What Therapists Don’t Talk About and Why: Understanding Taboos that Hurt Us and Our Clients. Pope, Sonne, and Greene. American Psychological Association, 2006.
Therapy’s Delusions: The Myth of the Unconscious and Exploitation of Today’s Walking Worried. Ofshe and Watters. Scribner, 1999.
Making Monsters: False Memories, Psychotherapy, and Sexual Hysteria. Ofshe and Watters. University of California Press, 1996.
Crazy Therapies: What Are They? Do They Work? Singer and Lalich. Jossey-Bass, 1996.
Gaslighting, the Double Whammy, Interrogation and Other Methods of Covert Control in Psychotherapy and Analysis. Theodore L. Dorpat. Jason Aronson, 1996.
The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions. Donald A. Eisner. Praeger, 2000.
The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change. Bernie Zilbergeld. Little, Brown, and Company, 1983.
The Illusion of Psychotherapy. William M. Epstein. Transaction Publishers, 1995.
Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology. Edited by Scott O. Lilienfeld, Steven Jay Lynn and Jeffrey M. Mohr. The Guildford Press, 2003.
Demystifying Therapy. Ernesto Spinelli. Constable and Company Ltd, 1994.
Psychotherapy and its Discontents. Edited by Windy Dryden and Colin Feltham. Open University Press, 1992.
Can Psychotherapists Hurt You? Judi Striano. Professional Press, 1988.
Other interesting authors: Thomas Szasz, David Smail, Irving Yalom, Hans Strupp
I’ve heard that Alex Howard’s Challenges to Counselling & Psychotherapy is a good book.
Therapy is a Con 
Thanks for the reading list. I have many on my blog. I will put a link to your site on mine. You can find me at the website above or at “Multiple Personalities Don’t Exist”
Keep up the good blog! Thanks.
I’d like to suggest a video resource. About 20 years ago or so, PBS Frontline made a documentary on the recovered-memory controversy called “Divided Memories.” Although not available on the PBS website, large portions of the documentary have recently become available on YouTube. I don’t agree with everything the filmmakers imply (Peter Freyd does not seem like the most innocent parent to me), but there are some highly revealing and disturbing segments that make the viewer question the nature and credentials of therapists. Highlights include:
–A California therapist admitting that he doesn’t exactly believe in objective reality and that it therefore doesn’t really matter whether his clients actually did grow up in satanic cults, because “we all live in a delusion…to some extent.” Meanwhile, one of his patients, tormented by what she believes to be authentic memories of ritual abuse, self-injures and attempts suicide.
–A much more chastened therapist, this one from Arizona, admits that he inadvertently ruined his patients’ lives with regression therapy and talks of how therapy has become a kind of substitute religion.
–Yet another therapist claims to have helped patients recover memories of having been stuck in the Fallopian tube prior to their own conception (yes, you read that correctly) and leads some truly weird group sessions. I found this woman’s image and persona particularly interesting.
–Refugees from a Philadelphia group-therapy cult tell horror stories about how their own lives began to deteriorate once they got involved with the group. The therapists running the place have since been successfully sued.
I don’t have skin in the recovered-memory game in particular, so to me, these segments were more about flaws in psychotherapy/counseling at large. As such, I think the film is worth a look for anyone interested in criticism or debate regarding therapy.
Great stuff! Thanks!
You’re welcome!
Oh, and here are the URLs:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Oh, something else you might really dig–a piece of fiction that would *really* resonate with the theme of this blog. It’s a movie called “House of Games” with Lindsay Crouse and Joe Mantegna, based on the play by David Mamet (which itself is available on Amazon). Guess what the plot is? Psychiatrist meets professional con artist and forms an instant kinship. Who’s conning whom and who will win?
I found it deeply cathartic and insightful, and extremely well-written. I think it’s available on DVD from the Criterion Collection. Enjoy!
I guess when I find something of interest, I feel it would be better to share it in a comment on this blog. So here’s another something of interest: https://books.google.com/books?id=neUCAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA29&lpg=PA29&dq=new+york+magazine+aug+31+1987&source=bl&ots=ktM6Qo6vH-&sig=bKGfgsfvI9LzKhyZK5GTsfNvPXo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiP-7KA9qTPAhWMy4MKHUzmAPEQ6AEIKTAB#v=onepage&q=new%20york%20magazine%20aug%2031%201987&f=false
This is the August 31, 1987 issue of New York magazine, archived in Google Books. Scroll to page 34 and you’ll find the feature article “Prisoners of Psychotherapy” by Terri Minsky. It’s not quite as hard-hitting as the PBS documentary, but it is revealing in places, particularly on the subject of clients who can’t quit and the therapists who won’t let them. As one shrink bluntly puts it in the article, “You think I like to see $10,000 a year walk out the door?”
Oooh, good find!
Another video resource, also dealing with recovered memory/multiple personality therapy, this one from the CBC:
Again, there are some revealing quotes in here:
“There are a lot of techs here who will tell you that you know you’re getting better when you feel like shit. And I must be getting a lot better because I really feel like shit” –said by a woman who was obsessively compelled to badly injure herself as a result of her MPD therapy.
A therapy dropout says: “And I said to him, ‘what if it’s all been a lie?’ And he said to me, ‘well, I’d certainly have egg on my face.’ Egg on your face?! My family’s destroyed, I’m an alcoholic, I’m a drug addict now, I almost had my kids taken away from me, and you have egg on your face?!”
Another old New York magazine article, relevant to CBT and REBT: http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/14947/
That’s a profile of Albert Ellis, father of modern behavioral therapies, in which we learn that Ellis was a vicious control freak who cursed at patients, had sex with them after they had terminated therapy, and was so loathed by the other people around him that the very board of the institute he founded considered kicking him out. If you want to learn what a horrifying compassion deficit looks like, this is it.