Philosophical Counseling, Not Marinoff
A person whose intellectual taste and judgments I trust told me that she started reading ‘Plato, Not Prozac’ but then she had to quit. I was not surprised: I discarded Lou Marinoff both as a philosopher and as a counselor many years ago back in Germany. I didn’t even have to open his over-advertised book, it was enough to browse a few articles and reviews like Tudor B. Munteanu’s review http://www.friesian.com/munteanu.htm or Alessandro Volpone’s ‘Plato, Not Viagra’ : http://win.filosofare.org/Pf/marginalia/RecMarinoff/Plato_not%20_Viagra.htm
Now I opened the book randomly and the first thing I saw was that he mentioned the Cynics and the early Stoics as ‘Pre-Socratics’ (page 53). This is like saying that the H-bomb was a pre-A-bomb or World War II was pre-World War I while his book’s cover proudly states that ‘Lou Marinoff, Ph.D., is a philosophy professor at the City College of New York, a pioneer of the philosophical counseling movement in North America, and president of the American Philosophical Practitioners Association.”
Shlomit Schuster said that Marinoff’s book and activities caused a “worldwide embarrassment for the profession” . I should say that it caused a worldwide embarrassment for two professions: both for philosophers and for philosophical counselors.
I was curious to see what Marinoff is doing 20 years after having started causing the worldwide embarrassment and was surprised to see that he is still churning out his ‘certifications’ to anyone willing to pay $800-1200 for a 3 day session.
I don’t seem to have grasped yet that this is the land of boundless possibilities.
Maybe because I am sort of “pre-Marinoff”?
the culture of stress-FREEDOM is optional
I used to make an analogy to illustrate the difference between an egalitarian social group pursuing stress-freedom versus a highly hierarchical one that cultivates dominance through aggression by comparing the two groups to bonobos vs. chimpanzees as we know them from studies and articles which all insist that the differences are hardwired in the animals’ brains, like the article published in the Washington Post.
Watching ‘Stress, Portrait of a Killer – Full Doc 2008 by National Geographic’ ( a 15 minutes version is also available) I’m not so sure about the hard wiring. If baboons can change their culture so radically from aggressive into peaceful why could humans not do it, too?
True, for the baboons the cultural change was only possible after the aggressive stressor jerks of the community were killed by their own damaged immune systems (and some infected meat stolen from humans)…
Epicurus and his friends did not wait for all the aggressive human bullies to kill themselves but formed intentional alternative communities for the cultivation of human flourishing through stress-FREEDOM and friendship.
In fact, in our own days, too, more and more human groups are opting out from the majority’s aggressive hierarchical competitive structures and build alternative communities with different structures, like the 200 year old ordered anarchy on Tristan da Cunha or the hundreds of intentional communities in the US and West Europe.
how the pleasure principle shapes our world
THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE in the New Yorker: Stephen Greenblatt explains how Lucretius and his poem “On the Nature of Things” shaped the modern world.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/2011/08/08/110808on_audio_greenblatt
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