Psychology is a strange religion. While it offers us tools to assist those in emotional pain as well as skills and understanding to help raise children, most schools of psychology claim, as Christian denominations have before them, that their approach is the true way to help human beings achieve emotional health and happiness. As psychology becomes popular, generalizations become more extreme and more dogmatic. Another deadly doctrine of psychology is that there is a right way to raise children, guaranteeing that they will be happy and successful adults. Frightened young people tell me earnestly that they want to be psychologically healthy.
Psychology promises more than it can deliver.
These beliefs, temptations primarily of the affluent First World which would be unimaginable to most of the human family, are employed mercilessly by the marketing industry, and they are recognizable in uses of Christianity. The irrational beliefs guarantee that we human beings can be in charge of our own destiny, that we can keep bad things from happening to us and to those we love. These unfounded beliefs promise that we will not have to deal with our finitude. I suggest that fictions which feed these basic irrational beliefs take different forms for each generation, but the promise of invulnerability remains constant. In the 1950s, for example, marriage and family was the formula that seemed to guarantee perfect happiness to women.