In Therapy We Trust

Historian Eva Moskowitz takes on a genuinely original thesis here: that Americans were already pursuing emotional self-fulfillment through the nineteenth-century mind cure movement long before Freud arrived, and that therapy-speak has since become a kind of secular religion shaping law, politics, workplaces, and television. The historical sweep from the 1800s through Prozac and Oprah is impressive, and Moskowitz writes clearly enough for non-specialists to follow. The caveat is that the argument occasionally gets unwieldy — critics noted she sometimes conflates very different therapeutic traditions, and the book doesn't engage much with the genuine clinical benefits therapy provides. If you're curious about how America came to explain everything through psychological language, this is a serious and worthwhile starting point.