The Origins of Unhappiness

The introduction sets out David Smail's main thesis: to understand emotional distress, the common belief has to be turned upside down — instead of looking inward to find and destroy the products of «psychopathology» in ourselves, we should look to the world to identify the sources of our pain and happiness. The author claims that at the outset we are all not the carriers of some psychological abnormality but innocent victims of social pathology. This does not mean we are not psychologically damaged by life experience, but that neither the causes nor the «cures» of such damage can be treated as «internal» matters.

Smail writes that earlier criticisms fell short in three respects: they did not draw a radical conclusion from their own arguments (from Adler to Laing they spoke from a therapeutic viewpoint), their theoretical elements still rest on individual psychology (the roots of most are in Freudian psychoanalysis) and the vision of society offered is often confined to the family. The author worked thirty years as a clinical psychologist in the National Health Service and drew this conclusion: the people who came to him increasingly thought less that something was «wrong» with them, and their suffering could in no way be counted as their own «fault». The book offers no «simple answers», because if there were a simple answer it would have been found long ago.

Chapter 1 opens with the growing place of psychology in society: once a small branch of the academy and the preserve of a handful of eccentric doctors, psychology is now a growing industry whose products — counselling, psychotherapy, psychometric tests and stress management — are known to everyone. The author accepts that some benefits have come from this transformation (the move away from electric shock and mysterious treatments), but asks: what does this explosion show? Has there been a decrease in psychological distress? The answer: there is no evidence that the wider use of psychological theories and techniques has reduced distress and their development has not been based on scientific proof.

Smail calls the psychological field a «marketplace»: psychoanalysis was the first «brand-name therapy», and there are rival groups each trying to draw its own boundaries, patent its procedures and keep out intruders; the theories of leaders like Freud, Jung, Rogers and Ellis reflect their personal concerns. The question of which of these therapies is «true» is meaningless, because they are more or less plain philosophies of life and strategies for coping with it. This part of the chapter arrives at the idea that «psychology flourishes because we want it to be effective so much and because it is impossible to show that it is not effective».

• The author sets out his thesis openly in the introduction and derives the topic of the following chapters from it
• The criticism is systematised in three points: not drawing a radical conclusion, resting on individual psychology, the narrowness of the vision of society
• Academic terms and plain language are used together; the author tries to treat the reader as an «average reader»
• The chapter is built in the sequence of observation, question and answer