In the Name of Enlightenment Psychological insight is the creed
of our time. In the name of enlightenment, experts promise help
and faith, knowledge and comfort. They devise confident formulas
for happy living and ambitious plans for dissolving the knots of
conflict. Psychology, according to its boosters, possesses
worthwhile answers to our most difficult personal questions and
practical solutions for our most intractable social problems. In
the late twentieth-century United States, we are likely to
believe what psychological experts tell us. They speak with
authority to a vast audience and have become familiar figures in
most communities, in the media, and in virtually every corner of
popular culture. Their advice is a big business. It is taken for
granted that they have a right to a central place in debates
about the current state and future direction of American
society. From families to governments, from abuse and recovery
to war and urban violence, from the mysteries of individual
subjectivity to the man