First Drafts - The Prospect magazine blog

Derek Draper, Labour adviser turned psychotherapist, has recently graced the Guardian’s Comment is Free blog with a piece on TV therapy programmes, one of which he is currently involved with. It’s an interesting topic, and an interesting post, not least for its reliance on a technique familiar to any regular reader of “defences” of arguably exploitative, voyeuristic programmes. Draper summarizes his case as follows:

[T]he most fundamental argument for TV therapy is related to the objections to it… I suspect there is an underlying, if often unconscious, dynamic behind many of the objections to this new “psychological TV”: that being openly emotional is still something many people find uncomfortable, and therefore that exploring our thoughts and feelings and searching for emotional comfort is something that should be done only in private.

This is the fallacy of begging the question or, in more formal terms, petitio principii, in which the proposition to be debated—in this case, that TV therapy is a good thing—has already been assumed. Any reader who accepts that “the objections” to Draper’s position are founded on an unreasonable and “often unconscious… dynamic” must accept that there can be little legitimate querying of his conclusions. It is, in other words, impossible to suggest Draper is wrong without rejecting the terms of his debate (which also present an oversimple account of his opponents’ arguments). He continues:

Why do we flinch at seeing feelings expressed and explored in public? Why do we assume that people will be risking damage to themselves if they open up their emotions and let others know how they are feeling on the inside?

These are both good questions, but they are not being asked openly. Their intention, rather, is to bolster the opinions offered in the previous paragraph. “We”, Draper tells us, flinch at seeing our feelings publicly expressed; “we” assume we risk damage by opening up; and “we” are surely unreasonable when we assert these things. Thus, when “we” disagree with him, it’s because of our unconscious fears and repressions. And who wants to be on the side of nasty things like repression, or against good stuff like expression, self-exploration and opening-up?

Importantly, Draper’s position does not involve a failure of logic. It is an informal, as opposed to a formal, fallacy—we cannot deduce from it that any of his claims are wrong. He is, after all, an expert. Like many other experts, however, his writing here presents opinion as though it were argument; and makes the assumption that its author knows better than “we” do about our true feelings and motives. He may well be right. But this is still a dishonest way of beginning a debate.