WILLIAM J. Doherty and Barbara Dafoe Whitehead never planned their pincer movement on American society. Their timing, though impeccable, was accidental. First Doherty's book Soul Searching: Why Psychotherapy Must Promote Moral Responsibility described American individualism run amok, then Whitehead's recent bestseller The Divorce Culture exposed the hidden cost of the chaos, particularly for children.
Together the publications form an alarming picture of a culture, that dismisses virtues as hang-ups, one in which the proudest boast is "I'm doing this for me".
Nor is it surprising that both books have taken off in such a way as the now adult children of the "me" generation ask if the price of their parents' self-fulfilment quest was perhaps too high.
This accusation of self-obsession is nothing new to the US - Christopher Lasch wrote The Culture Of Narcissism in 1979, after all - but these writers are not just chronicling a decline. They are warning of a crisis.
Judging by their examples, everyday life has become perplexing. A woman feels compelled to visit her dying mother. Her psychotherapist detects unhealthy obligation in her client and asks "What is she to you now?" A husband wants to preserve his marriage. "We are in the business of saving individuals, not marriages," he is told by a marriage therapist. A couple takes the advice of a "vow sourcebook" and pledges to marry for "as long as we both shall like". A divorce workbook for young children explains "legal stuff". Then it moves on to fun stuff. "What do you think a courtroom looks like?" it asks "Draw a picture here."
The American family is not what it was - and that's official. In 1992 The American Heritage Dictionary dropped the words "blood, marriage or adoption" from its definition of "family". It substituted: "Two or more people who share goals or values, have long-term commitments to one another, and reside usually in the same dwelling place." Choice, it seemed, had vanquished tradition.
"For many, psychotherapy replaced family as the only reliable haven in a heartless world," William Doherty writes, accusing his own profession of abdicating its role as moral counsellor. "What is going on here?" the Journal of the American Medical Association asked in its December 1996 review of Soul Searching. It was understandably confused by book on therapy that used words like "should" and "responsibility" - taboo notions in the 250 forms of therapy currently available.
"This was a rearguard action and I expected a negative backlash," admits Doherty, the director of marriage and family therapy at the University of Minnesota. But he had articulated what a growing number of therapists feel: that instead of strengthening civil society they have helped to dismantle it by promoting unfettered self-interest. "I have seen took many parents move on from their children," Doherty writes, adding that he has also witnessed too many spouses discard a marriage when an attractive alternative appears and too many individuals avoid social responsibility under the rubric of "it's not my thing".
His call for a re-evaluation may be a personal crusade. It is also, however, a matter of professional urgency. Psychotherapy has been not on the couch but on the ropes in recent years, suffering body blows to its reputation. Hysterical cases of recovered memory, the cynical use of mental health defence and protracted child custody battles all reinforced the public's suspicion of hucksterism. William Doherty accepts the lesser charge of hubris.
"In the past we believed we could keep our hands clean of the moral residue from clients' decisions," he writes, "but the culture we helped to shape is in crisis, partly because people believed what we told them about the good life."
The messages were clear and consistent. Be good to yourself and others in your life will be fine. "I do my thing, and you do your thing/I am not in this world to live up to your expectations" as the 1960s Gestalt prayer begins.
The psychotherapist's original job - to liberate the individual from corrosive guilt and shame - was appropriate when guilt and shame had the upper hand, Doherty observes. By the 1990s, however, "expressive self-interest" is established and "the dark side of individualism" becomes visible. Relationships that no longer satisfy the individual are jettisoned, ethical judgments become matters of taste and the political shrinks to the personal. "It makes subjectivity the most important thing," Jungian analyst James Hillman observed in a recent interview, "and therapists are the experts subjectivity".
Doherty insists he and his colleagues are not experts on morality and he is horrified by the idea of the preacher/therapist. He asks only that his profession try to "reverse its contribution to the increasing self-orientation of contemporary life," by cultivating rather than rejecting a client's moral sense. Most psychotherapists have, he feels, become like accountants "who advise the chief executive officer to cut losses and close down the factory" - the factory in this case being the family.
"I'm not talking about a permanent commitment," a suitor assures his beloved in a New Yorker cartoon, "I'm talking about marriage." The joke reflects a common reality. Some 64 per cent of American marriages end in divorce and 50 per cent of children will experience it. "Family break-up," Barbara Dafoe Whitehead writes, "has become a defining event of American childhood." She and Doherty lament the fact and insist that its implications have been wilfully ignored.
Media reaction to The Divorce Culture proved Whitehead had touched a raw nerve. Within days of the book's publication, the soft-spoken, 52-year-old Massachusetts woman was appearing on talk shows and in lecture halls nationwide, addressing diverse audiences, many made up of Whitehead's former feminist allies.
"I place myself in the tradition of progressive feminism concerned about the well-being of children," she recently commented. "By 1980s standards, I tell off the feminist map. I don't think that's because I have taken a wrong turn."
A significant number of women seem to agree with her. On The Connection, a high-brow Boston radio programme, Whitehead listened to one caller who tearfully insisted the happiness of a second marriage had been achieved at the expense of her children's stability. "They were on firm footing before," the woman said, "but now they're adolescents and they don't know who they are. I've got it all but they shouldn't have paid the price, and, if I had known that then I wouldn't have left their father." Subsequent callers questioned Whitehead's findings and some echoed her concern. None attacked her, however, and that made her a rarity in the blood sport of talk radio.
Whitehead does not gloat over such tearful endorsements of her thesis, nor does she blame the victims. "The last thing I want to do is heap more woes and sorrows upon people who have been through divorce - that includes my daughter and my brothers and sister," she told the Boston Globe last month, "I do think that if we can get our heads straight about what to do with a culture, that's really hard on marriages and relationships in general, we can talk about what the problem is."
Such comments do not satisfy the critics who accuse Whitehead of initiating a conservative backlash. She answers the charge by undermining it. The entire framework for thinking about divorce has come to be shaped by this sense of entitlement," she argues, "so that expressions of concern about children are often angrily rejected as unfeeling, attacks on divorced individuals.
The Divorce Culture does not attack. It analyses. Tracing the history of divorce in the US, it pinpoints two defining moments, one in the 1920s when rising economic expectations bred material dissatisfaction and one in the 1960s the era of "psychologic revolution" - when "rising emotional expectations forced a growing sense of emotional dissatisfaction and restlessness in marriage."
Women in particular were advised to evacuate the toxic marital environment. Numerous consciousness-raising books presented divorce, not marriage, as "the defining achievement of women's lives, the great article of freedom".
WHITEHEAD, a feminist, concedes that liberation was necessary. She points out, however, that American children paid for it. "The ability to shape and reshape intimate relationships is a source of hope, optimism and possibility," she writes. "But as adults enjoy more freedom in the pursuit of a satisfying, intimate life, children's family lives become increasingly subject to arrangement, regulation, and control."
For the million or more children annually who experience parental divorce in the US, "the suitcase is the only secure fixture of a peripatetic childhood" as they commute between mother and father. A growing number are frequent fliers, accumulating air miles as they divide their holiday time between households thousands of miles apart.
Whitehead provides statistics that reveal poor academic performance and behavioural problems in the children of divorce. She also cites the reactions of today's young adults. "When I speak to college students, very few say that the divorce of their parents taught them important lessons," she said in a recent radio interview, "They say `I never want to go through that'."
Nobody wants to go through it, Whitehead's critics insist, but many must. And the alternative - enforced unity of warring parents - is horrific for children. Whitehead responds that she is calling for a reassessment of the divorce culture, not for a repeal of divorce law. In doing so, however, like Doherty, she has hit America where it hurts.
