15 July 2008
Tuesday 15 July 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Philip Dodd and guests explore whether we have become an emotionally incontinent society and ask if it is time we resurrected the stiff upper lip.
Playlist
Happiness, according to Aristotle, is 'the meaning and the purpose of life.' The government certainly seems to agree, appointing a so-called Happiness Tsar and providing £173 million in funding to train thousands of new Cognitive Behavioural Therapists - professionals who will help people suffering from depression to retrain their thought patterns.
But does all this focus on attaining happiness really do us any good? Or have we instead become a culture morbidly focussed on our own feelings and unable to talk about anything but ourselves? Recent studies have argued that so-called 'therapy culture' is damaging our education system, and that people who've been through trauma often fare better if they choose not to talk about it, than if they share their feelings.
So is it time that we stopped talking and returned to the days of the stiff upper lip? Philip Dodd is joined in studio by writer and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, who believes in the power of not talking and by Prof Susie Orbach, the psychotherapist and writer, who argues that - perhaps contrary to appearances - we are not yet an emotionally intelligent society. Major General Sir Patrick Cordingley, former Commander of the Desert Rats, gives a soldier's view of how best to survive testing times and cultural historian Prof Richard Luckhurst, charts the history of trauma as an idea
