June 21 (Bloomberg) -- There are countless reasons to celebrate the new book ``One Nation Under Therapy: How the Helping Culture Is Eroding Self-Reliance.''

One of those reasons will strike particularly close to the heart of businessmen and women who share a certain old-fashioned temperament. Here they will find, at long last, a justification for keeping their mouths shut.

``One Nation Under Therapy'' (published by St. Martin's Press) is written by Christina Hoff Sommers, a former philosophy professor at Clark University, and Sally Satel, a practicing psychiatrist. Scanning several areas of U.S. life, from education to psychology, they have discovered the influence of a new and unwholesome ideology that they have tagged with a perfect new word.

``Therapism,'' they write, is a doctrine that ``valorizes openness, emotional self-absorption and the sharing of feelings.'' It contains two crucial propositions: ``that vulnerability, rather than strength, characterizes the American psyche; and that a diffident, anguished, and emotionally apprehensive public requires a vast array of therapists, self-esteem educators, grief counselors'' and other representatives of the helping professions.

The authors describe therapism's influence in ways both statistical and anecdotal, but their charge will be instinctively plausible to any parent who has followed trends in U.S. schooling or to any TV watcher who has been bored enough to stumble upon the insistently empathetic ``Dr. Phil.''

Mandated Sensitivity

More to the point, it will be familiar to anyone who has ever been enrolled in a company-mandated workshop or seminar or retreat that specializes in ``team building'' or ``sensitivity training'' or ``diversity training.''

With their role-playing and simulation exercises, their mandatory openness and ``sharing of feelings,'' such seminars are therapism in action. Indeed, it's not too much to say that therapism is now built into the culture of U.S. business.

Consider, as one example among many, ``Emotional Competence Training,'' a program first developed at American Express Financial Advisers but since widely used as a model among U.S. businesses.

It was designed to help managers ``develop a greater awareness of their own emotional reactions and those of their'' subordinates at work, according to the program summary -- and this, in turn, should goose the company's bottom line.

Exhibitionism

To achieve its goal, the program forces the unlucky business folk into every kind of emotional exhibitionism. First a ``facilitator'' teaches them ``to become more aware of what they're feeling at any point in time.''

Then they're placed into small groups to ``discuss among themselves how emotions are important in their own workplace.'' Then there's ``self-talk,'' in which ``participants learn how their inner dialogue with themselves shapes their feelings and actions.''

It gets worse. The poor saps are then taught ``how to `reframe' their self-talk to make it more constructive.'' Next comes training in how ``self-disclosure (can) improve relationships.''

And still they're only halfway through the program. At each step, meanwhile, participants ``engage in exercises'' borrowed from the techniques of New Age therapy: visualizations, meditation, role- playing and endless jabber about feelings.

All of this is done in front of co-workers, needless to say, creating the potential for maximum mortification.

Emotional Correctness

Most such programs are undertaken in service of something their boosters call ``emotional intelligence,'' a term popularized by Daniel Goleman, a former science writer for the New York Times, in a bestselling book in 1995.

Satel and Sommers have a better word for it: emotional correctness -- a subtle form of indoctrination, even intimidation, in which one kind of personal style, the self-absorbed and intrusive and endlessly chatty, is valued to the exclusion of other, older virtues, such as reticence, modesty and a disinclination to dwell on oneself.

Business is supposed to be a pragmatic discipline, riveted to results above all, so it is curious to note that there is no indication that this constant, mandatory ``sharing of feelings'' does anyone any good (except of course the facilitators, who make a nice living).

No Evidence

Some psychologists have known this for a long time. Satel and Sommers cite a 30-year-old University of Wisconsin study testing the theory that ``if a person can be convinced, allowed, or helped to express his feelings, he will in some way benefit from it.'' The study found no evidence supporting the theory.

Moreover, they write, ``The intervening years have produced a sizable and compelling body of research demonstrating that the expression of feelings is not a sure pathway to fulfillment. On the contrary, it often leads to unhappiness.''

``One Nation Under Therapy'' spends more time looking at the effects of emotional correctness on school children, whose personal development might be seriously skewed by therapism's constant hectoring.

Its effects on adults is more ambiguous.

``It's a waste of time and money,'' Satel said in an interview last week. ``It's a distraction from other things a company could be doing. But it's probably more irritating than damaging.''

Either way, the attachment of U.S. companies to therapism does amount to a kind of discrimination against those of us who cling to old-style reticence. The next time an employer enrolls one of us in a seminar on ``workplace dynamics'' or ``team building,'' what should be our response? A class-action suit under the Americans With Disabilities Act?

Maybe a work stoppage? I've already got the chant for the picket line: ``We balk at self-talk!'' But the picketers will probably be too shy to use it.

To contact the writer of this column: Andrew Ferguson in Washington at aferguson62@yahoo.com.

Last Updated: June 21, 2005 00:09 EDT