David John Smail[1] (23 April 1938 – 3 August 2014)[2] was a British clinical psychologist who was a proponent of a social materialist explanation of psychological distress.
Critical of the claims made by psychotherapy, he suggests that it only works to the extent that the therapist becomes a friend of the patient, providing encouragement and support.
While he does not condemn therapy as useless, he suspected that it is only effective to the extent that the therapist becomes a true friend to the client, involved in their world.
Catharsis, the supposed process by which people are 'cured' of 'mental illness' once they gain 'insight' into their problems, is illusory, and therapists are to a large extent magicians involved in wishful thinking.
Interest and power, he says, are what determine events in our lives more than we are allowed to acknowledge, individuals generally have limited agency, and 'willpower' is a fiction .
The causes of distress are not to be found in faulty or dysfunctional brains, but in the often toxic family circumstances, community settings, the workplace and the wider social world, with all its inequalities, injustices and environmental breakdown.