There is a persistent narrative in contemporary society that we lack psychological support, that we urgently need more psychologists. But do we really? Even though psychology as a profession is flourishing, particularly in the United States, with an estimated 6% growth projected from 2024 to 2034 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics), we seem increasingly less capable of coping with the angst of modern life. We worry more, stress more, and feel overwhelmed by a range of everyday pressures. To make things easier, we turn to psychologists for help.

In this text, I argue that there is an underlying issue that psychology, as presently practiced in the mainstream, cannot resolve—despite having largely monopolized the trade of everyday mental health. Even as the number of psychologists rises, so too do the levels of anxiety, depression, and stress, particularly since COVID-19 (WHO, 2022). We find ourselves in a paradoxical situation: more psychologists than ever, yet more psychological distress than ever. What happened? Is psychology capable of resolving the crises of the contemporary world, or has it become, perhaps more harshly, a discourse that legitimizes the very problems it seeks to solve?

Before addressing these questions, some disclaimers are necessary. The purpose of this text is not to discredit psychology as a science. Like any discipline, psychology plays an important role in uncovering truth and contributing to a better world. However, within the consumer market culture of today, psychology has become the victim of its own discursivization, leading to a decline in theoretical depth and a stagnation of methodological innovation. Its theoretical sophistication has eroded as mainstream psychology has drifted away from its Freudian and broader philosophical foundations, embracing instead a narrowly materialistic and biologized conception of the mind. This shift has replaced deep questions of meaning, desire, symbolism, and subjectivity with technocratic behavioral models—easier to measure yet conceptually flawed.

At the same time, methodological innovation has slowed. Research is increasingly constrained by the expectation that all insights must be validated through established, decades-old instruments and protocols. This produces a self-reinforcing conservatism: methods are endlessly perfected but rarely reimagined. As a result, psychology has begun to communicate primarily with itself for itself. The discipline thus faces an epistemological crisis, a crisis which, like all crises in science, holds the potential for renewal. Of course, there are important resistant traditions within psychology: critical psychology, psychoanalysis, and others that challenge these trends, though they remain far from dominant.

Where does this leave us, considering today’s social climate and the growing insistence that we need more psychologists? If what we mean by more psychologists is simply more practitioners rigorously oriented toward individuals, treating individuals in isolation from the social structures that shape them, then we will continue deepening the very problems we hope to resolve. This critique targets the dominant market-based psychology culture and the broader culture of well-being, not psychology per se.

The very desire for more psychologists is rooted in a narcissistic cultural drift that places the ego at the center of the world, constantly demanding attention, alienated from the world. Within this framework, the solution is always to fix the individual, not the societal conditions that burden them. We focus on positive solutions for the individual while ignoring the structural environment. This is precisely why positive psychology thrives in neoliberal societies: it aligns well with a world demanding self-optimization, uninterrupted productivity, and emotional compliance. In the life world, positive psychology serves as an instrument of stability and performance. Instead of questioning burnout-inducing structures, it teaches people to meditate their way through exhaustion, to reframe stress as a challenge, and to interpret chronic precarity as an opportunity for growth—to change themselves and not society.

In this way, the narrative that we need more psychologists prevents us from making crucial changes to the societal environment. What religious confession achieved in past centuries, contemporary psychotherapy now achieves in the secular age (Foucault 1978).

But to examine this more closely, we must explore how psychology is understood and practiced today. Again, the issue is not the discipline itself but the cultural conditions that shape its everyday meaning. The dominant narrative frames psychology as (1) commodified, (2) individualized, and (3) positively oriented.

Commodification

Psychological practice today is best exemplified by psychotherapy, where time and money are directly linked—making it extremely perverse in nature. One pays for a portion of another’s time and expertise. This does not imply that psychotherapists do not care about their clients; rather, it underscores a relationship structured by the symbolism of money, rendering the relational bond conditional within a broader market logic. Therapy has become a commodity that, in consumer culture, people begin not only to consume but even to desire as an object of personal fulfillment.

Individualization

The individualized orientation of contemporary psychology intensifies a trend that Fromm (see Helderman, 2020) diagnosed decades before the mindfulness boom. He warned that Western appropriations of Buddhist and Zen practices risk becoming tools for adjusting individuals to a pathological society instead of transforming the society itself. What Fromm observed emerging is now fully realized: a psychological culture that offers personalized techniques of calm, emotional regulation, and mental clarity while leaving untouched the social structures that produce anxiety, burnout, and despair. Mindfulness and therapy culture thus privatize suffering and distance us from the societal sphere. To care about us alone becomes the central point. Others are here to achieve that.

Positivity

The positively oriented turn in contemporary psychology does not deny suffering, but it frames it as something to be managed or transformed into growth. Even when acknowledging negativity, the field remains normatively committed to movement toward the better, resilience, and optimism. What is rarely admitted is that, as Schopenhauer insisted, suffering is not an interruption of life but its basic condition, an existential constant not easily reframed into opportunity. In focusing primarily on coping strategies that promise equilibrium, psychology subtly demands that suffering justify itself by producing value. Schopenhauer would call this demand cruel: some suffering has no meaning, and insisting that it must have it is to misunderstand the nature of human experience. Different therapeutic traditions vary in how honestly they confront suffering, yet all remain limited so long as they address it through the isolated individual rather than considering the collective conditions that generate it.

These three tendencies, commodification, individualization, and positivity, are not exhaustive, but they are enough for the purposes of this article to illustrate the core issue. We must now return to our central question: Do we need more psychologists?

If contemporary discourse is calling for more psychologists, it is often calling for more individuals capable of enduring conditions that should not be endured in the first place. So, the question is not whether we need more psychologists, but whether we still remember that no individual can heal a society that refuses to examine itself. What we truly need are those who can address the conditions of life with greater depth. Those who analyze social solidarity, order, and collective emotions. In other words, we need more philosophy and sociology, not as replacements for psychology but as essential companions to it. What we suffer from today is not the shortage of psychology but the shortage of understanding the contexts.

This does not mean we should abandon psychology. Rather, we need a psychology that reflects on its neighboring disciplines, a psychology that re-engages philosophical depth, confronts social structures, and contributes to public debate beyond the individual psyche (with the collaboration, not paradigmatic colonization of the spheres of the social world). So, we need philosophers and sociologists more actively involved in schools, policymaking, and even psychotherapy. Only by integrating context, meaning, and structure can we shift the perspective of contemporary psychology, particularly of positive psychology, beyond its neoliberal constraints.

Perhaps the present moment offers precisely this opportunity: a closer merger of disciplines in what Fromm once envisioned as sociological psychoanalysis.