I agree, I think there’s some holdover influence from psychoanalysis where the basic intuition seems to be that there’s always some deeper explanation for mental illnesses relating to underlying complexes or misdevelopment or something, and that therapy is finding and fixing those, but I don’t think this was ever a sensible idea to default to. Sometimes the reason someone is an alcoholic is as dumb as “I was a little bored at the wrong time to be a little bored, and alcohol is a socially normalized way to address this”.
I agree, I think there’s some holdover influence from psychoanalysis where the basic intuition seems to be that there’s always some deeper explanation for mental illnesses relating to underlying complexes or misdevelopment or something, and that therapy is finding and fixing those, but I don’t think this was ever a sensible idea to default to. Sometimes the reason someone is an alcoholic is as dumb as “I was a little bored at the wrong time to be a little bored, and alcohol is a socially normalized way to address this”.