Emmy van Deurzen observes that psychological frameworks make judgement easy. They supply definitions—of sanity and its absence, of healthy development and its arrest, of the parent who went wrong and the psyche that bears the consequence. The definitions arrive pre-formed. The practitioner applies them. The person being assessed is seen through them.
The framework provides the categories and the categories provide the certainty, and the certainty is experienced as knowledge because it has the form of knowledge—the technical vocabulary, the theoretical coherence, the accumulated authority of a discipline that has been developing its apparatus for over a century.
What van Deurzen notices, and what her observation opens, is the gap between the appearance of knowledge and its substance. The framework sees clearly within its own categories. The question it does not ask is whether the categories are adequate to the situation—whether the person being assessed is accurately described by the framework’s translation of them, or whether the translation has produced a version of the person that fits the framework rather than the person.
This gap between the framework’s version and the thing itself is not specific to psychology. It appears wherever a system of categories becomes the primary tool for understanding a situation, and the system’s confidence in its own categories substitutes for engagement with what the situation actually is.
Religious orthodoxy provides the oldest and most thoroughly documented example of this structure. The framework supplies categories of salvation and damnation, of the faithful and the fallen, of the properly formed conscience and the one that has gone astray. The categories are clear. The person who has mastered the framework can apply them with confidence to any situation—can know with apparent certainty who is in a state of grace and who is not, whose suffering reflects divine testing and whose reflects divine punishment, whose doubts are the normal friction of faith and whose indicate a deeper corruption. The knowing is easy because the framework does the work. The practitioner does not need to engage with the complexity of the individual life. The individual life is evidence to be classified.
Van Deurzen draws the parallel herself, though in a different direction—she compares therapy fees to indulgences, the medieval practice of purchasing relief from the consequences of sin through a formal transaction with an authorised institution. The parallel she is drawing is between the therapeutic process and the religious one: both offer the illusion of redemption through a process conducted by an authorised practitioner within an established framework, and both can proceed indefinitely because the framework always contains more categories to apply, more stages to work through, more interpretations to deepen the previous ones.
The indulgence worked because the framework said it worked. The sale completed the process the framework required. Whether the underlying condition—the sin, the moral state, the relationship between the person and their God—had changed was a question the framework had already answered: the process had been completed, the fee had been paid, the practitioner had administered the transaction. The record was clear.
Political ideology provides a parallel that operates at larger scale and with more visible consequences. The ideological framework supplies categories for understanding society—class, consciousness, historical stage, the correct and incorrect sides of the dialectic—with a precision that makes judgement not just easy but necessary. The framework does not merely allow the practitioner to assess who is deficient. It requires the assessment. Deficiency is structural. The person who has not yet understood their position within the framework’s categories is in a state of false consciousness, and false consciousness is a condition to be corrected, not a perspective to be respected.
The correction is, as van Deurzen says of therapy, a form of leading by the hand. The practitioner who has mastered the framework guides the not-yet-enlightened toward the correct way of thinking. The guidance is presented as liberation—the removal of false consciousness, the achievement of genuine understanding, the transition from deficiency to clarity.
The person being guided is expected to recognise, at the end of the process, that they now think correctly. Those who follow the framework find, within the framework’s logic, salvation. Those who do not are still deficient, still in need of further guidance, still not yet at the stage of development the framework predicts they should reach.
The framework’s confidence in its own categories means that resistance to the framework is itself evidence of deficiency. The person who questions the classification is demonstrating the problem the classification identifies. The framework is self-sealing. Confirmation and contradiction are both absorbed as evidence of its accuracy.
Medical diagnosis, in its institutional rather than its clinical form, produces a similar structure, though with different content and a different relationship to the person being assessed. The diagnostic framework supplies categories of normal and pathological, of the condition that explains the symptom and the symptom that reveals the condition. The categories are applied to a person who presents with experiences that do not fit their ordinary life. The framework translates those experiences into a diagnosis. The diagnosis is the framework’s version of what is happening.
The clinical practitioner who engages carefully with the person—who treats the diagnosis as a starting point rather than a conclusion, who remains open to the possibility that the framework’s translation is incomplete—uses the framework as a tool. The institutional practitioner who applies the framework uniformly, who expects the person to conform to the diagnostic category, who treats deviation from the expected presentation as complication or non-compliance, has made the framework primary. The person is secondary—evidence to be classified rather than a situation to be understood.
Van Deurzen’s concern is that psychotherapy has drifted toward this institutional mode. The framework has become primary. The person’s life outside the sessions—the living intensely and reflectively, the challenging new experiences—has become secondary. The session is where the real work occurs. The life is where the session’s insights are applied, or fail to be applied, which generates material for the next session. The framework is self-sustaining. The person remains inside it.
Legal systems provide another variation of the same structure, one in which the gap between the framework’s categories and the actual situation is not incidental but constitutive. The law operates through categories that are necessarily general, applied to situations that are necessarily particular. The gap between them is where judgement is required—the judgement about whether this situation is adequately described by this category, whether the category’s application produces a result that corresponds to what the situation actually requires.
A legal system that has confidence in its own categories—that treats the category’s application as sufficient without examining the correspondence—produces decisions that are internally coherent and externally disconnected. The decision follows correctly from the framework. The framework’s application to the situation was wrong. The correctness and the wrongness coexist without cancelling each other, because the system measures correctness within the framework, not correspondence between the framework and the situation.
Van Deurzen’s observation that therapy can teach people to think in a new way—the practitioner’s way, the framework’s way—finds its legal parallel in the expectation that the person appearing before the system will speak in the system’s categories, will present their situation in the terms the framework can process, will translate their actual experience into the vocabulary the framework accepts. The translation is not neutral. It excludes what the framework cannot accommodate. What is excluded does not appear in the record. The record is the framework’s version of the situation.
What connects these examples is not a common subject but a common structure. A framework is developed to address genuine complexity. The framework works—it produces results that are better than no framework, more consistent, more transmissible across practitioners, more amenable to refinement over time. The framework’s success generates confidence in its categories. The confidence in the categories gradually displaces the engagement with the thing the categories are supposed to describe.
The framework becomes the lens rather than the tool. The lens is the seeing. What the lens cannot see does not exist.
Van Deurzen’s remedy is implicit in how she frames the alternative: living more intensely and reflectively, letting oneself be challenged by new experiences. The remedy is not the abandonment of frameworks. It is the restoration of the primary relationship—between the person and their actual experience, between the practitioner and the actual situation—from which the framework is supposed to derive its authority. The framework is useful when it illuminates what the direct engagement has already encountered. It is a substitution when it replaces the engagement.
The practitioner who applies a framework to a situation they have not genuinely encountered is producing the appearance of understanding. The appearance is convincing. The technical vocabulary is precise. The theoretical coherence is real. The confidence is genuine. The understanding is the framework’s.
The medieval person who bought an indulgence had been through a real process, administered by a real practitioner, within a framework that commanded genuine belief. The relief they experienced was real. Whether the underlying condition had changed is the question van Deurzen is asking, not about medieval religion, but about contemporary therapy—and, by extension, about every framework that has become confident enough in its own categories to stop asking whether the categories are adequate to the situation they are supposed to describe.
The framework sees what it was built to see.
The situation continues beyond the edge of that vision.
The question is whether the practitioner notices the edge.
Or proceeds as though the vision were complete.
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“Everyday Mysteries, A Handbook of Existential Psychotherapy”, Emmy Van Deurzen; Routledge, 2010
