‘The rich and powerful are naïve and fallible and weak.’ (The White Lotus/HBO)
It sounds like a Netflix thriller. First, the mysterious death: an ageing high-street fashion mogul falls to his death from a scenic coastal precipice while walking with his middle-aged son, who happened to be both perturbed about an unfavourable change to his inheritance and at a conveniently safe distance at the time of the fall. Then, the scandal: the family’s questionably credentialled Ecuadorian psychoanalyst’s ex-assistant discloses that the exact location of the fall was meticulously preplanned for a father-son confrontation, and that the confrontation itself was rehearsed. Finally, inevitably, the courtroom drama, as the psychotherapist sweeps in with white clothes and dark glasses, and the defence team explains that the father-son tussle was only ever metaphorical — Freud’s Death of the Father, “a climax of group interaction, in a process of liberation and growing by emotionally overcoming the paternal conditioning”.
This was not, in fact, a fictional plotline, but reportage from the pretrial hearing of Mango heir Jonathan Andic, accused of murdering his father Isak, and whose therapist, Julia Lüderwaldt, faced questioning for her unconventional methods. Lüderwaldt had, at first, resisted police questioning, citing client confidentiality in line with therapeutic norms. When it transpired that Lüderwaldt, who described herself as a “prestigious doctor, psychologist and psychoanalyst”, appeared to lack formal registration in any of those fields — and therefore risked prosecution for misuse of protected titles — she changed her mind.
In Spain, as in Britain and the US, all manner of self-styled therapists and coaches proliferate on social media, building their brand on TikTok or Instagram and selling their one-to-one services to a parasocially captured audience. But Lüderwaldt wasn’t flogging life coaching or dodgy diagnoses to frazzled mums; she was high-end, her marketing limited to word of mouth among Spain’s ultra-high-net-worth. If she wasn’t a proper therapist, what was she?
From shows like White Lotus and Succession, we’re familiar with the shadowy hinterland of helpmeets and fixers that subsists around the powerful and rich. Masseurs, meditation coaches and sex workers are variously employed to meet needs that prove more existential than physiological: there is something about the condition of being unconstrained by material concerns that messes people up, and confidants can emerge in unexpected places. Not that this is just a TV fantasy. Cherie Blair’s personal trainer Carole Caplin became her stylist and wellness adviser too, purveying crystals and quantum healing. The exact methodology of the court adviser, whether it’s fashion, Freud or craniosacral release, doesn’t necessarily matter so much as their charisma and the dependence they can foster in their client base. Even Rasputin started out as a wandering healer.
The Rasputin figure is a timeless archetype. The history of ancient Rome is peppered with astrologers and ex-slaves who slide into key decision-making roles. Rasputin himself filled a vacant position with the Romanovs after his predecessor, the French mystic-turned-physician Maître Philippe, got expelled from Russia for practicing medicine without a licence, just as Spain’s courts might eventually come for Lüderwaldt. The Romanovs wanted a metaphysical shortcut to a viable male heir, but they also needed to offload their deepest anxieties outside the enforced secrecy of the family. A faith healer treating haemophilia already knew too much, and could therefore be told more, and the relief of speaking freely is a force in its own right, placing the listener in a position of formidable power.
Today, the confessional relationship is no longer part of the spiritual domain. Lüderwaldt’s self-ID into psychotherapy is specific to our materialist times: we see ourselves as rational creatures whose suffering can best be met by science, and we yearn for the magic-bullet framework that can help us fix it.
The problem is that most of the putative science of our inner life is bunk. Academic psychology has well-documented problems replicating findings. Freud’s claims about the invisible mechanisms of the mind are shrouded in pseudoscientific language but largely unfalsifiable. This can sometimes be convenient: the “death of the father” was only ever a metaphor for one’s individuation into adulthood, at least if they ask in court. Besides, this reading is, if anything, a more sober take than Freud’s own musings, which argued that the drive to kill the father was rooted in sexual jealousy of his command of the mother or the harem of women-in-general, depending on which Freud you’re reading.
Point to a wilder element of psychoanalytic theory, such as penis envy, and the refrain is generally that true psychoanalysis no longer takes it seriously, rather like proponents of a religion argue that you’re only looking at the problematic passages in their holy book and not the bits about peace and love. True, Lüderwaldt may have been an uncredentialled maverick. Yet the actual ideas that actual therapists advocate, like polyvagal theory, internal family systems or Bessel van der Kolk’s popular trauma narratives, are often pretty dubious too.
But humans are fallible creatures who like ego-validation even more than the sciencey vibes that prop it up: give us a story, any story, that absolves us of blame, or that, even better, makes us victim rather than offender in our interpersonal power games, and we’re captivated. The twin themes of Lüderwaldt’s most high-profile work seem to be family and money. Tennis star Arantxa Sánchez Vicario accused her family of mismanaging her earnings; Lüderwaldt reportedly intervened. The husband of a Spanish royal was convicted of embezzlement of public funds; Lüderwaldt helped the family adjust to the news. The backdrop of Jonathan Andic’s cliff-top confrontation was a disputed inheritance: a reasonably modest advance, and a charitable foundation that would have swallowed the remainder. Lüderwaldt reportedly pressured Isak Andic into giving his son a figure of €40 million.
We can only speculate whether Lüderwaldt’s genius involved reframing the ugly realities of familial money tussles into the language of inner conflict. Certainly, with the right therapeutic prodding, fighting over money can be turned into a tale of emotional betrayal. Your drive to manage your reputation in the midst of scandal is a trauma in which you, not the taxpayer, are the ultimate victim; your resentment over not being handed enough unearned wealth is a need for reparation, without which the primal wound of your father’s dominance will continue to fester.
The laundering of human greed and vanity into morally palatable tales of victimhood is therapy culture’s contribution to our times. We can’t lay all of this at Freud’s door. Much of it stems from the pay-to-play financial dynamic of the therapeutic relationship. Financial security stems from happy punters, and while therapists are supposed to swim upstream against the tendency to people-please, many don’t. The client holds the purse strings and, in return, the therapist shapes the client’s perception of their world. A strange thing about our current moment is that this practice of employing court flatterers is no longer limited to kings or magnates — it turns out we all want one in our lives.
If the inbuilt asymmetry of the therapeutic relationship lends itself to power games, the psychoanalytic tradition is a particularly rich repository of strategy for the master manipulator. Analysis claims that the patient cannot know his unconscious mind; he can only come to understand it, and what he really thinks, with the analyst’s interpretation. The core clinical concept of psychoanalysis, transference, requires the patient to redirect powerful unconscious feelings about his parents onto the analyst, who becomes an authority figure invoking intense emotions in the client.
Once you accrue this kind of power, you have people over a barrel. Lüderwaldt is reported to have left former clients feeling guilty and tearful, totally dependent on her to make decisions. If, as reported, her tactics were to ramp up to more sessions with more family members over time, so that she was enmeshed within the family unit, her distorted version of psychoanalysis offered a route in. The family is the locus of your problems, and the analyst can take on that familial role to fix them.
In more religious times, Rasputin’s charisma was bolstered by his status as a holy man. The priesthood, whether within the official hierarchies of the Church or in the diffuse spiritual circles outside of it, wielded power. Some priests were good, but priests who were bad could do a lot of harm, unchecked by a credulous congregation.
Therapists are Rasputins, private priests-for-hire. Most of the therapeutic churches, or “modalities”, have rules to keep their congregations safe, such as boundaries that forbid therapists from seeking controlling stakes in family finances. Still, rogue priests are everywhere, including ones with certificates. The recovered memory and satanic ritual abuse movements were, for example, driven by impeccably credentialled, experienced practitioners who committed terrible harms to patients and their families.
What we should not do, therefore, is treat therapy with religious deference. Some therapists are bad, and some are good. Some therapeutic ideas, like listening to what people are saying without interruption, are sensible. Some, like the Oedipus complex, or orgone accumulators, or recovered memories, are really stupid.
Shows like The White Lotus were hits because they showed us that the rich and powerful are as naïve and fallible and weak as the rest of us. They invited us to laugh at their frailties. We felt very comfortable poking fun at Carole Caplin, the upstart with her woo-woo ideas about healing who somehow got an immensely powerful and well-educated QC to fall for her bullshit. We remain reticent when it comes to psychotherapy, though, even though it too is riven with laughable nonsense.