It can be easy to lose sight of where words come from. ‘Brand’, ‘branding’ and ‘rebranding’ probably make us think of business, marketing, advertising, etc. ‘Apple’ is a brand. ‘Uniqlo’ is a brand. ‘The Artist Formerly Known as Prince’, now deceased, continues to be a brand. . . . But where does this word come from? And what does it reveal about what it means ‘to brand’?
‘Brand’, as noun, originally meant a burning, conflagration or destruction by fire. It could also mean the thing burning, like a piece of wood in a fire. Another meaning, and one that brings us closer to the present day business meanings of the word, is the mark made through burning something with a piece of hot iron. Hence the ‘branding’ of cattle, and hence too why property in general is ‘branded’ by its owners. And so a ‘brand’ is also a trademark – a literal mark on the goods sold by a particular manufacturer of those goods (think of the labels on wine bottles). A ‘brand’ can also mean the instrument that creates ‘brands’ – so the red hot iron that brands cattle is itself a brand. This meaning is interesting because it connects all of the previous meanings of the word with the practice of healing insofar as the brand is also a name for the object used in cauterising a wound.1
There are negative connotations too: the branding of criminals connects the word with ideas of disgrace, stigma and infamy.2 We might connect this again to the idea of healing because we can say that we are branded by certain experiences—‘marked’ by trauma, for example. Hence the title of that well-known book by Bessel van der Kolk, The Body Keeps the Score. The idea here is that the body is scored, marked—branded—by psychological trauma (a word that in the original Greek simply means ‘wound’3).
This idea of wounding is not all negative if we consider the meaning of ‘stigma’. The ‘branding’ of Jesus through his stigmata are signs of our redemption in the Christian tradition, and the appearance of stigmata on the bodies of the faithful have generally been regarded as an intimate connection with the saviour.
Of course, when you do an ordinary search on the Internet, you don’t learn much about the above meanings and associations. Instead, everything will relate to the commercial senses of the word: Wikipedia, Investopedia, Hubspot, Canva. . . . all these links will speak about branding in business terms. Branding, in the business sense, uses words and images to connect a product or service with a ‘bigger idea’, and through this connection produce a certain kind of belief. Branding is about ‘shaping what the product or organization says and does, in order to change how people think, feel, and act, in a way that creates commercial (and sometimes also social) value’.4
But the other meanings of ‘brand’ persist in the word’s predominantly commercial use today. And this is worth reflecting on when you work or think or feel in a way that is not easily reconciled with the world of business. ‘Dare Wisdom’ is an apposite example. It is the name of a counselling and psychotherapy practice. Counselling and psychotherapy, as practices, are oriented towards psychological healing, the healing of psychological wounds, or, as we have seen, brands. Branding and therapy, then, do not sit together very easily because business and healing, are not easily reconciled: they are different pursuits, and in a certain sense they are incompatible pursuits, as the ‘traumatic’ meaning of ‘brand’ reveals.
In addition to its connection to the psychotherapeutic tradition, ‘Dare Wisdom’ has philosophic and spiritual meanings that also do not sit easily with the idea of ‘branding’ in the business sense. The Buddha’s awakening begins with the renunciation of ordinary or ‘household’ life (in which the pursuit of wealth is included),5 Socrates refused to teach for a fee,6 and Jesus rejected the co-presence of commerce and spirituality (Matthew 21:12-13).7
Each of these traditions understands that the pursuit of wisdom and goodness is obstructed by a concern with wealth. Buddhism and Christianity both established monastic traditions—communities of people who renounce the concerns of ordinary life, including wealth. But this involves all sorts of contradictions. There are, for example, well established rules in the Buddhist monastic traditions interdicting the handling of money by monks. Consequently, members of the laity—called the ‘kalpikāraka’ in Sanskrit8—are employed to handle money on their behalf. The quest for a purely contemplative life requires, it would seem, that someone else do your dirty work for you. . . .
Western philosophy begins with the distinction between the sophist and the philosopher, which among other differences, concerns Socrates’ refusal to accept a fee for his teaching. Socrates still depended on the largess of patrons, as did Plato and Aristotle. Plato did not charge a fee for tuition at the academy, but students had to sustain themselves in their study.9 The contemplative life is more easily led when one has the—already existing—means to support it. Most contemporary philosophers continue this tradition by working as academics: employees of universities, and thus, by extension, the state. This is another version of letting someone else do your dirty work for you: the life of an employee doesn’t put you beyond the circulation of capital, but it does help to keep lucre at arm’s length.
The modern psychotherapeutic tradition is very different to all of the previous examples because it begins with private practice: Freud and his early followers were all doctors established in private practice, and all of them had to perform the role of healer on the one hand, and small business owner on the other.10 This shapes some of the ethical stakes of the practice, for as Farr Curlin and Chris Tollefsen write about medicine:
Those who practice medicine can do so with a variety of goods in view, but many of these goods—for example, money and social prestige—have nothing intrinsically to do with the practice. One can readily imagine a physician practicing medicine without pay and in a context in which she gains no social prestige. Moreover, insofar as a physician practices medicine for money or prestige, the physician is motivated to ignore medicine’s “standards of excellence” if by doing so he gains more of these external benefits.11
The same, of course, is true of the practice of psychotherapy.
So let’s state the problem bluntly: how does one dare to pursue wisdom for one’s living? Philosophers and monks solve the problem through institutionalisation: organise a community and then organise a relation between that community and the state that governs the society in which that community exists, and through this relation outsource the problems of sustenance, thereby leaving oneself to concentrate on contemplative and scientific pursuits.
The professional circumstances of the psychotherapist in private practice, not having recourse to employment or the support of communal life, makes them much more a ‘householder’ by comparison: whatever the circumstances of their actual private lives (living with intimate partners or not, having children or not), their practice requires that they involve themselves in detail with very worldly concerns. Anna Brandon offers the following catalogue: ‘office rent, marketing/advertising, bank/credit card processing fees, Internet, telephone, office equipment and supplies, continuing education, insurance, licensing, organization dues, website development and maintenance, and, of course, the practice management software subscription’12 And this is not merely a financial expense, it also involves expenditures of time and cognitive effort, especially if the practitioner—out of choice or, more often, necessity—undertakes the development of their website, marketing and advertising themselves. And because most marketing now occurs via the Internet, the latter activities will also require the do-it-all-yourself practitioner to learn and implement web design, search engine optimisation (SEO), email lists, and content production for themselves as well.
Such practical business concerns are not very conducive to a life of contemplation and rigorous scientific inquiry. Nor are they the conditions best suited to the development of a practical wisdom that pertains to the clinical practice of counselling and psychotherapy. They also entail certain ethical risks for someone who is in the ‘helping’ professions.13 Nevertheless, there is also value in pursuing wisdom—and the premise of Dare Wisdom is that either counselling and psychotherapy are about the pursuit of wisdom or they are about nothing at all—amidst the messiness of ordinary life (running a business, being a partner, a parent, etc.) This is because it democratises the pursuit of wisdom, and because it helps to reveal the parasitic aspect of the other contemplative traditions that tend to abhor ordinary life while depending on others to live it.
Because the focus of this blog post is that aspect of business called branding, and because branding falls within the domain of marketing more generally, it is worth considering the concerns of someone seeking to market their business today. For this purpose, consider Seth Godin’s ten-point ‘Simple Marketing Worksheet’, each of which he states in the form of a series of questions.14 Question 4: What are they afraid of? What would a marketer do with this knowledge? They would use it to sell something of course. And once you start down that path, you also have a pecuniary interest in keeping your target market afraid. This is clearly a violation of the principle of autonomy that is commonly understood to inform the practice of the helping professions.15 Question 5: What story will you tell? Is it true? The temptation to lie for one’s own profit runs contrary to the entire spirit of the psychotherapeutic encounter. (To be fair to Godin, he advises his readers to tell true stories.) Truth-telling is a vital component of the patient helper relationship, and deception is undermining of the practice of healing.16 Question 8: How will you reach the early adopters and neophiliacs? ‘Neophiliacs’ is Godin’s word for people who crave novelty. But is psychotherapy about novelty? The proliferation of different—and trademarked—kinds, types, or schools of psychotherapy, appears to testify in the affirmative. But contrary to what you will hear the acolytes of CBT, or psychoanalysis, or [insert name of psychotherapy] repeat ad nauseum—consider the business interests involved here—the efficacy of psychotherapy is poorly correlated with the ‘brand’ of psychotherapy delivered compared with the individual psychotherapist delivering the therapy regardless of the brand, and research into common factors in psychotherapy, together with emerging research into deliberate practice, goes a long way in explaining why.17 Psychotherapy is, therefore, often not about new things. Psychotherapy already works—exceedingly well! And if, as I believe to be the case, psychotherapy is one tradition, among others, devoted to the pursuit of wisdom, then psychotherapy may be about retreading old—even ancient—paths. There is novelty here too of course, but it is the novelty of an individual having to walk the path towards wisdom for themselves—a novelty far removed from the consumption of novel products or services. I don’t deny the importance of genuine intellectual and practical innovations where they improve our knowledge, practice, or quality of living. But innovation ought to be authentic and not the amnesic repackaging of old ideas.
The ethical concerns I raise do not pertain merely to the actions or inactions of individual practitioners—which are already addressed by the ethics codes of relevant professional organisations—but to the relation between psychotherapy-as-a-practice and psychotherapy-as-a-business. In summary, when the psychotherapist is also a small business owner their professional concerns are no longer confined to ethical clinical practice but extend to questions about the compatibility between a professional life as a healer on the one hand and turning a profit on the other. Thus, the broader context for this enquiry is contemporary capitalism. Psychotherapists in private practice inhabit this world as business owners, but also as ordinary social subjects. This means that all aspects of their practice must contend with a world that is oriented towards over-consumption, the (appearance of) incessant novelty,18 mass surveillance19 with the aim of mass manipulation (contemporary capitalism is not merely interested in what you desire but in teaching you what to desire, to adapt one of Slavoj Žižek’s claims about the cinema).
How are psychotherapists to navigate this treacherous terrain, particularly with regard to marketing and branding? I am sympathetic to William Reid’s advice that the ‘quality of your work and reputation are your most important, and most effective, marketing’,20 and Anna Brandon’s gloss of this, that ‘[w]ord-of-mouth referrals and a strong community reputation cost nothing but diligence and continual sharpening of clinical tools.’21 But the Internet complicates this view of things. For therapists offering predominantly ‘online psychotherapy’,22 this injunction to depend merely on the quality of your work and its place in the community becomes unfeasible for at least two reasons. Such therapists are cut-off from geographic community: as a therapist working online, you are not a part of the ‘neighborhood’, and so there is no community in the traditional sense to build a reputation within. Brandon’s recommendation that one target ‘other professionals (e.g., family practice physicians, lawyers, therapists with a specialty different from one’s own target population) or potential referral sources (e.g., churches, schools, community agencies) rather than marketing to the general public or specific potential patients’23 meets with similar limitations: being cut-off from geographic community means you are not a part of the community in which such relationships are traditionally developed.
Word-of-mouth referrals from existing or past patients will still work for therapists offering predominantly ‘online psychotherapy’ as long as the therapist provides a quality service, but this is difficult for therapists who are not already well-established because word-of-mouth referrals require that your case-load meets certain thresholds before it begins to auto-generate an adequate number of referrals. This makes sense when one consider one of the other challenges for the psychotherapist in private practice, ones that appear to be uniquely applicable to psychotherapists in particular, and other professionals in the field of mental health more generally: people don’t necessarily want to share their therapist with their friends, colleagues, or family. They may be inclined to do so once their own treatment is complete (though when this will occur is often difficult to determine in advance). And, given the stigma surrounding mental health, people may not be inclined to recommend a therapist because doing so is a tacit admission that you have been in therapy yourself.
Therapists working in a predominantly online environment appear to have some unique challenges that are not easily addressed by traditional approaches to referral generation. Of course, online or virtual communities exists as well, and psychotherapists could, at least in theory, belong to these. These communities are often ‘communities of interest’. While online communities may correlate with identities such as gender, race, culture, religion, sexual orientation, it is also easy to see how personal interest may create another online community that cuts across many of the others. So, people of diverse cultural and religious backgrounds, gender identities, ages, or sexual orientation, may be united in their interest in Korean cuisine, 19th century Russian literature, or South African birds, etc. What makes these communities what they are, in the first instance, is a shared interest. This interest, and by extension, this community, can then be targeted for businesses seeking to market services and products of relevance to this group.
The problem for therapists in private practice is that the communities of interest that relate to their service (e.g. people active in a forum for those suffering from depression) do not have a free interest in mental health. Instead their interest is constrained by their own suffering: they are not free to choose this interest in the same way that someone with an interest, for example, in stamp collection might. Even if one set aside the idea of a community of interest, and limited oneself to market segmentation, the same vulnerability is present: the segment of the market that is of interest to psychotherapists from a business perspective are people enduring mental suffering, and this makes these people vulnerable to exploitation. These are unique ethical challenges for psychotherapists (and people in the healthcare and helping professions more generally) because, from a purely economic perspective, therapists have an interest in people experiencing unnecessary mental suffering because such people are potential patients and because potential patients are potential clients.
These are complex issues, and this complexity means that I must end this post by suggesting an orientation rather than a solution. The therapist in private practice inhabits the ordinary world in ways that cloistered contemplatives do not, and, as small business owners earning their living as service providers, they inhabit the world of business in ways that the salaried do not. Our work of orientation must take place in the circumstances of the problem at hand: in the trenches of a world dominated by the commerce of business interests.
The German playwright and theatre director, Bertolt Brech, sought to do something similar in another time and context. The tensions of his circumstances related to his being a communist artist working in the entertainment industry. Consider the contradiction of being a successful theatre artist—someone who is in one sense a peddler of illusions—and a communist. In the case of the latter you are committed to changing the material conditions of people’s lives to realise radical political and economic equality, while in the case of the former you produce illusions that distract people from the material conditions of their existence. What was Brecht’s solution? Besides producing plays whose subject matter was directly political, he also employed techniques—Gestus, Verfremdung (defamiliarisation), and historicisation—that pointed to the illusion from within the production of illusion itself.
You don’t have to be a communist to see the tensions inherent in private practice. You merely have to be a practitioner with a conscience who is also a small business owner. The tensions are already there. The question is what to do about them.
One Brechtian moment in the history of psychotherapy was Carl Roger’s choice of the word ‘client’ rather than ‘patient’—a form of verbal ‘gestus’24—which not merely acknowledged, but also foregrounded, the financial transaction between therapist and patient. Psychotherapy is an intimate encounter between the patient and their therapist, following which money changes hands.25 There is something here worth thinking about.
This post is my attempt to do some of this Brechtian and Rogerian work, and having begun, I think I can offer a provisional reconciliation between the necessity of branding for business reasons, the therapeutic, philosophic and spiritual meanings that also cluster around the word ‘brand’, and my personal and professional interest in daring wisdom. The branding of a private practice must reflect the intrinsic nature of the activity it aims to represent.26 In the case of Dare Wisdom – Counselling & Psychotherapy, this intrinsic nature is the practice of counselling and psychotherapy, a practice oriented towards healing unnecessary mental suffering. Insofar as this practice is also, as I believe it is, necessarily connected to the pursuit of wisdom, the pursuit of wisdom forms a necessary part of the practice: what the practitioner as professional professes to do and what they believe themselves called to do. (This is how a profession can also be a vocation: the integration of what we project of ourselves in the world (what we profess), and what we are called to do by the world (vocation).) The commercial branding of the words ‘Dare Wisdom’ must serve as a public declaration and pledge. The name of the practice, ‘Dare Wisdom’, is simultaneously a slogan and the slogan is simultaneously a motto. To ‘dare wisdom’ is to commit to walking a certain path. It is not a declaration of attainment or ownership, but a kind of convocation of intention: have the courage to know, have the courage to let the unconscious speak, and have the courage to develop beyond the limits of the self.
1‘Brand (n.)’, in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, July 2023), https://www.oed.com/https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1524723108; ‘Brand (v.)’, in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, September 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/8522273905.
2‘Brand (v.)’.
3Oxford English Dictionary, ‘Trauma (n.)’, in Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford University Press, July 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/6758286467.
4Robert Jones, Branding: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press, 2017).
5Bhikkhu Nanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, trans., The Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha: A Translation of the Majjhima Nikaya (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1995). In the Ariyapariyesanā Sutta, the Buddha states, ‘Later, while still young, a black-haired young man endowed with the blessing of youth, in the prime of life, though my mother and father wished otherwise and wept with tearful faces, I shaved off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and went forth from the home life into homelessness.’ In the Cūḷahatthipadopama Sutta: “A householder or householder’s son or one born in some other clan hears that Dhamma. On hearing the Dhamma he acquires faith in the Tathāgata. Possessing that faith, he considers thus: ‘Household life is crowded and dusty; life gone forth is wide open. It is not easy, while living in a home, to lead the holy life utterly perfect and pure as a polished shell. Suppose I shave off my hair and beard, put on the yellow robe, and go forth from the home life into homelessness.’. . .”
6Plato, ‘Apology’, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Hackett Publishing Co., 1997), 17–36. Socrates: ‘If anyone, young or old, desires to listen to me when I am talking and dealing with my own concerns, I have never begrudged this to anyone, but I do not converse when I receive a fee and not when I do not.’
7Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett, eds., The Bible: Authorized King James Version, 1 edition (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008). ‘And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.’
8Robert E. Buswell and Donald S. Lopez, eds., The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
9Lewis Trelawny-Cassity, ‘Plato: The Academy’, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (blog), accessed 12 February 2024, https://iep.utm.edu/plato-academy/.
10George Makari, Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008); Peter Gay, Freud: A Life for Our Time, First Edition (New York: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1988).
11Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen, The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).
12Anna R. Brandon, ‘The Business of Psychotherapy in Private Practice’, in Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics, ed. Manuel Trachsel et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 412–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198817338.013.21.
13Clara E. Hill, Helping Skills: Facilitating Exploration, Insight, and Action (4th Ed.)., 4th ed. (Washington: American Psychological Association, 2014), https://doi.org/10.1037/14345-000.
14Seth Godin, This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See, Illustrated edition (New York: Portfolio, 2018).
15Tom L. Beauchamp and James F. Childress, Principles of Biomedical Ethics, 8th edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Basil Varkey, ‘Principles of Clinical Ethics and Their Application to Practice’, Medical Principles and Practice 30, no. 1 (February 2021): 17–28, https://doi.org/10.1159/000509119.
16Varkey, ‘Principles of Clinical Ethics and Their Application to Practice’.
17John C. Norcross and Michael J. Lambert, eds., Psychotherapy Relationships That Work: Evidence-Based Therapist Contributions, Third edition, vol. 1, 2 vols (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2019); Bruce E. Wampold and Zac E. Imel, The Great Psychotherapy Debate: The Evidence for What Makes Psychotherapy Work, Second edition (New York: Routledge, 2015); Tony Rousmaniere et al., eds., The Cycle of Excellence: Using Deliberate Practice to Improve Supervision and Training, 1st edition (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2017).
18Joseph Alois Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, [4th ed.] (London: Allen & Unwin, 1954); Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2008). See the distinction Badiou offers in his preface between ‘democratic materialism’ and the ‘materialist dialectic’ for a valuable presentation of the appearance of novelty/appearance of novelty.
19Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (New York: PublicAffairs, 2019).
20William H. Reid, ‘Law and Psychiatry. Doing Forensic Work, III: Marketing Your Practice’, Journal of Psychiatric Practice 18, no. 4 (July 2012): 291–95, https://doi.org/10.1097/01.pra.0000416020.68462.ba.
21Brandon, ‘The Business of Psychotherapy in Private Practice’.
22Julia Stoll and Manuel Trachsel, ‘Ethical Aspects of Online Psychotherapy’, in The Oxford Handbook of Psychotherapy Ethics, ed. Manuel Trachsel et al., First edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 732–43.
23Brandon, ‘The Business of Psychotherapy in Private Practice’.
24Meg Mumford, Bertolt Brecht, 1st edition (London: Routledge, 2009). ‘To ‘show the Gestus’ came to mean to present artistically the mutable socio-economic and ideological construction of human behaviour and relations.’
25Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Against Therapy: Emotional Tyranny and the Myth of Psychological Healing (Untreed Reads Publishing, 2012).
26Farr Curlin and Christopher Tollefsen, The Way of Medicine: Ethics and the Healing Profession (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021).