Self Control, Self Knowledge, and Self Mastery
You might say that cognitive-behavioral therapy aims at achieving self-control, while psychodynamic psychotherapy aims at achieving self-understanding. But what the ancients aimed for was self-mastery, something that encompassed both concepts and transcended them.
.. It will only ever be available to an elite – and that elite may be shrinking because of Baumol’s cost disease, which makes anything labor-intensive more expensive over time as automation makes capital-intensive activities cheaper. That’s one reason CBT is so popular – it’s also not really scalable, but it’s more scalable by far than the psychodynamic approach. It’s a form of therapy perfectly suited to a society that finds the inner life to be a bit of a nuisance, but demands every-increasing organizational competence of its monads.
It is depressing to think that there are good economic reasons why an affluent society can’t afford to incubate very many mastered selves, but I don’t think the ancients would be surprised at all.