Politics & Power Quote by David Viscott

America doesn’t enter the room as a flag or a myth here; it shows up as a patient. Viscott’s line reframes therapy from private self-improvement into a national diagnostic: the country’s signature problems are not just political or economic, but psychological - fragmented selves trying to assemble into something livable. The phrasing matters. “Really America” punctures the polished story we like to tell about resilience and individual grit; he’s pointing at the unglamorous backstage where people admit they’re scared, angry, numb, or ashamed. “In therapy” is both literal and metaphorical: a clinical space where denial loses its grip, and a cultural moment when confession becomes a civic language.

The subtext is gently accusatory. If so many people are “trying to get themselves together,” something has been pulling them apart: relentless mobility, competitive loneliness, trauma packaged as normal, the pressure to perform happiness while quietly unraveling. Viscott also sneaks in a critique of American individualism. “People” are doing the work, not institutions; the burden of repair is privatized. Therapy becomes a workaround for systemic stressors that don’t show up on an intake form: precarious work, racism, family instability, the churn of consumer identity.

“Be whole” lands as the emotional thesis. Not success. Not status. Wholeness - integration, coherence, a self that doesn’t have to compartmentalize just to survive. It’s a hopeful line, but not sentimental: the hope is earned in the hard, repetitive labor of telling the truth about who you are, and what your country keeps asking you to swallow.