The Possibilities of Therapy: Stoic Strategies

Extirpation therapy might seem at this point nothing less than silly. Even sillier might seem a method that aims not just at extirpating some emotions from our psychology but the complete emotional repertoire itself. On Nussbaum’s reading of the Stoics, it is just this kind of radical approach that they had in mind. The goal of this chapter, then, is to consider the kinds of arguments Nussbaum attributes to the Stoics in defense of such radical extirpation. For, according to Nussbaum, the Stoics argued that despite the strongly counterintuitive and apparently silly suggestion that all emotions should be extirpated, such