This course explores the history behind today’s psychotherapeutic landscape, looking at sites ranging from the clinician’s office to the modern workplace to the media.  We look at the development, methods, aims, efficacy, and limitations of a range of psychotherapeutic modalities from Freud’s time to our own—among them psychoanalytic, psychodynamic, cognitive, behavioral, manualized, and evidence-based treatments as well as family, sex, and group therapies.  We also explore how, in the midst of challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, longstanding therapeutic precepts have been called into question; notably, teletherapy—once considered a suspect practice—has enjoyed overnight acceptance.  The course examines long-standing tensions running through the therapeutic project: Is psychotherapy best conceived of as a quest for self-improvement or as a means to relieve symptoms?  Should it aim to alter cognition and/or behavior, or should it focus instead on the inner life?  Is mind or brain its proper object?  Is it an indulgence or a necessity?  Is its efficacy subject to scientific measurement?  And, if so, in what does cure consist?  Throughout, we will ask what sort of person (and problems) is envisioned by each approach, whether explicitly or implicitly.  How do therapists think about their practices?  How have writers and poets, media personalities and comics, embraced or disdained and made sense or made fun of psychotherapy?  The question of the relationship between professional practices and the rise of a popular therapeutic sensibility is central to the course.  Do we suffer less and enjoy greater self-knowledge one hundred years after the invention of the talking cures?