IS STOIC PHILOSOPHY HELPFUL AS PSYCHOTHERAPY? RICHARD SORABJI Is Stoic philosophy helpful as psychotherapy? Two views have been expressed. Marth Nussbaum believes it is.1 Bernard Williams, reviewing her, thinks it strange that it ever have been supposed that rigorous philosophical analysis could be therapeut Moreover, Stoic therapy has a peculiar unintelligibility of its own.2 What then should think?3 Martha Nussbaum has not addressed the very serious objections raised against Chrysippus' analysis of the emotions by his fellow-Stoic Posidonius. Some of these strike home, I believe, and so impair his effectiveness as a psychotherapist. Nonetheless, despite this, I agree with her that the rigorous philosophical treatment of the emotions by the Stoics is of great therapeutic value. The rigour of the Stoic philosophical debate is something I want to insist on. Chrysippus claimed that emotions are value judgments. Posidonius pressed counter- examples. Seneca provides certain lines of reply. Chrysippus achieved a precision, seldom matched in the modern philosophical literature, although it may have been matched in medieval Oxford4 about exactly which judgments constitute emotions. And this in turn made it possible for counter-examples more precise than those in the modern literature to be formulated.5 He said that all emotions are forms of the most generic four: distress, pleasure, appetite and fear. Moreover, each of these four consists of precisely two judgments: the judgment that there is good or bad (benefit or harm) at hand and the judgment that it is right (appropriate) to react.6 The goodness, badness and Tightness are not normally equated by ordinary people with moral goodness, badness or Tightness, 1 Martha Nussbaum The Therapy of Desire, (Princeton 1994) Ch. 10. 2 Bernard Williams 'Do not disturb', review of Nussbaum, London Review of Books (20 Oct. 1994) 25-6. 3 The following material will be more fully defended in my forthcoming book, Emotions and How to Cope With Them , the material in Section 1 in Troeis Engberg Pedersen and Juha Sihvola, eds., The Passions in Hellenistic Philosophy , forthcoming Kluwer, Dordrecht, 1997. Full acknowledgements will be made there but I have benefited from discussion with Lilli Alanen, Michael Bratman, Malcolm Budd, David Charles, Chris Hughes, Dale Jamieson, Ian Kidd, Alasdair Maclntyre and Ram Prasad, as well as with those mentioned below. 4 Simo Knuttila tells me that there were debates like that between Chrysippus and Zeno and between Chrysippus and Posidonius in Adam Wodeham in the fourteenth century, which he will describe in a book in preparation. 5 For a parallel modern exchange, see Robert Solomon The Passions (New York 1976), with review by David Sachs in Philosophical Review 87 (1978) 472-5. 6 The evidence needs to be collected from Cicero Tusc. 4.11-14; Diogenes Laertius Lives 7.110-114; ps.-Andronicus Peri Pathon 1-5; Galen de Placitis Hippocratis et Piatonis (PHP) 4.2.1-6; 4.3.1-2; 5.1.4, ed. and transi, de Lacy, Corpus Medicorum Graecorum 5.4, 1, 2, pp. 238-41; 246-9; 292-3; Stobaeus Eclogae 2.90, Wachsmuth. ARISTOTLE AND AFTER 1 97