There are varieties of self-help therapy that pretty clearly see their goal as making the subject feel good about themself, and that tend to be dismissive of the criterion of truth if the truth is too much to handle. We tend to look down on such therapies. We say that the cure they produce is only a seeming cure, that sooner or later the subject will again crash against reality. Yet what if, by some kind of social consensus, we agreed not to rock the boat but on the contrary to come together to affirm one another’s fantasies, as happens in some therapeutic groups? Then there would be no reality to crash against.

J. M. Coetzee, The Good Story: Exchanges on Truth, Fiction and Psychotherapy (2015)