The Socratic Shrink: “On a recent Manhattan morning, with a cold wind slashing off New York Harbor, Lou Marinoff took the granite steps of the federal courthouse two at a time — brown eyes fierce, ivory white skin offsetting his dark beard, a Russian fur hat making him the very picture of the engaged intellectual. A tenured philosophy professor at City College of New York and the author of The Big Questions: How Philosophy Can Change Your Life and of the international best seller Plato, Not Prozac! Applying Eternal Wisdom to Everyday Problems, Marinoff is the world’s most successful marketer of philosophical counseling. A controversial new talk therapy, philosophical counseling takes the premise that many of our problems stem from uncertainties about the meaning of life and from faulty logic.” —New York Times Actually, there appears to be nothing new and very little controversial except perhaps the notion that a professor of philosophy is pushing this as a narcissistic marketing trend. Existential influences on psychoanalytic psychotherapy are as old as the discipline, and every psychology student knows of the contributions of Fromm and Frankl. And cognitive approaches which explore and address faulty logic are time-honored, arguably stemming from Albert Ellis.