ABSTRACT
Thrive: The Power of Evidence-Based Psychological Therapies (Layard and Clark, 2014) published to coincide with the tenth anniversary of the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) revolution is a master-myth of the latter kind. It is a story of relentless progress entirely devoid of errors, wrong turns or mistaken hypotheses. Like victorious generals, Layard and Clark rehearse and reinforce the rationales first put forward in Happiness and The Depression Report and look back at the successes of their campaign strategy called Increasing Access to Psychological Therapies (IAPT). Master-myths are stories of identity formation: they tell us: who we are, why we are, how we came to be, and why we are rightfully here. What is becoming clearer through this brief discussion is that identity formation is primarily a process of differentiation rather than of coalescence. The same sorts of processes of inclusion and exclusion continually take place in all kinds of identity formation from schools of philosophy to professional designations to teenage fashions.
