There are more saviors in the world than the mind can comprehend. Bookstores have shelf after shelf of books that promise to save us from anything we can name - anxieties, fears, personal difficulties, or whatever else may be causing us distress. A whole range of people - some of them reliable counselors but all too many of them little more than hucksters - offer themselves to the troubled (for a fee, of course), usually with implicit or explicit promises of remedies for whatever problems one may have encountered. Sometimes the remedy is proposed as a religious one, sometimes as a psychological one, sometimes in still other terms. The number of people who have answers for the problems of the world is truly astounding, and the disguises under which they work defy imagination!

Were one to att…