Was reading something from a well known psychiatrist (Scott Peck) wherein he asserts that love is the essential ingredient in therapy. And therapy amounts to reparenting. Give the client the love they lacked in childhood. Further, he says that mental illness stems from this missing or defective love in childhood.

What he does not talk about is what happens if this reparenting fails. As with other authors I've read, it's not even mentioned! Presumably if a person with some sort of latent or sub-clinical mental illness goes through this failure, they would become mentally ill, or if already actively mentally ill their illness would be exacerbated. And perhaps their chances of healing this would be greatly diminished. (Not saying I believe in the concept of mental "illness" as espoused by the MH profession, but I use this term for convenience.)

If mental illness is caused by social and relational and familial problems, and therapy becomes a dysfunctional and damaging social relationship that replicates or reenacts familial and other toxic relationships, then clearly it can lead to so-called mental illness.

If therapists are in fact in the business of attempting reparenting, reversing or inducing mental illness, providing love… seems very serious business indeed. But most therapists, in my experience, enter into this process casually (and without consent) and are not even capable of speaking intelligently about it. What's wrong with this picture?

Also, all of this is completely at odds with the idea of professional distance, the therapist as consultant or adviser, providing a service. Peck acts as if it's entirely normal to pay a total stranger to love you and reparent you. How did this process ever get off the ground?