Americans are abandoning psychiatrists and turning to philosophers to solve the problems of modern life.

It is all too good to be true, right down to the last hair on his bushy philosophers beard Louis Marinoff even looks like a Socrates of the Upper West Side, the Ancient Greek sage come back to earth as a fin de siecle New Yorker.

Dr Marinoff, a Professor of Philosophy at the City College of New York, has just tumbled out of a taxi and into my messy office on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue. He is bubbling with opinions, bursting with words, dying to tell me all about the things he does. "We're in the vanguard," he says, a touch immodestly.

I have before me a real, live "philosophical counsellor", one of a small (but growing) band of men and women who think that modern man, over-reliant on psychiatry, really needs philosophy to solve his deepest problems. Plato, not Prozac, is the way forward. Put Freud to one side for a moment, with all that stuff about castration complexes, and ponder awhile on Hobbes, Locke and Kierkesgaard. Sprinkle your life even, with some zesty ontology from Heidegger, and you will taste the difference.

Philosophical counselling is setting out to make psychiatrists obsolete. The movement is, as Dr Marinoff explains, "designed to address the predicaments of the average person through philosophical means, rather than psychological ones". It began with Gerd Achenbach, who opened the first philosophical counselling practice in Bergisch Gladbach near Cologne, in 1981. A year later Dr Achenbach founded the Association for Philosophical Practice, which he still heads. Dr Marinoff is "one of Achenbach's boys". In 1994 to little attention in the press, he co-organised the first International Conference on Philosophical Counselling, in Vancouver, which proved to be the trampoline from which this audacious movement has since soared higher and higher.

So high, in fact, that psychiatrists, now a perturbed bunch, have begun to stick in the professional knife. In a public statement recently, philosophical counsellors were described as "harmful" by a former president of the American Psychological Association.

But Dr Marinoff is blithe, even cocky, about his movement's prospects. "Look, if there's a product you can sell and people want it, then there will be those who will sell it. Philosophical counselling is a bit like heroin in that sense. But it's neither costly, nor addictive. In fact, it's utterly beneficial."

What does a philosophical counsellor actually do? According to the introductory chapter of 'Essays on Philosophical Counselling', the movement's bible, the counsellor is a philosopher who receives clients and discusses with them their personal problems and predicaments".

These range from general feelings of meaninglessness and a desire for better self-understanding to specific problems such as divorce, suicidal tendencies and job dissatisfaction - in fact, most of the neo-pathological problems commonly treated by therapists.

Psychiatrists according to Dr Marinoff, "are increasingly writing prescriptions for people who really need discussion and debate. Much of today's therapy is 'nothing but neural pharmacology'. He says it is not necessarily the case that all symptoms patients show may be treated by drugs. If someone's struggling with a moral or ethical problem, then the root cause may be inaccessible to medicine.'

To illustrate this point Dr Marinoff cites the case of a man examined by his colleague Ben Mijuskovic, a Californian philosophical counsellor. Dr Mijuskovic saw a man who had become a monk when he was only 17. He was now 37, and was experiencing symptoms of major depression - fatigue. sleeping problems, feelings of hopelessness, helplessness and 'suicidal ideation'. During the course of philosophical counselling, it became increasingly clear that his problems were not the result of latent childhood or adolescent traumas - as therapists might have readily assumed - but rather the result of a painful awareness that he had spent two decades of his life committed to monastic ways.

These included helping strangers, but excluded sexual intimacy and the formation of a "biological family" to which he could belong. The sadness of his dilemma clearly troubled him deeply, but it would be wrong to say that this was a psychiatric issue, which could be addressed by medication and an endless replaying of his emotional past. It was not. As the sessions progressed, it became clear that he had to make a decision reaffirming his original choice or "striking out freely and anxiously towards a new life". According to a philosophical counsellor the monk's crisis was religious and intellectual. It had nothing to do with a psychotherapists couch".

In any case, a philosophical Counsellor's time is cheaper. Unlike top psychiatrists who charge you "hundreds of dollars per session", Dr Marinoff charges $100 an hour to treat you with Kant, Wingerstein or the Epicureans.

I asked him for a concrete match of philosopher to problem, and he gave me the example of a man who came to see him recently. "An ordinary sort of Joe from Wall Street with money brains and confidence, but whose foundations were shaking when he discovered that his wife was having an affair.

"My wife has been seeing someone else", the man told Dr Marinoff. "I'm unhappy. I'm contemplating divorce. What should I do?" This is "a text book case of one who needs a philosophers armchair, not a psychiatrist's expensive couch. Philosophical counsellors offer a "process of questioning, not of finding answers". Dr Marinoff helps such people "to walk their wit". He explains, "When this man came to me and said "What should I do?" I threw the question back at him: "What would you like to do? Presumably you don't want her to commit adultery any more. Do you want to preserve the marriage?" He did, so we worked with certain philosophers, like Kant, who talks about the principles of forgiveness and compassion, as well as the ethics of duty."

If the man does not want to save the marriage, and is looking for a way out of a rotten union, Dr Marinoff might mischievously, suggest a reading of Shakespeare. There are a lot of things in his ouevre that don't flatter the constancy of women. Or he would even read Eccleasiastes.

Philosophical counsellors, abhor "the sexual presuppositions of psychotherapy". Dr Marinoff says "Freud supposed that the roots of all our problems are sexual. This is patently false, which is why his disciples - Reich, Adler, Riviere, Junt - all broke away from him. None of them touches upon the fundamental human problem because there isn't one fundamental human problem. You can't take people, as Freud did, and shoehorn them all into a condition. We don't do that."