It’s pretty much been laid out in the show that he’s a bad “therapist”, mainly because he’s not an actual therapist, just a horse therapist. So I always get weirded out when people try to utilize what he talks about to analyze Bojack as a character. I thought the conversation about him drunkenly telling Bojack that he has a secret hatred for horses was meant to be a joke about how much of a hack he is, since it’s such a baseless assumption that it’s even proven wrong later in the series (when he visits the horse historical village place). He’s meant to satirize “therapists” who don’t have any more qualifications than an armchair, right?
Either way, I love it when shows do make therapy a flawed process. We did see an actually good therapist later in the series, and even then she slipped up now and then, and I felt Dr. Champ was supposed to be the antithesis to her. It makes the show feel even more grounded in reality, than therapists in other shows basically being the talking piece for the writers to roast their own character.
Which is another small part of Bojack Horseman that is unfortunately accurate. Too many people are struggling, and yet too many of the readily available therapists are just not good. And if Bojack’s rich ass fancy therapy places are bad then you can imagine how it is for lower class people!
The rich ass therapy place he goes to is not supposed to provide great therapy. It’s a cozy “rehab” you go to in order to say “I went to rehab” without doing all the hard struggles it takes to actually change yourself. They provide some programs in order to claim to be a legit operation but apart from physically isolating the patients from their habits, there is not much helping going on.
Honestly, it’s even worse than that — it’s specifically designed to be a rotating door so they get repeat clients. Can’t have them actually get better, that’s bad for business.
I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a reference to a real life upper class rehab center (even down to the name of the center being wordplay in the show.)