The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change. Katie Wright
The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change
The alignment of therapy and feminism serves as a useful counterpoint to the therapeutic as oppressive argument. During the 1970s there was spirited debate about whether psychology and therapy were part of women's oppression or vehicles of liberation. Consciousness raising became a significant feminist mobilization strategy, offering an avowedly political context for therapeutic interactions. Radical and feminist therapy grew out of these debates, constituting as Cloud notes, "a middle ground between social movement activism and an insular therapeutic practice."87 Rather than replicating unequal social relations, feminist therapy seeks to empower women by establishing an egalitarian relationship between therapist and client. Moreover, it is highly critical of the society in which it is practiced.88
In considering the question of whether psychology has been oppressive or liberating for women, Ellen Herman captures its ambivalent legacy, arguing that "it was neither and it was both." According to Herman: "Feminism's dual identity as a public campaign for formal equality and a cultural revolution in the subjective experience of gender demonstrates very clearly how much the direction of postwar political activism depended upon the hallmarks of psychological expertise during this period: the merging of public and private, the political and the psychological."89 Psychology not only elaborated certain models of feminine subjectivity, but psychological ideas allowed feminism to challenge the patriarchal authority of experts and was also instrumental in the construction of the feminist. As Eva Illouz also notes: "Despite the patriarchal and misogynist views of psychologists … from the start the categories of psychological discourse entertained affinities with feminist thought."90
Following Herman and Illouz, then, trying to determine whether psychology, and indeed the therapeutic society more broadly, have been liberating or oppressive to some extent misses the point. The pressing question is in what ways, how, when, and for whom. Moreover, as feminist analyses have been largely concerned with identifying the therapeutic as an agent of women's oppression—rather than focusing on the larger issue of cultural change—an adequate account of the gendered character of the therapeutic itself, including the shifts in masculinity that it entails, has yet to be elaborated.
Assessing the Therapeutic: Ways Forward
As the foregoing discussion establishes, social theoretical literature of the past half-century provides a wide-ranging analysis of major dimensions of the therapeutic turn. What distinguishes these varying interpretations from those emanating from within the therapeutic itself, exemplified by the promise of the human potential movement and the industry of self-help that it spawned, is a broad consensus that the therapeutic is inimical to sociopolitical, cultural, and personal life. That this dominant narrative is shared by divergent intellectual traditions—from the conservatism of Rieffian cultural sociology to radical feminism, the materialism of neo-Marxism, and Foucauldian analyses of power—suggests that it is a compelling critique. Nevertheless, there remain issues that have yet to be addressed.
The heightened concern with private problems and the ascendancy of a culture of emotionalism have to date been interpreted predominantly in a negative light. Yet much unease about the therapeutic has gendered undertones.91 Moreover, the composite picture that emerges from existing cultural analyses still reflects traditional Freudian notions of authority, and is premised upon an unproblematic reading of the dichotomy of the public and private spheres. Through a preoccupation with attempts to theorize the destabilization of the self, there has, furthermore, been a failure to identify and draw out the implications of changes in the personal realm and shifts in the gender order. In short, there has been little analysis informed by feminist theory and, where it exists, it is limited by conceptualizations of gender relations as male dominance over women.92 As Joan Williams argues, such a model oversimplifies the complexity of gender: "What women face is not a foot on their neck but the trivial minipolitics of everyday life, which are gendered in many institutions in the sense that they operate differently for women than for men."93 For Williams, a more helpful model is to understand gender as a "force field" that that pulls men and women in different ways.
Utilizing a framework of gender as a system of power relations allows for a more complex conceptualization, one that can, in turn, provide the basis for an alternative reading in which therapeutic culture is more positively implicated in the destabilization of a set of traditional gendered arrangements governing public and private life. Raewyn Connell's account of gender as a social structure, a historically shifting system of power relations is particularly instructive.94 Both Williams' notion of gender as a "force field" and Connell's conceptualization of the "gender order"—which describes the gendered patterns of social relationships—provide a way of moving beyond categories of men and women which obscure differences among men and between women.
Underpinning the analysis that I develop in subsequent chapters is the rudiment of an alternative framework from which to consider the implications of the rise of the therapeutic society.95 The major theoretical strands in my analysis concern: the significance of cultural authority, power, and agency; the shifting relationship between the public and private spheres; and, changes in personal life. Recognition of the salience of the gendered structuring of emotions throws new light on the cultural and personal processes associated with the therapeutic society. The remainder of the chapter presents an outline of the framework I am using as the basis for my account of the rise of the therapeutic in Australia. Beginning with the question of authority, however, it also suggests alternative directions for theorizing that might be fruitfully pursued.
A belief in the necessity of authoritative controls for social order permeates many accounts of the therapeutic, as does a concomitant view of socialization that idealizes the patriarchal family.96 The concern with diminishing authority, apparent in the interpretations of Rieff and Lasch especially, hinges upon on a Freudian model of personality development in which the father—both actual and symbolic—plays a critical role. The internalization of authority through the resolution of the Oedipus complex is regarded as critical to the development of the autonomous individual. The concern with weakening authority, or "the decline of Oedipal Man," as Jessica Benjamin puts it, thus reflects fears that the Oedipus complex "was the fundament for the autonomous, rational individual, and today's unstable families with their less authoritarian fathers no longer foster the Oedipus complex as Freud described it."97
In Freud's account of the Oedipal drama, it is the intervention of the father that breaks the intensity of the mother-child bond and thus makes possible both an individuated personality and social life more broadly. The "problem" of weakening paternal authority—so troubling to both Rieff and Lasch—is premised upon a reading which posits that the internalization of a powerful super-ego is critical to normal development. Yet feminist theorists have forcefully criticized this position. They have drawn on other psychoanalytic traditions, notably object-relations, to question the salience of the Freudian account of infant psychosexual development that underwrites the cultural critique. They have emphasized especially the relative neglect of the role of the mother and of the pre-Oedipal stage.98 This work not only challenges theories of development that privilege patriarchal authority, it also calls into question key assumptions of foundational critiques of the therapeutic, assumptions that are often, perhaps unwittingly, reinscribed in more contemporary accounts.
The main alternative standpoint to the Freudian informed cultural critique of the therapeutic society is that available in the works of Foucault and his followers. Such readings have proved fruitful in understanding its regulatory dimensions and the ways in which therapeutic discourses are implicated in contemporary forms of self-government. Yet, as I have already noted, there are problems too with the implicit model of subjectivity that emerges from Foucauldian theory. The theory of selfhood in Foucault's work, according to McNay, "leads to a conception of the individual as an isolated entity, rather than explaining how the self is constructed in the context of social interaction."99 As Elliott has also argued: "Foucault's obsessively self-mastering individual is intrinsically monadic, closed in on itself and shut off from emotional intimacy and communal bonds."100 His critique of the Foucauldian subject goes further, as he notes that "Foucault nowhere confronts the possibility that self-realization is itself embedded within realms of mutuality, trust, intimacy