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
out of the personal sphere, psychoanalytic theory and therapy can be said to offer individuals a radical purchase on the dilemmas of living in the modern epoch."115
In contrast to dominant stories of cultural decline and social regulation, both Elliott and Giddens therefore point to an alternative assessment of the therapeutic turn. While recognizing that the therapeutic can foster narcissism and self-indulgence, Elliott is also open to its promise: "By constructing narratives of the self with which they feel relatively comfortable, the work of therapy ideally leads individuals to a greater emotional openness in the choosing of identities."116 Their readings, moreover, pave the way for a different set of moral and ethical questions to be posed from those associated with the traditional social order. Before turning to this, however, it is important to note that, in developing a more complex account of cultural change, it is necessary to consider the historical factors that give rise to practices of therapy, and indeed to the ascendancy of therapeutic culture more broadly.
Again, Zaretsky is helpful. His analysis of psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of personal life demonstrates that it has both repressive and liberatory aspects.117 Thus for Zaretsky, the legacy of psychoanalysis has been an ambivalent one, connected in very significant ways to the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century—notably the establishment of the welfare state, and the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Yet simultaneously psychoanalysis "became a font of antipolitical, antifeminist, and homophobic prejudice."118 He notes that in the areas of autonomy, the emancipation of women, and in personal life, psychoanalysis has produced contradictory effects. In the case of sexuality, "analysis advanced cultural understandings of female sexuality and homosexuality even as it became at times a vicious and effective enemy of feminists and homosexuals."119 Similarly in personal life, he shows how it both undermined traditional authority and gave rise to new forms of control. Zaretsky's delineation of the ambivalent legacy of psychoanalysis holds true for the therapeutic society more broadly, especially in terms of how it has been thoroughly interconnected with shifts in the private sphere.
In many accounts of the therapeutic, such changes are often posited in terms of moral decline, uncertainty, and diminished selfhood. Yet, the transformations in intimate life that took place over the course of the twentieth century may equally be understood in terms of democratization, a process that, furthermore, has generated new kinds of moral and ethical values. Of particular importance here is the work of Jeffrey Weeks, who offers a more optimistic reading of changes in personal life.120 As he argues, while the transformations occurring in the sexual domain and in private life may be "often muddled and confusing, marked by the uncertainty which governs public and private life today … they also contain within them evidence of care, mutuality, responsibility and love which make it possible to be hopeful about our human future."121
In this context then, the weakening of traditional forms of authority, while disturbing to conservative cultural analysts, may be understood differently. Indeed, a more complex picture emerges when the weakening of cultural authority is understood as part of a reconfiguration of the cultural-symbolic logic of gender. This reconfiguration opens up a potentially emancipatory and transformative space for women and other marginalized groups, and indeed also for many men, for whom traditional ideals of manhood are experienced as oppressive.
Therapeutic culture, especially the confessional mode, has brought the personal and the private into the public sphere in distinct ways, and has also been central to the legitimizing of the emotional realm and the speaking of the hitherto unspeakable. Elliott and Lemert's recent work on the role of confessional practices is instructive here. While they paint a somewhat gloomy picture of "the new individualism," the ambivalence that characterizes Elliott's earlier work is evident, as they argue: "Confessional culture, to be sure, can promote a narrowing of the arts of public political life; but it needn't. The public confession of private sentiments can, in fact, work the other way … and involve an opening out of the self to an increasingly interconnected world."122 Yet it is not simply that confessional culture may promote interconnectedness, as important as that may be. For as personal pain has assumed legitimacy in the public domain, greater accountability for and recognition of distress has also emerged. Framing this as a gendered issue, we might say that the increasing legitimacy accorded to psychological and emotional life, as well as the public articulation of personal inadequacy and suffering, has disrupted a set of gendered arrangements governing public life, and challenged a particular kind of hegemonic masculinity.
This masculine ideal, perhaps best exemplified in the film genre of the American Western was, as Connell points out, constructed around a "self-conscious cult of inarticulate masculine heroism."123 Similarly, in the Australian context, masculine ideals traditionally have been predicated on a repressive, anti-emotional expression of manhood. As Connell puts it: "the hegemonic construction of masculinity in contemporary Australian culture is outward-turned and plays down all private emotion."124 Yet the therapeutic increasingly challenges this notion of repressive masculinity, and in doing so, is playing a pivotal role in disrupting the dichotomy between rationality and emotion, split as it has historically been into the two spheres of the public and private, or in terms of subject positions, the masculine and feminine. The extent that the therapeutic is implicated in shifts in the gender order raises important questions that accounts of cultural decline and social regulation have largely failed to consider. As Connell establishes, gender ideologies, identities, and relations are heterogeneous and subject to ongoing transformation and contestation. A key task, then, is to try to ascertain the extent to which the therapeutic is implicated in social and cultural changes that have given rise to a shift towards more equitable gender relations.
Yet there is also another dimension, that of the perceived amorality of the therapeutic society. While casting their arguments in slightly different ways, Rieff, Lasch, and Furedi all regard the therapeutic self as essentially amoral—caught on a treadmill of meaningless self-improvement in an ultimately fruitless quest for subjective wellbeing. Yet such a picture is inevitably only partial. To view therapeutic culture as amoral is to fail to recognize its multidimensionality, taking, for example, the preoccupation with self-gratification, pleasure, and happiness as its only facet. Without dismissing the potential for narcissistic self-absorption, it is important to acknowledge that valuing the self also entails recognition of suffering which has a thoroughly moral dimension. This also raises the question of power, and the ways in which a therapeutic imperative, underpinned by a confessional culture, has made possible challenges to traditional authority—particularly to forms of authority that have been abusive or unjust. From this standpoint, the sanctity of the self in therapeutic culture cannot be understood merely as hedonistic and amoral. For the therapeutic has its own moral logic, one in which the authority of the self can be marshaled to speak against oppression. To the extent that therapeutic culture encourages and legitimizes the claims of damage inflicted upon the individual (often in the private sphere), the argument of amorality becomes a problematic one.
To conclude, it is important to recognize the legitimacy of concerns about the therapeutic in relation to the issues outlined above. However, without resorting to an overly optimistic position, it is possible to challenge excessively pessimistic interpretations by working toward an alternative reading that pays greater heed to the gendered and contradictory dimensions of the therapeutic society. In moving forward, it is important to look carefully at the historical processes that give rise to the contradictions, with an eye both to the potential for social control and hollow individualism—in short, the negative strands—but also to be open to the therapeutic promise: the potential for increasing caring relations and remedying forms of social injustice.
For as well as at times a self-indulgent preoccupation with personal fulfillment, therapeutic culture has facilitated the assertion of individual rights to bodily autonomy, emotional wellbeing, and personal safety. In particular, I suggest that most existing accounts do not adequately grapple with the problem of suffering.125 Reading the therapeutic predominantly in terms of new desires for self-fulfillment and happiness obscures an equally plausible explanation, that it is not about the desire for happiness, but a shifting orientation to suffering. Through the opening up of the private, the legitimizing of the emotional realm, and the speaking of the hitherto unspeakable, therapeutic culture has engendered more complex consequences—particularly