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
consolation has established itself as "the prevailing strategy of crisis management."45 In Cloud's analysis, the therapeutic is a persuasive rhetoric that displaces social and political action and stifles dissent within a discourse of individual responsibility and consolation. It is, in her view, the pervasiveness of this rhetoric that "makes the therapeutic so influential in channeling individual responses to exploitation, alienation, isolation, oppression, and other socially produced hardships."46
According to Cloud, "therapeutic persuasions" have pervaded the cultural landscape to such an extent that structural and systematic disadvantage is obscured by the rhetoric of therapy. Writing in the 1990s, her analysis takes account of the shift from the period of economic stability and prosperity to the "leaner and meaner" environment of the 1980s and 1990s—of downsizing, restructuring, workforce casualization, and technological change. She argues that therapeutic consolation obfuscates corporate responsibility, as workers are encouraged to take personal responsibility for structural change. Cloud is particularly critical of such strategies, which she interprets as offering merely symbolic consolation rather than material compensation. As she argues: "The most important rhetorical feature of the therapeutic is its tendency to encourage citizens to perceive political issues, conflicts, and inequalities as personal failures subject to personal amelioration. Therapy offers consolation rather than compensation, individual adaptation rather than social change, and an experience of politics that is impoverished in its isolation from structural critique and collective action."47
Furedi similarly critiques the systematic expansion and institutionalization of counseling services targeting the unemployed and those facing redundancy. He follows Lasch and Cloud in interpreting such trends in terms of control and consolation, but he picks up on Nolan's notion of pathologization in arguing that social problems are not only individualized, but are recast as emotional deficit. In his analysis, a distinctive feature of the contemporary therapeutic society that arose in the 1970s and intensified in the 1980s was a preoccupation with individual pathology. "Stress" and "mental health" emerged, he argues, as popular and political issues that displaced attention from the political and economic realms.48
Similar concerns have been leveled at particular therapeutic cultural forms, most notably, the television talk show and the self-help book. Locating the talk show within the genre of "recovery religion," Kathleen Lowney argues that explanations of individual behavior fail to acknowledge social and structural dimensions, and instead simply focus on the psychological. As she points out: "individualizing social problems becomes necessary since it is not possible to interview 'institutional racism' but it is possible to have a provocative interview with a 'skinhead.'"49 Once the causes are individualized, Lowney argues, so are the solutions. A similar set of concerns regarding individualization and depoliticization is also directed toward therapeutic guides, psychological literature, and other "self-help fashions."50 In a scathing critique, Wendy Kaminer argues that "the notion of selfhood that emerges from recovery (the most vulgarized renditions of salvation by grace, positive thinking, and mind cure) is essentially more conducive to totalitarianism than democracy."51
These critiques resonate with Lasch's view that the therapeutic is an agent not of liberation but of capitalist enterprise and social control. In further elaborating issues also raised in Ewen's work, Aric Sigman argues that the appropriation of psychology by the media and corporate sector has led to a distortion of sound psychological principles.52 As a psychologist, his concern is primarily with the proliferation of popular therapeutic discourses rather than psychotherapy or the growth of psychology itself. Sigman levels his critique of the misappropriation of psychological knowledge at the media and publishing, a trend he argues was established in the late 1960s as self-fulfillment, happiness, and personal growth superseded the modest aspirations of a contented life and religious notions of salvation. His concern with the diffusion of pop psychology is not only that it is often based on erroneous concepts, but that the imperatives of personal growth are in themselves counterproductive, generating a disapproval and rejection of one's self in a never-ending quest for self-improvement.
Sigman's condemnation of pop psychology reflects widespread concerns about therapeutic culture itself. Critiques of clinical practices of psychotherapy and counseling, however, have generally been more cautiously advanced. Cloud is quite typical in this regard, making clear that her concern "is not about what therapy does for us privately." Rather, her disquiet arises from the consequences of therapeutic discourses for politics, activism, and social change, as "therapeutic motifs at the level of cultural persuasion work against the formulation of a collective political project in the public sphere."53
In analyses such as this, therapy itself is bracketed from critical assessment whereas its wider cultural ramifications are read as pernicious. Separating therapy from its broader sociocultural impact does overcome some problems of theorizing, but it also stands as a theoretical contrivance at risk of unraveling. For therapy and the broader therapeutic culture are not so easily disentangled. Not only is therapy itself the central metaphor of therapeutic culture, but it constitutes a critical institution within the therapeutic society. Nevertheless, in recognizing personal distress and the capacity of therapy to alleviate it, Cloud's account differs from Rieff's moral objection. The opposition is grounded, rather, in objection to the wider political ramifications of the individualizing of social problems. Therapy in the private world of the individual is thus in itself not viewed as problematic, but in the public world of work and politics, therapeutic strategies and therapeutic rhetoric are to be thoroughly resisted.
Other accounts, however, do not concur with such a benign view of the clinical encounter. With the emergence of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s, the subject of mental health came to the fore as a political issue. As David Ingleby notes, although the concerns of those involved varied, they were "united in seeing the scientific image of psychiatry as a smokescreen; the real questions were: whose side is the psychiatrist on, what kind of society does he serve, and do we want it?"54 In a similarly critical view of the clinical practice of therapy under advanced capitalism, James Hillman and Michael Ventura assert that: "If therapy imagines its task to be that of helping people cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel), to normalize their oddity, and to accept themselves 'and work within your situation; make it work for you' (rather than refuse the unacceptable), then therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebs. Coping simply equals compliance."55 Hillman and Ventura argue that therapy constructs social problems as individual ones and in so doing displaces deficits of the body politic. They suggest that unless the institution of therapy can recognize the ways in which social problems are manifest in the individual patient, social change is thwarted and therapists are in effect colluding with the state to stifle dissent by assisting people to cope and function within oppressive social and political systems.
Governing & Constituting the Modern Self
While sharing concerns of political economy critics about social regulation, interpretations of the therapeutic society informed by the work of Michel Foucault have focused on the role of psychological discourses in the constitution of the modern self, and in the operation of modern systems of power.56 Foucault's writings on madness, medicine, and psychology, and his theorization of governmentality and subjectification, have thus provided an intellectual and methodological alternative for understanding the significance of the therapeutic turn. In particular, his analysis of the historical significance of the development of the human sciences and his delineation of modes of internalized self-government through "technologies of the self" have been widely influential, especially in reading psychology and psychiatry as disciplinary discourses aimed at shaping particular forms of conduct.57
In his genealogies of the modern self, Foucault traced the ways in which the invention of new knowledges of the human subject enabled new forms of authority to be exercised over the conduct of citizens. A central tenet of his conceptualization of power and subjectivity is that under liberalism, social control and individual freedom became inextricably intertwined. Consequently, social regulation came to work not in opposition to individual autonomy, but indeed through people's capacity to choose and to act.
While Jacques Donzelot, for example, shared with Lasch a concern about the intrusion of