Читать книгу The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change - Katie Wright - Страница 8

In accounts that emphasize the political economy rather than the cultural symbolic, historical transformations associated with the development of capitalist market economies are seen as central to the formation of a therapeutic ethos.³¹ Though some, most notably Lasch, develop approaches that integrate the social and cultural with an analysis of the political economy, the major point of divergence lies in what is seen as the distinguishing feature of the therapeutic. While Rieff read the therapeutic as remissive, the political economy critique views it rather as a potent mechanism of depoliticization and social control. Grounded in historical materialism, this line of interpretation makes changes in the production and consumption systems of the capitalist economy central to analyses of the therapeutic society.

The extent to which the advent of consumer capitalism and the ascendancy of the therapeutic were mutually reinforcing has been widely noted.³² According to T.J. Jackson Lears, the shift from a Protestant ethos of self-denial to a therapeutic culture of self-gratification provided fertile ground for the expansion of consumer capitalism. Advertisers, he notes, "began speaking to many of the same preoccupations addressed by liberal ministers, psychologists, and other therapeutic ideologues. A dialectic developed between Americans' new emotional needs and advertisers' strategies; each continually reshaped and intensified the other."³³ As Stuart Ewen has shown, psychology provided advertisers with insights into "human instinct" that stimulated the desire for consumption in mass audiences.³⁴ A critical dimension of this involved creating a level of unease and dissatisfaction that consumer culture then promised to ameliorate. With the promise of self-improvement through consumption, Philip Cushman argues that advertising became—like psychotherapy itself—a therapeutic activity.³⁵

In displacing the ethic of salvation, the emerging ethos of self-realization provided, Lears argues, a "new and secular basis for capitalist cultural hegemony."³⁶ He suggests that shifting patterns of consumption were intimately connected to changing experiences of selfhood in the late nineteenth century. The corrosive effects of capitalism and technological change were intensified by the secularization of Protestantism. These factors coalesced, he argues, to undermine the solid sense of selfhood that had been maintained by Victorian moral boundaries and religious authority. There was, according to Lears, an increasing sense of anxiety amongst the educated bourgeoisie that was generated by urbanization, technological development, and greater levels of affluence: a phenomenon he refers to as "the feeling of unreality."³⁷

The observation that the political and economic structures of capitalist modernity gave rise to changing experiences of selfhood is widespread.³⁸ Lears' evocative depiction of the "sense of unreality" experienced during the late Victorian era resonates with David Riesman's account of post-WWII shifts in culture and personality. Riesman argued that selfhood lost coherence in the rapidly changing social circumstances associated with transformations in organizational life and new forms of mass communication. In his view, corporate culture, bureaucratization, and closer to home, permissive parenting, brought about changes in social character; the "inner-directed" individual guided by internalized values, conscience and guilt, gave way to the "other-directed" conformist individual who sought cues from others. By contrast to feelings of guilt that govern the inner-directed person, Riesman argued that the "prime psychological lever of the other-directed person is a diffuse anxiety."³⁹

Tackling similar themes several years later, Lasch extended Riesman's account of American culture and personality in his analysis of narcissism. In the Minimal Self, in particular, he developed the idea that changes in personality under advanced capitalism involved a hollowing out or emptying of the self as a strategy of "psychic survival in troubled times." Lasch grounds his analysis of minimal selfhood in the context of the expansion of the state and corporate bureaucracies, the rise of managerialism, shifts in cultural authority, and the decline of the family, arguing that social conditions under advanced capitalism are increasingly warlike—not only in the public sphere, but also in personal life. In his analysis, the family is no longer a "haven in a heartless world" and the private sphere "has become as anarchical, as warlike, and as full of stress as the marketplace itself."⁴⁰ The retreat inward and the growth of ideals of self-improvement for Lasch are thus understood as a direct consequence of major social change: "The growth of bureaucracy, the cult of consumption with its immediate gratifications, but above all the severance of the sense of historical continuity have transformed the Protestant ethic while carrying the underlying principles of capitalist society to their logical conclusion. The pursuit of self-interest, formerly identified with the rational pursuit of gain and the accumulation of wealth, has become a search for pleasure and psychic survival."⁴¹

Entering therapy, in his view, is a means of mitigating psychic disintegration. The hope of achieving mental health represents for Lasch, "the modern equivalent of salvation," with therapists, not priests, the "principal allies in the struggle for composure."⁴² More broadly, the fixation with emotional life and self-improvement reflect, in his view, a repudiation of the past and the "waning sense of historical time."⁴³ A preoccupation with present concerns and personal change has arisen as the sole means by which individuals can exercise control over their lives. However, these strategies of "psychic survival" have brought about, according to Lasch, an unfortunate shift from political engagement to self-examination: "Having displaced religion as the organizing framework of American culture, the therapeutic outlook threatens to displace politics as well, the last refuge of ideology. Bureaucracy transforms collective grievances into personal problems amenable to therapeutic intervention."⁴⁴

Lasch's view of the therapeutic as a mechanism of depoliticization constitutes one of the most salient contributions to debates about the therapeutic society. Indeed, following Lasch, the personalization of social problems has been widely read as its central impulse. Dana Cloud, for example, draws on this idea to argue that therapeutic 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.