The Therapeutic Turn

How psychology altered Western culture

Ole Jacob Madsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317699903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

In what ways has psychology become more influential in Western society? In this book author Ole Jacob Madsen considers the notion of a 'Therapeutic Turn' in Western culture – the tendency for psychology to permeate ever new spheres within society.

The Therapeutic Turn evaluates the increasing prevalence of psychology in several areas of Western society: Western consumer culture, contemporary Christianity, self-help, sport and politics. Madsen proposes that there are problematic aspects to this development which are seldom recognised due to a widely held assumption that 'the more psychology, the better for everyone'. A recurring concern with psychological solutions is that they often provide individual solutions to structural problems. As a result, psychologists may be inadvertently increasing the burden on the shoulders of the people they are meant to help and, at the same time, our capacity to understand individual suffering in the light of major historical and political changes in society is becoming increasingly clouded.

The Therapeutic Turn presents an accessible and engaging critique of the influence of psychology within Western society. It will appeal to a broad audience of students, academics and lay readers interested in this aspect of modernity and contemporary society, and it will also be of great interest to practitioners and therapists.

1 Introduction

All the great problems of our age are becoming more and more psychological the better we understand them. The world needs a new psychology larger in all its dimensions more than it needs anything else.

(Granville Stanley Hall, 1923, p. 437)

Granville Stanley Hall (1844–1924) was the first president of the American Psychological Association (APA) and one of the founders of modern psychology. Like most of the pioneers within the profession, Hall had an unshakeable belief in the idea that the more psychological our understanding of ourselves and society is, the better. With this book my intention is (1) to demonstrate that psychology today continues to operate in accordance with Hall’s basic assumption that ‘the more psychology, the better’, and (2) to present some critical objections to the widespread perception that most of the problems of society should be viewed and handled psychologically.

Although psychology has only been in existence as an independent science and discipline for approximately 135 years, it has nonetheless had an enormous impact on Western culture. The latter for its own part has been assigned contemporary diagnoses such as ‘the age of psychology’ (Havemann, 1957), ‘the triumph of the therapeutic’ (Rieff, 1987), ‘the psychological society’ (Gross, 1978), ‘the therapeutic state’ (Nolan, 1998; Polsky, 1991) and ‘therapy culture’ (Furedi, 2004; Imber, 2004). The French sociologist Alain Ehrenberg (2007) has therefore maintained that psychology can no longer be understood in purely scientific terms, but must also be viewed against the background of a cultural climate in which the individual personality has been made the subject of an enormous social and medical interest. In contrast to psychiatry, which is a relatively peripheral institution with a limited range of impact, psychology and the emotional life must be considered the key juncture between the private and political spheres, where the most important contradictions of modern society now find expression. Cultural sociologist Eva Illouz (2008) makes the argument that a therapeutic ethos now transcends all national borders and regional differences, hereby providing the basis for a global psychological mentality and discourse about individuality. She claims that no other cultural framework, with the exception of political liberalism and market liberalism’s economic logic of profit, has exercised as much influence on the twentieth century’s ideas about the individual. The Danish psychologist Svend Brinkmann (2008) has stated that modern psychology has become so predominant in our understanding of ourselves and the surrounding world that it constitutes what the philosopher Charles Taylor (2004) has called a social imaginary, which is not only a specific theory espoused by many about the nature of the world, but the very framework comprising our theories about ourselves and the world.

Modern psychology underwent a rapid development following its establishment as an autonomous, small and experimental science in 1879 in Leipzig, Germany, expanding into a broadly applied science and professional expertise in increasingly more areas of society throughout the course of the twentieth century. As a profession, psychology experienced its first breakthrough in the USA and this geographical ‘power shift’ from Europe to the USA occurred after Hall invited the leading psychoanalysts of the time to the States in 1909. During the crossing from Europe, in transit to what the historians view as the great inauguration journey and breakthrough of psychoanalysis in the USA – the Clarke lectures of 1909 – Sigmund Freud is alleged to have said to his crown prince Carl Jung: ‘they do not know that we bring them the plague’ (as cited in Strong, 1984, p. 65). Freud and psychoanalysis were to enjoy a unique penetration of American society throughout the course of the twentieth century. Most of the critical studies of the therapeutic ethos – which often address the issue of psychology’s impact on culture – have therefore been written by American sociologists and historians about the USA. There are, however, many signs from the period indicating that the ‘cultural plague’, Freud’s tongue-in-cheek characterisation of psychological ethics, returned to Europe with unmitigated force just a few years later (Rieff, 1987). In today’s postmodern, globalised media reality, psychology is propagated along the same lines as other cultural impulses from the USA, such as the entertainment industry. Illouz (2008) maintains that the transmission of psychology is taking place on a scale comparable to that of Hollywood films. Nonetheless, if the descriptions of the therapeutic culture seem somewhat exaggerated from a Norwegian perspective, we should perhaps understand them as a crystal ball providing a vision of the future, rather than reject them out of hand as having little relevance for us (Vetlesen, 2009b).

Implicit in a contemporary diagnosis such as ‘the therapeutic society’ is the perception that as a phenomenon it extends beyond the incidence of psychological disorders in the population and the clinical expertise employed to treat them. The term is testimony to the fact that therapeutic solutions have overstepped the bounds of the therapist’s office. Historian T. J. Jackson Lears (1983) has described the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century as an important moral shift in the West, from the Protestant ethic, rooted in the belief in salvation through ascetic self-denial, to a therapeutic ethos offering self-realisation in this life, where the objective is no longer salvation, but attainment of the best physical and psychological health possible. Lears is quick to emphasise that there is nothing historically new about people having an interest in emotional or physical well-being. All cultures, from antiquity to the present day, have probably contained a therapeutic dimension (Ekeland, 1999). What is new is that the therapeutic ethos is introduced as a promise of liberation that does not depend on God or other transcendent, eternal entity, but for the first time in history is based exclusively on the self (Lears, 1983). Freud’s psychoanalysis and the subsequent, general psychological movement have therefore unfolded in a situation that is new, historically speaking – involving the cultivation of an individualised and therapeutic culture of rights, in which psychology and the self, respectively, replace religion and God(s), and the role of authority or duty in establishing the position of the individual in society.

Psychology has today become a central part of the social reality and mass culture. A number of historians now claim that psychology and psychotherapy have become commonplace and demystified, so it is in particular through popular culture genres such as self-help literature, health tips and therapeutic reality TV that the therapeutic message is being spread. The popular American monthly magazine Psychology Today (1967–) communicates well the split personality of today’s psychology, containing everything from self-help advice to the latest scientific research. Here you will find answers to how you can find the most suitable therapist for your needs, and where you can study to become a psychologist. The magazine advertises anti-depressants and weight-loss drinks side by side. The entire message is packaged in a glossy, appealing format, reflecting that psychology has become or is well on its way to becoming something attractive and positive and is no longer in any sense shameful or mysterious. ‘Mental life’ has quite simply assumed its rightful place within the enormous focus health has come to receive in the daily lives of ordinary people and the media in Western culture. Thus Psychology Today provides a precise image of the state of psychology at a time when psychology, much like health in general, has become a boundless and never-ending project, a point which is substantiated by the definition of health presented by the World Health Organization (2006, p. 1) in 1948: ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.’

Over the course of recent decades psychology has also appeared in areas of society that one would not automatically expect, such as in the worlds of finance and sports, which one would assume were first and foremost about monetary and physical values, respectively. The financial crisis of 2007–2010 summoned a steady stream of economic experts who told us that the crisis was about ‘the psychology in the market’. Traditional economic theory was even criticised for not taking into account the psychology of consumers to a sufficient extent (Akerlof and Shiller, 2009). By contrast a popular reality TV concept like the Luxury Trap now logically features psychologists alongside economic experts, in order to best aid couples troubled with unpaid bills and credit card debts.

This book was largely written in the period between two Olympic Games during which psychology came to receive a great deal of attention in the media coverage. Norwegian athletes in the Summer Olympics in Beijing 2008, such as the speed walker Kjersti Tysse Plätzer, received emotional training with a psychologist throughout, while the handball player Tonje Larsen needed psychological help for insomnia. For the Norwegian women’s football team in Beijing, their psychologist was an important weapon, in that nobody was as well prepared in terms of the ‘mental part’ as they were (Brenna, 2008). The American swimming star Michael Phelps became the poster child for the positive channelling of ADHD’s ecstatic energy (cf. Parker-Pope, 2008), while Norway’s silver medallist in the 100 metre breast stroke, Alexander Dale Oen, stated in an interview with the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation that the secret of his success was not first and foremost his physique or technique but his self-confidence. During the Winter Olympics in Vancouver in 2010 a year and a half later, the tendency to make reference to ‘the mental part’ was even more pronounced – the support team was made up of four psychologists offering 24-hour acute follow-up of the Norwegian athletes and scarcely a single day passed without ‘nerves out of control’ or ‘emotional fortitude’ being offered as an explanation for the difference between victory and defeat. As the president of the Norwegian Psychological Association, Tor Levin Hofgaard (2010), could proudly state in his official blog: ‘Psychology strikes gold in the Olympics’.

How are we to understand this development? Is the increased focus on psychology today an expression of the fact that we live in a sicker society or that we have less tolerance for deviance? Or, to the contrary, does it mean that today we have greater openness and better scientific and technological methods, along with more resources than before, which make it possible to both treat unwanted psychological disorders and work with oneself emotionally in ways unknown to previous generations? The question of psychology’s status touches in a sense upon the important questions of our time about late modernity and the direction in which society in heading: is everything getting better, or is everything getting worse? Or alternatively: What do we gain and what do we lose? These questions are naturally so general that it is impossible to give a single, conclusive answer. But this nonetheless does not mean that one should refrain from asking this type of question. In fact, the psychology profession is ethically bound to do so, as the ethical guidelines stipulate that a psychologist shall be ‘attentive’ to and ‘responsible’ for the society in which he or she is practising (Norwegian Psychological Association, 1998).

Psychology as a science and profession has in a relatively short period of time succeeded in becoming a key social stakeholder and important form of expertise, consulted in areas far afield from its traditional knowledge domains, which have primarily been the therapeutic couch and research laboratory. As psychology acquires more power and influence than ever before, it also acquires greater responsibility. That is as it should be. As the uncle of the super-hero Spider-Man said: ‘With great power comes great responsibility.’ This Marvel Comics series was produced by the artist Stan Lee during the Cold War and it has therefore been interpreted as a critical admonition about the abuse of science and technology (Genter, 2007). The German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) claims in his influential work Risk Society that one of the most important changes and challenges of late modernity is society’s increasing dependence on scientific and technological knowledge. As scientific and technological advancements entail a greater risk than formerly was the case, with the potential to destroy the earth, it becomes critical to our survival that scientific and technological expertise includes a practice of critical self-reflection, particularly since politicians cannot be expected to have an understanding of all of the dilemmas inherent in new technological developments. Political scientist Erik Oddvar Eriksen (2001) has used the telling image ‘democracy’s black hole’ as a metaphor for the power wielded by the professions today, a power which is, however, seldom the topic of public debate or investigation. Politicians are at the mercy of experts – and it is then to be expected that the experts take their social duty seriously and critically reflect upon the positive and negative consequences of their own enterprise. Although psychology is not in possession of nuclear weapons or atomic power, which is certainly what Stan Lee and Ulrich Beck had in mind, I will show here that psychology’s potential to do damage is absolutely not insignificant. Psychology has assumed an important mission: namely, the management of human suffering and – as was the case with its predecessor, Christianity – it can offer relief and comfort, but also in some cases become the very source of the suffering itself. ‘Thou who can heal can also make sick’, as the old saying goes. The idea that modern, evidence-based psychotherapy or psychology can potentially have such destructive effects is however not to be found in the profession’s optimistic ‘upgrading programme’. This is cause for concern and the point of departure for this book.

Chapter overview

In the next chapter (2) I address psychology’s role in the establishment of the modern consumer society. Here I show how the relation between psychology and economy has been of great importance historically to ensure the functioning of the market economy. ‘The economic human being’ is of necessity also a ‘psychological human being’ in that psychological constructs such as ‘the empty self’, individualisation and self-realisation exert influence on the individual consumer as potent cultural and political imperatives. Psychology and capitalism have therefore a complex interconnection.

Chapter 3 covers the crisis of authority in the West – which would imply the problems that arise in modern society when traditional social roles and norms are abandoned. Here I devote particular attention to Philip Rieff’s reading of Sigmund Freud as a philosophical and political theorist. Freud’s psychoanalysis and, later, the more general psychology provide one possible formula for the nature of the relation between the individual and society in a modern age. Rieff is, however, of the opinion that the social model of Freud and psychology, which we still live with today, is not sustainable in the long run.

In Chapter 4 the investigation of authority continues, but under its traditional name: ‘the sacred’. The sacred and religion have, historically speaking, constituted an important social institution which contextualised human beings within a community and motivated them to search beyond the limits of the self. What happens when this institution is dissolved and replaced by a therapeutic expertise that advises the individual to search for the answers within that self? Here I also discuss whether the ‘return of religion’ and neo-religiosity/neo-spiritualism of recent decades imply that we must re-evaluate whether our perception of the world is in fact secularised and therapeutic.

Chapter 5 explores the role of the therapeutic ethos as this finds expressions in the hands of therapeutic experts in weekly magazines, books and on TV. Here I investigate self-help literature, The Oprah Winfrey Show and what I call therapeutic reality TV. In that a number of those researching the propagation of psychology in culture have pointed out that popular psychology, often communicated by TV programmes with a global reach, currently exercises the greatest impact on society today, there is reason to believe that a number of characteristics of the therapeutic culture which until now have been predominantly restricted to the USA are in the process of reaching Norway and other parts of the world.

In Chapter 6 I explore how psychology and the concept of ‘the mental part’ have entered the sports arena in the past decade. Sports psychology has in a short period of time come to play a highly critical role in Norwegian and international sports – in professional football and in the training period leading up to the Summer and Winter Olympics. The degree to which ‘the mental’ is or is not of critical importance to performance is here of secondary interest. Instead I employ sports as a mirror of society to demonstrate individual features that emerge when one implements therapeutic explanatory models.

In Chapter 7 I look more closely at neoliberalism, a political ideology that over the course of recent decades has had the same period of expansion and catchment area as psychology. In that both neoliberalism and psychology give the individual a central position, it is natural to presume that they are closely related. As such, neoliberalism represents a litmus test for psychology’s ideological resistance and credibility.

Chapter 8 addresses the psychology profession’s ethos and position in relation to the ethical dilemmas I have presented in the book. I make the argument that psychologists have a large degree of ethical awareness of client-related factors, but an underdeveloped understanding of socio-ethical problems with respect to how the discipline comes into contact and conflict, respectively, with important social issues. One area where this disparity finds expression is in the Norwegian Psychological Association’s political work, which in spite of its good intentions lacks any awareness of the negative aspects of the increased immediacy of psychology in society.

In the final chapter (9) I summarise the book’s perspectives on psychology in society and address a number of objections to the book’s analyses, before I then highlight some of the more disturbing features of how psychology may develop in the future. For a number of reasons there are (unfortunately) a good many factors indicating that neither politicians nor professionals see any problems with psychology’s ideological bias: the use of individual solutions on social problems. The result can be even more psychological ailments in the future, something which both politicians and professionals will, paradoxically, use to justify our need for even more psychology.

Guidance regarding the book’s perspective

Some readers may be puzzled at this point by my use of the term ‘psychology’. It can therefore be appropriate to give an explanation of how I employ the term throughout the book. Psychology is today a science, a clinical profession and a cultural artefact, with a presence as therapeutic expertise in our culture as never before. Psychologist, on the other hand, is a professional title protected by law in Norway, as in most other countries. In the therapy market of today, however, a number of different occupational groups exist, all of which offer a form of therapeutic expertise. As the gestalt therapist Elisabeth Arnet (2009) correctly asserts in her book with the fitting title Therapy: What Is Right For Me?: psychologists and psychiatrists no longer have a treatment monopoly. With such a multitude of therapeutic experts, there is no point in restricting oneself to psychology as practised by psychologists, even though this is the professional group to which the book devotes the greatest amount of attention. In that this profession has a title protected by law that relies on the trust of society, it is reasonable that psychologists be expected to exercise the greatest ethical awareness. Any disparity here will be more serious and a greater cause for alarm than among other practitioners in the therapeutic market. This is also the professional group with which I have first-hand experience as a psychology student, working psychologist and researcher.

With regard to method, it is challenging to treat psychologists and psychology as a concrete and uniform entity: imprecise generalisations and oversimplifications are a risk. Psychology has since its conception always been characterised by a number of schools and movements which have been from time to time relatively and mutually antagonistic and which have offered extremely different answers to key questions in psychology on the relation between genetics–environment, personality–situation, emotion–cognition, etc. In short, psycholo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The consumer self
• 3 Crisis of authority: Philip Rieff’s critique of Freud’s worldview
• 4 Psychology and religion
• 5 The self-help culture
• 6 Psychology and sports
• 7 Psychology and neoliberalism
• 8 The ethos of the psychology profession
• 9 Conclusion
• References
• Index