Therapy Culture:Cultivating Vu

Frank Furedi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134356331
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2004. Therapy Culture explores the powerful influence of therapeutic imperative in Anglo-American societies. In recent decades virtually every sphere of life has become subject to a new emotional culture. Professor Furedi suggests that the recent cultural turn towards the realm of the emotions coincides with a radical redefinition of personhood. Increasingly, vulnerability is presented as the defining feature of people's psychology. Terms like 'at risk', 'scarred for life' or 'emotional damage' evoke a unique sense of powerlessness. Furedi questions widely accepted thesis that the therapeutic culture is primarily about imposing a new conformity through the management of people's emotions. Through framing the problem of everyday life through the prism of emotions, therapeutic culture incites people to feel powerless and ill. Drawing on developments in popular culture, political and social life, Furedi provides a path-breaking analysis of the therapeutic turn.

1 The culture of emotionalism

Trying to make sense of the problems that confront us in a complex modern society is a challenge fraught with difficulty. Many of the important forces that shape our lives – globalisation, the workings of the market, political and cultural institutions – have an abstract, almost invisible, character. Consequently, most of the time we are not aware of the forces that mould our behaviour and influence the decisions we take. Not surprisingly, we tend to believe that ‘our actions and feelings are derived from something inside ourselves’.¹ So we often attribute our actions and choices to the state of our emotions – to such ‘facts’ as that we are ‘in denial’ or ‘stressed’ or ‘burnt out’ or going through a ‘mid-life crisis’. This view of human behaviour is based on widely held assumptions that ‘create a picture of meaning as something produced within an individual’s mind; this is held to be something internal, private and solitary’.²

Today, the conviction that our experiences are the outcome of personal choices is fuelled by a heightened sense of individuation. In an age of hypermobility and the fragmentation of communities and social networks, people’s lives have acquired an intensely atomised character. The German sociologist Ulrich Beck writes of the ‘isolation of individuals within homogeneous social groups’.³ As a result, our ability to perceive the many things that we share and to grasp the wider social forces that influence our decisions is compromised by the experience of isolation. In such circumstances finding meaning in our experience is fraught with difficulty. Isolation also encourages individuals to interpret the difficulty they have in making sense of their lives as the product of their internal life, rather than as a statement about the inability of society to provide people with a common web of meaning. In such circumstances, the distress that emerges from social conditions can be experienced as a problem of the self. Increasingly, we tend to think of social problems as emotional ones.

Recasting social problems as emotional ones

Today, western culture makes sense of the experience of social isolation through interpreting behaviour through the highly individualised idiom of therapeutic discourse. Our culture has fostered a climate where the internal world of the individual has become the site where the problems of society are raised and where it is perceived they need to be resolved. This shift of focus from the social to the internal life of the individual has also led to a reorientation of intellectual life towards a preoccupation with the self. Since the self is defined through feelings, the state of emotion is often represented as the key determinant of both individual and collective behaviour. Social problems are frequently recast as individual ones that have no direct connection to the social realm.

One of the consequences of this decline in the sociological imagination is a growing tendency to redefine public issues as the private problem of the individual. This mood is vividly captured through the individualised idiom of therapy. Through the language of psychology, therapeutic culture frames the way that problems are perceived. ‘The result is that social problems are increasingly perceived in terms of psychological dispositions: as personal inadequacies, guilt feelings, anxieties, conflicts and neuroses’, concludes Beck.⁴ As David Smail, a British clinical psychologist, argues, the language of therapy helps to construct a common sense that regards feelings and behaviour as the outcome of ‘interior causation’.⁵ Everyday common sense instructs us to regard feelings and behaviour as the product of passions that come from inside ourselves. As Bracken suggests, contemporary human subjectivity is understood as the ‘source of everything’.⁶

Of course, understanding the self and the internal life of the individual is important for comprehending individual behaviour and the wider life of the community. However, a one-dimensional preoccupation with the self often leads to overlooking the social and cultural foundations of individual identity. This approach leads to a novel and specific representation of the self – one that the American sociologist John Rice has characterised as an ‘asocial self’.⁷ From the standpoint of the asocial self what matters is its internal life. The significance of social and cultural influence is discounted in favour of a narrow psychological deliberation of personal emotions. In previous periods of modern life, important intellectual trends tended to attach little significance to the individual self in their explanations of society. A crude economic or social determinism had little room for the individual subject. For example, a bewildering variety of human action – why people joined clubs, why women had small families or why a particular group hated foreign people – was explained as the outcome of economic circumstances. But yesterday’s economic and social determinism has been overtaken by a new and far cruder variety of determinism – that of ‘emotional determinism’. The state of our emotion is now represented as the cause of many of the problems faced by contemporary society. The way we feel about ourselves – our self-esteem – has become an important explanatory tool for making sense of the world.

Low self-esteem is now associated with many of the ills that afflict society. Policy-makers, media commentators and experts regularly demand that action should be taken to raise the self-esteem of school children, teenagers, parents, the elderly, the homeless, the mentally ill, delinquents, the unemployed, those suffering racism, and lone parents, to name but a few of the groups experiencing this problem. Moreover, as we note in Chapter 8, the self-esteem deficit is often presented as a condition that transcends the individual and afflicts entire generations and communities.

From the standpoint of emotional determinism, the individual is perceived as the source of the problems facing society. This doctrine perceives the individual as one who is afflicted by a general state of emotional deficit. In the past, the cultural elites castigated the lower orders for being irrational and not in control of their emotions. Refined and delicate emotions were associated with the more elevated and educated sections of society. According to today’s cultural script, no-one is immune from the problem of emotional deficit. Aristocrats like Princess Diana, Mafia mobster Tony Soprano as well as the ordinary folk who are just trying to get on with life, are all suitable candidates for the couch.

Both in Britain and the US, explanations oriented towards the emotions are now used to make sense of problems that in the past were illuminated through socio-economic or philosophical analysis. ‘Problems that were once considered political, economic, or educational are today found to be psychological’, notes Eva Moskowitz in her important study of the history of therapeutic culture in the US.⁸ Moskowitz notes that America’s ‘obsession with feelings’ in the 1970s helped establish an environment where social problems tended to be framed from a psychological perspective. This trend was particularly evident in relation to the problem of racial oppression, where increasingly the consequence of discrimination was interpreted in therapeutic terms. According to this approach, those who suffered from racism suffered permanent damage to their personality. In effect they became damaged people. In turn, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn has noted that the cure for the damaged personality requires therapeutics leading to an emphasis on managing attitudes and away from tackling the question of equality.⁹

In Britain, too, there is a growing tendency to psychologise the problem of racism. Whereas in the past critics of racism emphasised the salience of economic inequality, discrimination and violence, today there is a tendency to adopt the therapeutic language of victimisation. A recent study conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation focused on the ‘devastating stress’ suffered by victims of racial harassment. The report self-consciously sought to win public sympathy for victims of racism by focusing on the therapeutic card. Its focus was on the ‘anger, stress, depression, sleepless nights’ of the respondents of this survey.¹⁰ Racism itself has been recast as a semiconscious psychological process. The influential Macpherson Report, published in 1999, helped codify feelings and emotions into law. Sir William Macpherson, the author of this report, defined institutional racism as a problem of the mind. In his definition of institutional racism, Macpherson declared that it ‘can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people’. The key word here is ‘unwitting’; an unconscious response driven by unregulated and untamed emotions.

The tendency to perceive the failures of institutions and of society in terms of their impact on individual emotions is not confined to the issue of racism. When The Guardian newspaper published a major report on the crisis in Britain’s education system, its emphasis was on the emotional damage suffered by poor children, rather than on their social conditions or the failure of the system of education: ‘Poverty does its worst damage with the emotions of those who live with it’.¹¹ It seems that society is far more comfortable in dealing with poverty as a mental health problem than as a social issue. This approach is supported by a widely held premise that adverse circumstances, even relatively banal ones are stress-inducing and cause trauma and various forms of mental illness.

In Britain, the shift of focus from problems rooted in the social realm to emotional turmoil began in the 1970s, but acquired a significant momentum in the 1980s. During the economic upheavals of the early 1980s, even radical critics of society began to emphasise the mental health consequences of free-market capitalism. As they grappled with a growing mood of disenchantment with trade union militancy and redistributionist politics, many activists became drawn towards protesting about the mental health consequences of inequalities. Numerous studies indicting the destructive mental health outcomes of unemployment and job insecurity were published during this period. One report, published in 1980, predicted that 50,000 people will have died by 1984 as a result of stress caused by unemployment.¹² Studies proclaiming the negative mental health impact of un-employment converged with wider cultural influences to replace a socio-economic critique of capitalism with a therapeutic one. ‘It is now possible to show empirically that the unfettered free market is bad for the nation’s mental health’, declared a critic of the Conservative government in The New Statesman. He added that a ‘substantial and growing part of the population is suffering psychologically from government policies’.¹³

The prevailing cultural climate provided a fertile terrain for the growth of therapeutic critique of capitalism. Its orientation towards psychological damage caused by systemic forces was one that could readily be accomodated by the individualistic temper of the 1980s. Even the Thatcher government was happy to absorb forms of therapeutic management into its schemes targeting the unemployed. Resources devoted to the counselling of the unemployed were systematically expanded in the 1980s. The cumulative effect of these trends was to individualise protest and encourage what Beck characterises as the ‘individual therapeutic ways of handling problems’.¹⁴

Problems of the emotions are not just represented as the inexorable outcome of problems, such as poverty, racism, poor parenting and domestic violence. Emotional dysfunctions are, in turn, frequently depicted as the cause of virtually every form of social breakdown. According to the outlook of emotional determinism, unprocessed and unmanaged emotions are the cause of the ills that afflict society. This deterministic outlook is widely promoted by advocates of the idea of emotional intelligence. Proponents of the doctrine of emotional intelligence believe that lack of self-awareness and a reluctance to acknowledge one’s true feelings are responsible for both individual distress and the problems facing society. They claim that people who are emotionally illiterate are potentially destructive personalities, who bear responsibility for many of the ills facing society. This transformation of social and cultural problems into psychological ones is most eloquently expressed in Daniel Goleman’s bestseller, Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More than IQ. Goleman takes the view that society faces a ‘collective emotional crisis’. He sees a ‘growing calamity in our shared emotional life’, which is expressed in marital violence, child abuse, rising juvenile delinquency and the growing incidence of depression and post-traumatic stress. The problems associated with emotional illiteracy are alarming according to Goleman. The shooting of classmates by American schoolchildren, teenage pregnancy, bullying, drug abuse and mental illness are some of the consequences of the public’s refusal to attend to its emotional needs. The solution offered by Goleman is more emotional education, which provides strategies for managing emotions and recognising feelings.¹⁵

British advocates of emotional literacy claim that the origins of ‘violence and inequality’ can ‘in part be found in the childhood experience of avoidant individuals whose feelings have been brushed aside and thus not treated as “equal”, in the sense of having their emotions respected’.¹⁶ Emotional determinism is mobilised to account for the problem of the environment. According to Antidote, an organisation devoted to raising the emotional literacy of the British people, ‘fear of loss, fear of the unknown and fear of someone else having more than us renders us blind to the obvious direction the natural world is heading’. Antidote claims that our ‘anger’ drives us to ‘ignore this reality’. Antidote indicts society for wasting ‘much of its precious resource: the energy and creativity of its people’. It claims that this unhappy state of affairs is a ‘consequence of our reluctance to acknowledge that feelings influence almost everything we do’.¹⁷

Violence between nations and wars are also attributed an emotional causation. It is claimed that ‘trauma’, especially when unprocessed and ‘congealed over generations’, fuels outbursts of violence. ‘Long-term deep-set and unconscious trauma can do much to explain, for example, why September 11 happened; why Orangemen are still marching; why young Palestinians are killing themselves in suicide bombings’, writes the head of an advocacy group devoted to providing therapeutic training to journalists.¹⁸ The belief that international conflict arises from trauma-induced psychological and social dysfunctionalism has influenced the thinking of organisations involved in the field of humanitarian aid. A UNICEF briefing document noted in 1994 that, ‘the world has only just begun to realise that left untreated, the psychological wounds of war can be most damaging, as children grow up unable to function normally, often driven to perpetuate the violence they have experienced’.¹⁹ As Vanessa Pupavac observed in her studies of post-conflict strategies, increasingly, ‘many international documents refer to the “rehabilitation of post-conflict societies”, rather than their reconstruction’.²⁰

The refusal to acknowledge or process one’s feelings is also depicted as the cause of the Middle East conflict. Not even Saddam Hussein is exempt from gaining a therapeutic diagnosis. Whilst the West put pressure on the Iraqi regime to reveal its weapons of mass destruction, Saddam was frequently characterised by the media as ‘in denial’. One American political psychologist, Dr Jerrold Post, stated that ‘it all goes back to his mother’s womb’. According to Post, Saddam’s mother ‘both tried to commit suicide and to have an abortion’. This experience ‘wounded his self-esteem’, creating a condition known as ‘the wounded self’. Another account contends that Saddam was so shamed by his humble origins that it left him ‘pathologically incapable in later life of trusting anyone’.²¹

The belief that ‘it all goes back to the womb’ is the axial principle of emotional determinism. This argument is based on the premise that the early emotional experience of a child will determine and define behaviour in later years. It is claimed that the emotional damage suffered by children can constitute a life sentence. Many observers contend that ‘invisible scars’ inflicted on the psyche never heal and damage the victim for life. Unlike physical acts, which have a beginning and an end and are specific in nature, the realm of emotions knows no boundaries. According to this intensely deterministic model, children who experience distress become traumatised and carry the scars of this episode with them into adulthood. It is claimed that the trauma suffered by such young adults can dispose them towards acts of violent behaviour. Childhood trauma is represented as the point of departure for the destructive behaviour of adults. This deterministic world-view has been used to explain the violent conflict in Afghanistan. According to one account, a significant majority of children in Kabul have been traumatised through the impact of the culture of violence on their lives. ‘While such events can lead to considerable psychological trauma and distress, they may also inure a young mind to violence’, argues an advocate of emotional determinism. The consequences of childhood trauma are elaborated in the following terms:

The average Taliban and Northern Alliance soldiers are a product of the same cycle of social upheaval experienced from early childhood. Ignorance, isolation, and a daily ritual of v...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The culture of emotionalism
• 2 The politics of emotion
• 3 Targeting privacy and informal relations
• 4 How did we get here?
• 5 The diminished self
• 6 The self at risk
• 7 Fragile identity: hooked on self-esteem
• 8 Conferring recognition: the quest for identity and the state
• 9 Therapeutic claims-making and the demand for a diagnosis
• Final thoughts: does it matter?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index