The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills, Dylan Kerrigan, Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills, Dylan Kerrigan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429656187
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural studies, development studies, and American Indian studies, it adopts a consciously global focus, combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised, it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life, before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological, as well as significant transformations of key institutions, such as work, family, education, and religion, it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies, the political interest in happiness, and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally, the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.

Part 1

Introduction

Introduction

Therapeutic global cultures from a multidisciplinary perspective: present and future challenges

Daniel Nehring, Ole Jacob Madsen, Edgar Cabanas, China Mills, and Dylan Kerrigan

This handbook responds to growing scholarly interest in the study of therapeutic cultures across the social sciences and humanities. It comprises 36 original contributions that showcase theoretical perspectives and areas of empirical enquiry across a range of disciplines and from a variety of social settings around the world. The objectives of this book are threefold. First of all, it seeks to showcase critical enquiry into the diverse and multifaceted roles which psychotherapeutic discourses, practices, technologies, and institutions may play in contemporary societies and on a transnational scale. In doing so, the book highlights the transformative effects which these discourses, practices, technologies, and institutions may bring to bear on contemporary societies, and on human experience of self, social relationships, and the human world.

In this context, second, the book provides a point of departure for interdisciplinary dialogue. Critical social research on therapeutic cultures is burgeoning across a range of disciplines and disciplinary subfields, such as critical mental health (Cohen, 2018), anthropology (Yang, 2018), sociology (Illouz, 2008; Binkley, 2011; Wright, 2010), psychology (Madsen, 2014; Cabanas and Illouz, 2019a), global mental health and public health (Mills, 2014), political economy (Davies, 2015, 2018), and cultural studies (Aubry and Travis, 2015). However, attendant academic debates often remain confined to particular disciplines, and more work is arguably needed to constitute the study of therapeutic cultures as a coherent interdisciplinary field of social and cultural research.

Third, in developing this book it is our aim to foreground the global reach of psychologically and psychotherapeutically informed modes of experience of everyday life, popular understandings of self and social relationships, and institutional arrangements, as well as the equally broadly international scale of attendant research. Departing from a number of early seminal studies in the USA, such as the much-cited and influential work of Christopher Lasch (1979, 1984), research conducted within the Global Northwest has long overshadowed scholarship in the majority of the world. Globalisation and the advent of new communication technologies have relatively recently begun to provide pathways for academic collaboration and dialogue beyond the Global Northwest. However, this potential for global dialogue is being contested by the hierarchies of contemporary academic capitalism and the marketisation of scholarship, in the form of the international dominance of Anglophone publishing houses in the Global Northwest and the power of a fairly small band of universities in the same part of the world to steer academic debates.

In response, this book adopts a global perspective on therapeutic cultures in terms of the subjects it covers and in terms of the scholarly voices it includes. The geographic range of case studies in this book is of necessity limited by the reach of our academic networks and the finite scope of even a large handbook. This means that its basic geographic scope is far from comprehensive. Nonetheless, we hope that the following collection of chapters may contribute to laying the conceptual and thematic groundwork for further, more expansive debates about transnational therapeutic cultures and its dynamics in both the Global South and the Global North.

In this introduction, we survey the book’s subject matter from five perspectives. First, we consider the growing influence of psychologically informed discourses and practices in everyday life and ask what might be meant by the psychologisation of society. Second, we examine the rise of the happiness industry and new technologies of happiness, and we consider their socio-cultural significance. Together, these two parts set out themes and concepts that may account for the diffusion, popularisation, and institutionalisation of psychological knowledge within specific societies. The following two parts then draw attention to the transnational scale of attendant social processes. Third, we explore how psy-expertise is enmeshed in global mental health and the transnational diffusion of specific institutional structures, forms of knowledge, and practices regarding mental health and well-being. We then, fourth, approach the psychologisation of social life and its international reach from the perspective of therapeutic politics. Here, we consider the broader implications of therapeutic cultures in terms of the social, economic, cultural, and political relationships between Global South and Global North and the coloniality of power. Finally, we shift our perspective to the academic conditions for the study of global therapeutic cultures. In this section, our concern rests with trends and features of contemporary research on therapeutic cultures. We highlight certain salient feature in the cross-disciplinary and geographic structure of this research, and we point to significant issues to be addressed in future enquiry.

The psychologisation of society and the problem of social critique

Addressing the socio-cultural and political significance of therapeutic cultures, the notion of psychologisation provides a useful point of departure. Psychologisation means simply “to make something psychological”, which may involve moral, political, or social categories are reduced to a question of psychology. Originally stemming from a philosophical debate in the 19th century involving Wilhelm Wundt, Edmund Husserl, and Gottlob Frege among others, revolving around the question on whether logic and meaning could be considered psychological notions or whether these categories transcends the subjective life of persons and is best understood as epistemological notions of knowledge and truth (Kusch, 1995). Today, psychologisation usually refers to the exponential influence of psychology in the 20th and 21st century first in America and later in the whole word, which supports “a hegemonic discourse delivering particular signifiers and discursive schemes for looking upon oneself and upon the world” (De Vos, 2010: p.528). For instance, Mark Jarzombek (2000) argues that the “everywhereness” of psychology within Western contemporary culture around the millennium shift holds comparison to what perspective was during the Renaissance period: No aspect of the world was left untouched after its advent.

To “psychologise” an area or question is on the first hand still considered blameworthy today, while on the other hand has seemingly become so ordinary that hardly anyone takes much offence anymore. For instance, on the morning of the 9th of November 2016 after the American presidential election the night before, in which Donald Trump became the 45th President of the United States, the Norwegian Public Broadcaster NRK introduced its news-coverage in the following: “This election has taken its toll on American’s psyche, and made them stressed and worn-out. We shall psychologise the election in this broadcast”. And then a professional psychologist was introduced that advised listeners that many of them now suffer from stressful feelings and worries about the world situation, and told them how they should learn to cope with it. Also national news sources in Sweden and Denmark provided similar news stories—psychological self-help recipes and therapeutic advice on how to handle fears and talk to your child about it: “Psychologist: Don’t let Trump control your life” (Madsen, 2017: p.15). This particular example of psychologisation of world politics showcases perhaps both how psychologisation indeed reduces questions of historical and public importance to personal and individual reactions, yet also suggests that many people today actually find psychologisation quite helpful.

The first observers of the growth of psychologisation and psychology in the latter half of the 20th century traditionally took a critical stance towards its increased influence on public life. For instance, the pioneer scholar on “the triumph of the therapeutic” Philip Rieff (1979: p.18) remarked that “It is as a social science that Freudian psychology must be dealt with”. The emerging “therapeutic culture“ attempted to offer salvation or healing without the necessary bonds to a community, but rather based on human’s construction of himself out of himself, was according to Rieff (1987), doomed to failure as feelings of well-being or self-esteem had been reduced to goals in themselves, as opposed to a by-product of the search for a larger collective goal in traditional, religious cultures. While Rieff’s predecessor, Christopher Lasch (1979) lamented in his best-selling book The Culture of Narcissism that the therapeutic worldview had drawn religion out of the American consciousness, and now even threatened politics as ideology’s last place of refuge. Lasch (1979: p.30) feared that the many therapeutic heirs to Freudian analysis offered in 1970s cultural climate offered ultimately nothing but a “diverting [of] attention from social problems to personal ones, from real issues to false issues”.

The next generation of scholars writing on “the therapeutic culture” in the 2000s like Katie Wright and Eva Illouz shows however that the early theorists of psychologisation failed to see anything but its depoliticising tendencies and acknowledge the potentials in the therapeutic outlook. Wright (2008) maintains how the therapeutic culture disrupted the traditional boundaries between public and private life, which helped to make suffering more socially acceptable and increase caring relations and remedied new forms of social injustice. At the same time, Illouz (2008) stresses that we still know very little of how and why the therapeutic has triumphed, which necessarily must involve the support the narrative offers men and women in their everyday life. Hence, the therapeutic culture would not have come into being across the globe unless it provided people with a set of strategies and techniques that help them “do things” and cope and resolve practical questions in their daily lives. If we only interpret psychologisation of society as repression and with “the epistemology of suspicion” we are left with a thin understanding of the complexities involved, maintains Illouz, while a thick description must mean to uncover also how agents can actively make use of therapeutic discourse in their exercise of selfhood and struggle for recognition and coherence.

Finally, the recent tendency to take a more lenient view of psychologisation does not exclude critique. For instance, Illouz (2008: p.247) stresses that the penetration of psychologisation and the ability to include almost everything in its worldview is disconcerting: “In the therapeutic ethos there is no such thing as senseless suffering and chaos, and this is why, in the final analysis, its cultural impact should worry us”.

Technologies of happiness and everyday life

Alongside academic conversations about the psychologisation of society, recent research has placed considerable emphasis on discourses, technologies, and institutionalised practices concerned with the promotion of happiness. Indeed, if anything has marked the evolution of therapeutic culture in the last two decades on a global scale, that has been an increasing focus on happiness, well-being, and positivity. Whereas this progressive shift towards happiness has multiple political, economic, and ideological causes (Ahmed, 2010; Binkley, 2014; Cederström and Spicer, 2015; Davies, 2015; Cabanas and Illouz, 2019b)―including the increasing emotionalisation of consumption and labour (Gilmore and Pine, 2007; Cabanas and Illouz, 2017)―there is little doubt that positive psychology is one of the movements that most significantly have contributed to this shift (Frawley, 2015; Cabanas and Illouz, 2019a). Founded circa the year 2000, positive psychology spread the idea that it was finally the time for a new positive therapeutic paradigm that broke away with “business-as-usual therapy” through the replacement of the “disease model” characteristic of “traditional therapy” (Seligman, 2002) with the study of “what makes life worth living” (e.g., Fredrickson, 2009; Peterson and Seligman, 2004; Seligman, 2011a). In the words of the founding fathers of the field, such a focus on happiness and well-being would move “all of the social sciences away from their negative bias” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi, 2000: p.13...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• PART 1 Introduction
• PART 2 Therapeutic discourses: editor’s introduction
• PART 3 Therapeutic experiences: editor’s introduction
• PART 4 Therapeutic practices: editor’s introduction
• PART 5 Therapeutic technologies and therapeutic institutions: editor’s Introduction
• PART 6 Therapeutic politics: editor’s introduction
• Index