De-politicizing needs: Therapy culture and the ‘happiness turn’

Sara Ahmed dates a ‘happiness turn’ in the human and social sciences from about 2005 (2010, p. 5). In part, this burst of research about the science and economics of happiness was a professionalization of a ‘positive psychology’ movement that had already gripped popular culture and geared up workplace and institutional cultures to the pursuit of cheerful ‘well-being’ (Davies, 2015). Positive psychology offered an alternative to a clinical psychology that dwelt upon dysfunction and responded to emotional disorder. Grimly satirized by Barbara Ehrenreich as ‘Smile or Die’ thinking, positive psychology determined that people must make their happiness into an abiding goal and purpose.

Aiming to surpass the traditional preoccupation of the psychological professions with negative states (neuroses, psychoses, disorders of various kinds), positive psychology maps out with the same measure of scientific precision applied to mental pathologies, the psychological states identified with joy, flourishing, expressive well being and happiness itself.

(Binkley, 2011, p. 373)

Samuel Binkley goes on to argue that the ‘happiness turn’ is deeply entwined with, and serves key purposes of, ‘neoliberal life’. He is struck by the ubiquity of a new discourse that exhorts institutional, managerial and planning agencies to perform the governance of individuals, communities and organizations through a system-wide, rewarded positivity. A dogmatic optimism that is oriented towards future successes and refuses to be weighed down by complaints and criticisms is to be mandated as the new positive spirit of self-disciplined jobholders. Ehrenreich reflects on the reach of this mandated positivity in a study that ruefully details how a breast cancer diagnosis swept her into a ‘cheerful breast cancer culture' in which medical and support establishments expected and rewarded a celebratory mood (2009, p. 37). Binkley and Ehrenreich have agreed that the real conservatism of positive psychology ‘lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power’ (Ehrenreich, 2009, p. 170). Binkley’s more specific point is that the happiness turn is peculiarly adapted to neoliberal governmen-tality that intends to refashion subjectivities that have been shaped by welfarist social government. Neoliberalism, he observes, finds in positive psychology a

De-politicizing needs 95 vital cultural resource for its bid to reverse those dependencies imposed by the social that ‘choke off happiness itself by deadening the impulsive freedom that drives the entrepreneurial subject toward the maximization of his own emotional life, viewed as human capital' (2011, p. 383).

Catherine Rottenberg (2018) joins Binkley and Ehrenreich in identifying the ‘happiness turn’ as a species of what has come to be known as a post-war ‘therapeutic culture’. The turn to a mandatory happiness in part gave a particular profile to therapy culture’s erosion of liberal demarcations between separate spheres of action and values. In its far-reaching reorganization of modernity, neoliberalism has modelled an entrepreneurial subjectivity that finds the same sort of motivations and challenges in all domains of life. Public life, just as in the spheres of work and domestic life, confronts us with the task of successfully negotiating risks and using all available resources to come out on top in the competitive game. Not only is the separation of the value spheres overwhelmed by this homogenizing logic, the dispositions and motivations that had been the markers of particular cultural domains can now be raided to mutually reinforce each other. Formerly private dispositions and capacities (of empathy, care, adaptability) are now claimed by the workplace as the necessary resource of the customer-oriented, flexible (no longer just efficient) jobholder. Therapy culture targets failures to rise to the challenges of the collapse of the value spheres. It offers to help failing individuals find personal resources that are needed to successfully negotiate neoliberal life. Modelled on clinical practices that diagnose and treat pathology, it might be supposed that therapy culture would be anathema to the fundamentals of positive psychology. However, it seems that, its self-representations notwithstanding, responding to dysfunction remains the imperative of the happiness mm.

Frank Furedi describes therapy culture as the escape of clinical practices ‘from their distinct and functionally specific role to merge with and extend their logics widely across cultural institutions’ (2004, p. 17). While positive psychology rejects the negativity that invades contemporary culture with presumptions of ailing, disturbed and dysfunctional selves, continuities with therapy culture run deeply thr ough its central purposes. Ahmed’s diagnosis of the reliance of the happiness mm on the cultural pathologization of the ‘killjoy’, the melancholic who exiles him/herself from happiness, underlines the connection (2010). The ‘happiness industry' offers a personality makeover that is designed to release blocked potentials for positivity and to skill the individual up to a resilient ‘wellness’, fighting off the malaise of a lazy defeatism. Identifying the happiness mm as a particular episode within therapy culture illuminates some of the essential features of this mandated positivity. It helps us to underline how a scoping of a post-liberal self works by producing and addressing self-dissatisfactions. It also provides some insights into the difficulties of convicting this process of rebuilding personalities of distortions, oppressions and cultural blockages.

Not always agreeing in their estimations of therapy culture, sociologists are usually united on its cultural dominance in post-liberal societies. Furedi observes that ‘[f]rom birth, marriage and parenting, through to bereavement, people’s experience is interpreted through the therapeutic ethos’ (2004, p. 12). Eva Moskowitz refers to therapy as ‘American cult’ (2001, p. 1). Modelling a form of socialization that replies to the overburdening of a liberal ideal of the strong, self-sufficient ego, therapy culture is attentive to vulnerabilities yet mindful of fixed cultural investments in a self-fashioning individuality. A therapeutic culture offers to help the weary, failing self to get back up.

According to some sociologists there’s not much to complain about. Therapy culture sidesteps the prescriptive closures of the religious world view and offers only to train up the self-understandings that are required to make one's way in a complex, pluralistic contemporary world. Anthony Giddens was attracted to the emancipatory promise of these ‘texts of our time’, many of which ‘point towards changes that might release individuals from influences which block their autonomous development’ (1992, p. 64). Around the same time, Nikolas Rose overcame some initial ambivalence and was drawn to therapy culture’s post-liberal ideal of the individual as a self-engineered construct for its overcoming of the naturalistic fallacy of liberal autonomy (1990). More recently, however, Rottenberg has challenged an apparent cultural swindle in the therapeutic mindset as liberal commitments to equal rights and liberation are replaced by a post-liberal commitment to happiness and the well-being of the balanced life (2018). Her reservations about therapy culture see Rottenberg him to liberal ideals as the excluded cultural potentials that can illuminate the cultural losses. Binkley is right in identifying a welfarist social democratic project as another main target for therapy culture. Taking our critical cue from this diagnosis, we need to rethink how therapy culture has de-politicized a social democratic politicization of needs.

Therapy culture has proved to be a slippery customer for critics who have been hard pressed to spell out their reservations in any systematic and coherent way. This chapter will explore some of these difficulties and will propose its own critical grounds. Formed in the image of the ‘helping professions', therapy culture is a fhistratingly elusive target that confesses to no particular agenda of its own, proposing an open-ended responsiveness to requirements that are brought to it. Particular goals and philosophies of the self come into vogue and pass away, therapy culture has no fixed commitments. This normative disavowal apparently puts a counting-the-costs approach that would weigh certain prescriptions of the self against the cultural ideals they neglect, out of reach. The therapeutic offer to relieve the liberal self of its burden of self-sufficient autonomy is equally available to a romantic unblocking of an authentic subjectivity and as a guide for the rational self-chooser. Following up on a trail of scepticism about the traction that normative critical theory can achieve against therapy culture, Eva Illouz supposes that an immanent critique that deconstructs self-contradictions in therapeutic discourses might be an alternative. However, I will argue that critique does have to offer a diagnosis of the cultural sacrifices that are involved in the ideological dominance of therapy culture. Its postured ideological open-endedness must be interrogated. While the therapeutic is able to move agnostically between different ways of describing our individual freedoms, the curing intentions carried by the therapeutic framework construct these values in quite particular and limited ways. The final section of the chapter uses Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher's distinction

De-poHtici:ing needs 97 between needs and wants to argue that therapy culture impoverishes the idealization of self-fashioning as a process. I claim too that a therapeutic framework draws upon diminished accounts of the values of rational autonomy and authenticity and obscures the possibilities for creative intersections between them.