Obstacles for normatively grounded critique

It’s not hard to see why sociologists have been challenged by the task of spelling out the costs of what Christopher Lasch described as the rise in the post-Second World War period of a ‘psychiatric imperialism’ that seemed to be determined to minister ‘to all of society as the patient’ (1977, p. 98). This undertaking offered itself as a benign, caring response to the damaging failures of harsh liberal ideologies that had sheeted all ethical responsibility for the well-constructed life home to the autonomous subject. Liberal divisions between private and public life had seemed to depend on the self-confidence and resourcefulness of ethically independent personalities. However, this faith in personal resources was badly shaken by economic upheavals and the trauma of world war and further undermined by the bureaucratization of social and cultural life in the post-war years. In this context, therapy culture, which offered to draw up neglected dimensions of the self and creatively connect these with a reforming social agenda, seemed a welcome revival of the narrative of a powerful self. Private freedoms now seemed to be about teachable ‘life skills’. With this break out of a therapeutic reconstruction of private life came the first round of its critical reception.

Originally published in 1966, Phillip Rieff's The Triumph of the Therapeutic articulated the main themes of the early critiques. Rieff despised the ‘narcissistic’ preoccupations of a culture of complaint that championed ‘the instinctual Everyman twisting his neck uncomfortably in the starched collar of culture’ (1996, p. 8). As he saw it, a therapeutic regime that promoted the appetites over a supposedly repressive ego would actually only deliver the self up to an infinitely manipulable quest for well-being (p. 13). Rieff reminded us that individual life is ‘a delicate personal achievement’ and he insisted that a discriminating ego must play a central part (p. 50). Rieff, and after him Lasch, wanted to reinvest the ego with the task of crafting a life that reflected chosen, individual priorities. They saw this as a rear guard action in defence of a reasoning ego that was under attack from a culture tuned into the dreamy narcissism of an instinctual self.

The tenor of this early critique of a scripted, one-sided surrender to the release of a ‘true self has since reappeared as a critique of ‘the authenticity hoax’ (Potter, 2010) and as diagnosis of the techniques deployed by ‘brand-culture’ (Banet-Weisser, 2012). There is a shift in this new ironic diagnosis of the marketing of markers of authenticity. This later diagnosis of a self-contradictory jargon of the authentic slides away from the earlier critical ambition to tally the cultural costs against the neglected ideal of rationally controlled ego. However, it turned out that therapy culture would not be easily convicted on the grounds of sacrificed cultural goods. With no fixed allegiance to any one-dimensional set of ambitions,

it could make itself readily available to building the rational chooser as well as supporting the authentic self-discoverer.

Today we are familiar with a therapeutic regime that wants to cure us of ‘anything in the psyche that escapes or subverts our rational control' (Illouz, 1997, p. 293). Even happiness turns out to be a rational choice that abundantly repays the effort that is required (Ehrenreich, 2009; Binkley, 2011). For a new generation of critics, then, the ideal of the rational self-chooser could not, as Rieff and Lasch supposed, be the grounds upon which we measure the cultural losses of a therapy regime. Therapy culture has now also installed itself as champion to the rationally self-fashioned life. Later on I want to expose therapy culture as the vessel for a determinate set of interests that imposes particular limited interpretations on the value ideals that it appropriates. For now I consider the way in which shifting descriptions of the ends taken up by a triumphant therapeutic culture has seemed to pull the normative rug from under main critical strategies.

Rieff backed the arbitrating capacity of the rational ego to interrupt the seductions of a therapy industry that had been dedicated to a lazy self-preoccupation. However, some years later, Michel Foucault (2006) described therapeutic culture as a generalized set of techniques aimed at the production of a rationally selfdirecting individuality. To grasp what this switch in its objectives meant, we need to appreciate the reshaping of therapy culture in accordance with a new sense of its cultural importance. Early on, therapeutic culture had positioned itself as support to a Romantic ‘stand in' for a lost confidence in a liberal belief in the spontaneous powers of the private individual. As a liberal reliance on private freedom as a ‘ready made region that has to be respected’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 65) came under pressure from inhibiting social conditions, efforts were made to redescribe the spontaneous resources available to a self-realizing individuality. This redescription of freedom as a state of being seemed set to rescue the ideal from the demands of a rational, self-directed life. However, this attempt to reconfigure the ready-madeness of private freedom turned out to be a challenge to the ideal as well. The attempt to manufacture typologies for the ‘instinctual Everyman’ only underlined that there could be no redemption for the idea of already constituted private freedoms. Therapy culture emerged, then, as an enthusiastic advocate of the post-liberal conviction that freedom ‘is something that has to be constantly produced’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 65). Therapy culture might now make itself available to any of the struggling cultural aspirations delivered to it.

Main themes in Nikolas Rose’s 1990 study Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self drew attention to changed objectives of a maturing therapy culture. Far from chastising its seeming neglect of the rational, arbitrating ego, Rose describes therapy culture as a regime that uses the techniques of a consumersociety to distribute the ideal of the rational, self-choosing individual. A therapeutic culture is now charged to reconstruct confidence in competencies that had been assigned to the ego. Rose tells us that to ‘[s]elves unable to operate the imperative of choice’ therapy culture offers to ‘restore the status of the choosing individual’ (1990, p. 228). Early on he evidently regarded this promise with some suspicion. In the therapeutic regime.

[e]very aspect of life, like every commodity, is imbued with a self-referential meaning: every choice we make is an emblem of our identity, a mark of our individuality, each is a message to ourselves and others as to the sort of person we are, each casts a glow back, illuminating the self of the he or she who consumes.

(Rose, 1990, p. 227)

Sometime later, Illouz posted a critical response to the ‘banality’ of therapy culture’s offer to provide a ‘cognitive and emotional “tool kit’” that is supposed to help ‘disorganized selves manage the conduct of their lives in contemporary polities’ (2008, p. 241). She is particularly struck by the flattening of ‘our emotional imagination and experience’ that is required by the advice industry.

The theme of cultural losses that is evoked here seems to call for an explicit account of the sacrifices that are involved. However, as already indicated, therapy culture will not let itself be easily convicted. The ‘tool kit’ is able to offer itself as a support to any type of existential needs that are handed to it and so seems to disarm charges that it has neglected important cultural potentials. Rieff underlines the supposedly open-ended responsiveness of a triumphant therapeutic. Therapy, he tells us, ‘is no attempt to enforce conformity but apparently part of a profoundly emancipatory project of learning to be a self (1996, p. 238). Declining the role of ambassador to any particular world view, therapy culture constantly renews its relevance by its offer to code the contents of our own longings for emancipation. It is, we have seen, equally at the service of hopes for self-realizing authenticity and to aspirations for a self-choosing reason.

It is not just its capacity to embrace different objectives that has troubled the search to justify a critique of therapy culture. Criticism has also been robbed of a certain type of normative foundation by the part therapy culture has played in ousting a liberal appeal to the ready-made character of private freedoms. Now that this naturalizing liberal conviction has lost cultural traction, we tend to be unmoved by critiques that focus on the distortion of a pre-existing self by therapy culture’s imposed ideals. Therapy’s offer of a bundle of life skills appears only as one mode of the ‘limitations, controls, forms of coercion' (Foucault, 2008, p. 65) that are called upon in the construction of our self-understandings. We cannot, it seems, easily convict therapeutic culture for the repressive artificiality of programs designed to help us ‘learn to be a self. Taking up therapy culture’s offer to break out of liberalism’s naturalizing straitjacket, Rose is finally reconciled to the triumph of the therapeutic. Governing the Soul ends up denouncing the ‘paranoid’ attitude of some social theorists who are supposedly blind to ‘the central feature of these new apparatuses and techniques’; namely to the ‘pluralization of the agencies and mechanisms of regulation of the internal worlds of institutions, families and individuals' (Rose, 1990, p. 257). This accommodation acknowledges no distortions or cultural sacrifices. The reality, we are told, is that modern selves have come to live the project of modern freedom ‘in terms of identity, and to search for the means to enhance that autonomy through the application of expertise’ (p. 258).

Others remain unforgiving. Furedi insists that, due to its dependence on ’the fatalistic premise of the vulnerable self, therapy culture has produced a ‘passive sense of the self in which ‘the experimenting and transformative role of the individual is all but extinguished’ (2004, p. 204). And Stjepan G. Mestrovic describes a ‘postemotional society’ as a ‘new phase of development in which synthetic, quasi emotions become the basis for a widespread manipulation' (1997, p. xi). Such observations seem to again challenge the critics to tell us about the cultural goods that are supposedly denied or distorted. However, this requirement is not always followed up. Mestrovic, for instance, asserts that the task of describing ‘escape roots’ from therapeutic manipulations is not essential to a critical investigation (pp. xv-xvi).