a broader approach that integrates an analysis of various dimensions of the therapeutic society with an examination of the institutions of psychotherapy and psychology, Dana Becker engages more directly with debates about the therapeutic itself. Critical of the gender-blind assumptions in cultural analyses like those of Rieff and Lasch, she notes: "American cultural critics, worriedly cautioning their compatriots about a falling away from the values and virtues of a communal past, never suggested that men and women had not experienced that past identically; they never looked beyond the construction of psychological man to ask: 'Who is psychological woman?'"82
"Psychological woman," according to Becker, "is by and large not an activist, nor is her therapist—nor are the media experts that counsel her."83 She has been depoliticized and duped, shaped by the discourses of science and individualism, her problems are constructed as psychological, rather than recognized as social. While therapeutic culture promises her empowerment, it keeps her in her place by reinforcing dominant stereotypical feminine attributes and it offers her only a compensatory form of power. For Becker, the promise that knowledge is power is the straw man of the therapeutic society. She argues that self-knowledge and self-esteem are too readily conflated with ideals of personal empowerment. While the therapeutic promises women control over their lives, she argues that "the repackaging of the psychological as power reproduces what has long been the cultural norm for women: the colonization of both the interior world of the psyche and the small world of intimate relationships."84
That the helping professions—as the institutional embodiment of the therapeutic—are themselves patriarchal is also regarded as problematic. As Becker elaborates: "The story of how psychotherapy emerged as a profession … is a story about how men developed those 'technologies of the self' … and about how those technologies came to be broadly employed and adopted."85 Foucault's influence is evident, but she also draws out more explicitly themes of depoliticization that are more reminiscent of Lasch. Becker thus provides an important feminist reading of the therapeutic society. In bringing women into the analysis, she reveals many limitations of earlier accounts. As a cultural ethos, and in its institutional form through professional practice, the therapeutic is experienced differently by women than it is by men.
In other respects, however, Becker's account does not move substantially beyond the existing framework. For while she questions the masculinist assumptions of theorists like Lasch and suggests, furthermore, that the therapeutic itself may be patriarchal, she nevertheless reaches similar conclusions in her assessment of its disabling effects. While her account provides a welcome complement to cultural analyses that overlook the centrality of gender, the implicit argument that women are duped by therapeutic culture is nevertheless problematic. Without recognition of the myriad ways in which women not only embrace the therapeutic, but also resist it and use it for their own ends, the complex and contradictory dimensions of the therapeutic society remain only partially understood.86
The alignment of therapy and feminism serves as a useful counterpoint to the therapeutic as oppressive argument. During the 1970s there was spirited debate about whether psychology and therapy were part of women's oppression or vehicles of liberation. Consciousness raising became a significant feminist mobilization strategy, offering an avowedly political context for therapeutic interactions. Radical and feminist therapy grew out of these debates, constituting as Cloud notes, "a middle ground between social movement activism and an insular therapeutic practice."87 Rather than replicating unequal social relations, feminist therapy seeks to empower women by establishing an egalitarian relationship between therapist and client. Moreover, it is highly critical of the society in which it is practiced.88
In considering the question of whether psychology has been oppressive or liberating for women, Ellen Herman captures its ambivalent legacy, arguing that "it was neither and it was both." According to Herman: "Feminism's dual identity as a public campaign for formal equality and a cultural revolution in the subjective experience of gender demonstrates very clearly how much the direction of postwar political activism depended upon the hallmarks of psychological expertise during this period: the merging of public and private, the political and the psychological."89 Psychology not only elaborated certain models of feminine subjectivity, but psychological ideas allowed feminism to challenge the patriarchal authority of experts and was also instrumental in the construction of the feminist. As Eva Illouz also notes: "Despite the patriarchal and misogynist views of psychologists … from the start the categories of psychological discourse entertained affinities with feminist thought."90
Following Herman and Illouz, then, trying to determine whether psychology, and indeed the therapeutic society more broadly, have been liberating or oppressive to some extent misses the point. The pressing question is in what ways, how, when, and for whom. Moreover, as feminist analyses have been largely concerned with identifying the therapeutic as an agent of women's oppression—rather than focusing on the larger issue of cultural change—an adequate account of the gendered character of the therapeutic itself, including the shifts in masculinity that it entails, has yet to be elaborated.
Assessing the Therapeutic: Ways Forward
As the foregoing discussion establishes, social theoretical literature of the past half-century provides a wide-ranging analysis of major dimensions of the therapeutic turn. What distinguishes these varying interpretations from those emanating from within the therapeutic itself, exemplified by the promise of the human potential movement and the industry of self-help that it spawned, is a broad consensus that the therapeutic is inimical to sociopolitical, cultural, and personal life. That this dominant narrative is shared by divergent intellectual traditions—from the conservatism of Rieffian cultural sociology to radical feminism, the materialism of neo-Marxism, and Foucauldian analyses of power—suggests that it is a compelling critique. Nevertheless, there remain issues that have yet to be addressed.
The heightened concern with private problems and the ascendancy of a culture of emotionalism have to date been interpreted predominantly in a negative light. Yet much unease about the therapeutic has gendered undertones.91 Moreover, the composite picture that emerges from existing cultural analyses still reflects traditional Freudian notions of authority, and is premised upon an unproblematic reading of the dichotomy of the public and private spheres. Through a preoccupation with attempts to theorize the destabilization of the self, there has, furthermore, been a failure to identify and draw out the implications of changes in the personal realm and shifts in the gender order. In short, there has been little analysis informed by feminist theory and, where it exists, it is limited by conceptualizations of gender relations as male dominance over women.92 As Joan Williams argues, such a model oversimplifies the complexity of gender: "What women face is not a foot on their neck but the trivial minipolitics of everyday life, which are gendered in many institutions in the sense that they operate differently for women than for men."93 For Williams, a more helpful model is to understand gender as a "force field" that that pulls men and women in different ways.
Utilizing a framework of gender as a system of power relations allows for a more complex conceptualization, one that can, in turn, provide the basis for an alternative reading in which therapeutic culture is more positively implicated in the destabilization of a set of traditional gendered arrangements governing public and private life. Raewyn Connell's account of gender as a social structure, a historically shifting system of power relations is particularly instructive.94 Both Williams' notion of gender as a "force field" and Connell's conceptualization of the "gender order"—which describes the gendered patterns of social relationships—provide a way of moving beyond categories of men and women which obscure differences among men and between women.
Underpinning the analysis that I develop in subsequent chapters is the rudiment of an alternative framework from which to consider the implications of the rise of the therapeutic society.95 The major theoretical strands in my analysis concern: the significance of cultural authority, power, and agency; the shifting relationship between the public and private spheres;
