personal life. Recognition of the salience of the gendered structuring of emotions throws new light on the cultural and personal processes associated with the therapeutic society. The remainder of the chapter presents an outline of the framework I am using as the basis for my account of the rise of the therapeutic in Australia. Beginning with the question of authority, however, it also suggests alternative directions for theorizing that might be fruitfully pursued.
A belief in the necessity of authoritative controls for social order permeates many accounts of the therapeutic, as does a concomitant view of socialization that idealizes the patriarchal family.96 The concern with diminishing authority, apparent in the interpretations of Rieff and Lasch especially, hinges upon on a Freudian model of personality development in which the father—both actual and symbolic—plays a critical role. The internalization of authority through the resolution of the Oedipus complex is regarded as critical to the development of the autonomous individual. The concern with weakening authority, or "the decline of Oedipal Man," as Jessica Benjamin puts it, thus reflects fears that the Oedipus complex "was the fundament for the autonomous, rational individual, and today's unstable families with their less authoritarian fathers no longer foster the Oedipus complex as Freud described it."97
In Freud's account of the Oedipal drama, it is the intervention of the father that breaks the intensity of the mother-child bond and thus makes possible both an individuated personality and social life more broadly. The "problem" of weakening paternal authority—so troubling to both Rieff and Lasch—is premised upon a reading which posits that the internalization of a powerful super-ego is critical to normal development. Yet feminist theorists have forcefully criticized this position. They have drawn on other psychoanalytic traditions, notably object-relations, to question the salience of the Freudian account of infant psychosexual development that underwrites the cultural critique. They have emphasized especially the relative neglect of the role of the mother and of the pre-Oedipal stage.98 This work not only challenges theories of development that privilege patriarchal authority, it also calls into question key assumptions of foundational critiques of the therapeutic, assumptions that are often, perhaps unwittingly, reinscribed in more contemporary accounts.
The main alternative standpoint to the Freudian informed cultural critique of the therapeutic society is that available in the works of Foucault and his followers. Such readings have proved fruitful in understanding its regulatory dimensions and the ways in which therapeutic discourses are implicated in contemporary forms of self-government. Yet, as I have already noted, there are problems too with the implicit model of subjectivity that emerges from Foucauldian theory. The theory of selfhood in Foucault's work, according to McNay, "leads to a conception of the individual as an isolated entity, rather than explaining how the self is constructed in the context of social interaction."99 As Elliott has also argued: "Foucault's obsessively self-mastering individual is intrinsically monadic, closed in on itself and shut off from emotional intimacy and communal bonds."100 His critique of the Foucauldian subject goes further, as he notes that "Foucault nowhere confronts the possibility that self-realization is itself embedded within realms of mutuality, trust, intimacy and affection."101 Examining the underlying assumptions regarding the self that underpin dominant critiques of the therapeutic society renders these readings problematic, but it also suggests a possible way forward.
Following the influential work of Nancy Chodorow, the concept of the relational self provides an alternative basis from which to understand personality development and thus also an alternative standpoint from which to consider the implications of weakening cultural/paternal/traditional authority.102 Jessica Benjamin's critique of the Oedipal repudiation of dependency (on mother/woman) and her appraisal of the ideal of (male) autonomy advanced in her theory of intersubjectivity also illuminates important facets of past theorizing. As Chodorow and Benjamin have both elaborated in theorizing self-other relationships, the Freudian view of development bound up with the ideals of autonomy and separation is a highly masculinist one.
In contrast to the Freudian privileging of the father's authority and the Foucauldian obliteration of connectedness, both Benjamin and Chodorow emphasize the relational dimensions of psychosocial development. In their accounts, it is the balancing of separation and connectedness that is critical, and they show how the dynamics of this process plays out differently for males and females. Whilst the complexities of their accounts of gendered personality development cannot be explored here, it is possible to utilize some basic insights from feminist object-relations theory to challenge the presumed gender-neutral self of Freudian and Foucauldian theory that have buttressed theorization of the therapeutic. A different account of personality development can thus provide the basis for an alternative sociocultural critique, one that includes women, and indeed recognizes gendered social processes more broadly, especially those associated with the division between the public and private spheres.
Though Lasch, for example, mounted his case against advanced capitalism, Eli Zaretsky establishes that capitalism itself gave rise to the particular form of family life premised on the patriarchal family, the very form that Lasch was trying to defend.103 "Defenders of the private sphere" (to borrow Benjamin's term) thus accept not only as inevitable but also as desirable the implicitly gendered dichotomization between a public rationality and a private realm of emotions.104 The major problem with this position is that it does not adequately consider relations of domination and subordination that have been associated with this split, namely women's exclusion—both physically and symbolically—from the public sphere, as well as the unequal and exploitative social relations between men and women, and indeed children, in the home.105 Thus the destabilization of the public/private split, lamented by Lasch and more recently by Furedi, becomes more complex in light of feminist and other social theory that interrogates assumptions about the sanctity of the domestic realm.
For as with the supposedly gender-neutral accounts of personality development which underpin many analyses of the therapeutic, a related set of suppositions about the public and private spheres takes for granted the historical emergence of a gendered division between the private world of home and family and the public world of politics, work, and civil society. As feminist theory has long recognized, the public has historically been constructed as the real world of politics, law, culture, and morality. In opposition, the private has been regarded as the world of sexual relationships, women, children, and virtue.
Zaretsky has shown too that the way in which the public/private dichotomy emerged with industrial capitalism was itself highly gendered. As work moved outside the home and the sexual division of labor became culturally entrenched, "society divided and the family became the realm of 'private life.'"106 Zaretsky provides a lead not only in understanding the gendered division of the public and private, but also in theorizing the relationship between the two spheres as historically shifting. The shift from household production to that of the market economy not only intensified the gendered character of public and private life, it entailed a devaluation of the private and the elevation of the public. The private thus became not only the realm of women and children, but also the site of emotions, which were increasingly excluded from the public sphere. Rationality thus came to characterize the domain of men and public life, as dependency and emotions were devalued and rejected as feminine.
In light of the historical dichotomization of the public and private spheres—in which masculinity was equated with a (public) rationality that suppressed femininity and associated it with (private) emotions—the unleashing of the emotional and the "private" into the public realm represents a decisive shift, one which has not surprisingly aroused significant disquiet. The rise of a therapeutic ethos in public life thus may be read, at least in part, as a feminization of the public sphere, a development that has disrupted the gendered organization of both private and public life. Rather than proceeding, then, from the assumption that the proper place for the expression of emotion and discussion of "private issues" is the domestic realm—critical and historical perspectives problematize the idealization of the public/private split advanced by cultural critics.
What is still largely missing in existing accounts is
