of the emancipatory potential of the change in the relationship between public and private life, and how "speaking out" about personal problems, or matters historically deemed to be private, has opened up new discursive spaces in which it is not only the powerful that can have a public voice.107 Rather than signaling moral collapse and cultural decline, the diminution of traditional forms of authority, changing gender relations, and shifts in the private sphere can equally be read as part of broader democratic currents characteristic of the contemporary era. In considering this issue, Anthony Giddens' analysis of late modernity, particularly his theorization of self-identity, intimacy, and processes of democratization, is particularly instructive.
Giddens suggests that while transformations in the personal sphere have generated new dilemmas they have also given rise to new possibilities of intimacy and self-expression. In contrast to readings of moral and social decline, for Giddens, "the transformation of intimacy" has opened up new opportunities for the democratization of the personal order, both in the sexual arena and in family life. As with the work of John Scanzoni, who has labeled changes in the family life as part of a "continuing revolution in personal life" in which women and children have gained greater power, Giddens' work suggests a less pessimistic reading of declining paternal authority.108
In his view: "There is only one story to tell about the family today, and that is of democracy … Democratization in the context of the family implies equality, mutual respect, autonomy, decision-making through communication and freedom from violence. Much the same characteristics also supply a model of parent-child relationships. Parents of course will still claim authority over children, and rightly so; but these will be more negotiated and open than before."109 Giddens' assessment of changes in the family and intimate relations has been questioned as overly optimistic and as failing to recognize the extent to which familial relations remain structured by differing power arrangements.110 Yet Giddens himself does not imply that these changes have resulted in the disappearance of authority altogether. Rather, his work points to the ways in which communication and negotiation have become key aspirations in the conduct of family life.111
Linked to broader sociocultural trends of democratization, transitions in the private sphere have nonetheless generated anxiety. According to Giddens, the modern self "has to be explored and constructed as part of a reflexive process of connecting personal and social change."112 In his analysis, therapy itself is highly bound up with the reflexivity of modernity and self-identity. Again, his interpretation offers a more ambivalent reading of cultural change: "Therapy is not simply a means of coping with novel anxieties, but an expression of the reflexivity of the self—a phenomenon which, on the level of the individual, like the broader institutions of modernity, balances opportunity and potential catastrophe in equal measure."113
Another alternative to overly negative assessments is similarly elaborated in Elliott's work. As with Giddens, he views therapy as deeply connected to late modernity, arguing that "psychological expertise offers reassurance against the insecurities of living."114 Yet there is another important dimension that emerges in Elliott's work, namely his recognition of the imaginary capacity of self-representation and self-construction characteristic of the modern era. Elliott cautiously suggests that the therapeutic may be an emancipatory response to late modernity. As he explains: "In terms of the opening out of the personal sphere, psychoanalytic theory and therapy can be said to offer individuals a radical purchase on the dilemmas of living in the modern epoch."115
In contrast to dominant stories of cultural decline and social regulation, both Elliott and Giddens therefore point to an alternative assessment of the therapeutic turn. While recognizing that the therapeutic can foster narcissism and self-indulgence, Elliott is also open to its promise: "By constructing narratives of the self with which they feel relatively comfortable, the work of therapy ideally leads individuals to a greater emotional openness in the choosing of identities."116 Their readings, moreover, pave the way for a different set of moral and ethical questions to be posed from those associated with the traditional social order. Before turning to this, however, it is important to note that, in developing a more complex account of cultural change, it is necessary to consider the historical factors that give rise to practices of therapy, and indeed to the ascendancy of therapeutic culture more broadly.
Again, Zaretsky is helpful. His analysis of psychoanalysis as a theory and practice of personal life demonstrates that it has both repressive and liberatory aspects.117 Thus for Zaretsky, the legacy of psychoanalysis has been an ambivalent one, connected in very significant ways to the emancipatory projects of the twentieth century—notably the establishment of the welfare state, and the feminist and gay liberation movements of the 1970s. Yet simultaneously psychoanalysis "became a font of antipolitical, antifeminist, and homophobic prejudice."118 He notes that in the areas of autonomy, the emancipation of women, and in personal life, psychoanalysis has produced contradictory effects. In the case of sexuality, "analysis advanced cultural understandings of female sexuality and homosexuality even as it became at times a vicious and effective enemy of feminists and homosexuals."119 Similarly in personal life, he shows how it both undermined traditional authority and gave rise to new forms of control. Zaretsky's delineation of the ambivalent legacy of psychoanalysis holds true for the therapeutic society more broadly, especially in terms of how it has been thoroughly interconnected with shifts in the private sphere.
In many accounts of the therapeutic, such changes are often posited in terms of moral decline, uncertainty, and diminished selfhood. Yet, the transformations in intimate life that took place over the course of the twentieth century may equally be understood in terms of democratization, a process that, furthermore, has generated new kinds of moral and ethical values. Of particular importance here is the work of Jeffrey Weeks, who offers a more optimistic reading of changes in personal life.120 As he argues, while the transformations occurring in the sexual domain and in private life may be "often muddled and confusing, marked by the uncertainty which governs public and private life today … they also contain within them evidence of care, mutuality, responsibility and love which make it possible to be hopeful about our human future."121
In this context then, the weakening of traditional forms of authority, while disturbing to conservative cultural analysts, may be understood differently. Indeed, a more complex picture emerges when the weakening of cultural authority is understood as part of a reconfiguration of the cultural-symbolic logic of gender. This reconfiguration opens up a potentially emancipatory and transformative space for women and other marginalized groups, and indeed also for many men, for whom traditional ideals of manhood are experienced as oppressive.
Therapeutic culture, especially the confessional mode, has brought the personal and the private into the public sphere in distinct ways, and has also been central to the legitimizing of the emotional realm and the speaking of the hitherto unspeakable. Elliott and Lemert's recent work on the role of confessional practices is instructive here. While they paint a somewhat gloomy picture of "the new individualism," the ambivalence that characterizes Elliott's earlier work is evident, as they argue: "Confessional culture, to be sure, can promote a narrowing of the arts of public political life; but it needn't. The public confession of private sentiments can, in fact, work the other way … and involve an opening out of the self to an increasingly interconnected world."122 Yet it is not simply that confessional culture may promote interconnectedness, as important as that may be. For as personal pain has assumed legitimacy in the public domain, greater accountability for and recognition of distress has also emerged. Framing this as a gendered issue, we might say that the increasing legitimacy accorded to psychological and emotional life, as well as the public articulation of personal inadequacy and suffering, has disrupted a set of gendered arrangements governing public life, and challenged a particular kind of hegemonic masculinity.
This masculine ideal, perhaps best exemplified in the film genre of the American Western was, as Connell points out, constructed around a "self-conscious cult of inarticulate masculine heroism."123 Similarly, in the Australian context, masculine ideals traditionally have been predicated
