and in doing so, is playing a pivotal role in disrupting the dichotomy between rationality and emotion, split as it has historically been into the two spheres of the public and private, or in terms of subject positions, the masculine and feminine. The extent that the therapeutic is implicated in shifts in the gender order raises important questions that accounts of cultural decline and social regulation have largely failed to consider. As Connell establishes, gender ideologies, identities, and relations are heterogeneous and subject to ongoing transformation and contestation. A key task, then, is to try to ascertain the extent to which the therapeutic is implicated in social and cultural changes that have given rise to a shift towards more equitable gender relations.
Yet there is also another dimension, that of the perceived amorality of the therapeutic society. While casting their arguments in slightly different ways, Rieff, Lasch, and Furedi all regard the therapeutic self as essentially amoral—caught on a treadmill of meaningless self-improvement in an ultimately fruitless quest for subjective wellbeing. Yet such a picture is inevitably only partial. To view therapeutic culture as amoral is to fail to recognize its multidimensionality, taking, for example, the preoccupation with self-gratification, pleasure, and happiness as its only facet. Without dismissing the potential for narcissistic self-absorption, it is important to acknowledge that valuing the self also entails recognition of suffering which has a thoroughly moral dimension. This also raises the question of power, and the ways in which a therapeutic imperative, underpinned by a confessional culture, has made possible challenges to traditional authority—particularly to forms of authority that have been abusive or unjust. From this standpoint, the sanctity of the self in therapeutic culture cannot be understood merely as hedonistic and amoral. For the therapeutic has its own moral logic, one in which the authority of the self can be marshaled to speak against oppression. To the extent that therapeutic culture encourages and legitimizes the claims of damage inflicted upon the individual (often in the private sphere), the argument of amorality becomes a problematic one.
To conclude, it is important to recognize the legitimacy of concerns about the therapeutic in relation to the issues outlined above. However, without resorting to an overly optimistic position, it is possible to challenge excessively pessimistic interpretations by working toward an alternative reading that pays greater heed to the gendered and contradictory dimensions of the therapeutic society. In moving forward, it is important to look carefully at the historical processes that give rise to the contradictions, with an eye both to the potential for social control and hollow individualism—in short, the negative strands—but also to be open to the therapeutic promise: the potential for increasing caring relations and remedying forms of social injustice.
For as well as at times a self-indulgent preoccupation with personal fulfillment, therapeutic culture has facilitated the assertion of individual rights to bodily autonomy, emotional wellbeing, and personal safety. In particular, I suggest that most existing accounts do not adequately grapple with the problem of suffering.125 Reading the therapeutic predominantly in terms of new desires for self-fulfillment and happiness obscures an equally plausible explanation, that it is not about the desire for happiness, but a shifting orientation to suffering. Through the opening up of the private, the legitimizing of the emotional realm, and the speaking of the hitherto unspeakable, therapeutic culture has engendered more complex consequences—particularly for women and other marginalized groups—than dominant accounts have thus far suggested.
In the following chapters, I trace the ascendancy of therapeutic culture in Australia. Beginning in the late nineteenth century in the context of social, cultural, and personal change, the popularization of "nervousness" and changing ideas about mental health reflected growing concerns about the "stresses and strains of modern life." Indeed longstanding social theoretical concerns about the personal consequences of modernity, about opportunity and risk, are evident in medical and popular discourses of that time. Concerns that provided, I argue, the context for the rise of the therapeutic society.
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