form and I extend my thanks to the editors and publishers for allowing me to republish revised versions of the following: "Theorizing Therapeutic Culture: Past Influences, Future Directions," Journal of Sociology 44 no. 4 (2008): 321-336; "Engendering a Therapeutic Ethos: Modernity, Masculinity & Nervousness," Journal of Historical Sociology 22 no. 1 (2009): 84-107; and 'Therapy Culture' in Reflected Light: La Trobe Essays, edited by Peter Beilharz and Robert Manne, 302-312 (Black Inc: Melbourne, 2006).
I am grateful for permission to reproduce the artwork appearing on the cover: "Street Scene" by Charles Blackman, 1960, oil on masonite. Collection: Art Gallery of Ballarat, The William, Rene and Blair Ritchie Collection. Bequest of Blair Ritchie, 1998.
I am also grateful to those copyright holders who have given permission to reproduce images used in the text. While every effort has been made to trace and contact copyright holders for all of the illustrations used in this volume, it has not been possible to determine copyright in all cases. For any omissions I apologize to those concerned.
This book is dedicated to my children Jake, Molly, and Brigid, whose good humor, encouragement, and patience kept me going, and to my husband Sean, who has lived with this project for as long as I have, and whose friendship, support, and scholarly insight made its completion possible.
Abbreviations
AAAS: Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science
AAPP: Australasian Association of Psychology and Philosophy
ABC: Australian Broadcasting Commission
ACER: Australian Council for Educational Research
ADHD: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder
AFL: Australian Football League
AIIP: Australian Institute of Industrial Psychology
AJPP: Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy
ALP: Australian Labor Party
APS: Australian Psychological Society
BPS: British Psychological Society
CBT: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
NRL: National Rugby League
MJA: Medical Journal of Australia
Introduction
Like the citizens of many other Western societies, Australians are fascinated with emotional and psychological life. Popular culture and social policy alike reflect a widely held belief that talk is therapeutic and that speaking about problems helps to resolve them. Character traits and behaviors are routinely evaluated through a psychological lens: we talk of people being in denial, repressed, and having anger management issues. We indulge in retail therapy to lift our mood, engage life coaches to help us succeed, and consult therapists for mental health problems, relationship difficulties, and personal tribulations. In times of disaster, trauma counselors are dispatched along with emergency service personnel. Helplines and support groups assist people in crisis, while psychiatry, clinical psychology, and a range of other therapeutic interventions are funded by the state. From concerns about rising rates of depression and ADHD, to celebrity confessions, misery memoirs, and footballers talking about their feelings, social and cultural life in Australia is marked by a concern with psychological wellbeing. As in the United States, Britain, and elsewhere, the therapeutic has clearly triumphed.
The privileging of psychological discourses and the prominence of counseling as a remedial life strategy are emblematic manifestations of the therapeutic society. Yet the therapeutic extends more widely than concerns with psychological selfhood and the individual in therapy. It encompasses a multifaceted spectrum of discourses, social practices, and cultural artifacts that discursively and institutionally pervade social and cultural life. It takes a clinical form in which individuals either voluntarily seek—or are coerced into seeking—assistance from psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, and counselors. Culturally, it finds expression in the spread of psychological ideas and therapeutic motifs in popular culture, as well as through discourses and practices that have been normalized through the institutional fabric of organizations.1
Through an analysis of its emergence in Australia, this book examines the rise of the therapeutic society and explores its legacy for sociocultural, political, and personal life in the globalized West. The historical shifts considered in the pages that follow reflect widespread changes that have taken place throughout Western societies. The book, therefore, not only throws light on Australian developments. It also provides the basis for theorizing the therapeutic more generally, and for examining questions of broader significance: What does it mean to live the good life in an age of therapy? Have ideals of reticence and self-reliance been dethroned by a culture of emotional expressiveness and help seeking? And has the rise of the therapeutic society ushered in a more compassionate and caring era, or have we simply become fixated with self-esteem and hooked on feeling good?
The book brings together historical research, social theory, and phenomenological accounts of therapy to offer an alternative perspective on the therapeutic turn, one that challenges orthodox accounts and raises new questions about gender, suffering, and struggles for dignity and justice. A principal aim of the book is to illuminate and historicize the therapeutic society through an examination of key institutional sites and cultural carriers that fostered its emergence. It seeks to elucidate the processes whereby over the course of the twentieth century, Australia's public and political spheres, no less than intimate and private life, were transformed along therapeutic lines. Put another way, how it was that by century's end, the renowned "she'll be right" attitude had given way to an unreservedly therapeutic sensibility, with psychologists and psychiatrists in Australia comprising almost twice the per capita rate of the United States—a country often assumed to be the vanguard of "therapy culture" in the West.2
While it may appear self-evident that a sociocultural phenomenon as multifaceted as the therapeutic will have wide ranging consequences, its apparently inexorable rise has aroused significant disquiet amongst social analysts and cultural commentators. According to the prevailing view, vulnerability characterizes contemporary selfhood and victimhood confers privileged status to those who claim it. Confession and depression are regarded as symptoms of a sick society in which consolation has replaced political change and transcendental meaning has given way to self-improvement. Twenty-first century faith at best refers to the feel good revivalism of evangelical religion, but more often a belief in the power of therapeutics or pharmaceuticals. With meaning pursued on the therapist's couch, or through the banality of reality television, hollow chit-chat, self-help books, and endless rumination, modern society and selfhood are regarded by many as being in a state of steady decline.
The rise of the therapeutic has thus been widely regarded as an insidious development. The gloomy prognosis of cultural and personal decline delineated by Philip Rieff four decades ago both demarcated the terrain and set the tone of things to come. Christopher Lasch famously identified a "culture of narcissism," while more recently Frank Furedi bemoaned the pervasive emotionalism of "therapy culture."3 Following Lasch, accounts of social control feature prominently alongside narratives of cultural decline. Feminist critiques of both therapy and the therapeutic society, for example, implicate psychological knowledge and therapeutic authority in the social control of women.4 Though a more ambivalent reading is refracted through a Foucauldian lens, in the final analysis the therapeutic is largely reduced to a beguiling apparatus of subjection, with "psy" knowledges underwriting the government of subjectivity and social life in advanced liberal democracies.5
Social theoretical critiques of the therapeutic society
