closes with an argument for greater recognition of the complex and contradictory dimensions of the therapeutic. In particular, I suggest that recognition of emotional suffering, made possible by the therapeutic turn, has an important part to play in moving towards a more just society. Indeed, I argue that acknowledgement of suffering and struggles for human dignity and social justice constitute central dimensions of the therapeutic project—ones that so far have been largely overlooked. A more complex and indeed ambivalent interpretation of cultural change is called for, one that acknowledges how the privileging of the psychological and emotional dimensions of selfhood has led to the exposure of widespread experiences of suffering, and has challenged a set of gendered arrangements governing both public and private life.
1
The Therapeutic Society & Its Discontents
A cultural revolution does not occur as a discernible event, or as a plurality of events, nor does it occur swiftly within a few years, as does a political revolution; only afterwards, when the revolution itself has been incorporated into the new system of controls, do such mythic condensations of cultural change occur.
—Philip Rieff, 1966
For close to half a century, social scientists and cultural analysts have lamented the increasing influence of psychology, the rise of therapy and counseling, and an associated preoccupation with the self and internal life. From a variety of intellectual traditions and theoretical standpoints, it has been widely argued that the ascendancy of a modern therapeutic ethos has been a pernicious development, inciting cultural decline, a narcissistic concern with the self, and leading to the rise of a so-called victim culture. Philip Rieff's influential reading of the deterioration of social and cultural life is predicated upon an interpretation of the therapeutic as remissive, that is, that it has ushered in an era of unprecedented lack of constraint and a concomitant diminishment of dignified conduct.1 In contrast, analyses emphasizing the capitalist political economy, as well as those following Michel Foucault, advance alternative critiques of psychological knowledge and therapeutic practices as highly bound up with modern forms of social control and regulation.2
This chapter examines social theoretical readings of the therapeutic turn, beginning with Rieff's pioneering analysis of "faith after Freud," which has informed a diversity of standpoints. Christopher Lasch, for example, shared his moral conservatism but added a political critique, arguing that the therapeutic had incited a turn away from politics and social engagement towards a preoccupation with self-improvement and personal fulfillment. James Nolan examined its institutionalization within the apparatus of the modern state, and argued that the therapeutic is deployed as a moralizing discourse that justifies and legitimates the operations of government. More recently Frank Furedi has elaborated concerns about the ascendancy of the emotional realm and the cultivation of vulnerability, situating his analysis of the therapeutic within contemporary debates about the amplification of risk.3
During the four decades between Rieff's seminal treatise and Furedi's contemporary exposition, debate has shifted as the intellectual climate has changed. Rieff's analysis reflected postwar concerns, that of Lasch the cultural and economic transitions of the late 1960s and 1970s, Nolan's the therapeutic authority secured by century's end, while Furedi's account of "therapy culture" reflects the growing cultural influence of therapy and counseling in the contemporary climate of economic, political, and personal uncertainty.
From the Rieffian story of moral collapse to Marxist interpretations of capitalist control, Foucauldian analyses of disciplinary discourses, and feminist objections to therapy, there is widespread consensus that the ascendancy of the therapeutic has been deleterious to sociocultural, political, and personal life. As insightful as these approaches are, a critical analysis suggests that they have nevertheless inadequately theorized the complex and contradictory dimensions of the therapeutic society.4 Drawing on recent directions in social theory, I propose an alternative framework for theorizing by way of a reinterpretation of the changing nexus between internalized cultural authority, the weakening of the division between the public and private spheres, and changes in family life and intimate relationships. These developments, all of which involve gendered social processes, underpin the reflexive culture of late modernity. Attention to them at the conceptual level, and exploration of their historical manifestation in the Australian context, throws light on important dimensions of the therapeutic society, especially those associated both with the struggles of ordinary people in dealing with changing social conditions, and with increased social recognition of forms of emotional suffering which had hitherto largely been hidden. To contextualize these concerns, I turn first to the theoretical accounts that have shaped understandings of the therapeutic over the last several decades.
Moral Collapse
A persistent theme in critiques of the therapeutic society is that its inherent focus on the self and internal life has fostered a pervasive moral collapse. Underpinning this line of analysis is disquiet about the displacement of traditional authority, a concern definitively elaborated in 1966 with the publication of Philip Rieff's seminal text, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, but foreshadowed earlier with his declaration that "the emergence of psychological man" sounded the death knell for Western culture.5 Rather than directing the self toward communal purposes—which for Rieffian sociology is the primary function of culture itself—Rieff identified the driving impulse of the therapeutic as one of interiority.
Locating its gestation in the transition from a premodern social order, the most basic tenet of Rieff's argument is that the therapeutic emerged with changing notions of selfhood that accompanied secularization and liberal individualism. With the old order of the Christian tradition undermined, he interpreted the new organizing symbolic as scientific rather than sacred, governed not by religious authority but by psycho-affective imperatives. By contrast with the moral authority of the Christian era, he argued that the therapeutic had given rise to the birth of a society in which the "self, improved, is the ultimate concern of modern culture."6
Nietzsche, Durkheim, and Freud inform Rieff's pessimistic reading of cultural and personal decline. In his theorizing of the collapse of the sacred and moral orders, diminished authority and lower levels of societal repression signaled for Rieff, "the end of the historical road taken by the Western spirit."7 According to his analysis, the collapse of communal faith and the erosion of religious authority had led to a shift in the balance of what Durkheim referred to as the system of interdicts, or as Rieff put it, "a reorganization of those dialectical expressions of Yes and No the interplay of which constitutes culture."8 The corollary of secularization was, therefore, the emergence of a remissive therapeutic culture in which repression no longer functioned as a powerful mechanism of control and cohesion. He argued: "What is revolutionary in modern culture refers to releases from inherited doctrines of therapeutic deprivation; from a predicate of renunciatory control, enjoying releases from impulse need, our culture has shifted toward a predicate of impulse release, projecting controls unsteadily based upon an infinite variety of wants raised to the status of needs."9
The symbolic controls of the Christian era had, according to Rieff, provided not only the foundational elements of moral authority and social cohesion, but also the structuring principles of the personality. He was thus pessimistic about the implications of the "dissolution of a unitary system of common belief, accompanied, as it must be," he argued, "by a certain disorganization of personality."10 According to his analysis, the subjugation of lower order wants to higher order needs, while constraining, freed the self from base instinctual desires. In the Christian era, this was most evident in the repression of sexuality, the nexus around which much of the Christian doctrine centered. The separation of procreation and sexuality, according to Rieff, served the individual and culture well. Writing in response to the social changes of the 1960s, he was troubled by the liberation of sexuality in the modern era, producing as he saw it, the liberation of the id and consequently the dominance of unruly and disruptive
