the self.
For Rieff, the shift toward a culture of impulse release offers only an illusory freedom in that it leads to the collapse of public life, community, social responsibility, and ultimately the self. In view of his lack of interest in the experience of those marginalized by the dominant cultural order, it is unsurprising that he is cynical about the diminution of repression. His concern, rather, is that in a secular, remissive, and therapeutic culture, faith and reverence no longer function to direct individuals toward communal purpose. As he articulated the distinction as it played out in the formation of character: "Religious man was born to be saved; psychological man is born to be pleased. The difference was established long ago, when 'I believe,' the cry of the ascetic, lost precedence to 'one feels,' the caveat of the therapeutic."11
In Rieff 's analysis, the displacement of a religious framework by a psychological worldview has resulted in diminished levels of repression that threaten the viability of both culture and the self. His preoccupation with a sacred order as essential to maintaining communal purpose reflects his debt to both Durkheim and Nietzsche. However, it is the Freudian view of the crucial role played by a strong cultural super-ego in containing the id—both at the individual and collective level—which underpins his interpretation of the threat to the moral demand system that the therapeutic ethos entails. Fundamental to his analysis is the assumption that the private domain of intimate and familial relations cannot form the basis of a moral order, which must be universal and abstract. In taking for granted the differing values of public and private life as established in Western political thought, Rieff's analysis privileges the cultural over the social.12
While clearly influenced by Rieff's cultural analysis, the social forms the cornerstone of James Nolan's examination of the institutionalization of the therapeutic within the political order of late twentieth century America.13 Nolan argues that the therapeutic ethos must be understood not only in cultural symbolic terms, but also in terms of how it shapes the social landscape and the terrain of public policy. In the criminal justice system, in education, and especially in welfare, Nolan sees the therapeutic ethos as a means by which the state, facing diminishing public confidence and with weakened authority, deploys a legitimizing discourse of morality. Nolan follows Rieff in predicating his analysis on the erosion of traditional codes of moral understanding, but he draws on other theoretical traditions, notably Weber's notion of legitimation, to argue that psychological and therapeutic discourses have become a key way in which the modern state secures legitimacy.
For Nolan, a defining feature of the therapeutic state is the centrality of emotions in social and political life. Indeed, he argues that an "emotivist ethic" has supplanted traditional morality and become the touchstone for modern understandings of self and world. In such a "psychologically defined moral universe," psychologists and therapists have a particularly important role in defining reality, behavior is increasingly understood in pathological terms, and there has been a concomitant rise in a mentality of victimhood.14 Implicit in his analysis is a view of the moral barrenness of the therapeutic and he speculates on the ramifications, for both society and the self, of the state taking on the role of the therapist. In a somewhat gloomy prognosis, Nolan suggests that "Weber's modern iron cage may become the postmodern padded cage."15
In another reading concerned with the moral implications of the therapeutic, John Carroll speculates on the viability of the emerging remissive culture and its effect on personality.16 One of his primary concerns is that with the decline of authority, "guilt is read as a psychological and not a moral problem. It is to be eradicated by therapy." In his view: "The force within the individual that enforces morality is interpreted as psychological, deriving from the parental environment. The ethical domain is merely a helpful mask, to be delicately stripped away by the analyst once it becomes troublesome."17 Once again, as with Rieff, the psychological and the ethical—the personal and the public—are dichotomized, and it is the latter that is more highly valued. With the decline of religious authority and the ascendancy of the therapeutic, psychological experts—"secular priests" as Maurice North called them—are seen as having taken over the function of the spiritual guide.18 In contrast to the clergy who enforced the moral order, the therapeutic professional is regarded as an advocate of the id rather than an embodiment of the cultural super-ego.
Carroll's characterization casts the analyst's role as the facilitation of subjective wellbeing through the eradication of guilt. The role of the counselor or psychotherapist is therefore to bolster self-sufficiency by banishing the dread, guilt, and anxiety that become manifest in the individual when traditional authority has been supplanted by a preoccupation with the self. As Michael Casey puts it: "Authority, after all, is the foundational problem of therapy, the problem therapy was created to solve."19 As the pacesetters of change, Rieff himself argued that therapists have played a crucial role in the decline of Western culture. He interpreted the "psychologizers" as a pseudo authority, a face that is "all mask and makeup" rather than carrying legitimate moral weight.20
The psychological expert is similarly critiqued by Martin Gross, who following Rieff argued that: "The contemporary Psychological Society is the most vulnerable culture in history. Its citizen is a new model of Western man, one who is dependent on others for guidance as to what is real or false. In the unsure state of his mind, he is even doubtful of the authenticity of his own emotions. As the Protestant ethic has weakened in Western society, the confused citizen has turned to the only alternative he knows: the psychological expert who claims there is a new scientific standard of behavior to replace fading tradition."21 Though sharing the concerns of Rieff and Carroll about cultural and personal decline, the analysis Gross develops is primarily driven by a critique of psychological knowledge itself and the professions constructed upon it. The problem of moral authority as held by the therapist rather than the clergy nevertheless figures prominently, with Gross suggesting that psychiatrists and psychotherapists have become the new seers. Not only have they power to define normality, but according to Gross, they are also the new keepers of the sacred order: "By offering the seeming structure of science wedded to mystical insight, the psychological and psychiatric seer successfully masquerades as a modern oracle."22
A similar theme of moral indignation about the role of the helping professions emerges in Christopher Lasch's analysis of the modern therapist as principally charged with consoling the discontents of the modern age.23 For Lasch, the reliance on psychological expertise forms part of a wider set of influences—including schools, peer groups, and the mass media—that undermine parental (but notably paternal) authority. Lasch's overarching concern with the decline of cultural authority, and in particular his anxiety about the absent father, shares something of the conservatism of the Rieffian tradition, especially in relation to the shaping of personality. Reflecting the more Marxist inspired critical reading of the Frankfurt School, however, his concern about the implications of a weakened super-ego is couched in terms of the impact of capitalism on working life and familial relations. I will return to Lasch's sociopolitical critique below and conclude the present discussion of his work by noting his formulation of the "psychic repercussions" of cultural change.
While Rieff articulated the consequences of declining authority in Durkheimian terms of the shifting balance of interdicts and remissions, Lasch elaborates this theme in his theory of cultural narcissism. Rejecting the association of narcissism with selfishness, he sees the "narcissistic personality of our time" as a self under threat of disintegration, an empty self that adopts behaviors that may at the surface appear to be selfish, but in reality are indicative of the self struggling to survive against a barrage of forces that threaten psychic annihilation.24
As with Rieff's anxiety about the disorganization of the personality and Lasch's alarm at the rise of narcissism, there has been widespread concern that the ascendancy of the therapeutic has not only involved cultural impoverishment, but also personal decline. Extending earlier analyses, and drawing on Nolan's delineation of the emotivist ethic and escalating claims of victimization in the contemporary era, Furedi argues that the therapeutic ethos fosters a pervasive emotional vulnerability. Indeed he contends
