of those involved varied, they were "united in seeing the scientific image of psychiatry as a smokescreen; the real questions were: whose side is the psychiatrist on, what kind of society does he serve, and do we want it?"54 In a similarly critical view of the clinical practice of therapy under advanced capitalism, James Hillman and Michael Ventura assert that: "If therapy imagines its task to be that of helping people cope (and not protest), to adapt (and not rebel), to normalize their oddity, and to accept themselves 'and work within your situation; make it work for you' (rather than refuse the unacceptable), then therapy is collaborating with what the state wants: docile plebs. Coping simply equals compliance."55 Hillman and Ventura argue that therapy constructs social problems as individual ones and in so doing displaces deficits of the body politic. They suggest that unless the institution of therapy can recognize the ways in which social problems are manifest in the individual patient, social change is thwarted and therapists are in effect colluding with the state to stifle dissent by assisting people to cope and function within oppressive social and political systems.
Governing & Constituting the Modern Self
While sharing concerns of political economy critics about social regulation, interpretations of the therapeutic society informed by the work of Michel Foucault have focused on the role of psychological discourses in the constitution of the modern self, and in the operation of modern systems of power.56 Foucault's writings on madness, medicine, and psychology, and his theorization of governmentality and subjectification, have thus provided an intellectual and methodological alternative for understanding the significance of the therapeutic turn. In particular, his analysis of the historical significance of the development of the human sciences and his delineation of modes of internalized self-government through "technologies of the self" have been widely influential, especially in reading psychology and psychiatry as disciplinary discourses aimed at shaping particular forms of conduct.57
In his genealogies of the modern self, Foucault traced the ways in which the invention of new knowledges of the human subject enabled new forms of authority to be exercised over the conduct of citizens. A central tenet of his conceptualization of power and subjectivity is that under liberalism, social control and individual freedom became inextricably intertwined. Consequently, social regulation came to work not in opposition to individual autonomy, but indeed through people's capacity to choose and to act.
While Jacques Donzelot, for example, shared with Lasch a concern about the intrusion of experts into private life, he followed Foucault in arguing that new forms of knowledge about the individual subject were instrumental to the changing means by which populations were governed.58 Taking the family as the site of analysis, Donzelot charted the ways in which government of the family gave way to government through the family. He argued that during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, state patriarchy effectively displaced the paternal authority embodied in the male head of the family. A critical way in which this was achieved was through the alliance that developed between women (mothers) and the moralizing agents of the state; that is, the family welfare professionals—first doctors and philanthropists, and later psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers. While not sharing Lasch's psychoanalytic standpoint, he was nevertheless similarly concerned about the consequences of diminishing paternal authority. For as the state secured control over the family, the mother gained greater control within the household, but the father's position was increasingly undermined.
The authority of professional expertise, buttressed by knowledges of the human sciences, formed a cornerstone of Donzelot's critique. In his analysis, such expertise functions directly through clinical encounters, professional advice, and so on, but also indirectly, through the "regulation of images"—for example, of motherhood and fatherhood—which produced new norms of conduct in relation to family life. He was particularly concerned about the implications of the colonization of private life for families occupying the lower social strata. The state and the helping professions, in Donzelot's view, formed a "tutelary complex" directed toward the socialization of working class families, a process resulting in families being "stripped of all effective rights and brought into a relation of dependence vis-à-vis welfare and educative agents."59 By contrast, bourgeois families who willingly seized on new educative, medical, and relational norms were able to exercise greater control over their relationships with social welfare professionals. Nevertheless, for both working and middle-class families, the "protective liberation" of children, in Donzelot's view, amounted to new forms of "supervised freedom" and resulted in diminished autonomy of the family.
Extending the scope of investigation beyond the family to links between political power, expertise, and the self more broadly, Nikolas Rose has built on Foucault's intellectual project in his analyses of "psy" as an apparatus of truth, power, and subjectification. For Rose, psy encapsulates the various "ways of thinking and acting" which have been brought into existence by psychology, psychiatry, and their cognate disciplines.60 As he argues: "The dependence of government upon knowledge … enables us to appreciate the role that psychology, psychiatry, and the other 'psy' sciences have played within the systems of power in which human subjects have become caught up. The conceptual systems devised within the 'human' sciences, the languages of analysis and explanation that they invented, the ways of speaking about human conduct that they constituted, have provided the means whereby human subjectivity and intersubjectivity could enter the calculations of the authorities."61
Rose underscores the centrality of psy knowledges and psy professionals in the government of subjectivity in the current era. In his account, there are essentially two means by which psychological "knowledge and know how" is disseminated. The first is via the organizational practices of those involved in the helping professions, for example in social work and nursing, but also more broadly through the work of those charged with authority over others, like teachers and managers. The second route operates through what he refers to as "psychotherapies of normality"—that is, ways of relating to oneself and others, including the development of techniques for dealing with problems, planning for the future, and devising ways of achieving happiness. For Rose, the interpretation of experience through a psychological or psychodynamic lens underwrites the vast array of therapeutic technologies, including "self-inspection, self-problematization, self-monitoring and self-transformation."62 With the rise of psychological knowledges and the diffusion of psychotherapeutic techniques, Rose argues that "a new culture of the self has taken shape. Confession has moved beyond the consulting room" and everyday life has become subject to a kind of "clinical reason."63
This so-called clinical reason is evident not only in processes of self-analysis and the analysis of others, but the concomitant role of talk in the therapeutic society. Foucault's genealogy of confession is useful here. He traced the history of confessional practices, particularly those associated with sexual prohibition, from the religious realm—where confession was associated with renunciation—to the medical arena where "the obtaining of the confession and its effects were recodified as therapeutic operations."64 For Foucault, confession is a "technology of the self," a means by which the self is constituted. In the Christian tradition, such verbalization was linked to renunciation of sin; however, with the influence of the human sciences, Foucault argues that verbalization became important in its own right: "From the eighteenth century to the present, the techniques of verbalization have been reinserted in a different context by the so-called human sciences in order to use them without renunciation of the self but to constitute, positively, a new self. To use these techniques without renouncing oneself constitutes a decisive break."65
As through confession, constituting the self "positively" in the therapeutic society is also enacted through consumption. Rose connects what he terms technologies of consumption with psychological technologies, arguing that the two are interlinked; consumption is stimulated through advertising and market research which utilizes psychological knowledge and techniques, while psychological expertise is itself disseminated by means of therapies and products to be consumed.
Other influential Foucauldian-inflected accounts have focused more
