The Psychologization of Society

On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway

Ole Jacob Madsen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351118323
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Psychologization of Society explores the manner in which psychology has increasingly crept into everyday life, with nature reduced to a source of mental health, the belief in God motivated by health not salvation, sin and evil turned into psychiatric diagnosis and the market economy being primarily driven by psychology. Showing that Norway, like the United States and Great Britain, is currently subjected to a psychological worldview or "therapeutic ethos," Madsen examines an array of spheres such as media, law, religion, self-help literature and cosmetic surgery to shed light on the ways in which the therapeutic ethos, rather than simply "triumphing" over them, actually blends in with regional norms and values. A study of the psychological imprint on Western countries as a form of the global democratisation of psychologised self-care, this book explores the boundless struggle to be the "best version of yourself" in contemporary neoliberal culture. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, psychology and cultural and media studies with interests in therapeutic discourses and paradoxes of health.

1 Introduction

Half a century ago the late sociologist Peter Berger perceptively remarked that “Psychoanalysis has become a part of the American scene” in one the earliest works on the cultural influence of psychoanalysis, which Berger (1965, p. 27) defined as “a way of understanding the nature of man and an ordering of human experience on the basis of this understanding.” Today, psychology in all its dimensions has become a part of the world scene, with few geographical regions and societal spheres left untouched by its influence. What are the consequences of this omnipotent therapeutic worldview?

This book is concerned with the psychologization and cultural influence of psychology in late modern Western society, mainly through Scandinavia and Norway in particular. I have chosen to investigate the larger societal and historical effects of contemporary psychology through the critical body of work commonly referred to under the notions “the triumph of the therapeutic” (Rieff, 1987), “the therapeutic ethos” (Nolan, 1998), and “the therapeutic culture” (Illouz, 2008). A simple working definition of “the therapeutic” could be a psychological way of thinking and talking about ourselves and the world. The therapeutic ethos has previously been postulated as an instance of the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci’s notion of “cultural hegemony” (Lears, 1983). Gramsci (1971, p. 323) has been credited with advancing the Marxist notions of ideology from a system of beliefs reflecting certain economical class interests toward a more complex set of values, norms, perceptions, beliefs, sentiments, and prejudices:

The “spontaneous philosophy” which is proper to everybody. This philosophy is contained in: 1. language itself, which is a totality of determined notions and concepts and not just of words grammatically devoid of content; 2. “common sense” and “good sense”; 3. popular religion, and therefore, also in the entire system of beliefs, superstitions, opinions, ways of seeing things and of acting, which are collectively bundled together under the name of “folklore.”

Moreover, contemporary scholars on the therapeutic culture have been unequivocal in wrestling the documentation about psychology’s growing influence away from prefixed one-dimensional ideas of ideological suppression, instead maintaining that psychology has in fact been constitutive of a meaning-system rendering the modern subject free and autonomous in his or her choices (Illouz, 2008; Rose, 1999). Yet, with all systems of meaning there are antagonisms and contradictions within that require close attention and critical examination. Sometimes the less powerful may be unwitting accomplices in the maintenance of existing inequalities through the cultural hegemony and symbolic universe they create from this for themselves in order to make life understandable and tolerable (Lears, 1985). Furthermore, Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony is open and flexible enough to allow the creation of counter-hegemonies as a living option, but since the therapeutic ethos is at heart a self-referential source of authority there is uncertainty as to the openness of the therapeutic cultural hegemony and long-term effects it has on the utopian imagination (see Jameson, 2004). This basic ambiguity of promise and threat being distinct from the therapeutic is perhaps part of its attraction and a possible explanation for the extended tradition of writing about the larger societal consequences of psychology’s growing influence in Western society throughout its 138-year-old history as an independent academic discipline and clinical profession, especially as it is situated in the latter half of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Despite the fact that books on the therapeutic keep on coming, the leading cultural sociologist Eva Illouz (2008) nonetheless underscores that even if all the scholars agree on psychology’s global influence we do not know much about how and why the therapeutic has triumphed. Hence, there is still much work to be done.

Historical and theoretical background

This study builds conceptually on the growing scholarly research tradition surrounding “the therapeutic.” The single work that is most commonly credited with originating this tradition is American sociologist Philip Rieff’s The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud, which was first published in 1966 (Loss, 2002; Wright, 2008). The opening of Rieff’s introductory chapter “Towards a Theory of Culture” recites W. B. Yeats’ renowned poem “The Second Coming,” which vibrantly depicts the twentieth century, and has been interpreted as a forewarning of something new that will come to succeed Christianity, just as Christ once transformed the world upon his appearance. It is fairly apparent that Rieff thinks that the old Christian culture is on its deathbed (if not already lost) and is about to be replaced by the therapeutic culture. The famous line from Yeats’ poem: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity” also appears to capture Rieff’s lukewarm feelings for the growing influence of psychology in the Western world. In Chapter 4 I delve further into contemporary Christianity and the therapeutic turn by relating it the Protestant Church of Norway and its latest amendments in order to stay relevant for the late modern soul-seekers of today.

Religion aside, why was Rieff so concerned with the rise of the therapeutic? The problem with the purported “therapeutic culture” is that in Rieff’s (1987, p. 4) mind it actually fails to fulfill the most important task culture traditionally has served throughout the history of man: “Culture is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” In contrast, the “psychologizers” seek to pit “human nature against social order” through their individualistic conceptions of the self, which in Rieff’s (1987, p. 3) view turns things on its head since well-being now becomes the end, rather than a by-product of the striving toward a superior communal end. The therapeutic is a breach away from the traditional configuration of Western culture with its transcendental vertical authority, and the human condition is now tragically cast into a horizontal weightless state of cultural decline in which the old morals are no longer self-evident without a powerful and compelling system of culture (Rieff, 1987). Hence, the whole of modern culture tries to establish a totally new weltanschauung without reference to a transcendental order of existence. According to Rieff (2006, p. 13) this is fatal, as put forward in his seminal warning of a coming catastrophe: “No culture has ever preserved itself where it is not a registration of sacred order.”

There is no denying that analytical lucidity is not one of Rieff’s strong suits. The relative small amount of secondary literature available on him emphasizes his artistic language style and depicts his work as “very inaccessible” (Zondervan, 2005, p. 140). However, since Rieff was well acquainted with Freud, having written a dissertation on him (Rieff, 1979), I believe Rieff is a historically important figure because he was a visionary in his approach to Freud as a theorist and not as a therapist by assessing the political and moral long-term effects of the cultural movement and emergence of “psychological man” that Freud inadvertently helped to set in motion; a fate not unlike contemporary psychology itself.

Despite Rieff’s habitually prophetic and esoteric writings (reminiscent of philosophers such as Nietzsche and Bataille), he became an influential critic of the therapeutic and inspired several later works in the following decades on the emerging therapeutic culture. For instance, American historians Christopher Lasch and T. J. Jackson-Lears, who both reified Rieff’s analysis of the therapeutic as a replacement for religion, and also attended to the close relationship between the therapeutic culture and the consumer culture (which Rieff just briefly touched upon) (Loss, 2002). The classical reference here is German sociologist Max Weber’s (2001) The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, in which he locates a convincing, but surprising, affinity between the Protestant religion and the economic system at the time. In the book chapter “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” Lears quotes author Virginia Woolf, who supposedly said around December 1910 that “human character changed.” Lears expands this picture (reminiscent of Rieff) by describing fundamental cultural transformations that primarily took place amid the educated classes in Western capitalist nations around the turn of the twentieth century. Lears (1983, p. 4) traces the emerging consumer culture in the United States to important religious and psychological transformations in this period:

I shall argue that the crucial moral change was the beginning of a shift from a Protestant ethos of salvation through self-denial toward a therapeutic ethos stressing self-realization in this world – an ethos characterized by an almost obsessive concern with psychic and physical health defined in sweeping terms.

Lears immediately admits that one can argue that there is nothing specifically historically new about the therapeutic ethos since all historical cultures most likely have had a therapeutic dimension to them. Yet, he claims that something distinctively new happened in the United States in this time frame. The quest for health was traditionally conducted within larger communal, ethical, or religious frames of meaning, though by the late nineteenth century those frameworks were diminishing. This meant that the quest for health became an entirely secular and self-referential project that was rooted in markedly modern emotional needs – “above all the need to renew a sense of selfhood that had grown fragmented, diffuse, and somehow ‘unreal’” (Lears, 1983, p. 4). In the transition from Rieff’s “kulturkampf” to Lears’ historical investigations, “the therapeutic ethos” seems to go through a shift in agenda from a critique of Western civilization and the therapeutic movement to the tracking of cultural changes in American society. Lears maintains that the early psychological pioneers and advertisement agents, such as the prominent behaviorist John B. Watson, did not really understand the scope of the therapeutic culture they helped to create. Lears’ (1983, p. 5) notion of the therapeutic as a “cultural hegemony” means that the therapeutic ethos helped to create a taken-for-granted “reality,” which is not conspiringly controlled by the dominating classes or interests:

This cultural “progress” is a messy business, generating social and psychological conflicts that remain unresolved even among the affluent and educated. The changes in the dominant culture are not always deliberately engineered; at times they stem from attempts to resolve private dilemmas that seem to have little to do with the public realm of class domination.

The emerging therapeutic culture that Lears historically depicts is basically an antagonistic place that emerges where consumption’s role is to realize an independent and secure sense of selfhood in a secular culture devoted to the pseudo-religious needs of health and physical and mental well-being. Works from academic pioneers such as Lears on the therapeutic helped to clear the way for more detailed investigations of the therapeutic throughout the 1990s into state bureaucracy (Nolan, 1998; Polsky, 1991) and strategies of governance, both in the United States (Cruikshank, 1996, 1999) and Great Britain (Rose, 1996, 1999).

The American sociologist James Nolan Jr. (1998) picks up in the same Weberian vein when he sets out to investigate how the cultural impulse Rieff called “the triumph of the therapeutic” had begun to institutionalize itself in the various functions of the political order in America at the end of the century. Nolan’s main premise is that the therapeutic ethos has now effectively replaced the older sources of state legitimation such as civic republicanism, Lockean liberalism, or the early American Protestant ethos, and provides the cultural symbols the state laws can justify themselves by. In addition, British sociologist Nikolas Rose (1996, 1999), by drawing on the historical investigations of French philosopher Michel Foucault, has looked into how the modern state’s governmental strategies for conduct in Great Britain merged with ethical self-technologies the subject engages in order to govern themselves. Psychology, psychotherapy, psychometrics, and other psy-disciplines appear as highly useful allies for the advanced liberal state in order to reach and influence the individual on an intimate level. In Chapter 3 I follow up Nolan’s and Rose’s investigations and offer a comparison to the history of the influence of the therapeutic ethos and “psy” on Norwegian lawmaking opening up for greater individual autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s.

The twenty-first century scholarly work on the therapeutic culture is generally characterized by a more dispassionate and at times appreciative attitude toward its content matter (see Aubry & Travis, 2015). Australian sociologist Katie Wright is part of the new balanced branch of scholars on therapeutic culture that draw on the less pessimistic assessments of this cultural turn, arguing among other things that psychological knowledge has given the self an optional language to articulate and experience suffering previously confided only to one’s private life. Wright (2008) maintains that therapeutic culture has indeed facilitated the assertion of individual rights to the person, and draws on two historical instances from Australia to problematize the complexity latent in the ascendancy of the therapeutic. Lifeline telephone counseling emerged in Australia in 1963, and was founded by the Reverend Alan Walker of Sydney’s Central Methodist Mission, which Wright (2008) interprets as part of a series of responses to suffering and social crisis in the private sphere that is given greater responsiveness by religious authorities (as opposed to a traditional view of the decline of religious authority). Second, the establishment of a Royal Commission on Human Relationships by Australian Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1974 came about “to inquire into the family, social, educational, legal and sexual aspects of male and female relationships” partly as a political compromise after moves to reform abortion laws (Wright, 2008, p. 331). Voices of women, children, migrants, people with disabilities, sexual minority groups, and indigenous Australians were publicly made available for the first time, which helped to gather a comprehensive picture of pain and suffering in the personal domain, such as domestic violence and child abuse; partly as a result of this, child abuse was criminalized both in Australia and internationally (Wright, 2008). Thus, the therapeutic culture’s disruption of the boundaries between the public and private is possible to view in a different and more positive light than perspectives of control and/or decline allow. Rather than take the triumph of the therapeutic to mean a weakened cultural authority, Wright (2011) interprets it as a reconfiguration of the demarcation of public and private life in the normative prescriptions of masculinity and femininity. Despite all this, she is still wary of reading the therapeutic culture purely as a place for self-fulfillment and happiness:

Difficult political questions remain. While theorists since [Christopher] Lasch have recognized the depoliticizing tendency of the therapeutic, it is important too to acknowledge that lifting the lid on pain was itself a political development. As with second wave feminism and the politicization of the personal, in the opening up of private life the therapeutic has been profoundly political. In moving forward, it is important to look carefully at the historical processes that give rise to contradictions of the therapeutic, with an eye to both the potential for social control and hollow individualism – in short, the negative strands – but also to the therapeutic’s promise: the potential for increasing caring relations and remedying forms of social injustice.

(Wright, 2008, p. 333)

Finally, I would like to draw attention to the Moroccan-born French cultural sociologist Eva Illouz (2003, 2007, 2008), whose influential works on the therapeutic culture I believe have helped contemporary studies of the cultural influence of psychology move a step forward. What makes Illouz (2008) particularly innovative is her ambition to overcome the “epistemology of suspicion” that the scholarly tradition on the therapeutic has traditionally been coloured with, as well as any preconception of how social relations should look and the avoidance of what she calls “bulldozer concepts” such as “ideology,” “bio-power,” or “surveillance,” all of which end up flattening the deep complexity of the social. Instead, Illouz sets out to develop an immanent critique which emerges from a “thick” understanding of people’s desires and goals. The distinction between thick and thin descriptions originally stems from Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle (1971), who described two boys rapidly contracting their right eyelids. A t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editors’ foreword
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Media
• 3. Law
• 4. Religion
• 5. Self-help
• 6. “Giving psychology away”
• 7. Psychologization
• 8. Conclusion
• Index