2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
with the search for “the New You”. An overriding belief in the possibilities of
self-reconstruction, redesign and reorganization infuses various versions of individual
therapy, but such longings are also marshalled in living rooms across the globe, as a
mass-mediated spectacle of private anxieties are dramatized for public consumption.
Radio talkback, TV talk-shows and cybertherapy are all at the core of this restructuring
of the “talking cure” through the twin forces of multimedia and popular culture.
What accounts for our culture’s fascination with therapy? How should we understand
the rise of therapy, both its uses at the level of individual psychology and the wider
power it exerts at the level of culture? Do therapy and the language of therapeutics
represent simply a new form of social control? Some critics have suggested precisely
this and, given the attention accorded to such views, it is important to briefly consider
these now.
In his influential book of the late 1950s, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff cast
the rise of therapy in terms of a rebranding of emotional life, principally with reference
to psychological illness. This rebranding involved the therapeutic scrutiny of people’s
psychology (particularly focusing on personal unhappiness), framed as part of a
broader quest for “emotional health”. In wider cultural terms, therapy for Rieff seeks to
construct “the sane self in a mad world” (1965). Developing upon Rieff’s notion of the
triumph of the therapeutic, the American historian Christopher Lasch also criticized
therapy, writing of an emergent “culture of narcissism” (1991). According to Lasch, the
therapeutic encounter promotes a kind of cultural hypochondria in which individuals
turn away from the collective problems of society and retreat narrowly inwards on the
self. For Lasch, the spread of a culture of narcissism opens the way for a therapeutic
imperative in which crisis becomes both permanent and personalized. More recently,
Frank Furedi, in his book Therapy Culture (2003), has likewise attacked the dominance
of therapy culture, which he claims imposes a new cultural conformity through an
oppressive management of people’s emotions.
Another critique of the rise of therapy – a more complex and, I think, more interesting
one – focuses on its recoding of traditional religious confession for a secular age. One
version of this criticism is that developed by the late French historian, Michel
Foucault. Foucault’s writings, indebted to structural linguistics and post-structuralist
theory, are technically dense; the argument I seek to develop here, which draws on
but also departs from Foucault, thus involves a somewhat more complex vocabulary
than I have used elsewhere in this book. The core of Foucault’s argument, bluntly put,
is that therapy reorders traditional religious confession as a form of privatism; this it
does through “manufacturing” a truth in the ongoing production of stories by which