2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
changing ways in which contemporary confessions – or, if you will, therapy – take
place in public. I refer to the rise of therapeutic confession in the mass media, but
also Web 2.0 and related digital technologies. Had Foucault been able to consider the
role of new communication technologies upon the formation and reformation of the
self, he might have seen just how powerfully confessional culture constructs new
privatized relations – in which, contrary to his sometimes fatalistic account of how
power mysteriously operates behind the backs of individuals, the reinvention of self
and broader social relations arises as a skilled cultural accomplishment.
Therapy, I am suggesting, is a system of reinvention through which contemporary
women and men seek to reconstruct the self. Therapy, at least those versions of it
influenced by psychoanalysis and psychotherapeutics, is not just a means to limit or
overcome psychological “illnesses” and “trauma” – although its language is often
couched in this way. As an expression of the drive to reinvention, therapy seeks to
promote the redesign of the self as a means of achieving a sense of greater personal
autonomy. This is not to say that those engaged in therapeutic endeavours are
necessarily successful in achieving greater selfunderstanding; therapy, as has been
well documented in various studies, can sometimes also promote dependence – and
in extreme situations might also function as a form of addiction. Yet the general point
remains that the goals of therapy are geared to self-reinvention, and thus it should be
evaluated as part of a broader technology of reinvention.
Perhaps one of the most intriguing ways in which therapy, understood as a
technology of reinvention, has developed in the twenty-first century concerns the
radical speeding-up of its delivery time. Consider, for example, the following. In
Freud’s Vienna, people committing to psychoanalytic treatment were, in effect,
signing up for a programme of self-exploration that might range anywhere from
three to five years. Moreover, the slow, emotionally difficult work of therapy would be
undertaken on an almost daily basis – typically, three to four days a week over the
duration of approximately one hour each session. By contrast, many versions of
contemporary therapy centre on quick delivery. Fast therapy, as noted at the
beginning of this chapter, has become all the rage. From life coaching to phone
therapy, and from cyber-therapy to speed shrinking: therapy today is delivered faster
than ever before, with an immediacy to the promise of self-reinvention which is
especially striking. In our high-speed society, time has been radically compressed –
hence, the spread of fast therapy.
Accompanying this acceleration in the delivery-time of therapy, the contemporary
period has also been marked by the spread of therapeutics into more and more sectors