2 :: THE REINVENTION OF PERSONS
of popular culture and everyday life. As a result of Web 2.0, digital culture and new
forms of media interaction, the therapeutic ethos has moved well beyond the
consulting room and into every facet of daily life. In promoting new forms of therapy as
part of a wider system of mediated reinvention, the influence of the talking cure can be
tracked at the levels of talkback radio, TV talk-shows and online dialogues. Aspects of
popular culture become reorganized in terms of therapeutics, with the imperative to
confess (somewhat in the fashion analysed by Foucault) a central theme.
“Ours is a society”, writes Susan Sontag, “in which secrets of private life that,
formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamour to get on
a television show to reveal” (2004). One reason that the public display of emotion is
experienced by growing numbers of women and men as energizing is that
therapeutics has gone global – offering to reach new audiences in distant locations.
American media theorist Mimi White argues that contemporary popular culture has
given a novel twist to therapeutic confession, switching confessional speech away
from a singular expert (the therapist) and towards a whole host of possible
audiences, including listeners, viewers, hosts, experts and others. “At the heart of the
new therapeutic culture”, says White, “everyone confesses over and over again to
everybody else” (White, 1992: 179). Psychotherapy is only one very particular model
advanced by our globalized confessional culture. Twelve-step therapy programmes,
personal counselling, memory recovery experts, addiction management
programmes, Gestalt and behavioural therapy, phone and cybertherapy, peer
counsellors, Internet analysts: the list of therapies today continually crosses and
multiplies, producing hybrids and new techniques and models for public confession.
If living in a mediated therapeutic culture offers new possibilities for the redesign of
the self, it is also the case that new burdens arise as well. Many critics of therapy
culture are correct, in some part at least, to dismiss aspects of the confessional turn
in public life as apolitical or trivial. Arguably the spread of confessional morality has
contributed, at least for some individuals, to a retreat from social problems, in a turn
towards privatism. Eva Moskowitz, in In Therapy We Trust, argues that therapy culture
“focuses our attention on the private life, blinding us to the larger, public good”
(2001:7). Moskowitz’s standpoint is interesting, but needs to be recast in order to
adequately grasp how therapeutics intersects with reinvention society. Confessional
culture, to be sure, can promote a narrowing of the arts of public political life, but not
necessarily. The public confession of private sentiments can, in fact, work the other
way around – opening out of the self to an increasingly interconnected world and thus
promoting self-reinvention.