In the past century, numerous social critics have observed the rise of therapeutic culture, a loosely aligned network of assumptions, practices, and institutions that tout the importance of individual happiness, emotional fulfilment, and self-actualization. While the United States has proved to be especially receptive to it, this culture has spread across the globe. According to the accounts produced by its early critics, therapeutic culture represents a destructive trend—one that spells the death of civic engagement and communal activity, undermining the republican traditions of hard work and ... More

In the past century, numerous social critics have observed the rise of therapeutic culture, a loosely aligned network of assumptions, practices, and institutions that tout the importance of individual happiness, emotional fulfilment, and self-actualization. While the United States has proved to be especially receptive to it, this culture has spread across the globe. According to the accounts produced by its early critics, therapeutic culture represents a destructive trend—one that spells the death of civic engagement and communal activity, undermining the republican traditions of hard work and self-reliance, and turning those who embrace its premises into shallow, quiescent narcissists. While indebted to these critics for making the phenomena of therapeutic culture visible and underscoring some of the legitimate dangers that it poses, this collection seeks to complicate their description by calling attention to the heterogeneous and unpredictable ways that therapeutic practices operate in everyday life. The book’s introduction offers a history of therapeutic culture’s emergence in Europe and the United States and of the schools of criticism that have traced its growth, while also pointing to more recent developments that demand new theoretical approaches. The individual essays, which are organized around particular key words, such as “pain,” “privacy,” and “narcissism,” focus on specific historical examples, theoretical, legal, and political debates, and narratives produced by individual consumers, in order to construct a more nuanced, more empirically grounded picture of therapeutic culture than the one popularized in earlier critical accounts.