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Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625013X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
For the past half century, intellectuals and other critics have lamented America’s descent into a therapeutic culture--or in Christopher Lasch’s lasting phrase, a "culture of narcissism.” But is that the case? The essays in this collection take a fresh look at therapeutic culture and its critiques. Rather than a cesspool of self-involvement, therapeutic culture may instead be a productive and meaningful way that people negotiate with issues of culture, society, race, gender, and identity. Most important, the editors and contributors grapple with the historically and socially constructed nature of therapeutic culture and its influence. With its dazzling array of contributors and perspectives, this is a book worth getting off the couch for.
Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625013X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
Get Book
Book Description
For the past half century, intellectuals and other critics have lamented America’s descent into a therapeutic culture--or in Christopher Lasch’s lasting phrase, a "culture of narcissism.” But is that the case? The essays in this collection take a fresh look at therapeutic culture and its critiques. Rather than a cesspool of self-involvement, therapeutic culture may instead be a productive and meaningful way that people negotiate with issues of culture, society, race, gender, and identity. Most important, the editors and contributors grapple with the historically and socially constructed nature of therapeutic culture and its influence. With its dazzling array of contributors and perspectives, this is a book worth getting off the couch for.
Author: Timothy Aubry
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022625027X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Social critics have long lamented America’s descent into a “culture of narcissism,” as Christopher Lasch so lastingly put it fifty years ago. From “first world problems” to political correctness, from the Oprahfication of emotional discourse to the development of Big Pharma products for every real and imagined pathology, therapeutic culture gets the blame. Ask not where the stereotype of feckless, overmedicated, half-paralyzed millennials comes from, for it comes from their parents’ therapist’s couches. Rethinking Therapeutic Culture makes a powerful case that we’ve got it all wrong. Editors Timothy Aubry and Trysh Travis bring us a dazzling array of contributors and perspectives to challenge the prevailing view of therapeutic culture as a destructive force that encourages narcissism, insecurity, and social isolation. The collection encourages us to examine what legitimate needs therapeutic practices have served and what unexpected political and social functions they may have performed. Offering both an extended history and a series of critical interventions organized around keywords like pain, privacy, and narcissism, this volume offers a more nuanced, empirically grounded picture of therapeutic culture than the one popularized by critics. Rethinking Therapeutic Culture is a timely book that will change the way we’ve been taught to see the landscape of therapy and self-help.
Author: Suvi Salmenniemi
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031105729
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
This book contributes to research on therapeutic culture by drawing on longstanding ethnographic work and by offering a new theoretical reading of therapeutic culture in today's society. It suggests that the therapeutic field serves as a key site in which a number of contradictions of capitalism are confronted and lived out. It shows that therapeutic engagements are inherently ambivalent and contradictory, as they can be articulated and engaged with in many different ways and harnessed for diverse, and often contradictory, political projects. The book takes issue with the interpretation of therapeutic culture as merely individualising, depoliticizing and working in congruence with neoliberalism, and shows that therapeutic engagements may also open up a space for contestation and critique of neoliberal capitalism, animate collective action for social change and articulate alternative forms of life and subjectivities. The book will speak to a wide variety of audiences in the social sciences and will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, critical psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical social theory.
Author: Piroska Csúri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 042958864X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 143
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Book Description
By focusing on quantitative and qualitative research in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires, this book expands on the notion of "therapeutic culture." Usually considered a global phenomenon disseminated from North to South, and associated to "modern" forms of "psychologized" subjectivity, "therapeutic culture" has become a key notion to understanding contemporary culture. However, this path-breaking research, grounded in a bottom-up perspective that follows specific therapeutic narratives, shows that the concept of the "therapeutic" should be extended to encompass a diversity of practices, both "secular" and "religious," "modern" and "traditional," that are deemed as therapeutic by the actors involved, although they are overlooked as such by most of the current literature. Pentecostal and Afro-Brazilian religions as well as New Age practices coexist and interact with "conventional" therapeutic techniques such as Psychoanalysis, conforming complex and hybrid therapeutic networks associated to different (also hybrid) forms of subjectivity. Although the book draws upon two cases from the "Global South," its theoretical conclusions are applicable to the analysis of the realm of the therapeutic at large. The book is aimed at university students (both graduate and undergraduate) and at the general public interested in the notion of the therapeutic and, specifically, in Latin American culture.
Author: Daniel Nehring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429656181
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 425
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Book Description
The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural studies, development studies, and American Indian studies, it adopts a consciously global focus, combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised, it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life, before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological, as well as significant transformations of key institutions, such as work, family, education, and religion, it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies, the political interest in happiness, and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally, the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.
Author: Daniel Nehring
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317010779
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 186
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Book Description
This book builds a fresh perspective on therapeutic narratives of intimate life. Focusing on the question of how popular psychology organises everyday experiences of intimacy, its argument is grounded in qualitative research in Trinidad in the Anglophone Caribbean. Against the backdrop of Trinidad’s colonial and postcolonial history, the authors map the development of therapeutic institutions and popular therapeutic practices and explore how transnationally mobile, commercial forms of popular psychology, mostly originating in the Global North, have taken root in Trinidadian society through online social networks, self-help books, and other media. In this sense, the book adds to social research on the transnational spread of a digital attention economy and its participation in the proliferation of popular psychological discourse. Drawing on in-depth interviews with self-help readers, the book considers how popular psychology organises their everyday experiences of intimate life. It argues that the proliferation of self-help media contributes to the psychologisation of intimate relationships and obscures the social dimensions of intimacy in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, and other social structures and inequalities. At the same time, the book draws on anthropological arguments about the colonisation of consciousness in the Global South to interpret the insertion of transnationally mobile popular psychology into Trinidadian society. An innovative contribution to scholarship on therapeutic cultures, which explores the widely under-researched dissemination of popular psychology in the Global South, the book adds to a sociological understanding of the ways in which therapeutic narratives of self and intimate relationships come to be incorporated into everyday experience. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, anthropology, and the sociology of gender, sexuality, families, and personal life.
Author: Donileen Loseke
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351472151
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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Book Description
For nearly half a century, social scientists have made claims that there is a "therapeutic ethos" with extensive influence upon numerous aspects of American society. In Therapeutic Culture, twelve authors address the implications of this ethos and its effects on a wide range of social institutions, extending from the family to schools, and operating in religious behavior and within the legal system. Has there been, as the sociological theorist Philip Rieff argued in 1966, a "triumph of the therapeutic?" If so, in what kinds of institutions has it been most pervasive? At the same time, what aspects of modern culture has it replaced or defeated? Therapeutic Culture addresses these questions, and raises others. Part 1 of this volume examines the emergence of the idea of "authenticity" as it defines the manipulation of emotions and behavior both in the United States and Great Britain. Contributors include Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Frank Furedi, Jonathan B. Imber, and Alan Woolfolk. Part 2 illustrates specific cases of the effects of therapeutic culture within institutions, including courts, schools, religious communities, and the "virtual community" of the Internet. Contributors include James L. Nolan, Jr., John Steadman Rice, Felicia Wu Song, and James Tucker. Part 3 extends the analyses of specific social institutions to the broader consequences that have resulted as a therapeutic ethos has taken root in contemporary life. Contributors include Digby Anderson, Ellen Herman, and James Davison Hunter. Part 4 is devoted to a previously unpublished essay by Philip Rieff whose significant influence can be seen in many of the contributions. Rieff revisits the highly controversial confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 and offers ample evidence of the therapeutic uses of politics as well as the political manipulations available within a therapeutic culture to provide a fitting conclusion. This volume establishes a benchmark for furthe
Author: Ian Miller
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1509559418
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 200
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Book Description
At the end of the last century, the idea of self-esteem became enormously influential. A staggering amount of psychological research and self-help literature was published, and before long was devoured by readers. Self-esteem initiatives permeated American schools. Self-esteem became the way of understanding ourselves, our personalities, our interactions with others. Nowadays, few people think much about the idea of self-esteem—but perhaps we should. Self-Esteem: An American History is the first historical study exploring the emotional politics of self-esteem in modern America. Written with verve and insight, Ian Miller’s expert analysis explores the critiques of self-help which accuse it of propping up conservative agendas by encouraging us to look solely inside ourselves to resolve life’s problems. At the same time, he reveals how African American, LGBTQ+ and feminist activists endeavored to build positive collective identities based upon self-esteem, pride and self-respect. This revelatory book will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of mental health, well-being, emotions in the United States’ unique society and culture.
Author: Arthur Kleinman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439118582
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 256
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Book Description
In this book, Kleinman proposes an international view of mental illness and mental care. Arthur Kleinman, M.D., examines how the prevalence and nature of disorders vary in different cultures, how clinicians make their diagnoses, and how they heal, and the educational and practical implications of a true understanding of the interplay between biology and culture.
Author: Suvi Salmenniemi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351233378
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 191
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Book Description
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351233392, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume examines the ways in which people engage with therapeutic practices, such as life coaching, mindfulness, complementary and alternative medicine, sex and relationship counselling, spiritual healing and self-tracking. It investigates how human and non-human actors, systems of thought and practice are assembled and interwoven in therapeutic engagements, and traces the situated, material and political dimensions of these engagements. By focusing on lived experiences through ethnographically informed case studies, the book elucidates the diverse forms, meanings and embodied effects of therapeutic engagements in different settings, as well as their potential for both oppressive and subversive social change. In this way, Assembling Therapeutics contributes to our understanding of multiple modes of healing, self-knowledge and power in contemporary societies.
