Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture

“This book represents a much-awaited study of the uses of therapeutic practices by people who try to navigate the uncertainties in which capitalist societies have thrown them. Written lucidly, it engages the reader in the best of cultural analysis: a discourse as powerful and hegemonic as psychology turns out to be politically ambivalent and a useful tool to empower the self.”- Eva Illouz, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

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.

Suvi Salmenniemi is Professor of sociology at the University of Turku, Finland. Her areas of expertise include therapeutic culture, political sociology, cultural studies, feminist research, ethnography and critical social theory.