Christian R. Gelder at the Sydney Review of Books:
To seek out a therapeutic practice, we are sometimes told, is often the expression of a desire for change. But ‘therapy’ is hardly separate from the culture it intersects with, and may end up changing that very culture. If the poet W. H. Auden could describe Freud as ‘no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion’, then surely that was because Freud’s language eventually became our own; phrases like ‘acting defensively’ or ‘feeling conflicted’, as John Forrester notes, have been absorbed into everyday speech. A particular therapeutic practice can thereby help to bring into being the self it seeks to describe (such as the epochal emergence of what Philip Rieff once called ‘psychological man’), as its models of successful treatment and its language for the mind, emotions, and behaviour become part of culture’s common-sense. Even the use of ‘therapy’ tells us something about its contemporary cultural status, indexing far more than any individual therapeutic act. ‘You should talk to a therapist’ is a refrain regularly printed on t-shirts, worn by internet celebrities of all stripes, and the remark trades off the sense that recommending therapy could be seen as an act of care just as it could also be a moral corrective for bad behaviour (‘go to therapy, you naughty boy!’).
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.