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Contents

Acknowledgments ix

1. Introduction 1

Cultural Sociology and the Therapeutic / 8 Therapy as a New Emotional Style / 12 Texts and Contexts / 16 Cultural Critique and Psychology / 19

2. Freud: A Cultural Innovator 22

Psychoanalysis as a Charismatic Enterprise / 24 The Social Organization of Freudian Charisma / 26 Freud in America / 29 The Freudian Cultural Matrix / 35 The Romance of Psychology and Popular Culture / 51 Conclusion / 56

3. From Homo economicus to Homo communicans 58

Emotional Control in the Sociology of Organizations / 61 The Power of Control and the Control of Power / 64 Psychologists Enter the Market / 66 A New Emotional Style / 72 Emotional Control / 75 The Communicative Ethic as the Spirit of the

Corporation / 88 Emotional, Moral, and Professional Competence / 95 Conclusion / 103

4. The Tyranny of Intimacy 105

Intimacy: An Increasingly Cold Haven / 107 Beyond Their Will? Psychologists and Marriage / 115 What Feminism and Psychology Have in Common / 120 Intimacy: A New Emotional Imagination / 125 Communicative Rationality in the Bedroom / 131 Toward the Ideology of Pure Emotion / 135 The Cooling of Passion / 142 Conclusion / 149

5. Triumphant Suffering 152

Why Therapy Triumphed / 156 The Therapeutic Narrative of Selfhood / 171 Performing the Self through Therapy / 178 A Narrative in Action / 186 Conclusion / 196

6. A New Emotional Stratification? 197

The Rise of Emotional Competence / 200 Emotional Intelligence and Its Antecedents / 202 The Global Therapeutic Habitus and the New Man / 217 Intimacy as a Social Good / 222 Conclusion / 235

7. Conclusion: Institutional Pragmatism in the Study of Culture 238

Notes 249

Index 287

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FIVE Triumphant Suffering

He [the support group leader] always looked forward to the second session. Time to get down to business, to start revealing the secrets that made it all worthwhile. Sure, the process itself was rewarding, seeing these damaged people begin to heal and make the first steps towards their new lives, but what he really loved were the stories: life’s rich pattern, like a tapestry unraveling in front of him. . . . Maybe the class was the knitting needles to help people pull themselves back together again, a little more disheveled but more interesting this time around.

— Kate Harrison

Only what goes on hurting will stick.

— Nietzsche

It seems to me that it is possible to make fiction work inside of truth.

— Michel Foucault

In 1859, in a widely popular book called Self-Help, Samuel Smiles offered a series of biographies of men who had risen from obscurity to fame and wealth (self-help was masculine, and women had little or no room in nar- ratives of success and self-reliance). Immensely popular, the book made a powerful case for Victorian notions of individual responsibility. With the characteristic optimism and moral voluntarism of the nineteenth-

century faith in progress, Smiles evoked the “spirit of self-help in the energetic action of individuals who, rising above the heads of the mass, knew to distinguish themselves from others.” Their lives, he wrote, inspire high thinking and are examples of resolute working, integrity, and “truly noble and manly character.” The power of self-help, Smiles went on, is the power of each to accomplish for himself; self-help had thus resolutely democratic overtones, as it enabled even the “humblest of men to work out for themselves an honorable competency and a solid reputation.”1

Some sixty years later, addressing his fellow psychoanalysts in the aftermath of the trauma of the First World War, Freud offered a grandiose yet pessimistic vision of the task to come for psychoanalysis: “Compared with the vast amount of neurotic misery which there is in the world, and perhaps need not be, the quantity we can do away with is almost negli- gible. Besides this, the necessities of our existence limit our work to the well-to-do-classes.” “At present,” Freud added, “we can nothing for the wider social strata, who suffer extremely seriously from neuroses.” Despite his call to democratize psychoanalysis, Freud was skeptical about poor people’s willingness to part with their neuroses “because the hard life that awaits them if they recover offers them no attraction, and illness gives them one more claim to social help.” Where Smiles believed that the simple or the poor man could rise above the ordinary trials of everyday life through sobriety, endurance, and energy, Freud offered the disquieting possibility that neither psychoanalysts nor the poor might remedy “that vast amount of neurotic misery” because, as Freud ex- plained so well, laborers will prefer their moral and mental agony over recovery.2 Contrary to Smiles’s self-help ethos, which stipulated that moral strength could determine one’s social position and social destiny, Freud held the pessimistic view of the psyche and society that the very capacity to help oneself was conditioned by one’s social class and that, like other aspects of psychic development, such capacity could be dam- aged. If psychic development was damaged, it could not be restored through sheer willpower. Only the scientific, painstaking (and costly) work of the analyst could contribute to the improvement of the self. By making psychoanalysis the only road to psychic salvation, Freud sug-

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gested that self-help did not depend on one’s moral endurance, virtue, and volition because the unconscious could take many cunning routes to defeat the decisions of consciousness. If the unconscious could defeat one’s determination to help oneself, then this in turn meant that the Freudian outlook, at least initially, was incompatible with what would become the industry of self-help. Further, “moral spine” and “strong will” were the symptoms of the very problem (neurosis) that Freudian- ism was set to resolve.

Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth, Smiles and Freud stood at opposite positions of the moral dis- course of selfhood: Smiles’s ethos of self-help made the access to mobil- ity and to the market dependent on the exercise of virtue obtained by the combined effect of volition and moral spine. By contrast, self-help and virtue had no place in Freud’s overall theoretical framework. This is because the family narrative that was at the heart of the Freudian outlook was not linear but figurative, to use Erich Auerbach’s word. The figura- tive form of narrative is opposed to the linear or horizontal narrative in that it “combines two events causally and chronologically remote from each other, by attributing to them a meaning common to both.”3 Whereas self-help postulated that life was a series of accumulated achievements and could be understood as incrementally unfolding along a horizontal time line, the Freudian view of the self postulated that one had to draw many invisible vertical lines between key events in one’s childhood and subsequent psychic development and conceived of a person’s life as un- folding not in a linear but in a cyclical way. Moreover, for Freud, health, rather than success, was the new goal of the psyche, and this health did not depend on one’s sheer will because healing occurred, so to speak, behind the back of the patient’s cogito and will. Only transference, resis- tance, dream work, and free association—and not “volition” or “self- control”—could lead to psychic and ultimately social transformation. Finally, psychic recovery could not be democratic and evenly distributed throughout society. In fact, Freud suggested that therapy entertained a hidden affinity with social privilege.

Yet if we take a snapshot of contemporary American culture, it is easy to observe everywhere a powerful cultural alliance between Smiles’s

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ethos of self-improvement and such notions of Freudian inspiration as childhood trauma, patterns of self-defeating behavior, and unconscious conflicts. Where Freud was dubious about the possibility of a self-made recovery, a vast industry of self-help—addressing issues such as inti- macy, child rearing, leadership, divorce, assertiveness, anger manage- ment, dieting, and well-being—now relentlessly drives home Smiles’s message that self-help is in everyone’s reach. By an ironic twist of history, this self-help ethos has become Freudian with a vengeance, for it contains some basic Freudian tenets, such as the claim that much of our identity is unconscious, that its emotional makeup is riddled with conflicts, that most of our conflicts have an internal rather than an external origin, and that conflicts can be overcome through the proper verbal management of one’s self and psyche.

The juxtaposition of psychology and self-help—which had initially stood at opposite poles of culture—is one illustration among many of the ways in which seemingly incompatible cultural frameworks can blend to produce a hybrid cultural system different from either of the original sys- tems. Such an alliance occurred because the language of psychotherapy left the realm of experts and moved to the realm of popular culture, where it interlocked and combined with various other key categories of American culture, such as the pursuit of happiness, self-reliance, and the belief in the perfectibility of the self. In fact, Freudian premises about the self could move to the core of American culture when the Freudian out- look was modified enough by subsequent theorists to admit the idea of the perfectibility of the self.

The purpose of this chapter is to reflect on the ways in which the alliance between the therapeutic discourse and the self-help ethos has produced a narrative of self that has deeply transformed autobiographi- cal discourse, that is, how life stories are conceived, told, and negotiated in interpersonal interaction, thereby also transforming identity. Because it has been able to adapt to and absorb different cultural persuasions, psychological discourse has increased the scope of its influence through- out the twentieth century and has come to organize contemporary nar- ratives of selfhood and identity. The durability of a cultural structure is not opposed to change but is on the contrary often explained by it. What

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we must explain, then, is how, as Orlando Patterson put it, “identity per- sists through many sources of change.”4

The therapeutic narrative has been performed in an array of social sites, such as support groups and television confessional talk shows, and has absorbed a variety of cultural meanings, most conspicuously femi- nism and the New Age movement. In becoming diffused on a wide scale, the therapeutic ethos moved from being a knowledge system to becom- ing what Raymond Williams has dubbed a “structure of feeling.”5 The notion of “structure of feeling” designates two opposite phenomena: “feeling” points to a kind of experience that is inchoate, that defines who we are without our being able to articulate this “who we are.” Yet the notion of “structure” also suggests that this level of experience has an underlying pattern, that it is systematic rather than haphazard. Indeed, self-help therapeutic culture is an informal and almost inchoate aspect of our social experience, yet it is also a deeply internalized cultural schema organizing perception of self and others, autobiography, and interper- sonal interaction.6 If we want to understand how psychology has become a deep cultural structure, that is, a pervasive and unconscious one,7we must understand how and why psychology spilled over several cultural arenas and how it became part of the mental and emotional apparatus of actors. Thus the question of the durability of a cultural structure inevitably brings us back to the question of its depth, which in turn can be reformulated as one of the central theoretical questions of cultural sociology: How does (the therapeutic) cultural structure translate into the “micropractices” of giving accounts, telling one’s life story, and explain- ing others’ behavior? This chapter tries to capture the depth of (thera- peutic) cultural structure by examining this dual aspect.

W h y T h e r a p y T r i u m p h e d

The therapeutic outlook became a cultural structure enacted in the micro- practices of actors thanks to a number of factors: internal changes in psy- chological theory; the institutionalization of the therapeutic discourse in the state; the growing social authority of psychologists; the role of insur- ance companies and pharmaceutical industries in regulating pathology and therapy; and the use of psychology by various actors in civil society.

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All of these factors explain how therapy took hold of the self in the form of a powerful narrative, the primary vocation of which is to manage var- ious disruptions of biography (e.g., divorce, bereavement, unemploy- ment), the uncertainties that have become inherent in postmodern lives (due to the increasing complexity of the economy and of the cultural sphere), and problems of what I call—following Luc Boltanski’s termi- nology—the “size” of the self, how big or how small one defines one- self (as expressed in such “pathologies” as low self-esteem, low self- confidence, and lack of assertiveness).

Internal Changes in Psychological Theory As noted in chapter 2, Freudian psychology resonated with the highly popular nineteenth-century movement known as the “mind cure move- ment,” which included both Christian Science and various non–Christian Science forms of “health mysticism.”8 As William James has suggested, this movement was “a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side,” whose basic purpose was “the system- atic cultivation of healthy-mindedness.”9 Protestantism strongly empha- sized voluntary action, and in the American context self-help strategies for living have been notoriously combined with popular religions, mak- ing spirituality and self-help a central aspect of American culture. This fundamental element of American culture was not easily compatible with the profoundly pessimistic and deterministic framework of the Freudian outlook.

In fact, psychoanalysis could diffuse widely in American popular cul- ture because much of the Freudian bleak determinism was erased from it. It was thus easy for alternative psychological theories—which provided a more optimistic and open-ended view of self-development—to spread. Heinz Hartmann (along with Ernst Kris and Rudolph Loewenstein) played a very important role in making psychoanalysis far more com- patible with the core values of American culture. For ego psychologists, the ego rather than the id is the basis of human behavior and functioning and is understood in terms of its adaptive functions. Psychologists like Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Albert Ellis, although dif- fering in outlook, all rejected the Freudian determinism of the psyche and preferred a more flexible and open-ended view of the self, thus opening

up new possibilities for a greater compatibility between psychology and American moral views of the person. For Alfred Adler, for example, the conscious and unconscious are both in the service of the individual, who uses them to further personal goals. In his view, behavior could change throughout a person’s life span in accordance with both the immediate demands of the situation and the long-range goals inherent in one’s lifestyle. People move toward self-selected goals that they feel will give them a place in the world, provide them with security, and preserve their self-esteem. Ellis, like Adler, insisted upon action and viewed life as a dynamic striving. Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society published in 1950, was another watershed in the history of the integration of psychoanaly- sis in mainstream American culture.10 Erikson departed from earlier psy- chodynamic thought in that he depicted persons as more rational and therefore more conscious in their decision making and problem solving. Whereas Freud believed that the ego struggles to resolve conflicts be- tween instinctual urges and moral constraints, Erikson argued that the ego is an autonomous system that deals with reality through perception, thinking, attention, and memory. As a result of his emphasis on the adap- tive functions of the ego, Erikson viewed the person as competent in dealing with various environments over the course of development.11

Whereas Freud concerned himself with the influence of parents on the child’s emerging personality, Erikson stressed the historical setting in which the child’s ego was molded. If the ego’s development was inextri- cably bound up with the changing nature of social institutions and value systems, this meant it had far more plasticity than the Freudian ego. Moreover, Erikson suggested that the ego developed throughout the life span and was not limited to the early childhood experiences, which in turn suggested the possibility of continuous change. Whereas Freud’s objective was to explore how early trauma might bring about psy- chopathology in adulthood, Erikson’s goal was to draw attention to the human capacity to triumph over the psychological hazards of living. In short, Freud’s fatalistic determinism was countered by Erikson’s opti- mistic and voluntarist premise that every crisis provided the opportunity for the self to grow and to develop mastery over the world. These devel- opments made psychology increasingly compatible with the values of

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the self-help ethos, for they suggested that growth and maturity were inherent components of the life course and that they were obtainable by conscious acts of will and volition.

Thus ego psychology constituted a cultural bridge between the science of psychology and the conceptions of selfhood dominant in American culture. The movement that would help seal this alliance and help psy- chology make the deepest inroads in popular culture was undoubtedly the humanist movement. Its two most conspicuous and influential rep- resentatives were Abraham Maslow and his mentor, Carl Rogers.

Simplifying a great deal of Freudian theory, Carl Rogers viewed peo- ple as basically good or healthy and mental health as the normal pro- gression of life, with mental illness, criminality, and other human prob- lems as distortions of that natural, innate tendency toward health. In fact, Rogers extended and stretched a great deal the category of “health” by making it an intrinsic attribute of human beings. Rogers’s entire theory was built on the very simple idea of a tendency toward self-actualization, defined as the built-in motivation present in every life form to develop its potentials to the fullest extent possible. In a lecture given at Oberlin College in 1954, Rogers suggested that “whether one calls it a growth ten- dency, a drive toward self-actualization, or a forward-moving directional tendency, it is the mainspring of life, and is, in the last analysis, the ten- dency upon which all psychotherapy depends. It is the urge which is evi- dent in all organic and human life—to expand, extend, become autono- mous, develop, mature—the tendency to express and activate all the capacities of the self . . . . [This tendency] awaits only the proper condi- tions to be released and expressed.”12 Using metaphors borrowed from the realm of plants and animals, Rogers suggests that growth is a uni- versal tendency that is never really absent, only buried. By positing growth as an inherent component of the human condition, Rogers could then offer a simple explanation for lives that were less than fulfilling: they were simply lacking in “self-realization.” The goal of therapy thus increasingly became to help one realize one’s own authentic self, whether that self needed to be unearthed or fashioned from scratch. The basis for maintaining such drive for growth was, according to Rogers, “to have a basic unconditional positive regard for oneself. Any ‘conditions of

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worth’—I am worthy if I please my father, or I am worthy if I get a good grade—pose a limit to self-actualization,”13 thus suggesting that the self was now enjoined to strive for the elusive goal of self-realization.

But it was Abraham Maslow who would use and fuse these ideas in the most successful synthesis between self-help ethos and psychology. Like the psychologists just discussed, proponents of humanistic psychol- ogy maintain that people are largely conscious and rational beings who are not dominated by unconscious needs and conflicts and that they experience, decide, and freely choose their actions. Also inspired by ego psychologists was the idea “of becoming,” according to which a person is never static: an adolescent is different from what he or she was in child- hood and from what he or she will be in adulthood. Accordingly, it is the person’s responsibility as a free agent to realize as many of his or her potentialities as possible; only by actualizing these can the person live a truly authentic life. It is wrong for people to refuse to make the most of every moment of their existence and to fulfill that existence to the best of their ability. Maslow’s idea called for a need for self-actualization and led him to offer a hypothesis that would have a resounding success in U.S. culture, namely that fear of success was what prevented a person from aspiring to greatness and self-fulfillment:

It is reasonably [sic] to assume in practically every human being, and cer- tainly in almost every newborn baby, that there is an active will toward health, an impulse toward growth, or toward the actualization of human potentialities. But at once we are confronted by the saddening realiza- tion that so few people make it. Only a small proportion of the human population gets to the point of identity, or selfhood, full humanness, self-actualization, etc. Even in a society like ours which is relatively one of the most fortunate on the face of the earth. . . . This is our new way of approaching the problem of humanness, i.e. with an appreciation of its high possibilities and simultaneously, a deep disappointment that these possibilities are so infrequently actualized.14

The result was to define a new category of people: those who did not con- form to these psychological ideals of self-fulfillment were now sick. “The people we call ‘sick’ are the people who are not themselves, the people who have built up all sorts of neurotic defenses against being human.”15

Or, to put things slightly differently, “The concept of creativeness and the

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concept of the healthy, self-actualizing, fully human person seem to be coming closer and closer together, and may perhaps turn out to be the same thing.”16

This represented an extraordinarily enlarged realm of action for psy- chologists. Not only did psychologists move from psychological distur- bance to the much wider realm of neurotic misery, but they now moved from neurotic misery to the idea that health and self-realization were syn- onymous. The effect of putting self-realization at the very center of mod- els of selfhood was to make most lives become “un-self-realized.” This basic idea formed the core of psychology’s uncanny popular success.

But for ideas to guide action, they need an institutional basis. If, as this work assumes, the self is a deeply institutionalized form, we should look for the institutional basis of languages of subjectivity. As John Meyer put it, “The subjective qualities of actors [conform] to and [adapt] the larger cultural resources and prescriptions.”17 I suggest that therapeutic pre- scriptions could saturate the American polity because they were enacted within three main arenas — the state, the market, and civil society — against the backdrop of the growing social authority of the experts.

Professional Authority The authority of the psychologist became pervasive in the late 1960s because it found little resistance in the cultural and political arena. In the 1960s, the political ideologies that would have been likely to oppose the individualist and psychological conceptions of the self were on the wane. As Steven Brint put it, “Professional powers are most extensive . . . when professional experts are operating in a depoliticized environment of unchallenged premises. . . . Professional influence can be extensive when professionals are able to assert a central cultural value in the absence of a strong counter-ideology.”18 The 1960s represented an important step toward the depoliticization of the cultural arena because sexuality, self- development, and private life now occupied the center stage of public discourse. More exactly, because these categories had been politicized in the students’ protests and discourse, they pushed aside the “older” col- lectivist understanding and practice of politics and helped focus collec- tive attention on personal well-being and sexuality. The maturation and expansion of the consumer market, allied with the sexual revolution,

helped increase the visibility and authority of psychologists because these two cultural and ideological persuasions—consumerism and sex- ual liberation—both made the self, sexuality, and private life into crucial sites of identity. In the context of the demise of grand political ideologies and of the increasing legitimacy and cultural visibility of such topics as sexuality and intimate relationships, psychologists were the natural can- didates to provide much-needed guidance on topics such as sexuality or intimacy, about which parents or friends had little to contribute. Indeed, areas of conduct are all the more likely to be riddled with uncertainties and to be shaped by the authority of experts when social networks do not (or cannot) serve as guides.19 Because sexuality had become the supreme site of identity, psychologists could play a role as arbitrators of private life. Using this psychological narrative, psychologists increasingly addressed the public both as consumers and as patients. In particular, because the “paperback revolution,” initiated by Pocket Books in 1939, put easily affordable books in the reach of consumers, popular psychol- ogy could now address and reach an ever-widening number of middle- and lower-middle-class people. This paperback revolution enabled psy- chologists to directly address a wide and heterogeneous public that could now afford accessible expert advice. Such books could be found every- where, in convenience stores, railway stations, and drugstores, thus con- solidating the already flourishing self-help industry.

The self-help publishing industry grew dramatically in the last de- cades of the twentieth century. “The trade publication American Book- seller reports that self-help book sales rose by 96 percent in the five years between 1991 and 1996. By 1998, self-help book sales were said to total some $581 million, where they constituted a powerful force within the publishing industry. . . . Indeed the self-improvement industry, inclusive of books, seminars, audio and video products, and personal coaching, is said to constitute a 2.48-billion-a-year industry.”20

The State The therapeutic discourse of self-help became pervasive when it was adopted and diffused by the state, that is, when the state defined itself and became culturally active as what James Nolan calls a “therapeutic

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state.”21 Ellen Herman has argued that the massive adoption of the ther- apeutic discourse by the state may be attributed to the great concern over social adjustment and well-being in the postwar era. As she puts it, “It was understood that mental health was necessary to the efficacy of the Armed Forces in the short run and national security, domestic tranquility, and economic competitiveness in the long run.”22 Reflecting this mood, the National Institute of Mental Health was created in 1946, and its fund- ing then grew at a spectacular rate. If in 1950 the agency’s budget was $8.7 million, in 1967 it was $315 million, thus suggesting that psycholog- ical health and services were deemed to be of universal value and appli- cation.23 Another example of the increasing dominance of mental health– related and psychological language was the fact that in the 1960s the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) was spending more money on psychological studies of behavior than on conventional medical research on the biology of mental disease.24 The institutionalization of the therapeutic outlook in the state apparatus was further manifested in the increasing legitimacy of psychological modes of knowing and ascertain- ing the truth. As Nolan reports, from 1968 to 1983, the number of clinical psychologists grew threefold. “The monumental increase in the psychol- ogization of modern life is also evident in the fact that there are more therapists than librarians, firefighters, or mail carriers in the United States, and twice as many therapists as dentists or pharmacists.” By 1986, there were “253,000 psychologists employed in the United States, more than one-fifth of whom held doctoral degrees.” During the same period, it was estimated that an average of ten million Americans sought thera- peutic advice in a single year.25 This spectacular increase was tightly con- nected with the legitimacy that psychology enjoyed in the American state apparatus.

Nolan argues that the (American) state has increasingly relied on the codes, symbolism, and moral discourse of the therapeutic ethos to deploy various rehabilitation programs for such groups as the poor, prison inmates, delinquents, and victims claiming emotional injuries. For exam- ple, while throughout the twentieth century the number of emotional injury cases remained constant and unchanged, after the 1960s the “num- ber of cases dealing with claims for emotional damages rose at an extra-

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ordinary rate.”26 Indeed, courts increasingly recognized the independent nature of emotions and emotional injuries, as evidenced by the increasing number of psychological experts called to testify on behalf of emotionally injured victims and by the fact that criminals were increasingly treated by therapists. Nolan attributes the increasing dominance of psychologists in the state apparatus to the state’s need for legitimation. He does not explain, however, why the therapeutic discourse could provide that legit- imation. I would argue that at least one of the reasons why the state has increasingly relied upon psychology is that, as George Thomas and col- leagues have persuasively documented, modern “collective actors com- mand greater legitimacy and authority if they are founded on a theory of individual membership and activity.”27 In this view, individualism is not opposed to state power. In fact, as Michel Foucault and John Meyer have argued, in different yet congruent styles the modern state organizes its power around cultural conceptions and moral views of the individual. The state, in conjunction with the public discourse of media culture, has provided publicly available repertoires to frame languages of selfhood and individualism. It is thus seriously mistaken to view the psychologi- cal self as “asocial” or anti-institutional.28 The therapeutic discourse pro- vided added legitimacy to the state at the same time that it was natural- ized by its adoption in the state apparatus. The psychological discourse is one of the main sources of models of individualism, adopted and propagated by the state.29 These models, as Meyer and his associates argue, are present in the agenda and the mode of intervention of the state in such various domains as education, business, science, and politics.

The Market: The Pharmaceutical Industry and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) was one of the main instruments enabling the extraordinary expansion of psycho- logical modes of explanation. The third edition of the DSM (a.k.a. DSM III) became the psychologists’ definitive “bible,” providing a compre- hensive list of mental problems, some of which were already known and others of which had been only recently mapped out and diagnosed by a board of psychiatrists and clinical psychologists.30 The DSM is the out-

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come of research experiments and of numerous deliberations conducted in committees. The ultimate reference book for mental disorders, it lists alphabetically and defines a wide variety of disorders.31 The DSM is pub- lished by the American Psychological Association, and at least since DSM III (published in 1980) it has become a widely popular and prof- itable commercial enterprise. For example, only ten months after its pub- lication, the sale of DSM IV grossed $18 million.32

Although DSM III considerably expanded the range of behaviors defined as markers of mental disorder, the manual never actually defined what exactly qualified these behaviors as mental disorders. The creation of a classification system in which symptoms signified and thus qualified as markers of a mental or emotional disorder now pathologized a wide range of behaviors. For example, “oppositional disorder” (coded 313.81) is defined “as a pattern of disobedient, negativistic, and provocative opposition to authority figures,” “histrionic personality disorder” (coded 301.50) occurs when individuals are “lively and dramatic and always drawing attention to themselves,” and “avoidant and personality dis- order” (coded 301.82) is characterized by “hypersensitivity to potential rejection, humiliation, or shame and unwillingness to enter into relation- ships unless given unusually strong guarantees of uncritical accep- tance.”33 With the attempt to carefully codify and classify pathologies, the category of mental disorder became very loose and very wide, including behaviors or personality traits that merely fell outside the range of what psychologists postulated was “average.” Behaviors or personality fea- tures that might have been previously categorized as “having a bad tem- per” were now in need of care and management and were henceforth pathologized.

Herb Kutchins and Stuart Kirk suggest that the codification of pathol- ogies is related to the close connection between mental health treatment and insurance coverage. DSM III grew out of the need to make the rela- tionship between diagnosis and treatment tighter so that insurance companies (or other payers) could process claims more efficiently. As Kutchins and Kirk put it, “DSM is the psychotherapist’s password for insurance reimbursement.”34 DSM — which provides the code numbers to be listed on the claims for insurance reimbursement—is the bridge

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connecting mental health professionals and such large money-giving institutions as Medicaid, Social Security Disability Income, benefit pro- grams for veterans, and Medicare.35 Not only is it used by the majority of mental health clinicians, but it is increasingly used by third parties such as “state legislatures, regulatory agencies, courts, licensing boards, insur- ance companies, child welfare authorities, police, etc.”36 In addition, pharmaceutical industries have an interest in the expansion of mental pathologies that can then be treated with psychiatric medications.37 As Kutchin and Kirk eloquently put it, “For drug companies, . . . unlabeled masses are a vast untapped market, the virgin Alaskan oil fields of men- tal disorder.”38 Thus the DSM, willfully or not, helps label and chart new mental health consumer territories, which in turn help expand pharma- ceutical companies. Hence the expansion of the category of mental ill- ness, dysfunction, or emotional pathology is related to the professional and financial interests of mental health professionals and drug compa- nies. It is also related to the increasing use of psychological categories to claim benefits, compensations, or extenuating circumstances in courts. In this process, the DSM has clearly considerably enlarged the scope of psy- chologists’ authority, who now legislate over such questions as how much anger may be appropriately expressed, how much sexual desire one should have, how much anxiety one should feel, and which emo- tional behaviors should be given the label of “mental disease.” Because the classificatory and bureaucratic logic that lies behind the making of DSM aims at controlling, predicting, and managing rationally mental disorders, it has increasingly lowered the thresholds defining dysfunc- tions. This process has most successfully enabled the market’s appropri- ation of therapy by providing the classifications and cultural frames that have enabled the radical commodification of therapy.

Yet if John Meyer’s theory of culture enables us to understand the “supply side” of culture (which agencies produce it), it does not ask why some institutionalized rules are more likely to be followed than others. The institutionalization of the therapeutic discourse in the state and in the market alone does not explain the uncanny ease with which it took hold of models of selfhood. Therapeutic models of selfhood had an extra- ordinary cultural resonance because political actors operating in civil society made new demands on the state and on legislatures and ad-

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vanced their claims by using and relying on the basic cultural schemes of the therapeutic language to further their struggles.

Civil Society As outlined in the previous chapter, feminism was one of the major polit- ical and cultural formations to adopt the therapeutic discourse, as early as the 1920s and most forcefully in the 1970s. Feminism found in psy- chology a useful cultural ally because it both promoted sexuality as the site of emancipation and offered the historically unprecedented view that the private sphere should be governed by the (political and psychologi- cal) ideal of self-determination. But in the 1980s this alliance took a new turn when feminism denounced the oppressive effects of the patriarchal family in the abuse of children. Ian Hacking argues that the movement against child abuse was started around 1961–62 by a group of pediatri- cians in Denver who, using x-rays, drew the attention of the public to children who seemed to suffer from repeated injuries.39 If pediatricians could shake public opinion so swiftly, it was because this category of crime suited very well already constituted views of the child’s psyche and of the long-lasting effects of injuries experienced during childhood. In 1971, in her address to the New York Radical Feminist Conference, Florence Rush brought the topic of child abuse to the attention of her audience,40 a move that had important consequences for feminism. The cause of child abuse was later adopted by feminist activists because it helped transform psychic injury into a political critique of the family.

Alice Miller was one of the most forceful feminists writing against child abuse. In her widely influential The Drama of the Gifted Child, Miller utilized therapeutic logic, asserting that to survive and avoid unbearable pain the mind of the abused child is provided with a remarkable mecha- nism, the “gift” of “repression,” allowing for the storage of abusive expe- riences outside consciousness.41 Miller placed trauma at the center of one’s life narrative and advanced repression as the explanation for why some abused or neglected children do not feel and are not aware of the ravages of trauma as adults. Following the therapeutic logic according to which adults will reproduce the suffering inflicted on them as children, she also saw psychic problems transmitted from one generation to the next:

Any person who abuses his children has himself been severely traumatized in his childhood in some form or another. This statement applies without exception since it is absolutely impossible for someone who has grown up in an environment of honesty, respect, and affection ever to feel driven to torment a weaker person in such a way as to inflict lifelong damage. He has learned very early on that it is right and proper to provide the small, helpless creature with protection and guidance; this knowledge, stored at that early age in his mind and body, will remain effective for the rest of his life.42

Miller also held the view that self-esteem is the most central attribute of successful socialization and that it must be based on the authenticity of one’s feelings.

Large cohorts of feminists have followed in Miller’s footsteps. Using the defense of abused children, feminism found a new tactic to criticize the family and patriarchy. This was because the social problem labeled “child abuse” enabled feminism to mobilize cultural categories, such as that of the child, that had a broader and more universal appeal.

The cultural categories of “child abuse” and “trauma” were crucial in feminists’ tactics because they tapped into universal and uncontested moral views about the sacredness of children and of the family, shared equally by the Right and by the Left. Feminists used the category of trauma to criticize the family, to protect the child, to pass new legislation, and to fight male violence against both women and children, thus illus- trating the ways psychological knowledge was used in civil society to convert private ills into political problems and to further universalize feminist struggles. The result of these tactics was that the state and the courts slowly started to indict a new category of perpetrators and to reg- ulate men’s behavior inside the family.

Another group that was instrumental in promoting the therapeutic narrative consisted of Vietnam veterans who used the category of trauma to receive social and cultural benefits. In 1980, the American Psychiatric Association officially recognized the category of trauma. “The establish- ment of PTSD resulted, in part, from intense lobbying by mental health workers and lay activists on behalf of Vietnam War veterans. The PTSD diagnosis acknowledged and dignified the psychological suffering of American veterans amid their ambivalent reception by a divided and

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war-weary populace. It grounded their puzzling symptoms and behav- iors in tangible external events, promising to free individual veterans of the stigma of mental illness and guaranteeing them (in theory, at least) sympathy, medical attention, and compensation.”43 Here again we see at work the blurring of political and private categories and the attempt to ground claims (to compensation or judiciary pursuits) in the universal categories of “psychological damage.” Following the institutional and epistemological logic of the therapeutic discourse, PTSD became pro- gressively applied to a wide variety of occurrences, such as rape, terror attacks, crime, and even accidents, thus contributing to the expansion of the category as an illness construct applied to an ever-widening pool of victims.

As Ron Eyerman has argued, it is not the experience that produces traumatic effect but rather how we remember it. Experience, as cultural sociologists know, is mediated by culture.44 Both feminists and Vietnam veterans could construct certain experiences as traumatic because they held in common a few cultural assumptions that in turn could coalesce into a memory of trauma: that people could be damaged psychically, not just physically; that there could be a considerable time lag between the time at which such damage was perpetrated and its actual consequences; that there could be symptoms of PTSD without necessarily a self-aware recollection of the events that led to it; that compensation could be claimed (or indictment pursued) decades after the trauma; that trauma severely threatened the possibilities of self-development; and that all cit- izens had an equal right to a healthy psyche. These actors—feminists and Vietnam veterans—were only paving the way for a variety of other polit- ical actors who were increasingly entering civil society by making claims to victimhood and psychic damage in the name of ideals of personhood that intertwined the psychic and the political.

From the multitude of examples illustrating the inflation of the num- ber of psychological diseases in general and the expansion of the defini- tion of PTSD, we can cite that of Carol Wilson and Mary Ellen Fromouth, two psychologists who argue that much of what is called sibling rivalry should be properly relabeled as relationships of abuse. As Frank Furedi reports, “Moral entrepreneurs attempting to raise public ‘awareness’ of

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this issue argue that emotional abuse is present in all forms of sibling abuse. They suggest that survivors of sibling abuse often display signs of PTSD, complex post-traumatic disorder and dissociative identity disor- der.”45 Once they are redefined as suffering from any given disorder resulting from PTSD, victims of siblings abuse can be processed by the vast pharmaceutical-health-media-legal industries, which in turn pro- vide the adequate vocabularies and cultural frames to construct a story, make claims on institutions and agencies, and demand reparations.

While I agree with Eva Moskowitz and Frank Furedi that from the 1970s onward political problems were increasingly framed as personal and psychic deficiencies,46 I do not believe, as they do, that this means political problems were privatized or disconnected from politics. On the contrary, once psychologized, social problems were refunneled into the public sphere to make new and expanding claims on the polity (which did not, however, take the form of organized ideological propositions). This constitutes, undoubtedly, one of the most obvious transformations of the public sphere in the 1990s, a transformation resulting from the fact that so many different social actors had an interest in promoting a narra- tive of disease and victimhood.

This analysis offers an outstanding example of what Latour calls a “process of translation”—the process in which individual or collective actors constantly work to translate their own language, problems, iden- tities, or interests into those of others.47 Feminists, psychologists, the state and its armies of social workers, academics working in the field of men- tal health, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical companies have “translated” the therapeutic narrative because all these actors, for differ- ent reasons, have had a strong interest in promoting and expanding a narrative of the self defined by pathology, thereby de facto promoting a narrative of disease. The therapeutic persuasion thus functions as an enlarged cultural “trading zone,” a twist on the expression of the histo- rian of science Peter Galison, which designates that various groups with different interests and ways of thinking are engaged in the exchange of knowledge and symbols even when they differ on the meaning of what they are exchanging.48

These various actors have all converged in creating a realm of action in

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which mental and emotional health is the primary commodity circulated, a realm in turn marking the boundaries of an “emotional field,” namely a sphere of social life in which the state, academia, different segments of cultural industries, groups of professionals accredited by the state and universities, and the large market of medications and popular culture have intersected and created a domain of action with its own language, rules, objects, and boundaries. The rivalry between various schools of psychology, or even the rivalry between psychiatry and psychology, should not overshadow their ultimate agreement on defining emotional life as something in need of management and control and on regulating it under the incessantly expanding ideal of health channeled by the state and the market. A great variety of social and institutional actors compete with one another to define self-realization, health, or pathology, thus making emotional health a new commodity produced, circulated, and recycled in social and economic sites that take the form of a field. The constitution of this “emotional field” explains the emergence of new forms of capital (see next chapter) and new schemas to understand the self in terms of disease, health, suffering, and self-realization. In the same way that artistic fields define “true” art, emotional fields define “real” (mental, emotional) health. In the same way that artistic fields define the set of competencies necessary to evaluate art, emotional fields define the emotional and personal dispositions according to which health, maturity, or self-realization is established. How such fields produce new forms of habitus is what I examine in the remainder of this chapter and in the next chapter.

T h e T h e r a p e u t i c N a r r a t i v e o f S e l f h o o d

The Therapeutic Narrative As noted earlier, the therapeutic persuasion has transformed what was once classified as a moral problem into a disease and may thus be under- stood as part and parcel of the broader phenomenon of the medicaliza- tion of social life. The therapeutic discourse has indeed performed a mas- sive cultural recoding of what was previously defined as immoral behavior into what Mariana Valverde has called a “disease of the will,” a

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disease in which the self’s capacity to monitor its actions and to change them is at stake.49 With the injunction that we become our most “com- plete” or “self-realized” selves, no guideline was provided to help deter- mine what differentiated a complete from an incomplete self. If “the real self” is continually evolving and if, as Maslow states, “one’s needs, wishes, feelings, values, goals, and behavior all change with age and experience,”50 then it is impossible to establish what the self-realized self actually is. Conversely and symmetrically, any behavior could be classi- fied (conceived of) as “self-defeating,” “neurotic,” or “unhealthy.” In fact, when one examines the assumption that underlies most texts using therapeutic language, a clear pattern structuring the therapeutic form of thought emerges: the ideal of health or self-realization defines, a contrario, dysfunctions that are produced by the very category of the “fully self- realized life.” That is, the claim that an un-self-realized life needs therapy is analogous to the claim that someone who does not use the full poten- tial of his muscles is sick,51 with the difference that in the psychological discourse it is not even clear what qualifies as a “strong muscle.” This fundamental logic shapes the therapeutic narrative (see chapter 2).

Narrative has become a key category to understand how selfhood is constituted through culture, how the self communicates with others, and how one makes sense of one’s place in a particular social environ- ment. Life stories focus attention on certain objects through the ways in which they connect events in the life course together. Narratives contain an abstract (summary of the gist of the narrative); an orientation in space, time, situation, and participants; a complicating action (sequence of events); an evaluation (significance and meaning of the action, atti- tude of the narrator); and a resolution.52 A biographical narrative is a narrative that selects and connects the “significant events” in one’s life, thus giving a person’s life meaning, direction, and purpose. Students of autobiographical discourse have argued that narratives shape our self- understandings and the ways we interact with others. Indeed, how we grasp our lives and communicate them to others depends on the narra- tive form we choose “to tell our lives.”53 Life stories have a form. To use Paul Ricoeur ’s expression, they “emplot the self” in specific ways, inte- grating the various events of one’s life within an overall narrative frame-

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work or story that carries a general theme.54 Narratives of self draw upon broader, collective narratives, values, and scripts that imbue these personal stories with socially significant meanings. Personal narratives may also embed a collective dimension, as they can be linked to master or grand “cultural key scenarios,”55 to use Sherry Ortner ’s felicitous expression.

The main characteristic of therapeutic narratives is that the goal of the story dictates the events that are selected to tell the story as well as the ways in which these events, as components of the narrative, are con- nected.56 Narrative goals such as “sexual liberation,” “self-realization,” “professional success,” or “intimacy” dictate the complication that will prevent me from attaining my goal, which will in turn dictate which past events of one’s life I will pay attention to and the emotional logic that will bind these events together (e.g., “I should have a life with intimacy; yet I do not experience intimacy; that is because all the men I am with are dis- tant; the men I am with are distant because I choose them this way; I choose distant men because my mother never attended to my needs. How do I know my needs were unfulfilled then? Because they are unfulfilled now”). In that sense, the therapeutic narrative is retrospectively emplot- ted or “written backwards”: the “end” of the story (my present predica- ment and my prospective improvement) initiates the story.

But we arrive here at an extraordinary paradox: therapeutic culture— the primary vocation of which is to heal—must generate a narrative structure in which suffering and victimhood actually define the self. Indeed, the therapeutic narrative functions only by conceiving of life events as the markers of failed or thwarted opportunities for self- development. Thus the narrative of self-help is fundamentally sustained by a narrative of suffering. This is because suffering is the central “knot” of the narrative, what initiates and motivates it, helps it unfold, and makes it “work.” Therapeutic storytelling is thus inherently circular: to tell a story is to tell a story about a “diseased self.” As Michel Foucault laconically remarked in his History of Sexuality, the care of the self, cast in medical metaphors of health, paradoxically encouraged a view of a “sick” self in need of correction and transformation.57

Let me offer an example of such narrative. As suggested in the previ-

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ous chapter, intimacy was posited by psychologists as an ideal to be reached in sexual and marital relations. In the context of close relation- ships, intimacy, like self-realization and other categories invented by psychologists, became a code word for “health.” Healthy relationships were intimate, and intimacy was healthy. Once the notion of intimacy was posited as the norm and standard for healthy relationships, the absence of intimacy could become the organizing overall narrative frame of a variety of problems. In the therapeutic narrative, an absence of inti- macy can only point to one’s emotional makeup: for example, to what psychologists call a fear of intimacy. Quoting a therapist, a Redbook article aptly makes the point as follows: “In our society, people are more afraid of intimacy than sex. . . . Typically, people with intimacy problems have trouble feeling sexual in close relationships, although they may function very well in more casual affairs.”58 Therapeutic narratives are supremely tautological, for once an emotional state is defined as healthy and desir- able, then all behaviors or states that fall short of this ideal point to prob- lematic emotions or unconscious barriers, which in turn must be under- stood and managed in the framework of the therapeutic narrative. “Some couples feel mismatched: They think that the distance in their marriages exists because they are married to the wrong person. They both may have chosen their incompatible mates because they need distance: If they were married to someone they really liked, they would have to be intimate and then they would be in even greater trouble.”59 Instead of taking “incom- patibility” as a cause for discord, incompatibility is taken to be the symp- tom of deep unconscious fears, the unearthing of which will initiate the narrative reworking of the self. “Fear of intimacy” becomes a narrative peg for intimate relationships, a way of framing, explaining, and trans- forming them. If distant men (or women) are really only afraid of some- thing they actually deeply long for, then this narrative provides both the dominant theme of their deficient identity and the goal toward which such an identity can be re-formed.

The symbolic structure of therapeutic narratives is highly compatible with the cultural industry because narrative pegs can be easily changed, thus making the psychological profession susceptible to renewable con- sumption of “narratives” and “narrative fashions.” To illustrate, in the

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1980s, a new narrative frame was offered in a book that, one year after its publication, had sold more than three million copies: Women Who Love Too Much.60 That book replaced “fear” with a new narrative peg, namely “addiction,” to play the narrative role of explaining why some relations fell short of the ideal of intimacy psychologists had constructed. Any behavior that falls short of the therapeutic ideal requires an explanation.61

In this process, opposites can become equivalent: in Norwood’s book, for example, it turns out that addiction actually hides fear. “If you have found yourself obsessed with a man, you may have suspected that the root of that obsession was not love but fear. We who love obsessively are full of fear.”62 And how does one know that one has the disease of “lov- ing too much”? Simply by looking at one’s own childhood. Childhood spent in a dysfunctional family is likely to produce addiction. What is a dysfunctional family? A family where one’s needs are not met. And how does one know that one’s needs were not met in childhood? Simply by looking at one’s present situation. The nature of the tautology is obvious: any present predicament points to a past injury (which can range from severe physical abuse to lack of love or benign negligence). A past lack of love can manifest in two equally opposite ways: either one is “afraid of intimacy” or one “compensates for lack of love by being a care-giver.”63

Loving too much and not loving enough are thus converted into symp- toms of the same pathology. The crux of the reasoning that lies behind these claims again follows the psychologist’s reasoning: by definition, healthy love does not hurt and is not painful; if anything hurts or goes awry, it necessarily points to a psychological deficiency of the person who loves, a deficiency that can mean either of two opposite facts, loving too much or not enough. “When being in love means being in pain we are loving too much. . . . When our relationship jeopardizes our emo- tional well-being . . . we are definitely loving too much.”64 Intimacy and health thus become equated and equivalent. “But we are not attracted to healthy men, men with whom there was some hope of getting our own needs met. . . . They seem boring to us. We are attracted to men who replicate for us the struggle we endured with our parents, when we tried to be good enough, loving enough, worthy enough, helpful enough, and smart enough to win the love, attention, and approval from those who

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could not give us what we needed, because of their own problems and preoccupations. Now we operate as though love, attention, and approval don’t count unless we are able to extract them from a man who is also unable to readily give them to us, because of his own problems and pre- occupations.”65 The therapeutic narrative structure can produce contra- dictory plot lines—fear of intimacy or addiction to intimacy—that orga- nize the self in a consistent way by finding the causes of a deficient relationship in a repressed or forgotten past. How is this narrative struc- tured? Or more exactly, how does its structure reflect some important ideological mechanisms of the therapeutic discourse?

A Demonic Narrative William Sewell Jr. and many others have suggested that institutions build cultural coherence not so much by trying to establish uniformity as by trying to organize difference. Institutions are “constantly engaged in efforts not only to normalize or homogenize but also to hierarchize, encapsulate, exclude, criminalize, hegemonize, or marginalize practices and populations that diverge from the sanctioned ideal.”66 What is inter- esting and perhaps unprecedented in the therapeutic persuasion is that it has institutionalized the self through “difference” that is actually gener- ated by the moral and scientific ideal of health and normality.

Through the positing of an undefined and endlessly expanding ideal of health, any and all behaviors could be labeled, a contrario, “pathologi- cal,” “sick,” “neurotic,” or, more simply, “dysfunctional” or “un-self- realized.” The therapeutic narrative posits normality as the goal of the narrative of self, but because that goal is never given a clear positive con- tent it in fact produces a wide variety of un-self-realized and therefore sick people. The narrative of self-help is thus not the remedy to failure or misery; rather, the very injunction to strive for higher levels of health and self- realization produces narratives of suffering. The contemporary twist on Freud’s famous claim is that we are the masters of our own house, even when, or perhaps especially when, that house is on fire.

In other words, the narrative of therapeutic self-help is not, as struc- turalists would have it, the binary opposite of a narrative of “disease.” Rather, the very same narrative that promotes self-help is a narrative of

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disease and psychic suffering. Because cultural schemas can be extended or transposed to new situations, feminists, veterans, courts, state services, and professionals of mental care appropriated and translated the same schema of disease and self-realization to organize the self, making the narrative of self-realization a truly Derridean entity, containing and enacting simultaneously that which it wants to exclude, namely disease, suffering, and pain.

This narrative does not constitute a distortion of psychoanalysis but was embedded within it from the start. For example, Margaret Mahler, one of the foremost early proponents of psychoanalysis in America, claimed: “It seems inherent in the human condition that not even the most normally endowed child, with the most optimally accessible mother, is able to weather the separation-individuation process without crises, come out unscathed by the rapprochement struggle, and enter the oedipal phase without developmental difficulty.”67 If the “most normally endowed child” and the “most optimally accessible mother” still produce “difficulties” and “crises,” then both normal and pathological children—all children—do not and cannot achieve mental health and consequently need the help of psychology to surmount the crises inherent in the very experience of liv- ing. This basic vision of health—intrinsic in the therapeutic narrative of self-liberation and self-realization—leans on a narrative of disease.

This narrative may be characterized as a “demonic narrative.”68 As explained by Alon Nahi and Haim Omer, a demonic narrative situates the source of suffering in an evil principle that is outside the subject, whether Satan or a traumatic event. This form of evil is characterized by its ability to insidiously get inside the person. Evil is inside a person and is basically hidden from observers and even from the subject’s own view. In the same way that the devil can take control of a person without his or her knowledge, trauma can leave its destructive marks without the per- son’s awareness. Moreover, in the demonic narrative, the identity of the person is taken over and transformed by the evil principle, which has insidiously entered his or her soul and body. Similarly, in the therapeutic narrative a trauma forges a new identity. Another characteristic of the demonic narrative is that only an outside person can correctly decipher the signs of psychic contamination. This is why confession is central to

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the purification process, which must follow the identification of the demonic possession. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, in the demonic narrative one thing and its opposite are both interpreted as proof of the presence of the demon. Acknowledgment that one has met with Satan is as strong a proof of one’s encounter with the devil as vehe- ment denial. Similarly, to become aware of one’s psychological problems is as indicative of their power as one’s denial of them.

To summarize: in order to explain how therapy became a basic schema for the self, we must account for the fact that it has become part of the routine operations of large institutions that command many cultural and social resources, or what William Sewell calls an “institutional node,”69

such as the state or the market. Moreover, the therapeutic narrative is located at the tenuous, conflict-ridden, and unstable junction between the market and the language of rights that has increasingly saturated civil society. Institutionalization and diffuse dispersal of the therapeutic nar- rative code throughout society go hand in hand and are key to under- standing how the therapeutic self was made into a narrative schema organizing the self.

P e r f o r m i n g t h e S e l f t h r o u g h T h e r a p y

Cultural schemas are deep forms of cultural encoding in that they orga- nize perception of the world within basic structures that in turn constrain the ways we communicate and interact with our environment. Because of its wide institutional resonance, the therapeutic narrative has become a basic self-schema, organizing stories about the self and, more specifically, autobiographical discourse. It is the form as much as the content of how we make sense of ourselves in the world. Cultural schemas can be extended or transposed to new situations when the opportunity arises. In that sense a schematic structure is virtual, that is, it can be actualized in a potentially broad and undetermined range of situations. “Cultural action puts texts into practice.”70 But just how does it do that? Therapeutic texts have become translated into practice because from the start they were texts that were performed. These performances started in the consulting room of the psychoanalyst but later became considerably extended when new sites were added, most conspicuously the support group and the

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television talk show. “Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation. . . . It is the meaning that they, as social actors, consciously or unconsciously wish to have others believe. In order for their display to be effective, actors must offer a plausible performance, one that leads those to whom their actions and gestures are directed to accept their motives and explanations as a reasonable account.”71

The therapeutic narrative structures the mode of speech in a performa- tive genre that has emerged in the last fifteen years and has transformed the entire medium of TV, namely the television talk show. The most suc- cessful and well-known example of this television genre is the Oprah Winfrey talk show, viewed by more than thirty-three million people daily. Oprah Winfrey has notoriously used a therapeutic style of interviewing and has intensely promoted a therapeutic style of self-improvement. As I have argued elsewhere, her vast cultural and economic enterprise has depended on her capacity to perform her inner self, that is, on her capac- ity to convince her audience of the authenticity of her suffering and self- overcoming. Moreover, her show has been a platform for the performance of the problems and struggles of ordinary guests who, in the act of their self, use the therapeutic narrative. Here is an example of how the Oprah Winfrey show provides its guests with a therapeutic narrative with which to frame and perform their self-understanding.

Sue wants to file for divorce. Her husband, Gary, feels distressed by the prospect and very much wants to go back to his wife. His desire to go back to his estranged wife is framed as a psychological problem, pre- sented under the broad heading of “why people want to get back to their ex.” A psychotherapist, Carolyn Bushong, has the primary function of framing Gary’s story as a problem and of providing the general narrative accounting for his behavior:

Oprah: We’ve been joined by Carolyn Bushong. She’s a psychotherapist, and her book is called Loving Him without Losing You. And she says that love is not usually the reason that people can’t get over their exes. It is?

Bushong: Well, there are a lot of reasons, but a lot of it is rejection. And I think that’s what’s hooking him [Gary] in here — is that he needs — you need to win her back to feel like you’re OK with yourself. . . . [Later in the show] Gary is addicted to that. And “that” is that feeling that “I’m a

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bad person. That — my ex says I’m a bad person. And maybe I am a bad person. So if I can convince her that I’m not a bad person, then they’ll be OK again . . . in righting the wrong, it is the part, again, where maybe I feel guilty about what I did and I want to — I want to make it up to that person so that my guilt can go away.

Oprah: Do you feel some guilt, too, Gary? Gary: Sure, I do. Bushong: Yeah, about [your trying to control Sue]. Oprah: And you want to say, if you would just take me back, I can show

you I want to, and not do that anymore. Gary: That’s the way I felt in the past, yes. Oprah: Yeah, OK, that you can’t live or with — live with or without the ex. Bushong: And that gets into addicted — addictive relationships. There are

so many relationships where people feel like, you know, “I want this person, I love them, but I hate them.”72

A few observations are called for. First, a group of people who “love too much” or people “who can’t live without their ex” are simultaneously constituted as sick people and as consumers by the profession of therapy, the publishing industry, and the television talk show, thus illustrating that the cultural power and pervasiveness of therapy is related to the fact that consumer culture has been one of the main venues for therapy. Second, we can observe how the therapeutic narrative constitutes emotions, here guilt, as public objects to be exposed, discussed, argued over, and, most of all, performed, that is, communicated for an audience and evaluated for their authenticity. Thus, in becoming therapeutic, the self becomes both more private (centered on its inner interiority) and more public (in pos- session of a language to make private life accountable and subject to the objective evaluation of others). Third, the therapeutic biography is an ideal commodity in that it demands no or little economic investment—it demands only that the person allow us to peek into the dark corners of his or her psyche and that he or she be willing to tell a story. Narrating and being transformed by one’s narration are the very commodities pro- duced, processed, and circulated by a wide array of media outlets (women’s and men’s magazines, talk shows, radio call-in programs, etc.) because they can generate an almost unprecedented surplus value. In fact, what grants the therapeutic narrative its performative character is its location in the market. If Oprah Winfrey has become one of the richest

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women in the United States, it is because talk shows demand very little economic investment and because the conversion of private woes into public concerns appeals to popular taste by transgressing the cultural boundary between private and public. Fourth, in this account, the thera- peutic narrative exerts an obvious and “substantial interpretive sway” over processes of self-interpretation.73 What helps a person rewrite the story of his or her life is the therapeutic goal of the story.74 Finally, this nar- rative foregrounds negative emotions such as shame, guilt, fear, and inadequacy, yet it does not activate moral schemes of blame or guilt.

The therapeutic narrative has significantly transformed autobio- graphical discourse in that it makes the public exposure of psychic suf- fering central to the account of oneself. If nineteenth-century autobio- graphical narratives were characterized by their “rag to riches” storyline, a new contemporary autobiographical genre takes an opposite character: these stories are about psychic agony, even in the midst of fame and wealth, and they are about the very act of telling them. Three examples will clarify my point. The first concerns Oprah Winfrey, who, at the apex of her glory, could construct her life as follows:

Before the Book [an autobiographical book she was supposed to write], she was emotionally adrift in the murky and suffocating waters of self-doubt. . . . What matters is how she felt inside, in the deepest corridors of her soul. And there, she never felt good enough. Everything flows from that: her perpetual struggle with obesity (“The Pounds represented the weight of my life”), her sexually active adolescence (“It wasn’t because I liked running around having sex. It was because once I started I didn’t want the other boys to be mad at me”), her willingness to make a fool of herself for a man in the name of love (“I was in relationship after relationship where I was mistreated because I felt that was what I deserved”). “I know it appears I have every- thing,” Oprah says, glancing around her $20 million, 88,000 square foot film and TV complex just west of downtown Chicago. “And people think because you’re on TV you have the world by a string. But I have struggled with MY own self-value for many, many years. And I am just now coming to terms with it.”75

The narrative of psychic suffering recasts success biographies as biographies in which the self itself is never quite “made” and in which one’s psychic suffering becomes an ongoing constitutive aspect of one’s

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identity. In the new therapeutic autobiography, success is not what drives the story; rather, it is precisely the possibility that the self is or can be undone in the midst of worldly success. To take another example, an actress as young and successful as Brooke Shields can write an autobiog- raphy whose interest lies almost exclusively in its account of her post- partum depression.76 The value of such accounts lies in the fact that in the therapeutic worldview even successful lives are still in the making, with the very act of telling the story being one aspect of such process of self- making. In a similar way, Jane Fonda’s autobiography77 is told as the unfolding of an emotional and psychological drama that starts with an unhappy childhood spent with a cold and distant father, who, in her story, becomes the hidden but real cause for her three equally failed mar- riages. Fonda’s book is sarcastically reviewed by the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a way that highlights the overuse of the therapeutic formula: “Fonda offers six decades’ worth of exhaustive excavations into her lost and found selves. ‘My life so far’ is not a lyrical title, but it captures Jungian Jane’s Sisyphean, Oprah-phean struggle to process her pain and banish her demons. Her book is a psychobabble loop of . . . forfeiting her authenticity and feeling disembodied, then try- ing to reinhabit her body and ‘own’ her womanhood and her space and her vagina, and her leadership and her wrinkles and her mother, so that her ‘authentic self’ can emerge.”78 All three autobiographies of powerful, successful, and glamorous women are thus told as tales of past wounds, in which the protagonist is still at work in her successful and glamorous life and is perpetually overcoming her emotional problems.

The narrative of self-help and self-realization is a narrative of memory and of the memory of suffering, but it is simultaneously a narrative in which the exercise of memory brings redemption from it. Central to this narrative is the assumption that one exercises one’s memory of suffering to free oneself from it.

Around the 1990s, such confessional autobiographies became a well- established genre. As Furedi suggests, the “illness memoir became one of the most distinct literary genres of the 1990s.”79 In fact, the illness mem- oir has given rise to “what Bookseller magazine refers to as ‘mis lit,’ or ‘misery memoirs,’ in which the author tells of his or her triumph over

personal trauma.”80 Strangely enough, this genre seems to have particu- larly flourished among the privileged, who, I suggest, can use the narra- tive to further bestow on themselves symbolic capital, to show that their life is still a struggle against (and a success over) an adversity that has now a psychic character. To illustrate the cultural distinctiveness of this narrative genre, we may quote here Abraham Lincoln’s remark about his own life: “It is a great piece of folly to attempt to make anything out of my early life. It can all be condensed into a single sentence . . . the short and simple annals of the poor.”81 The therapeutic narrative is radically opposed to this way of telling one’s life story, as it consists precisely in making everything out of early life. In conformity with the stoicism and restraint that pervaded much of Protestant culture, Lincoln refused to adorn poverty and suffering with meaning. In contrast, the therapeutic narrative consists precisely in adorning with maximum meaning any and all forms of suffering, both real and invented.

It is tempting to lament the pervasiveness of such narrative. But we should resist this temptation. Instead, we should explain how its sym- bolic structure has resonated with the structure of wants and desires of contemporary men and women. I posit that the therapeutic narrative has had a wide cultural resonance for a number of reasons.

1. It addresses and explains contradictory emotions—loving too much or not loving enough; being aggressive or not being assertive enough. In marketing terms, it is like a cigarette that could satisfy both smokers and nonsmokers as well as smokers of different brands of cigarettes. In other words, the therapeutic structure is a generic structure that lacks specific content and is therefore highly mobile and flexible, adaptable to a wide variety of ills, able to account for individual particularity, yet able to be shared by many others. This generic flexibility in turn enables the constitution of what David Held calls “communities of fate,”82 or communities organized around common suffering, best exemplified by the phenomenon of the support group.

2. The therapeutic narrative taps into the subject simultaneously as a patient and as a consumer, as someone in need of management

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and care and as someone who can, if helped, be in control of his or her actions. In that respect, it merges two contradictory constructions of self at work in contemporary culture: the self as a (potential or actual) victim of social circumstances and the self as the sole author and actor of one’s life.

3. The narrative uses the basic cultural template of the Judeo- Christian narrative. That template that is both regressive and progressive: regressive because it is about past events that are, so to speak, still present and at work in people’s lives, and pro- gressive because the goal of the narrative is to establish prospec- tive redemption, here, emotional health. In that way, the narra- tive is a very efficient tool to establish coherence and continuity for the self.

4. The narrative makes one responsible for one’s psychic well- being, yet does so by removing any notion of moral culpability. It enables one to mobilize the cultural schemes and values of moral individualism and of self-improvement. Yet by transpos- ing these to childhood and to deficient families, it exonerates the person from the moral weight of being at fault for living an unsatisfactory life.

5. The narrative is performative, and in that sense it is more than a story because it reorganizes experience as it tells it. In the same way that performative verbs do the very action they proffer, a wide variety of social sites such as support groups or talk shows provide a platform on which healing is performed. This is an important feature, as it is in the experience of self-change and in the construction of that experience that modern subjects experience themselves as morally and socially most competent. Self-change is perhaps the chief source of contemporary moral worth.

6. The therapeutic discourse is a contagious cultural structure because it can be duplicated and spread to collaterals, grandchil- dren, and spouses. For example, second- and third-generation trauma victims now have their own support groups by virtue of their grandparents’ having been actual victims of the Holocaust.83

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This is possible because they draw on a symbolic structure that enables them to constitute their identity as sick subjects to be healed. In this way, the therapeutic narrative can activate family lineage and create continuity, both vertically and horizontally.

7. This narrative has been very compelling for men and women alike because it taps into the (traditionally male) ideal of self- reliance through the foregrounding of emotional life and be- cause it enables self-management in both the private and the public sphere. To that extent, this narrative can be said to be gender blind.

8. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, the therapeutic narrative emerges from the fact that the individual has become embedded in a culture saturated with the notion of rights. The psychologi- cal persuasion provides the lexicon and grammar to articulate claims to “recognition,” claims that one’s private suffering ought to be publicly acknowledged and remedied. Like no other cul- tural language, the language of psychology mixes together private emotionality and public norms. The language of psy- chology has codified the private self and made this private self ready for public scrutiny and exposure. This mechanism can transform suffering into victimhood and victimhood into an identity. The therapeutic narrative calls on us to improve our lives, but it can do so only by making us attend to our defi- ciencies, suffering, and dysfunctions. In making this suffering a public form of speech, in which one must expose to others the injuries inflicted on the self by others, one becomes ipso facto a public victim, somebody whose psychic damage points to the past injuries perpetrated by others and whose status as victim is acquired in the very act of telling others one’s injuries in public. In becoming public, this speech not only allows the subject to obtain symbolic reparation (in the form of recognition) but also compels him or her to change and to improve his or her con- dition. It thereby inaugurates a new model of selfhood and responsibility: it makes one responsible for one’s future but not for one’s past. It promotes a self that is passive—in that it is

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defined by wounds inflicted by others—but is commanded to become highly active, in that it is summoned to change. It is highly responsible for self-transformation, yet it is not held morally accountable for its deficiencies. This split model of re- sponsibility marks, I believe, a new cultural form of selfhood.

My last suggestion is greatly at odds with the claim of many com- mentators that the American creed of success and self-reliance is being eroded by therapeutic self-absorption. Christina Hoff Sommers and Sally Satel in particular have forcefully claimed that “therapism” corrodes a stoic attitude and a sense of self-responsibility.84 As I have suggested, this claim is mistaken and fails to recognize that therapeutic culture has marked a major advance in the ethos of self-reliance; although it takes a stance of victimhood and moral disculpation for the past, it enjoins a vol- untarist responsibility for the future.

A N a r r a t i v e i n A c t i o n

Cognitive typifications, or schemas, should be viewed as institutions “deposited” in mental frames. Similarly and conversely, mental struc- tures point back to the institutions from which they emanate.85 As Terry Eagleton suggests, “A successful ideology must work both practically and theoretically, and discover some way of linking these levels. It must extend from an elaborated system of thought to the minutiae of everyday life, from a scholarly treatise to a shout in the street.”86 Indeed, ideologi- cal systems are particularly prone to be “action oriented,” that is, to make their propositions and beliefs binding through an array of practices and behaviors. Only within the context of a practical framework does a theoretical discourse become integrated into ordinary conceptions of the self. In other words, to circulate, culture must be embodied in social prac- tices. To be operative, cultural ideas need to crystallize around objects, interaction rituals, and social performances. Support groups have served as one of the main cultural vehicles for the translation of the textual and institutional structure of therapy into a cultural performance. In this respect, the emergence of support groups should be understood as the

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other side of the cultural coin of institutionalized therapeutic language. The therapeutic structure exists in the dense interplay of a textual culture and of social performances, chiefly through support groups.

Support groups are very diverse in orientation and method. Their themes and methods range from meditation groups to primal scream groups, assertiveness training groups, Alcoholics Anonymous, groups for survivors of sexual abuse, rape, trauma, or genocide, and groups for single persons, overeaters, and people with anorexia. In fact, there is such a wide variety of support groups that if we were to define them by their content the very notion of the support group would dissolve. That there can be such a wide variety of themes around which support groups get organized suggests that they have a deeper cultural structure in common. While much has been written about support groups, few have noted the simple fact that support groups activate and perform the structure of therapeutic narratives. The therapeutic narrative schema makes it possi- ble to emplot the self in ways that turn the narration of the self into a pub- lic performance.

Support groups are characterized by making private stories into pub- lic communicative acts.87 The mechanism that enables the translation of the private into the public is therapeutic: it is the therapeutic narrative code that dictates how private stories can be shared, the motivation in telling them in public, and how the audience should interpret them. If we view the support group as a cultural framework in which one enacts and acquires an identity narrative, it becomes obvious that the support group is a cultural form in the sense given by Simmel, that is, a way to organize social experience, negotiate distance between self and others, and draw boundaries between private and public self.

What makes self-esteem, eating, alcohol, or being a third-generation Holocaust survivor into problems to be exposed, told, and shared in the context of a support group is the close interplay between three categories of narratives: a generic therapeutic narrative, which conceives of the self as in need of development and/or reparation and that summons the self to reshape the present through the exercise of memory; a theme narrative, shared by all members of the support group (obesity, alcohol, divorce, social anxiety, etc.), that constitutes the focus and the experience presum-

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ably shared by all members of the support group; and finally a personal, customized narrative for each member. Support groups structure encoun- ters and storytelling through these three categories of narrative. I would even venture to say that the therapeutic narrative could spread through society as a set of techniques to present and perform the self because it combined a standardized therapeutic narrative—applicable to men and women, youth and adults, “normally neurotic” and pathologically dys- functional persons—with one that was highly individualized and cus- tomized, adapted to the life circumstances of the person who used it.

While many support groups have remained outside the purview of the market and have developed in the interstices of civil society, the form of the support group has increasingly become commodified. I would like to focus here on a practice that bears affinities to the support group with- out being equivalent to it, namely the for-profit workshop that lasts any- where from a few hours to a few days. These workshops are usually led by people who, like the leaders of support groups, claim to have them- selves benefited from the techniques they offer. These workshops have a more clearly defined commercial character and illustrate well the inser- tion of therapy in the market and its commodification. While support groups emanate from civil society, these workshops attempt to commer- cialize the therapeutic narrative and to package it in a standardized, short, and recyclable formula.

In 1998, I participated in one of the three-day Forum workshops pro- vided by the Landmark Education Corporation (LEC). I chose this par- ticular workshop because it is the most successful global therapeutic cul- tural form—it not only “exports” global psychological cultural frames in specific locales but presupposes them—and because it had the reputa- tion for having a significant impact on its participants.

The Forum is an offshoot and development of est, which was founded by Werner Erhard, a former car retailer who had a “revelation” that he transformed into “empowerment” workshops. With no small amount of bravado, the Web page presenting Werner Erhard claims that

Werner Erhard, a force for change, became a cultural icon and shaped human consciousness in the last half of the 20th century. In 1971, Erhard introduced the breakthrough notion of “transformation” to the American

public — a notion that redefined how people saw their lives and continues to be seen as a powerful, practical and relevant resource in contemporary society. Transformation, according to Erhard, creates a clear distinction between changing an existing model (no matter how significantly) and creating an entirely new model. This thinking gave rise to the idea that human beings could transform their lives in a very short period of time yielding powerful, long-lasting results.

Erhard developed a dynamic, evolutionary “think tank” for leading-edge programs designed to maximize personal and organizational effectiveness, communication, and the ability to relate to others. The results were extraor- dinary. To this day, people report remarkable, sustainable benefits in their personal and professional lives — in their families, careers, organizations, and communities.

Millions of people have been influenced by Erhard’s work through direct participation or the cultural change that occurred as thought leaders built upon and applied Erhard’s thinking. The multi-billion-dollar personal growth industry continues to draw and expand on Erhard’s original concepts.88

A few elements are interesting here. Like its successor the Forum, est was a hodge-podge of doctrines and ideas, religious (Zen and scientol- ogy), philosophical (most notably Heidegger’s existentialism), and psy- chological (most conspicuously echoing Maslow and Rogers). The work- shop is not, strictly speaking, psychological, but it has used many of the themes and techniques characteristic of the therapeutic persuasion and more specifically of humanist psychology. For example, an advanced course called the Wisdom Course is described as an “eight-month-long inquiry that transforms our ordinary conversations and ways of relating to others, from a fundamentally childish way of being that we inherited from our past to a fundamentally adult way of being that fully utilizes our best capabilities.” It is noteworthy that Erhard was not a psychologist but an ordinary, nonprofessional, white-collar worker. What would later become an international workshop for self-change could spring from an ordinary member of the American middle class because the therapeutic language and narrative had become so deeply entrenched in American culture that a nonprofessional psychologist could use its basic categories and mix them with elements taken from the New Age movement to offer a framework for self-change. The second noteworthy element in the cre-

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ation of the Forum is that it represented an unprecedented attempt to commodify the therapeutic narrative, in that it could now become a fifty- or sixty-hour object of consumption. Indeed, the Erhard Web site esti- mates that close to one million people worldwide underwent the est training before the seminars were halted in 1991, to be replaced by LEC. LEC grosses some $50 million a year in business and has attracted several hundreds of thousands participants worldwide. It is headquartered in San Francisco and has forty-two offices in eleven countries, thus sug- gesting that it is a global enterprise.

The workshop functions as a global company, both in the sense that its structure is designed to spread worldwide and in the sense that it offers a homogeneous cultural form that it circulates worldwide. At the top of the corporation is a body of fifty leaders from different countries who are trained in the United States. These leaders are the only ones authorized to deliver the workshop at the senior level. They carry programs in more than one hundred locations in the United States, Canada, the Middle East, Australia, Europe, Asia, and India. What enables the corporation to function as a global cultural form is its simultaneous use of Far Eastern spirituality and therapeutic schemas,89 both of which have become per- manent cultural features of Western cultures in the form of the New Age movement. Reflecting an important aspect of the New Age movement, the workshop seamlessly blends New Age spirituality with psychologi- cal techniques of self-knowledge and discussion. But the most interesting feature is LEC’s dual economic structure: a commercial structure embod- ied in various workshops delivered only by authorized leaders and a vol- untary structure, that is, a series of meetings held after the main work- shop in which the attendees rehearse the lessons learned during the workshops with the help of a group of volunteers whose main function is to keep the participants within the cultural orbit of the Forum and to motivate them to attend the more advanced workshops. Those after- workshop sessions are all led by former attendees of the Forum, who, after undergoing formal training, conduct voluntary sessions with Forum attendants. The voluntary workshops are an important addition to the for-profit workshops because they make self-transformation an ongoing and incremental process, thus translating each “higher” step toward self-transformation into a new economic outlay. LEC mixes a

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highly commodified version of the therapeutic narrative with the infor- mal, voluntary work of people who can influence others through their disinterestedness, past suffering, and capacity to restructure their selves.

In accordance with the self-realization narrative and the widespread therapeutic ideal of communication, the LEC Web site defines the purpose of its workshop as that of providing its participants with “a remarkable enhancement in their ability to communicate and relate to others and to accomplish what’s important to them in their own lives.” The leader of the Forum workshop I attended defined the main goal of the workshop as one of empowerment and self-transformation, thus firmly placing the workshop in the genre of self-help. Moreover, the workshop makes force- ful claims to self-realization. Toward that end, it uses at least two termi- nologies: one derived from the realm of spirituality and New Age thought (referring, for example, to Zen Buddhism) and the other derived from the “scientific” terminology of psychology. However, the core of their pro- gram is committed to the cultural model of communication analyzed in the previous chapters. Their programs are described as “committed to generating extraordinary communication—powerful listening and com- mitted speaking that results in self-expression and fulfillment.”90

Support groups arise from disruptions and crises in the life course. It is easy to see how divorce, rape, or sexual abuse can provide both the motivations for participating in a support group and its thematic raw material, for experiences that most reveal a breach between self and soci- ety and between the ideal and the real are those most in need of being narrativized.91 In this perspective, the main object of support groups is to renarrate the self and to make sense of life-disrupting events. A study of large group awareness training confirms that the participants (or pros- pective participants) in these programs are more likely to be faced with life crises.

A study was conducted to assess the psychosocial characteristics of individ- uals who become involved in large group awareness training (LGAT) pro- grams. Prospective participants in The Forum, which has been classified as an LGAT, were compared with nonparticipating peers and with available normative samples on measures of well-being, negative life events, social support, and philosophical orientation. Results revealed that prospective participants were significantly more distressed than peer and normative

samples of community residents and had a higher level of impact of recent negative life events compared with peer (but not normative) samples.92

Yet although this workshop contains people whose lives have been disrupted, the narrative structure it puts into service is essentially acti- vated by the Rogerian ideal of self-realization. The Forum leader thus opens the workshop by claiming that “to be extraordinary is what we are committed to. . . . The Forum encompasses all areas of your life. It will be taken care of. Just try it.”

To reach this extraordinariness, the leader calls upon participants to identify a dysfunction, a source of complaint. Indeed, the first way of emplotting the self offered by the workshop is to focus on what the Forum calls “a racket,” or a recurring complaint. The first step toward a narrative reconstruction of the self consists in “looking back in the past to identify the source of complaint.” Following the therapeutic logic, the Forum narrative is put into motion by focusing on a dysfunctional aspect of one’s life that unfolds through the creation of a system of analogies between different recurring aspects of one’s life. To mobilize the self— and thereby to make it a source of emplotment and self-change—this complaint is claimed to hold a hidden benefit for the complainer. As a leaflet describing the Forum program suggests, “In the Rackets segment, we discuss the idea of a racket as an unproductive way of being or acting that includes a complaint that something shouldn’t be the way it is. Often, we don’t notice that while our complaints may seem justified, even legitimate, there is a certain payoff—some advantage or benefit we are receiving that reinforces the cycle of behavior. At the same time, this way of being has steep costs, whether in our vitality, affinity, self- expression, or sense of fulfillment.” This step offers an explanation for one’s discontent but almost simultaneously is accompanied by the claim that such complaining serves hidden purposes and has hidden benefits; the assumption of hidden and secondary benefit from suffering in turn makes it possible to call on the individual to change.

The leader asks participants to think intensely about people they have difficult relationships with, such as colleagues, bosses, or close relatives. Here again the emplotment of the self is activated by focus on a dysfunc-

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tion. Moreover, the very ideal of self-realization or “extraordinariness” is likely to generate a sense of perpetual crisis.

During the workshop in which I participated, various people stood up in front of an audience of a few hundred people and told them the com- plaints thus solicited. One woman claimed she had not talked to her father for many years. A man claimed that he had always wanted to become a musician but had never fulfilled his dream. He declared he was now ready to make the move. Another man declared that he now under- stood that he was always running away from home and avoiding his responsibilities and that he was now ready to cope with them. Another woman, whose parents had divorced when she was a child, claimed that after twenty years she now understood that she was consumed by an unexpressed anger toward her father, who had left home. To give a final example, a forty-two-year-old woman whose brother had died when she was twelve suggested that she now understood that her lifelong problem had been a failure to grieve properly for her dead brother. As a result, she had become passive and anxious and unable to get a hold of her life.

The workshop taps into two main categories of problems. The first cat- egory concerns the self’s relative positioning vis-à-vis others, its compe- tence, and its capacity to compare well to others: problems such as self- esteem, assertiveness, an inferiority or superiority complex, or insecurity. The second category concerns the viability and durability of close rela- tionships and/or the difficulty of the self in entering such relationships.

For example, Daniel, who participated in the workshop, tells the fol- lowing story on the Web:

One of my automatic ways of being came out of an incident when I was eleven, and [when] I was forced to admit publicly to my friends that I was too shy to kiss a girl who lived across the street. I felt humiliated, and I con- cluded that I could never make it socially or really be brave with girls. So instead I re-designed myself to be studious, serious, hard-working and responsible as a way of compensating for this. Part of this was that I had to do things on my own, by myself. It became my winning formula. It still is, but since I can now distinguish it and see it, it doesn’t have to run me any- more. I have the freedom to be ways and create things which the previous automatic way of being would have forbidden as off-limits or too threaten-

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ing. I see myself as less rigid, and more able to enjoy integrating an increas- ing variety of people and activities in my social circle, my community, and my work.

The insignificance of this incident—admitting publicly he was too shy to kiss a girl—illustrates how the dysfunctions that form the basis of self-narratives have to do with how the self is sized up and evaluated. Indeed, many of the diseases of the self are about how big or small one feels vis-à-vis others.93 We see in this story the therapeutic narrative at work. The person identifies a behavior—hard work, seriousness, or stu- diousness—as “pathological” by identifying an incident responsible for causing it and by focusing on the behaviors or feelings that the incident presumably precluded. In conformity with the new narrative structure provided by the Forum, this man also tries to identify the benefits accrued by his behavior. Once a racket is identified and one’s life story is accordingly and appropriately framed, the next step is to execute an act that will signal a dramatic break from previous patterns and that can be interpreted as signifying that one’s life story is in the process of changing. This corresponds to dramaturgy as Victor Turner defined it: “The dra- maturgical phase begins when crises arise in the daily flow of social inter- action.”94 These public stories are forms of metalanguage dealing with everyday crises that are neither amorphous nor open-ended but have a diachronic structure, identifiable and isolatable phases, and an end, all deemed by Turner to be characteristic of performances. In these groups, men and women become reflexive and “reveal” themselves to them- selves as well as to others. These narrations retell one’s life by viewing the present as problematic, by locating in the past an event explaining one’s predicament and directly connected to it, and by making emotional self-understanding the motor of self-change. In conformity with the ther- apeutic ethos, these stories of self-change stress self-understanding and the capacity to exercise choices in a flexible way.

The group acts not only as the site for a verbal narration but also as the witness for an immediate change demanded by the leader. After a racket has been identified, each participant is asked to write a letter and/or make a phone call to someone he or she has not spoken to and to ask for forgiveness or otherwise have an important and revealing conversation.

The conversation is a purely performative event, for, in conducting it with someone with whom one has a difficult relationship one is already effecting a change (which can then be attributed to the powerful effects of the Forum workshop). One is then asked to tell the group about how the conversation produced a change in oneself, thus making the event into a dramaturgical performance that acquires even more emotional power when it is ratified by the group.

An example of the ideal Forum story is given below. It was told by a former attendant of the first workshop whose story was supposed to con- vince and recruit newcomers.

My story is simple. The Forum gave me back my life. I grew up in a family with a father who used to beat me and I went around life carrying a heavy burden on my shoulders. What the Forum made me see was that I was afraid of people and was judgmental of them, how I could not get close to people, and how I chose to be a victim, a person who has been hurt and victimized in his life. The biggest present I got in life was when I attended and completed the Forum. I went to my father and I told him, “Daddy, I love you. It doesn’t matter what happened.” At that point I had not seen my father for a few years, since my parents had been divorced. But then I spoke to him as if nothing had happened, I sat down with him in his house, we drank coffee, and I got my life back. My father today has cancer and my mother supports him very much, we all support him very much, and with- out the Forum I can hardly imagine where we would all be. I would proba- bly have come to him with all the weight of my past, with all the weight of the years where he abused me. The fact that I’m able to forgive him makes me a freer person. The past cannot dictate itself to me anymore.

Discussing Victor Turner, James Clifford argues that social perfor- mances enact powerful stories “that provide the social process with a rhetoric, a mode of employment, and a meaning.”95 In the story just quoted, as in the entire therapeutic persuasion, the rhetoric, mode of employment, and meanings are chiefly provided by the therapeutic nar- rative and performance of self-change.

During the various intermissions of the workshop, I discussed with various (five) participants whether they liked the Forum and what they liked about it. All were very enthusiastic about the workshop. When I asked them informally to state what they liked about it, the four women

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and one man concurred that the idea that “you are in charge” and that “you can change your life” was by far the most appealing.

Self-change is thus the keystone of the large therapeutic cultural edi- fice, and self-change can take place only if ills and suffering are first defined, labeled, and categorized. This dual narrative structure in turn generates the dual moral world of contemporary men and women, a world in which both “victims” and “survivors” are celebrated. The dual narrative structure of victimhood and survival is also a moral structure that endows selfhood with a moral status.

C o n c l u s i o n

In his discussion of narcissism, Fred Alford suggests that the sociologist Christopher Lasch and the philosopher Alaisdair McIntyre share the view that the therapeutic-narcissistic self can no longer have a coherent narrative of selfhood. Because the self retreats into the present and into the realm of inner emotional life, it can no longer produce a narrative meaningfully connecting life events and projecting the self into the future.96 However, as this chapter suggests, the opposite seems to be true. The therapeutic discourse offers endless possibilities for coherently nar- rativizing the life story through its “diseases.” This assumption, central to the support group, is what makes the therapeutic persuasion “work”: if failure can always be corrected, then it has to be somehow the result of a “disease of the will,” that is, to be self-made, and if it is self-made, it can also be unmade, which in turn legitimates and perpetuates the very exis- tence of the therapeutic institution. Indeed, what is particularly interest- ing about therapeutic narratives is that the narrative about the self quickly becomes a “narrative in action”—a narrative about the process of under- standing, working at, and overcoming (or not overcoming) one’s prob- lems. Far from being unable to bestow coherence on a given life, thera- peutic narratives can be faulted for making too much sense of one’s life, of binding too tightly the present, the past, and the future in a seamless nar- rative of psychic wounding and self-change. The social and economic consequences of such gender-blind or androgynous narratives of self- hood are examined in the next chapter.

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