Modernity, social regulation, and the politics of the therapeutic sensibility

Abstract

Psychological practice makes many claims for emancipatory potential; and as such becomes an unquestionable good. Yet history teaches that all unquestionable goods pose a special class of risk, in the exertion of subterranean forms of social regulation and control. In this article we demonstrate how, even in purportedly successful therapeutic encounters guided by ethically minded clinicians, dangers of coercion exist—as psychological modalities unwittingly enact political givens. As such the field of psychological practices produces a kind of therapeutic sensibility which has the following features: enacting modernity’s centring of the isolated self, thereby reenforcing one of the key features of contemporary society—an interiorism which renders individuals into ideological isolates; depoliticising a subject’s suffering, a depoliticisation which erases cultural awareness of the implicitly interest-driven ideology underlying therapeutic treatment; or contrarily, becoming an instrument for the complete politicisation of identity without subject; an expression of the commodification of social identity and the reductive objectification, and the missing of, the subject; offering a socially sanctioned means of regulating emotional expression, and thereby pathologising socially and politically threatening affective states. What is called for, we contend, is a critical and dialectical approach to emancipatory potential of psychological practice.