Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural studies, development studies, and American Indian studies, it adopts a consciously global focus, combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised, it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life, before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological, as well as significant transformations of key institutions, such as work, family, education, and religion, it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies, the political interest in happiness, and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally, the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.

"This amazing panoptic survey and critique won’t make you very happy, but it will show you what you are being inducted into by those who use happiness or wellbeing as touchstones for how to live your life. The Handbook is threaded together by a variety of conceptual frameworks, key among them an urgent sense that we need to grasp what is being done to us when we are encouraged and then coerced at a depth of emotional engagement that makes it difficult to disentangle ourselves from the contradictory inconsistent apparatuses of personal improvement. This book uncovers the variety of ways in which we are adapted to unbearable circumstances, and it shows us that there are alternatives to therapeutic consolation; this is an invaluable resource for everyone who thinks critically about how are selves are locked into therapeutic theory and practice, that which always holds out the false promise to help us escape it. Now, with this book as your guide, you can take your distance, even, perhaps, do something better."Ian Parker, Emeritus Professor of Management, University of Leicester, UK"This imaginative and fascinating handbook is a major turning point in understanding how therapeutic ideas, assumptions and practices have spread through private and public life, politics and popular culture around the world. Fifty four years after Philip Rieff inaugurated interest in the American ‘triumph of the therapeutic’, this book’s diverse disciplinary perspectives shine new light on the myriad ways in which therapeutic culture responds to people’s problems whilst simultaneously creating new forms of oppression and commercial exploitation."Kathryn Ecclestone, co-author of The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education

Daniel Nehring is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swansea University, UK. His research concerns the personal consequences of globalisation and the rapid mobilisation of social life in the early 21st century. He is the co-author of Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry and Therapeutic Worlds. He is also the convenor of the international academic network ‘Popular Psychology, Self-Help Culture and the Happiness Industry’. Ole Jacob Madsen is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture, Optimizing the Self: Social Representations of Self-Help and The Psychologization of Society: On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway. Edgar Cabanas is Research Fellow at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Spain. He is the co-author of Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Industry and Science of Happiness Control our Lives, which has been translated into over 10 languages, as well as the author of several scientific papers and book chapters. China Mills is Lecturer in Critical Education Psychology at the University of Sheffield, UK and the author of Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World.Dylan Kerrigan is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Leicester, UK, and a Visiting Lecturer with the University of the West Indies. He is co-author of Therapeutic Worlds: Popular Psychology and the Socio-Cultural Organisation of Intimate Life.