"A tour de force of critical insights and broad scholarship that provides a rich banquet of ideas for those interested in a broader understanding of the modern soul. It is one of those rare books that forces the reader, whether he agrees or disagrees, to think in new and creative ways."—Charles W. Smith, author of Success and Survival on Wall Street

"Eva Illouz has made another seminal contribution to cultural sociology. Forty years ago, Philip Rieff announced the advent of a new 'therapeutic culture' wherein self-realization, once achieved as a byproduct of commitment to a communal purpose, is pursued as an end in itself. How the therapeutic culture affects selfhood, on the other hand, has remained a mystery. To clarify the matter, Illouz shows how therapeutic values insinuate themselves into the corporate world, the state, mass media, civil society, the family, and the bedroom. Eva Illouz has given to our generation the fullest and clearest account of therapeutic individualism ever written."—Barry Schwartz, author of Abraham Lincoln in the Post-Heroic Era

"Located within a cultural history of introspection, Eva Illouz has given us a highly original treatise-a cultural critique-of therapeutic discourse as one of the principal historical formations, languages, and codes that both articulate and shape what modern selfhood is today. An important work in cultural sociology and the sociology of emotions, Illouz will change many of our ideas about the emotions and late capitalism."—E. Doyle McCarthy, author of Knowledge as Culture: The New Sociology of Knowledge

Eva Illouz is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a member of the Center for the Study of Rationality. She is also the Academic Director of the Program in Cultural Studies. She is the author of Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (UC Press; honorable mention, Outstanding Contribution Award, American Sociological Association, 2000); The Culture of Capitalism (in hebrew); Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery: An Essay on Popular Culture (Best Book Award, American Sociological Association, 2005); and Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism.

Saving the Modern Soul

THERAPY, EMOTIONS, AND THE CULTURE OF SELF-HELPBy EVA ILLOUZ

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Copyright © 2008 The Regents of the University of California
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-25373-5

Contents

Acknowledgments.....................................................................ix1. Introduction.....................................................................1Cultural Sociology and the Therapeutic..............................................8Therapy as a New Emotional Style....................................................12Texts and Contexts..................................................................16Cultural Critique and Psychology....................................................192. Freud: A Cultural Innovator......................................................22Psychoanalysis as a Charismatic Enterprise..........................................24The Social Organization of Freudian Charisma........................................26Freud in America....................................................................29The Freudian Cultural Matrix........................................................35The Romance of Psychology and Popular Culture.......................................51Conclusion..........................................................................563. From Homo economicus to Homo communicans.........................................58Emotional Control in the Sociology of Organizations.................................61The Power of Control and the Control of Power.......................................64Psychologists Enter the Market......................................................66A New Emotional Style...............................................................72Emotional Control...................................................................75The Communicative Ethic as the Spirit of the Corporation............................88Emotional, Moral, and Professional Competence.......................................95Conclusion..........................................................................1034. The Tyranny of Intimacy..........................................................105Intimacy: An Increasingly Cold Haven................................................107Beyond Their Will? Psychologists and Marriage.......................................115What Feminism and Psychology Have in Common.........................................120Intimacy: ANew Emotional Imagination................................................125Communicative Rationality in the Bedroom............................................131Toward the Ideology of Pure Emotion.................................................135The Cooling of Passion..............................................................142Conclusion..........................................................................1495. Triumphant Suffering.............................................................152Why Therapy Triumphed...............................................................156The Therapeutic Narrative of Selfhood...............................................171Performing the Self through Therapy.................................................178A Narrative in Action...............................................................186Conclusion..........................................................................1966. A New Emotional Stratification?..................................................197The Rise of Emotional Competence....................................................200Emotional Intelligence and Its Antecedents..........................................202The Global Therapeutic Habitus and the New Man......................................217Intimacy as a Social Good...........................................................222Conclusion..........................................................................2357. Conclusion: Institutional Pragmatism in the Study of Culture.....................238Notes...............................................................................249Index...............................................................................287

Chapter One

Introduction

To be sure, the concept of enlightenment must not be too restricted methodologically, for, as I understand it, it embraces more than just logical deduction and empirical verification, but rather, beyond these two, the will and the ability to speculate phenomenologically, to empathize, to approach the limits of reason.... Emotions? For all I care, yes. Where is it decreed that enlightenment must be free of emotion? To me the opposite seems to be true.

Enlightenment can properly fulfill its task only if it sets to work with passion. -Jean Amery

By words one person can make another blissfully happy or drive him to despair, by words the teacher conveys his knowledge to his pupils. Words provoke affects and are in general the means of mutual influence among men. -Sigmund Freud

Studies and critiques of therapy have steadily accumulated for the past three decades. Although differing in method and outlook, they agree that the therapeutic persuasion is quintessentially modern and that it is modern in what is most disquieting about modernity: bureaucratization, narcissism, the construction of a false self, the control of modern lives by the state, the collapse of cultural and moral hierarchies, the intense privatization of life caused by capitalist social organization, the emptiness of the modern self severed from communal relationships, large-scale surveillance, the expansion of state power and state legitimation, and "risk society" and the cultivation of the self's vulnerability. Studies of the therapeutic discourse alone could provide us with a compendium of the various themes that make up the sociology (and critique) of modernity.

The communitarian critique of modernity argues that psychology expresses an atomistic individualism that creates or at least encourages the very ills it claims to heal. Thus, while psychology supposedly addresses and helps resolve our increasing difficulty in entering or remaining in social relations, it actually encourages us to put our needs and preferences above our commitments to others. Under the aegis of the therapeutic discourse, social relations are dissolved by a pernicious utilitarianism that condones a lack of commitment to social institutions and legitimizes a narcissistic and shallow identity.

Commentators such as Lionel Trilling, Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and Philip Cushman have interpreted the rise of the therapeutic worldview as marking the decline of an autonomous realm of culture and values. Thanks to consumption and therapeutic practice, the self has been smoothly integrated into the institutions of modernity, causing culture to lose its power of transcendence and opposition to society. The very seductiveness of consumption and therapeutic self-absorption marks the decline of any serious opposition to society and the general cultural exhaustion of Western civilization. No longer capable of creating heroes, binding values, and cultural ideals, the self has withdrawn inside its own empty shell. In calling on us to withdraw into ourselves, the therapeutic persuasion has made us abandon the great realms of citizenship and politics and cannot provide us with an intelligible way of linking the private self to the public sphere because it has emptied the self of its communal and political content, replacing this content with a narcissistic...