What's wrong with therapy culture?

Pauline Johnson

pp. 117-132

in: Harry Blatterer, Pauline Johnson, Maria R. Markus (eds), Modern privacy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010

Abstract

"No I have not sought counseling nor do I intend to seek it. I am a grown man. I am not receptive to being counseled. I am beyond the reach of counseling." Professor Lurie, main character in J. M Coetzee's Disgrace, fronts a university committee set to investigate complaints about his sexual relationship with a student in "the wrong spirit" (Coetzee, 1999, p. 49). Neither an admission of guilt nor an appeal to the compulsions of Eros will satisfy the committee that demands that Lurie make his damaged self available for therapy. Refusing to give the committee a confession that, it can tell, "comes from his heart," Lurie has no stomach for what has been termed in the sociological literature "therapy culture." Typically this sees the ideologies that underpin clinical practices escape from a distinct and functionally specific role to merge with and extend their impact across wider cultural institutions (Furedi, 2004, p. 17). This has involved a shifting vocabulary of ends and means that is underpinned by a constant undertaking to relieve complexity with the helpful offer to manage our subjectivities for us.