Therapy, Sociology, and the Modern Soul

Eva Illouz, a sociologist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has been raising profound questions that can perplex the well-intentioned therapist. Whether investigating therapy itself or its facsimiles in popular media (e.g., as proffered by Oprah Winfrey), Illouz is concerned about where “therapeutic culture” seems to be taking us.

Are we better off for knowing so much from today’s experts on mental health hygiene? How are our emotions and relationships being transformed by such knowledge? Worse, might therapists be complicit in furthering a neoliberalist agenda of privatising and individualising what it means to be human? Illouz’s books (e.g., Saving the Modern Soul, Why Love Hurts, Cold Intimacies) challenge cherished assumptions about the role played by therapists in contemporary society.

She makes important claims about what therapists are doing, intentionally or otherwise. In this era of therapeutic culture, new preoccupations have emerged over how we manage emotions and relationships. Such forms of “management” occur beyond therapists’ offices; the public at large understandably wants a say in how their lives are to be managed. For Illouz, they seem to be apprenticing for such managerial roles—using psychologists’ language, transforming psychological advice into their own, and becoming vigilant regarding departures from ‘healthy’ emotions and relationships. It remains to be seen how the increasing dominance of “our” understanding of the good life will continue to shape society. We were fortunate to speak with Eva Illouz by phone to share some of her provocative thinking with New Therapist readers.

Tom: What drew you to study human emotional experience and therapeutic culture?

Eva: For me, an emotion is like those miniature works which, despite being very small, contain whole worlds, to be seen only from up close. That’s how I look at emotions like a small, tiny, fleeting event that contains very big worlds once you put a magnifying glass on it. And that magnifying glass, for me, is sociology. What you see in an emotion are culture, norms, values, and institutions.

Tom: How about therapeutic culture itself? What got you interested in that?

Eva: I got interested in love. I think love today is managed by two main cultural views. One is the Hollywood, fairy tale, advertising, soap opera matrix and the mass media that contain many visual and narrative fantasies of love. The other area would be the therapeutic culture, which is, in a way, no less commercialised than the first segment and is no less based on myths than the other. Whereas many people would view psychology as the healthy counterpart, the therapeutic counterpart, to the fantasy-ridden media technologies, I would view them exactly on par. I view psychological culture as one form of belief system about intimacy that also has powerful fantasies. Each one is a different culture with its own rules and own beliefs about love.

Tom: Economics, and capitalism in particular, feature in how you account for human suffering and wellbeing—but not in ways one normally associates with wealth and poverty. Could you speak to emotional inequalities as you see them in contemporary Western society?

Eva: The contemporary economy, or even modernity, is characterised by the management of the self. It is crucial to manage yourself adequately not only to have friends and find a partner, but also to move up the ladder. There is a style that gets you further, an emotional style that enables you to claim the privileges of leadership over others. This style contains many emotional rules for example, the capacity to display self-control. To be friendly, but in a kind of impersonal way. To bracket your emotionality. In a service economy that requires you to be in touch every day with people, to get something out of a process of negotiation, and where you have to make a good impression on others by the ways in which you speak, handle and manage yourself in such an economy, how you handle your emotions becomes extremely important.

Emotional intelligence is a new, more indirect and subtle way to hierarchise people. It doesn’t take the formal route; we usually do not associate emotions with class. But in fact, emotional style is very much associated with a class. The middle class has been the one who has consumed most psychological advice, and because it has consumed most of that advice, it has also made it into a norm. So the therapeutic emotional style, which I think is the prerogative of a certain class, discriminates against others. We have strong emotional norms that make people look, or be, more normative or less normative. These norms are then enforced in corporations; they’re enforced for evaluations at school. For example, Attention Deficit Disorder, which is supposedly a cognitive diagnosis—I would argue that it also contains an emotional component. It makes a distinction between one emotional norm, concentration, focus, quietness, etc. and another pathological norm of being scattered, having a high volume, etcetera. Emotional norms that make people look, or be, more normative or less normative. These norms are then enforced in corporations; they’re enforced for evaluations at school. For example, Attention Deficit Disorder, which is supposedly a cognitive diagnosis I would argue that it also contains an emotional component. It makes a distinction between one emotional norm: concentration, focus, quietness, etcetera and another, pathological norm being scattered, having a high volume, etcetera.

There is another reason also: modern economy and modern society are ridden with uncertainties and ambivalence. In the face of constant uncertainty within relationships, people who have the most of what we commonly call self-confidence are the ones who are likely to fare better. It’s not because self-confidence is, so to speak, intrinsically a kind of inherent universal dimension of the good or mature psyche. It’s because self-confidence becomes an asset in modern societies, in which people are plagued with a lack of certainty vis-a-vis who they are, what they are worth, and what the worth of others is. In the 20th century, there is an obsession with self-confidence.

Karen: As counsellors, we often see clients who arrive either having self-diagnosed with a psychiatric condition or self-identified with a pop psychological label “I have low self-confidence,” for instance. Why do you think it’s so tempting for people to self-diagnose?

Eva: We live in a society where expert knowledge is constantly flowing. That claim to expertise, to pseudo-expertise, contains many political motifs. The citizen is equal to the expert—he does not let the expert decide, or manage his life. There has been a movement towards the democratisation or equalisation of the expert authority of the patient.

Second, I think the therapeutic imperative has been fixed thoroughly in our culture, such that people interpret everything that does not quite work in their lives in psychological terms. The narrative works backwards: “If I’d had a good childhood and a good psyche, everything would work out. But things are not working out right now. My wife is leaving me; I’m being fired at my job, or my friend got the promotion and I didn’t. Therefore, something must be wrong with my psyche. So what is it that is wrong with my psyche? Oh! Yes! I have a narcissistic disorder. Because when people are not giving me support, I feel really, really bad. That's my problem in life—I have a narcissistic disorder.” That, I would say, reflects a deep internalisation of the rules of engagement in therapeutic culture.

These rules of engagement say that if something is not quite working properly, then it must reflect back on my faulty psyche. And therefore it is my responsibility, in a way, to understand myself—how my psyche failed me. And because we live a huge mass of events—one day I behave this way, and the narcissistic label is going to work perfectly well; tomorrow, another story can stick and I might use, let’s say, borderline personality disorder to explain my behaviour or my dysfunction. I think patients can probably switch very easily from one label to another, because they’re caught in very many situations, which elicit in them very many reactions. And these reactions can lead to different narratives.

People are engaging in this mode of self-analysis because psychology has transformed the very fabric of our culture into self-help culture: self-help, do-it yourself, understand yourself. People construct these narratives to explain a posteriori what they interpret as their failures, by attributing them to external causes and making themselves responsible for them. So there is this interesting interplay between—on the one hand it’s not really my fault, because I have this narcissistic personality disorder, and that’s because my mother was so harsh with me. On the other hand, I have to do something about it. So this articulation between what I’m not responsible for, but victim of—what somebody else is responsible for—and what I am responsible for, namely to change, or to understand myself, or to have a better handle on my psychological problem, is very powerful because it splits the locus of responsibility. I’m not bad, because somebody did it to me, but now I’m good because I am transforming myself and understanding myself.

Monica: Saving the Modern Soul was published six years ago. Have any of your ideas changed or shifted as a result of having conversations about your book?

Eva: Actually, it’s interesting psychology plays a huge, huge role in Israel. That’s because the whole society was engineered, so to speak—it was not organically created like French or English society, which has evolved for a long time. So psychologists played a very big role in Israel, and they continue to—numerically, there’s a very high number of psychologists for the population.

I wrote an article about a year ago, claiming that psychology was privatising collective anger and a collective sense of distress, and that everybody was translating their sense of failure to their own personal life. I claimed that psychologists were harming the formation of political consciousness, and that there was a big analogy between neoliberalism and psychology. So what has become sharper in my mind since then is the incredible affinity between the political philosophy of neoliberalism which says that individuals are responsible for everything that happens to them, that individuals are the basis of society and psychology.

Before, I focused more on the idea that consumer culture and psychology had a great deal in common. I have since come to understand that there was another connection that is even more powerful: neoliberal economic philosophy. The neoliberal capitalist philosophy places the overwhelming reality of society on the shoulders of individuals. It says to individuals, “the real reality is not big structures, big government, or social class the real reality is what you feel inside.” Neoliberalism is not only a revolution in the relationship between markets and state. It’s also a revolution in how people think about what constitutes their reality. Neoliberalism says there is no such thing as a big structure. The government they’re only individuals in their own private lives. And the only things we should care about are private lives, private liberties, or private initiatives. In that sense, psychology has very much reinforced neoliberalism and its view that the individual is the source and the cause of everything that happens to him or her.

Tom: Are there any final things you want us to take away from this conversation emphases in your work that we could share with the readers of this magazine?

Eva: Without ever intending to, psychological culture has made us highly responsible for—and guilty over what happens to us. Imagine somebody who is chronically angry; or chronically anxious; or chronically depressed. Anxiety, depression, and anger are quite often totally valid and adequate reactions to very elusive, difficult, uncertain social conditions. They are completely valid reactions. But psychological culture makes these reactions inadequate, dysfunctional, pathological, in need of repair, in need of healing. If there is a purpose to my work, it is to re-open this question of the valid emotional response. To re-open this question by examining the relationship between an individual and his or her environment. There are many places where anger and depression are valid responses, so the question becomes, what do we do with these responses without pathologising them? I’m not saying that people should remain stuck in these situations. I’m saying, let’s simply not pathologise them. Let’s completely change that language pathology by re-introducing the relationship between the individual and his or her environment.

About the interviewers

Karen H. Ross is a discursive collaborative therapist and doctoral student at the University of Calgary. She is interested in how different discourses of "mental health" shape options for problem-solving and identity construction, particularly among young people.

Monica Sesma-Vazquez is a collaborative and social constructionist practitioner (mostly in therapeutic and educational spaces), currently doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Calgary. She is a Taos Eliseos professor, and the Spanish Translator Editor for the International Journal of Collaborative Practices.

Tom Strong is a University of Calgary therapist, educator and supervisor whose research, teaching, and practice focuses on optimising the collaborative potentials of therapeutic dialogue. His most recent book (co-edited with Andy Lock) is Discursive perspectives on therapeutic practice (Oxford University Press).