Therapeutic Worlds: Popular Psychology and the Sociocultural Organisation of Intimate Life

ISBN-13: 9781472425980 / Angielski / Twarda / 2019 / 186 str.

Daniel Nehring; Dylan Kerrigan; Emmanuel Alvarado

Opis

This book builds a fresh perspective on therapeutic narratives of intimate life, based on unprecedented empirical research on self-help books in the UK, the USA and Mexico. Exploring narratives of love, intimacy and marriage across a range of self-help literature, Therapeutic Narratives in Popular Culture reconstructs self-help as a transnational cultural phenomenon, charting the production, circulation, and consumption of self-help books at the international level and analysing transnational flows of therapeutic discourses. With close attention to the cultural and political significance of self-help narratives in relation to the persistent hegemony of neoliberal discourses of personal life in the Western world, this volume provides, for the first time, a rigorous analysis of self-help as a transnational cultural phenomenon. Contributing to debates about therapeutic culture, in part by exploring some of its so-far widely under-researched facets, such as Christian religious-conservative self-help, Therapeutic Narratives in Popular Culture offers significant points of departure from established scholarly narratives about therapeutic culture and the individualisation and fragmentation of intimate life. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies and the sociology of gender, sexuality, families and personal life.

Recenzje

'This impressive work offers fresh insights into the global reach of popular psychology and the ways in which it shapes intimate life. The book provides a valuable and much-needed contribution to studies of self-help and therapeutic cultures beyond the Global North. Drawing on an empirical study conducted in Trinidad and Tobago, Nehring and Kerrigan deftly blend historical analysis of local cultures and practices of love and intimacy and the ongoing effects of colonisation with personal accounts of the ways in which people draw on popular psychology in their own lives. This compelling book demonstrates the transnational movement of ‘psy’ discourse – how it travels and becomes embedded in local cultures and practices, and in turn how this shapes self-identity and social relationships. A must read for anyone interested in debates about therapeutic culture and sociological accounts of intimacy, individualisation and the global circulation of popular psychology.' - Katie Wright, La Trobe University; author of The Rise of the Therapeutic Society: Psychological Knowledge & the Contradictions of Cultural Change

Spis treści

1. The psychological imagination  2. Psychology and the social organisation of power  3. Transnational popular psychology in Trinidad  4. A brief social history of marriage, love, and intimacy in Trinidad  5. Love, intimacy, and relationship management  6. Adaptation, gender roles, and the need for self-help  7. Popular psychology and the colonisation of intimate life in Trinidad  8. The psychologisation of intimate life