Therapeutic Culture and the History of Interiority
This presentation builds on an emerging interdisciplinary focus on “therapeutic culture.” Such perspectives consider the increasingly pervasive presence of psychological, therapeutic and emotional rhetorics in public discourse and private life, evidenced in the popularity of self-help books, the establishment of professional norms centered on personal feelings and affect management, and a broader centering of government policy on matters such as happiness, loneliness and other aspects of emotional well being. Specifically, this presentation will consider one powerful theme woven through many of these discourses: the problem of “interiority,” where therapeutic subjectivity is related through the urgent need to “get inside oneself.” Within therapeutic culture, interiority, it is argued, is a theme expressed through rich metaphorical language, though its effect goes beyond the linguist and the emotional, carrying a powerful bodily resonance. Borrowing from recent treatments of metaphor in cognitive and linguistic theory, as well as historical overviews of the popularity of therapeutic sensibilities in the American context, metaphors of interiority are explored in historical cases drawn from a history of popular psychology, extending from the humanistic psychology movement of the 1960’s and 70s to the franchise of publications from the 1990s celebrating the “inner child” motif. Tracing a certain historical trajectory, it is argued that metaphors of interiority have shifted over the course of half a century from an epistemic problem centered on the need to know oneself and others and to breach the interior realm as a problem of understanding and acceptance, to an utilitarian problem centered on interiority as the source of dynamic potential and useful forces. Moreover, it is argued that different framings of interiority lend themselves to varied critical projects: the epistemic problem of interiority animated a powerful cultural movement in the 1960’s and 70’s centered on personal authenticity, alienation and a critique of technocratic society. Later, under neoliberal regimes of psychological knowledge, this same interiority is taken up as a problem of human capital.
SAM BINKLEY 
Leave a comment