ABSTRACT
Multiple crises of late capitalism seem increasingly to be expressed through the media, in policy discourses and in everyday life as ‘relentlessly repetitive problematisations’ (Isin, 2004: 228) or as ‘wicked’ problems; namely, intractable, highly complex, changing and contested (e.g. Richardson, 2011; Bache et al., 2015). A particular focus is mental illness, presented as a worsening global epidemic by the World Health Organization, UNICEFand the OECD as well as pharmaceutical companies, psychology professional bodies and global corporations (e.g. Mills, 2014; Davies, 2015). In a British context, especially since the election of a Labour government in 1997, these concerns have become intertwined with fears about the general psycho-emotional states of citizens and the difficulty of childhood and life transitions. One effect across the education system and other social policy settings has been to create slippery elisions between wellbeing, mental health, resilience and ‘character’. As part of a therapeutic behaviour change agenda under successive govern-
ments over this time period, these elisions have enabled diverse, ad hoc ideas and practices from counselling, psychotherapy, neurolinguistic programming, positive psychology, mindfulness, self-help and peer-based therapies to permeate numerous areas of research and practice in education and social policy (Ecclestone, 2013). In exploring the intersection of these developments with wider behaviour change policy agendas, this chapter focuses on the images of human subjects these agendas generate and respond to, the new types of experts emerging to govern them, and the dangers that arise. In setting the scene for discussion of these themes, I outline examples of the political and cultural normalisation of a therapeutic behaviour change agenda. In educational settings from early years to university, numerous policy
reports reflect a wide, influential consensus that an interrelated set of psychoemotional attributes, dispositions and behaviours associated with emotional regulation/intelligence/literacy, resilience, stoicism, optimism, character, hope, aspiration and community-mindedness can be taught, learned and transferred between contexts and over time as an essential foundation for successful
educational and life functioning (e.g. Sharples, 2007; Paterson et al., 2014; O’Donnell et al., 2014). Between 1998 and 2010, successive governments sponsored myriad generic
or universal initiatives seeking to develop this extensive list of psycho-emotional foundations. During the same period, there has been a big increase in targeted activities for those with formal diagnoses of psychological, emotional and behavioural conditions and disorders (e.g. Harwood and Allen, 2014). Although the Conservative-led coalition government (formed in 2010) replaced political sponsorship of national social and emotional learning programmes with renewed interest in the much older notion of ‘character’, its Conservative successor (elected in 2015) has elided this with an intensification of concern about mental health. Under the banner of character, the government funds various initiatives to promote the skills and dispositions of earlier wellbeing initiatives (see Morgan, 2015a, 2015b and Ecclestone, 2013 for discussion). Claims about a need for approaches to strengthen psycho-emotional skills
also pervade family and parenting policies. For example, since the late 1990s, ideas from neuroscience have been used to embellish successive governments’ resurrection of determinist ideas from the 1930s about the lifelong effects of neglect, poor attachment and dysfunctional parenting. All mainstream political parties now agree that the inner states of human subjects determine the relationship between psycho-emotional responses and behaviours in complex, non-linear ways from conception, requiring ‘early intervention’ – especially for families deemed ‘inadequate’ and ‘troubled’ – to create a virtuous circle of engagement, inclusion, aspirations, achievement and social mobility (e.g. Field, 2010; Allen, 2011; Department for Education and WAVE Trust, 2013). For example, proposed antenatal and postnatal care assessments privilege the emotional bond between mother and child and prospective mothers’ attachment behaviour, especially for parents considered to have problems (Department for Education and WAVE Trust, 2013). This contemporary turn in notions of ‘good parenting’ and associated resource allocations continues the shift amongst charities and state agencies since the 1890s from ameliorating the effects of poverty and ‘poor hygiene’ to intervening in the psycho-emotional dynamics of families from an increasingly early stage (Gillies, 2015; see also Myers, 2010 and Stewart, 2011). More broadly, the politically and culturally popular idea that psycho-
emotional dysfunction generates damaging individual and social legacies together with the wider normalization of associated assessment and intervention are inseparable from what sociologists call ‘therapeutic culture’; namely, the prevalence of ideas, practices and assumptions from branches of psychology, therapy, counselling and self-help throughout popular culture, politics, education, legal and welfare systems (see Rose, 1999; Nolan, 1998, Furedi, 2004, Wright, 2011, Ecclestone and Hayes, 2009). In educational settings at all levels, these ideas and practices have become intertwined with long-running criticisms of an overly cognitive approach to learning and the promotion of more attention to affective dimensions. For example, notions such as ‘learning to learn’, ‘being
an independent/collaborative learner/reflective practitioner’ and ‘co-producing learning’ are embedded routinely in pedagogies and related assessments such as personal development portfolios, professional journals, mentoring programmes, and staff appraisals and reviews. These normalise regular assessments of dispositions, attitudes and behaviours such as self-esteem, engagement, confidence, resilience, emotional management and motivation. At the same time, lifestyle and popular media, books, articles, and software applications that monitor psycho-emotional states, together with everyday casual speculations amongst colleagues, friends and family, make ‘emotional issues’, people’s ability to deal with situations, and psychological causes of behaviour a constant source of cultural preoccupation. These political, institutional and cultural dimensions to the normalisation of
therapeutic behaviour change approaches across different policy arenas frame my exploration in this chapter of the ways in which vulnerability has become a key tenet of contemporary crisis discourses about the ‘ideal’ citizen as rational, autonomous, reasoning and choosing, and how it is integral to contemporary forms of psychological governance. The chapter aims to open new theoretical and empirical lines of enquiry in relation to three interrelated cultural and political phenomena: the rise of vulnerable subjects as targets for new forms of therapeutic governance; the role of the state in responding to and producing particular subjectivities; and the dangers arising from the erratic, sometimes intrusive, state-sponsored intervention market that these developments generate. My exploration of these themes is structured as follows. The first section relates
a powerful contemporary sensibility of endemic psycho-emotional vulnerability to long-running philosophical and political debates about the salience and desirability of the archetypal rational, autonomous, choice-making liberal and neo-liberal human subject as a target for governance; it also highlights some historical and contemporary examples of engagement between wider behaviour change policy interests and these subjects. I then use a Weberian understanding of authority to explore how a growing market of therapeutic interventions invokes dichotomies between different images of subjects as targets for governance that, in turn, legitimise new types of psy-expertise. The third section illuminates dangers that arise when governance becomes rooted in cultural anxiety about psycho-emotional vulnerability as a defining feature of everyday experience. I conclude with propositions that the privileging of vulnerable subjects in therapeutic forms of governance reflects the state’s growing uncertainty about its ability to govern through notions of the archetypal liberal and neo-liberal subject.
