ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the rise and relative decline of positive emotions as social problems. Using the examples of self-esteem and happiness, it describes how shifting popular and political discourses of therapeutic culture enable therapeutic vocabularies to emerge and disperse. The chapter conceptualises these as fad-like cycles of discovery, adoption, expansion, and exhaustion. Key to understanding these cycles are underlying belief systems that remain untouched in the exhaustion phase. That is, continuous cycles of discovery and exhaustion betray an implicit realisation that as solutions to social problems, much less understandings of fundamental drivers of history, emotions are limited in their explanatory power. Yet the belief in the fragility of the human subject and its fundamental role in ‘why things go wrong’ remains deep-rooted and pervasive. The chapter closes by arguing that if one wishes to challenge the global spread of therapeutic culture, it is necessary not simply to offer a critique of any one particular signifier, but rather to understand and challenge underlying beliefs about human subjectivity that partially drive their adoption.
