ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the theorising and empirical research that has emerged from the notion of the ‘therapeutic ethos’ and ‘therapeutic culture’. I will take as my starting point the writings of influential sociologists and historians like Philip Rieff, Peter Berger, and Christopher Lasch in the 1960s and 1970s, which primarily focused on how psychoanalysis in America arose from the therapy offices and universities into the wider culture as part of an ongoing ‘Kulturkampf'. In the 1980s and 1990s, the analysis of psychology’s growing influence embraced the whole of Western society, and linked this development to institutional and political changes related to individualisation (Ulrich Beck), state legitimation (James Nolan), and neoliberal rules of governing in advanced liberal democracies (Nikolas Rose). In the 2000s and 2010s, scholars of the therapeutic like Eva Illouz and Katie Wright, also provided as much-needed pragmatist and feminist refinement of the early mainly critical reception of “the therapeutic turn”, which helps to establish the study of therapeutic culture(s) as an independent and vibrant research-field along other important aspects of contemporary culture.
