ABSTRACT
Today in the United States, the therapeutic culture has a reach that no one whose notion of the therapeutic centred on one couch, one White, male psychiatrist and a woman’s interior world awaiting illumination could have imagined. In order to understand how the therapeutic culture has come to obscure the social underpinnings of tensions in American women’s lives, this chapter addresses how neoliberal discourses related to the medicalisation and biologisation of human problems shape our shared cultural meanings. In addition, it examines how middle-class healthism in the United States, intertwined with ideas about stress and the need for work/life “balance,” have set a cultural agenda that papers over gender and class differences. Finally, it explores how the ubiquity of trauma discourse in the United States has contributed to the increasing convergence of feminist psychotherapy and trauma therapy, centralising discussions of risk and vulnerability within the project of psychotherapy itself. In the chapter, I argue that to the extent that these cultural developments in the United States have been reproduced in the therapeutic culture more broadly and feminist psychotherapy praxis more specifically, they have influenced women to direct their attention and their actions to the domain of the personal rather than the political.
