ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to raise a few exploratory questions about the content and form of consciousness-raising as a mode of purveying knowledge or bringing about change by pointing to some of its distinguishing characteristics, placing it in the therapeutic tradition, and considering some of its possible ramifications. As early as 1966 when Triumph of the Therapeutic was published, Philip Rieff thought that the shifting emphasis in the civil rights movement signaled the likelihood that African Americans would embrace the therapeutic framework of the dominant culture. Rieff thought the movement had the capacity to reinvigorate the whole “moral demand system in the white American culture.” The therapeutic culture, Rieff wrote, obliterated “distinctions between right and wrong,” preached an “ethic of release,” set as an ideal a “manipulatable sense of well-being,” and preferred individual satisfaction over sacrifice in the interests of a morally viable community.
