ABSTRACT
As Rice John Steadman Rice has cogently argued, the “liberation psychotherapy” of the time articulated a “revolutionary discourse” based upon “the seemingly innocuous conviction that the individual’s subjection to communal purpose is the cause of psychological sickness.” Out of the discourse arose an ethic of self-actualization or -affirmation based upon dubious anti-cultural and anti-institutional premises that specified therapeutic criteria of health and sickness as the new standards by which to measure spiritual growth. Rice has taken up precisely the question in his study of the co-dependency movement, arguing that co-dependency represents a “discourse of reform” within the larger “discourse of revolution” that defines the triumph of the therapeutic. Of the classical sociologists, Max Weber is the most important theorist for helping therapists to understand the traditional role of religion and culture in character formation and the failure of that function in the twentieth century.
