ABSTRACT
Analysis of medical discourses from a historical perspective allows us to better understand society’s emotional regime because what contemporary individuals experience and express as medically right or wrong owes much to the language and practice of science. As was pointed out in the Introduction, the concept “emotional culture” is closely related to that of “therapeutic culture” and, to a certain extent, could be considered a preliminary step toward the “medicalization of experience” that we see in many contexts. In fact, one of the consequences of the ever growing colonization of the emotional sphere by scientific-technical rationality is a culture with an increasingly therapeutic character.
