ABSTRACT
Seeping through contemporary culture, positive psychology mandates cheerful optimism and buoyant resilience as ‘winning’ dispositions for neoliberal life. It works as a species of ‘therapy culture’ that both erodes liberal demarcations of an autonomous private life and raids this subjective world of dispositions to be reappropriated by the ‘entrepreneurial’ personality. Therapy culture is also well adapted to the ideological tasks of misrepresenting and displacing the social democratic ‘politicization of needs’. This chapter will discuss the contrast that Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher make between ‘wants’ and ‘needs’ in order to track the mechanisms that have been used to defeat this radical social democratic potential.
