ABSTRACT
The book departs from the scholarly tradition often referred to as “the therapeutic ethos” or “the therapeutic culture,” a research tradition that most often is ascribed to Philip Rieff’s seminal notion of The Triumph of the Therapeutic put forward in 1966. The early reception of psychoanalysis and later psychology’s cultural influence in Western culture mainly saw it as a part of a cultural decay of American society, whereas contemporary scholars of the therapeutic tends to hold a less predisposed and more favorable view, which also calls for more empirical investigations of the unfolding of the therapeutic from different regions of the world. My contribution to this task is to investigate the influence of the therapeutic ethos on contemporary Norwegian culture such as the media, law, religion, self-help including cosmetic surgery, inspired by cultural sociologist Eva Illouz’s pragmatic program that emphasizes “how” and “why”-questions. In this introductory chapter I also provide the reader with definitions of key concepts, an idea of the overarching research question, and an overview of the book per each individual section.
