ABSTRACT
Boltanski and Chiapello’s historical study tracing ideological changes in capitalism is an important theoretical contribution for making sense of this fusion of the therapeutic with neoliberalism. This chapter explores what it feels like to live and work under neoliberal demands for competition, productivity and performance. While therapeutic practitioners are often presented, implicitly or explicitly, as strategic self-managing subjects buying into the ethos of neoliberalism, have sought to complicate this interpretation by showing how therapeutic assemblages may also enable and initiate contestation of the neoliberal ethic of work and its destructive effects on subjectivity. Neoliberal capitalism, with its new therapeutic spirit, has also given rise to new modalities of alienation. Rosa has called for the revival of the concept of alienation in sociology as a ’general term describing subjects’ dysfunctional relation to the world. In assembling personalised therapeutic self-care packages, research participants sought to renegotiate their relationships with work and express moral resistance to neoliberalism and its hidden injuries.
