Cultural Representations of Therapeutic Cultures

In the previous chapter, I provided an introduction to key thinkers in the sociology of therapeutic cultures who work at the macro level, offering broad ideas of the emergence of therapeutic ways of thinking in society, the state and the workplace. This section examines the contribution of commentators who draw upon different theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds, such as Marxism, feminist cultural studies, and critical psychology. Many of these theorists carry out a range of close textual analyses of cultural representations of the ‘therapeutic’ in diverse cultural products including films, television programmes, self-help books and political rhetoric. Although varied in their evaluation of the effects of therapeutic representations, these writers enable us to see that the ambit of therapeutic ideas extends beyond the state and beyond social institutions to the cultural sphere.