The 'Emotional Markup' of Psychotherapeutic Culture: Imperatives, Ideational Contradictions, and Lines of Analysis

Abstract

This article is devoted to the emotional side of the '(psycho)therapeutic culture' that has emerged in the West as a result of the penetration of psychotherapeutic ideas into almost all spheres of society. This culture interprets life events, relationships, and social processes through the prism of psychology, and is now rapidly globalizing, claiming to be a moral regulator. Meanwhile, the scientific approach is often lost, taking forms far removed from professional psychology and adapted to mass culture. Sociologists have explored the reasons for the spread of the psychotherapeutic culture, pointing to its ambivalence and its relationship with late capitalism, especially neoliberalism. Some scholars see in it an ethical potential for liberation and the formation of an autonomous moral subject seeking new forms of solidarity based on an ethics of authenticity and self-care. Others take a critical approach, seeing the therapeutic culture as an emotional and ideological tool that favors elites and shapes a 'narcissistic' subject, morally insensitive, losing social ties, and easy to control. This paper is aimed to review approaches to the analysis of therapeutic culture and to consider its ambiguities that can produce ambiguous social consequences and undermine the integrative and creative potential of this culture in terms of highlighted emotional ideals or imperatives. The combination of the desire for rational management of emotions and the cult of authentic feelings is the main point of contradiction. This article analyzes other contradictions, such as between the desire for intense emotional communication and the desire for personal autonomy. The emotional-­therapeutic logic is contradictory and therefore compatible with other ideologies accepted in different cultural contexts, including the Russian one. It is important to assess the influence of psychotherapeutic culture in different spheres of social life, especially social policy, where a contradictory emotional-­therapeutic style may hinder the implementation of socio-­political programs.