The Psychologization of Society
The Psychologization of Society explores the manner in which psychology has increasingly crept into everyday life, with nature reduced to a source of mental health, the belief in God motivated by health not salvation, sin and evil turned into psychiatric diagnosis, and the market economy being primarily driven by psychology. Showing that Norway, like the United States and Great Britain, is currently subjected to a psychological worldview or therapeutic ethos, Madsen examines an array of spheres such as media, law, religion, self-help literature, and cosmetic surgery to shed light on the ways in which the therapeutic ethos, rather than simply triumphing over them, actually blends in with regional norms and values. A study of the psychological imprint on Western countries as a form of the global democratization of psychologized self-care, this book explores the boundless struggle to be the best version of yourself in contemporary neoliberal culture. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, psychology, and cultural and media studies with interests in therapeutic discourses and paradoxes of health.
Ole Jacob Madsen is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Oslo, Norway. He is the author of The Therapeutic Turn: How Psychology Altered Western Culture and Optimizing the Self: Social Representations of Self-Help.
Therapeutic Cultures
This interdisciplinary series explores the role which therapeutic discourses and practices play in the organisation of social life, critically addressing the two broad questions of how therapeutic knowledge is popularised beyond academia and mental health care, and how it participates in popular culture, and in institutional structures and processes in government, law, education, media, health, work, family life, public and private policies.
Therapeutic Cultures seeks to address the histories of therapeutic culture and engage with its contemporary manifestations, so welcomes books that examine the transnationalisation of therapeutic discourses and practices and their uses in local institutional settings, as well as studies of the ways in which therapeutic discourses and practices participate in the social organisation of power, and how they become ingrained across a wide array of institutions.
Series editors
Daniel Nehring, East China University of Science and Technology, China
Ole Jacob Madsen, University of Oslo, Norway
Edgar Cabanas, Universidad Camilo Jos Cela, Spain
China Mills, University of Sheffield, UK
Dylan Kerrigan, University of the West Indies, Trinidad and Tobago
Titles in this series
The Psychologization of Society
On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway
Ole Jacob Madsen
For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/TC
The Psychologization of Society
On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway
Ole Jacob Madsen
First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Ole Jacob Madsen
The right of Ole Jacob Madsen to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Names: Madsen, Ole Jacob, 1978- author.
Title: The psychologization of society : on the unfolding of the therapeutic in Norway / Ole Jacob Madsen.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. | Series: Therapeutic cultures | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018008436| ISBN 9780815360421 (hbk) | ISBN 9781351118347 (ebk)
Subjects: LCSH: PsychologyNorway. | Mental healthNorway. | Self-help techniquesNorway. | NorwegiansPsychology.
Classification: LCC BF108.N8 M33 2018 | DDC 150.9481dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018008436
ISBN: 978-0-8153-6042-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-11834-7 (ebk)
In The Psychologization of Society, Ole Jacob Madsen sets out a complex analysis of contemporary therapeutic culture. The books argument departs from the prevailing dissonance in contemporary scholarly assessments of the relationship between psychology and society, between a positivist tradition that supports the growing role of psychological knowledge in social life and a revisionist tradition that has often been sharply critical of mental health discourses and practices. Madsen seeks to move beyond this dissonance and arrive at a more nuanced understanding of the socio-cultural significance of therapeutic meaning systems. In this context, he analyzes the prevalence of therapeutic discourses, products, and practices, including mass media across key spheres of contemporary social life, including the law, organized religion, professional psychological practice, and mass media, in the form of womens magazines and self-help literature. On this basis, he develops an account of the psychologization of social life. This culminates in the conclusion that psychologys hegemony has evolved to the point of becoming a monotheistic ontology of late modernity (p. 16), without easy alternatives. However, crucially, Madsen then complicates this assessment by challenging the obvious conclusion that resistance is futile (p. 144). Instead, he points to the continuing importance of critiques of psychologization, and asks what shape such critiques might take at a time when humanity is simultaneously faced with the urgent crisis of global warming and ecological collapse.
The Psychologization of Society marks an important step in academic debates about therapeutic culture. Building on a thoughtful assessment of extant scholarship, it offers an analysis of psychologization and the significance of psychological knowledge to contemporary social life that is mindful of the ambiguous implications of psychologys hegemony. In Madsens account, psychologization is bound up with both with the democratization of self-care, happiness, and self-esteem, and with a potentially limitless quest for self-optimization in the context of neoliberal governance. While processes have to some extent been documented in previous research, the ambiguities that result from their interaction has rarely been acknowledged. In this sense, Ole Jacob Madsens careful conceptualization of therapeutic culture opens up an important arena of debate for the study of therapeutic culture.
At the same time, this careful conceptualization rests on empirical enquiry that reaches significantly farther than most prior research. On the one hand,
