Therapeutic Cultures: Practices of Social Control or Self-Creation?

Having introduced the background to this book, and its aims, this chapter provides a detailed review of key ideas and positions within what I am calling the sociology of therapeutic cultures. In particular, it will review the work of Anthony Giddens, James Nolan and Nikolas Rose as these are highly influential sociologists whose writing on therapeutic cultures is shaping the field, albeit from different perspectives. They provide a range of critical perspectives with which to understand the rise and contours of therapeutic cultures across a number of social domains, including the workplace. Working at a more macro, theoretical perspective, each theorist offers a different take on the key features of therapeutic cultures and the potential politics effects of their growth and proliferation. In particular, these social scientists seen the therapeutic self as something influenced by large-scale changes in society. This chapter will be followed by Chapter 4 which focuses on more empirical accounts of therapeutic cultures, in particular accounts of self-help books, self-help book readers and representations of therapeutic cultures on television. These are important because they provide a more micro account of how people interact with therapeutic cultures, and reveal some of the complexities in these reactions in a way which the more broad sociological theories do not.