| From television talk shows to presidential campaign speeches, from twelve-step groups to feminist politics, motifs of therapy are ubiquitous in U.S. political culture. A common argument suggests that since the Vietnam War, the therapeutic ethos has impoverished public political life in the United States. It is my goal in this dissertation to develop, through a series of case studies, a materialist rhetoric of therapy that links the rise of the therapeutic with particular political and economic interests, and describes the specific mechanisms by which the therapeutic is a persuasive part of our culture.;My thesis is that therapy, as a hegemonic strategy of liberal capitalism in the U.S., dislocates social and political conflicts onto individuals, privatizes both the experience of oppression and possible modes of resistance to it, and translates political questions into moral issues to be resolved through personal, spiritual, or psychological change. More than simple narcissism, therapy as a cultural rhetoric privatizes and personalizes the experience of political problems in contemporary U.S. culture.;Chapter One develops a theory of the therapeutic as an ideological mechanism and rhetorical strategy of liberal capitalism. In Chapter Two, I argue for locating a rhetoric of therapy in the context of hegemony theory, which explains how themes and motifs of private transformation and individual healing become safe vehicles for expressions of social discontent. Support group news during the 1991 Persian Gulf war is a clear example of the process by which nations are consoled and protest is domesticated within a therapeutic frame. Chapter Three argues that post-Marxism, in its idealism, implicit individualism, and political relativism resembles the hyper-therapeutic and pro-capitalist rhetoric of the New Age movement. Chapter Four argues that feminism, too, with the core insistence that the personal is political, is often a therapeutic rather than a political discourse.;I conclude the dissertation by posing a Marxist model of collective, public challenges to the capitalist system against the therapeutic recuperation of political energy in contemporary culture. |
