The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures, popular psychology, and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, politics, law, history, social work, cultural studies, development studies, and American Indian studies, it adopts a consciously global focus, combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised, it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life, before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological, as well as significant transformations of key institutions, such as work, family, education, and religion, it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies, the political interest in happiness, and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally, the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research, The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.

Daniel Nehring is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Swansea University, UK. His research concerns the personal consequences of globalisation and the rapid mobilisation of social life in the early 21st century. He is the co-author of Transnational Popular Psychology and the Global Self-Help Industry and Therapeutic Worlds. He is also the convenor of the international academic network 'Popular Psychology, Self-Help Culture and the Happiness Industry'. 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, Optimizing the Self: Social Representations of Self-Help and The Psychologization of Society: On the Unfolding of the Therapeutic in Norway. Edgar Cabanas is Research Fellow at Universidad Camilo José Cela, Spain. He is the co-author of Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Industry and Science of Happiness Control our Lives, which has been translated into over 10 languages, as well as the author of several scientific papers and book chapters. China Mills is Lecturer in Critical Education Psychology at the University of Sheffield, UK and the author of Decolonizing Global Mental Health: The Psychiatrization of the Majority World. Dylan Kerrigan is Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Leicester, UK, and a Visiting Lecturer with the University of the West Indies. He is co-author of Therapeutic Worlds: Popular Psychology and the Socio-Cultural Organisation of Intimate Life.

Part 1: Introduction General Introduction 1. Therapeutic Cultures: Historical Perspectives 2. Charting the Emergence of the Self as a Social Representation from Early Modernity to 20th Century: A Constructionist Approach 3. Self-Help, Therapeutic Industries, and Neoliberalism Part 2: Therapeutic Discourses Editors' Introduction 4. Happiness Imperialism 5. Spirituality and Happiness from New Thought to Positive Psychology 6. Resilience: The Failure of Success 7. Stigmas Old and New: The Changing Nature of Stigma in the Twenty-first Century 8. ADHD as a Symptom of the Times: Social Distress and its Naturalization 9. Mindfulness as a Self-help Fad: The Mindfulness Industry, Popular Psychological Knowledge and the Sociological Imagination Part 3: Therapeutic Experiences Editors' Introduction 10. Self-esteem, Happiness and the Therapeutic Fad Cycle 11. The Cultivation of Subjectivity of Young People in Youth Support Systems 12. Mental Health, Subjectivity and Subjective Development: The Multiple Angles of Mental Health Care 13. Embodied Therapeutic Culture 14. Unlearning Privilege: The Therepeutic Ethos and the Battle Within the White Self 15. Therapeutic Culture and Relational Wellbeing Part 4: Therapeutic Practices Editors' Introduction 16. Globalizing Personality: A View from China 17. Digital Therapeutic Culture 18. Counselling and Confucianism in China 19. Between Freud and Umbanda: Therapeutic Constellations in Buenos Aires, Argentina 20. Faith Healing: Haunted Discourses of Distress in India 21. Masculine Performers and Good Girls: Negotiating Gender Norms in Therapeutic Engagements Part 5: Therapeutic Technologies and Therapeutic Institutions Editors' Introduction 22. Therapeutic Education? Negotiating 'Evidence' and 'Experience' as part of the Professionalization of Psychiatry Students in India 23. The Crisis of Psychotherapy and the Road to a Post-Therapeutic Future 24. India's Digital Therapeutic Assemblage: Smartphone Apps, Stress, and Mental Health 25. The Nordic Therapeutic Welfare State and its Resilient Citizens 26. Victim and Therapeutic Cultures and the Contentious Climate of Universities 27. Undead Psyche: Post-colonial Art as Therapeutic Paradox in the Caribbean 28. Psychology Estranged: Mind, Culture and Capitalism Part 6: Therapeutic Politics Editors' Introduction 29. Neo-liberal Genre, not so Liberal Consumption: When a Japanese 'Morning Person' Book Crossed the South Korean Border 30. Where Has All the Context Gone? Feminism within Therapeutic Culture 31. Trauma's Empty Promise: Indigenous Death, Economics, and Resurgence 32. Recognising the Political in the Therapeutic: Trauma Talk and Public Inquiries 33. Ontological Coaching and the Post-Therapeutic turn in Neoliberal Governmentality 34. Therapeutic Jurisprudence in Trinidad and Tobago: Legitimacy, Inclusion and the Neo-colonialism of Procedural Justice