anti-therapy¹

The idea that talking about our feelings could be a political act seems counterintuitive. Aren’t people talking about their emotions more than ever before? And hasn’t this new emotionalism coincided with the emergence of what I have called capitalist realism — the deeply embedded view that capitalism is the only “realistic” economic system?

New Labour and the Birth of Emo-Politics

In order to begin to answer this, let’s turn to one of the central hubs of capitalist realism, the UK. Tony Blair’s New Labour naturalised what Thatcher had to fight for: the idea that there was no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. In retrospect, it is now clear that the first few months of Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister also inaugurated a new moment in British political life — the birth of what we might call emo-politics. Blair brought a new emotional tone to British government. He positioned himself as part of a Britain that was more at ease with expressing its feeling than his parents’ generation and their predecessors — with their stereotypical “stiff upper lips” — had been. Crucial to this was Blair and his advisers’ manipulation of the extraordinary grief jamboree that ensued in the immediate wake of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, which happened only a few months after New Labour came to power.

The death famously wrongfooted the monarchy, with its older models of duty and emotional restraint, but Blair’s delivery of his famous speech about the “People’s Princess” — scripted by New Labour’s spin doctor, Alastair Campbell — not only established his authority as a prime minister, it initiated a new phase of neoliberal governance in Britain.

Thanks to Campbell and compliant members of the British media, a strong narrative soon emerged, in which Blair’s apparent emotional openness was contrasted with the Queen’s “coldness”. The monarch’s remoteness was now equated with “unhealthy” forms of emotional repression. Just as Blair sold himself as a moderniser who was taking the Labour Party away from the “class politics of the past”, so New Labour would also make a break with the traditional account of emotions. The government would now take the lead in ensuring that the population had the “correct”, “healthy” response to emotional distress. The normative tone would have been worrying enough, but New Labour’s emotional politics went far beyond mere mood-setting or the offering of recommendations.

Instead, the new conception of emotional health was passive-aggressively enforced — in the authoritarian style of neoliberalism which New Labour made their own — by a battery of measures which intervened to an unprecedented degree in the population’s emotional lives. Health, education and social control were all part of this project. Teachers were suborned into the role of emo-cops, ensuring that schoolchildren complied with the new emotional normativity. Parents judged to be failing were now required to attend “parenting classes”.

Meanwhile, the question of how genuine Blair’s feelings of grief were takes us to the heart of the Blair enigma: did he really believe in the doctrines he hawked, or was he a strange combination of charismatic showmanmanipulator and depthless puppet of capital? What did Blair see when he looked in the mirror then, and what does he see now? Are we dealing with self-deception, messianic delusion, or a new kind of postmodern psychopathy? The enigma remains as unsolvable now as it was twenty years ago. What is certain is that Blair led the way in normalising the emotional self-exploitation that was necessary for the final phase of neoliberalism in Britain.

The early Blair perfected the art of “spincerity” — the public performance of an emotion that you may or may not actually feel. As Britain’s economy became ever more reliant on the service and sales jobs, increasing numbers of workers were forced to develop the techniques of emotional simulation which Blair publicly pioneered.

In their book The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education, Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes argue that New Labour turned to popular therapy to fill the gap left by class politics. These “therapeutic orthodoxies”, they argue,

include claims that past life experiences have long-term negative emotional effects for everyone, and particularly pernicious effects for an increasing minority. The overall message is that, behind our apparently confident facades, we are all, to a greater or lesser extent, fragile and vulnerable and, as a consequence, we need particular forms of emotional support.²

Ecclestone and Hayes are right that these therapeutic tenets have been widely promulgated, and often accepted without much criticism. As Eva Illouz has been especially perspicacious in identifying, therapeutic orthodoxies have been disseminated, not only by therapists themselves, but by a popular culture which has enthusiastically adopted therapeutic motifs and conceptual frames. Ecclestone and Hayes are also right that therapy filled the gap that appeared when New Labour explicitly repudiated the concept of class struggle. However, Ecclestone and Hayes’s solution to the “therapeutic turn” is simply to play off one form of reactionary politics against another. Their call for a return to an education based on “reason, science and progress” is superficially laudable. Ultimately, however, theirs is conservative position, which offers us only a (false) choice between different kinds of authoritarianism. In place of New Labour’s soft — but highly invasive — authoritarianism, Ecclestone and Hayes posit an unappetizing return to traditional forms of authoritarianism. They are also in danger of endorsing the very emotional remoteness that superficially justifies the therapeutic turn. The problem with what I would like to call here the therapeutic imaginary is not that it posits subjects as vulnerable, haunted by events in their past lives, and lacking in confidence. Most subjects in capitalism — including those in the ruling class — fit that description. The problem with the therapeutic imaginary — and this is a problem that goes back to Freud and the origins of psychoanalysis — is its claim that these issues can be solved by the individual subject working on him- or herself, with only the therapist to assist them.

In addition, Ecclestone and Hayes’ refusal of the role of emotion in education — or rather their placing of emotion in opposition to “reason, science and progress” — presents a diminished account of the Enlightenment project to which they claim allegiance. This is the Enlightenment as understood by someone like Richard Dawkins — an Enlightenment rightly criticised for its patriarchal bias by the “postmodern” theorists that it is no surprise at all to see Ecclestone and Hayes disdaining. The “Enlightenment” here ends up simply reinforcing the largely unexamined class, gender and race assumptions of the ruling class.

This account of Enlightenment can be contrasted with the one that emerges in the work of Jonathan Israel. In Israel’s narrative, Enlightenment corrodes the bases of all traditional forms of authority. This does not lead to some “postmodern” free-for-all any more than it mandates some dogmatic adherence to the current institutions of science. Rather, forms of “authority” which claim their legitimacy from tradition stand exposed as illegitimate, which is to say authoritarian. It then becomes possible to contrast such authoritarianism with a democratic and transparent model of authority.

The defining principle of Radical Enlightenment is the conviction that there is nothing that — in theory if not in fact — cannot be understood. This was the belief animating Spinoza’s philosophy, which, Israel argues, provided the foundations upon which Radical Enlightenment would grow.

Here we can return to the emotions. As is well known, far from ignoring emotions, or assuming they could be bypassed in some way, Spinoza’s philosophy makes the management of emotions central to its project. It aims not to subdue emotions, but to engineer joy — a task that can only be achieved when reason is not simply opposed to feelings, but brought to bear on them. According to Spinoza’s logic, ignoring emotions only mystifies them, putting them beyond the purview of rational enquiry. All of which makes Spinoza an eminently modern philosopher, but also a thinker whose work is an indispensable resource for any progressive project. This is especially so now, in an era in which more and more areas of life and the psyche dominated by agencies which engage in libidinal and emotional engineering — most of which is undertaken, knowingly or unknowingly, in the interests of capital.

New Labour’s authoritarian emo-politics was ostensibly part of its “progressive” supplement to capitalist realism. Blairism maintained that the only way to implement any measures that would produce “social justice” was to capitulate to the dominance of capitalism. It was “unrealistic” to hope for anything more; such expectations were a relic of an earlier moment — the conditions for which have now disappeared - when the organised working class could assert itself against capital. New Labour accepted and naturalized this new composition of social forces, arguing that its capitulation would allow it the bargaining room to bring in measures — such as the minimum wage - which a Thatcherite neoliberal party would always block. It turned out, however, that New Labour’s emo-politics were actually fundamental to the securing of neoliberalism in the UK. To understand why that is, we have to reflect more closely on what neoliberalism is. We must also further reflect on the role that the therapeutic imaginary has played in embedding neoliberalism. To do that, we will now shift our attention away from the UK, and onto the US.

Antinomies of the Therapeutic Imaginary

Jennifer M. Silva’s Coming Up Short: Working-Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty heartbreakingly registers the corrosive effects of the neoliberal environment on intimacy.

Silva’s book focuses on young people specifically — it is based on a hundred interviews she undertook with young working-class men and women in two American cities (Lowell, Massachusetts and Richmond, Virginia). On the face of it, Silva’s starting point is similar to Ecclestone’s and Hayes’. “In a world of rapid change and tenuous loyalties,” Silva argues, “the language and institution of therapy — and the self-transformation it promises — has exploded in American culture.”³ Ecclestone and Hayes saw New Labour’s adoption of therapeutic tropes as the consequence of some mixture of opportunism, authoritarianism and bungled good intentions. For Silva, meanwhile, the spread of therapeutic culture in the US is both a means by which neoliberal individualism has been embedded and a consequence of that embedding. According to Ecclestone and Hayes, therapy produces a “softening” of subjectivity and culture, manifested in a weakening of authority and a strengthening of an ever more intrusive state. For Silva, by contrast, the dissemination of therapeutic concepts has resulting in a hardening of the individual subject. “[W]orking class men and women born in the wake of neoliberalism […] learn to see their struggles to survive on their own as morally right, making a virtue of not asking for help; if they could do it, then everyone else should too.”⁴

This brings out the difference between New Labour’s rendition of neoliberalism and neoliberalism in the American context. The New Labour model of the (implicitly working-class) subject functioned as a double-bind. The double bind, as Deleuze and Guattari explain in Anti-Oedipus, “is the term used by Gregory Bateson to describe the simultaneous transmission of two kinds of messages, one of which contradicts the other, as for example the father who says to his son: go ahead, criticize me, but strongly hints that all effective criticism — at least a certain type of criticism — will be very unwelcome.”⁵ The contradictory instructions serve to destabilise the subject, keeping them in a state of permanent neurotic anxiety.

On the one hand, the working-class subject was interpellated by New Labour as a being capable of radical, indeed practically infinite, selftransformation. (One of the most significant effects of this ideology — which was at one and the same time its presupposition — was the divesting of the subject of its class position. Class “identity” was perceived as both an atavism and a constraint, holding the subject back from the infinite promises of self-reinvention.) On the other hand, as soon as something went “wrong” — when the behavior of working-class individuals inevitably went outside the parameters policed by the myriad of surveillance and control agencies which the New Labour administration invented — they were seen as fundamentally lacking in self-determination and the capacity for self-care, and were subject to intensive disciplining (e.g. the parenting classes mentioned above).

In practice, the American situation that Silva describes operates with the same double bind. It is just that the emphasis is different. New Labour, still haunted by a socialist and social democratic history that it could never fully abjure, presented its management and disciplining of the working class in passive-aggressive terms, as “care”. In the US, where this social democratic history is lacking, the hyper(neo)-liberal interpellation of the subject as capable of self-determination and self-reinvention is supplemented — especially in the case of black working-class individuals — by the aggressive use of incarceration. Therapeutic narratives of self-transformation feed into what Alex Williams has called “negative solidarity”. This is the tendency for neoliberal subjects to “race to the bottom”. If others are perceived to be in receipt of resources or benefits that they “haven’t earned”, they should not only be denied those resources, they should be publicly shamed for claiming them. Everyone should “stand on their own two feet”.

One of the many values of Silva’s book is the thorough account it gives of the emotional and cultural roots of negative solidarity. Silva argues that the hardened model of subjectivity that she sees exhibited by most of the people she interviewed for her study is the result of years of institutional and existential abandonment. A therapeutic narrative of heroic selftransformation is the only story that makes sense in a world in which institutions can no longer be relied upon to support or nurture individuals. In an environment dominated by unrelenting competition and insecurity, it is neither possible to trust others, nor to project any sort of long-term future. Naturally, these two problems feed into one another, in one of the many vicious spirals which neoliberal culture has specialised in innovating. The inability to imagine a secure future makes it very difficult to engage in any sort of long-term commitment. Rather than seeing a partner as someone who might share the stresses imposed by a harshly competitive social field, many of the working-class individuals to whom Silva spoke instead saw relationships as an additional source of stress. In particular, many of the heterosexual women regarded relationships with men as too risky a proposition. In conditions where they could not depend on much outside themselves, the self-reliance they were forced to develop was both a culturally validated achievement and a hard-won survival strategy which they were reluctant to give up.

In any case, what we confront here is a first antinomy of the therapeutic imaginary: the idea that the proliferation of therapeutic orthodoxies simultaneously produces “softened” subjects — subjects who identify as lacking, if not actually damaged — and subjects that are “hardened” — subjects who pride themselves on a claimed invulnerability. We can approach the second antinomy via the notion of subjects that are excessively invested in their own vulnerability. The severe problems inherent in such an investment from a left-wing point of view were analysed twenty years ago by Wendy Brown in her important essay “Wounded Attachments”.⁶ Brown understood very well the libidinal, discursive and administrative complex that would produce New Labour: “As liberal discourse converts political identity into essentialized private interest,” she wrote, “disciplinary power converts interest into normativized social identity manageable by regulatory regimes.” However, the main point of Brown’s essay was to diagnose the psycho-libidinal origins of an identarian political formation which has become even more deeply embedded since she wrote the essay in the 1990s. Drawing on Nietzsche’s account of resentment in On The Genealogy of Morals, Brown wrote of a political subjectivity which “becomes deeply invested in its own impotence, even while it seeks to assuage the pain of its powerlessness through its vengeful moralizing, through its wide distribution of suffering, through its reproach of power as such.” As Brown observed, “politicized identity thus becomes attached to its own exclusion both because it is premised on this exclusion for its very existence as identity.” Brown’s careful diagnoses of this political psychopathology turned out to be prophetic as well as astute. Twenty years on, and the mixture of moralizing aggression and investment in impotence has proliferated in a political atmosphere now substantially shaped by the online environment. In her article, “Sexual Paranoia Strikes Academe”, published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Laura Kipnis describes a situation on American campuses in which female students are encouraged to see themselves as helpless victims of predatory lecturers. “Everywhere on campuses today,” Kipnis wrote,

you find scholars whose work elaborates sophisticated models of power and agency. It would be hard to overstate the influence, across disciplines, of Michel Foucault, whose signature idea was that power has no permanent address or valence. Yet our workplaces themselves are promulgating the crudest version of top-down power imaginable, recasting the professoriate as Snidely Whiplashes twirling our mustaches and students as helpless damsels tied to railroad tracks. Students lack volition and independent desires of their own; professors are would-be coercers with dastardly plans to corrupt the innocent.⁷

Kipnis’s article predictably became embroiled in the very processes it sought to analyse, as she became the target of aggressive moralising attack from groups self-identifying as representatives of the vulnerable.

Here, then, is the first part of our second antinomy of the therapeutic imaginary: there is an excessive tendency amongst many subjects today to identify as victims of abuse. It is important to note at this point that I am not conflating Kipnis’s argument with that of Ecclestone and Hayes. Whereas their position ultimately amounts to a call for the restoration of older models of authority, Kipnis is more of a left-libertarian who deplores the moralising authoritarianism that has spread so pervasively through American student politics. At no point does Kipnis underplay the suffering caused by actual abuse, or imply that the “survivors” of such abuse should button up and get on with it.

If both Kipnis and Brown’s essays highlight real and pervasive psychopathologies on the left, their analyses need to be weighed against an acknowledgement that sexual abuse by those in politics and media is actually far more widespread than had been previously supposed. The obvious example here would be the disturbing and curious case of Jimmy Savile in the UK (which is echoed by the accusations that have recently circled around Bill Cosby in the US). Savile was a DJ turned light entertainer, best known in the 1970s for his work on the children’s wish-fulfilment television show Jim’ll Fix It. After his death, rumours that had dogged him for many years were confirmed — Savile had sexually abused thousands of victims, including many children.

Savile was no ordinary entertainer or media figure. Like some character out of a David Lynch film, Savile had links with both the criminal underworld and the most powerful members of the ruling class. A massive police investigation into those who had worked with Savile (Operation Yewtree) discovered that he was not alone — many of his associates were also paedophiles. Yet the remit of Operation Yewtree was confined to the entertainment world — Savile was also a friend of politicians and policemen. In the wake of the Savile allegations emerging, a new scandal is brewing in the UK. This time it centres on politics, with Thatcher’s right-hand man Leon Brittan and former Conservative prime minister Edward Heath among those accused of paedophilia.

This brings us to the second half of the second antinomy of the therapeutic imaginary: there is far more abuse than had previously been thought possible. The sense of the possible here has little to do with what actually happened; rather, it is what is deemed credible by the virtual figure that Lacanian theory calls the big Other. The big Other is something like the virtual observer assumed to be the audience for official discourse, and it is the big Other which secures the consistency of any reality system. There is always some discrepancy between what groups and individuals know and what the big Other believes. This is because, as Lacan notes, a defining feature of the big Other is its inability to see everything. However, a severe crisis will occur if the discrepancy between what groups and individuals know and what the big Other “believes” becomes too marked. In such conditions, the official reality system is in danger of collapse. There is every reason to suspect that, in the UK and elsewhere in Europe, this is what we are currently encountering. Under pressure from the banking crisis of 2008, and the emergence of new political parties such as Syriza and Podemos, the reality- and libidinalengineering systems that have maintained capitalist realism for the last thirty years are beginning to look dysfunctional. In England in particular — the oldest capitalist country, and the culture with the most effective and historically durable dampening mechanisms in the world available to it — capitalist realism has operated by dramatically narrowing the affective and representational bandwidth of culture. A culture dominated by reality TV, self-improvement propaganda and corporate appeasement — all of which push therapeutic orthodoxies — has produced diminished expectations and representational conservatism. Yet the representational frameworks which have served English capitalist realism so well since the 1980s clearly cannot accommodate the trauma of the establishment paedophile scandals, any more than they can accommodate popular mobilisations against neoliberalism. You would indeed need the formal inventiveness of a David Lynch or a David Peace to do justice to the extremity of what the English ruling class has got up to. It turns out that the supposed fantasmatic and melodramatic excesses of Lynch and Peace’s work — its tendency to see conspiracies and abuse everywhere — is much closer to actuality than the moderation of respectable middlebrow literary and televisual “realism”.

So here is the second antinomy in full: there is an excessive tendency amongst many subjects today to identify as victims of abuse; however, there is far more abuse than had previously been imagined. How can both these claims be true — and if they are, what does it tell us about the therapeutic imaginary?

Capital Is More Real Than You Are: There Is No Such Thing as the Autonomous Individual

To break out of this impasse, we need to abandon the belief in the autonomous individual that has been at the heart, not only of neoliberalism, but of the whole liberal tradition. In a successful attempt to break with social democratic and socialist collectivism, neoliberalism invested massive ideological effort into reflating this conception of the individual, with its supporting dramaturgy of choice and responsibility.

If we want to reject this conception of the individual, then we might turn once again to Spinoza, whose whole work was based on the premise that such an individual could not exist. But, in the context of therapy, we might also turn to the radical therapist David Smail, who rejected all of the standard tropes of individualist therapy. “[W]hat we take to be causal processes of thought, decision and will are frequently little more than a kind of commentary that accompanies our action,” Smail argued in his book Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress.⁸ The interiority presupposed by much therapy is little more than an ideological special effect. Like Spinoza, Smail understands that the socalled “inside” is really a folding of the outside. Most of what is supposedly “inside” us has been acquired from the wider social field. “Many of the characteristics that we tend to regard as entirely ‘psychological’ are acquired from outside. The most significant case in point is probably ‘self-confidence’, the crumbling of which is so often at the root of the kind of personal distress which can be ‘diagnosed’ by the experts as ‘neurotic’.”⁹ This means that, contrary to the founding principles of something like cognitive behavioural therapy, the means for self-transformation are not available to individuals.

What people who suffer psychological distress tend to become aware of is that no matter how much they want to change, no matter how hard they try, no matter what mental gymnastics they put themselves through, their experiences of life stay much the same. This is because there is no such thing as an autonomous individual. What powers we have are acquired from and distributed within our social context, some of them (the most powerful) at unreachable distances from us. The very meaning of our actions is not something that we can autonomously determine, but is made intelligible (or otherwise) by orders of culture (proximal as well as distal) over which we have virtually no control.¹⁰

This is why any individual therapy — even that practiced by a sympathetic and politically progressive therapist — can only ever have limited effects. In order to really come to terms with the damage that has been done to them by and in the wider social field, individuals need to engage in collective practices that will reverse neoliberalism’s privatisation of stress. Here we can return to an important observation by Jennifer M. Silva:

In social movements like feminism, self-awareness, or naming one’s problems, was the first step to radical collective awareness. For this generation, it is the only step, completely detached from any kind of solidarity; while they struggle with similar, and structurally rooted, problems, there is no sense of ‘we’. The possibility of collective politicization through naming one’s suffering is easily subsumed within these larger structures of domination because others who struggle are not seen as fellow sufferers but as objects of scorn.¹¹

The spreading of therapeutic narratives was one way in which neoliberalism contained and privatised the molecular revolution that consciousnessraising brought about. The struggle to dismantle neoliberalism will therefore necessarily involve the rediscovery and reinvention of these formerly popular practices. So now we are in a position to answer the question I posed at the start of this essay: When can talking about our feelings become a political act? When it is part of a practice of consciousness-raising that makes visible the impersonal and intersubjective structures that ideology normally obscures from us.