Abstract
The notion of therapeutic culture has become a mainstay—dare I even say cliché?—in critical analyses of psychology, psychiatry, and therapy. Psychological perspectives, discourses, and practices have become ubiquitous in Western societies, and we are all now under their sway, chained to an individualizing and depoliticizing outlook on ourselves and society. Or so critics argue. Suvi Salmenniemi's Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture: Capitalism on the Skin offers instead a well-needed re-examination of this long-standing and rather monolithic interpretation of therapeutic culture. The book builds on ethnographic fieldwork carried out by Salmenniemi among alternative therapy practitioners in Finland offering mindfulness, reiki healing, life coaching, angel healing, empowerment groups, mediation, and tarot cards, to just mention some. Theoretically, Salmenniemi draws on Stuart Hall's theory of articulation, denoting the linking together of various elements into a contingent whole. This, Salmenniemi (2022: 15) argues, allows us to “approach therapeutic culture as a kind of assemblage” without any essential form. It is rather “an articulation of elements that sometimes work in conjunction, and at other times in contradiction.” Therapeutic discourses and practices must therefore be situated in specific contexts and the therapeutic field is constantly being negotiated and fought over.
The book contains five empirical chapters, with each chapter focusing on a particular key concept related to therapeutic culture. Salmenniemi's overall argument is that there is no particular, static relation between these concepts and therapeutic practices. Such practices can equally well support as oppose political engagements (Chapter 2), alienation from ourselves (Chapter 3), the incorporation of therapy in an individualized, entrepreneurial health economy (Chapter 4), the instrumentalization and commodification of affects (Chapter 5), and the reproduction of gender roles (Chapter 6). As this argument broadly recurs in each chapter, I will restrict my discussion to one of them to illustrate how Salmenniemi nuances and expands on the notion of therapeutic culture.
In contrast to critics’ claim that therapeutic practices substitute navel-gazing for (collective) political action, Salmenniemi describes in Chapter 2 how practitioners engaged in various ways with politics. Some started a political party with a primary focus on issues of health and well-being. While they emphasized that everyone has a duty to look after their own health—a view in line with critics’ claim that therapy aligns with neoliberalism's obsession with personal responsibility—they also protested cutbacks to the Finnish welfare state and criticized tax havens. Others had grown weary of formal politics and its seeming inability to affect meaningful change, opting to focus on “a form of lifestyle politics that foregrounds the everyday as a meaningful arena of political engagement” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 61). While it may be easy to interpret this as an escape from politics altogether, Salmenniemi demonstrates that this is a too simplistic view. Through lifestyle choices such as avoiding meat or foregoing material luxuries, Salmenniemi's interlocutors instead “sought alternative ways of being in the world” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 62) that would oppose a capitalist logic. Although many focused on “ethical work on the self” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 64), they also participated in non-governmental organizations such as the Red Cross, trade unions, and charities. The practitioners’ diverse engagements with individual and collective politics highlight the weakness of a too-monolithic notion of therapeutic culture. Salmenniemi also argues that the therapy practitioners’ forms of political agency may not fit “the prevailing liberal-secular-progressive political imaginary” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 71) but that it should not be overlooked. We must instead rethink what politics is—and can be—and question “the traditional antinomies between individual and collective, therapeutic and political” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 70).
Salmenniemi's arguments and conclusions are insightful and empirically well-supported, and she convincingly shows how therapeutic culture can take on different meanings and have diverse implications. Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture thus represents a refreshing and important take on a, by now, rather weary analytical notion. However, I find that the marginal position of alternative therapies in Finnish society, and how this bears upon therapeutic culture as an analytical notion, could be further addressed to clarify the applicability of—and limits to—Salmenniemi's argument. She notes that alternative therapies are culturally marginalized, viewed with suspicion and scorn—even though 30% of Finnish people have sought out such help (Salmenniemi, 2022: 118)—and that Finland currently has no legislation regulating alternative therapies. Yet, as Salmenniemi suggests in the concluding chapter, therapeutic engagements seem to offer people “a way to make sense of and negotiate the lived and embodied contradictions of capitalism” (Salmenniemi, 2022: 214), including that public health and social services are underfunded, overstrained, or seen as simply aiming to return workers to wage work as quickly as possible. In contrast, alternative therapies offer “recognition of personal experience and emotional and spiritual needs, … comprehensive care, and attention to the underlying causes of suffering”—albeit at times with a neo-liberal emphasis on self-responsibility. These therapies can also, according to Salmenniemi, be seen as a way to find hope in a time of post-political disillusion.
The pull of alternative therapies is consequently connected by Salmenniemi to the erosion of the Finnish welfare state. But how much of their appeal is due to their marginal status? A common strand in the critique of therapeutic culture is that its depoliticizing and individualizing effects are related to the “psy-sciences’” intimate imbrication with the state and its regulatory agencies (for a classic example, see Rose, 1985). Do alternative therapies’ “subaltern” position offer some particularly liberatory potential, denied the more traditional therapies? Are the ambivalence and open-endedness attributed by Salmenniemi to therapeutic culture due to her studying alternative therapies?
These critical questions notwithstanding, Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture is a stimulating read whose important contributions should be of interest not only to those studying therapeutic culture, but also to anyone interested in sociological studies of gender, (post-)politics, health, affects, and the experiences of life in contemporary Post-Fordist societies.
