THE CONSTRUCTION OF THERAPEUTIC CULTURE IN THE SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES

Abstract

The article is devoted to the epistemological analysis of the formation and development of the concept of “therapeutic culture” within the social and human sciences of the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. The study traces the historical-intellectual context of the emergence of this phenomenon, identifies the key discursive frameworks of its theorization, and proposes a conception of five models that enable the comprehension of research on the therapeutic within its socio-historical conditions. Five basic models are distinguished: cultural decline, therapeutic subjectivation, reflexive modernity, emotional culture, and therapeutic cultures. Within the first model, represented by the works of P. Rieff and C. Lasch, the therapeutic is interpreted as a symptom of the crisis of Western culture, undermining traditional forms of morality, social solidarity, and shaping a new type of psychological man. The second model, developed on the basis of the works of M. Foucault and N. Rose, reveals the therapeutic as a contingent technology of power and subjectivation that institutionalizes specific modes of self-narration and the formation of the “entrepreneurial self.” The third model, exemplified in the concepts of A. Giddens and U. Beck, consider the therapeutic as a resource of navigation in the conditions of reflexive modernity and the risk society, where the individual constructs the self as a reflexive project. The fourth model, examined in the context of the affective turn and the works of C. Wright, E. Illouz, and A. Hochschild, emphasizes the emotional dimension of the therapeutic, highlighting its role in the democratization of experience, the commodification of feelings, and the politicization of affects. Finally, the fifth model — therapeutic cultures, proposed on the basis of the works of O. J. Madsen and colleagues, departs from a unitary approach to the therapeutic as a homogeneous phenomenon. This model advances a polyphonic vision of multiple and hybrid therapeutic cultures that function across diverse national, religious, and social contexts and mutually recode one another. Given the breadth and complexity of the problematics, the proposed analysis should be regarded as a preliminary epistemological reconstruction — inevitably limited in its completeness and speculative in a number of conclusions — yet one that provides a foundation for further elaboration.