One nation in therapy

With a subject so omnipresent as that of the “psychological” in contemporary American culture, it helps to approach from a distance. Thus the following brief historical fable, in the form of a set of cross-cultural parallels from the history of religion. My fable concerns the transmission of Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent to three quite different cultures: in Tibet, where it only gained hold once trantric traditions of Buddhism assimilated themselves to existing forms and structures of Bon animism; in China, where and when, in the form of Ch’an Buddhism, it made its peace with Taoist thought; and in the contemporary United States, where, under the guidance of such Western teachers as Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, and Pema Chödrön, thousands of newly minted practitioners resonate to an emergent synthesis of ancient dharmic teachings on impermance and “no-self” and various contemporary forms of “personal growth work.” ¹

That Buddhism is only finally gaining a foothold in American culture today by blending its traditional soteriological agenda with various forms of psychological “self-realization” suggests something of the strength of what Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears have called “the therapeutic ethos” in our time—an ethos whose headquarters lie within white middle- and upper-middle-class life, but whose reach now affects all racial and class-defined groups. ² Each of the three books under review here has much more to tell us about the manifold social and cultural processes through which the normative American self and its relations with the social have been psychologized; together, they provide a composite account which not only enables further explorations and critiques, but allows us, however briefly, to step outside our own common sense, and dream some different, and arguably more enabling dreams of how we might otherwise be.

Philip Cushman’s Constructing the Self, Constructing America is unapologetically zealous in this latter mission—as befits a clinical psychologist whose education in critical theory is largely self-taught and whose effort in writing this book took place on the margins of an ongoing teaching and therapeutic practice. In the opening chapters of this “cultural history of psychotherapy,” Cushman elaborates a theoretical perspective, combining what he calls “social constructionism” à la Foucault with “philosophical hermeneutics” à la Gadamer, in the ringing tones of an exuberant autodidact. Subsequent chapters then whiz us through a guided tour of the history of the “Self in America” from the colonial era to the present—though for those who want an even more breathless quick-march through the entire history of subject-object relations in the West, a thirty-page appendix is provided at the end of the book—followed by rambling, scatter-shot synopses of various critical histories of the growth of the asylum, the emergence of modern and pathologized gendered identities and therapeutic regimes, the birth of psychoanalysis in Europe, and the contrasting emergence of pre- and proto-psychological technologies of self-liberation (for example, mesmerism, or, later, George Beard’s treatments for “neurasthenic disorders”) in nineteenth-century America.

All this prefatory material is dolloped out in such unassimilated lumps that the reader is apt to feel, like a Dan Ackroyd-Bill Murray Ghostbuster, so “slimed” by inchoate history as to prefer a hot shower to continued reading. Yet Cushman emerges from this jumbled heap with a useful insight into the key difference between American and European therapeutic regimes throughout the nineteenth century: the former, long before Esalen, assuming the dynamic and affirmative nature of the self, and thus seeking to “actualize” its sunny potential; the latter, even before Freud, assuming the need for rational constraint...