30 IV 2008
Thomas Cole’s piece in response to Philip Rieff’s Triumph of the Therapeutic seems to explore human condition beyond Rieff’s characterization of a totalizing psychology. To Cole, Rieff’s statement that “by this time men may have gone too far… to specialize… in techniques that are to be called… ‘therapeutic,’ with nothing at stake beyond a manipulatable sense of well-being” too harsh and too over-simplistic(Rieff, in Cole, 267). Cole correctly sees the ironic nature in Rieff’s use of “triumph” in his book, and offers the “therapeutic” to be along the lines of Marcuse’s “one-dimensional man”: he lacks true moral virtue and conforms to corporations, post-industrial society’s mass consumer culture, and opinions of experts (268). Cole further notes that Rieff’s “psychological man” is a continuation of Freud’s theory, as a man who “lives by the ideals of insight—practical, experimental insight leading to the mastery of his own personality” (267). Religious faith seems unnecessary to Rieff’s psychological man; to him a culture shaped by the ideas of dominant elites prevails when it penetrates therapeutic functionary through a social system of institutions, life patterns, and other aspects of everyday life, successfully replacing the old value of Christian culture through “deconversion” (270). But something seems missing from this construction of society. Cole believes that the problem behind Rieff’s mentality is his “attempt to understand human experience by standing entirely apart from it is like trying to jump over our own shadow”—instead, “important truths in life cannot be understood by logical or empirical methods alone; they must be experienced holistically” (273).
Cole’s example against Rieff is his personal encounter with the therapeutic, embodied by Dr Banquer, perfect incarnation of the “analytic attitude”. He then turns to Charles Taylor to suggest that rather than condemning society with personal and cultural loss, the solution should be the pursuit of identity, meaning, and connections (283). The search for these is not an individual process but always within a discursive domain within a “horizon of important questions” beyond the individual self; he has to interact with others rather than merely investigate into himself. Cole’s personal response is religion; faith still has a place even after Rieff’s characterization of society as therapeutic.
I am not convinced, however, that Cole’s essay truly answers Rieff’s point; it seems that whereas Rieff analyzes the therapeutic to offer an explanation of a post-industrial society, Cole address a problem of individual identity (which, inevitably, is beyond the individual in its pursuit). Rieff does describe a “psychological man”; but the psychological man is not an individual problem but the result of certain social institutions and societal practices—it is merely the manifestation of societal structure at an individual level. Cole’s response provides an individual remedy by attempting to create some degree of freedom for the individual to pursue identity and religion beyond the therapeutic, but he fails to recognize that the therapeutic comes from the structure of society rather than individual choices. Even though a possible remedy is offered, it cannot be taken without a connection to the structural transformation that must correspond with this option.
In my reading of Cole, the efforts of Conscious Raising groups described by Herman seems to resemble his attempt; it creates a possible remedy against the male-dominated therapeutic society from individual perspectives, but lacks a true method to change the social institution that shape the individual. The goal of CR groups, according to Herman, was to “communicate the subjective feel of women’s everyday lives” (297). Members of CR groups perceive their projects to be political; it begins with “feeling, but [] was supposed to lead to thinking and acting” (301). Yet the efforts of CR groups were similar to Cole’s response to Rieff. Borrowing from Marxist (more specifically, from Lukacs) concept of “consciousness”, women in CR groups fail to recognize that the original meaning of “class consciousness” contains within itself the momentum for complete reformation of social structure and revolution of mentality. Acting as a part of an already shaped post-industrial society and using its own cultural logic, Cole and CR groups only provide individual deviations that are perhaps already discounted by the social structure.
