In the second of the lectures that make up Frozen Intimacies, Eva Illouz begins by making a comparison between Samuel Smiles, author of Self-help (1859), and Sigmund Freud.

Although it is true that at present the postulates of these two authors tend to resemble each other to such an extent that psychology is confused with self-help, the basic principles that give rise to them are considerably different .

The differences between self-help and psychology

While Smiles considered that “moral strength could overcome a person’s position and social destiny,” Freud “held the pessimistic conviction (…) that the ability to help oneself was conditioned by the social class one belonged to.

Therefore, for the father of psychoanalysis, “self-help and virtue” were not in themselves sufficient elements for a healthy psyche, since “only transference, resistance, work with dreams, free association – and not “volition” or “self-control” – could lead to a psychic and, ultimately, social transformation.

The Fusion of Psychology and Self-Help: The Therapeutic Narrative

To understand the approach of psychology to the popular culture of self-help we should pay attention to the social phenomena that began to accentuate in the United States from the 1960s onwards: the discrediting of political ideologies, the expansion of consumerism and the so-called sexual revolution contributed to increase a narrative of the self-realization of the self.

Likewise, the therapeutic narrative managed to permeate the dominant cultural meanings through the capillarity offered by a series of social practices related to the management of emotions.

On the other hand, in the theoretical basis of the syncretism between psychology and self-help are the theses of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow, for whom the search for self-realization, understood as “the motivation in every form of life to develop its possibilities to the maximum” was consubstantial to a healthy mind. This is how psychology became mainly a therapeutic psychology that, “by postulating an undefined and constantly expanding ideal of health”, made self-realization the criterion by which to increasingly classify emotional states as healthy or pathological.

Suffering and Individualism in Therapeutic Narrative

In this light, Illouz presents a series of examples of how the therapeutic narrative depends entirely on establishing and generalizing a diagnosis in terms of emotional dysfunction in advance, in order to subsequently assert the prescriptive capacity that is presupposed. Thus, self-realization needs to make sense of the psychic complications in the individual’s past (“what prevents him from being happy, successful and intimate”).

Consequently, the therapeutic narrative became a commodity with the performative capacity to transform the consumer into a patient (“since, in order to be better – the main product being promoted and sold in this new field – one must first be sick”), thus mobilising a series of professionals related to psychology, medicine, the pharmaceutical industry, the publishing world and television.

And since “it consists precisely of giving meaning to common lives as an expression (hidden or open) of suffering”, what is interesting about the therapeutic narrative of self-help and self-realisation is that it involves a methodological individualism , based on “the demand to express and represent one’s own suffering”. The author’s opinion is that the two demands of the therapeutic narrative, self-realization and suffering, were institutionalized in the culture, since they were in line with “one of the main models for the individualism that the State adopted and propagated”.

Emotional intelligence as a capital

On the other hand, the field of mental and emotional health resulting from the therapeutic narrative is sustained by the competence it generates. Proof of this competence is the notion of “emotional intelligence”, which, based on certain criteria (“self-awareness, control of emotions, personal motivation, empathy, management of relationships”), allows to consider, and stratify, the aptitude of people in the social and, especially, the labour field, while granting a status (cultural capital) and facilitating personal relationships (social capital) in order to obtain economic returns.

Similarly, the author reminds us that we should not underestimate the implications of emotional intelligence on the security of the self in the context of an intimacy that in the contemporary world of late modernity is extremely fragile.

Bibliographic references:

  • Illouz, Eva. (2007). Frozen Intimacies. Emotions in Capitalism. Katz Editors (p.93-159).