This article presents a contextualized treatment of the current configuration of self, some of the pathologies that plague it, and the technologies that attempt to heal it. Of particular interest is the historical shift from the Victorian, sexually restricted self to the post-World War II empty self. The empty self is soothed and made cohesive by becoming "filled up" with food, consumer products, and celebrities. Its historical antecedents, economic constituents, and political consequences are the focus of this article. The two professions most responsible for healing the empty self, advertising and psychotherapy, find themselves in a bind: They must treat a psychological symptom without being able to address its historical causes. Both circumvent the bind by employing the life-style solution, a strategy that attempts to heal by covertly filling the empty self with the accoutrements, values, and mannerisms of idealized figures. This strategy solves an old problem but creates new ones, including an opportunity for abuse by exploitive therapists, cult leaders, and politicians. Psychology's role in constructing the empty self, and thus reproducing the current hierarchy of power and privilege, is examined.
Daniel Stern's (1985) respected theory of infant development is critiqued from a social-constructionist perspective in order to demonstrate how decontextualized psychology theories inadvertantly perpetuate the political status quo. Self-invariants in the core-self phase are discussed as reflections of the current configuration of self rather than a discovery of universal elements of human development. The parental attunement response is reinterpreted as a way by which Western interiority and subjectivity are socially constructed. Language as the fundamental cause of alienation and dividedness is disputed. In Stern's theory, universal qualities of the self and the processes of language acquisition are responsible for several psychological ills characteristic of the 20th century. By exonerating political structures as causal factors, decontextualized theories legitimize, justify, and perpetuate current arrangements of power and privilege.
The authors studied psychotherapeutic practices commonly used in managed care settings and the theories and rhetorical strategies that justify them to speculate about if or how they are beginning to influence societywide understandings about the proper way of being human at the turn of the millennium. The practices--and effects--of managed care regulations on the self are interpreted by studying how the patient, the therapist, and the therapeutic relationship come to light in managed care settings. These categories are then used to speculate about the configuration of the newly emerging, 21st-century self. By extending hermeneutic concerns about instrumentalism and technicism, the authors suggest a new way of thinking about psychotherapy modeled less on positivist science and more on moral discourse. Finally, given this more hermeneutic understanding of psychotherapy, the authors speculate about alternative conceptions and arrangements of care.
artifacts of our modem American cultural terrain, reflecting and shaping the central themes of the past 100 years. The history of psychotherapy is intertwined with the history of the United States: its promise, optimism, and vitality; its corruptions, collusions, and dangers. America's history is a grand history, filled with new beginnings and unlimited opportunities; yet it is also a history of oppression, exploitation, and profound betrayal. Most of all, it is a history of a mixture of people who attempt to live together without a common tradition of shared meanings in a rapidly changing world of powerful social and economic forces such as industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and secularization. It is the story of religious institutions and moral discourse that, confronted with economic and political pressures to conform and collude, have had difficulty maintaining authority and developing viable alternatives to sociopolitical trends. As a result, America's history has become a history of the modem ills of uncertainty and doubt. It was into this world that psychotherapy was born.
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