Self-help as a glocalised therapeutic assemblage

Abstract

This article analyses how therapeutic self-help discourse, as a global form, has been domesticated in contemporary Russia. It proposes the concept of a glocalised therapeutic assemblage to capture the dynamics through which a range of transnational and historical elements are pulled together in self-help. Drawing on analysis of bestselling self-help books and interviews with their readers, the article addresses the domestication and transformation of two paradigmatic features of the self-help genre: the ‘bullet-point’ narrative form and the idea of positive thinking. The article identifies three domestication strategies. First, the bullet-point form is domesticated by articulating it with the Russian discourse of ‘culturedness’, transforming it into a multilayered intertextual narrative. The second domestication strategy places positive thinking in dialogue with Russian discourses of suffering, while the third fuses positive thinking with historical discourses of spirituality and consciousness, thus subverting the idea of the transformative power of the rational mind. The article concludes by suggesting that the concept of assemblage is helpful in highlighting the situated and variegated forms of self-help and therapeutic culture.

Domesticating startup culture in Finland

“…As such, the books can be seen as simultaneously guiding the reader into startup culture, and also constructing it. In my close reading of the research material, I focus on how startup culture is constructed in the material dialogically with Finnish historical, local, and situated discourses and cultural meaning systems: foreign elements are intertwined in local meaning systems utilising local resources and discursive practices (Salmenniemi & Adamson, 2015;Tiyanen-Qadir & Salmenniemi, 2017).…”

The Construction of the Neoliberal Self in Belgrade Psychotherapeutic Practice

“…Budući da neoliberalizam stavlja značajan naglasak na slobodu pojedinaca, njihove preduzetničke kapacitete i ličnu odgovornost, kultura samopomoći je doživela značajan procvat na zapadu. Literatura za samopomoć je postala zaštitni znak takve kulture i vrlo je dobro proučena (Coyle & Grodin 1993;Rimke 2000;Barker 2002;Crawford 2004;McGee 2005;Illouz 2008;Effing 2009;Collingsworth 2014;Poon 2015;Salmenniemi & Adamson 2015;Tiaynen-Qadir & Salmennieni 2017). S druge strane, na prostoru bivše Jugoslavije ona ostaje relativno zanemarena.…”

Trump therapy: Personal identity, political trauma and the contradictions of therapeutic practice

“…These responses have filtered into therapeutic spaces, especially among those critical of the Trump administration or negatively affected by Trump’s policies and rhetoric (LiVecchi and Obasaju, 2018). The trauma associated with the election has then been met with a therapeutic response, whether in clinical settings or with some recourse to the bundle of techniques that makes up a broader ‘therapeutic assemblage’ (Tiaynen-Qadir and Salmenniemi, 2017). This locates it within what has been identified as the ‘emotionalisation of politics’ (Yates, 2015: 1) or the heightened prominence of emotion in the civic sphere concomitant to the institution of a therapy culture (Richards, 2007).…”