Overview
- Offers an ethnographic interpretation of therapeutic culture
- Engages with a range of theories including articulation theory, critical theory and feminist theory
- Argues that the therapeutic field serves as a lens through which to understand the realities of capitalism
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
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About this book
This book contributes to research on therapeutic culture by drawing on longstanding ethnographic work and by offering a new theoretical reading of therapeutic culture in today's society. It suggests that the therapeutic field serves as a key site in which a number of contradictions of capitalism are confronted and lived out. It shows that therapeutic engagements are inherently ambivalent and contradictory, as they can be articulated and engaged with in many different ways and harnessed for diverse, and often contradictory, political projects. The book takes issue with the interpretation of therapeutic culture as merely individualising, depoliticizing and working in congruence with neoliberalism, and shows that therapeutic engagements may also open up a space for contestation and critique of neoliberal capitalism, animate collective action for social change and articulate alternative forms of life and subjectivities. The book will speak to a wide variety of audiences in the social sciences and will be of particular interest to those working in the fields of sociology, anthropology, critical psychology, cultural studies, gender studies, and critical social theory.
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Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Affect, Alienation, and Politics in Therapeutic Culture
Book Subtitle: Capitalism on the Skin
Authors: Suvi Salmenniemi
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10572-2
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-10571-5Published: 13 August 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-10574-6Published: 14 August 2023
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-10572-2Published: 12 August 2022
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: VII, 222
Topics: Medical Sociology, Complementary & Alternative Medicine, Political Sociology, Sociology of Culture, Sociology of Work, Critical Psychology