Therapy’s supposed interior self is an ideological fiction masking social origins

Evidence

If we want to reject this conception of the individual, then we might turn once again to Spinoza, whose whole work was based on the premise that such an individual could not exist. But, in the context of therapy, we might also turn to the radical therapist David Smail, who rejected all of the standard tropes of individualist therapy. “[W]hat we take to be causal processes of thought, decision and will are frequently little more than a kind of commentary that accompanies our action,” Smail argued in his book Power, Interest and Psychology: Elements of a Social Materialist Understanding of Distress. The interiority presupposed by much therapy is little more than an ideological special effect. Like Spinoza, Smail understands that the socalled “inside” is really a folding of the outside. Most of what is supposedly “inside” us has been acquired from the wider social field. “Many of the characteristics that we tend to regard as entirely ‘psychological’ are acquired from outside. The most significant case in point is probably ‘self-confidence’, the crumbling of which is so often at the root of the kind of personal distress which can be ‘diagnosed’ by the experts as ‘neurotic’.” This means that, contrary to the founding principles of something like cognitive behavioural therapy, the means for self-transformation are not available to individuals. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1945

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest (What I’m reading for: small acts) in how interiority is socially constructed — parallels claims from earlier chapters on therapy/privatisation of stress. — connects to: Capitalism couples harsh self-blame with a therapeutic myth that individuals can fix everything — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1887; Therapy’s real flaw is privatizing systemic problems as individual self-work — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1923; Psychoanalysis marginalized Fanon for violating its boundary between inner psyche and social reality (+9 more)

Broader Connections

• The authentic inner self is a structural illusion; feelings are trite repetitions #corroborates (0.90) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1186
• Therapeutic self-naming privatises suffering and prevents collective solidarity. #expands (0.85) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1372
• Therapy co-opted consciousness-raising by converting it from collective to private practice #exemplifies (0.83) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1949
• Psychoanalysis marginalized Fanon for violating its boundary between inner psyche and social reality #corroborates (0.82)
• Therapeutic self-awareness has been stripped of its collectivising political potential #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1372
• Individualized therapy depoliticized the collective consciousness-raising of 1970s movements. #exemplifies (0.80) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1949
• Ideology defines the self by stigmatising the Other #expands (0.78) — Chris Allen, Islamophobia, 833
• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self #corroborates (0.78) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421
• Socially prescribed conduct can serve as scaffolding for self-realization rather than constraint #complicates (0.74) — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 1027