Quote:An example? Encounter groups . These meetings were an attempt to help individuals work together to tackle internalised oppression. However this kind of collective work soon became co-opted by ideas such as self-actualisation. The inner world was to be explored now not for the collective endeavour, but in the pursuit of individual happiness. Mass activism began to wane as the sale of self-help books mushroomed, carrying within their pages the message that responsibility for growth and happiness rested firmly in the individual. Why, after all, go to a feminist encounter group, when the tools for enlightenment lay in a self-help book one could peruse at home?
The side effect of the rise of therapy culture was a de-politicised understanding of embodied distress, and a certain navel gazing. The causes of anger and anxiety were located solely in individual’s childhoods or, as the 21st century beckoned, genes. Consideration of power relations and the structural causes of inequalities became a lefty side project, getting in the way of developing “brand me”, or a side note at the end of academic articles. Alternative ideas of the self received a special kind of ridicule – a phenomenon we see in the reaction to Corbynism today. Alternative ideas within psychology got sidelined.
How my heart sings 