Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures

<p><em>The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures</em> explores central lines of enquiry and seminal scholarship on therapeutic cultures popular psychology and the happiness industry. Bringing together studies of therapeutic cultures from sociology anthropology psychology education politics law history social work cultural studies development studies and American Indian studies it adopts a consciously global focus combining studies of the psychologisation of social life from across the world. Thematically organised it offers historical accounts of the growing prominence of therapeutic discourses and practices in everyday life before moving to consider the construction of self-identity in the context of the diffusion of therapeutic discourses in connection with the global spread of capitalism. With attention to the ways in which emotional language has brought new problematisations of the dichotomy between the normal and the pathological as well as significant transformations of key institutions such as work family education and religion it examines emergent trends in therapeutic culture and explores the manner in which the advent of new therapeutic technologies the political interest in happiness and the radical privatisation and financialisation of social life converge to remake self-identities and modes of everyday experience. Finally the volume features the work of scholars who have foregrounded the historical and contemporary implication of psychotherapeutic practices in processes of globalisation and colonial and postcolonial modes of social organisation. Presenting agenda-setting research to encourage interdisciplinary and international dialogue and foster the development of a distinctive new field of social research <i>The Routledge International Handbook of Global Therapeutic Cultures </i>will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in the advance of therapeutic discourses and practices in an increasingly psychologised society.</p>