Therapeutic Redescription

Abstract

AbstractCritical thinking and individual well-being are not always seen as compatible, yet they converge in the practice of therapeutic redescription. A spiritual exercise originating with the Stoics, therapeutic redescription is meant to emancipate the individual from obsessive ideas, such as the desire for wealth, love, fame, art, or immortality. Cognitive-behavioral therapy has appropriated this Stoical technique, which is essentially a concession to the tremendous power of language and rhetoric to define our experience of the world. With its emphasis on “cognitive reappraisal,” CBT encourages individuals to become more aware of their “attributional style” (the valences of their internal rhetoric) and asks them to learn to reformulate fears or obsessions in less emotive or irrational terms. This chapter looks to the modern literary prevalence of this practice of therapeutic redescription, from Marcel Proust to Doris Lessing to Sheila Heti. In particular, it examines Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (2018) as an exercise in using therapeutic redescription to transcend inherited cultural scripts about womanhood and maternity. It then asks whether the Stoical exercise provides a useful precedent for assessing what Heather Love has called the “descriptive turn” in literary studies, from Rita Felski’s ambition “to redescribe critique rather than explain it,” to Love, Sharon Marcus, and Stephen Best’s project of “Building a Better Description,” to Dora Zhang’s attention to the “heterogeneity of descriptive practices.” I maintain that the revival of therapeutic redescription participates in the mistrust of charisma that informs our disciplinary and cultural present.