‘We can’t live without beliefs’: Self and society in therapeutic engagements

Abstract

Therapeutic technologies of happiness, emotional wellbeing and self-improvement are a highly influential cultural phenomenon and a rapidly growing business worldwide; yet little is known of the motivations for engaging with these technologies. This article addresses this gap by investigating how therapeutic engagements are experienced and what participants hope to gain from them. Therapeutic technologies are conceived as psychologically informed regimes of knowledge and practice which aim to transform one’s relationship to oneself and shape the ways in which one makes sense of and acts upon oneself and the social world. Drawing on a set of interviews with consumers of therapeutic technologies in Russia, the article identifies three key motivations for engaging with such technologies: searching for new blueprints for ethical work on the self after a profound transformation of the ideological field; coming to terms with new mechanisms of inequality, particularly in the field of labour; and mobilizing therapeutic technologies as a response to inadequacies in the field of health. By unpacking these motivations and subjective experiences of therapeutic engagements, the article seeks to shed light on the growing popularity of therapeutic technologies under contemporary capitalism.