The importance of repression
A little over a half-century ago, the sociologist Philip Rieff announced the “triumph of the therapeutic” with his 1966 book of the same name. Perhaps because the phrase itself is so striking, it has been widely cited but only rarely understood.
It seems intuitively obvious, almost tautological, to say that we live in a “therapeutic culture”. Even if we no longer speak of our id or superego, our everyday language is filled with pop-psychiatric jargon — trauma, grief, and abuse; narcissism and “borderline personality” and PTSD. When Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez described her experience during the January 6 riot to her followers on Instagram, she spoke of her “trauma” and her status as a “survivor” of sexual assault, while accusing Republicans who downplayed the event of using the “tactics of abusers”. Not that she’s alone: the conservative Daily Signal has accused AOC herself of “gaslighting” the public over rising crime rates.
But Rieff’s point was not merely that we had come to view ourselves in therapeutic terms, supplanting older moral and religious modes of evaluation. He was making an argument about the wider implications of this shift in perspective — a shift that he considered to be, without exaggeration, the most important cultural development in the West since the Enlightenment. Indeed, Rieff saw it as nothing short of an apocalypse. Modern therapeutic culture, in his view, had become what he called in his later writings an “anti-culture”: a negation of the very idea of culture that, because it set itself in opposition to everything that had traditionally given human lives meaning, was inherently unstable. It could not reproduce itself indefinitely, and would be succeeded, Rieff predicted, by barbarism and chaos.
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